Spending the holiday break in Florida rather than Pennsylvania wasn't the worst choice.

Trying out a new workflow where I write my reading notes into Obsidian and use it to generate a network map that I use to better conceptualize gaps. It's really been helpful in organizing my thoughts which I feel like I haven't been able to do very well since ~2020.

I just backed Argentina, a Tale of Two Utopias on @kickstarter.com www.kickstarter.com/projects/wrk...

I need a better way to find new books for my graduate seminars that doesn't require searching each publisher's website. Goodreads and JSTOR are useless. Any recommendations?

Calling all aspiring chairs who are human geographers--we are hiring in the Dept. of Geography & Spatial Sciences. I am on this committee and am available to answer any questions!!! #geography #geogchat #geosky careers.udel.edu/cw/en-us/job...

Pittsburgh Riverhounds vs Miami FC

University has decided faculty are no longer allowed to install, update, or uninstall software on their computers. They've issued me a new computer that doesn't have the software I teach installed. Incredible foresight.

Trying to find outside reviewers for my T&P review this fall and I have to say, the state of websites in higher education might be worse than the labor conditions.

Spring in Pittsburgh

Week four of "Urban Planning and Political Ecology" and the students are already interested in insurgent/insurrectionary planning.

They’ve apparently been digging out this hill for years. I have no idea why. #photography

Ice fishing on the Allegheny #photography

I asked students struggling to setup a group chat why they didn't use a different messaging app. "Like WhatsApp," they ask. "Well, I use Signal." "Yeah, you look like you would use Signal."

cannot wait to get release updates on new books from james joyce

"The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting [weaponry] from [boxes labeled 'books and bibles']" (someone else posted this image and I didn't want to quote tweet because it wasn't their point, but this is all i could think)

I am extremely excited to announce that for the first time ever, Skype a Scientist is offering mini-grants to support IRL science communication!! Communicating science out in our communities is critical. We want to enable others to get their projects off the ground! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

It’s bitterly cold in Pittsburgh today. Thinking about warmer days. #photography

Snowy campus scene

Sunset in the Everglades as seen from the Amtrak Floridian.

I get uncomfortable when people say something like "I'm sorry" when I say I'm from Florida. I don't think people realize how incredible of a place it has been (and could be again). I don't think there would be space for someone like Jesse in Gainesville now, though. Maybe that's what the apology is?

A University is when a person with 6 figure salary tells a person with a 5 figure salary that they have to cancel the class of a person making 4 figures a year because a class has 7 students enrolled instead of 8

Reviewing grant/scholarship/fellowship propsals/applications really impresses upon me how much need there is to break graduate students out of the "no one has done this" paradigm. More often than not, someone has done it. That's not what novelty needs to be.

The Metro NY Library Council helps build digital repositories for other org's; they just launched a new People's Archive Digital Repository for the DC Public Library — featuring radical magazines, bike club photos, oral histories, archives of DC punk + Go Go, other 🌟 stuff! digdc.dclibrary.org

Why is the Italian Super Cup taking place in Riyadh?

I keep seeing posts about how Luigi Mangione will be taken care of and perfected. He's at MDC Brooklyn, a facility that frequently has no heat and had conditions so poor that BOP stopped sending convicted people there after a judge described the conditions as "dangerous" and "barbaric."

I took the Amtrak Floridian from Pittsburgh to Miami with @imenarv.bsky.social It's a picturesque journey.

Love these stickers from Be Our Neighbor Millvale. It's not enough to bang drums outside of a Nazi's house. You have to build a community where everyone is safe.

Trying not to be the person that just sits in a coffee shop all day but they are playing p.s. eliot, the front bottoms, and mom jeans and it's making that hard.

Worse, perhaps, than being sick is coming back to a week's worth of work and the apparent expectation that it needs to be handled immediately.

This institution is obsessed with having an in-person faculty meeting (despite most people continuing to join via Zoom including an entire campus that is a minimum of 45 minutes away) and it is ridiculous. Thankfully, the tenor of the meeting today is "work to contract."

Pittsburgh 🤝 Georgetown, Guyana

Who are the river people on here? Hydrologists, geomorphologists, historians, anthropologists, poets, writers, people who love them. Looking to make a starter pack! #rivers #envhist #envhum 🏞️

first dusting of the season on the farm nothing sticking in the city

Today in class, a first-year student asked how to manage the grief and anxiety that comes with critical environmental social science. The class brainstormed ideas and shared their own strategies, but I wonder if there's a good way to integrate these strategies into the curriculum?

Words I would like to have removed from my brain: assessment, accreditation

I think about this comic every time anyone mentions the Venezuela-Guyana border.

Millvale is the best.

The most important thing I did this academic year was play a very small role in bringing rare (in the US) Venezuelan peppers to Pittsburgh. I wish academia could have this kind of direct, positive, cultural/community impact all of the time.

I'm going to need someone to explain to me Pittsburgh's obsession with Pigeon Bagels. They are good, but the lines are ridiculous.

There's something really wrong when it takes 18 months to get peer reviews back and none of them mention the really great work on the topic that has been published in the interceding period but do suggest you cite things that you kind of already cited.

For the past few months there has been a large piece of graffiti on 28 in Pittsburgh that said "No War In Gaza." It--and only it, the other graffiti is still there--has been removed. The removal happened right after the Allegheny County Council voted against calling for a ceasefire.

Every Irish band booked to play SXSW has pulled out, joining the boycott in solidarity with Gaza. You love to see it

90 percent of teaching GIS is saying "did you clear your selection?" The other 10 is saying "wait, that didn't work because I forgot to clear my selection."

Huge update thanks to Reddit: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown create new D Word key: bEnableGentech value: 0

Dear Adobe, I do not need or want AI features in your PDF reader. I need it to functionally open PDFs and sometimes allow me to fill them out and sign them. That's it.

More than four years after @dylanmharris.bsky.social and I started talking about ruins, editing a shared GDoc in a haphazard way, the fruits of our labor are finally in the world. Read our introduction to Ruins and Ruination in Political Ecology now out in CNS: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RWBRI...

Last call for this combined OPS/Tenure Track Faculty Position in energy/built systems/green buildings with me at Chatham University. Happy to talk about the position and my experiences since starting here in June. www.higheredjobs.com/institution/...