iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Noah Blan

Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Now available in Open Access.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

After 3 years of 100+ loss seasons, my Chicago White Sox have clinched a spot in the playoffs. 🖤⚾️

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NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 19/09/2026

I interrupt your timeline to bring you a wood duck wearing a leash.

A wildlife expert stands at an event table behind a wood duck. The wood duck wears a harness and leash for security.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I’m thrilled to share that my book Carolingian Ecological Sovereignty is out now with @archumanities.bsky.social ! You can order physical copies now, and the open access versions will be available sometime in early October. www.arc-humanities.org/978180270283... Keep an eye out for updates here 📚

arc-humanities.org

Carolingian Ecological Sovereignty - Arc Humanities Press

During the early Middle Ages, the ecological was political—as it is today. For the Carolingians, the governance of nature was integral to the making of emp...

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Why is the Netflix NFL broadcast quality so bad? Can they not handle all the streaming? Fuzzy picture. Tinny sound. This is an atrocious product.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Just like that it’s Drew Lock time.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If you’re the next president (regardless of party), you give QatarForce One a reaaallll long look under competent scrutiny and a proper shakedown before using, right? Or maybe just…scrap the whole thing??

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Claire E. Aubin @ceaubin.com · 03/09/2026

TODAY ON @thisguysucked.com: The excellent Jamelle Bouie @jamellebouie.net tells me that George McClellan was a racist coward who deserves to have his name cursed forever. So we tried our best to do that.

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

My (non-academic) friend/neighbor, slightly high, begged me to sit by the pool with her while she did her SoCal thing but I wanted to read so I ended up reading The Odyssey out loud to her and now she is 1000% IN for the journey.

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Elise Schuenke @troubledminnesotan.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Genuinely one of the most influential graphic novelists of all time and her passing is so heartbreaking. Please read Persepolis if you haven’t, it’s a poignant story of resistance that deserves all the love

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

“I’d like the ‘chipper chicken’”

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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

If you've already had your doom quotient for the day, I'd recommend skipping this.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

This is a post in which I remind myself and anyone who cares why Oathbreakers (www.harpercollins.com/products/oat...) by @profgabriele.com and @lollardfish.bsky.social is so great to read but also to teach with. But let me back up a bit first to explain why I’m teaching it at all.

harpercollins.com

Oathbreakers

“Fascinating.” — The Wall Street Journal “An enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset.” — Publishers Weekly The authors of The Bright Ages return with ...

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Sometimes you are ready to face the work day and sometimes you are down a rabbit hole looking at 2,000 BCE Japanese pottery that looks like Snorlax before 8AM.

Several photographs of a Jomon period piece of pottery that is tall, getting wider at the top, and around the rim is a design that looks similar to the sleepy Pokemon Snorlax.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Got my TDAP booster today. Cheers to another decade of immunity from nineteenth century diseases! 💉😷

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

There isn't a sigh hard enough for these dumbass headlines. Warriors were a SOCIAL GROUP, and later a legal classification. Gender was not relevant to whether one was part of a warrior group/family/etc. You might as well write: THIS JUST IN: WOMEN EXISTED! www.the-independent.com/asia/japan/b...

the-independent.com

Half of Japan’s samurai were women, groundbreaking exhibition at British Museum says

‘Samurai’ explores over a thousand years of Japanese history related to the elite warrior class

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

SAUCE CALL! Someone gifted me a yuzu ponzu sauce (!) and it got me thinking, maybe I'm not bored with food, maybe I'm just not punching it up enough with dope sauces. Do you have a sauce that's killer? Smother everything in it? A chimichurri you'd smack on a donut? Tell us us (me) your secrets! 👀

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Me: Did you miss me? Him: Did you miss ME??????

A cream colored tabby with a dumb face and alien eyeballs gazing up to sneef snoof his mother. Fox is a babby.

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

It's that time of year! Since 2020, when we all started saying "I didn't have that on my bingo board!" I have been collecting the most brain-breaking, exasperating, and otherwise unexpected news throughout the year. But this year felt kind of special, didn't it? Who could keep up? This felt right.

A 49-space homemade bingo board labeled "I CAN'T EVEN. GET ME OUTTA HERE. 2025 BINGO" with a picture of the moon and a tiny rocket ship flying towards it, indicating that we are simply done with the earth after this year. Instead of actual entries on each bingo spot, all of them say "2025," because this was one fucking year, amirite? The FREE SPACE spot also says "what just happened" and one of the spots says "2025 intensifies" with other 2025s superimposed on the background to indicate the intensity of how goddamn terrible this year was to live through. Yikes on bikes, folks! Take a deep breath and send good vibes into 2026.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

As course evaluations open, don't forget the importance of telling students *why* evals matter. I like to explain their use for TT faculty vs. contingent faculty and how students contribute to ed processes through them. I also explain biases, with this helpful viz: benschmidt.org/profGender/#...

A visualization of different disciplines plotted against numeric values, with blue dots representing male instructors and women representing female instructors. To the left is text: Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews
I've had trouble keeping this site up continuously during COVID. As of March 2021, I'm now trying a new strategy to cache common queries on the server even when the underlying database is down. If you find that many searches don't change the results, that's why.
This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.

Search term(s) (case-insensitive):
use commas to aggregate multiple terms

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The Tonearm @thetonearm.com · 09/11/2025

"He and other teachers hand-picked students who looked like they might be isolated, or might be into darker art and music — kids who might be potential metalheads. More than fifty students initially enrolled. By the end of the first semester, kids were sneaking out of other classes to join."

hcn.org

Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation - High Country News

In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.

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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

That Roman database of roads that's been in the news: treat with some caution.

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Revan @revan.eurosky.social · 02/11/2025

Did not expect one of the best paragraphs I’d read about baseball would come from an Irish newspaper www.irishexaminer.com/sport-column...

And in that pause between pitch and contact - longer than logic, shorter than hope - we remembered why baseball existed long before we judged a sport's value by viral moments and betting apps. It is the romance of failure. The mortal beauty of trying and missing seven times out of 10 and still being considered great. It is the only sport where patience is a weapon, and panic the surest death. You cannot simply run out the clock in baseball; you must face it, pitch by terrifying pitch, until it finally releases you.

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Today for my materiality class we read a chapter in Karen Gerhart's book The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan, and based on her fastidious work I created a competitive "set up the medieval death scene" game. 💀 My students competed to set up the corpse with the correct trappings.

A small model of a tatami room with green mats. It has on each of the four sides model white curtains placed, and inside a model of a dead figure in a coffin surrounded by little paper priests and a mini folding screen with gold. There is a white sheet of paper representing a death shroud over the corpse.

Close up of a small model standing byobu folding screen with green bamboo patterns over gold.

A pile of small models on a fake tatami mat foam board, including white paper death shrouds, gold painted folding screens, and tiny corpses in coffins.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Important: “What unites these professionals is their expertise in designing and delivering on the academic mission of the university, with special emphasis on student success…In essence, they do academic work, but without academic protections.”

insidehighered.com

Academic Staff Need Academic Freedom, Too (opinion)

Colleges cannot continue to operate as if all staff work is identical, Aaron Stoller writes.

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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

COVER REVEAL AND PREORDER: The Public Scholar - A Practical Handbook. "Perry focuses on the practical details of how to approach public scholarship. How do you pitch a piece to an editor? When should you follow or ignore the rules of the genre? And what happens once your piece is out in the world?"

Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

All-day wildcard baseball and a series-concluding W matchup this evening featuring a supremely gutsy Fever team and on the other side the league MVP makes for quite a day of consequential sports viewing.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Well, at least we know with certainty that the bears are not a serious team. Changes my commitments for the season probably for the betterment of my mental health 🙃

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

It absolutely matters here that Pritzker was effective at sounding the alarm and plainly stating this would be unconstitutional in a profoundly radical and fundamental way, and showing he could rally practical popular opposition, which then gets spun as backing out over "legal headaches."

Alayna Treene
@alaynatreene
Trump shelved his plans to target Chicago as the next city for his domestic crime push after advisers warned him that sending in troops to help with local law enforcement (without buy-in from the state’s governor) could create legal headaches they want to avoid, sources familiar with the matter told CNN

Now he’s going to Memphis

W/
@HBRabinowitz
https://cnn.com/2025/09/12/politics/chicago-memphis-trump-national-guard

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Star Wars Holocron @swholocron.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

ANDOR creator Tony Gilroy likes the idea of a Kleya and Vel ‘Nazi hunters’ spin-off series in which the duo hunt after former Imperials following the fall of the Empire with the assistance of Dedra Meero in a Hannibal Lector-esque role. (Source: youtu.be/mGBXFWvPRsE?...)

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CJ Fogler @cjzero.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

the turf at Soldier Field does not look great

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Nostalgia is corrosive. It dwells on remembrances of the past at the expense of the present or future possibilities. Memory is imperfect. We tend to privilege what makes us feel better. Related, I for one look forward to the Chicago Bears at Arlington Heights and the end of the “Bear weather” myth.

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Mina Kimes @minakimes.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Oooo we got a Sunday night classic on our hands!

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

An all-NFC North matchup on CBS feels very 80s.

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Noah Blan @noahwblan.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

End of 3rd quarter. This game feels like it’s been on for 3 days. Anyway, Go…Blue.

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

We are excited to share that online registration for our upcoming symposium is open! Anyone interested in premodern Japanese law and/or the law from a Global Middle Ages perspective should check it out! Abstracts all online! ⤵️

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