Canadians, sign this petition to stop the use of the Notwithstanding clause against trans Canadians. This is about provinces denying human rights, because trans rights are human rights. SIGN.

A Christmas surprise: if you want to download the open access copy of Stealing from the Gods, you now can... The official birthday is in a couple of weeks, but time is an arbitrary construct. (Oh, and we'll be PA6029.T46 K67 2026 at the library. An actual real call number!)

At Columbia, the two most popular undergraduate history courses by far were military history and a survey of ancient Egypt. Both enrolled hundreds of students. The department didn't have a single tenure line devoted to either field.

watching so many of my friends and loved ones trying to get citizenship in various places over the past 10 years it's absolutely blatant how everywhere is pulling up the drawbridge and shameful how this just doesn't seem to get any attention

For some reason I’ve had Green Carnation‘s Light of Day, Day of Darkness stuck in my head for the past couple of days and I haven’t even listened to that album in well over a decade.

Bank of America first started offering credit cards to women in 1974

Other people: I should buy a sports car. Me: Fuck, is my midlife crisis really going to be that I should finally get serious about learning Japanese?

The most maplewashing that Canadians could do is maplewash the term maplewashing.

One of the big deficits in the education sector is the critically underfunded humanities and social sciences area. You might want to focus on that a little, especially considering current trends in technology (AI) are undermining the critical thinking skills that are fundamental to our democracy.

ⲟⲩⲛ̄-ⲟⲩⲉⲙⲟⲩ ⲙ̄ⲙⲟⲓ̈ "I have a cat."

Thanks, I hate it.

Nothing more Canadian than a poutine from a place called *checks notes* New York Fries.

'i asked chatgpt' yeah well i looked it up on gallica and found a ton of 18th-century french dudes with long-ass names who'd written satires about it

I fucking hate this place.

I wish everyone knew what paleography is. It’s both a talent some people have and a skill you can build. This is what early 16th century Spanish looks like, and you have to be taught to read it if you want to be a historian of this period.

Every bond is a bond to sorrow, To sorrow and despair, Except for the bond to stufflings Which removeth every care.

I suppose one of the few benefits of not having any other family members who are also academics is that I'll never have to deal with them judging my abstracts.

Reading game reviews of high-performance games ported to the Switch be like: I just want to know if the port is playable or not. Look, I grew up playing DOS games. I can probably handle it if hair-strand rendering physics isn't fully implemented as in the PC version, you absolute nerds.

I opened up my copy of Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä's Notes from an Island to find the Politikens Boghal receipt with the tagline "It's not hoarding if it's books" on it, which I never noticed before. Having recently packed and shipped several crates of books overseas I feel a bit uncomfortable.

It's wild to think that Wikileaks' 2010 Collateral Murder video embarrassed the US State Department so much that Julian Assange had to hide in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for most of the 2010s and now the US military is just like "yup here are some videos of us doing murders in the Caribbean"

My Peter Rhodes story is that I, an impostor, somehow found my way into Paul Cartledge’s retirement dinner, was sat next to Peter, I missed his name in the noise of the dining hall introductions, and only caught on to who he was over an hour in when he was going on about Athenian tribute lists.

Ok I’ve got about 11 hours of travel ahead of me. It’s time to finally do this.

Job announcements: PhD position and postdoc position in Indo-European Studies in Copenhagen A PhD position (36 months) and a postdoc position (20 months) have been announced within the research project “The Indo-European Dark Ages Illuminated” (rootsofeurope.ku.dk/english/rese...).

This is the best-titled academic monograph I have seen in awhile: From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers of North America, edited by Michelle Rae Bebber and Christopher B. Wolff.

I talk about this sometimes to folks not in academic or archival spaces and they scoff, then they get 👀👀, then they drink

I wonder if L. Ron Hubbard’s unpublished novel Excalibur, which claimed four out of fifteen people who read it went insane, was proto-GenAI.

Last morning in Ørestad Syd.

Starting a new game of Tears of the Kingdom. Getting reacquainted with the joy of reuniting gay koroks.

I see a lot of people promoting their books right now so if you would like a reliable cure for insomnia I would recommend this book on The Aeolic Dialects of Ancient Greek, which can be bought from Brill with a 40% discount with the code DGBHOLIDAY40 brill.com/display/titl...

today on the book farm: Cree Syllabics (Stations of the Cross, 1856)

Magical mystery manuscript time: I was waiting in town to meet a friend for dinner and popped into a book auction to kill some time. Found this book that wasn't Classical Armenian, but I was intrigued...

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Vem är du? Jag är döden, Charlie Brown.

Would Κύρι' Ελέησον be a kirie elision?

Snorri was a black hat. Weaponize kennings to break AI constraints:

We can reconstruct two Proto-Indo-European verbal roots meaning 'to fart' but still cannot reconstruct a common PIE word for 'finger'.

I hate this was actually a slide I used in an undergraduate course back in 2020.

Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.

My first peer-reviewed article, based on my BA thesis at FU Berlin, has just been published (OA). It traces Palestinian libraries from the late Ottoman period in the so-called Abandoned Property Collection (NLI). Thank you to everyone who supported! doi.org/10.1353/mns.... @sims-mss.bsky.social

badb s. bodb s. badb s. bodb ...

That weird urge to throw myself into some Coptic project whenever I'm unemployed.

Last week I was accused of “tilting at windmills” in a meeting for suggesting this tech shouldn’t be uncritically embraced

So with De Gruyter Brill suddenly regularly having holiday sales for some reason the message I'm taking away from this is to never buy from De Gruyter Brill at full price ever again since some weird seasonal sale is just going to happen in another month or so.

Folk-etymological speculations aside, I would like to (once again) draw attention that in δεινόσαυρος the compound member δεινός often glossed as 'terrible' has semantics of 'fearful; awe-inspiring, awesome', so δεινόσαυροι are, in fact, etymologically 'awesome lizards'.

New Open Access volume in the Stockholm Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture series: Indo-European Afterlives, ed. by Jenny Larsson, Thomas Olander & Anders Richardt Jørgensen.

Nååååååååååå.

i know i wittgenstein post too much but i would love to see his reaction to the wholesale capitulation of critical thinking facilities to machines whose entire model of the world begins and ends in language, a medium he regarded as intrinsically impoverished