Anyone know if there's a way to hide "Recommended" files in the Win 11 Start menu while still keeping items in jump lists for individual apps? They seem to be controlled by the same toggle and that's super annoying.

A first class parcel from my publisher, postmarked 4th December, arrived today, so if you're expecting a Christmas card or present from somebody *checks notes* about sixty miles down the road, don't hold your breath.

I want to be able to mute combos of words and users. Like, that topic is fine, and that person is fine, I just don't like that person's takes on that particular topic so I want to mute the combo. First social media site to give me this level of control will win a lot of my respect 😆

EVEN JANE AUSTEN IS GETTING THESE? Damn.

Evidence (only one teabag in the dish) suggests this was the first cup. I went out having had no tea at all.

Remember this big blog post I wrote much earlier in the year about aromantic queer histories? This is the article I was writing which prompted it: journal.fi/scf/article/...

Very sad to come home from the shops and find a cup of tea, undrunk, cold, on the table. My tea...

Send this to the AI shills who think their apps are useful to me because they're an upgrade on Ctrl+F. Buddy. I need to go to another city or sometimes country to look at microfilms of manuscripts for which no detailed catalogue record even exists. I dream of ctrl+F here.

Not only has almost nothing been digitised, 90% of everything isn't even really *described*, except at a very high aggregate level.

My parents are asking me about the plot of a Christmas play I had a glockenspiel solo in. In 2001. It has been twenty-four years. I do not know why Mr Gruber was sad and angry. Perhaps I never did. I'm sorry. I can still play the glockenspiel solo though, if you need it.

Am I fortunate enough to be followed by anyone who could tell me if Inverness had taxi apps in 2016? It didn’t have Uber, I know that much 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

*in the exhausted tone of somebody crawling across a marathon finish line three hours after everybody else finished* I submitted my manuscripts article

I was very unsuccessful at Christmas shopping today, but I did get about three metres down the road and suddenly realise I could combine two novel ideas into ONE devastatingly sad book set during a seventeenth-century Irish massacre, instead of writing two of those, so, you win some, you lose some.

This article is about Láeg, Fer Diad, and Emer all wanting to be buried with Cú Chulainn, and what that might tell us about how relationships are constructed and conceptualised in these particular early modern tales (with an aromantic slant on queer readings of that overlap).

Newest article came forth just in time to whack the word "forthcoming" off it in the bibliography of this article I'm frantically trying to finish before Christmas... journal.fi/scf/article/...

I'll just add to that, when collecting citations from other works, it's not just an AI problem that the citation might not say what the person you're collecting it from thinks it does. As someone who gets obsessive about finding the "first" source of various claims, I see this a lot.

Accidentally pinned something else and then lost my old pinned post, oh no. Gotta go looking for it again or else I'll have to make a new one

Proofreading text based on this and like. why. It's 22:50 on the last Friday before Christmas and this is what I'm dealing with. Free me

Newest article came forth just in time to whack the word "forthcoming" off it in the bibliography of this article I'm frantically trying to finish before Christmas... journal.fi/scf/article/...

This year, we had a special issue of the journal on gender and theory in medieval Celtic literature, which has now just been published. It is available, open access as always, here: journal.fi/scf/issue/vi...

Put all the page/folio numbers in, please clap. Now I just have to proofread all the edited text which is the fun bit, cos only I can proofread that, because nobody else has got the manuscripts, sob

Only the classiest and, honestly, eeriest of seasonal music from the Maypole Folk Collective at our last session of 2025

Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction: January-June 2026 Trying something different this year and breaking up by genre, so if you're looking for SFF/H, Crime Fiction, or Graphic Novels, just keep scrolling! (Yes, some of those distinctions are a little fuzzy. I did my best.) Romance will still be…

I wish publishers would stop using the title field on ebooks for blurbs, taglines, pitches, lists of awards, bestseller status, "from the author of..." etc. It clutters up ebook metadata SO MUCH (and it's unreadable and useless on an e-reader anyway).

Forgot to put the page/folio numbers in. Need to put the page/folio numbers in. SIGH.

Vacancy: Assistant Professor of Celtic, with a specialism in Old Irish, University of Cambridge. #MedievalSky www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

Wish us a happy birthday: Donate $27 to celebrate our 27th year! www.classy.org/give/476271/...

This giveaways ends tomorrow, btw!

Only the classiest and, honestly, eeriest of seasonal music from the Maypole Folk Collective at our last session of 2025

Themes: wanting control over your body and your life (and not having it); the military recruitment of teenagers (and why that's bad); the arms trade (and why that's bad); societal cycles of violence (and why nobody breaks out of them alone); friendship; redemption without forgiveness.

If, like me, you're dismayed to learn that it's less than 2 weeks until Christmas and haven't bought a single present yet, may I suggest my YA trilogy about a traumatised teenage assassin trying to live a normal life for the older teens and other YA readers in your life?: finnlongman.com/books/

Just now I was talking to someone about Rosemary Sutcliff, author of The Eagle of the Ninth and other works, and when I searched her (to verify something I'd said off the top of my head) I discovered she was, coincidentally, born 14 December 1920 Today would have been her 105th birthday!

This does make it sound like tech firms moved to Ireland and immediately fell foul of a Co. Kildare demon-summoning circle. Or possibly joined one.

Ah, gotta love a dickhead driver honking at me and yelling at me to use the underpass when I was crossing a junction in the one direction where there is no bike ramp on either the entrance or exit I needed to use. I'll just take my bike down the steps then shall I

I loved the butterfly assassin!! I read it basically in one sitting, it’s so good!!

Is anyone else getting posts showing up in their notifications that aren't replies to their own posts, and in which they're not mentioned anywhere? I can't work out why they're in that feed.

Also nudging this towards those whose only knowledge of their YA-aged relatives is "idk, I'm pretty sure they like The Hunger Games". This is also a speculative dystopia feat. political and philosophical commentary about the nature of violence, & niche/obscure enough that you can be the cool uncle!

I think the comment on the first draft of The Hummingbird Killer that was just 90% swearing will always have a special place in my heart. It's from 2014 and I treasure the screenshot still.

Every single year I refuse to start thinking about Christmas until December, and then inevitably I'm really busy and/or ill for the first week or two of December, and the next thing I know it's the 13th and I haven't made a single plan beyond a vague intention to go to my parents'.

If, like me, you're dismayed to learn that it's less than 2 weeks until Christmas and haven't bought a single present yet, may I suggest my YA trilogy about a traumatised teenage assassin trying to live a normal life for the older teens and other YA readers in your life?: finnlongman.com/books/

Should add this article includes a review of existing scholarship and a summary of some of the retellings / commercial reworkings of this story, and that bibliography (now up to 16 items) includes all of those.

Every time I move anything half my tables migrate and I would like them to... stop doing that...

The bibliography for this article is so funny. There are literally 14 things there, including two of my own articles and three unpublished PhD theses, and then there are like. sixty unedited manuscripts.

"With your November 2025 publication date approaching, you are entering the most critical window for building visibility, generating sustained excitement, and—" The AI generated book marketing emails are as unprepared for it to somehow be 12th December already as I am, apparently

I don't know if I'll be able to keep the appendix of this article (which is just a list of all the prose manuscripts for ref & to clarify their contents and which I've viewed) but it'll be useful somewhere so it's worth putting together. But wow I've viewed a lot of manuscripts

So it turns out that even if you suddenly figure out how to fix your article's Problem Paragraph at half midnight, you should not try opening it on your phone if it contains diagrams, because Microsoft Word will not be happy about it, and you will face the consequences the next day

The ad for the second postdoctoral position on our @leverhulme.ac.uk Britain’s Early Medieval Letters project is now live. We’re looking for an Old English specialist (who also works with Latin). 32-month FT post. Deadline for apps is 16 Jan 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

There are, like, two separate questions here that I never finished answering because I got distracted talking about parchment for about ten minutes solid

🎆Job Klaxon!!🎆 Folúntais: Scoláireachtaí Uí Dhonnabháin @scs-dias.bsky.social @dias.ie. Spriocdháta 5 Eanáir 2026 2 O’Donovan Scholarship vacancies at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Deadline 5 January 2026: www.dias.ie/2025/12/05/v...

After an evening spent editing the captions (sorry if any errors remain), the Q&A from my book launch is now live, so you get to see me rambling about medieval literature while on codeine and also completely failing to sit in chairs, my default state of being: youtu.be/iOc1ULognsU