'Otters' in ink by Jackie Morris, artist, author and illustrator who lives and works in a small cottage by the sea in Wales #WomensArt

Also, a plot point or character or symbol can have a Christian (or other religious/ideological) meaning as part of a network of meanings. Like, lembas are kind of the Eucharist but they are also kind of speculation about what if pre-packaged military rations tasted good yknow.

Other people: excited about getting a PhD bc they get to put Dr. At the front of their name. Me: excited about getting a PhD bc then I can use two of my favorite reactions and mean it.

I also currently have a GoFundMe for top surgery! Please consider donating, the more I get, the less likely that I need to go the Medical Tourism route (which has dangers and complications). gofund.me/a5e31e43a

What better occasion for my first post on Bluesky than my brilliant friend @mariebreta.bsky.social defending her PhD thesis on #Tolkien and #TolkienIllustrations at @upecofficiel.bsky.social today. Marie, you are amazing! #TolkienScholarship

This is what I’m talking about when I talk about technologies of liberation This required careful measurement and design

I'm rewatching E1 of Game of Thrones for reasons, and now that this show is truly dead, and realistically GRRM is never going to finish these books, I think it's time to talk about my big theory! Mind, I don't keep up with fan theories or gossip, but I had ONE big theory of my own.

The cat's out of the bag!! My work is appearing in this very important incoming volume!!! It's been so hard keeping it secret for the last couple of years!!

It's been nearly seven years since I first started researching and sharing Hezekiah Moscow's story on my blog. Now just over a year until my book is published. Back to writing tonight! If you enjoy/ed #AThousandBlows, please buy THE DEVIL'S DANCE FLOOR next year, eh 🥊✌🏻 www.grapplingwithhistory.com

The fabric arts linked in this article are all going to be in museums one day, this is *EXACTLY* the kind of historic art that protest makes.

The art selected for this piece made me cry. Enjoy crying about how many of us are angry, hurting, fighting.

It's me again sharing my GoFundMe! I'm 47% of the way to the lower goal (medical tourism) but it's looking more and more like I'm going to go local, which will raise the goal even further (to be updated when confirmed). Seriously every little bit helps, sharing around helps! gofund.me/976e61ada

PhD researchers, career academics, independent scholars, lend me your ears! I am curious what other people's daily routines are! I always find it helpful to know what others are doing (be it the same or different!). Share your routine on an average/ideal day!

girl you know how.

Flashbangs burn hotter then lava. They've caused serious burns, severed hands, and even killed. *That's* what ICE just tossed into a car full of kids. Here's our investigation from 2015, by @juliaangwin.com: www.propublica.org/article/flas...

The woman in this photo was trying to get around ICE vans to go to her doctor's appointment when they dragged her out and arrested her. She's fucking terrified. If you don't have empathy, then you're the toxic asshole.

It's me again sharing my GoFundMe! I'm 47% of the way to the lower goal (medical tourism) but it's looking more and more like I'm going to go local, which will raise the goal even further (to be updated when confirmed). Seriously every little bit helps, sharing around helps! gofund.me/976e61ada

What I hate most about gen Ai is how it takes away the effort. When I saw art before, I knew that even if it shitty and bad, i could tell that there was someone who worked hard to make it happen. It’s why shit like The Room got popular, because you could see the earnest effort on display.

If this was any other set of medical treatments, the entire medical community would be scrambling to study how they could improve their own treatments.

I've been thinking a lot about visual rhetoric lately. Probably because I'm a fundamentally anti discipline division, and because my background is in visual art history and I've shifted gears to literature. So have some thoughts:

I come to you all with a request for community help: I'm a US/Latvian dual citizen (through my family) and I need to renew my Latvian passport ASAP (I live in the UK as a leave-to-remain EU citizen). All the paperwork is in Latvian though, and I need someone who can read the language to help me out.

This is your semiregular reminder that Judeo-Christian is an evangelical buzzword designed to obfuscate the history of Christian oppression of Jews while alienating Islam. Don't use it. Judaism and Christianity are VERY different, and Christanity and Islam are estranged siblings. Just say Abrahamic.

New season of a Thousand Blows! I love the costuming on this show, but I especially love that the ladies are wearing chatalains. It's the little details of normal life!

That moment when you realize that Wake Up Dead Man is telling the same story as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Paranoid Reading.

BREAKING: X’s chatbot Grok isn’t just making AI porn deepfakes, it’s now making Nazi AI porn deepfakes, undressing women and showing them wearing “swastika bikinis”. Many of these women are Jewish, including a recently deceased Holocaust survivor.

Calling ICE agents "Nazis" is not a rhetorical slur, it's an accurate description. These people took this job in order to do ethnic cleansing, to engage in cruelty and domination toward nonwhite people. The fascist militia types have been signing up in droves, and they are eager to kill people.

I come to you all with a request for community help: I'm a US/Latvian dual citizen (through my family) and I need to renew my Latvian passport ASAP (I live in the UK as a leave-to-remain EU citizen). All the paperwork is in Latvian though, and I need someone who can read the language to help me out.

Because they are stupid.

I’ve seen this take 1,000 times and I’ve responded to it just as many. Despite JRRT’s grumpy old man politics and Romantic aesthetic influences, he thoughtfully and consistently interrogated nationalism and authoritarianism throughout his work. This doesn’t matter to fascists cuz they can’t read.

A thing I keep coming back to while working on thesis is that I think people have consistently misinterpreted Tolkien contemplating Ideals with that reflecting how he actually was in life. One such example, his heroic ideal does not actually reflect his own war experience, at all.

I was getting very excited about A Thousand Blows on my personal account and realized that was very silly of me. This is your inspiration to watch A Thousand Blows, it's SO GOOD.

Fully how I imagine myself when I'm doing my PT stretches in the morning.

Some of you may know that I almost did a PhD in Sex Education in Museums, and so I find the yearly Pornhub stats absolutely fascinating. Some observations:

Finally, I can show off my entrance for Feanorian zine! Really proud of this art, and insanely glad for the opportunity to join such an amazing project! There is lots of amazing fic and art there, so give everyone some love, if you can! I will put a link in the thread below! #tolkien #silmarillion

Keep it up everyone! Maybe 2026 can finally bring its death

It's totally wild that AI enshitification has made Wikipedia more reliable than a Google search. At least Wikipedia is mildly strict about editing, it's edited by people, it cites it's sources and it's peer reviewed in the loosest sense of the term.

Relating to my previous post but separate: I think I've realized that I love doing theatre and film crit because they both combine literature and visual arts methodologies, with their own distinct methodologies also thrown in. You need to understand storytelling AND visual language for both.

It's out!🍾 I am delighted to announce the publication of our "Germany's History Wars. Contesting Memory and Identity Today" It is Open Access! 👇 You can download it here for free. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

My wish for 2026 is that everyone who does art criticism (of all mediums; literature, visual art, film, theater, music) take at least one practical art making class (of any medium). Understanding how art is made profoundly changes how you do criticism.

So uh. In "Wake Up Dead Man" Rian Johnson may have very intentionally engaged with the far-right appropriating discourse around LOTR in his critique. It's subtle, but someone pointed out on tumblr various references (besides one very obvious one) and I want to shake Rian's hand.

Having now read a substantial amount of Mary Renault in a short period, one right after the other, I feel like her best work tends to be the beginnings and endings of her stories, and in the middle she gets tends to get lost in the weeds of wanting to follow the history rather than tell a story.

Literally everyone I know has been personally victimized by the end of 2025 (myself included). I don't think I've spoken to a single person who hasn't had either a breakdown, a personal tragedy, or a medical emergency in the last month. The vibe's bad, take care of yourselves.

i wanna know why the famously litigious Tolkien Estate is ok with technofascists stealing names from Lord of the Rings for their doomsday devices

Also, the impermanence of the digital really bothers me. Sure, paper burns and libraries and archives are susceptible to fire, water, and neglect. BUT so much of the early Internet is gone and we're supposed to just ignore that. We must continue to use analog communication alongside digital.

Signed prints of my Lord Of The Rings / Muppets trilogy are now up on jameshance.com ☺️❤️✨🎨 Don’t forget to use the code BUY2GET3 to get the third one for free!🎄

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

Sometimes, I think people forget that the most important part of scholarship isn't citation recall, but independent thinking and source analysis. But once again, see my laundry list of issues with where academia as a whole has ended up in the 21st century.

OK but as someone who has finally found the joy of cooking, this is so tempting. Will the novelty suck me in? Possibly.

Realized it’s been a while since I posted my Bronze Age Fellowship of the Ring so here the lads are again

✨GIFCon is back for 2026! ✨ We’re very excited to launch the Call for Papers for GIFCon 2026, with the theme “Technologies of the Fantastic” You can find out more here: fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20...