Can I interest you in a Viking resurrection egg in these trying times?

He writes 8 solid hours a day five days a week and has a staff of 35. Someone cleans his house, makes his meals, handles his admin, and does his laundry. One cannot compare oneself to Sanderson levels of output 😆

Remarking on a part of today’s discourse… the “AI” slop thieves stole and scraped over fifty (50!) of my novels and gods know how many years’ worth of my blog to “train” their plagiarism machine.

So my writing may be labeled as “made by ‘AI’” due to the sheer scale of the theft. This infuriates me.

It lasted 12 hours before I was gently reminded of two outstanding tasks 😞

Since June 2024 I've written a book, a PhD, given dozens of papers especially in the Jane Austen 250 year, am the consulting editor on a major new trade fashion book, and have been chasing my tail & falling behind the whole time - all on top of my demanding academic day job.

Right now: peace 🙂‍↕️

Hoop Skirt Zone Ahead

As of this moment I have no (none, zero, nada, 0) personal academic work due. This hasn't happened for ohhhhhh, a minimum of 18 months, maybe two years? There's things coming up but not for a bit.

I genuinely don't quite even know how to feel this feeling.

I'm listening to the sound of silence.

Treasury calls in Blair thinktank to advise on using Al across public services

When you want to give fascist zillionaires a squillion pounds for dreck, but you aren’t sure how to go about doing it

As someone who works on Austen, I'm begging people to stop adapting Austen.

Glad someone else thought this too. This is pretty much the green dress from the 2005 P&P, plus all its hand / nature / morning tropes.

New forecast from EPRI: data centers will consume 9% to 17% of U.S. electricity by 2030, up from 4% to 5% today. This is a 60% increase from last year's projection. Under existing policies, "incremental [power] supply is dominated by natural gas." powering-intelligence.epri.com

The long 2010s are finally over

The point is that Academia has been around for years, long before AI, and has retroactively applied this, without much notice, to everything already there.

I used a handwritten exam the other day as evidence of why the student handed in an AI essay, as I had their unmediated expressions to compare

The nicest thing about a snow day, and working while the college is officially closed, is that it's a snowbody bothering me day and I get more done.

Just delete them from the site

I can send you the link for their terms of service, because historian.

a friend of mine posted this to me on facebook, god bless her...

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

Cover of "Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age" by Ada Palmer, which is bright orange with white text, and has a greyscale image of the statue of Perseus holding Medusa's head aloft, his sword passing through the letters of the word "the"

So lemme tell you about @adapalmer.bsky.social's Inventing the Renaissance, which came out last year and absolutely blew me away.

I'd replace half the 1st-year curriculum with this book.

Reading it made me a better historian, and also the kind of person who underlines books.

Plus, it's hilarious.

it's weird to see people complain about Bad Bunny's performance being in Spanish when there have been entire operas in Italian, German and French performed in the US and the top song of the last two years, K-Pop Demon Hunters' "Golden" has lyrics in Korean

Did you see this? I chose the decade of my late teens / early 20s too!

Holy shit. This is extremely relevant -- like, it's eerie how relevant -- to a story called "Lily the Immortal" by Kyile Lee Baker, that I narrated for It's Storytime last week.

Heathcliff is only written as 'dark'. In Bronte's day, that could have applied to Roma, black Irish, Welsh, Mediterranean, north African, western Asian, Indian, Black, and many more.

Jacob Elordi is half Basque, a Spanish ethnic minority that would have been called 'dark' in Yorkshire.

Judging by the sound from the dudes in the apartment next door, something significant just happened in the Super Bowl

A black and white illustration of a woman wearing mourning including a cloche hat and veil, a high-necked dress with a hobble skirt and carrying a muff.

#TheVictorianBookoftheDead 1911 Mourning ensemble with hat and veil and muff.
“The Grace that Lacks any Harshness of Line Makes Mourning Distinctive.”

Would wear

Look at Norma Shearer in this get up. An absolute scorching knock out. From The Sketch, 1925.

GIVEAWAY! To celebrate Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore show from Dior's AW26 collection, we are giving away a copy of Paul Poiret: Inventing Modern Luxury by Mary E. Davis. To be in with a chance, like and share this post by midnight 31 January 2026. Winners will be DM'ed from this account only.