Marilyn D. Mollmann (1927–2026)

My grandma was born Marilyn Inderhees on August 6th, 1927, in Cincinnati.  She was the second of four, after older brother Jack, and before little sister Audrey, and little brother Bob. She grew up in Westwood; her father, Edward, was co-owner of a paint store, Mohawk Paints, in downtown Cincinnati.

Marilyn’s mother, Helen, was the homemaker, and she raised the family through the tough times of the Great Depression and World War II. During rationing, her dad had a secret supply of Hershey bars from Mr. Habig at Habig’s drug store. They would divide a bar up eight ways – two pieces for mom and dad, four for the kids, and two for the dog, Trixie.  They had a victory garden on the empty lot next door, and her dad was the air raid warden for the neighborhood.

Marilyn and the little girl down the street, who was a few months older, walked to school together, beginning in first grade. That was her friend Dorothy, or “Dot.” They would stay friends for over ninety years and later become sisters-in-law.

After grade school, Marilyn attended Mother of Mercy High School, graduating in June 1945, just a few weeks after Victory in Europe; she turned eighteen in August, just a few weeks before Victory in the Pacific over the Japanese. I wonder what these times were like for a young woman. After high school, she got a job working downtown, as a secretary. When not working, she had a rambunctious group of friends--she always liked to have fun.

She met Charles, and they married on June 16th, 1951, just eight days after he graduated as an electrical engineer. The night before she got married, her dad told her she was on her own, but if she ever needed help, he was there for her.  

Marilyn and Charlie were fortunate to be able to immediately buy their first house in North College Hill. Her mom and dad moved the furniture into their new house while they were gone on their honeymoon. The house was less than a five-minute walk to Charles’s brother Lou and wife Lottie, and to his sister MaryAnne and husband Mike. It was easy to hang out together at each other’s houses in the evenings, have dinner with their young families, or go to the North College Hill pool.

It took a few years to start a family, but then they came pretty quickly: Jim in 1954, Janet in 1955, Pat in 1957, Karen in 1960, and my father Dan, forever “her baby,” in 1963.

Her dad died suddenly and tragically in a car crash, in October 1955.  It was a shock to her and the rest of the family. Marilyn was 28, and her daughter Janet just a few weeks old. Marilyn forever would remember exactly where she was sitting in the living room when Charlie got the phone call. 

After seven years in North College Hill, with the family getting bigger, Marilyn and Charlie moved to the house on Lauderdale in 1958.  Here they raised the five kids, who attended Saint James School, and the family attended Saint James Church, where she would be a parishioner for almost seventy years.  She did mom duties, shuttling kids in the station wagon, clipping coupons to stretch a dollar, volunteering in the cafeteria and library and the PTA and so forth. Later in life, she would knit hats for babies in the NICU and organize the Yarn & Cards outreach here at St. James.

Marilyn and Charlie had a big group of friends who liked to play cards, party, and travel to Florida together: the Luipolds, the Grievenkamps, the Hudepohls, the Rolls, and so forth. She and Charlie liked their martinis. They would sit outside together every night in the warm months from 11:30 to 12:15 or so, and share one or two and just talk, and look out at the night.

She used to say to her husband, “Charlie you should put a porch on the roof.” An interesting vision, but it never happened. She would also say, “Charlie, you should put a skylight in the kitchen.”Also never happened. But then, “Charlie, you should cut a big hole in the back of the house and put in doors and a deck.” She got that one.

The kids got older, graduated high school, and all graduated college. She and Charlie survived a late career lay-off, and then enjoyed a long retirement with travel to far parts of the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe. She had several bouts with cancer. Challenges like this were invariably met with a little grumpiness and depression, followed in a few hours by embracing the reality of the situation, and just dealing with it, and doing her best. Persevering. 

The grandkids started coming in the 1980s, eventually reaching sixteen. She was always interested in what I had to say, though most of the time, she would laugh and say, “You’re such a character.” Then the great-grandkids, currently at twenty-two. If there’s a way I will always remember my grandmother, it’s on the annual Thanksgiving trip. This began in 1973, and lasted through almost all of the next fifty-three years. Unable to cook a traditional Thanksgiving turkey in a tiny state park cabin kitchen, Marilyn opted to cook Cincinnati chili instead. What began with seven attendees now includes Marilyn’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, running as many as fifty people. Because this began in West Virginia, every year at the Friday night cookout, the Mollmanns would belt out John Denver’s “Country Roads”—what the Mollmanns lack in musical talent, they make up for in enthusiasm. This song became a staple of Mollmann family weddings, and Marilyn would tear up when she heard it.

Charlie passed in 2013, after a few years of difficult health. She was in charge now, and within a few hours or days, got a new dishwasher, soon followed by repainting, updating the bathrooms, new doors, new driveway, new front porch, new garage door, new garage floor, new furniture, and so forth. She loved the house, and loved taking care of it, properly, cleanly, and neatly. She was able to stay there until the day she died.

Marilyn was a woman of tradition and habit. Every year, we would have Christmas Eve in her basement, every year we would do the same things in the same order, from the customary all-children photo, to Grandma’s punch. Every day, it was the rosary at 9:30, channel 9 noon news with lunch precisely at twelve; Divine Mercy chaplet at 3:00. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! at 7:00. Certain days of the week had certain breakfast items.

Marilyn was always there to listen. She talked on the phone regularly to her kids, and visited for dinner quite often. She was born in a different age, with different rules, but she was open to listening to new ideas and new norms. She adapted and grew. 

She was a great daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, great grandmother, and friend. An inspiration. A lovely person. A devout Catholic, attending church and praying the rosary for comfort, a member of the St. Mary’s Ladies Society, member of a weekly prayer group, and she and Charlie volunteered at Church, counting the collections. 

She was always positive, open to a new adventure, and full of energy. At age eighty, the first time she got on the waverunner with her son Dan, and he asked what she wanted to do, she said, “go fast.”

We want to thank Janet, Pat, and Karen for taking such good care of her in her final days.

She will be remembered and missed by her family and friends.

I cowrote the above with my dad, and read it at my grandmother's funeral earlier this week. She died on July 4th, just over a month shy of what would have been her 99th birthday. (Most people call this a eulogy, but in Catholicism it's technically "Words of Remembrance.") I'll probably have more to say about this later, but I just wanted to post the text for now.

Jump to the Beat!

As has been mentioned here on several occasions, I've been listening to my music more consistently in the last couple years. The consequence of this is, of course, that so have my kids. While Kid One is largely agnostic toward music (they do occasionally enjoy a bit of They Might Be Giants), Kid Two, like me, is the kind of person who will get a song stuck in their head and begin singing it randomly later on.

A particular favorite of Kid Two's in this regard is Belle and Sebastian's "The Party Line." I know Belle and Sebastian has been around for a while, and plays the kind of music that is very much to my taste, but I only got into them within the past six months, and have listened to their album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015) a decent amount. Kid Two would randomly bust out with "jump to the beat of the party line!" and begin jumping around. It actually hit the point where I could be listening to a different Belle and Sebastian track and he would start going, "Put on 'Party Line'!" (I do not think Kid One has this capacity to recognize different artists' styles yet.)

This wasn't the only song Kid Two would bust out with at random; in particular, the other was Goldfish's "Show You How," where he would just start going "get up and shake it now!" To a lesser extent, he'd sometimes also do the "oooh waaah oooh waaah oooooh oooh waaah oooh waaah oooh" bit from Goldfish's "This Is How It Goes."

Additionally, at his daycare, he somehow picked up "We Will Rock You," though he thought it was "We will, we will, we will rock and roll you," and would often ask for "rock and roll"... and would accept literally no other song as "rock and roll" because it didn't say "rock and roll" in it! I don't have any Queen on my iPod, but I did persuade him to accept "We Built This City" as a substitute... though the version I own is from 2011's The Muppets!

This seemed like enough songs for a critical mass, so I ended up making Kid Two a Yoto card. A Yoto, if you don't know, is a kid-friendly, screen-free audio player. Both of our kids own Yoto Minis, which allow them to place various cards in them that stream audio content: music, audiobooks, podcasts, and such. You can purchase premade cards from Yoto (we have bought a number of audiobooks from them especially), but you can also build your own playlists and link them to "make-your-own cards"; for Kid One, I have made a card of Pokémon theme songs, for example, and both kids have copies of a card of songs from Colourblocks and Numberblocks.

Kid Two was into the card. This was back in January, I think, and as time has passed, I have added songs to it either when I notice him singing them a lot or when he specifically requests I do so. He listened to it a lot early on, less so recently, but I'm sure he'll rediscover it sooner or later. Here's the current track listing:

1. "The Party Line" by Belle and Sebastian, from Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015)
2. "Show You How" by Goldfish, from Get Busy Living (2010)
3. "This Is How It Goes" by Goldfish, from Perceptions of Pacha (2008)
4. "We Built This City" by the Muppets, from The Muppets (2011)
5. "Shake It Up" by Nortec Collective, from Tijuana Sound Machine (2008)
6. "Mouthwash" by Kate Nash, from Made Of Bricks (2007)
7. "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
8. "Talk to Me" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
9. "If I Could Find" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
10. "What Might Have Been" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
11. "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants, from Flood (1990)
12. "Watching You" by Rogue Traders, from Here Come the Drums (2005)

Forty-eight minutes of excellent taste! Clearly a fan of South African house music in particular. His interest can often turn on very small things, in all seriousness; "Mouthwash" is on there because he likes the bit where Kate Nash goes "and I'm singing 'uh oh' on a Friday night..."

I do have to double-check lyrics before loading them onto the card (thankfully the Kate Nash song is appropriate for example! on the other hand, "The Party Line" includes the lyric, "People like to drive their cars and smoke up / People like to sit inside and toke up").

I recently asked him which of the songs on the card was his favorite, and he told me it was "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor. That one is a hit with both kids!

EDITED ON 2 MAY 2026: Just added "Get Down" from They Might Be Giants's new album The World Is to Dig at his request!

My First Trip to ICFA

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) is an annual conference in Orlando, Florida, that's been running for almost fifty years. I was excited when I first moved to Florida, because it meant it would be easy for me to go... but I've never been! The issue is that ICFA is usually the same weekend or the weekend before/after my regular conference, NCSA. Obviously I can't do two conferences simultaneously, but even back-to-back would be tough, especially since ICFA usually falls during my kids' spring break, and thus all the childcare would be on Hayley.

But... this year NCSA has been moved to July, meaning that I was able to go to ICFA! It's about ninety minutes from home to the conference venue, so I ended up staying at home and driving out two days.

The unique thing about ICFA is that it's both an academic conference and a creative one. So there are the usual panels and such, but also a lot of people who write science fiction and fantasy; the conference has multiple guests of honor which also come from both tracks. So this year, for example, there was scholar guest of honor Sherryl Vint... but also author guests of honor Ann Leckie and Ted Chiang! Not to mention attendees like Seth Dickinson, Neil Clarke, Ray Nayler, all in high favor around these parts.

Driving back and forth meant I didn't see as much of the conference as I might have (I wasn't going to get there around 8:30am!) but I enjoyed what I saw. I saw a couple great panels; I also really enjoyed both the keynotes of Ted Chiang and Sherryl Vint. The conference theme was "(Meta)Cognition" and they both had interesting takes on it. Chiang talked about how writing was a technology that actually changed our brains (something that won't surprise people who read his short fiction) and how he was skeptical that we could improve computers by connecting them to our brains; rather, the next cognitive technology will be something we can't even imagine. Vint discussed the way we are in what in the 1960s they called "information overload" and how the conditions technologies like LLMs are creating are also the conditions that tyranny needs to thrive.

Ann Leckie read from the forthcoming Radch novel and then did a Q&A and signing. The reading from Radiant Star revealed it has an omniscient narrator, a big change from the first-person perspective she's used in previous Radch novels. Someone asked her about this during the Q&A and she said she read Middlemarch to figure out how to write it! So obviously this Victorianist is excited. I got her to sign my copy of Ancillary Justice but ended up talking to her a lot about Raven Tower. I asked her if she could explain her approach to fantasy, and she said she approached it like a science fiction writer. And I was like, "Aha, that's why I like it!" She takes a fantastic premise but then thinks it through completely logically. I also got some fantasy recommendations from her.

I also chatted with Sarah Pinsker a bit when I got her to sign Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea; I told her I teach her uncollected story "Pay Attention," and she was like, "Oh, it's you!" I can't imagine being included in my course pack makes her a lot of money but I guess it is enough to notice! I also got to tell Ray Nayler I liked "Muallim" a lot. (Seth Dickinson, alas, seemed to be a no-show.)

Scholar-wise, probably the most interesting thing was there were a lot of scholars whose articles for Studies in the Fantastic I have copyedited but never met. I particularly enjoyed getting to chat withto Dennis Wilson Wise and Jess Gallerie. (I am always worried when I introduce myself to people I have copyedited, they will think I am a jerk... this has happened once but it did not happen this time.)

My own paper seemed to go over well enough, and I got some thoughtful questions and text recommendations. 

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot overall... and now I am trying to figure out if there is a way to go to both NCSA and ICFA in 2027. 

Our Year of "Kelsey"

Way back in Spring 2018, my second semester as a professor, I had a student—we'll call her Kelsey—take AWR 101 with me. I liked Kelsey a lot, she was smart and did the reading and had interesting things to say about it. Unfortunately, Kelsey failed the class; I forget exactly why now, but I think it was because she just didn't turn in a final paper.

That must have not scared her off, because Kelsey took me again in Spring 2019, for AWR 201, after filling her 101 credit with a community college course. Unfortunately, she failed again, because once again she did not submit a final paper. I got to know Kelsey more this semester. She had a job at a local amusement park, and one time she told me a story about how she missed the last bus home and the battery on her electric scooter was low, and she ended up having to walk from there back to her dorm, which took four hours... she made it home at 6am! I told her if she ever needed anything, she should call me.

She took me for AWR 201 again in Spring 2020. Unfortunately, Spring 2020 was a bad time to take classes if you struggled with school to begin with. She scraped through with a D, though.

That summer, I got an e-mail from her. "Do you remember how you said I should get in touch if I ever needed help?" it said. I called her back.

Unfortunately, Kelsey had fallen victim to a rental scam. She'd moved back home with her family once the pandemic began, but her plan was to move into an apartment that summer and resume her job at the amusement park. When her mother dropped her off at the apartment, the doors were all locked; the landlord apologize for never having sent her the keys, and told her that if she hired a locksmith, he'd reimburse her. A locksmith came, replaced all the locks, and then Kelsey's mother drove back home.

The next morning, the apartment's maintenance guy was very surprised to find someone living in an unoccupied unit.

It turned out there's a scam, where people from foreign countries will take a real apartment listing and duplicate it, pricing it just a bit lower. Then they make off with your deposit money and whatever else they can get while they string you along. The maintenance guy called the police; by the time I got there, this was all sorted out... but Kelsey had to go. So I rented a U-Haul, and we put some of her stuff in a storage unit she owned, and the bigger stuff in our garage, and Kelsey crashed with us for a few weeks until she was able to sort out a new living situation with some people she knew from school.

I periodically heard from her after that. Her grades got bad enough she had to drop out of school for a while while she worked to make money.

In Spring 2024, I got a cryptic text from her: "It turns out living outside isn't as romantic as I'd imagined."

She'd ended up in a spiral where she fell behind on car payments and lost her car, this meant she had a hard time keeping up with one of her part-time jobs and she lost it, but that meant she couldn't make rent, so she was evicted, and then she lived in a hotel until her savings ran out, so she checked her dog into daycare and spent the night trying to sleep in a park! This was January. I mean, we do live in Tampa, but it can still get pretty cold.

So once again, Kelsey crashed with us for a few weeks, until she was able to sort things out with her boyfriend in Missouri, and she headed off to live with him.

Unfortunately, he dumped her on Christmas. She made her way back to Florida, and we told her she could once again crash with us until she got back on her feet. She has family here in Florida, but does not get along with them very well.

What we did not expect is that she would end up living with us for a year! Kelsey's goal was to get a government job so that she could get back on her feet financially, but also get the benefit of free community college, so she could also get back on her feet academically and finally finish her degree. This took a long time. She was constantly applying to jobs, getting interviews sometimes, getting strung along by jobs that promised her good things that never materialized. She helped out around the house some, watched the kids occasionally, but mostly tried to stay out of our way, I think always feeling like she was imposing. She did eventually restart her job at the theme park for a little bit of money.

Finally, in Fall 2025, she got an offer and a real job! It took a while, but she finally got enough money to get a car... and got into an accident like a week a later. But while we were gone for Christmas, she moved into her new apartment.

It's been an interesting thing—I don't know that we've kept it secret, but we haven't gone out of our way to talk about it either, so few people in our lives really know about it. I am happy to finally get my office back! But also I worry about Kelsey; it seems to me she is very much an example of what people call the "precariat," just one bad day away from the edge. I hope she can get back on her feet, and I hope we've done our part to make that happen.

Being Gaslit by Google Gemini

Sometimes I like to take out my frustrations about generative AI by asking it questions I already know the answer to and seeing how wrong it is. For example, I will ask ChatGPT something like, "Who was the first female scientist in British literature?" and then scoff at it when it makes up a character in a Mary Shelley novel. (The correct answer, I would argue, is Maria Gallilee in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science.)

Over the years, it's gotten better at these things, though. Indeed, something I've noticed is that if I ask it highly specialized questions I already know the answer to, it often cites my own blog as a source! So just by posting my own thoughts on such questions here, I am helping train generative AI. It's unavoidable, I suppose, but frustrating.

This got me curious, though—given generative AI's tendency to uncritically "read" sources, what would happen if I asked it a question about something I asserted as true on my blog... and for which there were no sources other than my blog? Sometimes in my comic book reviews, I jokingly refer to what I call "Mollmann's Law of Retcons," the idea that what matters when evaluating a retcon is if the new concept is at least as interesting, if not moreso, than the original.

I asked ChatGPT about this; it of course made up something and called it "Mollmann's Law of Retcons."

What I found more interesting, though, was the interaction I had with Google Gemini. Gemini correctly defined the term and cited the blog post it found it in.

But then it went on to say:

It gained traction in online forums as a shorthand for the "Golden Rule" of franchise maintenance. 

Now as far as I know, despite my efforts to make it a "thing" via my blog it has not in fact become a "thing." So I asked who else was using it. It gave me some examples, claiming people used it to evaluate the Bucky Barnes retcon in Captain America comics and the "One More Day" retcon in Spider-Man ones. At the end, it stated:

In fan communities, you will see this law referenced whenever a writer changes a character’s origin. The shorthand often looks like this:

"Does this follow Mollmann's Law?" (Is the new story actually better?)

"This is a Mollmann violation." (You changed the past, but the result is boring/worse.) 

Wow! Quite awesome to learn people out there are using it. Could it give me a citation?

While I previously noted that Mollmann’s Law is "frequently cited" in fan communities, a more precise look at the evidence shows that it is actually a niche critical term rather than a mainstream industry standard.

It told me, though, that people used it on Reddit and Tumblr. Okay, I asked again, could it give me citations? Even of a Reddit post?

Well, no, of course not. And finally it admitted it had been wrong all along. I insulted it, it apologized. In its apology, it said:

Steven Mollmann is a clever critic, but his "Law" is his own invention for his own blog.

Finally, generative AI said something I totally agree with! I told it so, and after waffling on about how smart Steve Mollmann is, it said:

Since you're a fan of his work, are there other specific "laws" or critical frameworks from his blog (or others like it) that you find actually apply well to modern media?

I told it to find some itself. It came up with a couple things I do actually say on my blog sometimes, and a couple others that I think are not very good interpretations of things I say, but most interesting was when it said this:

In a particularly creative deep-dive into the works of L. Frank Baum, Mollmann proposed that later Oz characters (like the Patchwork Girl and the Glass Cat) shouldn't be read as traditional characters, but as art installations.

The Insight: He suggests characters like the Patchwork Girl are essentially "collages" and the Glass Cat is almost "René Magritte-esque." By viewing them as mobile pieces of avant-garde art rather than people with emotional arcs, he makes sense of Baum’s increasingly surrealist and "anti-heroic" later works. 

"Interesting" because not only have I never said this, but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing I ever would say! When I asked it for a citation, it cited a post on the Oz blog Burzee... which is most emphatically not by me. It's a collaborative blog; each post is a conversational review of an Oz book by my Internet friend Sarah Crozer and her friend Nick Campbell. I read the post, and pointed out that this idea actually came from Sarah.

It agreed that it had misread the post:

On the blog Burzee, the "Art Installation" theory is actually a collaborative spark between Sarah Crozer and "Nick" (which is the pseudonym Steven Mollmann used on that specific site).

Wait, what? When I asked it why it thought Nick was Steve Mollmann, it told me:

Actually, the identity of "Nick" on the Burzee blog isn’t just a hunch; it’s a verified fact of the "Oz blogosphere."

It dug in, giving a bunch of spurious citations, for example claiming that Sarah and I had presented together at ChLA, or that I was listed in Oz Club event listings. Having done this, it even cast doubt on the existence of my actual cowriter:

Since you’ve caught me on the Sarah Crozer vs. Steven Mollmann quote, would you like to know more about the other major "Nick" on his blog—the one he calls his "co-author" Michael Schuster?

I actually didn't pursue this thread, focusing instead on the supposed convergence between me and Nick. It gave me lots of "evidence," citing the Oz Club blog, citing my C.V., citing my own  blog. We had a lot of back-and-forth about this, with me demanding specific citations for bits of evidence it gave me, and it failing to provide them. Usually, I would ask it a question about where Steve Mollmann had done a thing, and it would give me evidence of Nick Campbell doing that thing, and then tell me that since Nick = Steve, this was proof they were the same person.

No matter how much I poked at it, it continued to insist they were the same person.

Unfortunately, I can't reconstruct the whole conversation because Google decided that it contained "a sensitive query" and everything beyond that point is vanished from the archives. But I do remember the broad strokes. It would say things like, 'Steve Mollmann received his Ph.D. in 2016, and at the same time, in a 2017 blog post, Nick Campbell mentions getting his Ph.D.' I would point out that 2016 and 2017 are not the same time, and it would spin some kind of theory about why the delay.

At one point, it quoted a comment by Nick about growing up in England; I asked it how this proved Nick was Steve if Steve was from America... it told me that Steve Mollmann spent part of his childhood in the UK! I think the conversation I linked to above went on for twice as long as what you see there. It took a long time, but I finally came up with enough contradictions between the lives of Steve and Nick to get it to admit they weren't the same person.

Generative AI being generative AI, though, it can't ever admit it was totally wrong—it shifted to telling me it was just passing on a common fan theory! When I asked it to cite someone propounding that theory, it of course couldn't do that either.

Anyone, anyone who knows how to do research knows how bad generative AI is at it, but I never dreamed it would work so hard to convince me that I didn't understand basic aspects of my own life! 

If You Haven't Got a Penny, Then a Ha'penny Will Do

Visiting Grandma's yarn store in Grandma's sweater.

Our second kid had the misfortune to be born just a couple days before Christmas. This means his birthday almost always bumps up against our travel plans. I think across 2022-24, we were either driving on his birthday, or his birthday was the last Friday of school before winter break, the day before we drove.

But the way these things move around finally worked out to his advantage this year, as Son Two's fifth birthday came three days after the last day of school. So we could spend two days travelling and then celebrate his birthday on a day with no driving... and even be with my family when we did! This coincides with his increasing awareness of his own birthday; this is the first year, I think, where he's been anticipating its arrival for a sustained period of time.

(At first, he was opposed that he wouldn't get to celebrate with his friends on his actual birthday, but he came around eventually, though he keeps referring to the party we'll have now that we're back home as his "fake birthday party.") 

Indeed, it was nice to celebrate. We were at my parents for Christmas, so they were both there, plus my sister and my brother's ex-wife. Son Two got some good presents, and for once, I felt like the presents of the birthday were well-separated from the presents of Christmas... three whole days! And then, instead of just getting to pick what fast-food restaurant we stopped at on our drive, he got a proper meal, generously prepared by my mom. He picked one of his favorite foods, pizza with black olives. And my mom also make a rainbow cake, which totally delighted him.

Son Two is at an interesting age (aren't they all?) where he is incredibly creative and playful but also desirous of a high level of autonomy that he doesn't get to receive. Lots of times his playfulness can be leveraged—he loves to use his turboboosters to race you to the bathroom—but other times it gets in the way—he might not stop playing with a cat toy long enough to actually do what he's supposed to do.

But I think our relationship is improving. He's more like me than Child One in some ways, especially his sense of humor and his desire to tease and be teased. For a long time, I think I often ended up focusing on Child One while my wife focused on Son Two, for lots of good and understandable reasons, but I've been trying to redress that balance a bit. He's into playing games like "hug monster" and he likes spinning imaginary stories with me; he had fun pretending we were driving a stolen car when we were doing Christmas shopping, for example! Some of his bad tendencies he definitely picks up from observing his older sibling, who struggles with violence.

He's starting to figure out reading; he knows all his letters and the sounds they make, but we haven't hit that phonics breakthrough of putting them together to sound out words. Of course, he's only in pre-K, so that's fine! 

His favorite "treat" is chocolate. Santa (i.e., my mother) put a bag of chocolate chips in his stocking, and never was a kid more ecstatic on Christmas morning.

I look forward to seeing how he continues to grow up over the next year. Hopefully he gets a real birthday again.

Star Trek Trivia!

A couple weeks ago, I was surprised to get an e-mail from a colleague—one with whom I would say I am friendly but not someone with whom I really socialize—inviting me to the regular trivia game he and some other colleagues participate in... but all became clear upon realizing it was Star Trek trivia. He was confident, my colleague said, that we would run the table if I joined in.

My wife was okay with me skipping a bedtime, so I did indeed join my colleagues at Magnanimous Brewing here in Tampa. Unfortunately, perhaps, Star Trek trivia does not have a wide popularity; my colleagues said there were many fewer teams than normal!

We did indeed crush it... though I don't think there were many super deep cuts; between my two colleagues, I think we got every question right but two, but I think there was just one question that I knew the answer to that neither of them did. (There was a question requiring one to name the captains of five different ships, and my colleague could only remember "Mariner's mom" for the captain of the USS Cerritos.) We came in first, but the small turnout meant that it was the bartender who came in second!

I haven't played trivia of any kind since I was in grad school, so it was a good time... even if it was not the deep cuts I might have really thrived at! But I think any set of Star Trek trivia questions that would have proved challenging for me would have been frustratingly unfun for most others.

We Are Now Firmly in the ChatGPT Era of Academic Writing

It seems unlikely that if you teach college writing, that you haven't been dealing with the impact of ChatGPT and other LLMs. I of course have had students using this next technology since Spring 2023. But the impact it's had on me and and my teaching is probably most starkly represented by this chart:

According to my syllabus policies, as well as our program policies, use of ChatGPT or similar technology is prohibited. Though I guess I can see how it might be useful in other courses, I don't see how it's useful in a writing course; my class (I would argue) is trying to use writing as a mode of thinking. We don't write to record what we already know, we write to come into the knowing of something.

The thing about ChatGPT use is that it's difficult to "prove" in some kind of "objective" sense—and this is the kind of thing academic integrity panels supposedly want. But the whole reason I am a professor of academic writing is that I supposedly have some kind of expertise in academic writing, and I do. It's an expertise honed by reading student writing for years, almost decades. I first taught an academic writing course in Fall 2008. Without methodically counting it all up, I would estimate that in that time I've taught sixty-five sections of first-year writing course, which means I've read the work of approximately thirteen hundred students, each of whom ought to write at a minimum of ten pages per semester, if we're going to be conservative. That means I've read at least (and certainly much more than) thirteen thousand pages of college-student papers in my life.

image generated, of course, by ChatGPT

You read a genre that much, you get to know it. I know what college students write like. What I'm reading now isn't it. But frustratingly, I don't know how much the academic integrity panel goes for "it just doesn't sound right" as evidence. A colleague of mine has suggested we should file more charges on this basis, though, and see what happens. Another colleague of mine has suggested that how college students write may be shifting as a result of ChatGPT, in that even if they're not actually using it your class, they read its output so much that it's influencing how they write. Now that's scary.

But anyway, clearly lots of them are using it. (Though, admittedly, some are clearly not! I have a lot of fondness for the crappy C paper now.)

The thing you can actually prove, though, is the veracity of sources. That is the basis on which all of my charges were filed this semester. Of my fourteen cases, I think three were about sources that did not exist. This, for me, means failure of the course. If you don't see that a basic part of research writing is that the sources you cite have to actually exist, then I don't know that you really belong in my class at all. I can't teach you this. Sure, use ChatGPT to find sources (in my personal experiments I have not found it to be very good at this, but I am sure it could be), but then make sure they are real! And of course, if you're summarizing fabricated sources on, say, an annotated bibliography, you are lying, because how could you have read a source that doesn't exist?

All of my other charges were about fabricated quotations from real sources, students claiming that direct quotations existed that did not actually exist. My institution requires that all academic integrity filings be accompanied by a formal meeting that is witness by a neutral faculty member; to make up for all the colleagues that had to witness mine, I witness a lot of other people's. This was the thing most of them saw as well. Frustratingly, a lot of students had this weird defense: that they didn't know quotation marks were reserved for direct quotations. One might tempted to believe this, except that very few students were making this mistake over a year ago, and though I think that the teaching of writing at the pre-college level has probably got worse since I started teaching in 2008, I don't believe that just a couple years ago, teachers stopped explaining what quotations marks are for.

So, the only explanation is that they are using ChatGPT to "find quotations"... but again, not confirming the existence of the quotations. Some of my students have admitted this when confronted, others have come up with not very compelling explanations. I have seen this across the board, in both my research writing class and in my text-based humanities course. (I can see why students might think I might not know that they made up a quotation from a source they found that I've never read; I don't see why they don't realize I won't catch them when they make up quotes from stories we all read together!)

Thankfully (I guess) it doesn't matter. At my institution, fabricated quotations or sources fall under the category of Deception and misrepresentation; I don't have to prove the fabrications come from anywhere in particular, I just have to prove they don't exist.

In my research writing course, fabrications in the final paper mean failing the final paper. It seems to me there's a basic parameter of the assignment you've failed to reach. And failing the final paper means failing the course. It seems to me there's something this course was supposed to teach you that you just didn't learn, and thus you need to take it again, if you can't write at least a D-level research paper by the end of an entire semester. In the past, I haven't had to enforce this policy very much, but I did at least three or four times this semester.

On top of all this, one has to remember—these are just the students I caught fabricating. There are also all the students using LLMs that I recognized but couldn't "prove," and thus just dinged them on points (I have become fond of marking assignments with a "0" and writing, "This is so vague an AI could have written it"), and then all the students who are actually "good" at using LLMs to write and turning in work that seems human-written... even when it's not. 

Even though ChatGPT has been around a couple years, it's clear that something is shifting in the way students use it. You can see that even just last semester, I only filed one charge (though I didn't teach research writing that time.) Many of my colleagues had similar experiences this semester in particular (though I don't think anyone filed as many charges as I did). As one of my colleagues has said, it seems like there's a shared ethos we used to assume the existence of that just doesn't exist anymore. And how can you teach people if that's the case? I can't teach someone that they want to be ethical.

So anyway, it's been a depressing semester. I even had two students file appeals that persisted beyond the end of the semester (and another just not respond to my communication attempts, which is for some reason an automatic appeal), which meant that it didn't stop even when the semester was over! But finally about two weeks ago, I heard about my last outstanding appeal.

I can't just keep doing everything the same way, clearly. But more on that in another post. 

Five Very Good Albums from When I Was in College

A couple months ago, a colleague mentioned "millennial walks" to me. This is apparently a TikTok thing, where millennials go on walks listening to "our" music, thinking of a better time when democracy wasn't collapsing and it felt like maybe someday you could afford to retire.

I can't claim that I've adopted this habit per se, but the last six months have seen me listening to a lot more music than I have in a long time. After Kid One was born, my at-home music got a lot more curtailed because it felt like we were always trying to get someone to nap; later, Kid One would often complain whenever I played music. But things are better on those fronts these days and I find myself hooking up my iPod to its speakers (that's how you know I'm a millennial!) and playing music at home, or bringing my iPod along in the car.

This does mean that I haven't really developed any new musical tastes since my older kid was born in 2018... but let's be fair, I was in my mid-thirties by then, I wasn't developing new musical tastes anyway. Mostly I've been relistening to stuff I got into during grad school, and catching up on new albums by artists I was into back then.

For this post, I want to talk about five albums from my college years, my own "millennial walk" playlist of sorts... which is funny because I actually didn't listen to music until after I graduated from college. But this is the music from that era I've been reconnecting to.

The Decemberists, Picaresque (2005)

My grad school friend Andrew Grubb got me into the Decemberists, who were (I think) the first band I ever saw in concert; the first album I ever picked up by them was Picaresque, which for me remains their best in its sheer concentration of high-quality works: I think "16 Military Wives" was the one he gave me that hooked me, but I also love "The Infanta," "The Bagman's Gambit," "The Mariner's Revenge Song," and "Of Angels and Angles." It's also one of those albums that's perfectly sequenced, each track leading into the next in such a way that it's greater than the sum of its parts.

My favorite song, though, is "The Sporting Life" about a kid who's an eternal disappointment to everyone around him—at least in his own mind—rendered in an ironic upbeat style. If you want to understand what it is to be Steve Mollmann, you could do worse than to listen to this song on repeat: "There's my father looking on, / And there's my girlfriend arm in arm / With the captain of the other team, / And all of this is clear to me, / They condescend to fix on me and frown."

The Weepies, Say I Am You (2005)

I think it was my mom who introduced me to the acoustic rock strains of the Weepies, a husband-and-wife duo. One of the interesting things of getting back into music I enjoyed when I was in my mid-twenties is finding out that, somehow, all my favorite cute young quirky singer-songwriters are middle-aged and have children. How did they get old!? Perhaps most depressing of all was to realize there never will be any more Weepies albums because they got divorced. They tell you there's a point in your life where everyone gets married, they tell you there's a point in your life where everyone has kids, but no one tells you there's going to be a point in your life where everyone gets divorced!

But we can pretend these kind of things don't happen if we listen to a twenty-year-old Weepies album. It has a lot of good tracks, but "Slow Pony Home" is one of my favorites:

I need to seek out some of Deb Talan's solo work, but I haven't got there yet.

Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)

I want to say I discovered Regina Spektor thanks to Pandora back when I was in grad school, but who knows. All her albums are great, and I particularly enjoy Soviet Kitsch (2003) and Far (2009), but if we're looking for one that came out when I was squarely in college, that would be Begin To Hope. Like most of her albums, it has a lot of quirky, up-tempo energetic music despite its often dark topics. Just today, I listened to "That Time," which segues from her discussion of different kinds of cigarettes she likes:

Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey, remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care; I just bummed from my friends.

...into a discussion of when her friend overdosed:

Hey, remember that time when you OD'ed?
Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?
Well, in the waiting room while waiting for news of you,
I hallucinated I could read your mind,
And I was on a lot of shit too, but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky.

Remember that time the world was simpler? Not sure I could explain why this song does but it does.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (2006)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a punk band, another my friend Andrew got me into during grad school. My favorite album by them is 2009's It's Blitz!, but their album that actually came out when I was in college was Show Your Bones. My favorite track from this one is probably "Cheated Hearts":

Cheated by the opposite of love,
Held on high from up up up above,
Kept my high from the second one,
Kept my eye on the first one.

Now take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.
Take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.

Is the lyrics website I just looked at right? I always thought it was "stow them safely." Anyway, I very rarely feel like I know what any Yeah Yeah Yeahs song is actually about but I always enjoy the vibe.

Goldfish, Caught in the Loop (2006)

I got into Goldfish a bit later than all the other entries on this list. They're a South African electronica group; when my wife spent her summers doing field work in South Africa, the South Africans in her group like to blare them while working, and I ended up hooked too. There's a lot of good music here to blast, but my favorite from this album is "The Four Forty Five Blues."

Chill but you can also jam out to it I guess? Good music to grade by or do the dishes to; as a middle-aged millennial, these are my most common activities while listening to music.

Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2025

NCSA is my traditional annual conference at this point; this year one of the board members asked me how long I'd been coming, suggesting it was something like three or four. This year was actually my seventh! I've been every year since 2017, barring the conference's two years going virtual for COVID.

This year was held in New Orleans, a city with a lot of nineteenth-century history. As always, I enjoyed the experience; my friend Christiana and Kim also presented as usual, and we met up with a couple other grad school friends who live in the area. I also got to reconnect with my old boss from UT, now at Tulane, and I convinced one of my own UT colleagues to come along. I do feel like all this socialization meant I was a bit less plugged into meeting new people (or even connecting with other conference regulars) this year! 

Lots of good food in New Orleans, of course. I particularly enjoyed eating beignets for breakfast, and I had some good jambalaya. 

This year's theme was "Fusions"; knowing academics, I knew there would be a lot of titles containing parentheses with words like "(in)fusions" and "(con)fusions." Thus I set myself a challenge of coming up with the worst use of parentheses at the conference, and looked up what the longest word containing "fusion" in the dictionary was. Hence, my paper was titled "The (Interdif)fusion of Women into Science in H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica"! But as my friend Christiana once told me, there's no difference between a bad title adopted ironically... and a bad title. I've been mining my never-completed book for conference papers for years now, and I think I am almost out of bits of I haven't presented. I can do Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent next year, but I am pretty sure I have nothing left after that! Does this mean I need to do... new research!?

Speaking of next year, NCSA is switching it up, doing a joint conference with two other organizations (INCS and INCSA, not confusingly at all) in Washington, D.C., in July as opposed to the usual March. Will it be weird? You can't just change things, I love the format and timing of NCSA!

What Is Christmas? ("Any good thing to make us all merry")

On its face, the question posed in my title is absurd. We all know what Christmas is, the celebration of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

But then... why do I celebrate Christmas, as someone who largely left behind my Christian faith around two decades ago now. Or rather, what is Christmas... to me? Because despite my lack of religious faith, I really do like Christmas. I like Christmas traditions, Christmas music, Christmas cookies, Christmas trees. Why do I like all of this? Do I just like cookies and presents? Or is there more to it than that?

I've said this before in various forms, but what gives Christmas resonance for me is the turn of the seasons—even living, as I do, in Florida where the seasons never turn. Christmas is the point when, as Steven Moffat put it in the Doctor Who story "A Christmas Carol," we are "halfway out of the dark." In the winter, the nights grow longer and the cold grows deeper, but we come together with family and loved ones to celebrate the fact that we are holding out against the cold, that we are making it into the promise of the new year. As Merle Haggard put it, "if we make it through December," that's something worth celebrating.

It's for this reason, I think, that the best Christmas stories and music always have those tinges of sadness to them. Last year, I wrote up five of my favorite Christmas albums, and more than one of them has a melancholy tone to them. I particularly like the work of Sting on his album If on a Winter's Night... and all three Christmas albums released by Over the Rhine. My favorite Christmas movie is It's a Wonderful Life, which is all about loss even if it is also about triumph.

It's a metaphor, of course. Christmas is the time that we celebrate our triumphs in the face of our losses, and the families and communities that let us experience them. I had a really tough year in some ways, but by December, I felt like I was getting through it, with the help of my wife and my kids and my friends who were there for me.

One of the songs on Sting's albums is called "Soul Cake"; it's about the English tradition of "soulling," where children and the poor go door-to-door offering to say prayers for the souls of the dead, in exchange for cookies called "soul cakes." I guess this is more of a Samhain tradition than a Christmas one, but it's still got that winter feeling, of thinking about our losses and pushing back against them together.

I've loved this song since I picked up the album back in 2021, but this year I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while, and make the soul cakes. (This is the recipe I ended up using.) The Saturday morning after finals week, we  decorated the tree we'd picked up the previous weekend. Then, I spent late morning baking while my kids played and my wife got work done and the Christmas music played on my soon-to-be-dead iPod. I don't usually bake, to be honest, but I found it very satisfying. That evening, my older kid and I went to my department's board game night, and we shared the soul cakes I had made. I had a good day—I was the happiest I'd been in a while.

I don't think I am in the clear yet... but I do feel like I am "halfway out of the dark." That's what Christmas is.

Almost Heaven (As Usual, Again)

"Why do we sing about West Virginia, Dad?"

Kid Two cheesing with his Aunt Cat

This is the question Kid One (now six, and on their sixth Mollmann Thanksgiving) asked me Friday night after the traditional Mollmann hot dog roast. I explained that the Mollmanns have been congregating in state parks for Thanksgiving for over fifty years now, and that in those old days, when it was just my grandparents and their five children, they used to go to Pipestem State Park in West Virginia. So even though we haven't gone to West Virginia since 2008 (too far for my grandmother these days), we still sing John Denver's "Country Roads." It is nothing to be proud of, but what (most of) the Mollmanns lack in musical aptitude, (some of) the Mollmanns make up for with enthusiasm... though for some reason the lyrics of the second verse continue to evade many of us. I recorded it this year, out of a sort of morbid curiosity, but I haven't yet had the courage to listen back to it.

These traditions are important, of course, they keep us who we are. Every Thanksgiving the Mollmanns congregate in a state park, we eat chili for dinner Thursday, we go hiking during the days. My own little unit of the Mollmanns has acquired its own traditions, too; I have to teach  the week of Thanskgiving but my wife doesn't, so my wife and kids fly out Saturday and spend some time with my wife's family, while I don't join them until Tuesday. It's more work for her, of course, but I think she really appreciates getting to spend that extended quality time with her mother, and the kids get a lot out of it, too.

Kid One tastes their first(ish) snowfall

Kid One can be resistant to changes in routine—I feel like last year they were particularly anti-hiking—but now I think we've done it enough that the kids recognize the annual routine themselves, and thus come to find it comforting as well. They were both enthusiastic, engaged hikers this year. I would say it was an above-average Thanksgiving for them. The last couple years, we've stayed in three or four medium-sized lodges, this year we stayed in two big ones. This meant that my immediate family stayed with a couple others, and thus my kids got to spend more time with my cousins' kids of similar ages, which was quite nice. Kid One declared another cousin their friend once they spent some time listening to Kid One's Yoto together (but could not, of course, remember her name), while Kid Two kept bossing around another kid who was two years older than him!

Most excitingly, they got to experience a snowfall! As Florida babies, their experiences with snow have been few and far between. It did snow when we were in Cleveland for Christmas in (I believe) 2021, but neither of them remember this, so it was very exciting, even though by Ohio standards we're talking a light dusting. "Is it Christmas?" Kid Two asked my wife. No, not yet, buddy.

After I explained the origins of Mollmann Thanksgiving, Kid One declared we ought to back to West Virginia. I don't know that the Mollmann clan can make this happen, probably the logistics are too complicated when Mollmann Thanksgiving has something like fifty total attendees. But tradition is important, and if I ever get the opportunity, I'd like to take my family back to where it all began, back to what they claim is "almost heaven."

My Kid and the Dragons Franchise

I haven't done a lot of parental blogging recently, so I thought I would write up what was honestly a pretty minor moment—but that is how I envision this blog, so there you go.

Last Wednesday, I picked up my six-year-old ("Kid One") from their aftercare program. Sometimes Kid One doesn't tell me anything  about their day, but this week, they were nice and chatty. Among other things, they informed me that they had come up with a new Dragons game. I later learned my wife knew about these games, but I didn't. The newest is the twelfth installment, Dragon Claws. When I asked if these were things they wrote or drew, they informed me that no, they just dreamed them up. There's the original Dragons (when I called it "Dragons 1" at some point, I was corrected that it was just Dragons), and then Dragons 2 through Dragons 11. Dragons 5 and 6 are "Dragons Mega" and Dragons 7 through 9 are "Dragons Mega Mega."

Apparently they play these games at recess with their friend (whom I'll call "Connor"). When we got home, it was a little early, and they had missed the recess component of aftercare because I picked up Kid One a bit earlier than mom usually does, so I suggested we play a Dragons game outside. They said I could pick which one, but when I said start from the beginning, they said they didn't remember the original Dragons, so we played Dragons 2 instead.

In Dragons 2, there's a dragon and a warrior; I was the warrior, and they were the dragon. (When Kid One and Connor play, Connor is usually the warrior as well.) First I had to defeat the dragon, then I captured the dragon in my dragonball and registered it to my dragonphone. After that, we battled together against a number of threats (the ones I remember are the flying "Rampagers") and the dragon, originally named "Attacker," evolved a couple times.

Obviously you can identify what their inspirations are! I was struck how Kid One is very obviously my kid, in that they look at systems of narrative and break them down and figure them out. They have already figured out the structure of a game franchise! I love seeing them enthusiastic  and energetic and imaginative; I had to do very little prompting, they mostly told me everything that was happening and came up with all the ideas. I was pretty tired, so we left off once we finished Dragons 2, but I am promised that our progress and characters will carry over into Dragons 3 when we play it!

Did the Wordlebot Make a Mistake? (Wordle No. 1214, 15 Oct. 2024)

No one needs me to explain what the Wordle is; I don't remember exactly when I picked it up, but I've been doing it since around the time it took off. (Unfortunately, I lost my stats in summer 2022 when my phone stopped working and I didn't have a New York Times account yet, so I only have a record of my last 833 games.)

And like many Wordle aficionados, I'm sure, I like to check out my scores against the Wordlebot. The Wordlebot, of course, plays with a 99 skill score, meaning it's in the 99th percentile for quality of guess. But when I went through the Wordlebot analysis of Wordle no. 1214, from Tuesday, October 15, 2024, I decided that its analysis of my guesses was wrong.

Here's my claim. Spoilers, of course, for a past Wordle.

So my initial guess was what has largely been my initial guess,* IRATE:

 

As you can see, the Wordlebot gives this a 94 skill score, though your opening word choice doesn't factor into your overall skill score.

Unless I get a whole lot of information from my first guess, I usually use LOCUS as my second:

It gives me three key consonants (L, C, and S) and the remaining two vowels. It's not always a great guess, but in this case it was; I got a 96 skill score off it and narrowed things down to just five words. 

With this information, my third guess was CODER:

 

Wordlebot gave me a 90 for this; I'm not very sure why COVER is considered the superior pick.

Anyway, it was clear to me that there were three options left, just as you can see in the above screenshot: CORER, COVER, and COWER. Probably, anyway. Sometimes I systematically go through all the possible letters but still miss an option. And I had three guesses left. I could of course just make each guess in turn, but 1) that meant a decent chance of scoring 6 guesses overall, and 2) what if I had indeed missed something and the answer was some other word I hadn't noticed?

So I decided to be a bit strategic and guess VOWED. This would eliminate COVER and COWER if they were the answer, leaving me free to guess CORER on my fifth guess, and thus giving me the space to guess one more word if it somehow wasn't the right answer.

As you can see, Wordlebot says, "Nice," but actually gives it a 51 skill score. It would have picked COVER. But had it picked COVER, it would have then picked, presumably, COWER, and then CORER, meaning with the information I had, it would have have taken the Wordlebot 6 guesses, whereas it took me 5.

Why is this? While the Wordlebot said CORER, COVER, and COWER were all possible, it actually didn't think CORER very probable. See this list:

You'll see it gives COVER a 99 skill score, COWER a 96 skill score... and CORER a 6 skill score! Ouch. And if you scroll down to the "Comparing our guesses" frame, you can see it assigns a very low probability score to CORER:

COVER is 51%, COWER is 48%... and CORER is 1%! 

Why is this? The Wordlebot's understanding of what makes for a probable word is derived from the NYT's own corpus. As per their explanation, "The bot's probabilities are estimated based on how common a word is, using the frequency of appearances in The Times since 2000 as a rough and imperfect proxy. This means the bot, just like humans, has to guess whether borderline words will wind up on the new (hidden) Wordle solution list." 

I do have to admit that CORER seemed somewhat less likely to COVER or COWER to me, but that COVER was fifty times as likely is not a ratio I would have come up with. But the NYT is a newspaper, and I guess newspapers probably talk about people covering and cowering a lot more than they talk about people using apple corers. But in day-to-day existence, while "corer" probably isn't used as much as the other two words, I don't think I would assign such a lopsided ratio.†

So while I can see why Wordlebot went with COVER, as it basically had a 50% chance of getting the solution in 4 according to its own metrics, it would have actually got it in 6, whereas I guaranteed getting it in 5 with my strategy. So I think I deserve a better skill score than 51 on VOWED, and a better skill score than 84 on the puzzle overall, neener neener.

* Once IRATE was the actual answer, I switched to a strategy I saw on the Wordle subreddit for switching things up, which was to use the previous day's answer as the next day's starting word. This was fun if tricky, and taught me to be a bit more strategic about my guesses. But as I neared exceeding a particularly long streak, I switched back to using IRATE in order to make things easier on myself.

† Interestingly, in the Google Books Ngram corpus for 2022, "cover" appears 150 times as often as "cower," and "cower" appears 10 times as often as "corer."