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generalising.bsky.social
Andrew
@generalising.bsky.social
210 followers 72 following 630 posts
Not another one to try and remember. We'll see.

Librarian. Scholarly communications, historic MPs, Wikipedia, inter alia other things. Misplaced Scot.
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Reposted by Andrew
alopex-ii.bsky.social
Tumulus builder: The grand burial of our chieftain will grant him immortality. Our way of life shall reign eternal

Artisan pressing coarse fibers into clay, unknowingly damning 1000 years of his descendants to be known the Coarse Fiber Ware Culture: oh for sure
January 17, 2026 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Andrew
asls.org.uk
Compton Mackenzie served with British Intelligence during WW1. Banned under the Official Secrets Act in 1932, the original version of his war memoir wasn’t published until 2011 – & was still not officially declassified in 2017…

Mark David Kaufman on “Spyography”
2/4
scalar.usc.edu/works/the-sp...
The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945: Spyography: Compton Mackenzie, Modernism, and the Intelligence Memoir
Mark David KaufmanAlvernia UniversityAbstractThis article traces the interwar emergence of the spyography, a mode of life-writing that shares much in common with literary modernism, including a fraugh...
scalar.usc.edu
January 17, 2026 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Andrew
kitwhitfield.bsky.social
Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/
January 17, 2026 at 10:34 AM
generalising.bsky.social
Jahangir on the rakhi (he liked the idea)
has gone to the abode of the dead. In the time of my revered father the Hindu Amirs and others in imitation of them performed the ceremony of rakhi in adorning him, making strings of rubies and royal pearls and flowers jewelled with gems of great value and binding them on his auspicious arms. This custom was carried on for some years. As they carried this extravagance to excess, and he disliked it, he forbade it. The brahmans by way of auguries used to tie these strings and (pieces of) silk according to their custom. I also in this year carried out this laudable religious practice, and ordered that the Hindu Amirs and the heads of the caste 1 should fasten rakhis on my arms. On the day of the rakhi, which was the 9th Amurdad, they performed the same rites, and other castes by way of imitation did not give up this bigotry ; this year I agreed to it, and ordered that the brahmans should bind strings (of cotton) and silk after the ancient manner. On this day by chance fell the anniversary of the death of the late king.2 The
January 17, 2026 at 2:17 PM
Reposted by Andrew
iucounu.bsky.social
at last we will be free from the backbreaking drudgery of ordering pizza from a menu and even counting how many people the pizza is for www.theverge.com/tech/863365/...
Pizza chain Papa Johns is one of the partners integrating Google's agentic shopping features into its ordering system. Customers will soon be able to order via a chatbot that can autofill in their last order, suggest items based on dietary restrictions, add coupons and deals, and use a "pizza assistant" to get recommendations for group orders. In a demo video shared by Papa Johns, the chatbot assistant asks for the number of people in the group. Don't want to count how many people are eating? No problem - just upload a photo of everyone in the group into the Papa Johns chatbot.
January 16, 2026 at 7:16 PM
generalising.bsky.social
For some reason I am reading the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangir. Conquest, rebellion, execution , endless gifts to retainers, and then a page of just thinking about fruit.
As I had experienced the excellencies of Kabul, and had eaten most of its fruits, in consequence of important considerations and the distance from the capital, on Sunday, the 4th Jumada-1-awwal, I gave an order that they should send out the advance camp in the direction of Hindustan. After some days I left the city, and the royal standards proceeded to the meadow of Safld-sang. Although the grapes were not yet fully ripe, I had often before this eaten Kabul grapes. There are many good sorts of grapes, especially the Sahibi and Kishmishl. The cherry also is a fruit of pleasant flavour, and one can eat more of it than of other fruits ; I have in a day eaten up to 150 of them. The term shah-alu means gilds1 (cherry), which are obtainable in most places of the country, but since gilds is like gilds, which is one of the names of the chalpdsa (lizard), my revered father called it shah-alu. The zard-alu paywandi 2 is good, and is abundant. There is especially a tree in the Shahr-ara garden, that Mirza Muhammad Hakim, my uncle, planted, and is known as the Mlrza'l. The apricots of this tree are quite unlike the apricots of other trees. The peaches also are very delicious and plentiful. They had brought some peaches from Istalif. I had them weighed in my presence, and they came exactly in weight to 25 rupees, which is 68 current misqdl. Notwithstanding the sweetness of the Kabul fruits, not one of them has, to my taste, the flavour of the mango. The parganah of Mahaban was given as jagir to Mahabat Khan. 'Abdu-r-Rahim, paymaster of the Ahadis, was promoted to the rank of 700 personal
January 17, 2026 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Andrew
toadally.bsky.social
We experienced a truly incredible moment at the aquarium when this octopus decided to be a total jerk to its tankmate.
January 16, 2026 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Andrew
nogoodwyfe.bsky.social
can’t stop laughing since learning that the earliest Oxford hall/college statutes forbade students from keeping dogs, falcons, and ferrets and then when King Henry IV founded King’s he made sure all of those were forbidden and added *monkeys, bears and wolves* to the list of banned student animals
January 16, 2026 at 10:27 PM
Reposted by Andrew
matthewkilburn.bsky.social
Paul Kerensa recalls 'Broadcasting on the Barricades', a mischievously disturbing broadcast by Ronald Knox, on its centenary. open.substack.com/pub/paulkere...
Fake(d) News and the First Radio Hoax - 'Broadcasting the Barricades' on its centenary
It's 100 years since Father Ronald Knox demolished Big Ben, roasted alive dignitaries... and terrified BBC listeners
open.substack.com
January 16, 2026 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Andrew
lauropea.bsky.social
naked? don't be such a luddite! the emperor has generative clothes from a large weaving model
January 15, 2026 at 11:22 PM
Reposted by Andrew
quillmatiq.com
And with the amount of money they're burning through, there's going to be *so* many ads.

Like, you think Google's above the fold looks bad? Just you wait.
January 16, 2026 at 7:38 PM
generalising.bsky.social
The man in the centre was a distant relation of Edgar Allen Poe; he was asked to leave Princeton twice, then went on to have a career including mining, ranching, surveying, and military service for four countries in six wars. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_...
publicdomainrev.bsky.social The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 3d
Photograph of Princeton students after a snowball fight between freshman and sophomores, 1893.

More images of snowball fights through history here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/snowball-fights
January 16, 2026 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Andrew
jasonv.bsky.social
Every example of ai being useful begins with "okay imagine you're in a situation, and you are very dumb"
"Here’s an example that Google’s Josh Woodward, VP of the Gemini app, Google Labs, and AI Studio, shared in a blog post about how Personal Intelligence can work. Google also put together a similar example in a video that I’ve embedded below: For example, we needed new tires for our 2019 Honda minivan two weeks ago. Standing in line at the shop, I realized I didn’t know the tire size. I asked Gemini. These days any chatbot can find these tire specs, but Gemini went further. It suggested different options: one for daily driving and another for all-weather conditions, referencing our family road trips to Oklahoma found in Google Photos. It then neatly pulled ratings and prices for each. As I got to the counter, I needed our license plate. Instead of searching for it or losing my spot in line to walk back to the parking lot, I asked Gemini. It pulled the seven-digit number from a picture in Photos and also helped me identify the van’s specific trim by searching Gmail. Just like that, we were set." https://www.theverge.com/news/861576/google-gemini-ai-personal-intelligence-gmail-search-youtube-photos
January 15, 2026 at 5:08 AM
Reposted by Andrew
molly.wiki
This is how free and open access works. There is no way to have a free and open access project and then go “wait, no, not like that”.

www.citationneeded.news/free-and-ope...
January 15, 2026 at 7:18 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Not that you would know it from the headline, but the actual story here is "we made them pay us some money for copies rather than scrape the site in a really annoying way"...
January 15, 2026 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Andrew
depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social
wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage
January 15, 2026 at 1:47 PM
generalising.bsky.social
This is my new favourite thing. (Best results so far: set to 8x12 pieces, easier on something without quick cuts or deep shadows)
krfabian.bsky.social K | krfabian @krfabian.bsky.social · 6d
Absolutely delighted to learn that while every other program out there is trying to find new ways to shoehorn AI into its features, VLC is just like, "Ever get bored watching a movie? Have you considered solving it as a jigsaw puzzle while you watch?"

www.tumblr.com/thefloatings...
Reblog by @thefloatingstone · 4 images
💬 0  🔁 77159  ❤️ 92393 · I just found out VLC media player lets you do this????
www.tumblr.com
January 12, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Reposted by Andrew
mthrjo.bsky.social
This overlooks two points, the first being that Elon Musk exercises a lot more power than Isaac Newton, and secondly, Elon Musk is in no way intellectually comparable to Isaac Newton.
mikepeeljourno.bsky.social Michael Peel @mikepeeljourno.bsky.social · 8d
"I think it is naive, frankly, to say that we should get rid of him because he’s a bad person," the new UK Royal Society president says of Elon Musk's membership.

The society would have expelled Isaac Newton if it made judgments on character & behaviour, Paul Nurse says.

www.ft.com/content/088b...
Elon Musk should keep UK Royal Society membership, says president
Paul Nurse tells FT that national science academy should avoid ‘making judgments’ about ‘character’ of fellows
www.ft.com
January 11, 2026 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Andrew
asls.org.uk
Dear Ann, wherever you are
Since you lately learnt to die,
You are this unsetting star
That shines unchanged in my eye…

Born in Kirkwall, Ann Scott-Moncrieff was a friend of the Orkney poet & translator Edwin Muir, who wrote this poem for her when she died.
#womenwriters #C20th
7/7
Edwin Muir FOR ANN SCOTT-MONCRIEFF (1914–1943) Dear Ann, wherever you are Since you lately learnt to die, You are this unsetting star That shines unchanged in my eye; So near, inaccessible, Absent and present so much Since out of the world you fell, Fell from hearing and touch— So near. But your mortal tongue Used for immortal use, The grace of a woman young, The air of an early muse, The wealth of the chambered brow And soaring flight of your eyes: These are no longer now. Death has a princely prize. You who were Ann much more Than others are that or this, Extravagant over the score To be what only is, Would you not still say now What you once used to say Of the great Why and How, On that or the other day? For though of your heritage The minority here began, Now you have come of age And are entirely Ann. Under the years’ assaults, In the storm of good and bad, You too had the faults That Emily Brontë had, Ills of body and soul, Of sinner and saint and all Who strive to make themselves whole, Smashed to bits by the Fall. Yet ‘the world is a pleasant place’ I can hear your voice repeat, While the sun shone in your face Last summer in Princes Street.
January 11, 2026 at 4:39 PM
generalising.bsky.social
There seem to be more coins around? I don't think I ever encountered anything above Rs 2 on previous trips. Having Rs 10/20 coins now rather than incredibly worn notes was useful.

(And card payments stride ever onwards: used a lot less cash in general this time)
January 10, 2026 at 9:32 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Iona's entire family are baffled I like methi but generously cook with it for me anyway.

(Food wise, this trip's discovery was nan katai, which is a perfect shortbread)
January 10, 2026 at 6:27 PM
generalising.bsky.social
On which note, Indian MasterChef is great fun even if entirely in a language I do not, technically, speak. We watched it every evening and I have stronger opinions on who should win than I have ever had for a TV show
January 10, 2026 at 6:27 PM
generalising.bsky.social
My Hindi is still abysmal (lots of disconnected nouns & no grammar) but somehow I was nonetheless able to distinguish accents when watching TV.
January 10, 2026 at 6:27 PM
generalising.bsky.social
I still stand out like a sore thumb in our Delhi suburb, but it's nice to feel like I have a reason to be there and to amble around without having to be A Tourist. I went and just sat in the mandir gardens on my own one evening and it was such a quiet pleasure.
A crossroads in an Indian suburb at night, with a couple of small stalls
January 10, 2026 at 6:27 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Indian whisky is suddenly very good (and relatedly, I am absolutely delighted to discover that "look like Japanese whisky" is a legit marketing technique to use now)
A bottle of Indri malt whisky, with a stylised black and red logo reminiscent of Japanese writing
January 10, 2026 at 6:27 PM