Made some notes for some conferences to attend, one abroad I wanna follow talks in, one a graduate student conference where I wanna present at, another that I wanna follow. Feels like grad school is getting real now. Thing is, I'm a bit unfamiliar with the process, bc master's during Covid...

Join us for our 2026 #SummerSchool focusing on 'Sickness & Health' with @ihr.bsky.social! We'll have trips, #archive visits, and lectures exploring everything from medieval medicine to public health throughout #London 's #history. Sign up early for a 10% discount: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Join us in two weeks—online and in person in Cape Town—for the first MEMOs Conference! More details about online registration coming soon, stay tuned 😉

Funny thing for me is when I glanced at that graphic I noticed none of the details but it jumped at me as AI generated, suppose we're slowly building immunity to this. Wish we had a vaccine tho instead of this "herd immunity" approach... we should've learned by now.

Huh! Apparently you can change the base of a number in Bash, like base#number, what gives you an updated line like auto_page_no="$( printf '%03d' $(( 10#$top_page_no + 1 )) )"

A lot can be said about this¹, but this is also some sovereign citizen level bullshit. __ ¹ i.e. OpenAI apparently claiming its blameless in a case of self harm cos using ChatGPT for self harm is prohibited by the ToS.

“AI is the future it’s legit and ethical and everybody wants it and that’s why we need to disguise it please let us disguise it”

*Bill Wurtz voice* You can make a great schism out of this!

Many thanks to Michael Hickok for his review of my book, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina in Histoire sociale / Social History @hssh1968.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/article/9715... 🗃️ what's history #skystorians #Balkans #OttomanEmipre #Habsburg #menasky

My essay on how early Republican, hygiene-focused modernization intersected with the visual and rhetorical representations of electric household appliances was published on the Trafo Blog. For more: trafo.hypotheses.org/62593

The real poetry is in how they made it like a pretend “paper”. Much like “AI” is pretend cognition in the stolen garments of language, this document is pretend science in the disguise of a… low effort all-defaults LaTeX based preprint lmfao “Paper” eh

not that it matters since it's a meme, but it's for glass from breaking windows, and similar debris, not actually if the building falls on you; we had this as kids in Cyprus too

If you see this, post your getaway vehicle.

Google surreptitiously opted many users into allowing the company access to private Gmail messages to train its AI models. If you want to see if your content is being mined and want to opt out, here are the instructions. www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

I’ve began slowly exploring archives since last summer and my fav find is some diplomat writing to Ottoman E saying, praphrasing, “ey we’ve some Swiss artisanal families looking to move, these troglodytic hillbillies couldn’t survive crossing the Atlantic, how about you have em they’re quite handy”.

OTOH it was much easier to sign up for H-Net and a bunch of its mailing lists' updates. (Quite a large bunch *panics mildly*) It seems that when you ask for digests only, they send you a singular digest combining all the subscriptions which is Very Very Very Nice

@globalurbanhistory.bsky.social has a very nice and attractive newsletter access to which is alas kept behind a signup process that was definitely not prepared w lowly grad students such as I in mind. 'Spose I'll suffice with following the social media & perhaps the blog... pity 🤷

So you’re telling me AI is not when billion dollar ebooks bots? I am perplexitied!

Damn! One of the books I had got for the PhD at İstanbul Uni, there’s a typo on the spine, the one jutting out, should be Avrupa Mektupları, which it is in the cover and all. What kind of publishing house does that? Not even bootlegs do that kind of thing…

Whoops! Microsoft’s new Windows AI agent platform lets in malware and you thought Windows was supposed to run software www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAeN... - video pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251119-who... - podcast time: 4 min 27 sec

Today I navigated an Ottoman Turkish print of Tarih-i Cevdet, found the section I needed, and was able to read a decent chunk of the text. Handwritten material in archives is still beyond my ability but I think this is a major milestone in Ottoman Tr learning & it felt very encouraging.

So Samsung updated my Android and took away the button that in split screen allowed me to pick a new app for the split. In response I had some of the readings for this week printed out and gonna see if I really like reading on the tablet more than on paper. Sod this all thing stop changing my tools

Data Center Watch worries anti-AI activism is working making AI haters seem very cool and effective (send this to an AI data centre hater you know!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPbT... - video pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251117-dat... - podcast time: 6 min 29 sec pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/17/d... - text

the AI popularity theory

Encountered leaf blowers and lawnmowers for the first time at uni, I think they should just bring in sheep instead. Positives: no grass wasted, cute sheep, baaaa instead of annoying motor noises. Negatives: literally none.

American don’t bring up random American shite in an int’l convo challenge, once again failed. I don’t know nor have to know about the details of your ex evil president’s wife’s regrettable life…

Am also on Mastodon now sunny.garden/@librarysqui...

Awaiting eagerly the death of the genre of biopic that's titled "Famous person's firstname". Be creative dammit. (This is not a comment on the quality of the films themselves, necessarily. But it does indicate a carelessness and intent to cash in on a trend, to me.)

#TIL a word: cryptogyny. A name for quite a familiar thing.

Oh no, no, not the Chinese, they're the worst! *faints racistly*

I feel like one thing that’s different from linguistics in history is book reviews are held in higher regard and are done better too. In the ctx of linguistics book reviews were merely those annoying things that you clicked on cos you thought it was the actual book.

bluesky are literally tech fash (rationalists, coiners, neoreactionaries), so when they say "toxicity" they mean hating on their fellow nazis

fascinating how when the same underlying technology produces this, it's called "deepfake" — but when it's generating college essays, it's called "AI" www.nola.com/news/educati...

To whoever thought putting “meta AI” in whatsapp was a good idea: 🖕

2024'te Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları’ndan çıkan “Bir Cereyan Hâsıl Oldu”nun yazarlarından Emine Öztaner ve Meltem Kocaman ile Ottoman History Podcast'ten Can Gümüş’ün sorularını yanıtladık. Yine meslektaşlarımdan çok şey öğrendiğim keyifli bir sohbet oldu www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/11/cere...

Beyond the Codex: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Manuscript Cultures 12.11.2025, 5 p.m. Tijana Krstić (CEU) Browsing Through the Library Collection of Süleyman Efendi, the Vaiz of the Grand Mosque of Buda (c. 1643-c.1655) Zoom and further information: orientalistik.univie.ac.at/fachrichtung...

People keep expressing surprise at this b/c they're missing something big. Which is: the immensity of anti-brown/Asian racism, emerging from its formative role in US settler-colonialism. This generates intense hostility especially to *politically* successful Brown people, from AOC to Mamdani. 1/7

reminder that the bluesky corp people doing this are rationalists, coiners and literal tech fascists they are convinced if they just code it right they will crack the secret of humans

Tebrikler hocam! Coincidentally I’ve a class on environmental history this week

I’ve somehow been on Mastodon/Fediverse and Bluesky for a long time by now (hate social media normally but accidents happen in life 🤷‍♀️) and I can say now that a lot of the discourse about differences is insubstantial. Bsky is Masto from 3-5 years ago, at any time, both the meta and the software

The mods already manually shadowban anything critical of Bluesky, its CEO, or head of trust and safety.

AGI is when Microsoft makes dollar and the more Microsoft makes dollar the more AGI it is Except when there’s no more money coming then it’s gonna go to Clippy jail

It’s nothing to do with our “mental muscles” and all to do with an economic class whose existence depends on being the middlemen where one is not needed, who are largely privileged and let be by regimes extant today Nobody wants these things and everyone knows what’s better

fixeder that for you: Elon Musk’s devious Wikipedia-powered Wikipedia impersonator (&c…)

Almost half of all replies under anything even remotely political is commonly hidden. Criteria seems to be arbitrary, it’s almost as if you could post the same reply twice and one end up hidden and one not. This place ridden with terrible, both abundant and incompetent censorship.

If this was not blatantly racist it'd still be a crime against humanity for that four-tiple em dash. Em dash is three dashes

Lesson learned today: don’t tell ppl you do history they tell you the stupidest shit imaginable

This has just happened: I read Little Red Riding Hood. As part of my PhD.

man, @theregister.com is really letting the fuckin nazis run rampant on their forums forums.theregister.com/forum/all/20...