Hey, if you want a fun niche fandom, remember Atlantis: The Lost Empire from 2001? The Atlantean language in that is a pretty fleshed-out conlang by Marc Okrand of Klingon fame. If you get into it online, you can find people doing decipherment and philology of the texts that appear on screen.

Scientists observing near Dominica have caught footage of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) giving birth with the support of the whole clan. Cetaceans really are the most wonderful animals and it’s fun to see a family structure of intelligent creatures in action.

A number of previously untranslated graffiti in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings have now been identified as being in various Indian scripts contemporary with the Roman period, inscribing languages such as Tamil and Sanskrit. Cikai Korran was the name of one particularly prolific vandal.

Jacob weird dream report: I had a dream where Trump invited me into the White House and then kicked me out and labeled me an enemy of the state when I saw the cabinet fighting. Then I joined a World War II simulation, got elected actual pope, and suddenly had access to the papal lightning powers.

It’s called fashion!

Very fascinated by the Greek and Roman collection of the Perseus Digital Library having exactly one Old English word somewhere in it. Is there some forgotten episode of the Aeneid I missed out on where Aeneas yelled “hwæt” in a moment of confusion, baffling philologists to this day?

Sorry, classicists, but I hate Aristotle because when I’m compiling ancient sources on animals, there are extremely evident taxonomies and deep animal knowledge further back in history but when I read Aristotle commentaries, he gets to be the inventor of biology because he’s a popular Greek.

This site feels at times like a field experiment in which prejudices and blindspots different groups of ostensibly progressive people will adopt in the absence of conservatives to fight. It’s really not great to be reading all this and I think I’ll try to reduce my time on the app again.

When tutoring and it’s math time and we gotta figure out how to calculate the volume of a rectangular prism by its side lengths, I love to reframe it as how many Minecraft blocks we need to build it, because kids get that shit and then they go use it and don’t forget it.

My toxic trait is that if we interact incidentally on social media and I click on your profile to see who you are and your major topic to post about is sports, you get like a -1 opinion modifier. Pretty minor and possible to overcome but initial red flag.

If we’re gonna do “everything Trump does is because…” on here, no answer is gonna have adequate explanatory power if it doesn’t center on enriching and empowering the hold of the billionaire class. That is who he consistently enfranchises, protects, and funnels money and resources to. It’s class.

The future we were promised.

Cute messy baby time.

This graphic is so perfect, so pleasing on the eye, so informative.

If in a Roman history space someone says that their favorite Roman emperor is Hadrian, almost unfailingly they are: 1. a member of the queer community pretending what he had with Antinous wasn’t pederastic. Or… 2. a vocal antisemite who likes what he did in Judea. Or… 3. named Adrian.

www.themeparkbrochures.net Hey, so I happened across a really cool special website today that archives maps and brochures from theme parks, often with multiple per park sorted by year. I want to share it, especially for zoo-builder fans like me who are fascinated by zoo layouts.

www.cnbc.com/2026/03/24/o... Closing services amidst struggling to justify valuation to investors is sure interesting. It’s probably not time to be unduly smug yet but it’s hard not to think about the bubble struggling under its own tension while reading an article like this.

Damn, that Moana trailer. What are they doing at Walt Disney Studios where they decide to make the same beloved movie again but looking worse? This isn’t even some old classic like the others. It’s a recent masterpiece that hasn’t had any time to age.

since i've not seen anyone on bsky discussing this, india has just passed an amendment on a bill that significantly undermines trans rights 🏳️‍⚧️ here's an article from sunday that explains it in more detail: theleaflet.in/leaflet-repo...

I always feel bad making this observation but sometimes I substitute-teach in a classroom where the majority of kids just struggle to make something up in an open-ended creative activity. I always worry about those spaces. Are the kids ever told to build or make or imagine or just follow tasks?

Hey, so this is really extremely bad. Remember always that these large tech companies aren’t your friends. They want more control over your life and society and are allying with your government officials to do it.

Periodic reminder that in the 1600s and 1700s, Russian traders in Alaska introduced the Tlingit to Qing coins which became a valued regional trade good. The Tlingit began integrating them into body armor which I think is pretty awesome.

Hm, Ugaritic homies know it’s that time of year where our thundering boi is getting back up.

Hey, Penny. Hey, Penny. Hey, Penny. What is it, Sheldon?

Question for the academic-flavored Francophone Bible nerds out there since I’m having trouble finding an answer I feel good with: do you know which French translation of the Bible is most likely to be quoted in a formal paper about biblical philology in a similar capacity to the NRSV in English?

The war on social science education in the United States continues.

If my posts feel eclectic or multivocal, just know that they primarily stem from two major sources, let’s call them J and E, which have been put together and added to by… uh… we’ll call it P, forming distinct voices in the text. Then there is D which makes a lot of its own posts.

Currently fascinated by three pieces by British painter John Martin depicting a Romantic view of ancient Mesopotamian cityscapes with scenes from history, the Bible, and classical writers. 1. The Fall of Babylon, 1819. 2. Belshazzar’s Feast, 1821. 3. The Fall of Nineveh, 1829.

I need every one of these damn Surviving Earth environment models as explorable virtual environments please. Would actually go so hard as an educational game like the old DK 3D Dinosaur Worlds, though I may be the only one who remembers and misses that.

OK, I’ve complained about French academic terminology quite a few times on here but I just got jumpscared by the fact that the Afroasiatic language family is still called “chamito-sémitique.” Holy 1800s racism, Batman, you should update that one.

🎶 So long and thanks for all the fish! 🎶

One of the historical source types I’m looking at for reconstructing ancient animal presences is Egyptian tribute lists of animals and animal resources. So if you miss my obsessive posts from a few months ago about learning hieroglyphs, you may be in luck because that’s likely to come back.

Pantropical spotted dolphin (Stenella attenuata) photographed jumping almost five meters above the surface of the water by members of the Pacific Whale Foundation off the coast of Maui. The adults are only around 2 meters long.

I’m RNA girl. In the RNA world. Amino acids. It’s fantastic. Screw the Hadean air. The black smoker is where. Methylation. Life is in creation. Come on, chem sis. Let’s do abiogenesis. Oo, whoa. Come on, chem sis. Let’s do abiogenesis.

So imagine a group of small eusocial colonial burrowing theropods that raise and cultivate herds of domesticated ceratopsians on the surface that supply part of their sustenance, like caterpillars to certain ants, managing the soil and the foliage to feed and grow them.

I am deep in the Wikipedia distraction hole with my writer’s block right now but I have just learned that a hybrid between a male lion and a female jagulep (jaguar-leopard hybrid) is called a lijagulep. Several have been bred, all in the early 1900s, such as London Zoo’s “Congolese spotted lion.”

English technical writing has the nice word “feral” to describe the descendants of domesticated animals that have gone to the wild. French academic writing doesn’t really seem to use a comparable word and just calls the animals “retournés à l’état sauvage” which goes so hard.

On the Wikipedia article for population bottlenecks, there is this lovely diagram to demonstrate, drawn by Wikipedian Ihatezxmbyz. I appreciate that the key clarifies that the blue-marked individuals are blue and the pink-marked ones are pink.

So whimsical!

I had a dream where I was back in Eugene and saw a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis; actually extirpated in Oregon) getting chased by college students in the street and because I’m me I had to mention it in a Bluesky post with a parenthetical specifying its taxon as Ursus arctos horribilis.

This is incredible to look at, damn.

While there’s some snark of course, I really love the intergenerational respect and excitement between a lot of people in the comments. I think it’s nice when we learn from each other from a place of care. Shoutout to the homies older and younger than me who dream of a better world. Live curious.

I totally forgot but happy ‘Eid al-Fitr to Muslim friends as well! I admittedly forgot it when writing this earlier post because it’s not connected to the Vernal Equinox and just happens to line up this year in its little cycle.

Happy Vernal/Autumnal Equinox, goobers! Happy long-day part of the year to the boreal homies and short-day part of the year to the austral homies! And happy Nowruz to all the Iranian peops out there!

www.lemonde.fr/internationa... The location of the French aircraft carrier FS Charles de Gaulle, located currently south of Turkey and west of Cyprus, has been given away by a sailor on the Strava app who was running on the ship deck.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... For a long time, Monte Verde in Chile has held the oldest widely accepted date for unambiguous evidence of human presence in South America at 14,500 years old, but a new study suggests a younger date in the Mid-Holocene.

I’m Investiture-Controversy-posting as a joke but I still want you all to know that in the (not Holy) Roman history Discord server I manage, I posted the controversy as question of the day and people are going off, holy shit.

Goodly people of Bluesky, I’m a northern Italian living in the 1100s and really stressed out by this whole Investiture Controversy thing. My Guelph friends say only the pope can invest bishops but my Ghibelline friends say bishops have to swear fealty to the emperor. Whom should I listen to?

Bro got that cool preacher energy.

Why is historical linguistics the field that specifically attracts the weirdest hyperfixated internet cranks? We’ve got someone whose thing is that Armenian is some missing link between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Japonic.