Something I'll say about John Blanche is that he threaded with exquisite precision the needle of making the Warhammer 40K setting look cool and striking without making it look appealing. He made a universe of rock album covers where no one is having a good time.

A baby mukade tried to sneak through my front door under the hinge and this one security violation has me treating every morning's departure for work like I'm trying to secretly sally around a siege.

"Ich askid ChatGPT," Well Ich askid the stones, and the forest, and the starres, and the mountaynes, and the moone daunsinge above, and what thei seyde was learninge, and dreames, and growinge thinges, and makinge art, and a worlde wher we talke to each othir and care about each othir.

My hatches: battened down My sails: reefed My cannon: secured My larder: stocked My tea: brewin'

It is fascinating to hear anyone care this much about things I don't think about. The question that for me with this is that if all these standards got set by the USA because of its massive 20th century manufacturing advantage... what happens when someone else does all the manufacturing?

"Infinite diversity in infinite combinations." It is not a statement of ideology. It is a statement of fact.

I've been feeling a bit burned out lately, but this weekend I was given a lesson to teach that wasn't based around a textbook or curricular outcomes or assessments or school promotion, and it forced me to lean on some skills from my time as an ALT that I frankly forgot I'd spent years building.

"the simplest of joys, that of the child and the closed box" I enjoy how often I can get students, even those who hate English class, to inspect something with English on it, just by handing it to them in a closed envelope and giving them minimal instructions otherwise.

His pissed off ghost has been living rent-free in my head all week. #StarTrek #DS9 #InThePaleMoonlight

NO LIES TOLD....

Counting-out rhymes are useful tools for handling decisions that need to be definitive, but aren't worth thinking about. The most famous one in English having an ethnic slur version is pretty yikes though. But any line from any song can be a counting-out rhyme. And I always have a song in my head.

This vent core is getting blasted with so many frogs, you wouldn't believe it. It's like Discount Frog Blasting city all up in this vent core. [Slaps roof of vent core] this baby can be blasted by so many frogs...

Oh man I loved Stargate!

Still my go-to take (not my own)

I am reading Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Iliad and one thing I didn't expect was the full-on belly laugh jokes. Like, there aren't a lot so far, but more than I'd expect in a blood-soaked, corpse-strewn battlefield.

more like mr. Adequatebar, amirite

This article that art and cultural experiences kept people in the UK as young as exercise peals like a churchbell.

I ORDER MY COFFEE BLACK. NO SUGAR. NO MILK. NO WATER. NO CUP. THEY HAND ME THE BEANS. I EAT THEM IN THE PARKING LOT LIKE A HORSE. THE BARISTAS HAVE STOPPED CHARGING ME. I HAVE NOT SLEPT SINCE TUESDAY. I CAN HEAR THE WIFI

Obviously I'm a huge fan of conlangs and neography. But it seems to me that an effective writing system needs to: 1. Be easy to read, 2. Be easy to write, 3. Have at least the potential to look aesthetically pleasing on the page. And yet many neographs I've seen ɪɴᴄʟᴜᴅɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴏᴡɴ only achieve #3.

Various Types of Women

When I was in school I printed out hundreds of pages of BBS manual on my family's dot-matrix printer, carefully tore all those tractor feed edges off, and put it all in a 3-inch binder to take to school and study in my free time. Mostly so I could run Tradewars 2002 for my friends.

It's wild how some people pay for illicit substances to hallucinate with when your brain becomes a random experience generator for 1/3 of your normal operating cycle for free. And only occasionally generates beings of utter malice to traumatize you while you're paralyzed.

playing a little tune

Not me, laughing at this for 10 minutes straight.

Fine, I'll meme.

A cheeky lil' late lunch MOS in the middle of my bike ride. Since ordering at restaurants is one of the first things I ever learned here, I am hyper-attuned to people having trouble with it. Guy in front of me seemed to be Japanese, seemed to be a native speaker, but for some reason he struggled.

I wasn't radicalized until I saw an ad for a consumer product that began with the words, "Are you bored with your swimming pool?"

How do we feel about "scandhole" instead of "scandtrap"? The 'h' could easily get elided and the 'o' sound could easily get reduced to a schwa if the speaker isn't careful, and then it just sounds like "scandal". But I think it works without unnatural enunciation.

Old English had "scandword" meaning "abusive blasphemous or obscene language a vile foul word or an opprobrious abusive word" and I really like that because "scand" has such a good mouthfeel for all those negative concepts. I want to adopt it. www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk

Me last week: OMG I can't believe Golden Week is almost here! It feels like we started the new year a few days ago. Me on the work day immediately following Showa Day: OMG could the holiday just properly get here I'm exhausted!

Ah, Showa Day. A national holiday where everyone who is desperate for a break after the hectic start to the fiscal year gets woken up at 9 AM by sound trucks blaring nationalistic music as they drive through the streets.

I'm not holding back tears, you're holding back tears! ----- I've had this theory for a long time that many genres of fiction should be defined by the emotion they evoke. Horror and romance are obvious. Bildungsroman is about the feeling of watching youth turn to growth. But what of fantasy?

Boardgame, TTRPG, and miniatures wargaming shop that's close enough to a station to get some foot traffic and far enough away to get some peace. I would offer a weekly "learn English through RPG" session where people who hate studying can roll up a character and play a scaffolded game in English.

I said The Acolyte was "fine", but it's probably the only SW media I've thought about for this long after viewing it. Mainly about how every character in the whole show has pretty reasonable, even sensible motivations for what they're doing, once you know why they're doing it.

After reading the Palantir article on Wired, I'm thinking about how many of the evil megacorporations in media I've consumed have to brainwash their employees or bribe them with extravagant wealth to get them to do evil.

Whelp.... þæs ofereode.

I just passed a café with the sign "coffee snafu", all lower-case, and the part of my brain that teaches English and the part of my brain that used to work in marketing are having a nifty argument about it.

That was a weird quake. It was like the amplitude was so low I almost couldn't feel it, except the wavelength of the shift was so long I thought I was having a vestibular breakdown. Almost made me queasy while it was happening.

Recently I treated myself to a Game Envy Lucent lamp for my painting station, and to reward myself for making to through the last two weeks I actually used it for painting. If there is a way to improve upon this lamp, I lack the imagination to think of it. #miniatures #miniaturepainting #infinity

bsky.app/profile/l4po... Were sled mushers the closest modern equivalent to Achaemenid Royal Road couriers in terms of the who having a job that involves lots of waiting for something to happen close to base and then needing to urgently travel on short notice thing?

Legit thank you to whoever was pumping their tunes as they drove by while I was cycling home from work. I worked two 6-day weeks in a row. Many of them were 10-hour days. I could be so grouchy about this. But I finally get a weekend, the weather is good, and someone is out there jammin sick tunes.

@alexsteacy.bsky.social @graham.loadingreadyrun.com Gratitude for your sacrifice and all, but Blobby might be the first *2D* game ever to make me motion sick and now I ned to li dwn.

There’s no place like Earth—and we’ve got the planet’s spectacular, one-of-a-kind geology to thank for it. In this video, we’ll explore how geology touches our lives, helps us solve mysteries about the planet’s past and its future, and puts our world's life in perspective. youtu.be/ypH6dR7YGfU

I am not an active MTG player, but I am suddenly curious how much of the new Strixhaven set I relate to professionally.

He's foiling! HE'S FOILING!!

Sometimes I think I'd like to introduce D&D to some of my students. But realistically speaking, my interests have changed so much from when I was their age that I would struggle to flesh out a setting beyond the village scriptorium. "Roll to interpret marginalia!"

Continuing on the teacher theme, there is so much great imagery in this poem by Iain Crichton Smith I am old enough to recall teachers in cloaks and to appreciate the Latin grammar joke Remember, as an adult, meeting my own teachers and worried why they remembered my name! #poetry #poemoftheday

...to sċrēada þu sagast?

I was thinking of something like this while listening to a podcast describing the Achaemenid Royal Road. What must life have been like to be a courier at an inn along the way? You had to just sit, never able to go anywhere else in case a messenger arrives. Then, you had to ride like the wind.

A colleague joked that I might have over-engineered a project and I joked that overengineering is my jam and I am so grateful that the colleague chose to laugh instead of acknowledging seriously that I had just voiced a real weakness that holds me back creatively.