iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

22° @aldebrn.me · 07/10/2026

Oh you did not just abbreviate "Jaguar God of the Underworld" as "JGU" archive.org/details/bloo... "The blood of kings: dynasty and ritual in Maya art" by famed Mayanists Drs Linda Schele & Mary Ellen Miller

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 05/10/2026

Reading how great cities like La Venta & San Lorenzo depopulated suddenly after centuries of staying power Truly, the last ten years have revealed so much about such historical mysteries. Now I have no trouble seeing how suddenly societies can repudiate their strengths and embrace their weaknesses

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 05/10/2026

Was reading about Grace Kelly. The America of the 50s seems like a different country? > "America seemed to pardon her tainted blood, tuning into her televised nuptial Mass in droves despite aversion to the religious spectacle" They saw Irish as "tainted"? And were acverse to religious spectacle…?

100

22° @aldebrn.me · 04/10/2026

OMG Dr Stephen Houston starts his lectures on the visuality of Maya writing by citing another artform I love: graffiti This is such a confirmatory moment Writing, in the context of graffiti, is imbued with so much artistry and personality right, and Maya script intensely exudes the same

youtube.com

Stephen D. Houston on Vital Signs: The Visual Cultures of Maya Writing, Part 1

YouTube video by National Gallery of Art Talks

001

22° @aldebrn.me · 04/10/2026

Merle Greene Robertson has a bunch of her rubbings of Maya sculpture in two PDFs here and omg these skulls are breathtaking www.precolumbia.org/pari/rubbing...

Rubbing ID: D15323, Merle Greene Robertson's rubbing of the Great Ballcourt at Chichen Itza. There are many shapes and patterns in the rubbing but near the bottom is a huge disc in the middle of this is a skull figure adorned with an elaborate headdress, facing right. It's not quite a skull: it has eye brows and a nose, but it's eye socket and teeth are very skull-like. Its mouth is open, a typical Maya speech bubble (looking like vines) coming out.

010

I LITERALLY CANNOT with how beautiful each and every Maya syllable and logogram is! Via the delightful www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/school-resou... I want literally each of these to be tattooed to my arm where I can admire it forever, each is so cool and precious and electrifying.

A 5 by 5 grid of vowels running across the top (a, e, i, o, and u) and consonants down (j, k, k', l, and m), and each cell containing 1-3 renderings of the syllable in Maya.

Each is breathtaking.

Ke is a hand with four fingers curled and the thumb pointing, like a right-hand-rule kind of thing (except it's a left hand).

Ko has two examples, both are long wide ovals but one has two little dots at either end and cross-hatched middle, while the other is a grid of squares that look like teeth in the cringe 😬 emoji.

Some like Ka have a simple example like a tall "C" shape with cross-hatching inside *and* a highly anthropomorphized (to me) face looking glum.

Given the examples are all tracings likely taken from various media (stone, reed, ceramic), there's a lot of diversity of just visual style here.

000

Oh I cannot with how beautiful Maya script is. Each character is a painting, on stone, on pottery, or in a book. These jaguars are making my soul sing looking at them All from mayaglyphs.org/CWLhtml/BAHL... which collects the various looks of this character pronounced "bahlam", meaning "jaguar" 🐆🐆

"in 1562, a Spanish friar named Diego de Landa burned every Maya book he could find" 😶 Words fail

000

What a sight it must have been to behold, a city of Plains Indian dog and their humans, traveling across the plains 🤩! (I love revisiting Barnhart's lectures every few months when New World art seizes me. Currently working thru his paper on the Maya Dresden Codex, which is amazingly beautiful.)

Screenshot of several paragraphs:

if we go further south into the Great Plains, we see another instance in which dogs were employed as beasts of burden or pack animals.

The ancient nomadic buffalo hunters there invented what we call a travois. It was a cargo carrying device that could be strapped to the back of a dog. The construction was simple, just two long poles with a cargo net in between.

The poles crossed at the dog's shoulders, secured to their chests by leather straps. Then they fanned out in a rectangular shape kept apart by a cross piece with their tips dragging on the ground behind the dog. The dogs of the now extinct Plains Indian dog breed weighed about 40 or 50 pounds and could easily carry at least their own weight.

In 1541, the Coronado expedition made their way out of New Mexico into the Great Plains and were the first Europeans to see these dogs in action. They described the nomad communities as mobile cities, hundreds of people accompanied by thousands of dogs. They said that each family had 20 to 40 dogs each.

European settlers and then later anthropologists reported the same up until the 1800s. That's when we intentionally murdered all the buffalo to destroy the nomadic hunters way of life. The dogs hauled their mobile villages from camp to camp, and the Travoy poles were actually the frames for their teepees.

Pretty smart. By the way, the natives called the Spaniards' horses power dogs at first. But their dogs also had many other important roles.

000

S3 E8 Dogs in the Ancient Americas - ArchaeoEd

"the Coronado expedition made their way out of New Mexico into the Great Plains and were the first Europeans to see these dogs in action. They described the nomad communities as mobile cities, hundreds of people accompanied by thousands of dogs. They said that each family had 20 to 40 dogs each." 🤯

archaeoed.com

In this episode I’ll ask the age old question – who’s a good dog? Dogs were man’s best friend in Americas for 1000’s of years, from Alaska to the […]

100

22° @aldebrn.me · 01/10/2026

“Includes vested stock“, oh, how much of the pay line is just a reflection of the stock market?

020

22° @aldebrn.me · 01/10/2026

It took me this beautiful post to realize that I’m the same (I am in my forties)

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 30/09/2026

I almost entirely solely seek out art history because of a strong emotional response to the art. Olmec art—the colossal heads, the jaguar babies, the jade, the dragons—just make my head spin with how beautiful they are. Lecturing without addressing that emotional resonance seems so cold and distant

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 30/09/2026

Bro (art history professor) took nearly TEN minutes talking Mesoamerican art before he said anything about how beautiful they are and how much he loves them I sort of get it—your job is to lecture, to teach, and it's maybe weird to bring your emotional response to your subject into your lecture?

youtube.com

Lecture 05 Pre-Classic Cultures: Olmecs & Teotihuacan

YouTube video by Art History with Travis Lee Clark

100

22° @aldebrn.me · 30/09/2026

No Thatcher. No Arendt. No Rand. It has "Luxemburgist Socialism" but no Rosa Luxemburg, that ideology's "key figure" is Anton Pannekoek.

001

Reposted by 22°

Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com · 25/09/2026

When I tell y'all that most interviewers are bad at assessing talent, this is what I mean.🤷🏿‍♂️ I'm not even saying that Kai should change! I'm just saying that if you interview people, not being like Kai is a huge competitive advantage for you! Other interviewers being bad at assessing, is your win!

1011213

22° @aldebrn.me · 24/09/2026

“For shonen manga, the panels are separated via time, in chronological order. In shojo manga, the panels are broken up by expression and the emotions felt by the characters.” —Akiko Higashimura (famous mangaka of Princess Jellyfish fame)

animefeminist.com

Lively, Happy People: An Interview with Akiko Higashimura - Anime Feminist

We were lucky enough to sit down for an interview with Higashimura, the massively accomplished mangaka best known in English for Princess Jellyfish

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 23/09/2026

”We cannot live in isolation, under arrest inside ourselves. We can learn enormously when we recognise ourselves in alterity: the Other also loves and hates, fears and has courage—just like me, like you.“ “Games for Actors and Non-Actors” by Augusto Boal Alterity. What a word!

books.apple.com

‎Games for Actors and Non-Actors

‎Arts & Entertainment · 2021

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 22/09/2026

“If you seek to explore a carefully crafted dark fantasy setting that isn't another European analogue” 🤩 the way I bought this Has a free self-play mechanism too!?!

142

山水 “san sui”, mountains and waters, landscapes containing them. Or. Earth sea. 風水 pronounced ”fū sui” in Japanese, wind-water (feng shui).

000

The best thing about Earthsea is Le Guin’s constant paeans to the sky and the wind, the trees and the grass, the sea and the mountain “The cloud cover had dispersed, and the sky arched its pure uncolored dome over the great circle of the waters.” (The Other Wind) Earth sea. 山水 pronounced “san sui”

100

Similar vibe but much stronger, more personal, more valuable today. More of a beginning.

000

Fourteen days ago I began A Wizard of Earthsea. Today I finished The Other Wind. Words fail me. What a holy song Le Guin sang to us. It will, I predict, bring me comfort for much time to come.

100

it’s trite to say but science answered most of the questions that religion used to answer except, to me, what lies after death, and, why does misfortune fall on us (how can we control chance). Le Guin gives a truly beautiful answer for the former in The Other Wind. It brings comfort to even me.

000

“Men fear death as dragons do not. Men want to own life, possess it, as if it were a jewel in a box.” (Le Guin, The Other Wind) This is one of two things that has always puzzled me—people’s fear of dying, & people’s desire for their “own” children and not the children of others. The two are linked.

100

How did The Other Wind not spark the creation of a major religion? “When I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. … That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

100

The cheek! The might of an imagination unfettered by greed! The willingness to say, “something I love, something I AM, is in the wrong” Le Guin for ever

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 16/09/2026

Omg just got to the mic-drop big reveal of The Other Wind, Earthsea’s last novel. The decentering! Le Guin decentered almost ALL of Earthsea, all the lands and peoples and institutions that she spent five and a half novels building! Most writers make their Other bear thousand-year lies—not Le Guin!

100

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t7t1x... and I put a PDF of just the Jane Eyre chapter (from Archive.org's digitization) here

120

22° @aldebrn.me · 16/09/2026

"And what do stories afford anyway? A way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation?" —Saidiya Hartman's legendary "Venus in Two Acts" (2008) (Blacksky is full of great posts about her "critical fabulation" technique. Learning from the wise and the mighty.)

read.dukeupress.edu

Venus in Two Acts | Small Axe | Duke University Press

010

22° @aldebrn.me · 16/09/2026

Reading Sharpe's "Calendar of Coroners Rolls of the City of London, A.D. 1300–1378" and… a husband pushes his wife into a fire. A man stabs a woman in a churchyard. 😱 This line in Saidiya Hartman's legendary "Venus in Two Acts" is everything I feel— "Scandal and excess inundate the archive."

read.dukeupress.edu

Venus in Two Acts | Small Axe | Duke University Press

22° @aldebrn.me · 15/09/2026

Like, “Here’s an amazing bit of juicy lore. But I’m gonna put my character far away from it. An outsider, commenting on the grand folks.” Any other author would eagerly tell you the story of a Taon harpist. Not Le Guin! I can’t tell you how much I love that. How much it’s influencing my writing

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 15/09/2026

“The best harps in Earthsea are made on Taon, and there are schools of music there, and many famous singers of the Lays and Deeds were born or learned their art there. Elini, however, is just a market town in the hills, with no music about it” (The Other Wind) LOVE Le Guin’s effortless decentering

22° @aldebrn.me · 15/09/2026

Just came across this in *Tales of Earthsea*, the story called “Dragonfly”. The resonance of this phrase. It feels biblical, Homeric.

000

22° @aldebrn.me · 14/09/2026

Nothing like an academic book ("Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270-1400" by Zvi Razi) casually mentioning how the Domesday Book records this manor having so many plows and tenants and "There were also 8 male and 2 female slaves." Cold 💀

011

Reposted by 22°

Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com · 09/09/2026

People already in the organization! Yes, design folks, PMs, and "non-technical" roles. Non-technical in scare quotes, because people that have degrees in things like physics or chemistry from MIT, call themselves "non-technical" just because they happen to be employed as a recruiter or sales rep.🤷🏿‍♂️

011

Misread "A dragon bridge" 🐉🌉 as "A dragon bride" 🐉👰

000

"The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very different from what historians of the so-called real world do." (foreword by Ursula K Le Guin to her "Tales from Earthsea", 2001) Central to my view of historiography.

100

From Le Guin’s afterword to Tehanu: “I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath … Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.” 35 years later, still an opus 🔥

“Where’s the guy with the shining staff? Who’s going to do the big magic? A little girl? Oh, come on. That’s not a hero tale!“

Then, highlighted:

“I didn’t want it to be. By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.”

000

Tehanu has been my favorite Earthsea book. 1. Tehanu 2. A Wizard of Earthsea 3. The Tombs of Atuan 4. The farthest shore I love it when a person asks “what does this look like to those without the power?”

100

Reading “Tehanu”, and, the way Le Guin uses the goat (or goats) as narrative beats, as cuts of comedy… what a masterful storyteller. A divine smith of words. I feel like a chick in the care of a mighty pen-wielding goddess.

100

A lecture delivered under the title Children, women, me…

I turned to her 1992 lecture "Earthsea Revisioned" to see if this weird taste for monarchy in Farthest Shore was addressed. While it's a fantastic journey about Le Guin's approach to gender ("The artist who was above gender had been exposed as a man hiding in a raincoat" 🔥), it is light on kings.

goodreads.com

Earthsea revisioned

000

The Farthest Shore: The Return of the King - Reactor

This review DIDN'T answer a question I too had about "Farthest Shore"'s king stanning: "Those of us who love Le Guin, who see in her a great political thinker, how are we to make this vision of medievalist monarchy restored fit with all we have (re)read so far? What to do with the King of Havnor?"

reactormag.com

A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week we’ll be covering The Farthest Sh...

100