Apparently Flight is acting prejudiced against white horses and is exhibiting “no one in the herd shall breed with you” behavior. 🤐 And because the lease agreement for the new mare says she must be with the big herd, Flight has to go to the paddock of shame. Still not thrilled about this.

Tomorrow I have to deal with the fact that Flight is being kicked out of his herd because he won’t stop terrorizing the new mare — and I am super unhappy with the options because I want him to be in a big pasture where he has to move a lot. Look at this punim. Is this the face of a monster?

“If we figure out what it means to be human, NO ONE TELL CHATGPT!” -my contribution to the AI leadership group this morning

Primary them all.

Won major auntie points by giving my favorite teen the Tiffany bracelet I received for my 16th birthday to her for her Sweet 16. If she only knew I was actually planning to pay any amount for Noah Kahan tickets, only to learn they are unscalpable so I had to come up with a better idea.

I very rarely run out of steam so badly that I can’t bring myself to do just a little bit more work. Fortunately, tomorrow is the horse convention.

Someone who shall not be named apparently told my mother that I don’t have friends, prompting a Saturday morning inquisition about my alleged lack of friends. Why, y’all.

“You can always interrupt me to give me little-known facts about Pan-Africanism.” -my beloved, who can stay

Apparently I have many repressed feelings about being on the faculty AI leadership thingy that ALL just came out in a text flood to a friend this morning.

I am going to the annual horse convention this weekend and just got a talking to about how I cannot come home with another horse. And I only have one!

I deeply appreciate how many friends I have who also believe that when daylight savings time ends, it's perfectly acceptable to have a drink at the campus hotel bar at 4pm.

Solidarity for every Desi who had to listen to their parents say, “Look at that Zohran Mamdani. *He* became mayor of NY. Why aren’t you mayor of NY?” today. ✊🏽

Hands down, the best professional decision I made last year was to work with @performant.bsky.social. Could not love collaborating with @jamiefolsom.bsky.social @anindita.org and their amazing colleagues more. 😍

In completely wild stuff this data visualization project reveals... one of the women who participated in the First Pan-African Conference, Ada Harris, was a teacher from Indianapolis who also patented the hair straightener. Thank you, Ada Harris, for one of my favorite implements.

That feeling of having spent six years on a project and wondering if it was actually a total waste of time. Blergh.

Data cleaning is reminding me of the time I was head delegate for Zaire at the Dublin Model UN Conference in 1997 (I know at least one of you was there!) and a major offensive in the civil war was launched, so we were running down Grafton Street on Easter Sunday trying to find a newspaper.

I will simply leave this clip from Lil' Bush, a cartoon I mightily enjoyed in the 2000s, right here. www.dailymotion.com/video/x2jynk

I should never make jokes. I joked to a friend about EvergreenLearnPineTherabot, the all-in-one green place AI platform, and this was in the student paper today. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2025...

Here is a new one: being asked to review a manuscript that I have a chapter in.

The fun thing about working on some of the later events related to Pan-Africanism is getting to send texts to friends saying "just put your uncle/aunt/father/grandfather in the dataset."

Two and a half more weeks of term and then I can mostly check out til January — and I’m not teaching again til April. I think I can, I think I can. 🚂🚂🚂🚂 #ChairLife

I realized that there are two Thomas Babington Macaulays after doing a double take while cleaning data. One (1800-1859) wrote Macaulay's Minute and the other (1826-1878) is the father of Herbert Macaulay, sometimes known as the founder of Nigerian nationalism. Hmm.

There are many reasons to be angry about French colonialism. Right now, it's the fact that it's put 3700+ points worth of geometry on a map and completely gummed up this data visualization.

Did everyone else already figure out that the Vice President’s character on South Park is Tattoo from Fantasy Island?

My beloved looked over at something I was doing and said, "Wow, it's like you're a real digital humanist now," which begs the question of exactly what I've been doing over the last two decades.

Delivered a full-on Gizmo impression at 6am when my beloved turned his phone flashlight on.

Our house upped our Halloween game this year.

What a world. Had to write this on a "future" section of a project. Might as well be honest 🤷‍♀️

When you are having a deeply aggravating battle with bureaucratic nonsense and the sweetest email pops up in your inbox. Thank goodness for kind people.

Happy Halloween! Don't miss the October edition of #ReviewsinDH, part II of a Reviews in the Classroom issue from Hilary Havens' students at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Thanks to Hilary & Reviews in the Classroom editors Kalani Craig R.C. Miessler and Lu Wang! reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v6-n10

There is a possibility my beloved and I are about to break up over our differing theories about how Simon and Garfunkel created the percussive bang in the chorus of "The Boxer."

Sure it was at 11:30pm but I got everything I absolutely had to get done today finished so I can just do research things until Monday. ⌛️

I am very excited about a project I am advising but it's gonna require me to read Monique Wittig's Virgile, non en français. Pensées et prières, y'all.

My 17-hour day was brought to you in part by Week 7 of the quarter system, but it had very high quality day on campus content.

Currently being punished for spending 10 hours riding my horse in extremely challenging conditions this weekend -- both in terms of my abs and doing zero work.

When I was a teenager, being radicalized by the musical Rent, which had just come out, I would’ve thought I’d grow up to be Mark not Collins.

In things I would have never believed would have ever happened if you had told me 5 years ago…

I walked my horse through fire today at Mountie school today. We also dealt with explosions and smoke, did drills, and negotiated sirens while approaching and circling a police cruiser. Flight was amazing — even our instructor said so. Four hours in the saddle, and we get to do it again tomorrow!

There comes a time in a relationship of 23 years when you decide to confess that you really love REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You” even though you think your partner hates it, and he says he loves it and thought YOU hated it.

Have discovered that Mountie school actually involves two hours of class before we even get on our horses. Serious business. 🐴👮🏽‍♀️

In my continuing attempt to not revert to work obsessed ways, I had breakfast with a dear friend and with one of my fairy godmentors instead of begging off to work on a database, and I have not laughed so hard in weeks. 🥰

My job is so weird 💚

Ah yes, when you have to verify whether or not the Pan-Africanist organizations in the database are actually CIA fronts.

I love wild stories, like the chairman of the All-African Peoples' Conference meeting Lumumba during a layover on the way to Accra — in a bar, where he was promoting beer — and inviting him to come along to the conference. It beats my dad going to the London Playboy Club with Kwame Nkrumah's son.

Hit the mother lode of Pan-African data from declassified CIA files, even though the last thing I need to be doing is adding more.

My former technical director sent me this sticker, which is my actual chairing motto. 😍

The fact that I have decided I am dissatisfied with a good chunk of the geoJSON from the API, I am manually replacing some of it, and this is why my childhood report cards always said I get so into details that I lose sight of the big picture...

Flight had to be separated from the herd, placed in a separate pen with a friend because he was bullying the new horse (and getting his girlfriend and two friends in on it) and she needs to find a place in the herd before they let him back in. 😭 Super horrified horse mom here.

If you ever need someone who has now become an expert in weird geoJSON assemblages to create polygons for disputed territories or historical geographical entities, it me.

Hard to not feel like we are living amid the death of the U.S. research university — for all its problems, a truly important institution. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...