The winter Olympics are starting, so I apologies ahead of time for how much I may tweet about ice hockey (and maybe other sports) for the next two weeks.

I still get these comments at least once a week without fail and they always make me laugh. Never in my life have I cared what year notation people use, so I always find it funny when people care so much that they feel the need to tell me they stopped watching because of it.

I had to go to the White House website to read the 'RESTORING TRUTH & SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY' for my public history research & that entire website is just sooooo 'we are an evil dictatorship' coated. All it needs is a renaming to something like 'Free Democratic National People's White House'.

I pointed out (elsewhere) that the Vice President was lying when he said in a speech that archaeologists used mass infant remains to identify ancient brothels (they don't) so now I have right-wing chuds emailing my university email to 'gotcha' me about the sites I mentioned by name already.

The Little Free Library on my street was absolutely full of books in early January and I am convinced this was because of all the books people received for Christmas that they did not want. After all, that was the reason why I was there. Getting rid of 'Spare' which I couldn't care less about.

To the average Roman Empire truther, remember that most of its inhabitants lived in villages or farms, many regularly on the verge of starvation, the Roman Army was not nicer than the „barbarians“ if they visited your neighborhood and those great sanitary amenities were full of lead and bacteria.

Being deep in writing my PhD, one thing I miss is researching into random historical topics. It's all just public & digital history with no time to read about Aztec sacrifices or sexuality in Rome. I don't know how I feel about this academic idea of only doing and specialising in one or two things.

Managed to again do some skating on the Fens this year.

Also, imperialism has never benefited you and never will. 'Uncommon Wealth, Britain and the Aftermath of Empire' is a great book showcasing how the British Empire has only benefited the powerful and the wealthy. Unless you're a rich upper class person, you will not see the benefits of imperialism.

I assume what we'll actually see is that elite institutions will attempt to reduce class sizes by increasing the number of adjuncts (to keep teaching loads of the tenure-line steady, but not hire more), while non-elite institutions will embrace jumbo-slop-classes.

I just got a US Visa email about having to update my paperwork. What paperwork? The last time I was there was 2 years ago. Is American visa now something you just need to constantly update like bank account information? I presume nothing will happen if I just ignore it but gods is this stupid.

One thing that interviewing experts has taught me is that most people don't think too deeply about the work they do. Like a lot of people are good at stuff without being able to properly explain why. They can tell you the strategies they employ but those are not explanations of why they employ them.

I’m already seeing faked images of Maduro’s capture mixed in with real ones, so just a reminder to be careful when looking at image and video feeds today.

Cough cough ...

So like…now what? Is there a plan here exactly for what happens when you decapitate a government overnight? Or is this just the “Jesus take the wheel” school of military planning?

Trying to remake a countrie's state apparatus by force, for it to be more like you want it to be, is a very complicated money & time consuming thing which is why most countries just put "their own people" in charge instead of fundamentally changing anything. Remember that with Venezuela.

People who complain about paper straws or plastic bottlecaps being attached are the same kind of people who complain about kids today being too privileged. Surely since you walked to school up hill both ways back in the day you can suck it up and deal with the little inconvenience of a paper straw.

Real Life Lore video scripts, including the ones that are like older than modern LLMs, feel like they are AI generated.

I posted on Patreon and YouTube Community an end of 2025 update about me and the channel. tldr is I am not going anywhere but the video drought from me will continue for at least one more year. www.patreon.com/posts/end-of...

Just saw the Odyssey trailer and it is horrible but they are all dressed like in what I imagine Roman carnival costumes of Homer would have been, and I cannot stop thinking that Vergil would have absolutely*loved* it.

Matt Walsh is not an expert at American history, and he is certainly not an expert at teaching American history. If you want to actually learn history, read books and listen to actual historians, not political reactionaries trying to spin narratives to promote their ideologies.

Medieval history be like: A knight had multiple arrows in him but kept fighting. Eventually he won but not before he lost an arm & severely damaged his leg. He survived & retired to a monastery for the rest of his life. His brother, in the same year, got a paper cut which got infected & he died.

I'm honestly so proud of my friends and our community, thank you so much to everyone who supported the Jingle Jam. We contributed an insane £138,000 for The Trevor Project to this!

I put together a blogpost reflecing a bit further on this point. I think that traditional practices are very important markers for understanding both the reality & the nature of climate change: my-albion.blogspot.com/2025/12/beer....

A climate historical addendum to my recent posts on brewing. This year my father starting boiling the water one day early so it had time to cool down before adding the yeast. Traditionally, we would have cooled it down by placing it in the snow, but, as he said, "now we don't have snow anymore".

Get ready to lock in for 36 straight hours of speedrunning: ESA Speedrunning are live now with a mega Jingle Jam marathon, making wishes come true for @makeawishintl.bsky.social! Tune in to /ESAMarathon and donate! Can we speedrun our way to our Jingle Jam 2025 fundraising goals!?

“A prediction market for short-form content” America really speed ran a national gambling addiction.

OK. Hear me out. Social media platform where there is no algorithm. Whether you find something you want to see is purely dependent on your search queries, content tags given by the creator, and pure chance.

Expedition 33 is good but it's not THAT good. Officially over rated if you ask me.

Today's wikipedia sidetracking or, probably more accurately, procrastination was spend reading about the greco-roman temples of mount Hermon.

The internet is a place where you can literally announce that you cured cancer and there will be some people complaining about it.

I am so furious at YouTube for doing this. You have literal gambling ads plastered across your website. The video you take action on contains no real gambling, and is promoting an LGBTQ+ children's charity fundraiser. Absolutely horrendous image and optics for the website. Completely moronic

It's officially £2,000,000 raised for charity! Thank you SO MUCH! We hope you've been loving our festive fundraiser - shout out your favourite Jingle Jam streams so far below so we can give them some love!

How many concussions in your life is too many? (asking for a friend)

Having seen the abysmal essay and good feedback, anyone defending firing the GA over this is a blatant bigot. Not only is there open transphobia, but TPUSA has proven that their ideology cannot withstand a modicum of scholarly scrutiny. Reactionaries cannot "debate." They're ignoramuses

The Internet, 2025: Rage bait all around with very few nuanced takes.

Although this is very obvious I still need to say that learning historical knowledge is easier than producing new historical knowledge.

I suspect this is true - the humanities will go back to being a status marker. Rich kids and the elect get to study Homer, but the middle class must settle for adjunct-taught mega-lectures before STEM classes. A grim destination, but right now that is the road the voters keep choosing.

When it comes to modern Eastern European geopolitics security guarantees have proven to be complelty meaningless.

I'm not joking

I attended an interesting seminar which argued that early medieval rulers did not care for enforcing Christian doctrine unless it served a political purpose. Even Justinian, a Roman emperor touted to be very religious, did on multiple occasions not bother converting heretics.

The largest video creators in most genres are the biggest grifters. It makes sense. They are the largest because they prioritise views/subscription, i.e. profits, over everything else, but in the process they lose (if they had any to begin with) a sense of morality & creative integrity.

On TikTok and Instagram you consume history because of the individual. Their comedy, personality, presentation, way of explaining. On YouTube people are more likely to consume history for the historical information. You don't search for history topics on TikTok or Instagram but on YouTube some do.

I love keeping my viewers on their toes. Is my next video going to be about the history of Slavs, Aztecs, Greeks, Sex, Sports? Who knows😄 Anything can happen ...

Austrians continue to rank as having one of the highest English proficiencies from non native English speaking countries, and as someone who goes to Austria often I refuse to believe who ever does this survey has ever left Vienna.

Reeves inherited a financial shitshow from the past Conservative goverment. Don't get me wrong, I think she has made some bad political decisions but what she's getting a lot of hate for in the media is mostly about stuff that isn't even her fault. Hate on the actual people responsible!

Being a public historian means that you get a lot of weird emails. I have had emails from the Archdiocese of Toronto asking me questions about Good King Wenceslas, multiple neo-pagan Slavic movements wanting my opinion, Balkan filmmakers wanting help with a historical fiction movie ...

Using Chatgpt to write something for you with citations is terrible. It makes up sources (especially ancient or medieval ones) and is over all just lost. However, asking it to simply just recommend you books on a specific topic which you can then read and cite yourself works very well.

I wrote this long post about people caring too much about who their ancestors were. But it became too personal so I deleted it. The moral of the story is that you are you, & your ancestors (both close & distant) shouldn't define who YOU are & people who define you based on your ancestors are idiots.

I was in the book store. Kid runs pasts me to the kids' book section yelling "Yaaaayyy books!" Then proceeds to open a book and says "Wait I have to read?" 🤣 (The kid looked quite young so I think he was expecting like a picture book but in the moment it sounded so funny)