A new blog post is up on the Innkeep site! A very interesting interview with our narrative consultant and song writer @jubalbarca.bsky.social about medieval history and medievalism in games.
innkeepgame.com/getting-medi...
#devlog #innkeep
just the sweetest little pangolin you ever saw
fun fact: no pangolin has ever done a single thing wrong in the entire history of the world
Disgusting reporting by BBC using a tiny number of cases to suggest widespread abuse of a system which routinely denies LGBTQIA+ individuals asylum and forces them back into environments of persecution. This article massively distorts the reality of the situation. 1/
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
• Delivering single-sex spaces on the basis of biological sex, in NHS wards, schools, sport and everyday life by upholding the Equality Act and delivering clear instructions to public services on how to comply with their legal obligations to women and to trans people. • Keeping women's prisons for women, instructing the Scottish Prison Service to remove all biologically male prisoners from women's prisons within days of the election. • Recommit the NHS to delivering single sex wards on the basis of biological sex, and ensuring patients can request same sex provision wherever possible.
Scottish Labour manifesto is out, don’t vote for them
The schlossberg clock tower, Graz, surrounded by garden and against a blue sky.
Not sure if I shared this yet: some recent writing with reflections on a trip to #Graz last November, entitled 'The Ways a Hearthfire Burns' and looking at the feel of the city today and the tensions with its past:
exilian.co.uk/forum/index....
#Travel #WritingCommunity #Travelogues #Austria
This is a terribly sad read. And quite relatable, the problems of "who is this communication really for" and "how do we communicate anyway" and "what are we actually being paid to do versus what we or society think we're being paid to do" all feel like significant issues in academia too.
Re-post by Averil Cameron on Bluesky
This was the Averil Cameron I knew, telling it like it is, here on social media. She was one of the least pretentious and straightforward academics I knew, which is also how she wrote, making her work easily engaging as well as fascinating
I did a thing and you can listen to it here! Also do listen to the other videos in the thread of people with much more experience talking much more succinctly :)
Thoughts always welcome if you have any on the talk!
LLMs are not my favourite things given their awful effects on public understandings of history, but in a world where people are claiming they can do anything it's becoming important to test those claims. So I've been working on this small project on structured data production as part of RELEVEN:
Of course.
Peasants in an early modern Armenian manuscript illustration. There are three of them, in pointed hats of yellowy, orange, and green, wearing knee-lenth cloth tunics with different patterns. They are drawn in a slightly stylised way, and they are cutting some sort of vine around which they are all arrayed and which fills the space between them, using curved blades.
A blog post for the Medieval Caucasus Network on our recent conference on studying non-elites in medieval Caucasia. It was a fascinating two days - hopefully this gives a flavour of some of those discussions:
medievalcaucasus.org/2026/03/stud...
#medieval #caucasus #history #Georgia #Armenia
I read The Wolf and His King by @finnlongman.com. It's *really* good. The core writing quality itself has a beauty and intense physicality to it, and it manages to produce a distinctly medieval sense of miracle that's exceptionally hard to pull off.
More thoughts:
exilian.co.uk/forum/index....
Yes, nail on the head with the issue: it's a party leadership that's progressively insulated itself from the movement it's trying to lead, and often inspires only tired blank stares or at absolute best loyal nodding and the occasional polite clap from most of its own people.
This is an *incredibly* petty looking thing to be angry about. We're supposed to be a pro-environment, pro-nature party: as someone who is helping my LD local party trying to pull together Tory and Reform facing campaigns, undermining our pro-nature credentials with this silliness is not helpful.
Hedgehogs are woke now
Today's earworm:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Ha...
I had a chat to the Nerds Amalgamated podcast about games and history, not sure if I shed much light on anything but in case you'd like to have a listen:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OqA...
Snowdrops in the woods. They are white flowers that "nod" over, hanging down fom the top of the stem. Each has three small white petals centrally with green edging, and then three much large outer white petals. In the background leaf letter and dead twigs can be seen.
A vitally important report that I hope @victoria-collins.bsky.social and Anna Sabine read in particular - and many others. 👇
publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ld...
Well, I'm officially older.
Might post more thoughts later, but more importantly, as is tradition I'm going to have a little jitsi call for scattered friends to say hello this evening (ca 20:00 to 23:59 Central Europe time, maybe going a bit later). If you'd like the link do give me a shout. :)
Mm, yeah, a lot of the gameplay in PS:T is pretty average. Though I'll forgive it a lot given that the core writing quality is, I think, about the best of its era: I think of RPGs I've played from that kinda late 90s/turn of the millennium period it has the most memorable lines and plot points.
Another night falls, and a new year of existing begins. Off below ground into my burrow to rest, for now.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTqQ...
Government anti-immigration nonsense creating an animal welfare crisis now: modern sheep grow so much wool that they actively need shearing regularly to stay healthy, but the government's visa crackdown attempting to stop immigration has meant there's nobody available who's trained to do the job.
Oh christ on a bicycle. Yeah, that's miserable :(
(Otherwise, super busy but holding up alright - hope all's well with you too :) )
Well this is horrifying. I'm not sure what I can say usefully here beyond "well this is horrifying".
Why are we as a society spending so much of our resources on projects like "bad computer simulacrum purporting to be my recently deceased former academic supervisor"?
Sitting here and realising I might genuinely have spent more time on trying to apply for money for myself or other people to do research as I have on actually researching anything seriously over the past 12 months.
Why do we run systems like this? Is this really a good use of every academic's time?
As someone with semi-regular wrist ouches, very much empathy :(
Yeah, that's a very good point, agreed. I can do an online lecture if needs be, but it's SO much better when I can read the room I'm in properly.
We cannot be professionals in every media format, and I find video is particularly specialised because doing it well takes lighting, scripting, time-consuming editing, etc. Add that to algorithmic feeds that promote on an exponential curve and most content goes out to die or at best to roll a die.
Those really also only work if you audience-build very heavily or have cash for channel promotions, in my experience. There already are quite a few lectures by me on YouTube: I doubt they clear a hundred views between them, even the games & history stuff which is not lacking in wider audience.