Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.

Happy 75th birthday to History Today! I'm very happy to have written for it in 2016 about the history of English spelling reform, and why it's always doomed to fail www.historytoday.com/brief-histor...

I’ve mostly given up making New Year’s resolutions for myself, but damn it if my cat isn’t going to accomplish his goals in 2026!

"Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both." Reading "Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin and heard this line echoing down the decades

I was always a fan of his work. Somehow he was an inspiration for the main character in the Dan Brown novels (The Da Vinci Code, etc.), and while I'm not a fan of those books, how amazing for a typographer and graphic artist to be cool enough to inspire works of international intrigue & conspiracy.

A list of animals who by @stancarey.bsky.social stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/a...

Not expecting anything to come of this email to Met Éireann, any more than a similar one I sent to Irish Rail over a year ago. But we live in hope. A reply from a human would be a start

A blast from the past. I wrote about this weird device back in 2010: stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/u...

Noticing a lot of discourse on the Twitter/X/Grok/AI nastiness & I just want to say: 🚨 Could people PLEASE stop referring to what’s being created as “child porn”? It’s CSA Material, whether it’s AI-generated or not. 🚨 Also: if you’re still posting etc. on that vile site, you’re endorsing the CSAM.

You either love false dichotomies or you don't.

We'd a secondary school reunion (25 years) and a chap returned a Beatles chord book he'd been loaned in 3rd year. Don't give up hope!

I see there’s a post about microplastics going around with a photo of drinking straws, so here is my semi-regular reminder that the 3 biggest sources of microplastics are tires (45%), synthetic clothing particles (35%) and paint (~10%). Lay article attached:

I lent someone a book 25 years ago and sometimes catch myself vaguely expecting to get it back one day

Remember, Beckett is for life, not just for Christmas

A bumper thread of words of the year from different dictionaries, organizations, and languages – everyone from Merriam-Webster to Potato News Today #WOTY2025

People at work love talking about 'tooling'. As far as I can tell it means 'tools' or 'software'. Can anyone who knows about tech and/or words explain what the parasitic 'ing' is bringing to the party?

Remember, Beckett is for life, not just for Christmas

seeking pointers to texts (academic or otherwise; primary or secondary; early modern or not) that discuss/theorize 'failure'? bonus points if it specifically addresses _textual_ 'failure'. here's an impression of fallen type for your troubles👇

Rachel Aviv's profile of Oliver Sacks is deeply sad but exceptionally good www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

This will be good.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Pure Good of Theory”

“I’ve made note of other examples of ‘animals who’ that I’ve read in books. This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity.”

Gonna straight-up steal this idiom from Dutch: "met lange tanden eten", literally "eating with long teeth"

Merriam-Webster Accused Of Bias After ‘Dictionary’ Named Word Of The Year

For fans of Iona and Peter Opie and, er, Christmas Batman, here's the crossover you never knew you needed

This petition to ban fox hunting on horseback with packs of dogs is almost at 30,000 signatures ahead of tomorrow's Dáil debate

"But hasn't the world always been going to hell in a handbasket? I asked her. Parts of the world, yes, but not the world entire, she said." —Jenny Offill, Weather

Thanks for putting this together (and for noticing in the first place)! Glad to see Sara Baume here, I explored the presence of animals in her novel A Line Made By Walking in this blog post (doesn’t explicitly reference pronouns but related ideas) deborahrosereeves.com/2019/06/27/b...

Sad. Many of its articles have seriously impacted me and my students, e.g.: specgram.com/CLIII.1/09.p...

"Fox hunting is a colonial bloodsport and it does not enjoy the support of the rural communities where it occurs." @saoirsemc.bsky.social on the facts behind the spin: www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm... Sign the petition: my.uplift.ie/petitions/pe... #SpeirGhorm #SpeirGorm

It seems like a small thing, but I tend to notice what pronouns people use when they refer to animals. Here's a new blog post about it: stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/a...

i semi-regularly think about this concept and way of describing it and crack up. absurd

This is why. I know I'm preaching to the choir. But this is why.

Rolling out the Matt Christman quote from after Charlottesville (2017) again:

Reposing with alt text: Bob Dylan meets the drum machine circa 1985 (via Campbell's recent memoir)

Greatly enjoyed this expansive criticism of conceptual problems in biology. Ball starts with some popular metaphors and models – DNA as blueprint, cell as factory, living systems as machines – and shows how these are all seriously misleading, and why it matters

What's it like inside your head?

Having become increasingly descriptivist in my old age, I applaud this wholeheartedly 🤓

Trans and nonbinary young people whose pronouns were respected had 31% lower odds of a past-year suicide attempt (n=12,174). New report from @trevorproject.bsky.social: www.thetrevorproject.org/research-bri...

BLOG POST: Another batch of spooky stories, mostly made for TV, that I think capture something of the vibe of the Lawrence Gordon Clark era of BBC ghost stories for Christmas. precastreinforced.co.uk/2025/12/11/a...

I’m flabbergasted that this has never existed before, though I probably shouldn't be. What a milestone!

I have heard the story of a ship coming into port with no living soul on board, but I did not know that Dracula had propped up a corpse at the wheel like it was steering. Very affecting scene and yet this is a very “everyone is twelve” prank for an ageless being to pull.

"First time reading Dracula and it's such a weird and amazing book" is one of my favourite internet microgenres. Thoroughly enjoying Kat's commentary

Couple of mini-reviews: Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019) letterboxd.com/stancarey/fi... and Nouvelle Vague (2025) letterboxd.com/stancarey/fi... #FilmSky

This has sold me on the value of singular “themself”, so much so that I’m wondering how we came to use “themselves” (singular) instead?

This remains the height of book promotion. And truly, it's looked like we've all been phoning it in since then.

Some excellent, chewy words here, including heteropessimism, necrosecurity, and thermochauvinism

On it. stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/t...

You are ABSOLUTELY NOT going to regret listening to this bird: