CENSORSHIP: Epstein. Banned word. TikTok.

Goodnight. Midnight Owl "Bubo" Transistor Radio 1960s. www.bidsquare.com/online-aucti...

"If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next," The Manic Street Preachers (1998) www.youtube.com/watch?v=22HT...

Can we please stop calling things a tragedy when we really mean atrocity? Yours in Classics … (FWIW, I think calling these events atrocities actually articulates that there is a crime being committed. By which I mean murder or mass murder.)

Woke up this morning to find that @signal.org had been uninstalled from my laptop. (Lenovo ThinkPad, running Windows 10 with the extended security updates.) I cannot imagine my doing this. Has anything similar happened to anyone else?

Hang on. Do any folks in the GLAM community use Nightshade or Glaze to poison their images for LLM AI?

A request for #GLAM advice: Should I create a new Meta account? I nuked my Facebook / Messenger (/ and Instagram, I guess) account, when I learned that USAians were able to opt out of Meta scraping their accounts for LLM AI training. (1/2)

Can we please stop calling things a tragedy when we really mean atrocity? Yours in Classics … (FWIW, I think calling these events atrocities actually articulates that there is a crime being committed. By which I mean murder or mass murder.)

The Fens, once the UK's largest lowland wetland, are under threat from environmental change. Examining changes in landscape, habitat, and species from the Neolithic to today underscores the need for integrated heritage and environmental management. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

writes @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social, "Grok is an intentional instrument for establishing, maintaining, & manipulating a consensus reality on X...coupled with the apparent eugenicist white-supremacist proclivities of its owner, this makes it...uniquely dangerous." www.techpolicy.press/grok-is-an-e...

Huh. Wondering how well the Bear Blog system would work with my @dreamhost.bsky.social domains. bearblog.dev

I am saying now that this will be my favourite post of the day, if not the week.

[Gets excited about a followed account saying, “Hello.”] it’s an auto-response, isn’t it?

Not for the first time, I am suspecting that a lot of WordPress theme designers don’t have a good sense of the appropriate font size for heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, etc.

"US senators introduce bill to stop Trump seizing Greenland." I'll be calling my reps, today, to ask them to support this bill. 🇬🇱 🇩🇰 🇪🇺 www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/...

Any archaeologists in touch with Dr. Laura Preston? We were classmates at UCL's Institute of Archaeology in the mid-1990s. She was in the Classics faculty at Cambridge in the 2000s but seems to have left the field. If anyone knows her & would pass my contact info on to her, I'd be very grateful.

Ok #archaeology peeps. Who has a reading about archaeological theory that they like to use for undergraduate classes? For students who might not have had archaeology classes before.

Heated Rivalry (1935)

Using AI tools to make your own work easier is cognitive fly-tipping. That work is just unloaded onto someone else downstream of you who will spend far longer sorting out your mess than you saved avoiding doing the work in the first place.

Where do I sign?

Hang on. Do any folks in the GLAM community use Nightshade or Glaze to poison their images for LLM AI?

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

A request for #GLAM advice: Should I create a new Meta account? I nuked my Facebook / Messenger (/ and Instagram, I guess) account, when I learned that USAians were able to opt out of Meta scraping their accounts for LLM AI training. (1/2)

"If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next," The Manic Street Preachers (1998) www.youtube.com/watch?v=22HT...

An important essay on “American exceptionalism.”

If you were at Elm’s Farm, you might have landed at Downhouse for a spell. Essex #Archaeology

Any other ”alumni” of the Downhouse Farm dig, led by Steve Godbold for the Essex County Council Field Archaeology Group out there? 1994-1995? Anyone? 🪣🪏👷👷‍♀️👷‍♂️

I designed the whole thing as a wraparound to demonstrate my understanding for book cover design requirements.

My assignment for Winona Nelson's SmArtschool class: Choose a favorite book and illustrate a cover for it. I picked "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, and my goal was to capture a similar bittersweet tone as the novel has.

Hot take: rather than all media defaulting to the visual (naff video livestreams for podcasts, etc.) the BBC and other broadcasters should ensure there are audio-only versions of documentaries - lots of people actively prefer listening over watching. This would also be great for accessibility, ofc

And I was “Today Years Old” (to adopt a popular internet colloquialism) when I learned about Aegean—with its city-building phase. we-evolve.co.uk/games/aegean/

This is a really interesting article on recent work on the historical & cultural formation of emotions. Makes me think of Sarah Tarlow’s splendid archaeological book, Bereavement & Commemoration. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

TTRPGers with an interest in ancient history! Ancient historians with an interest in TTRPGs? What are your favourite TTRPGs set in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond?

Looks like a really interesting project. I‘ve long wondered about TTG (minis, board games, & TTRPGers) and HIB (Human Information Behaviour, for non-LIS folks). (Oh, dear. LIS = Library & Information Science.)

So some younger humans are switching back to dumb phones, and paper flyers, and offline realities? Rrrrooaarr to this

The algorithms are making it a lot harder to spread the word about these online talks. Although numbers are still reasonable, it would be a great help if folk were able to give the 30 December event a quick share 🙂 Booking available here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/buildings-...

This is just to say I have read the book that was in your training data And which you had absorbed as mere statistics Forgive me your summary misses the point of reading at all.

Okay #Skybrarians, I'm in a position where getting my MLIS degree is a good idea. In order to do it though I'm really going to need some financial aid. The last time I looked for that was out of high school in 2009 and the world is dramatically different now. Anyone have any tips or advice for me?

So why can't we do this with detecting? Why not a license required to own a detector and an online test (to check knowledge of the law and Code of Practice) to be completed before license granted...? #Archaeology #Detecting 🏺 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Look! This! 👇

*laughs in archivist* anyone who thinks it's all been digitized is out of their goddamn mind. We don't have the staff, resources, or digital infrastructure to digitize, store, check, and maintain at preservations standards a digital copy of every single item in our collections.

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

This is a really interesting article on recent work on the historical & cultural formation of emotions. Makes me think of Sarah Tarlow’s splendid archaeological book, Bereavement & Commemoration. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

George Osborne has a new job in tech, and it doesn’t bode well for Britain | Chris Stokel-Walker

Tomorrow I'm in #Chester for the last #FeministArtOfWalking event of 2025. Join me at books on the walls 2-3pm for a reading and chat. No ticket or purchase needed, but might I suggest a signed book is a lovely Christmas gift? @plutopress.bsky.social (story filled walk pic from a previous visit)

Oh, yeah—Eponalia is almost here. 🐎

Calibri is now woke? Holy christ wait til he hears about Garamond....