My theory is imposter Simba. The official story is that Simba miraculously escaped the stampede, went into voluntary exile and returned years later to claim the throne from his usurper uncle. How convenient for the new Lion regime! The truth is that Simba died in the stampede with Mufasa

sorry this is so stupid

BROKE: Catalan is closer to French than Spanish WOKE: Catalan and Occitan are closer to each other than Langues d'oil and Castilian BESPOKE: The Albigensian Crusade was a plot by the Pope and Paris to conquer Languedoc and prevent the rise of big Romance nation in North-East Iberia and South Gallia

I suppose if I had to advance my own view, it is that The Dawn of Everything flatters the preconceptions of the academic and chattering classes, so invariably gets termed 'insightful' and 'interesting' moments before experts explain that it does, however, get *their* field catastrophically wrong.

Mentre l’estate finisce e capiamo che non realizzeremo mai l’ambiziosa lista di cose da fare che ci eravamo promessi, è tempo di pensare ai grandiosi progetti da iniziare al ritorno al lavoro

if you want to get a sense of just how crazy poor WW2 Italy was, I strongly recommend Norman Lewis' incredible book NAPLES '44. By 1971 that same country had become the world's dominant producer of white goods. (Judt's POSTWAR is also very good on this)

AI made Google shittier. Once the AI is convinced that you want to look for a specific thing, because it misunderstand the term you are actually looking for, it will only present links to that thing. It's like dealing with an arrogant stupid person who is convinced they are right

Setbacks are not definitive, you can always find a way out! Unfortunately the way out is always “do more work yourself”

Summertime! Time for research... right?

Vive la France! We might mock their obsession with grandeur, but they are the only nuclear power democratic Europe can rely on! www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOeF...

To bring this monomaniac energy to my grind, I’m sticking this on top of my to-do list

We really should have already come to an agreement on how to cite eBooks without fixed page numbers

Something that A New Hope communicates well is that the precarious equilibrium is finally crumbling. A senate ship is being attacked directly, the senate is abolished, planeticide is on the table, the Rebel Alliance moves. You go from Vichy collaborationism and quietism to SS combing the village

Intervista a mio padre sui suoi successi in astrofisica www.lastampa.it/tuttoscienze...

thank you to ettore to introducing me to truly insane new type of guy

"Dear professor, does the character limit include spaces or....." IT INCLUDES SPACES! IT ALWAYS INCLUDES SPACES! IF YOU EVER HAPPEN TO HAVE RULES WHERE SPACES DON'T COUNT, THEY WILL TELL YOU BECAUSE IT ALMOST NEVER HAPPENS!!!

I think one important role of pop science is legitimising public funding for research, countering “why should we spend all this money on the James Webb Telescope instead of potholes?!?!”

anti-bedtime left is a reactionary force: there's a reason socialist movements emphasized public education and dedication to craft.

My undergrad thesis supervisor liked to complain that no-one reads 'real history' any more (he was talking about massive doorstopper tomes on social history) At the same time, he acknowledged that without those thin journalistic volumes and documentaries, history would be a much smaller discipline

Historians about history popularisers. Among ourselves we complain that often they give the wrong picture and provide no more information than reading Wikipedia, but we recognise they legitimise the profession and offer a gateway that is at least better than journalists and ideologues

Every scholar who is writing or organising something goes through different stages of despair before finally landing on Arrakis's attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'

Unintentionally, the greatest advert for a cinema I’ve ever seen

Do you think students using LLMs as sources is a worse media literacy problem than e.g. TikTok? No doubt there's some compounding going on. But, I guess my reaction when people think LLMs will be a truth apocalypse is to say the apocalypse already happened. Can't damage a moonscape with more nukes.

I came specifically from Rome to watch this show @khanandsalinsky.bsky.social ! After all, I wrote the book on young Denis Healey!

I used to think that 'medieval peasants had it better than US office workers' was the ultimate in online self-pity and historical ignorance but 'video games were cheaper in the 1990s and life as a gamer was better' might have it beaten just because some of these dumb fucks were actually alive then.

I useful reminder, when folks insist without any evidence that the 'neo-liberal' world order has obviously failed or whatever, that this is the global poverty trend graph since 1820: I suppose you can argue these trends are *unrelated* but it's hard to argue liberalism ruined everything.

as @ettorrecos.bsky.social pointed out, the death star has to have an exhaust port of some kind and the imperials are well aware that it's a weakness -- it's well defended and the attack only works bc luke is force sensitive, something nobody could've predicted

also worth noting that the original scene that lays out the exhaust port weakness isn't like "oh ho, we've found the sabotage that's been left open for us!" but "we've done our analysis and this is the best we've got" and everyone but luke is like "no way that works" www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOgt...

Of course, they’re so calculating

Frustrating when I talk about lost productivity from depression and somebody says it’s a metric capitalism uses to keep us down. What if there are things I am good at and it is frustrating not being able to do them or things I want to be good at I can’t practice or want to give back to society?

Of course the Empire has access to fast information, like the postal system of the Mongol Empire. The Khan can send a messenger from Kyiv to Korea, but most people in Europe have only the vague witnesses of merchants like Marco Polo. This allows to create legends like Prester John

Star Wars only work if the technology is futuristic, except for communication, which is medieval. No broadcasting, messages need a messenger. No mass reproduction of cultural productions, oral culture is still the rule. The only way to have planets cut off by big events on Coruscant

(A hypothesis: the migration from “My country’s Social Democratic Party is not sufficiently pro-working class” to “and that’s why I’m now supporting the Radical Right” is more common among elites than among members of the public.)

Bullshit Jobs is truly one of the worst books ever written, not just for the abominable influence it’s had on the world (the worst since The Population Bomb in this respect) but because of how incredibly poorly written it is

Now that we have come back to Leo, it’s clear Pius XII ruined the name “Pius” for everyone

“The pope will be from Chicago” sounds like an 1880s Republican’s dire prediction for if we don’t stop Irish immigration

also you all need to see this, because this is something I don't think *anybody* could predict for where this ad goes

La situazione è complessa, ma può essere spiegata bene da una barzelletta inventata sotto il comunismo: “Perché i cechi amano i sovietici e odiano gli americani?” “Perché i sovietici li hanno liberati dai tedeschi, ma gli americani non li hanno liberati dai sovietici”

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using GIFs. (“Hard mode”: no Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR or Disney)

What if AGI already exists, it has achieved super-intelligence, but instead of destroying humanity, it has decided to act like a dad or an uncle and troll us by giving intentionally obtuse answers to our questions?

I hope I didn't screw it up, but it's the best I could do without Q's input...

Roma ha due squadre di calcio dal 1927, che hanno vinto 5 scudetti in totale. Dal 1927 sono morti 8 papi: Pio XI, Pio XII, Giovanni XXIII, Paolo VI, G. P. I e II, Benedetto XVI e Francesco. Quindi i cittadini di Roma vincono uno scudetto *meno spesso* che ad ogni morte di Papa!

the thing about M-L is that people raised in it from birth and groomed to implement it as a ruling ideology, in charge of the second most powerful country ever to have existed, abandoned it without objection and without complaint, en masse, without being conquered