Siblings are 0th cousins. An aunt and nephew, etc. are 0th cousins once removed. Identical twins are double 0th cousins. You’re your own negative 1st cousin genealogically, although if you’re a chimera many of your cells are 0th cousins genetically, and that’s not even counting your 1/2

The environment consisting of acts of disenfranchisement like voter roll purges of legal voters, w/o which she wins GA, MI, WI, PA and — like every Dem candidate after 1988(!)—the WH. The disenfranchisement acts were *legal*. No crime is being alleged. Yet no one should pretend they make a mandate.

I deleted Google Maps, Google Earth, and Apple Maps. Magic Earth is working great for directions and I was already using public domain satellite imagery, basemaps and shapefiles in QGIS for my content.

Well I don’t need to write a script to let me know when GNIS shifts the name to “Gulf of America”, because I just went to fetch the ID and apparently it’s today. Google said Google Maps is following.

The coup and its collaborators are the “Stalinists” of the “libertarian” right. No longer content with the speed at which neoliberalism funnels the means of governance into private hands, they act to seize the machinery of the administrative state in order to feign a dismantling of the /1

Black history IS American history. 24/7 and 365 days a year. Period. This administration cannot erase that fact.

Exactly why we need to replace ancestry composition maps that visually imply we have 0 ancestors outside the regions of close genetic cousins they are calling ancestral regions. There should be a gradient that’s aware of migrations and a model that goes back to identical ancestors point.

We use and need non-corporate hosts and repositories of public information — genealogy, geography and all else — for a reason. Truth is not determined by business relationships with the divide-and-conquer orgs that run our governments.

Google heard “jump” and asked “how high?” while already outside Earth’s gravity well. Even the executive order (applying only to certain federal publications) designates “Gulf of America” only to the U.S. continental shelf portion. Not Mexican, Cuban or international areas. #openstreetmap

anti-monarchist royal genealogy dystopian futurism content

To some extent I learned through TikTok that I *can* just talk to the camera, but damn if YouTube editing doesn’t get me right back to the habit of doing way-too-long editing for an accurate map or a visual gag.

What U.S. #genealogy tells us about birthright citizenship. It says 1/6, but that’s a maybe even though it’s in full elsewhere. I want to get a sense from followers first. Is posting segmented videos here (or videos at all) annoying (a potential limitation to this Skylight project)?

Popularizers of genetic genealogy have already provided much of the pseudoscientific underpinning, from NYT putting Nicholas Wade’s racist misinterpretations of scientists’ work on the nation’s science front page for decades to the links between Steve Sailer, Razib Khan and JD Vance.

The Gulf of Mexico isn't even named after Mexico (pt. 1 as bsky / #skylight only does 60s and low-res for now)

Much like NM, the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t named after the country we now call “Mexico”, but after the Mexica people and their capital region. The hydronym long predates the division of the continent into magic polygons, let alone the use of the hemispheric name “America” to refer to only one of them.

@skylight.social I’d love to beta test this.

The message is back. I keep closing the app and opening because “Continue” isn’t enough of a “fuck you” to the wording of the message. Make like a (crewless) Starship and explode, message!

Why not?

For the record, if you want the best in public history digital media today, go to @pbs.org’s Origins. Honest, unflinching, intersectional, and authentic. I’m blown away by each unapologetic episode.

Looks like YouGlish is unworkable right now because Google is blocking bots. I’d enjoyed using it for getting accurate localized pronunciations (of places in particular).

Let’s see how well it works to repost 9-year-old YouTube videos on TikTok with an intro. This is why Australia is missing from my globe. www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYoSJX24/

Predicting “Elizabeth III” is the name of the future final (as of 2201) head of state from the House of Oldenburg male line… barring possibilities like Solar-system-faring microstates, monarchy restorations and radical life extension. On TT, long form YT coming.

If TikTok does become unusable inside this arbitrary magic 🎻🎻-monopoly polygon on January 19, I’m mostly based @rootsandroutes1 on ▶️ and rootsandroutes.bsky.social. That’s where I got this screenshot I’m using for my #shutdownweekrepost edits.

MullvadVPN ad confusing me with the letter p looking like Old Swedish þorn. I hate it when comthanies use the theothle’s metadata too.

I’m not complaining about any author in particular here, but if your alternate history timeline includes our timeline’s people being born anyway, decades after the point of divergence, you have a story that can only be true if there’s an omnipotent being (a simulator) controlling outcomes, in /1

Stacey Plaskett doesn’t have a vote in Congress, but she is eligible to run for President.

My latest short is up on YT as well and I’d be grateful if you let that algorithm I’m currently dead to know there’s some interest. Thank you! youtube.com/shorts/j_tMD... It’ll be on IG and Reels too with a deleted first line.

Now entering 2025: ships keeping UTC+04;00 because they're between 67.5°E and 52.5°E or keeping the time of a port in the jurisdictions of UTC+04:00. These, also entering 2025, are those keeping the official time in effect in the Crozet Islands, Glorioso Islands and Tromelin Island, Réunion, /1

Now entering 2025 is UTC:04:30, which is only observed in Afghanistan, and there only primarily in international contexts, as hijri is official.

A note as more Muslim-majority jurisdictions enter the Gregorian calendar’s New Year 2025. This date happens to fall almost precisely in the middle of the Islamic calendar year (1466). The calendars, having different bases, are not in sync. Although there may be different interpretations /1

Now entering 2025: Vostok Station and Mawson Station in Antarctica, ships keeping UTC+05:00 because they're between 67.5°E and 82.5°E or keeping the time of a port in the jurisdictions of UTC+05:00. Also entering 2025 are researchers in Heard Island and McDonald Islands, /1

With UTC+05:30 (India and Sri Lanka) entering, the majority of the world’s population are now “in” 2025.

Yeah, my long-planned never-executed 26-hour New Year’s Eve time zone explainer livestream isn’t in the cards this year either, or even a fake version. Maybe for 2026.

As in many years, I just saw some families picking up used Christmas trees left in the park. I always assumed it’s people who are celebrating Christmas on the Julian calendar (some Orthodox jurisdictions) or on Gregorian Theophany (Armenian).

Theft and violence? That's unfair. The greatest contributions of "the West" are enlisting its central institutions (like academia, media and politics) toward the project of justifying theft and violence and twisting the lies used for that justification into its society-defining dogmatic "truths".

If we’re to have a surveillance state, can it just issue automatic 0.1%-income fines to drivers who honk at the driver in front of them for refusing to hit the pedestrians in the crosswalk?

Genealogists get understandably irritated when people put Biblical genealogies (and other ancient, disputed, single-source, myth-adjacent claims) in collaborative public trees. But in the ideal tree, all relationship claims are present, but with the source type clearly marked and with the /1

I have no view spike so I assume this is my TikTok followers finding me. Thank you, and I hope this keeps going!

Longtime time zone nerd looking for a place to schedule-post 38 videos consisting of “now it’s the new year in the following places observing UTC±hh:mm. It’s IG friendly but that’s an audience of no one. Pre-recorded TikTok lives? Would be irritating if it showed up anytime other than on time.

For my return to long-form YT I’m thinking about a takedown of Albion’s Seed as the U.S. history equivalent of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Same generation of scholars, same oversimplified takes on culture, same potential to inspire and excuse a politics of mass othering and mass suffering.

Why does TikTok have 60-character “thoughts” now, and when will they be threaded and put into a stream and an algorithm?

Beatrix von Storch, current AfD deputy leader begging a half-trillionaire oligarch for a throne, would share the same surname with Nicholas II and Charles III if royals used those. They’re the same male line that has headed states covering 30% of Earth’s land. Ahhh… populism.

AfD’s deputy leader is not only a granddaughter of the final Nazi head of state, but also male-line cousin to Charles III, with their patrilineal MRCA a king Danish magnates elected due to his dynasty’s centuries of success in genociding free Frisians and others who were resisting feudalization. 1/

The discourse and practices of “democracy” across humanity are no more beholden to the Greek etymology of the word (“[the] violence/power [of the majority] of the people”) than “music” is required to be devotional lyric poetry because it means “of the Muses”.

The argument that kids leaving cursive keeps them connected to and literate in a cursive past also falls flat. As a genealogist you need 5 distinct eras of cursive for that even in English, and I can read cursives in languages I don’t even know (лишишь iykyk). And then there’s the technology help.

I don’t know if the “cursive is faster because you don’t lift the pen” crowd has ever demonstrated that empirically, but have they tried simply printing much smaller with faster lifts? It always felt an order of magnitude quicker to me, let alone easier to scan and more accessible to other readers.

The U.S. term “Scots-Irish” is not synonymous with “Ulster Scots” Aside from the widely divergent histories that develop when people share common ancestry but not a continent, “Scots-Irish” now refers only to a mix with an American ethnogenesis. You won’t find, in the 21st century U.S. (1/2)

We don’t all have the same number of unique biological ancestors separating us and the identical ancestors point. The slopes of our paths to IAP vary by how closely related individuals’ parents tend to be within our ancestral populations, and on these populations’ relative isolation or centrality.

World family trees won’t achieve fidelity to how we conceptualize family until they ditch the model where a person can have only 2 correct parents. Relationships shown by DNA, by record, and by oral tradition may not overlap. When they don’t, add all (clearly marked for navigation and calculation).

Years: 30 Pro?: No Wildest discovery: Traditional media are willing to spread society-damaging genealogy disinformation and junk science for a pittance. Bad actors will do it for free. Companies profit from both. Remedy hasn’t been found. Niche: Large-network, “royal”, genealogy and identity