ValleyCon, Dean Haglund, and the Sharknado Principle

There’s a particular kind of optimism that only exists in the first few weeks after you move somewhere new. Everything is a little bit of an adventure. The crappy regional grocery store chain is an adventure. The local radio stations are an adventure. You haven’t yet learned which parts of the place are going to wear you down — you’re just excited.

Fargo, North Dakota. 2010. I had just moved to the city to start grad school. I would eventually come to loathe Fargo with a depth and consistency that, honestly, still kind of impresses me. But back then? It was new. I was young(ish), I was eager, and I wanted to see what the place had to offer.

And lo and behold, it turned out that what the place had to offer was a nerd convention.

ValleyCon is a sci-fi/fantasy/everything-nerdy convention that’s been running in the Fargo-Moorhead area since 1977, which surprised me then and still kind of surprises me now. Hey, I like Star Wars. I like videogames. I spent an embarrassing chunk of my youth reading EGM and PSM cover to cover, staring at photos from E3 like they were dispatches from some distant, glorious kingdom that I would one day get to visit. And yet, despite all of that fantasizing, I had never actually been to a convention. Not once.

So I went.

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Pumpkin pancakes (good ones!)

Given the website title, it’s probably about time that I actually post a pancake recipe. So, here we go.

It’s pumpkin season. You either love it or you’re already angry about it. Whether you’re a pumpkin lover or you still haven’t outgrown the sophomoric “my identity is hating things that are popular, therefore, pumpkin spice sucks!” thing, good pumpkin pancakes are awesome. I’m not trying to convince you; it’s just objectively true.

This is my recipe, pieced together over the years from a bunch of other recipes that didn’t quite hit the mark. This one hits the mark. Here’s the recipe, and hey, I’m giving it to you without my entire life story. Awesome, right?

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They’re waffles, dammit

Alright, I know. People put their entire life story in blog posts before they’ll tell you how to cook something. We get it — you lead a rich, textured life full of wonder, excitement, and anecdotes about food you ate in a small town in Portugal. We’re all happy for you.

I’ll try to cut to the chase, with a bit of context in case this sounds familiar to you. For years, I operated under the firm belief that vegan waffles simply could not exist. Not shouldn’t exist. Could not. Some immutable law of physics involving eggs and airiness and crispiness that I had absolutely no clue about. A few years ago, a thought occurred to me: “wait, that’s stupid.” So I bought a used waffle iron for $10 from someone in our apartment complex — confirming that yes, someone will always buy your old waffle iron. There is a market. Maybe even a waffle iron black market. I didn’t get that deep into the waffle iron game, so I don’t know.

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Social Psychology Is Looking at LLMs Wrong

I gave a version of this talk at SPSP 2026 in Chicago. It’s been rattling around in my head since, and I think there’s something here worth putting on paper. I could be wrong. Like, super wrong. But I’d rather be wrong out loud on this one. Hey, we’re all wrong sometimes, and some of us are wrong most of the time. It’s okay.

I say this as someone who straddles computational and social science, and who cares a lot about both sides of that line. I think social psychology is standing at the edge of a genuine paradigm shift and doesn’t realize it — not because the field lacks the sophistication, but because it’s looking at large language models and seeing the wrong thing.

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Setting Up Jellyfin with Hardware Transcoding on the Beelink EQ14 (Intel N150)

The Beelink EQ14, powered by Intel’s N150 processor, is a small, relatively inexpensive mini PC that can be a great little home media server. With Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) support, it’s capable of efficient hardware-accelerated transcoding using very little power. I picked one of these up a little while ago, but only just recently had a moment to sit down with it and try to get things set up and running.

I’ll admit, while the setup process wasn’t bad, I hit a number of roadblocks along the way. Not because it’s especially difficult, but mostly because I’ve never messed around with one of these things before. Assuming that there will be some subset of people in the same boat, I figured that it might be helpful to write up the steps that got things working for me.

This guide walks you through setting up Jellyfin on Ubuntu with Docker from scratch — focusing primarily on ensuring that it’s actually doing hardware-accelerated transcoding. I haven’t done any testing that pushes it to its limits, and I’m not savvy enough to say what all kinds of video formats/encodings it could actually handle.

For this write-up, I’m focusing on the most straightforward steps to get things up and running in a fashion consistent with basic security principles — no Portainer or reverse proxy; just a clean, focused setup. Of course, you can absolutely do the later parts of this process in something like Portainer (that’s actually what I prefer), and you can set up Nginx Proxy Manager, and lots of other things, but I wanted to focus on just getting from Point A to Point B so that I could get Jellyfin up and running on this bad boy.

So, with that, here’s how I got a Jellyfin server up and running on this little box. There was a lot of trial-and-error in-between these steps, but this is ultimately what worked for me.

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RIP #10: The Correspondence Principle

Note: This post is part of the “classic” RIP series, which is described in this initial post for context. (Originally posted on May 28, 2024)

One concept from the broader universe of psychological (and psychometric) theory that I’ve wanted to touch upon for some time now is what is known as “the correspondence principle.” This is a concept that I’ve brought up more than a few times in chatting with various members of the lab, and I figure that it is important enough to warrant its own RIP.

The correspondence principle is a foundational concept in psychology that has its origins in attitudes research and cognitive consistency theories. Put simply, this is the idea that I often describe as “when you ask people what they think or feel, you need to put it to them at the same level of specificity as the behaviors/outcomes you actually care about.”

A bit of history/backstory.

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RIP #9: The K-Factor

Note: This post is part of the “classic” RIP series, which is described in this initial post for context. (Originally posted April 1, 2024)

We’re long overdue for another RIP, so… let’s rip!

The history of research on personality and individual differences has a long and fascinating history of really, really smart people trying to understand the “best” way to describe the components and structure of various psychological phenomena. Early work on intelligence (or today, often referred to as “mental ability”) was marked by numerous people working to understand what types of mental abilities people had — what were all of the ways in which the brain could be tested for how well it could do different types of things? What were all of those different types of things that the brain could do? And so on. The story of intelligence testing is interesting in and of itself — it’s a truly fascinating tale that ranges from public education to the military to eugenics, and involved more than one of the people who would later be considered some of the most influential personality psychologists in history — but perhaps that’s for another RIP. Ultimately, the study of intelligence came down to a discussion of the g factor (i.e., “general intelligence”) — a superordinate, latent variable to which all other sub-factors of intelligence were linked in various ways. Put simply, a growing body of research found that all of the “mental abilities” that were being studied seemed to be loosely federated in such a way as to where if you scored higher on one, you’d be likely to score higher on several others as well. For a long time, the question of “how many dimensions of intelligence are there?” seemed to be largely resolved.

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Language Analysis Across Contexts: A Dialogue Between Forensic Linguistics and Psychology — A Rejoinder to Hunter & Grant (2025)

Before I dive into my thoughts, I want to openly acknowledge my longstanding involvement with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. I’ve been deeply engaged in its development and daily operations for well over a decade at this point in my life, ranging from (but hardly — and I mean hardly — limited to) continual development/improvement of the LIWC dictionary to driving major updates like LIWC-22. Although I use a fairly wide variety of NLP methods and don’t particularly consider myself a “LIWCian,” my close association with LIWC does color my perspectives. So, as you read on, please consider my insights with an understanding of this background.

Hunter and Grant’s recent critique raises some good questions about LIWC’s applicability in forensic and security contexts. Their observations highlight areas where care and context are necessary when using LIWC and, really, any type of computational tool. While I believe some of their conclusions overstate, or perhaps misplace, LIWC’s limitations1, their paper opens an opportunity to reflect on how we approach language analysis, particularly in high-stakes domains like security and extremism. I have not had any dialogue with the authors of the critique. My hope is that this post will come across as constructive rather than critical, collaborative rather than defensive. But, as we all know, language is complicated, and your interpretation may differ drastically from my intent.

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RIP #8: Approach versus Avoidance

Note: This post is part of the “classic” RIP series, which is described in this initial post for context. (Originally posted February 5, 2024)

Psychology, as a discipline, tends to go through waves of “big” and “small” thinking. Whenever it swings back to the “big” thinking time periods, we often see a return to some of the most basic, foundational questions about what underlies most (and perhaps all) of human psychology. To be even more accurate: all psychology across all members of the animal kingdom.

Over the past 150 years, we can see several periods of serious return to, and departure from, an absolutely key discussion point in the social sciences: Darwinian evolution. You’re all incredibly smart and thoughtful, so I won’t bore you with a ham-fisted retelling of evolutionary theory. But, really, the key talking point of evolutionary theory that we all know is this — in order for a species to survive in the long term, it has to survive in the short term. In practical terms, this means that we are well-served by propensities to avoid or escape harmful or noxious things in our environment, and approach things that are helpful or beneficial in some way. This basic idea is perhaps most often recognized in psychology, in its various forms, by infamous names like “hedonic motivation” or “the pleasure principle.”

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RIP #7: Positivity Offset

Note: This post is part of the “classic” RIP series, which is described in this initial post for context. (Originally posted January 2, 2024)

New year, new RIP! I hope that everyone has had a wonderful holiday season, and I’d like to kick the year off with something positive. Well, in a manner of speaking, I’d like to kick the year off by talking about positivity itself!

Over the years, I have heard many, many, many times that psychological science is a ridiculously diverse discipline, which is one thing that I absolutely love about the field. Take any given psychological topic, and you can study it through the lens of any number of subdisciplines. Are you interested in studying dating? You can study it through the lens of how romantic partners influence each other (social psych). You can study it by trying to figure out the different ways that people try to find a short- or long-term mate (evolutionary psych). You can study it through how people think about or understand their relationships with others (cognitive psych). You can study how relationships vary across time/space (cultural psych). You can study how relationship styles form and change throughout our lives (developmental psych). The list goes on and on. And that’s just talking about one particular slice of romantic relationships!

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