March on The Sphinx: why are obscure, unreadable and decades-old articles about Sumerian documents being sold on Amazon as if they are accessible histories of the origins of beer brewing? thesphinxblog.com/2025/03/18/f...

February on The Sphinx: in which I discover the poetry of Karoline von Günderrode, and start having very complex feelings about the philologist I’m trying to write a paper about: thesphinxblog.com/2025/02/07/e...

January on The Sphinx: why would someone attribute “it is better to give than to receive” to Thucydides? thesphinxblog.com/2025/01/14/t...

This is…a lot. From the AI cover art (c’mon SWJ, wtf) to the grasping at straws to connect Clausewitz (c’mon dude, not everything is dead Prussian) to a core misunderstanding of Posse Comitatus and the context of US hemispheric military action. Oy vey.

You're just going about your day when your stapler starts telling you how nice it would feel to staple your mouth shut. Your coffee cup chimes in, giggling with the voice of a breathless girl, that it would be so sexy if you added bleach to your coffee next time. Your excel app sieg heils, twice

This is why I have a *manual* espresso machine…

My biweekly chapter-by-chapter reread of The Lord of the Rings gets into the book proper this week with a discussion of "A Long-Expected Party". Click through to learn how J.R.R. Tolkien is (and is not) like Jane Austen. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Anguished poet-philosopher suffocated by loneliness and the restrictions of conventional society.

As I said, back in 2020

My annual list of blog posts, articles and other internet things that I enjoyed or found especially interesting this year: thesphinxblog.com/2025/12/29/b...

Are the people calling for citizenship stripping and deportation for historic tweets in any way related to people who think it an outrageous violation of "free speech" when the police ask them or their supporters questions about their historic tweets?

Apparently I'm doing this -- my open letter to that open latter about AI in writing and publishing. I emerged from Hibernation Week to write it, so god only knows how much sense it makes. But at least a human wrote it, so that's nice. Bonus: picture of my "cat," sweet baby Boomba.

Eva Marie Saint is 101, and never went fascist.

Some dickwad fed my silly, joyful Jingle Batman essay to the plagiarism machine and had it produce a totally vapid and soulless bullet-pointed biz-speak ‘summary’ which they then published on their own site with my graphic. Anyway that was when the joy went out of today for me…

Schloss Eggenberg Sami Chlaus Christmas beer: a glass of rich, spicy 14% deliciousness.

Entirely true, although obviously talk of ‘German’ food either ignores the existence of widely different regional cuisines or mashes them up into a single, mostly Bavarian composite.

Boxing Day Test serves up too much of a good thing even in the season of excess | Geoff Lemon

“Because this is a loose analogy with some decontextualised Roman law, I can pick and choose the bits that suit me and make everything else up.”

‘Diamonds Are Forever’: Object Fetishism As Entropy Resistance

Butlerian Jihad now!

On the one hand, it feels absurd to take these idiots in the slightest degree seriously. On the other hand, if we did take then seriously then there’s a case for locking them up in the Tower of London and forgetting them.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Twelve scholar-warriors Eleven vaccine sceptics Ten misquotations Nine IR Realists Eight toiling triremes Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes

On the eleventh day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Eleven vaccine sceptics Ten misquotations Nine IR Realists Eight toiling triremes Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes Tragic irony!

‘Twas Christmas Eve in A&E, and the 97-year-old battleaxe in the next cubicle is on her fourth cycle of pitiful pleas for help, crying that the nurses are trying to murder her, threatening to murder them and threatening to do herself an injury if she’s not allowed to leave.

On the tenth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Ten misquotations Nine IR Realists Eight toiling triremes Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes Tragic irony!

On the tenth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Ten misquotations Nine IR Realists Eight toiling triremes Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes Tragic irony!

On the ninth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Nine IR Realists Eight toiling triremes Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes Tragic irony!

On the eighth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Eight toiling triremes Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes Tragic irony!

On the seventh day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Seven sorry Spartans Six truest causes Tragic irony!

On the sixth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Six truest causes Tragic irony!

On the fifth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Tragic irony!

On the fourth day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Four hundred oligarchs, Fear, honour and interest, A bipolar conflict And a κτῆμά ἐς αἰεὶ.

On the third day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me Fear, honour and interest, A bipolar conflict And a κτῆμά ἐς αἰεὶ.

On the second day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me A bipolar conflict And a κτῆμά ἐς αἰεὶ.

🇵🇱🎄 Today, Poland, for the first time ever, joins its southern neighbours (🇨🇿🇸🇰), the Baltics, Denmark, Bulgaria and Cyprus in having 24 December as a work-free public holiday. 38m people are about to realise that Biedronka and Lidl aren't open today, Żabka will have a record turnover.

On the first day of Christmas, Thucydides sent to me A κτῆμά ἐς αἰεὶ.

The Trump Battleship nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-trump-cl...

Es ist Weihnachtszeit; es ist Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel Zeit!

If I were the sort of person who enjoyed writing nasty reviews I’d be having a field day. Instead I feel thoroughly miserable.

It’s up there with Spinal Tap for endless quotable lines and brilliant scenes, but with added Rickman.

42

New Odyssey: wine-dark sea; wine-dark sky; wine-dark land; generally gloomy clothing.

I can confirm from experience that you can mash these two lines together with barely a hiccup: “Driving home for Christmas, This is the road to hell…”

On Teaching in the context of Misconduct; With some Ring of Gyges thrown in. open.substack.com/pub/digressi... Come for a picture by @erikangner.com stay for the ring of Gyges

"I'm so sorry this is happening to you, bespoke AI prompters," I try to articulate, in-between bouts of hysterical laughter.

I think this was one of my better blog posts this year… thesphinxblog.com/2025/08/06/a...

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even Tiny Tim may die.

A passing thought in relation to the latest discussion of fake citations: this is going to accentuate pre-existing issues with citation practices. Not just the fact that some people, astonishingly, cite things they haven’t actually read, but biases in who gets cited. 1/3

If this is already the normal procedure everywhere, i.e. a google scholar import, universities’ library catalogues will be useless tomorrow.

A Lord of the Rings cover band called The Long Stryders.