"You must and will suppose, fair or foul reader, that I suppose a heap of happenings I had no hand to hand nor eye to eye knowledge of or concerning."
Ph.D Classics. Reviews @ Reactor Magazine (ex. Tor.com) and Locus Magazine. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hawkwing_lb Wordpress: https://lizbourke.wordpress.com Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@hawkwing_lb
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"You must and will suppose, fair or foul reader, that I suppose a heap of happenings I had no hand to hand nor eye to eye knowledge of or concerning."
UK readers! THE OBSIDIAN TOWER Kindle edition is on sale this month for 99p! It's about a Warden with broken magic, her spooky castle, the awful night that changes her life, and the dashing international magic troubleshooting squad that saves it... www.amazon.co.uk/Obsidian-Tow...
They bombed without warning a non-threatening small boat, which is insane and a violation of international law even if it was carrying contraband which we have no way of knowing, and then gleefully shared it as a snuff video.
Gorgeous glass gaming pieces from the Late British Iron Age. This unique set of 24 coloured glass domes with a flattened base and spiral decoration may have been used for a game similar to ludo some 2,000 years ago. British Museum 📷 by me #Archaeology
This was such a fun podcast to do! Also it has tiny bits of Teixcalaan worldbuilding, live and without a net…
You can have shit experiences with any airline, but Ryanair is the only one which makes clear that it actively hates you.
welp, gonna be spending my evening looking at videos of maglev trains.
Hugs.
(Also, any treatment of slavery that doesn't mention women's work apart from sexual exploitation frustrates me. Cloth, people! Second only after food production in the labour demands of the premodern household!)
The load-bearing myth at the heart of UK politics is that the politicians and media are tolerant and decent and working people are knuckle-dragging bigots, but it's actually completely the other way around.
And was there a trial? A judgment? A sentence? Just summary execution on the word of an Administration who has demonstrated no fealty to the truth. Were the folks in that boat “the worst of the worst” like the migrants outside Home Depot?
Don't feel like doing a repost that puts the murder video on the timeline yet again but do feel like repeating the point that the president just straight-up assassinated 11 people for supposedly doing something that wouldn't be a death-penalty crime if they were caught and convicted
So little money for grad students.
Er - sorry. You weren't asking for advice. (But basically modern Greece doesn't like talking about the Ottoman period, there's a serious lacuna between the Byzantium period and the pre-war-of-Independence rise of nationalism.)
So you want the holdings of the National Historical Museum, Athens: www.nhmuseum.gr/en/
Palestinian children & babies like Mohammed's daughter are being sickened, injured, & starved to death with their families in Israel's genocidal famine & invasion. Please help by sharing & donating if you can, Mohammed's previous GFM was closed:
It's a damn good book. So gorgeous. So gorged with symbolism and implication.
GET THIS BOOK PLEASE I'M FREAKING OUT IT'S SO GOOD IT'S SO DARK IT'S SO STRANGE IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL I'M RATIONING IT BECAUSE IF I FINISH THIS BOOK AND THERE'S NO ONE TO YELL WITH I WILL BE SAD HELP
THE STARVING SAINTS audiobook is on sale at libro fm!!! libro.fm/audiobooks/9...
The places where you actually NEED grace are filthy and bloody and despairing. Grace is the last cigarette shared in the gutter, the hand of the dying being held by the stranger, the kindness done by the broken.
*eyes the UK HE environment* ...yeah. Can't blame you there.
(That's the post I nearly made earlier.)
They're dissecting the body while it's still warm. You, too, can have the unique and historic opportunity to get a still-bloody organ for a souvenir!
I am calm. I am breathing deeply through my nose. I am counting to ten. I… WHAT, ARE YOU AFRAID YOUR DOG WILL INFODUMP TO YOU ABOUT THE FUCKING BALL?!?
ICYMI: (This time with the correct release date!) Weston Wei's delightful cover for my novel The Subtle Art of Folding Space, animated! Repairing physics that has gone awry! Delicious food! Choices no one should ever have to make! Release date: 4/7/2026
If you are in the Edmonton area Fiasco is still missing - please check garages and sheds and engines! Let's get him home, please share x
Happy book day to Valerie Valdes's WITCH YOU WOULD!
And happy book day to Elizabeth Bear's ANGEL MAKER! Karen Memory rides again!
stared at this for so long wondering if this was real or if Rian Johnson is just really committed to the bit, idk, either way I guess we win
...I want to relate it to dissection, but the humour might be too dark.
...well, this feels unexpectedly gruesome on multiple levels.
Yeah Heather Humphreys can get in the Sea if she thinks I will consider voting for her. The attempts to bring in UK style disabilities assements for being fit to work (which created misery and deaths of disabled people in the UK) was utterly ableist. #Áras25 #speirgorm
IT'S BOOOK DAYYYYYYY (and the crowd goes wild) A long-awaited return to Rapid City and the world of Karen Memory! www.patreon.com/posts/137115...
I've just been reminded of the time the wonderful @tkingfisher.com said lovely things about Peter S. Beagle and The Last Unicorn so this is a day when I have to remind you that that book is ice and fairy wings and lilacs and the death of everything and if you have not read it you absolutely should.
There is also the radical alternative of listening to your Hugo team when they try to help you avoid making stupid decisions.
Witch You Would Day! It's finally here! Witch You Would is out today! Proliferation of exclamation points!!! Thank you so much to everyone who boosted, pre-ordered, or is running out to a store today to grab a copy off a shelf; your support means the world to me. Double thanks if you tag me about…
I'm taking part in a 1-day cozy fantasy sale! Snap up my frothy, romantic Harwood Spellbook box set as well as so many other great sets by authors including @kehealey.bsky.social , @tansyrr.bsky.social, @ajlancaster.bsky.social , @mariecardno.bsky.social & more! books.bookfunnel.com/cozy-fantasy...
I mean, yeah. I know it's bad. Springer's one of the worst, though. Just absolute bullshit level pricing.
I still need to write my review but I suspect I'll be at least a little on the flattering side. blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro...
I'm assuming when you buy kevlar, they tell you that it's single use only? The moment Kevlar has been shot, it's no longer guaranteed to stop a bullet. Even I know that, and we don't have any gun shops on this side of the Pond.
But more power to you at 0500. I cannot be awake at that hour.
(I miss lifting, but I can't justify paying for a gym in order to go once a fortnight.)
I crawl onto the exercise bike for 15-20 minutes most mornings and I'm building my pushups (with as close to perfect form as I can make them) back up towards 15. And I have hopes that now summer's over I'll be able to hit at least one karate class weekly. But my god. It has been SOMETHING.
The Second Death of Locke by VL Bovalino, out of @orbitbooks.bsky.social (and blurbed by @tashasuri.bsky.social): it's very good. Doesn't hit me right in the narrative kinks the way some books have done this year, but damn, it's very good (and set in normatively queer world, too).
You have two small ones, right?
Where does fucking Springer get *off* charging €128 for access to an ebook or €30 for a chapter? Bloody highway robbery. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
I have been too sleep deprived for exercise routines and the necessary willpower for nearly four years.
Fuck I'm jealous of that muscle definition.
muuuscleeesss oh wait, there's a post, too. and it's good. but also: muuusssccclessss
My name quickly become a popular style prompt, resulting in hundreds of thousands of synthetic images that have now displaced my authentic artwork. I’ve watched my income decrease 30% year over year. Freelance gigs are harder to come by and art sales have significantly dropped.
Whether or not they caused the horrific fish kill, serious questions need to be asked why North Cork Creameries has been repeatedly in breach of their EPA discharge licence. Do we need 46,000 fish to be directly attributable to their pollution to stop it? 🧵 www.thejournal.ie/fish-kill-ri...
can confirm this is still active! Every US ebook seller I checked has the 1.99 price still.
Compare & contrast the approach to Russian artists who are silent on the murder of Ukrainians vs. the Irish artists who speak out on the murder of Palestinians
Being good at research will not save you if the university decides to rebalance towards teaching. Being good at teaching will not save you when the university decides to prioritise research. Being good at anything will not save you when the university decides to pivot towards the Next Big Thing.
Yes, I am probably going to be thinking AND ANOTHER THING (does the word "weaving" or "spinning" occur once in the text? NO IT DOES NOT) for a few days more. I suppose this betrays my own peculiar obsessions: for a treatment of the philology of unfreedom, I expect it won't be easily topped.
(Also, any treatment of slavery that doesn't mention women's work apart from sexual exploitation frustrates me. Cloth, people! Second only after food production in the labour demands of the premodern household!)
The national strike of school secretaries and caretakers continues, including at our school in Dublin 8. www.rte.ie/news/ireland...
One of my favourite books this year is on sale for less than three dollars American: @caitlinstarling.com's The Starving Saints: www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/... Read it: it's fucking great.
So I had a really frustrating time reading Stefan Brink's THRALDOM. I think he could have used more and better comparative material. But maybe I just hate philology: lizbourke.wordpress.com/2025/09/01/1...
But also he doesn't use Irish or north of England annals or archaeological material hardly at all?
So I had a really frustrating time reading Stefan Brink's THRALDOM. I think he could have used more and better comparative material. But maybe I just hate philology: lizbourke.wordpress.com/2025/09/01/1...
113. Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age by Stefan Brink Perhaps the most frustrating monograph I have read in a decade. The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber…
One of my favourite books this year is on sale for less than three dollars American: @caitlinstarling.com's The Starving Saints: www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/... Read it: it's fucking great.
This is scary as hell, but for news coverage? This is a GIFT. "You can be banned for *buying* Game of Thrones." Send emails to journalists and news sites and communities you're a part of and talk about the dangers here. People are going to care about this a lot more when it's not just creators.
Again - the reason that the Good Friday Agreement locks in the ECHR is that the UK had repeatedly been held accountable by the European Court of Human Rights for human rights breaches during the Troubles - while national courts had failed to do so, even upholding miscarriages of justice
A combination of two alien invasive species, sika deer and rhododendron, are killing this beautiful native forest in Lauragh, Kerry. The trees can't regenerate due to the overgrazing, and as they age and die, only the proliferating rhodo remains. Invasives are a *top* driver of global nature loss.
And France has just closed a regional railway line, in Creuse 😡 railwayworld.net/2025/08/31/f...
Get the hell off Substack before you literally can’t anymore without blowing up your business
Fish kills are preventable. Our massive dairy expansion in recent years has consequences, and North Cork Co-Op Creamery Plant must come clean on why pollution discharges were 52 times permitted levels. www.rte.ie/news/regiona...
#Speirgorm, we need to email about this, because it's really genuinely appallingly stupid and bad and at the moment Ireland's in support of it. #Ireland #IrishBluesky
Fully agree. Wisdom on the part of all concerned.
The Viking Ship was not very satisfying for my ship-nerdiness. MOAR SHIP.
Me, looking at timestamp: This seems like a long time to get to the joke Me, watching for 15sec: I am absolutely watching this whole thing
On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution. But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable
“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces. Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.” Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris
Do you remember the skeleton that emerged when the topsoil was removed? We now know a little more about this burial. Please note that photos of the skeleton will appear below. If you are easily upset, now would be a good time to stop reading. #Ostrowite25 #archaeology #medievalsky 🏺 🧵
This plot brought to you by the time I didn't teach (for my department, at least) for a semester because the faculty member in charge of scheduling forgot to put me on the course request email list and no one bothered to check until I asked, by which time the deadlines were passed. 🤷♂️
Academia murder book: an apparently normal department til the last 15 pages when during finals students ask why their classes weren't held and the tenured faculty realize they didn't notice the adjunct was murdered a week into the semester. Then the book ends, because they don't really care either.
Alas, not so well adapted to the rest of my household or majority society.
It's dark. Wolves might be there. Better to only sleep in daytime.
It's harder to think new (to you) thoughts without other people to challenge you, yeah.
If you want "space to think," getting an undemanding clerical job (still available in the early 1990s, I believe) and an external reader pass to the BL would probably do just as well.
...that is indeed not how any of it works. Finally getting funding and research leave to do that massive archival research project involving spending months in the basements of several libraries and repositories, now, that's a goal I could see going to hell and back for.
(I mean, pride, privilege, prejudice, funding and teaching pressures, and the departmental petty cash budget aren't romantic at all.)
I think a lot of dark academia works... doesn't have the love of mastery for its own sake that is the most romantic thing about the university. So much of it is instrumentalist. And I think that makes those works much more shallow than they could be otherwise.
I don't think I can ever regret doing a PhD, just for the sensation of stretching so hard to get to a modicum of mastery. The viva was the most stressful and yet the most satisfying conversation/argument/challenge I'd ever had. (I mean, I can regret... career trajectories etc. But not the doing.)
(Because that's where the joy of teaching comes in too, right? Most decent academics want their students to match and surpass them, and seeing them do it is - I'm given to understand - a thrill.)
"Now we're cooking. Now we can *argue* as peers on the same field. *Properly*."
And it's not the joy of *beating* your man there, right? It's the joy of *mastery*, of doing the thing so well and so competently that another master can look at you and say, "I think you are wrong down to the soles of your shoes for my own reasons but I cannot refute your argument on its merits."
And it is that specificity that gives them life.
And much of dark academia is really bad at offering the joy and weirdness that offsets the banal and painful. And I think you are right that this badness derives from the unreality, the genericism, with which it approaches the idea of the university. The real places have intense specificity.
It's the genomic analysis that redraws our understanding of who the person in Birka grave Bj 581 might have been and complicates a century of interpretation of warrior leadership in that society. For example. (At least this is the allure of history, to me.)
In the gleeful satisfaction of slotting pieces together, exploring patterns, challenging them: finding *one line* in a letter than changes the whole interpretation of a relationship, or one object in an archaeological dig that dates the entire stratum, or links two disparate places.
But it often fails to convey the romanticism - the allure, the consummation of seduction through intellectual ferment - because it evokes surfaces rather than substances, and the intellectual seduction is *in* the substance.
I think the aestheticisation is a problem for dark academia. In addition (forgive me, I am blearily tired) to creating an unreal place out of a real place (or a composite of real places), dark academia trades on a romantic image of the university to cast it as a predator.
I've been thinking a lot about this review, particularly the aspect re: the lack of trust in the reader, and I've got a bunch of not-yet-ready-for-showtime thoughts about how certain segments of book & internet culture have encouraged & exacerbated in that distrust in recent years--
Colours of a storm #Shetland
This is a cruel policy that makes no sense, it threatens to criminalize a vulnerable group for no reason, and it shows Sinn Féin up for the political windsock that they are. A party that changes its principles according to the geography of an island can’t be trusted. www.europesays.com/2367033/
No need to apologise!
Not actually enough ship. Social and economic, very good archaeology, but Jarman is interested in different things than I am. I'm trying to track down copies of the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum's publications but they seem to be mostly out of print. (Ole Crumlin-Pedersen seems to be a major name.)