Delicious December continues! Cheistmas leftovers reenacting Christmas dinner (I don't do the traditional roast)

I am spending Boxing day at home relaxing and very much enjoying watching this talk on a history of colour in horror film! youtu.be/VEyn_MVGkqg

A nice haul!

Very, very grateful for what's looking to be the start of a great reading year in 2026 🙏

I’m really excited to finish House of Leaves and consume the next haul (especially King Sorrow)

I loved Vera Wong!

My haul

My presents from my Mom!

A bit of an odd mix for me but I will try all of them

My haul this year, courtesy of my wife

My son and I do our book exchange on Christmas Eve. Here’s my haul this year.

Great haul!! Just the one for me but I plan to get a lot of use out of it in 2026!

Very pleased with my haul. 📚 Starting with the Christmas ghost stories

A Christmas (and early birthday) book haul! I've shown you mine, do show me yours! Christmas is for bookish wishlists coming true, I say!

Today only! Spooky sale! 👻

On the bottom of the plinth, the Lairds decree is written in English, Gaelic, French and Latin. It's a fascinating tale. www.atlasobscura.com/places/well-...

Tilly is helping

Mel sold me the idea of this film with the following review. Turns out, this is a fully accurate summary.

My Christmas tradition is watching Christmas slashers with my friends (Particularly loved 'The Sacrifice Game' and 'The Traveler' this year!) This talk gives you some top tips and a bit of history!

Delighted to have this published today in the Journal of the British Society for the History of Medicine bshm.org.uk/wp-content/u...

For my birthday I’d like to find indie and self-published queer SFF, if you have written one or know one that fits, please LINK below Brief: scifi: military, space opera fantasy: epic, political horror: scifi/ fantasy horror erotica with any of the above: yes NO: urban fantasy YA steam/clockpunk

Thread of my published writing! I will keep adding things as they become available 😊 My novelette Earworm: A walking tour of the ends of worlds... books2read.com/u/3kOvKn This is possibly one of my favourite things I've written, it is a standalone 10k cosmic horror/ weird fiction

Tilly is helping

Sam is being much too modest here BUT ALSO did you know you can hire me to do research for you??!! 🤯🤩 rosedoestheresearch.com

Went out to get presents... came home with a second-hand book haul for me. To be fair ONE of these is a present. The others are presents to me xD

I do think this is true. I'm often guilty myself of underplaying what the work I do looks like or how much time and effort it takes. Research isn't 'just reading' or a question of sucking up summaries others have created. It's knowledge creation. So let me go through the process with an example 1/

Sadie is a sad, anxious lesbian in her 40s with nothing of her own. When she inherits a friend's apartment, she uses the unexpected gift to make a new life. She even adopts a cat. But when she opens a room that's been shut up for years, she learns the gift has strings even the giver couldn't sever.

Took down my quote skeet because I remembered we don't do that here and I don't want his day to be worse because he made mine worse.

Continuing my plan to make the last weeks of December delicious, today's dinner! Not as photogenic but really tasty, I promise!

Be sure to keep an eye on the SSAG website and our mailing list for a variety of gothic and horror-related cfps and other announcements! CFPS: americangothicsociety.com/calls-for-pa... Listserv: www.freelists.org/list/america... #SSAG #GothicLit #Horror #cfp

Did you miss this weekend's absolutely cracking talk? We were joined by the marvellous Cat Irving again for a fascinating talk on the Afterlives of Cadavers. So many wild, wonderful and fascinating things to explore! youtu.be/imxZx62XHAw

Wait until you hear that LLMs can only train on digitized/datafied info. Most of the FACTS scholars use are in archives/libraries. Less than 1% of archival colletions worldwide have been digitized. Also: lots of facts are not even in archives, but in the attics.

By tracing citations and consulting something *in the archive* I learned that a magnificent 16th-century manuscript atlas (handwritten; hand-drawn and illustrated) had a double the number of pages most people thought it did. #ThisStuffAintOnline. 🗃 #earlymodern buttondown.com/surekhadavie...

I work regularly in a comparatively small archive and volunteer doing some digitizing and the percentage of stuff that is digitized is, I would say, far less than 5%. That which is digitized is not necessarily easily available to the public as there is no open digital archive of the material.

Did you miss this weekend's absolutely cracking talk? We were joined by the marvellous Cat Irving again for a fascinating talk on the Afterlives of Cadavers. So many wild, wonderful and fascinating things to explore! youtu.be/imxZx62XHAw

this is an amazing thread research is the creative process of asking questions, doing the diligence, talking to people, testing out ideas, asking more questions, analyzing and writing, asking more questions it's an absurd and glorious process 🏵️

This is actually an important point in Byron studies. Irving is often quoted in scholarship as a neutral historical source. Source assessment (dependent on all sorts of knowledge for comparison and on literary studies work on Irving in this case) is a big part of actual research.

Aargh, as a guest of Wildman. He was not the guest of Byron's resurrected corpse. That'll teach me to late night post xD

Paint me like one of your French prawns

Research is often coming across something, and going to oneself, 'Er, WHAT?' because it doesn't sound quite right, and going down a labyrinthine rabbithole - one instance that I pursued myself. And I suspect that there are probably still (non-online) sources in music-hall history worth consulting.

How do historians process that kind of material? Well, I read it all. I learned how to recognize the handwriting of every family member (40 cousins in one generation) and other correspondents. I learned how to skim. And then I transcribed 2000+ letters that I needed more time to analyze.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

folks I need some recommendations of places to start researching mining technology and practices in say roughly 1300-1600 ad in Europe. 👀

You know, I had the suspicion that this thread would make me realise the unhinged amount of work that goes into a tiny presentation and I was correct. But also, this is what research looks like. Not whatever they keep trying to persuade us LLMs can do.

A cozy detective story ❤️

I do think this is true. I'm often guilty myself of underplaying what the work I do looks like or how much time and effort it takes. Research isn't 'just reading' or a question of sucking up summaries others have created. It's knowledge creation. So let me go through the process with an example 1/

I have decided that holiday period is for delicious things. So I did a big shop and am very excited about the next week! A good start.

This! Whenever I teach literature in translation, we always explore the extent to which the translation is itself a creative act. It is so frustrating to see people talk as if you can auto-generate anything remotely resembling a good literary translation. You can't.

He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you're awake He knows you would taste really good So be ready with your stake Oh You'd better not shout You'd better not cry He's moving to London, he's sexy and bi Dracula is coming to town