Ergative Absolutive

I definitely guessed 'that paper does not actually exist,' solely from the publication date!

goddammit. Good to know.

Favorite images of 2025, Day 6: A roseate spoonbill splashes its wings through the water, causing an explosion of droplets as it looks straight ahead towards the camera. One of my favorite photos I've ever taken. #birds

I remain forever baffled by People Who Recognize Faces. It is a superpower, akin to birds sensing magnetic fields as they migrate.

Like Starfleet, the immune system cannot rotate its phaser frequencies fast enough to keep up. The trypanosomes spread and spread and spread and eventually they are in your brain, hiving your mind.

Resistance is futile.

Oh, sure, Erin tried to draw a cute parallel with her teenage self swapping around jackets as she hops from theatre to theatre evading the guards, but really:

The trypanosomes have hundreds of surface antigens. They swap them around to evade the immune system, replicating all the while.

Today I learned from @tpwky.bsky.social 's episode on Human African Trypanosomiasis (aka sleeping sickness) that the trypanosomes which cause the disease are the Borg.

Galaxy brain meme. Panel 1: Jonathan Harker found paprika hendl spicy because he is pathetically English. Panel 2: Hungarian paprika ranges from mild to very spicy; it's perfectly possible our friend Jonathan was served the spicy stuff Panel 3: "paprika hendl uses sweet paprika" recipes change quickly over time an dplace, Jonathan may have been served a regional variant Panel 4 (text running off bottom): PAPRIKA USED TO BE SPICER holy shit it used to be spicier before sweeter peppers were cultivated in the 1920s. plus the machine to remove the spicy pith and seeds was only invented in the 1860s. 19th century Hungarian cuisine was simply spicier than its modern counterpart. not to mention how even "mild" paprikca can cause indigestion which is why it's so frequently served with sour cream

WELCOME TO THE DRACULA PAPRIKA DISCOURSE!!

(meme from tumblr, not my own, original link seems to be dead now)

Review of Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire 4 stars An absolute delight. Such a charming narrative style, a generous, whimsical approach to footnotes (I'm really enjoying seeing Pratchettian footnotes appearing more often in narratives), a no-nonsense sight into small-town life and the assumptions and conventions that plague women older than 40 -- oh, yes, our heroine, Isabella Nagg, is over 40, and fat to boot. In a way, this reminds me a little bit of Lolly Willows, except without all of the things that infuriated me about that book. What happens when a woman whose life has been full of -- not even disappointments, but grey nothingness, decides to take up magic and turn herself into an entirely new person? I loved the donkey; I love the ideas of Goblin Market (Rosetti-style) being the above-ground form of an invasive fungus. Gwendolyn Gooch was a bit broad, but in keeping with the unconstrained humor of the rest of the book. I will definitely read more by this author.

Yes! I made exactly the same connection in my review of it

Slop graphics in academic journals Use this form to share graphics (e.g., figures, covers, graphical abstracts) made using generative A.I. that have appeared in academic journals. The plan is to compile these slop graphics in an ope...

If you run across a gen A.I. slop 🤖💩 diagram in an academic journal, I’d love to know about it! Please fill out this form:

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Slop in journals is illuminating about journals’ quality control. And journals would like you to forget their mistakes.

#AcademicChatter

I'm in the dedicated COAT BATH, because my coats deserve segregated bathing facilities, away from the rest of the hoi polloi laundry plebs.

“Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin.”

Except this bit:

Forget LLMs. The real stuff is LSWLMs.

(Language -> Sperm Whale Language)

(UK) Parliamentary Petition: Require generative AI watermarks & ban using people’s likeness without consent

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/736690

✨ A few years back I stood outside Wells Cathedral for a full day and photographed the impact of the light on the front facade. I was amazed at the outcome - at how a single entity could morph and change under the changing light. 🌅 #thread

to all my fellow academics out there—we’ve got this?

I am pleased to report that the last of the Thanksgiving dishes have been washed, the furniture moved back into its usual place, and the carpets vacuumed of crumbs.

(This is even more impressive than it sounds, since we live in the UK and must have Thanksgiving on Saturday.)

Good morning! I'm reading James Alistair Henry's 'Pagans', which is a delightful crime thriller set in an alternate world where there was never any Christianity. Loads of fun, so far. Ethnic tensions between the Celts and the Saxons. Mughal India and Pan-African Union are the real world powers.

phaw that's nothing. i was served as a pie by mistake during a production of titus andronicus and lived to tell the tale.

This is just to say

I have binned
the condiments
that were in
the back of the fridge

and which
we could not possibly
have been saving
for any discernible purpose

I ask no forgiveness
They were antique
so cold
and so impossibly past their use-by dates.

Yes, I was thinking about word-internal possibilities, but all I could come up with before 9am was 'Aesclepius', which didn't feel quite fair.

Huh, yeah, /skl/ is an unusual onset. Sclera (the whites of your eyes) is another. But other than those (and derivatives of them), I'm drawing a blank.

It's funny. It doesn't *sound* odd. It's not phonotactically illegal. But surely that phonological gap in word onsets isn't just an accident.

When people misused lawn darts, they were taken off the market.

Fuck, this is such a good idea. I don't teach composition, but I do teach the kind of class where I can offer students the opportunity to practice this kind of thing.

Well, not spring semester this year. This year it's stats. But next year it's a writing-heavy class.

A VERY hearty good morning to my food processor, which looked at a pound of flour and three sticks of butter and said, 'no problem, boss, give me ten seconds and I'll make a pie crust out of that for you.'

Alas, I could not catch more plot development before my stop arrived, but my guess is that the narrator WILL accept the mating bond, and our jade-eyed character will end up piercing her with more than his gaze.

Some over-the-shoulder reading-my-neighbour's ebook tidbits from this morning's commute:

'If I accepted the mating bond . . .'

'His jade eyes pierced me.'

Happy World Linguistics Day from Glasgow, Scotland!

Major props for using sandwich bags as liners, rather than putting them straight in the pocket. Not many 6-year-olds would think that far ahead.

Look, if you recommend a book to me, then you're agreeing to receive the trillion messages in which I let loose the floodgates of my opinions at each chapter break.

Brought to you by: my message to my friend who recommended Alchemised, containing speculation about necrothrall poop.

#amReading