Emily Horner

Runner up: "You looked at kayaks on our site, so here's an ad with uncomfortably vivid video of fishing."

The thing I hate most about targeted advertising is when I go to a clothing web site, find out they don't make my size, and they decide that because I visited their site once I should see their ads for the next six months.

Between the psychic damage from micro dosing Fox News and how difficult it is to get a Smith machine, I might need a new gym

Having studied linguistics means that I am still allowed to have a reasonable amount of language peeves but I have to preface them with "not a prescriptivist, but..."

Not a prescriptivist, but whenever a gen Z person pronounces "zine" as if it rhymes with "mine," I wish I didn't have that knowledge. (The last time this happened I did try to correct the person, more fool me, but she did not believe me that it was pronounced like in "magazine"!)

The orange daylilies are already starting to come up! I am going to have so much work to do to combat invasive species this spring.

In my heart of hearts, I hope that Hildy doesn't realize I'm a vegetarian, and thinks that I save all the good food for her. (Unless it's ice cream, which she loves and is only allowed in microscopic quantities, or cheese puffs, which she licks the dust from.)

Taking a four-day weekend this weekend. I'm at the point where I feel overworked only in emotional terms, like every email and meeting is causing me psychic damage.

WTAF YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS

Two human-sized figures in colorful traditional Hinamatsuri doll wear--but they both have dinosaur heads and hands.

Hinamatsuri, brought to you by the Fukui Dinosaur Museum.

if the US government logs these trees at the rate / quantity they're proposing, we'll lose one of the last old-growth forests. there's no coming back from that. if you have five minutes to leave a comment pushing back against the BLM, please do; there's a guide to that below.

This is such a magnificent pun that I have to notify all of you that "getsuyoubi" - Monday - has been changed to "ketsuyoubi" - butt day - in much the same way that we get "Caturday" from "Saturday."

Thus, the butt of a shima enaga - the Hokkaido subspecies of the long-tailed tit.

Heroic Chicago trans comedian recalls saving infant from ice-cold Lake Michigan: ‘I guess I’m going in’ “The most important part of this entire story is that the baby is okay,” Lio Cundiff told The Advocate.

Hey, while you’re here, I wrote a follow-up piece after interviewing Lio, the trans dude who saved the infant in Chicago.

Meet the stand-up comedian who's embarrassed by all the media attention he's getting.

www.advocate.com/news/people/...

Property taxes and medical debt. The joys of middle age.

That time of year when I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get a COL raise that covers how much my property taxes went up

Hard to know because the person asking me just typed the citation into chat and didn't answer any further questions!

I think I may have just received my first "please help me find this article which doesn't exist, it's a citation made up by an LLM."

I did not understand, when I took a job at the university with the Tolkien archives, how often discussions among geeks would turn to finer points of Silmarilion lore.

Photo of hand embroidered patches, barrettes, and buttons featuring lyrics from the Mountain Goats.

I made hand embroidered wearables featuring lyrics from the Mountain Goats. Now they’re up for auction on eBay, with all proceeds benefiting the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights! You have 7 days left to get in on this action. ebay.us/m/ww1gyt

@themountaingoats.bsky.social

At least I got some much-needed excitement from my cat's infernal insistence on sniffing the neighbor's yard.

Don't think vitamin D will help my end-of-February mood, but self-experimentation beats defeatism, I guess

Born #onthisday in 1868, the US sociologist + civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Celebrate with a look at the stunning hand-drawn "infographics" he made with his students, depicting conditions of African-American life in 1900: publicdomainreview.org/collection/w... #otd #BlackHistoryMonth

To care about being not just accessible but also precise, nuanced, careful, and still have that element of personality and voice and intimacy in your writing - it's rare, and it's DIFFICULT, but I think it's also what we desperately need in academia. No matter what the field is.

Some people sing the virtues of LLMs for making academic prose more accessible, and yeah, maybe, but it tends to flatten arguments and erase nuances - and that's the virtue of a human writer (though I will grant that it sometimes seems hard to find academic writers who care about writing well!)

Writing with style means writing papers that students can read, and can enjoy reading.
(Which is not to denigrate writing that's dense and heavy because it needs to be.)

And those papers were often also the papers that read most smoothly - the ones that were not so dense that I had to struggle through every paragraph.

At least, this was my experience as a student. The scholarship that I could most easily persuade myself to read and engage with was the scholarship that seemed to have a real person behind it. Papers whose style had an element of passion, care, thoughtfulness, urgency, or even playfulness.

(This is not the author's viewpoint and I don't want it to look like I'm quoting him just to dunk on him)
What occurred to me, reading this, is that in a moment when (I hear) it's really difficult to get undergrads to read anything, personality makes theory more accessible.

The USB cable in my car is on the fritz, so sometimes the radio interrupts my podcast.
It is very funny when a disco beat interrupts
"The normative anomie of modern capitalism--"

Can I read 170 pages of this very long and not particularly enjoyable book in time for book club tomorrow? I mean, I CAN, but at what cost?