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This reminds me of when I was a PhD candidate during comps (prelims). I was surprised that *I* had to put together all 3 of my reading lists instead of my committee. But then I realized that the act of compiling was an important learning experience.

TIL (a) Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana, married into the family of Frank Lloyd Wright (b)because FLW's 3rd wife believed she was a spiritual conduit to her dead daughter (also Svetlana)(c) both Svetlanas married the same man, FLW's wife's daughter's husband (d) FLW had a communal,"cult-y" compound

brother ignatz the bittern about to be mercilessly thwacked for his many crimes

Brother Ignatz you wretched beast, you rascal, you miserable scoundrel

one downside to marrying someone from a totally different climate: needing to be the expert on ice damming when, in fact, you yourself know next to nothing.

That ice is FLYING off of the roof right now, though.

A horse rider with spear and an incredibly badass conical goblin helmet

A woman in some kind of blank faced habit with the top of her head on fire, she looks like she’s manipulated genetic lines for 10,000 years to make sure you were born and you turned out to be a soft as shit dickhead

A load of couriers all wearing face mask sat around a yurt at the feet of a dude in a gold suit sat on a throne with his own face a pitiless void

A dude on a horse, the horse has fucking antlers and somehow that’s not the gnarliest thing here, again his helmeted head reveals a terrifying Stygian abyss where his face should be

Seen a couple of clips the past week from some 1995 Kyrgyzstan documentary The Universe of Manas and had to check out the whole thing. Just absolutely fucking unreal levels of drip here

youtu.be/jgJZCaOI5KE?...

Me when most cats yawn: that is a cat yawning, how cute

Me when the smaller of my two cats yawns: that is the spirit of death come to ferry me across that nameless, lonesome river

(It looks super freaky because of both colouration and how much she retracts her lips?)

Images were essential because of another important point. The ideas presented here only developed slowly, in combination with seeing the book in the flesh, then working with the digital images, making lists and diagrams, and assembling a paper model that, it is proposed, reiterated the structure and size of the original. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist famous for his explanations of creativity, has argued, creativity rarely relies on fast flashes of insight. This article and other installments of assumption-challenging research are the result of a slow burn, whose requirements include digital images, access to the originals, graphic tools to aid in visualization, plus time to think, often over years. Now that the solution to the manuscript's structure is on the table, it seems obvious. But it took about two years to develop. Part of those two years were taken up in just coming up with the right question to ask.

One of my favorite things about Kathryn Rudy's manuscripts scholarship is the candor with which she describes her method and her advocacy of the value of slow, intensive scholarship that combines access to digital materials with first-hand examination. Here she is on the Bolton/Blackburn Hours. +

A screenshot of the results page of a game. It reads "42.53/50. Genuinely unsettling accuracy. Please find a hobby. dialed.gg" There are 5 squares of colour: 3 greens of different shades, a yellow, and a plum purple.

"Turns out I’m bad at remembering colors. 42.5/50. Worse than you?" dialed.gg

New discovery: During excavations in Cologne, archaeologists have unearthed a lararium, a household shrine, dating back to the 2nd century. This discovery is considered unique north of the Alps. Similar examples were found in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...

🏺

OBELISK WITH PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTION, C4 BCE. THE BRITISH MUSEUM This refined and elegant epigraphy is Phoenician, a language spoken in the coastal cities of the Levant and in Carthage. The obelisk is a funerary stela found in a cemetery in Kition in Crete. It says "This pillar which Arish, chief of the brokers, erected to his father Parz, chief of the brokers, son of Menahem, chief of the brokers, son of Mashal, chief of the brokers, son of Parsi, chief of the brokers (or the brothers?), to his mother Shamzebaal of Azar, chief of the prefects (?) are their? resting place for ever." The Phoenicians were mad for commerce and the title "chief of the brokers" meant something like "head commercial agent". This script, in which letters represent separate vowels and consonants, and not ideograms or syllables, was functional and adaptable: our own alphabet derives from it.

#EpigraphyTuesday offers us this beautiful obelisk in the #BritishMuseum with an #inscription in #Phoenician from the C4 BCE. Our own script derives from these letters, passing first through archaic Greek and Latin. When this was carved, those alphabets had already split off. #AncientBluesky 🏺

sasquatch sits amongst some grass, with it's hand calmly on fire, caption reads: 'my headline act at the festival of grass was met with unprecedented heckling

Sasquatch Diaries Feb 8th
sasquatchdiaries.neocities.org

‘Tödlein’, Death as an archer.
Made from pear wood.
Dated to before 1519; artist: Hans Leinberger
www.khm.at/kunstwerke/t...

A series of worn inscriptions carved into the facade of a house on New Street, Scalloway. The inscription reads: 'This diagram illustrates the cause of the so called Earth Tides. Also each alternate Ocean Flood, the cause of which has never yet been understood. [Text below ridge mostly illegible] [Lower stone:] The water flows back when att[ractio]n over & forms a heap on opposite side of E[arth] to balance att[ractio]n flood. There is no [... illegible].

White stone inset in a facade of a house in Scalloway, reading 'Section at Equator of Earth. German theories controverted. Germans Are Not The Favoured of Heaven.'

Trouble with Reviewer 2? Why not carve your alternative theory into the side of your house instead?

(seen on a facade on New Street, Scalloway, Shetland)

Macbeth: SHIT

A Mandaic curse bowl in the Royal Ontario Museum. It has a spiraling Mandaic text that leads to an encircled x at the center.

This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.

nothing about Teams infuriates me as much as its batty handling of trying to scroll up through a chat to find a message. Would you like the scroll bar to randomly bounce around? Is that to your taste?

njs.libraries.rutgers.edu NJS: An Interdisciplinary Journal Summer 2025 The New Jersey Miscount: The 1860 Census and the Accidental Humanization of Enslaved Individuals By Luke Voyles DOI: 10.14713/njs.v1112.362 Abstract: The 1860 census is the only example in U.S. history when the U.S. government systematically recorded the names and ages of enslaved individuals of a state. Because government officials underestimated the number of enslaved people in New Jersey, there was no slave schedule in the state. Therefore, the names of enslaved individuals appeared within the households of their enslavers in the regular 1860 census. The official census statistics only listed 18 individuals as enslaved in 1860, but a close examination of every 1860 census page for New Jersey uncovers 64 names tied to slavery. This essay explores the context behind the census, and how the census accidentally humanized people whom it often marginalized.

Some years ago, I was chatting with a Retropolis reader, a young history student, and I mentioned there were several dozen people enslaved in New Jersey up until the day the 13th Amendment kicked in in December 1865.

Y’all. He identified every one of them.
njs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/nj...

Google with AI buttons

Google without AI buttons

I made a filterlist for uBlock Origin to remove Generative AI features on websites. Includes blocks for
* Google AI Summaries
* YouTube Ask button & chat summaries
* GitHub Copilot
* Facebook AI chat
* X's Grok buttons
* Deviantart DreamUp
* Booru AI images
* And more

github.com/Stevoisiak/S...

Paper aquatic plant replicas

New work- aquatic plants- mostly invasive. These are paper sculptures.

Polaroids of Catherine O'Hara in various costumes

Polaroids of Catherine O'Hara in various costumes

Catherine O’Hara wardrobe polaroids from Second City, 1983. RIP an absolute legend & icon💔

I love a good bug story, and "to solve the bug we have contracted assassins" is extremely funny

Very smooth rocks

387 tiny paper buildings, made in the 1950s / 60's by Austrian insurance clerk Peter Fritz.
socks-studio.com/2013/12/06/t...

They were stored in a plastic bag, before ending up in a junk shop where Oliver Croy found them in the early 2010s.

Worn papyrus with drawings of figures, symbols, and writing in Coptic. More here https://smarthistory.org/coptic-magical-text/

Coptic spell to Acquire a Beautiful Voice, 6th–7th century CE, Egypt, ink on papyrus, 37.3 x 25.4 cm (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven)
archives.yale.edu/repositories...

a bowl with a face and eyes raised upwards

incredible artifacts at the museo larco in lima

"In this whimsical maiolica sculpture, a well-dressed man leans forward in his seat with his head in a covered pot set above a fiery hearth. The vessel beside the hearth almost certainly held ink. The man’s actions are explained by an inscription on the chair: "I distill my brain and am totally happy." Thus the task of the writer is equated with distillation—the process through which a liquid is purified by heating and cooling, extracting its essence." https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/188899

Detail of inkstand showing damaged inscription

Side view of inkwell

Tips on coping from the Renaissance

Inkstand with a Man Distilling his Brains, maiolica, probably Urbino, ca. 1600. Inscribed in black on back of chair: “[…] CERV[...] IOTUTO LIETO” (Mi lambico il] cerv[ello] io tutto lieto; I distill my brain and am totally happy) (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

A screenshot of WhatsApp: Ash: Sebastián, I have one very pressing question. Sebastián Di Martino: Let me know Ash: Are jaguar soft? Sebastián Di Martino: They are very soft (two hearts on the answer)

Being a journalist is sick: I just contacted a pre-eminent jaguar conservationist in Argentine with a question that has been weighing on me for ages and he wrote back right away with an informed answer.

A detail from a Roman mosaic showing a boar in profile with his head to the right, emerging from reeds. The boar is realistically drawn in detail, with his short tail, ridge fur and tusk shown. Below his feet are shadows to indicate that he is moving.

A certain Iron Age boar has been attracting attention recently, so for this #MosaicMonday here's a perky Roman boar. He's from the wonderful Triumph of Neptune and the Seasons mosaic from La Chebba, now in the Bardo in Tunis, and he represents Winter.
#AncientBlueSky 🏺

Among my least favourite tech things to do:
-compare extremely similar pieces of hardware

-anything to do with networking

We probably need a new router (and possibly modem), which combines those two things in the worst way possible.

I just had my first case of capsaicin burn from handling a hot pepper, and this was remarkably effective?

Rub vegetable oil on hands

Put on latex/nitrile/etc gloves

Pour another glug of oil down the glove

Rub burning areas for 10 minutes

Remove glove, pour rubbing alcohol

Wash hands

Repeat