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a major american city is being forced to close schools because armed government agents are raiding and pepper spraying and terrorizing children and teachers for social media content

I don't know who needs to hear this, but cops are not allowed to shoot people just because you didn't do what they said. That is called murder when they do that. Some cops are working hard to convince people otherwise.

#TTRPG Designers, players, & related nerds: @ttrpgcataloging.bsky.social is a group of Library & Information Science MA students are working on a research project focused on improving cataloging for TTRPGs — unbelievably important work! They’re seeking participants for interviews.

this is so cool

My Dad is Dracula (and a Medieval Scholar) 🏰

Anti-war march in NYC, organized overnight. Happening right now, 8th Ave. People care.

Happening now: several hundred people are pouring into Chicago's downtown Federal Plaza. It's 25 degrees outside. Organizers are leading the crowd in a chant of, "no boots on the ground, no bombs in the air!" Two protesters hold a large banner reading, "no war for Venezuela oil."

I cannot emphasize enough that the attempts to anthropomorphize an algorithm is a fundamental act of journalistic malpractice and an intentional act to shield the people responsible for this. It's fucking shameful.

Came across this on Instagram and was immediately annoyed - most people currently alive can’t read most historical documents for a myriad of reasons that far exceed handwriting. That’s why people who actually do read those documents (historians) learn palaeography!

"As the data center industry grows across the country, concerns about noise and light pollution, water consumption and energy use are also spreading to largely Black and Brown communities like Prince George’s, whose residents have wrestled with a legacy of environmental racism."

2026 will be full of a variety of mosses to lay your hand against and go “oh yes that’s a good one” or “hm this one is not for me”

😓"NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts---Holdings from the library at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which includes unique documents from the early 20th century to the Soviet space race, will be warehoused or thrown out." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

Tomorrow is public domain day! In the US, most materials under copyright created through 1930 (and audio recordings created through 1925) join the public domain! 🎉 web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicd...

Today's artist without a (known) birthday: Clara Peeters of Antwerp & Amsterdam. Here in 1618 w/ collection of luxury goods, reminding us that they'd be vain & fleeting (if she hadn't painted them).

I love to see this angle on textiles showing up in more places! It's core to my argument about how running a Textile Makerspace is digital humanities. Humanities students especially are so scared of failure, and it's less intimidating when you start with thread before moving to computers. #DHmakes

"The question for the Luddites was never simply whether to accept or reject a new machine, but rather who controlled it, how it was deployed, and whose interests it served. . .

Love how he casually includes an intensely complex textile for no other reason than showing off:

If you think of "hiring in entry level positions" as "procuring labor to do the tasks entry level people do" then you probably do think AI is a magical headcount reduction machine. But the point of hiring in entry level positions is to produce mid-career employees.

when you insult me you're insulting the award-winning team of dozens of puppeteers and special effects wizards responsible for bringing my baffling physical presence to life. so maybe think twice about your careless words

"Starbucks baristas are struggling to make ends meet. Many rely on SNAP and Medicaid because they don't receive enough hours to pay their bills or access benefits... [T]he average barista receives just 19 hours of work per week, leaving them one hour short of the cutoff to receive company benefits."

Our photographer Alex Kormann captured the exact moment the presses stopped for the last time in Minneapolis, ending a 158 history of locally printed newspapers.

Got 5 minutes? Fire up your rageful typing fingers and write a comment on the government's efforts to ban trans healthcare for kids. Tell them you're taking time out of your Christmas to write it because it's that important.

The end of the year is in sight, and with it, the end of the embroidery of the adults I have some meaningful interaction with, every day this year. Down to the last few spirals. #DHmakes

Gender affirming care is a mere fraction of total healthcare, even for hospitals that provide it. Less than 0.1% of all children and teens receive gender affirming care. GAC has a near 0% regret rate. They’re shutting down hospitals and arresting doctors who serve millions of people over lies.

Indeed. The purchaseable *product* we call the TTRPG begins in the 1970s with Western Gunfight, Chainmail, and D&D. Yet role-playing "parlor games," simulations, and similar are centuries old and draw from a well that resembles all the positive stuff about D&D. Parlor games were feminized...

The archive at the Met Cloisters has a collection of miniature reproductions of art, furniture and architectural details that was used in planning the layout of the Cloisters. It’s kind of a Cloisters dollhouse and my fave thing in archives I’ve worked with (so far!).

My longtime love of physical media is only increasing as algorithms & AI seep into everything online like toxic runoff in groundwater, so I love this @coyotemedia.org story about a librarian in SF starting a vinyl collection for middle schoolers: www.coyotemedia.org/a-bay-area-l...

The 60 Minutes reporting on CECOT, with video recorded straight from broadcast (not multi-part phone recording off tv), now on Internet Archive.

I am sure this is on these professionals' minds, but I want to say it out loud: sometimes the digging you want to do is related to the actual physical form of the object! Digitizing things is a 'lossy' operation! You also have to make certain those digital records remain available, which is work!

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.

Treating trans children (and adults) this way is immoral. The people who say such things are wrong; a government that develops such policy is unjust; all its citizens suffer moral injury as a result. Trans people morally and materially suffer and die needlessly.

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

Happy 21st December evening everyone. May the Great Veiled Bear pass over you house tonight and not present you with one of his cursed Christmas cookies.

suspect a big reason why many academics and others who work in areas where getting facts RIGHT is key are disinterested in using LLMs for research: they’ve tried it, they keep noticing major errors in output, and they conclude that having to verify all that doesn’t actually save them time.

The present corporatized, monolithic, surveilled state of the internet is just one possibility out of many, and there is radical promise in uncovering alternatives: pirate radio to barbed wire telegraph, synthesizers transmitted over the telephone to encoded messages bounced off the surface of the 🌙

I've been thinking about how to organize a silent/solo game meetup for a while. At a library? Somewhere else? I love the idea of playing solo ttrpg games together. The idea is not unlike silentbook.club but the logistics, as with all things, can be complicated. Any experiences to share?

Fascinating article in @uk.theconversation.com from the @ihr.bsky.social's @justincolson.bsky.social and @uni-bamberg.de's Werner Scheltjens discussing their work with colleagues on the "Unlocking Upcycled Medieval Data" project. 📰You can read the article here: bit.ly/3L5CthA

Take a break from doom scrolling and have a little peak at the commission. I’m working on today. Next step, the grasshopper and the foliage.

Once again a reminder: We can have trans rights, bodily autonomy, gender nonconformity, and freedom of expression, or we can have none of these things. There’s no third option.

Academics are making the decision to shove unpublished original research that isn’t even theirs into the plagiarism machine. I can’t.

Here are some actions you can take to defend gender-affirming care in your hospital system.

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

Gender affirming care for trans people is safe, effective, and has a lower regret rate (4%) than almost any major medical procedure. It saves lives. These are facts. The right's talking-points are recycled "they are coming for your children!" scare tactics well over fifty years old at this point.

This is such a misunderstanding of why writers, artists, and designers do research to begin with, which is to find something unexpected, not capture the average or find reference for the default. And, as always, the biggest misapprehension: We don’t want to NOT do this part. It’s fun to learn shit

In the print made from the wood block, flag outline is meant to be colored in + the appropriate checkboxes ✔️ed. Here's an example print from the old version (where I accidentally ran the text together confusingly when resizing to fit different material than planned for):

sooper cool!

everyone's like "how do we solve the male loneliness epidemic" but they're unwilling to entertain the most obvious answer: 30 Plague Marines

every trans kid brings more value to the world than any chickenshit politician willing to sacrifice them for political points