Everyone's coming (back) to Mastodon this weekend thanks to a certain social media acquisition. Here's an old blog post of mine which I wrote after a similar influx in 2018 but which I should update at some stage.
I haven't been posting as many daily links thanks to being at a conference and then preparing for a day of training last week. Teaching PhD students how to use Git was more fun than I imagined, and I've got a whole post in the works about how the maintainers have been messing with git pull since 2020.
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Does Gandalf know the sun is a ball of fusing hydrogen? This is some high-grade nerding, a follow-up from Does Gandalf know about atoms? With recent adaptations of both Tolkien and Dune, the thing I miss is some self-awareness that science fiction and fantasy is, in some sense, inherently camp and ridiculous, and that this is part of the fun. Related: we should overthrow the hard/soft sf dichotomy in favour of straight/gay, and it's not a simple mapping: Orphan Black is simultaneously very hard (if by that we mean scientific plausibility) and very gay.
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Spectral slices of overtone singing, animated I may be the last music nerd on the planet to not know that human beings can sing two notes at the same time.
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Cat superstitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries