pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

Heads up #mediastudies: If you use YouTube as a resource for early recorded media (e.g., recordings of broadcast TV, home videos, early digital uploads, etc.), they're rolling out *automatic* upscaling with AI. blog.youtube/news-and-eve...

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

important update to the stupid fucking stupid youtube shit!!!

🧵Thread of cafes, restaurants, bars, bagel joints, etc offering free meals to SNAP recipients, for those who might need it, & so those who don't can give 'em their business. If you know of such offers in your area & don't see them here, please tell us in @'s. Here's one! toastedseattle.com

As a reminder: On BW&R, we have a resource list of publications where scholars can pitch their op-eds, essays, reviews, excerpts, and more! If you run such a site/podcast/blog/publication and accept pitches, please let me know so I can add you to the list! blackwhiteandread.com/pitchables/

Always check the original scans, never just lazily scrape the transcription data if there's a photo image to check. Doing it right takes ages but the overall quality of your dataset will be so much better.

Louis-Léopold Boilly, A trompe-l'oeil with a cat and a wooden log through a canvas, and a fish hanging from the stretcher, oil on canvas, 33½ x 37¾ in. (85 x 96 cm.) (formerly Christie's)

quick psa: if you use GDrive, go into Settings -> Manage Apps and make sure the Gemini AI horseshit is turned off. Just got a heads-up about it elsewhere, and sure enough, Gemini had been turned back on without my permission

I collect inspirational footnotes and share them from time to time:

notice the general mood of the timeline? how everyone is in a good mood and there’s a lot less misery and dooming? how there’s a lot of “we’re going to beat these assholes”? anyway that’s why these events are important

Y’all here is a fun fact: Portland has a brand new volunteer organization called “operation inflation” that allows people to borrow inflatable costumes for protests. They just started a couple weeks ago and have like a 160 costume library (and counting because people keep donating).

In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.

BTW I printed these. Three plates filled with these is a LOT of fucking whistles, and you set it up to print overnight and wake up to a big old plateful. makerworld.com/en/models/11...

📣 Call for Contributors: Edited Volume - The Medieval in Museums @archumanities.bsky.social 🖼️📜 🗓️ Abstract deadline: 3 Nov 2025 (17:00 GMT) ⏰ Full #CfP: bit.ly/CfPMiM

On the way home from the barn I heard a This American Life piece by a guy who had an AI clone of himself call his friends to have conversations and I would just like to state now that if anyone ever does this to me, we will no longer be friends. WTF is this world where we outsource all interaction?

V. excited to have found a child's diary from 1789, covering the period he & his family fled the French Revolution ... So far it has mostly been 'I am very annoyed about running away!', accompanied with detailed blow by blow accounts of his tutor's unfortunate bouts of diarrhoea #18c

They did give me a nightmare scenario addition: "The larger the datacenter, the larger the battery backup it needs, which we also only have recently started addressing in the code." And added "So, yeah, I guess we're waiting for a Triangle Shirtwaist Fire for datacenters."

The Ig Nobel is incredible , one year an Indian guy won it for calculating the average surface area of an elephant and during his acceptance they had an elephant hold up a sign with the surface area of the scientist on it, they do showbiz better than the Oscars

Normal advertising: Please prereg for my MFA capstone and justify my crying in a Denny's as I write about the unbearable beauty of humanity across time, thx wp.wpi.edu/apothecaryca...

Based on a lot of the sotto voce posting happening in my timeline, I'm looking at this thread I wrote (up and down) months ago, about genAI defenders and a possible reason for that defensiveness, and... Welp.

Were you at #Readercon this year? Did you see--or pop a message into--The 500-Year Time Capsule? Book an entry time to see the final collection for it, at my capstone installation "An Apothecary Dreams": wp.wpi.edu/apothecaryca...

Were you at #Readercon this year? Did you see--or pop a message into--The 500-Year Time Capsule? Book an entry time to see the final collection for it, at my capstone installation "An Apothecary Dreams": wp.wpi.edu/apothecaryca...

A wonderful thread involving secret compartments, secret treasures, care and kindness.

The art for this piece, 'Thank You For Your Interest', is a composite of 60 template rejection letters all received by the artist Claire Peckham. You can buy prints of the art, and her other work, here: www.clairepeckham.com/project...

EX FUMO IN LUCEM, from the dark to the light. This #earlymodern printing press is waiting for action. The motto was a marketing thing, as many publishers thought of themselves as bringers of light. To be more precise: they thought of themselves as sellers of enlightened paper goods. #bookhistory

Hey did you know that booking an entry time to my art installation this October is a very inexpensive way to see the inside of a lovely Tudor Revival house AND ALSO support arts-based research by a grad student in these Troubled Times? WIN-WIN wp.wpi.edu/apothecaryca...

Now at last it can be told: If you're in the Massachusetts area (or plan to be!) on October 10th or 11th, book an entry time to see the culmination of my degree: an immersive art installation about my experience with history, science, time, and humanity: www.tinyurl.com/an-apothecary-dreams

Actually, gonna repost this here, because I *really* need link to that Tumblr collection again.

"Oh my god is it Aristotle's Masterpiece" I thought before I clicked, and YES it IS

Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image by Jack Hartnell is a spectacularly illustrated history of an enigmatic surgical diagram. Out now! Explore a free sample of this fascinating book: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #History #Books #Art

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

At no point did this thread go where I expected it to

One of my favorite mutations in the history of English is that "sirens" came to mean a sound warning you to stay away.

Someone (and god help us if it ends up being me) should create a photo gallery of restaurants that still have the archaeological remnants of the partially walled-off "no smoking" section.

Do it. Search your name. Take their money. It’s yours anyway.

It’s funny because promoting and marketing a book in any way, shape, or form is actually NOT the author’s job. At all. It is unpaid labor we’ve been forced to do for so long the expectation has mutated like a virus into “okay now you also have to be a TikTok sensation to do this as a job.”

Can't believe I'm going through life as a weird little sack of various juices

This would still include literally dozens of my works (meaning basically everything I've had published before July 2022, plus possibly foreign translations of said works), so, yeah, let's keep going then www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

A human brain can hallucinate. An LLM cannot, because it doesn't have a brain. It presents a simulacrum of what a good answer looks like. As Rachel points out, it doesn't "know". The worst mistake we've made is to allow anthropomorphizing language to become the default for talking about "AI."

The month of September Septembre, Château de Saumur Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1412-16 Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly

Live from the internet! It's a new episode of No Story is Sacred! Ok,it was prerecorded several months ago. But it's still a new episode about the movie Saturday Night! nostoryissacred.com/episode-133-...

⚔️ ✍️ SHORT STORY SUBMISSIONS FOR NEW EDGE SWORD & SORCERY's 2026 ISSUES ARE NOW OPEN ✍️⚔️ Details here: newedgeswordandsorcery.com/submissions

Conference season is nearly upon us again, so here is some wise practical advice on giving papers. Write for orality, and practice reading them out loud beforehand. 🗃

FUCK YES LET’S GO

We close tomorrow. We don’t recommend leaving it until the very last minute – the portal can be… snappy.

Question to the BlueSky game studies-crowd! What are some of the best studies you know about the psychological, emotional and cognitive engagement of players with game fictions? I'm thinking of books by @kcisbister.bsky.social , Aubrey Anable and some others, but any other key recommendations?

It's time again for a classic game of "You thought you were following a sedate coworker/academic but surprise! MONSTERFUCKING CONTENT"

Meanwhile Anthropic has a full-page ad in the official Edinburgh Fringe Fesitival program (in the middle of the Comedy section, too, which is pretty funny considering the number of acts calling out AI for being bullshit) advertising how much it respects our data and can handle moral dilemmas