iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Proud of this score with three vowels hors de combat today!

Outlier game card showing a score of 851 for player deshabille (that's me)

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Imagining the person who decides to try cilantro because it's a bestseller

Cropped screenshot from a grocery store showing cilantro and tagged as a bestseller.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Dug up another one, this is from September 10 (Brown Day)? Look at that poor midday sun struggling to break through the ash dome

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I haven't heard "Orange Day" before but what else could we call this? This was my view looking out at my back yard in Berkeley that morning.

Photo looking down onto a porch with some loungers and pots, and a garage behind with trees framing the yard on either side. Everything looks like it was put through some fucked up metallic yellow filter but that's just how the world looked that day.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

No never-found-before words today, but first time I broke 800

My scorecard from today's Outlier showing score of 803

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Very niche question, but maybe one of my very niche (complimentary) followers will know. I'm trying to understand what's going on with the use of subscript dots in the apparatus for texts in this book (Raison and Pope's "Corpus transnuméré du linéare A") (1/)

Photo from page 105, showing subscript dots under some authorities in the textual apparatus.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

If I can be so so honest for a minute, I would say they clean up real well in Unicode. The actual original writing tends to look somewhere between childish and charming.

Photo of a broken clay artifact covered in Linear A glyphs. Maybe a libation table? I don't remember where this one is from. This hand is on the charming side IMO.

Photo of one of the tablets from Hagia Triada. What can I say about the hand here... the scribe was probably very busy counting grain and oil offerings and didn't have time to worry about stylusmanship.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

They do kind of have a point though

Picture of the original tablet (from GORILA v. 1)

Line drawing rendering of the original tablet (from GORILA v. 1)

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This is so funny. Trust nothing.

Picture from Raison and Pope's transcription of HT 37 (Corpus transnuméré p. 68). Line 3 has a number 6 and then vacat (i.e. the rest of the line is left blank). But the vacat has subpuncts, indicating a doubtful reading. So: we think this line is blank after the number, but we're not totally sure.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Please take a moment to appreciate the many variant forms of Linear A glyph 95 (Bennett's *80; probably pronounced /ma/)

Photo of a page from a book showing three dozen different versions of this glyph. The first one looks like a ladybug. A bunch look like cute aliens, or animal faces, or a star of David? One looks honest to god like a face from a mid-2000s ragecomic.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I would never miss a chance to share my language bookshelf!

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Why is facebook pushing posts from groups that I'm not in with AI slop images protesting AI data centers, what is even going on here

Photo-style image that's obviously AI generated, with a picture intended to show Arizona natural beauty I guess. It's all well rendered in the details but the totality is very weird and chaotic. Superimposed in the middle of says "Arizona, Not For Sale Not worth giving up an inch of this to a data center"

The image is screen shotted from Facebook and over the image at the bottom you can see the first few lines of text from the post which say: "Texas residents are increasingly pushing back against the idea that every stretch of Arizona desert ... should be turned into a massive data center."

Presumably it says Texas first because someone for some reason is churning these out at scale for every state and region, and the name of the game is slop quantity not quality.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Don't patronize me, Google

Screenshot of an email from Google informing me that my website got 20 clicks in the last 28 days

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Nice argument. Unfortunately I have already depicted myself as the smug Soviet soldier in a snappy jacket, and you as the bedraggled German soldier who just surrendered at Stalingrad.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Fantastic thread. I had no idea this was a thing. Delighted that my home state Arizona makes it on the board. Even better, that led to me finding on google maps an Arizona Fried Chicken in Indonesia with this logo

Photo of a drink cup from AFC, with the name of the chain and a rooster (?) with a sheriff hat in front of some saguaros.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Shared on fb by my former prof. Love the implication that linguistics and intelligence are polar opposites

Photo of a military recruitment office in Brooklyn. One panel says: "From linguistics to intelligence there are a lot of cool jobs"

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Current state of languages you can get voting materials in here in LA county

Photo of our voting sticker, which has the phrase "I voted!" in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Russian, Armenian, Farsi, Gujarati?, Japanese, Khmer, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Burmese, Bengali?, Indonesian, Mongolian and Telugu.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Fantastic bit of historic trivia from the Jewish Language Project

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Plenty of tough desert for sure, with real water and energy concerns. But IDK, here's a random Wikipedia photo showing the view along the river from a downtown bridge in Nevada's 8th largest city. Looks like there's space and resources for a couple more people in Elko

Photo from the Wikipedia page for Elko, Nevada. It shows a river flowing peacefully with trees and green grass on each side, and small hills or mountains in the distance. There is a bridge and some signs far in the distance down the river but otherwise you wouldn't know this was an inhabited area at all.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

extremely funny thing to say about Nevada specifically

Population density map of Nevada showing that almost all of the state has a population of less than 1 person per square mile

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Important LA transit news

Screenshot from a news article about the completion of the extension for the Purple line which they have for some reason renamed the D line:

"Metro officials emphasized the convenience of avoiding traffic while traveling underneath Wilshire Boulevard.

'You don’t have to sit in traffic,' Stanley said. 'You can ride the D.'"

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Semantics 1 instructors: time to update your "Who is the current king of France?" examples

Paragraph from the article linked by OP: “In [Montaclair's] view, the medal is not a forgery. A forgery implies that there is a genuine medal. As the genuine philology medal does not exist, his medal cannot be a forgery,” Lallois said.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Happy birthday to a real one

Text of the poem "Telemachus' Detachment":

When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

If you let me write a website for kids this is the kind of shit I would come up with

Screenshot from kiddle.co which is apparently a Kids Encyclopedia. Presumably some kind of scrape/transform with LLMs using Wikipedia data? I say that because for some reason they have an article on the Old English medical spell/prayer/recipe "wið færstice." This is the text of the first two paragraphs of the article:

"Wið færstice is an old medical text written in Old English. It's found in a collection called Lacnunga, which is kept at the British Library. The name Wið færstice means 'against a sudden or sharp pain'.

Long ago, people believed that sudden pains, like a sharp stitch, could be caused by witches, elves, or other spirits. This old charm was meant to help cure such pains. While some experts think it might have been for rheumatism, it could have been for other kinds of sudden pain too."

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Did everyone else know that Francisco Franco styled himself "protector of Islam" and sponsored a hajj during the Civil War?

Paragraph from an article in the London Review of Books: "In 1937, Franco sponsored a hajj to Mecca. To transport pilgrims, his government took the Spanish steamship Dómine (‘O Lord’), outfitted it with a mosque, and renamed it al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, the Arabic for Morocco. On board, the Spanish government organised Sufi liturgies and ritual sessions of dhikr, the invocation of God’s name. Styled as the ‘protector of Islam’, Franco met with the pilgrims in Seville, in the Royal Alcázar’s Islamicate throne room, where he delivered a speech framing Spain as a new Mecca. In the Arabic translation, Franco speaks in Quranic idioms; the general, al-khaniral, himself becomes Muslim. ‘It is difficult to overstate the sheer political strangeness of this moment,’ Eric Calderwood has written. For the Francoists, the appeal to ‘Hispano-Arab’ unity was a way to frame Spanish colonialism as superior to its counterpart in France, a foreign invader that used tactics of divide and rule against Arabs and Berbers to destroy Moroccan unity. (The Spanish colonial regime’s support of the Moroccan nationalist movement – legalising political parties and even financing several of them – paved the way for Moroccan independence in 1956.)"

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

We don't talk enough about how the old lady whispering hush appears to have a full set of Loebs

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

this post on tumblr really nailed the vibe for tdov this year

Screenshot with text that says "Happy trans day of visibility!!!! 🎉🩷🤍🩵🎉". Underneath is a still from the Lord of the Rings movie showing Frodo collapsed in a miserable hear on some rocks in Mordor or somewhere while the light from the Black Tower shines on him. He looks like he is extremely not enjoying this moment of visibility.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Mixed bag but yes absolutely a lot of that. IIRC one guy just left for a full time Wehrmacht propaganda job, before resuming his academic work after 1945. Then you have cases like whatever this is.

Translated snippet from the German Wikipedia page for Martin Schede: "Schede had also been president of the German Oriental Society (DMG) since 1939. The Aryan Paragraph was finally introduced there in 1940. He negotiated with the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) to have its "Turkestan Working Group," whose main task was the training of military mullahs for certain SS and Wehrmacht troops , incorporated into the DMG. This so-called "field mullah" complex belonged to the "Reich Foundation for Regional Geography," which the SS had been operating under various names since the end of 1943. The planned integration into the DMG, which was negotiated during 1944 and to which Schede had agreed according to SS records, did not materialize due to the war."

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

*Yamnaya vampire voice* Actually that one wasn't ours

Screenshot showing the etymology section from the Wiktionary page for sabulum (Latin word for gravel): "Traditionally derived from Proto-Indo-European *sámh₂-dʰ- (compare Ancient Greek ἄμαθος (ámathos), ψάμμος (psámmos), English sand, and possibly Old Armenian աւազ (awaz)) with a diminutive suffix -ulum. However, according to the EIEC, such a reconstruction is phonotactically impossible. More recent scholarship considers the Latin to be from a European substrate, with the original form *(p)sam- or *sab⁽ʰ⁾-. Under this view, the terms listed with *sámh₂-dʰ- are cognate and derived from the same substrate continuum, but not the ones listed with *sem(h₂)-."

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

The mighty Santa Cruz, pictured here at near-peak flow

Aerial photo of the Santa Cruz river flowing through the outskirts of Tucson. Well, not so much flowing. The channel is mostly dry and dusty but you can see a little trickle in the middle that just kind of sadly stops and disappears. There's also an area in the channel where a few green plants have managed to grow, standing out from the beige desert dirt.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Choosing signs for tomorrow

Photo of posters on a wood floor: "Only Losers Work For ICE"; "Fuck ICE", "Dykes Against ICE", "Quo usque tandem abutere Donalde patientia nostra?"

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Come to think of it, they went after the Greeks in that hearing too!

Testimony continues:

"MRS. FLANAGAN: Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.

MR. STARNES: Put that in the record because the charge has been made that this article of yours is entirely Communistic, and we want to help you.

MRS. FLANAGAN: Thank you. That statement will go in the record.

MR. STARNES: Of course, we had what some people call ‘Communists’ back in the days of the Greek theater.

MRS. FLANAGAN: Quite true.

MR. STARNES: And I believe Mr. Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn’t he?

MRS. FLANAGAN: I believe that was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists.

MR. STARNES: So we cannot say when it began."

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Brings to mind the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearing where they investigated whether Christopher Marlowe was a Communist

Screenshot showing HUAC testimony between Representative Starnes and Halley Flanagan of the Federal Theater Project:

"[Starnes quoting Flanagan:] ... They intend to remake a social structure without the help of money—and this ambition alone invests their undertaking with a certain Marlowesque madness.” You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?

MRS. FLANAGAN: I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.

MR. STARNES: Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all that we want to do.

MRS. FLANAGAN: Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Most extraordinary of all to me (but tucked in a corner you could easily miss!) was a set of tablets, including the Tripod Tablet that proved Ventris' analysis of Linear B as Greek!

ke-re-a2 *201 VAS[
ti-ri-po-de , a3-ke-u , ke-re-si-jo , we-ke *201VAS 2 ti-ri-po , e-me , po-de , o-wo-we *201VAS 1 ti-ri-po , ke-re-si-jo , we-ke , a-pu , ke-ka-u-me-no[
qe-to *203VAS 3 di-pa , me-zo-e , qe-to-ro-we *202VAS 1 di-pa-e , me-zo-e , ti-ri-o-we-e *202VAS 2 di-pa , me-wi-jo , qe-to-ro-we *202VAS 1 [
di-pa , me-wi-jo , ti-ri-jo-we *202VAS 1 di-pa , me-wi-jo , a-no-we *202VAS 1

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Leah @dreamsofvenus.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Rounded out the year by visiting the extraordinary "Kingdom of Pylos" exhibit at the Getty Villa, which included treasures from the Griffin Warrior's tomb - apparently their first time outside Europe.