BRING OUT YER DEAD
DH Dev at Duke University Libraries. Likes: Ancient / multilingual DH, Digital Preservation, TEI, Libraries, my brilliant colleagues, MUFC, UNC basketball, running. Dislikes: talking to computers (does swear at them a *lot* though), mean people.
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BRING OUT YER DEAD
Died by being accidentally run over with a golf cart 8 times.
Don’t think so. Yeah, honestly I think they need a shot stopper in this setup rather than a goalie who’s great at distribution.
Made it hard on themselves though…
I miss the old brand #CDC
No, but I’m picturing a reenactment of the Death of Stalin set in the White House, and it’s very funny.
The corporatization of universities has been a disaster.
A *lot* of these kinds of people have recently been let go, either as a direct result of DOGE cuts or fallout from grant cancellations, etc.
So the sandwich guy ... beat the wrap
I don't want to repost the awful stuff in that Chat GPT suicide case. But I will say that Chat GPT should be destroyed, financially and legally. The data centers should be disassembled and recycled. Sam Altman should go to prison.
General store with a restaurant attached is 💯 the vibe.
DC statehood now.
Absolute overreaction. I do sympathize that people want the slump to be over, but it’s not magic. They need time.
Children, in my experience, actually really enjoy learning in an environment where they can engage properly. Seems entirely believable to me.
When I had my dental care done at the UNC dental school back in the day, they used to always take my blood pressure at the start of a visit. And it would be high, of course. And the dentist would suggest I get it checked out. And I would want to yell "I AM CURRENTLY IN A DENTIST'S OFFICE."
LLMs *should* be at the “interesting but impractical” stage right now. Like nuclear fusion. Instead we’re building religions around them. 🤦🏻♂️
The latest thing Trump has done to DC: Scare the visitors away. Damaging all the businesses, large and small, that depend on them. Along the National Mall today, 1pm, on a stunningly beautiful Saturday afternoon in late August. (Article and more photos to come later today.)
I think people from the @TEIConsortium or @adho.org would help us enormously if they found the time to intervene here and describe use cases from our field for a modern XSLT in the browser: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578
🤷🏻♂️ Terry Pratchett wrote a book with him. I doubt that would have happened had he known.
I recall I did also mute Neil Gaiman way back because his posts were just filling up my feed. But then he turned out to be a sex pest as well as being annoying.
Friend from grad school. Apparently knows Luci from Twitter, so maybe some bad interaction or misunderstanding I know nothing of 🤷🏻♂️.
I did block J.D. Vance, because I don’t want to see that shit.
James is a friend of mine, so I imagine he must have come across you from my feed. No earthly idea why he’d block you. I rarely block anyone, even if I disagree with them.
It does make me wonder, darkly, whether we'll need to promote some obviously unsuitable ass, like Newsom, analogous to Churchill (a racist crank with manifest character defects) to lead the opposition. Maybe there's some sort of societal rule at play...
Seriously. That’s enough.
To be perfectly honest, I could have lived a happier life without having gained this perspective.
It really does put the whole pre-WW2 political environment into perspective for me. Why wasn’t there more effective opposition to fascism as it rose up? Well, we’re seeing it. Their opponents weren’t playing the same game—just not even in the fight.
I point this out for clarity. I also have a long-term interest in how my crafting of ideas is sometimes confused for the very serious idea being crafted. So to be clear: AI is political attack on labor with few limited cases for social value and an absolute ecological disaster.
Arabic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Russian, Eastern European & Eurasian Studies, Religion, & more—decimating the humanities destroys our ability to understand the world, act in it, and envision a future. Blue states are complicit in this destruction of scholarship and teaching @uoregon.bsky.social
That is obviously where this is going. They want to see if there’s any fallout when it happens.
It is online, but in seminar form. I have to do one of those read-the-slides-and-take-a-quiz ones too.
Pray for me. This afternoon I must spend an hour and a half on mandatory training so that I remain eligible to apply for grants that probably don’t exist any longer.
I’m convinced libraries need to model *not* being stampeded into AI adoption.
Trying to push through despair at the slow death of things I care about under the current dismantling of US academia and get this project finished. Feels a bit like I’m doing a puzzle sitting on the deck of the Titanic. I wonder if I’ll finish before everything sinks.
They are clearly doing whatever they can to create the conditions where someone gets shot. Presumably in order to find out if they can get away with it.
Feel like one political party kidnapping an opponent should be bigger news
🔥🔥WATCH: “Rappers are smarter than economists”👇🏽 @dossdiscourse.bsky.social explains more cops doesn’t lower crime it just means more money for private prisons— Addressing poverty/hunger/health care lowers crime… but Trump’s trillions transfer just made all that MUCH WORSE… meaning crime will rise.
#TEIFriday A brief thread in (1) #EpiDoc history and (2) open data pubication:
Jeez. We must have driven right by this like a block over on our way back from seeing friends in Columbia Heights. We’ve been in DC all day, and it’s Absolutely Normal. Not a crime wave in sight, btw. Well, other than in the WH.
I mean, Philosophy being the entire basis for science is just an appetizer…
Ain’t no dumbass like an Ivy League dumbass.
I was just thinking about this. I mean, I’m an introvert, but I’d talk to another human all day in preference to an LLM. They absolutely creep me out.
It will be bleach-based, no doubt.
XSLT *should* be part of the web platform. https://aramzs.xyz/noteworthy/xslt-is-still-important/
They’re only like 3 decades behind. That thing was supposed to explode and blow the moon out of orbit in 1999!
People *really* want to be told everything will be all right. That gets less and less likely all the time.
I just posted a free workbook that aims to help university workers better understand when and how to take risks in the fight against fascism in higher ed. halperta.com/shalperta%20...
Working on my slides for my #Balisage talk next week and getting heavily distracted by my mostly unwritten paper for the #TEI annual meeting in September. This is very on brand for me.
The downside to running a university like a business is that it will act like a business and simply adapt to government pressure rather than stand up to it.
We knew this was coming. The admin is going to want to fold immediately, so it’s up to the students, staff, faculty, and alumni—the people who really *are* the university—to agitate for our integrity.
So sorry Carrie. Wishing you strength and peace.
Apropos of nothing, but my dad once bought a Lada for the Child Care Board in Barbados (I assume it was the cheapest station wagon they could get). That thing had the *most elaborate* toolkit I’ve ever seen in a car. Dad: “That doesn’t bode well.”
Fair enough. I’m a massive fan of your work, by the way, so I will just quietly fanboy my way out of this argument 😁.
I haven't the faintest idea. And yes, I agree that is a flaw in the piece. I just don't think it invalidates the whole argument that we can make the case for a masculinity built on taking responsibility for our lives.
We shouldn't. They need to become human themselves so that they see others as humans too.
The quote I see is "The progressive left seemingly has no opinion on men getting laid." The word "help" occurs twice in the piece: "helpful" and "self-help." To me, that says the left isn't making a case that cuts through like the right is. I'm afraid the service you posted isn't working for me.
That’s not at all what I got from it. I read it as making the case that we can make a counter argument against right wing manchildishness based on being a responsible adult. If that is indeed his argument think it’s basically correct.
The frame of the piece is “This is a way to make the case to young men not to be total dicks” though. He’s not arguing that this is particularly original, nor that women haven’t been saying this all along. That’s a fair criticism of the piece, but I don’t think it invalidates it.
To be fair, in the article he does give a pretty detailed and reasonable answer, which is more or less that if you’re a functional human being, people will find that attractive, so you should work on that. The lure of the easy dunk is hard to resist though 🤷🏻♂️
brave DNC plant in RNC headquarters: we salute you for putting a lada on that poster
Y'all! There's only 2 more weeks to register for the Annual Meeting! Get on it! tei-c.org/news/2025/07...
Had to be done.
Not the first time I’ve heard that “Why walk if you can take X mode of transport” line, and a) I like walking, b) it’s good for me, c) you see things while walking that you miss if you zoom on past them.
More than decimation I’m afraid. Supposedly we are going to do less. But it’s unclear what that means so far.
Today was the last day for a whole bunch of great colleagues who took voluntary separation offers. Incredibly sad, and a massive loss of institutional memory all at once.
"The man who is not yet mayor is to blame for a shooting that happened under the watch of an ex-cop mayor who's thrown every available dollar at the NYPD," insists sex pest
Not that one.
The replies here are so funny because they’re all like “oh SKYDADDY?!?! You talked to SKYDADDY?!?!” and I don’t know what to tell you but a lot of people from a lot of different faiths actually do pray about stuff to think about it particularly this old ass Sunday School teacher from North Carolina
Seems like you have to option-tab in Safari. Frankly, that’s a little obnoxious. Looks like you can turn tab navigation on in settings though.
They have an excellent reason for it: because they may in the future be held accountable for their crimes.
This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1
A reminder that registration for the TEI Annual Meeting is open! See tei-c.org/news/2025/07... for the registration link and the conference program.
Wait?! To use direct messaging on #bsky I have to go through #AgeVerification and give all my personal data and gov ID to a multi-national *Games* company that assumes I'm a parent?! I'm all for keeping children safe, but this seems poorly thought out. www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/o...
Really, most universities *as institutions* are pretty conservative. You can just look at who’s on their Boards / who their major donors are.
My Dad used to say he liked running “because it’s so nice when you stop.” And he was right.
I’ve low key wondered for a while if chatbots end up getting banned for just this reason. Humans have always had the capacity to drive ourselves crazy, but this seems like a shortcut.
I call ‘em like I see ‘em 😁
#TEIFriday A reminder that if you have #EpiDoc related announcements (projects, jobs, publications, training) that you'd like to announce via Current Epigraphy, contact the EpiDoc rep, and they can circulate it for you. currentepigraphy.org/about/
So I guess my question is whether we’re moving to an environment where a lot less funded research happens, or one where it still happens but there’s a lot more itemized expenses and a corresponding drop in efficiency. And probably more administrators required to make it work. 🤷🏻♂️
That makes sense. But that’s going to have to happen anyway if we’re going to a 15% max. That’s simply not going to pay for operating expenses.
That seems not to be the case for NIH grants though. What I’m wondering is whether this will mean restructuring so that the university starts charging labs for, e.g., compute infrastructure, and that goes in as a direct cost. Massively less efficient.
So, I have a question about the 15% overhead thing, and it’s this: does anything prevent grant receiving institutions from refactoring proposals to make up for this in direct costs? It would make the process much less efficient, mean more admin, etc., but is that a viable response?
I imagine there’ll be a push for AI as a solution, but I’m deeply skeptical.
Not that it’s an ideal situation, but you have the skills to make it work. Most don’t.
When the only funding available is private and there’s much less of it, will admin still support DH programs? Team-based projects may become vanishingly rare. Maybe we have to plan on DIY as the rule.
“What did you do during the battle of LA, Grampa?” “Well, Timmy, I cleaned man poo out of the vehicles every morning.”
I am absolutely fine! Just a bit in shock and wondering about what the future holds.
I don’t think we’ve begun to reckon with what the destruction of government based DH funding in the US means for institutional support. But we’d better start having those conversations.
Well, now we know the impact of the cuts on our department, and Holy Crap. Dismaying.
My soror shared this note from a university hiring manager. The market isn’t just wrecked. I don’t think this is just a recessionary pullback. 2,000 applications for one higherEd job is 100% a sign of a structural failure. It’s so horrible. I’m sorry.
Those of you who teach history, classics, art history, archaeology, etc., especially of the ancient world: how much more likely are you to use numismatics in teaching due to digital resource accessibility than you were 10+ years ago? #classicsbluesky
At least regular banking is insured. The theoretical floor for Bitcoin is $0. Its valuation is based on consensus. Again, I hope not to see the event that breaks that consensus (same for stocks), but our leaders are not aware of the risks they are taking, so we might find out what that looks like!
The previous owner of our house clearly thought they were handy. They were not.
Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.
As with Bitcoin, there’s just stupid amounts of money poured into it, without a lot of consideration of the fundamentals. I’d prefer not to see an event destabilizing enough to change that, but maybe we will!
“I didn’t for one second think that the flooding could possibly be worse than Fran,” Fehrman says. “That is the literal high water mark.”
Spent several hours helping residents of Canterbury Townhomes in #Carrboro review damage, distribute food and water, and most importantly load flood debris into dumpsters before rains hit tonight. Just as I was leaving, a City of High Point boom truck was loading large items from the curb.
And I get paranoid now about accidentally picking the wrong one.
Been there, done that. They're not even as nice as the old blue ones. Sigh.
The draft program is available and early bird registration for the TEI Annual Meeting in Krakow is open! Register by July 8 for the lower rate! tei-c.org/news/2025/06...