I will say that I don’t actually like Kipling’s writing style very much. The elevated and archaic language of the characters combined with the folksy voice of the narrator is jarring in a weird way. The story is quite interesting though.

Baloo the brown bear is the best. He is the only one who is not a wolf who has the right to speak at the wolf council because he’s treated as wise but he’s not a good speaker at all and very chill and I like him.

Damn, the colonial-apologia angle is not even deep. I’ve barely started “Mowgli’s Brothers” and the narrator explains that the Law of the Jungle forbids killing Man because it leads explicitly to white men commanding brown men in a punitive attack on the jungle. The narrator supports this order.

I think I’ve decided I want to read The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, the collection of short stories put together in 1894. I was exposed to some of them when I was younger and I have thoughts but don’t feel like I have earned my opinions so I need to read it. Low opinion of Kipling to start.

On a related note to pitch to the crowd, I already have told the story I want to tell, but considering Gigantopithecus is known from some jaws and teeth, what is the version of it in you guys’ heads like?

Paleontology people and writer people, if you are writing (pre)historical fiction set in Mid-Pleistocene Southern China and you need a quick recognizable word for elephants, gomphotheres, and stegodontids collectively for a general audience, is “proboscidean” too technical or “pachyderm” too wrong?

Scrolling fast and I saw the image before I read the post itself and it was just “DONALD TRUMP NAME REMOVED” before I scrolled back up. Damn, we spiritually got him. He is nameless now. The orange one cannot be directly referred to. A truly powerful curse upon him.

This 2002 Onion op-ed gives me life.

We’re doing this as a tournament bracket where we argue and vote between two at a time. It took us four hours yesterday but we got through all the first rounds for Oceania, West Asia, the Americas, and Africa. We’ll be continuing next weekend at the same time. Go Nineveh and Caral!

Curious about people’s favorite great apes (family Hominidae though Hylobatidae fans can bribe me with fruit) but no Homo. If you had to pick a favorite species in our family but outside our genus, which would it be?

In loving memory of the Göktürk Khaganate (552-603) whose whole thing was just being stupidly long. Homies really saw the Eastern Roman Empire on one side of the bus seat and Northern Wei / Sui / Tang China on the other and sat in the middle and spread their legs.

Agnès is taking her first steps towards becoming a history buff by consuming books directly. Soon she will outpace us all. She just listed out all of the states of the Sixteen Kingdoms period that followed the fragmentation of the first Jin Dynasty. I’m very intimidated.

If you ever need to know why I am the way I am, this was one of my favorite movies in my childhood. I used to get the DVD at Blockbuster semi-regularly.

The day’s today! We have a big list of cities to go through, some of which were suggested on this site. I’ve handed it over to the friend who suggested it to run the event but it’s a server I manage and I’ll be there so come join!

Take me to the pristine environment these represent.

Just spitballing but I wonder if to fortify the capacities of local communities to deny data centers, protect natural spaces, and broadly resist larger corporate invasions, it would help to reorganize local governments to have to approve these things by direct democracy instead of a few officials.

The Agnès grindset is snuggle, sleep, eat, write a book. (OK, some might contest that I am writing the book and she is merely present but she has repeatedly hit things on the keyboard, technically contributing.)

Would you guys still love me if instead of having a brain or any central nervous system, I had a diffuse nerve net that could respond to stimuli locally in my body like the pristine and noble jellyfish?

Look, I usually don’t do celebrity crushes but… I… no, hear me out. If Justinian and Theodora approached me from across the hippodrome and said “we like your vibe,” I think I might get shrouded in those noble purple sheets.

One of my very long-time friends texted me today to ask if the World Cup is like the Olympics for soccer or something. I already think I’m pretty self-sheltered on hearing about sports and stuff but her level is incredible. How do I attain this? How do I get there?

😏

Had a Reddit interaction with an Arab nationalist that used Grok screenshots to argue that the Ayyubids were Arabs and not Turks or Kurds and then when pressed for a real source first deflected and then posted one that said they had both Arabic and Kurdish descent, treating it as a win. Breh.

Michael Crichton would be considered so woke if all of his books except this one were mysteriously lost to time.

We’ve chosen our weekly schedule! Signups still open until end of the month! Wednesdays: 9-11 US Pacific; 11-13 US Central; 17-19 UK. Thursdays: 9-10 US Pacific; 11-12 US Central; 17-18 UK. If you miss a session, it’s not a problem because I will send you the recording.

I found a lot of interesting thoughts in this article by political analyst Ned Resnikoff, who commentates on Trumpist fascism as “hyperfascism,” in the same vein as a hyperreality, a sort of fascism obsessed with the spectacle of authoritarian power more than it is in creating lasting stability.

The energy I hope I carry sometimes.

Last night in the Jacob dream report, I dreamed I was at the gym when I came across an article that researchers had found the body of someone who’d wandered off from the 1846-1847 Donner Party and gotten frozen in ice in the Sierra Nevada and his remains were perfectly spookily preserved.

Wild how in 2020 a bunch of Japanese researchers pulled up bacteria from the seafloor in the South Pacific Gyre that have been lying there dormant and very much alive since the fucking Early Cretaceous Period and then we all just went on with our lives knowing that’s what the seafloor is like.

My hot take is that my least favorite genre of classic literature is rich-people melodrama. Damn, some wealthy Victorian wrote yet another banger with a love triangle and the moral that rich people are constrained by society too and whoever is doing the canon keeps saying “YES, ADD IT TO THE LIST.”

Gonna add Prototaxites to my Frutiger Aero backgrounds and the floating fish in the bubbles in front of everything will include Dunkleosteus.

I’m about to teach my last class in this online archaeology course I put together. The first run-through has been really good with great feedback and successful execution. I’m really happy I made the choice to do this and look forward to running it again.

From “Symbolism of the ibex motif in Negev rock art” by Avner, Horwitz, and Horowitz, 2016. I love how Nabataeans and other Arab peoples (who associated the ibex with rain and astral symbols) just doodled ibexes into everything. Whimsically repping their collective favorite animal.

Contemporary understandings of cosmology have incorporated the idea of an expanding universe into explaining galaxies moving apart, but nobody has asked what dark energy means for the distances between cities. In “Heat Death Theory of the Classic Maya Trade Network Collapse,” I will…

Banger Tiktaalik content.

Saw a Redditor on r/HistoryMemes reply to someone’s stupid comment with “all quiet on the frontal lobe” and that’s such a raw insult that I can’t stop thinking about it. Utterly literary material, fam.

You should all read this by the way.

Sounds like someone was having a fun discussion about the Falkland Islands.

Kinda late for the Jacob dream report but last night I dreamed I went to Mecca except it looked like some stereotypically gentrified American suburban business district with modern buildings with big glass windows. The Kaaba was in the lobby of some multipurpose business center.

Aside from the awesome set of included animals, I absolutely love the depictions of environments in this. I’m excited and hopeful for a sort of storytelling that emphasizes the role of changing habitats and ecological regimes rather than just highlighting individual creatures.

Mosaic of an elephant vanquishing a tiger from Roman Syria in the 300s or 400s AD. Caspian tigers (a western continuity of the modern Siberian tiger) were present in northern Anatolia, the Caucasus, northern Iran, and much of Central Asia before their extirpation in the 1970s.

She does not want me working on anything.

Appreciation post for Sinosauropteryx prima, a 1-meter feathered coelurosaur dinosaur from Early Cretaceous China. Preserved banding patterns in the feathers on its tail have been suggested to be derived from the color patterns the animal had in life, showing it had a long stripy tail.

I feel like a lot of US states have joking rivalries with their neighbors but not Oregon and Washington. When we meet each other online or away, we’re like “hello, treasured Cascadian sibling” and instantly become besties as we bond over the same beloved landscape.

It’s fun to get up in the morning and have a miniature dachshund puppy run towards my bedroom door the moment I open it. So many little joys to having a dog around. Also I appreciate that she’s not good at running yet and sort of jumps repeatedly to do it.

My friend and I ended up playing The Isle for like four hours last night, the first time I’d played in 9 years. I was a Pachycephalosaurus. That game is so addicting and it’s fun to slowly get the hang of its geography. Still interested in other people who play it to make our herd bigger.

Skircle time!

The Tlatilco culture is the name Mesoamerican archaeologists give to a material assemblage dating between 1250 and 800 BC in the Valley of Mexico, indicating a formative agricultural civilization. Archaeologists believe they were a society of thick-thighed baddies.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s always been ambiguous whether Postosuchus was quadrupedal or bipedal, considering this extremely scientifically rigorous reconstruction from 2001 in the Lego Dinosaurs series.

🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇫🇷 🇦🇺 🇨🇿 🇵🇱 🇳🇱 🇳🇴 🇳🇿 🇬🇷 🇿🇦 🇿🇼 82 years ago today, Allied forces made five beachheads in Normandy in Nazi-occupied France with the aid of countless engineers and local French Resistance. We salute these brave combatants in the international fight against fascism. 🫡

In Andean civilizations, there is a motif called the “Staff God” of a deity standing between two vertically oriented objects held in their hands. The oldest object attributed to this motif is this jolly guy on a burnt piece of gourd dated to around 2250 BC in the Norte Chico region of Peru.