BIG NEWS at the end of theOneRing's post: Karen Wynn Fonstad's maps have found a home at the American Geographical Society Library here at UW-Milwaukee!!! www.theonering.net/torwp/2025/0...

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Came across this ad for the Milwaukee School of Engineering in vol 1 issue 2 of Amazing Stories! ‪@msoe-official.bsky.social‬

When talking about periods of history with few or no extant written sources, I implore: PLEASE, don't frame it as "all we have is the material/archaeological record." It reinforces the idea that the written word is the be-all and end-all of historical evidence...

Very cool, Popular Mechanics, but why did you use an image of Bryn Celli Ddu in North Wales? #popularmechanics

Milein Cosman, who was initially approached to do illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham. Both images from 1942-43; Eagle and Child on the right. #tolkien

Double feature suggestion: "Meatloaf's World" --> Wayne's World and Spice World

An amazing write-up of the venue my spouse has been pouring his lifeblood into!

NEW: Here's my breakdown of the latest Marquette Poll, which asks about Tony Evers and a third term. Along with those # 's, I took a look at what Wisconsinites agree on, where people stand on Trump's economic policies, and more. Let's recombobulate: www.therecombobulationarea.news/p/evers-thir...

Something really important about organizations’ decisions to adopt AI tools which people need to understand is this: it often comes down to a room of a handful of people who are simply uninformed and think it’s just a new norm they’ll be left behind on if they don’t find a use for it in their work.

This appears to be absolutely antithetical to the mission of the National Archives and a thinly-veiled attempt by the Trump administration to give it the authority to decide who gets to conduct research. It’s also entirely unnecessary. You already need to make an appt to conduct research at NARA II

Learned a few days ago that Ian Ballantine lived next to Todd Rudgren. My dad about lost his mind.

I spent the weekend at “The Ben Wikler Show,” aka the WisDems 2025 Convention. Read my 10 takeaways here. Let's recombobulate: www.therecombobulationarea.news/p/10-takeawa...

I watched something recently in which a character described being addicted to making money and I can't get the idea out of my head. Like, what would happen if accruing disgusting amounts of wealth was pathologized to a much greater extent and seen as necessitating treatment (e.g. immersion therapy)?

AS&S is one of my absolute favorite Milwaukee institutions––pls help if you can!

What can we expect from Tolkien's BOVADIUM FRAGMENTS? tinyurl.com/bovadian #Tolkien #Bovadium

My OCR version of Nick Groom's "Tolkien, Geology, and Romantic Lithology" keeps reading "stones" as "scones"––"the Seeing Scones," "the philosophical study of scones," "the Scone of Erech"... @willsherwood.bsky.social

Unexpected/completely predictable search result following a conversation that started with “How funny would it be if we got a phrenological head for our house?”

In her Close-Up on Gustave Doré’s engraving “Newgate—Exercise Yard,” 1872, @sarahcschaefer.bsky.social connects depictions of prisoners ranging from the nineteenth century to Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” 1971, and the much-publicized photographs of Luigi Mangione’s 2024 “perp walk.”

See you at #Westmoot!

Following the departure of Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the inaugural director and CEO of the still-under-construction Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, director George Lucas will take primary responsibility for curatorial direction at his namesake institution. www.artforum.com/news/george-...

Humbled to have been able to write on Doré's image of Victorian incarceration and its reverberations (van Gogh, Kubrick, Mangione) for this month's Artforum. www.artforum.com/features/gus... @artforum.com @tinariversryan.bsky.social

I love my friends

Have a great weekend!

Unreleased test footage of Gandalf vs. Durin’s Bane

Brb gonna go barf for a few hours

I AM SO EXCITED FOR THIS BOOK

There's no body of work that I would more desperately wish to experience for the first time again than David Lynch's. Every re-viewing feels both deeper and slightly less enchanted. The surrealistic nostalgia was completely his own. This one is hard.

oh hey @danshafer.bsky.social

Tickled that a strong case was made for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. My biggest takeaway from watching Ridley Scott's Napoleon was that it drove home how well B&TEA encapsulated that figure. @historyextra.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/my/podcast/w...

A nod to Saint-Lazare (Autun) in Season of the Witch (2011)

I commissioned my friend Amar to create a calligraphy that forms a Palestine sunbird (Cinnyris osea). The bird's form consists of characters from its Arabic name. Established as the national bird of #Palestine in 2015, this bird is now seen as a symbol of hope, freedom, and resistance. #art

no way this is a real person

Grateful to Jeff Zalar and Tony Steinhoff for including me and for their commitment to bringing this excellent volume to fruition! @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

I’m not sure I’ve encountered an institution quite so uneffected by museum practices of the past several decades as the Christ Church Picture Gallery. Nothing wrong with liking the old masters, and I get annoyed with over-zealous picture-takers as much as anybody…

A student asked B if he was doing anything for Thanksgiving. He replied, “Well, my wife is out of town and my cats are dead, but I’ve got a frozen pizza and a bottle of J&B.”

From the Gallery stacks at the Bodleian’s Weston Library

I’d never seen a Schaefer ad abroad before!

I don’t know why but it tickles me every time I see JRRT write “prob” instead of “probably”

About a week to go at the Bodleian and I'm already looking wistfully back on the first few days, which were entirely focused on sketching from Tolkien's drawings (I'm thinking of them as 'visual paraphrases'). Here's a few samples...

I’ve limited myself to rocks in my short time drawing, but John Howe’s talk seemed an appropriate time to attempt a portrait

c’mon, really?

Just when you thought Oxford couldn’t get more picturesque…