One of the (many) problems with my institution's email filter is that I work in special collections that include many records of religious organizations, and I don't actually know based on just the subject line "MAY THE SPIRIT OF GOD BE WITH YOU AND YOUR FAMILY" whether or not it's really spam

or, and hear me out, give every philadelphian a brand new hammer

Well, it happened. A client disregarded my advice about using generative AI and guess what? It gave them bad advice AND the judge ruled that by using it, Client waived confidentiality and ordered us to turn a bunch of private stuff over. STOP USING GENERATIVE AI FOR LEGAL THINGS. I BEG YOU.

כ׳װױן אין פּענסילװאַניע, האָב איך דאָך געשטימט

Climate change compounding with Philly problems (old buildings, under-resourced city…ugh).

This is poetry

Because the remaining folks are generally shallow shitheels, Google Android randomly decided wholescale to make every copied link switch to "share.google.com", a power they shouldn't have, and power they shouldn't take. Anyway, it can be unset, I suggest unsetting it.

I don't think folks younger than 30 know what the internet once legitimately promised to be (and I would argue briefly was): a boundary-less space of pretty much uncommodified information and communication. A mix between community bulletin boards and university library stacks.

uh fuck you, gemmy, there's nothing wrong with my arrows and I will NOT try to draw it better

I sincerely hope that people in the quotes popping off about the nationals fan base, when these assholes with the sign are almost certainly out of towners to a city that is 95% not this, have called their representatives about ending the federal occupation of a place without representation.

Coming this fall: CSI Mime Ami

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

I bought my little niece this Paddington Bear toy which talks when you squeeze it, but now my sister's dog has got hold of it and is savaging it ruthlessly while it says things like 'I wonder what adventures I shall have today!' and 'I'm your friend!'

Charles Dickens had a son nicknamed Plorn. really. what's more is, from his letters, Dickens was pretty disappointed with poor Plorn.

I am always having so much fun with scale drawings. These images are usually depicted quite small on a page in books, there just to show the size of the animal. I love adding some extra details and funny situations to these. :) Here is a series I have just made for an upcoming book. #SciArt

Coming this fall: CSI Mime Ami

PLAYING IT SAFE CAN CAUSE A LOT OF DAMAGE IN THE LONG RUN

cute little yiddish book called dos helfike helfandl (the helpful little elephant) just waiting to be written

Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island.

By far my favorite digital preservation fact: Toy Story 2 was completely deleted by accident, the back ups failed and the only reason they were able to recover it was that the tech director had recently had a baby and had gotten permission to have a copy at home: thenextweb.com/news/how-pix...

THEY MADE JIMMY CARTER SELL HIS PEANUT FARM.

here’s how it’s supposed to work I guess: Moms for Liberty prevents you from learning anything potentially distressing in K-12, then university campuses serve you up nothing but distressing ideas thereafter

Every Thursday after circus practice I go to one of those speakeasy bars that requires a rotating password to get in. The guy who takes the password asks me for interesting facts instead, because he knows I have them, but I'm running out! Tell me (brief) interesting facts I can share with him.

“reparations aren’t realisti—"

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

not beating the “tech as replacement mom” charges

Peer review is a poor mechanism for the deep forensic work needed to detect fraud of any sort. Peer review is broken, but where it works best is as an expert gut check on method, argument, and other matters of sensibility and soundness—assuming good faith on the part of the submitting authors.

*scientists frantically calculating the exact speed you need to jog through a museum in order to cheat death*

Things Learned Today While Researching Water/Waste Infrastructure Stuff inhabitat.com/107-million-...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

In addition, Family Search frequently utilizes prison labor to digitize materials they make available so it's just a turducken of exploitation activehistory.ca/blog/2026/04...

very delighted that I can now announce the Homosaurus was successful in two seperate #SSHRC applications. First up is a $50,000 Connections Grant "A Community de communautés: supporting the Québécois Homosaurus" which supports the implementation of the #Homosaurus in QC-FR

"...as companies hired CEOs with degrees from business schools...pay fell for workers and profits rose." Man, that really makes me think that taking over a business school and teaching everything from like an s-corp/social responsibility/pro-union perspective would be high-leverage.

l’ve seen several major respected library vendors try to sell products for astronomical price tags that were just open models without any further value add from their programming teams. Seems like a poor strategy for maintaining trust imo

This is the situation I refer to the most when trying to explain a the state of book bans right now. Utah has state mandated book destruction for books like Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and Damsel by Elana K Arnold. The vast majority of the books are written by women.

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

Yeah, well what if we had an artifact that wasn’t entangled in its social and historical context? Checkmate, haters

something i find amusing about (what lakoff and nuñez called) the romance of mathematics is how it's supposed to be just out there existing platonically And Yet™ very little of it exists without somebody's name attached to it

interesting rationale from a prospective juror in the Elon Musk Twitter stock manipulation case

In 1881, a publisher had the bright idea to reprint maps and city directories from a century earlier, and here is how they advertised them.

Currently transferring data over ethernet at about 18 MiB/second.* That's roughly equivalent to cramming 6 to 9 floppy disks down the wire every second. Truly incredible the world we live in.

Audited one of my favourite drawers today. As far as I can tell there was an entire generation of past mollusc curators who communicated entirely by means of passive-aggressive drawer notes to each other

On this day in 1985, the city of Philadelphia went to war against its own citizens. I wrote about it for @teenvogue.com back in 2020: www.teenvogue.com/story/histor...

Hey, doing this kind of human-clearly-not-in-the-loop AI transcription is a complete shirking of our duties as historians, archivists, and allied professions when dealing with records of enslavement especially. If there are records that can be automated ethically, it’s certainly not these, full stop

New on bloggERS! saaers.wordpress.com/2026/05/13/r...

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

Every time I teach the MOVE bombing, students are shocked. And when I teach the aftermath involving an anthropologist who hoarded some of the remains and used them as teaching tools, they are even more shocked. And I teach in Pennsylvania. Even some students from Philly are unaware of this history