My therapist: Don’t worry, Merovingian cursive is not real, it can’t hurt you Merovingian cursive:

The wind last night was so loud I didn't even hear this come down right across the street (the cones and machinery are from unrelated, planned work on the water service lines)

This is actually rather comforting

Apropos of SO MANY things

You HAVE to celebrate good things. Even if they’re tiny and fragile and may blow away. In fact, you have to celebrate the fragile ones EVEN HARDER because who knows how many chances you get? If you constantly think how it will all go wrong, if every triumph is met with “but…” you will burn out.

I've been offline a lot lately because of *gestures wildly* all of this, but I gotta share some pictures from a fantasy-themed wedding I went to earlier this month, because how adorable are these lovely people?

Calling all medievalists! Registration for the 60th annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo opened this week! Head to our website to register and learn more about what to expect this May: wmich.edu/medievalcong... #kzooicms #ICMS #medievalstudies

I'm angry about a lot of things. Outraged, frightened, you name it. But in the dark petty corners of my mind, I'm also just plain annoyed. Why do they get to take the small daily joys and triumphs and poison them with the guilt of "I should be doing more" and "but what about people with less"?

Trans folks seeking passports: Here's something potentially useful, to a small group. If you are in: Michigan Minnesota New York Vermont Washington You have access to an "EDL". This is a drivers license that can be used for LAND AND SEA (not air) entry to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean. (1/3)

ok. because we all could use a little joy here are some silly medieval hedgehogs for hedgehog day:

I can’t find any archival evidence that that the Langston Hughes poem circulating here today is authentic so here is a sourced Hughes poem, Beaumont to Detroit, 1943, published that year in the magazine Common Ground, in which he compares Hitler and Mussolini to American Jim Crow and the KKK

Anyway what you need to see today is probably one of the 9 puppies that got dropped along with his mother near the ranch. Dad was probably a German Shepherd, mom is the kind of medium sized yellow dog with black mask you get from mutts after many generations.

"The outer leaf of each quire (quinio) is parchment, while the remaining leaves are papyrus." Look at this, y'all!

It’s #HandwritingDay so I thought I’d share a thread about Renaissance handwritten documents I worked with in the research that led to “Inventing the Renaissance,” and the best and worst scripts I’ve ever seen. 1/? (Continuing countdown to the release of my *absurdly fat* *absurdly orange* book!)

Le partage de Verdun (843) :

Also, look at how someone in the 14th-c. rewrote the text on every page, which is itself written in 9th-c. rustic capitals. This is good evidence that later readers found rustic capitals challenging to read, as they had gone out of fashion by the time Gothic script developed.

Why did I not already have this bookmarked?! #medievalsky, you want this!

NOW WHY DID THIS MAKE ME CRY

CAPTCHA: are you a human ME: yes CAPTCHA: oh i am so sorry

Like, listen, do you think I am *not* a wobbly ball of horror whenever I let myself think about anything but the immediate task in front of me? But that feeling accomplishes nothing by itself, so I post about birds and the dog and coveting weird little cactus.

Classes are canceled again tomorrow. Today made sense - the high temperature was 2⁰ F - but Wednesday it's gonna be a balmy 16⁰ F (-9⁰ C). The only possible explanation: the university president wants to get in everyone's good graces before he retires at the end of the year

Progress? Progress! (now's the time I always start questioning the wisdom of cutting cloth up into small triangles and sewing them back together into different triangles and squares, however)

In the name of not forgetting the small joys, I'm spending my snow day today at the craft table

nonzero chance at this point that I may be able to counteract a significant amount of my despair about the next four years with incredulous laughter about how stupid all of it is it’s so stupid

When you’re feeling really low, just remember this was published in 2013.

Reading old books (and teaching other people how to read them)

Delightful discovery while proofing the @kzooicms.bsky.social program: two unrelated papers in unrelated sessions, both with titles beginning with the same quote from *Pearl*

Asheville and WNC should have shown everyone that there are no climate havens. Not even the Upper Midwest or Canada or Alaska. We're all in this together. If our neighbor's home is burning 2000+ miles away, and I depend on that neighbor for my survival, then I am in danger, too.

The fact that Greenland won’t happen helps the larger MAGA tactic of portraying Trump as harmless and ineffectual. But there are competent villains who will be doing very real work that does a lot of damage while he yaps about Greenland.

this is correct

Everybody; Victorian ladies were gracious, proper, well behaved and never silly. Victorian lady;

Today my paleography students chose the leaves and binding fragments they're going to work on for their semester projects. Sometimes this job is pretty great.

This is not a "sports" bill. It's a first-step-in-legally-defining-trans-people-out-of-existence bill

Firaxis—the studio behind the Civilization series—is hiring a historian. An *actual* historian. And note, when they ask for "4+ years as a Writer, Narrative Designer, or other position with commensurate duties," that includes teaching, writing, and research—i.e. your Ph.D. in History.

why is that financial company spelled Schwab and not əb

Elon Musk is a good example of how terrible people become increasingly radicalized into the far right simply because the far right is a community that accepts cruel, terrible people. It's tempting to say Elon is going "mask off", but I'd wager Elon didn't know who Tommy Robinson was 5 years ago. 1/

Happy New Year from Dorothy Parker (and me).

Meanwhile, this alpaca has a real Día de los Muertos look going on

The blep! Cats are cats are always cats

Oh thank goodness, the city is taking responsibility for the sewage backup. I guess that's the silver lining to having liquid (euphemism) oozing up out of the access point in the front yard?

If you are cis ("not transgender") I need to explain this to you. Bluesky today posted this vague thread, announcing-without-spelling-out that they're allowing a writer, net troll and anti-trans activist named Jesse Singal to stay on the platform, despite every trans user saying it makes us unsafe.

This efficiency ghoul wants to raise our costs and worsen our health. This ain’t efficient for anyone.

Les Boeufs sur le Toit

This is my cue to tell the story of these two quarantine signs I saw at the El Dorado County History Museum. First of all, always go visit those small local museums. They hold odd treasures.

Pretty sure there's a squirrel running around inside the walls right now

This is the cutest dang thing in the world

Hey what the fuck??

That course at UCLA is run by a tenured, esteemed professor in my field of medieval studies, and it's the poster child for what pulling the ladder up behind one's self looks like.