Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

You will be visited by three spirits

You will be visited by three spirits.

I just realized I'm over halfway through my list of countries at this point, which seems wild to me? I've got 44 on my TBR and still need recs for 54:

🇦🇬🇦🇿🇧🇯🇧🇲🇧🇹🇧🇫🇧🇮🇨🇻🇨🇫🇹🇩🇰🇲🇩🇲🇪🇷🇬🇫🇵🇫🇬🇦🇬🇲🇬🇱🇬🇼🇰🇮🇱🇮🇲🇻🇲🇱🇲🇭🇫🇲🇲🇩🇲🇨🇲🇲🇳🇦🇳🇷🇳🇨🇳🇮🇰🇵🇲🇰🇴🇲🇵🇼🇵🇬🇰🇳🇻🇨🇸🇲🇸🇨🇸🇮🇸🇧🇸🇸🇸🇷🇹🇯🇹🇱🇹🇴🇹🇻🇻🇺🇪🇭🇾🇪 + Tibet

Honestly one of my thoughts reading it was "we should have read this in school instead of Lord of the Flies". Can't believe I'd never heard of it until someone on here recommended it, it's going to be a top recommendation going forward.

The Wall Check out The Wall - While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. ...

116. 🇦🇹 Austria- Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

One night an invisible wall separates a remote hunting lodge from the rest of the world, killing every animal and person on the other side. The stranded nameless narrator has to survive in this new unsettling reality.

115. 🇹🇳 Tunisia- Houyem Ferchichi, "The Spider's Widow | أرملة العنكبوت"

Love how "the woman who is a spider lures the unsuspecting to their doom" is a motif across so many cultures

Let Slip the Beasts: Exciting Science Fiction!|Paperback Beneath the streets of East Resplendent, monsters are mounting a war against their masters. Kaliope Dearborne, a customer service nobody for a pharmaceutical mega-conglomerate, wants only to escape he...

114. 🇳🇴 Norway- Suzanne Berget, Let Slip the Beasts

Did someone say "gene-spliced ultraviolent cyberpunk"?

I ordered this one on Bookshop originally but seems to no longer be listed there. Chose a link for the less evil online bookstore option:

Mirage: A Novel A Novel

113. 🇲🇦 Morocco- Somaiya Daud, Mirage

A young woman is forced to be the body double for the heir to the empire that brutally rules her planet, in a top-tier entry in the Palace Intrigue subgenre.

112. 🇲🇳 Mongolia- Haltarin Bolor-Erdene, "Room for Rent"

Whomst amongst us has not accidentally rented a haunted apartment in college?

www.jstor.org/stable/10.73...

The Wall Check out The Wall - While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. ...

116. 🇦🇹 Austria- Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

One night an invisible wall separates a remote hunting lodge from the rest of the world, killing every animal and person on the other side. The stranded nameless narrator has to survive in this new unsettling reality.

I really wish we as a society had more educational opportunities for working adults that were purely just for the sake of learning. Evening language classes. How to fix your car courses on weekends. Spaces for learning shouldn't be something that stops in your 20s and maybe picks up post-retirement.

Color the Animals of Alaska, Tlingit-style! After creating the Christmas coloring book featuring his art years ago with daughter Vera, Don wanted to do additional coloring and activity books. His last collaborative project with his daughters…

My dad’s Indigenous coloring book is finally available! Over fifty original Alaska Native animal designs to color. My dad was a Tlingit formline artist, retired Alaska State Trooper, and National Park Ranger who loved traditional Tlingit art and wildlife.

(Sample pages below)

For real, I use this in my genetics lectures as a prime example of how not every gene an organism has is expressed in the phenotype by default. Everyone's got the blueprints to be something else, we just don't use them all at the same time.

each of us contains the full genetic instructions for both testosterone & estrogen driven hormone loadouts (along with varying combos of both)

this can be changed at any time. our genes will even start expressing themselves differently within ~3-6 months.

this is an existential threat to fascists.

A golden retriever holding an octopus in its mouth, so it looks like tentacles

The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)

I heard there were some secret jaws

That snowflakes had in their open maws

But you don’t really care for eel bones do ya?

I keep thinking back to how I was told that allowing me to defend was "devaluing an OU degree for other students" because my work was so subpar, when actually OU didn't need help from me at all in that area.

it intensely angers me every time I open a book PDF in Acrobat and the software reminds me that I’m reading a Long Document and gee, wouldn’t I prefer a summary instead

I am not a first grade child who requires the easy-reader version of big kid books, demon machine

Another University of Oklahoma instructor suspended in biblical psychology paper grading controversy The university is investigating whether the second instructor engaged in "viewpoint discrimination."

“The latest educator removed from the classroom allegedly told students they would be excused for attending a Friday protest in support of a transgender instructor who was suspended for accurately grading a paper.”
www.advocate.com/news/second-...

For Anchorage that's a decent benchmark, we don't get as cold as Fairbanks

Northern lights may be visible in 17 states (and maybe more) tonight Auroras may be visible from Alaska to Illinois as an incoming coronal mass ejection is expected to slam into Earth.

Based on the latest NOAA aurora forecast map, the following 17 states appear fully or partially above the aurora view line:

Alaska
North Dakota
Minnesota
Montana
Wisconsin
South Dakota
Michigan
Idaho
Washington
Maine
Vermont
New Hampshire
Iowa
Oregon
Wyoming
New York
Illinois

A crop of a Samantha Mash Illustration piece of a chicken being held by a woman. There is a color swatch in the middle that is named "Spring Chicken" that is a warm green, it has hex #ACA665 under it

Full credit to @flaroh.bsky.social for inspiring this attempt at picking my own colors of the year for 2026 (go see her version, she named her colors way better than I did!)🧡

Minoan dancer orange

“Athenian green” for Athena and Heracles

Wine dark sea for the odyssey

Pietas purple for the Aeneid

I can do this all day

“Rage red” for the Iliad

Submitting some 2026 colour ideas to @pantone in case it’s not too late for them to change their mind (more in thread)🏺🎨

And i may need to pick up some of their modern mocs ankle boots for my non-winter footwear needs 👀

Ooooh, some gorgeous options here!

Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications The dataset contains images of children’s faces downloaded from websites about autism, which sparked concerns at Springer Nature about consent and reliability.

Holy CRAP.

Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle.

Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it.

And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

My mom is a prolific quilter, the one on my bed is one of many (specifically it's the one she made to celebrate my PhD).

The one on the wall was rescued from a thrift store ages ago.

additionally, while I will do some repairs on these to at least wear them as cold-weather chore boots, the damage really is too substantial to repair to anything presentable, and the soles have degraded into a sticky putty that is practically peeling off