@floreustebius.bsky.social I was somehow unaware of your paper using palimpsest as a framework. That is one of my favorite words, and if I didn’t already know you and how cool and brilliant you are, this alone would make me badger @bardicknowledge.bsky.social to introduce us

Ok, @franklehman.bsky.social I see the appeal of photographing birds, at least when it can be done in a lovely pollinator garden on a pleasant riverwalk

When I think about the stupid mistakes LLMs make with words sometimes, (cf. the strawberry problem, fabricating quotations, or mixing up terms etc.), there's a well-known Old English riddle that comes to mind. It's more than 1,000 years old but I think it has something to tell us about AI... 🧵

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

I wrote something new for History Respawned today. It's a review of a new book about Red Dead, but it's really about academic writing and historical game studies as a field. Please read, but also know, I really really really really REALLY didn't want to write this review.

Make Weird Stuff.

I’m going to belatedly chime in here (thank you, @bardicknowledge.bsky.social for tagging me in!) and add a few things. In general, I agree with both of these threads, and largely what I want to add are questions

Okay so a couple years ago, someone* said "Twitter, tell me about f*ckbois of the 19th century" and we all went on this journey together *I would credit but they have since nuked their account (I just checked)

A version of the Orpheus myth where the audience knows that Hades is lying about whether Orpheus can take her back. She was always going to fade into smoke before she crossed the threshold. It is a small comfort, rather than a great tragedy, that Orpheus at least looks back.

Physicists have discovered ethnomusicology

In general, "career breaks" are poorly defined where academia is concerned; not all career breaks are health- or family-related. For humanists, working outside academia usually does not involve having ample time and resources for research and thus should absolutely be considered a "career break".

knowing the 17th edition is my whole personality (professionally speaking, anyway), so I'm NOT PREPARED

When Dave Ramsey is calling people idiots for spending money on childcare, it's because, in his mind, the right and proper way to get child care is to rely on the unpaid labor of women. The unsaid part of "why are you paying that much for child care" is "there's a woman who should do it for free."

A real life classical music shitposter 🫡

Symphonies and operas (and performances of them) were traditionally fully paid for by aristocrats as a way for them to flex their wealth and cultural power—orchestras as we know them were never designed to fund themselves

"neessuun wooorma"

I didn’t know I could love my favorite flour company any more

The integration of the “Simple Song” melody into the new Bluey episode _Relax_ is a great little detail that I’m using to distract myself from how hard Chili’s depiction in this episode is attacking me

I think we might see a hire for a one-year position with a 4/4 coaching load (football, tennis, bowling, beach volleyball)

Having family stay for the holidays is like watching players test the game you designed. They are using the space in such interesting ways. They are getting a mug to drink water from even though we have a cabinet full of glasses. I guess the visual language wasn’t clear enough there and that’s on me

Our students deserve better. The US leaves public educators and their students on the front lines of gun violence. They don’t want us to teach or learn, they want us to stay afraid. Our students said fuck this, we demand better.

Medieval manuscript catalogs have their own arcane language & it varies. There are some nice guides to how to read them, but I think my students will also benefit from infographics. So in the lead-up to the semester, here ate a couple I'll share here. Hope people find them useful!

One of my longest-held, unrealized concepts for a musical work is a 're-make' of "Pagliacci" in which the characters are in a metal band - first, I thought they should play power metal (a fun aesthetic), but now I think they should play Black Metal (allows a corpse paint aria)

The biggest enabler for creativity is stability. I wish that was made more central to the creative narrative. Figure out what your specific needs are to limit stressors and enable "boring" time and work to achieve that as hard as you're practicing your art.

“HEY GUYS, WELCOME TO MY CHANNEL!”

She also got engaged to some aristocrat (but he broke it off when he learned that she couldn't have children.) and also, when Billy Graham came to London in 1966, lay on his car to protest his saying miniskirts are sinful, thus cutting his speech short. Absolute legend.

Finally, some good news about the case where the British Museum used my translations of Qiu Jin's poetry without permission. https://yilinwang.com/qiu-jin-british-museum/

Naomi and I just went to our local polling station and voted NO on Ohio Issue 1. Well, I voted and Naomi got a sticker.

Exactly. It's information-shaped. It's not information.

Embarrassment in the cool light of morning: realizing I fucked up the meter of the polka on the Thursday night ludo livestream. Growing up Catholic means I must confess my mistake to someone (aka you all)

We did it, Joe.

Today's Cake Goal: Mount Doom Today's Cake Result:

Robert Bringhurst, _The Elements of Typographic Style_, 3.2 ed. (Point Roberts, WA: Hartley and Marks, 2008), 89–90.

Fucking PREACH. I wrote the second half of my dissertation in two hour chunks at the coffee shop across the street from Amelia’s preschool.

This is already an extraordinary piece on the literature of Việt Nam in the New York Times, but this note especially blew me away—what a powerful argument against house style when it comes to foreign languages:

Co-conspirator 6 is only available to Kickstarter backers.

They are intentionally framing climate and COVID as problems for individuals to deal with to distract us from holding the powerful accountable.

🎶Take my tweets, take DMs Rate limit what tweeps can see I don’t care, I can skeet You can’t take Bluesky from me. [guitar riff]🎶

Frightened men have been whimpering about the Barbie movie. TechnicallyRon took their one-star reviews from Letterboxd and put them on movie posters because it makes the film seem even cooler.

Hello world