...I wasn't saying they weren't present? I was saying that *if* the quoted post intended to imply - and I'm not sure they did - that such a scholar would be invalid (that they *should* be unhireable, in effect), that would be silly.

This bit from the NYT Vance story describes basically all of ultra-right-wing chud classics and medievalism: it *feels* ancient or medieval - or what they think that should be - despite actually being very modern, because it fits their neo-fascist ideology.

Some world-class Bluesky-ism there. It's amusing that I anticipated someone might raise this objection, so I wrote "refused" rather than just 'didn't' to make clear that I meant a voluntary rejection rather than someone dealing with issues outside of their control. Not that it mattered, evidently.

My music:

A little late on posting this up, but I had to share this amazing welded d10 (made by Cofactor: cofactordesigns.com/pages/tig-zi...) I got from my better half and little one (mostly my better half, for my little one is still quite little) for Father's Day. Gonna need to roll gently.

Feeling pretty good about calling Tucker "the Fritz Julius Kuhn of our time" back in 2022.

Tom Kean Jr.:

Man, 'Why are they even bombing us?' is just an incredibly revealing thing to say, the sort of thing most people only say in the presence of Isaac Chotiner. There's a quote for this one...

LOL, surfing youtube videos instead of writing like I should be and ran into one that references ACOUP and saw these comments, made my day. "a loving but wistful reminder of how the internet used to be" - yeah, yeah, that's about right.

Wait, hold up, I'm sorry - the actual data supporting the conclusions of your 'academia is politicized and not data-based enough' report may or may not be published at some point? Proof is for the peasants at public universities, I guess.

When I took paleography and we were going through the scripts, we got to Beneventan script - which uses a kind of stacked diamonds for minimums and doesn't really connect their caps, and the word I got as we were reading was, in fact, minimum. I must have stared at it for a full minute.

That said, I have my Britain-Cred Achievement:

Update on the Cat Colony! (After some testing, it seems the image problem was Firefox, alas) We've made it past the end-game year, we're now 2436 and the game is...kinda done? We've got nothing left really but to wait for the end-game crises. 1/

Ok, I know the map at the top is broken, but at this point I've got nothing. I've tried multiple different screenshots, in both jpeg and png. uh, here's a screen grab, let's see if it works:

Cat Colony Update: Khan out. The war with the Great Khan terminated faster than expected because immediately after rebuilding his fleet he charged it directly into my doomstack. The horde didn't fragment but coalesced into a single successor state. 1/

So I'm going to end up - bit by bit - reclaiming all of that red territory (as you can see me start to do). Meanwhile, I've got a hegemony federation type expanding via a ton of vassals. It's not ideal to see, but all of the purple empires there are vassals except one. 4/

Update on The Cat Colony: KHAAAAAAN! The big shakeup is we got the Great Khan midgame crisis, which basically popped up in the *middle* of the large federation to my counter-clockwise, and pretty swiftly overran most of it. 1/

You will be unsurprised to learn that the right-wing chuds think Aragorn would totally be a right-wing chud.

Update on The Cat Colony! We just hit 100 years in and we've finally successfully cleared out our fanatical purifier problem, absorbing nearly all of their space. My economy is, uh, in rough shape as a result. 1/

You can also use the 2025 jobs report to essentially extend the blue line further: it stays almost entirely flat through 2019, then drops in 2020, makes up that dip in 2021, then begins declining again:

One thing that I think is really valuable about the AHA's academic job reports and their data-driven nature is that while everyone reports that the academic job market was bad when they got a PhD, we can actually put some data to those recollections.

Alright, Stellaris Cat Colony Update: We picked a good time to bring the Cat Colony, the Fex-Klangan and my Bokian vassals to war with the our local Fanatical Purifiers and sliced off a chunk of their space in the resulting war, with nearly all of it going to my vassals.

And 33 years in and we've had some bad luck with the map: our clockwise route of expansion is blocked by a Fallen Empire and our counter-clockwise route has a big, angry Advanced Start Fanatical Purifiers empire. So the Catkeepers are going to have to grow some claws in a hurry.

So it has been nine months or so since Microsoft dropped this study on professions vulnerable to AI and it remains deeply funny to me that LLMs have not replaced historians or writers or concierges or journalists or editors. But they are automating software development!

Last year, I made a pair of pie charts to help folks visualize research funding priorities between the NIH (medicine) the NSF (all other sciences), the NEA (arts) and the NEH (humanities), with and without defense research spending:

Yeah, the gap in resources between medicine vs. other science vs. everything else is enormous. $45bn for medicine, $10bn for the NSF, $200m each for humanities and arts. I made pie-charts a while back, with and without defense research.

Yeah, Trump can't TACO unilaterally, he needs Iran to let him and they aren't likely to. Going back to my go-to clip for this entire mess:

So the statue-pfp crowd on The Bad Place are Having a Moment about the depiction of Achilles (image as a representative example). But the first guy to subvert Achilles was...Homer. Achilles isn't intended as some uncomplicated role model; that Alexander treated him as one is kinda a red flag.

The hilarious part is that this was so obviously the end-point of MAGA that Amazon's The Boys shot the parody scene of this *months* ago and yet still nailed it flawlessly, down to the stern face on the statue.