Stephen Ramsay

I love that poem. And Glück in general.

You are very kind. I will happily follow anyone who uses lines from Louise Glück as their profile.

This is marvelous.

Cambridge Introduction to Digital Humanities

Coming this August! Have me come tell your students that everyone is a digital humanist now, in an age of pervasive digital mediation -- happy to bring free copies

Right where everyone who has successfully completed a thesis has been. It's not you; it's the genre. When you get to the end, you'll say, "Oh, *that's* how you write this kind of thing!" You got this. Really.

Yeah, I mean, as someone who regularly uses autoconf, I should probably simmer on down a notch. Same story there. Lol

How does anyone work in Python with this virtual environment nonsense? I remember when Python was new. "Batteries Included!" Uh huh. Today: We give you the batteries. You're on your own with the single-use hex wrenches. And the instructions are in Linear A. Also requries knowledge of darke magick.

Sorry, I hadn’t read the comments!

You means *schmaltz*? (שמאַלץ) One of my favorite cooking terms!

Had a similar experience with a mountain lion a couple of years ago, and decided that I was okay with never beholding its fearful symmetry again.

With this system, I'll soon make a fortune: then I'll kill everyone in the world and go away.

PÈRE UBU: That may well be so, but I've changed the
government and I've had it announced in the official gazette that all the present taxes have to be paid twice over, and all those I may think up later will have to be paid three times over.

Everyone is reading *On Tyranny* and *1984*, but the text that speaks to our time is really Alfred Jarry's 1896 masterpiece *Ubu Roi.*

STANISLAS: Sire, we are down on the register for only one hundred and fifty-two fix-dollars, which we've already paid over six weeks ago come Michaelmas.

I'm going to teach Go this semester. Why not a dynamically typed language like Ruby or Python? Mainly because, in my experience, the answer to 90% of all the questions beginning programmers ask is some version of "What type is that?" Go might have just the right amount of type discipline.

Yes! I swear, I have no relationship to the company that makes that knife. But nothing comes close.

Hi folks. I'll be speaking at #MLA2026! It is session 438, The Humanities Funding Landscape, Saturday at 10:15AM in MTCC - 606. Come learn about our humanities programs @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. I'll also be talking a bit about my last (sad) days at the NEH. Grab me if you wanna chat!

Okay, it's not easy at all. But the result of all of this madness is that "Where's the good knife?" is no longer a question in my household. They are all sublimely beautiful. And extremely dangerous.

But it's easy! You just have get the angle right. And the pressure. And various precise motions. Pay attention to your legs; try to let the force of the pull stroke originate in your feet. Progress through several stone grits. And oil the blade and handles with camelia oil as the Samurai once did.

Undaunted, I watched approximately 1500 hours of YouTube videos and eventually purchased Japanese whetstones that are more expensive than the actual knives I'm sharpening -- which were soon replaced with high-carbon steel blades of the sort that will discolor if you look at them the wrong way.

After extensive research, I discovered that the correct path forward is to move to Japan and apprentice to a master sharpener for five years, at the end of which I'd be given a whetstone quarried from a sacred mountain. I was all in for that, obviously. My family was less enthusiastic.

(I'm the family cook, I have been a 19th-century shaving reenactor for many years -- another hyperfixation -- and I've been carrying a pocket knife since I was seven. So it seemed like a great idea).

What's that? We're supposed to post our hyperfixations? Here's one of maybe five. Years ago, I decided I wanted my kitchen knives and pocket knives to be really, really sharp. Like, sharp enough to shave with. Sharp enough to perform surgery. Sharp enough to come with a warning label.

I’m having trouble getting back to a computer, but I’m sure I have this somewhere. If you put an email address in my DM, I’ll send it to you.

I teach sorting algos, so I can introduce big O, so I can say, “You might encounter this notation some day.” But let’s face it. If you’re delighted by how ingenious quicksort is, you’re in the right class/major.

The answer is all of the above. But also: Clear, well defined steps that lead to guaranteed results is the kind of thing that makes my brain rejoice. Especially because the rest of my life is not like that at all.

Only when the crema is God-tier. And my adorable demitasse cups come.

My pour over method already approaches the fabrication of semiconductors in terms of complexity and tolerances. For Christmas, I got a Flair Pro 3 (manual espresso machine). Let the madness begin. #coffee

I feel the same way about Romeo and Juliet.

Καλά Χριστούγεννα! Χρόνια Πολλά!

This looks great. I’m sorry to miss mla this year.