Alex West

Thank you for the kind offer—I may well take you up on that.

My business here has concluded so I'm away.

I reckon this place is bad for the mind. I'm appalled enough by US foreign policy these days that I don't really care about awful things happening in the US; that's most of my TL. And I no longer have professional reasons for staying. So: bye! again!

Oh, don't worry - I'm much too busy at the moment. Planning an international move is always a pain in the arse. At the moment, the fewer emails that reach my inbox the better!

Jesus. I don't seem to have missed much in that case.

...is that to do with the man with the inadvisable tattoo(s)? Are people still talking about that or is there other Maine-related news?

I doubt anyone will need me for anything—thank god!—but I have received irate emails in the past from people accusing me of being hard to find. As if that couldn't possibly be by design.

Anyway, I hope you're all well. May all sentient beings be at peace.

I'm not going to come back to social media in general because life really is better without it. I prefer life as a hermit. But I'll leave this account open this time just in case anyone wants to contact me (go to my profile for links to my blogs—should be able to find my email address there).

Buddhist Sectarianism I stopped actively using most social networks this year out of frustration with America. I’m tired of hearing about Trump and the…

We're still moving to Ireland—flying there tomorrow, actually, to look at a house. Fingers crossed we've found the right place for us. I've been learning languages and reading and trying to avoid hearing the news. I've written a couple of things on the blog but that's all. medium.com/@WestsWorld/...

I signed in briefly to contact someone via DM so I thought I might as well say hi. I've been busy since the year began (and since the attack on Venezuela, when I left the site), but I doubt anything I've done has been of value to anyone else. So I don't have much to report.

I'll leave the account open this time so I can be tagged and messaged etc., but I won't be using the site. I've effectively left social media entirely—life does seem better without it.

haha, I left because I was tired of hearing so much about our unfortunate cousins across the Atlantic! My feed was (and is) 99% America-focused. It's very wearing and I have very little interest in it. I've only signed in now to send a DM to someone I have no other contact info for.

Anyway, I'll be off shortly. There's no point in trying to keep up with the madness at the moment anyway.

Tbh, I don't think Americans know how to respond to blanket criticism of their country. I've seen a lot of people on here saying "we're not all like that!" and "we're against Trump/the war too!"

That's fine. I know. I know a lot of gentle, kind, smart, wonderful Russian people as well.

Not sure—maybe. I might as well take advantage of this to cut down on social media use for a while.

Don't know. But I'm not buying anything new at the moment and don't have any active subscriptions (to e.g. Microsoft Office). Will need time to think of alternatives for a few things when it's time to renew them.

I reckon I'm going to be boycotting the USA this year.

That should be fairly easy, given that there are very few US products in shops over here. It will mean deactivating my Bluesky account though. #USABoycott

Not good enough!

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

Boycotting the World Cup seems like a great idea to me. I get to join the boycott without changing my behaviour at all.

don’t do the “maduro is bad, but…” thing. the defensive crouch won’t help, it muddles the message, and the important thing is that this is immoral, illegal, and idiotic. the three Is

we have not "apprehended" the president of venezuela. we have invaded a foreign country and kidnapped its leader. what the fuck are we doing here, i am going to lose my mind

I've found that the best way to learn a script/hand you don't know is to start writing in it. Get the flow between the letters and it all clicks into place

Secretary hand - Wikipedia

I took some notes in something similar as an experiment (an early 16thC Portuguese hand) but no, I use a form of English secretary hand, which is a little less intense: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secreta...

Some of the Javanese and Sundanese stuff I've worked on has barely been studied at all. There was one article on the mirror-handle script (from the 1940s, a couple of pages long) when I was writing about it.

Yeah - if the hand's consistent and has been studied in depth in the past, text in it should be tractable. Latin palaeography is technically complex but there are plenty of resources. Makes all the difference.

You're welcome

American cursive discourse is pretty strange. Another minor aspect of life needlessly turned into a culture war battlefield

I think children should be taught joined-up handwriting (as we called it when I was learning to read and write in England) because it teaches you that writing with a pen or pencil can be fun in its own right. I don't think people need to be able to read a specific sort of modern Anglophone cursive.

Anyway, palaeography's good fun, no matter which language or script you're dealing with. Trying hard to read difficult text is the fun bit. There aren't very many scholarly activities I find as rewarding as reading and analysing scripts.