Jacob

So I’ve completed my latest project: a run-through of the history of de-extinction, exploring the many methods that have been tried and treating it as a social phenomenon around science rather than just a snazzily marketed science topic. From Nazi cattle to modern questionable corporate claims.

It’s pretty standard fare for the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá to get used by bad historical sources to represent an Aztec temple or something but I just happened across an educational-resources site where it was passing as an Egyptian pyramid. I have lost years of my life by psychic damage.

Whether it's this or Sanxingdui: Future Past, I think it's worth pointing out that nobody is even asking for AI-generated movies at all. The only selling point is that it's cool that a computer can make the moving pictures, but you can see that free online and it's tiring to people by now.

Very good read and summary.

I enjoy the pretty horizon of the crepuscular hours when the dawn starts to break. The night isn’t forever but let’s use the day well.

Alhamdulillah.

Guys, genuinely, learn multiple languages. Consume media in multiple languages. Get new perspectives and humor and opportunities. You don’t know what you’re missing until you do it and you don’t realize how easy it was to be in a specific cultural bubble speaking one or two. And it’s fun.

We’re currently babysitting a King Charles spaniel named Pookie and Agnès has taken to getting along with him. The two spend their time together watching whenever someone’s in the kitchen as you can see from both last night and this morning.

Last night in the Jacob dream report was convoluted because I woke up multiple times due to Brazil but one segment involved me finding an old book someone was giving away, Lonely Planet’s The Axis, about traveling in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. Aight.

So fucking based.

It’s gotta be more than 50% right now. My Brazilification injection dose is way up.

Pogging so hard right now.

YES, YES, YES, YES. OK, incredible news. Love you, Brazil. I can go back to bed.

This whale looks like it’s about to make an absolutely terrible offensive joke.

Me and who? (Miniature painting of an Indian ruler, probably Ram Singh II, maharaja of Jaipur from 1833 to 1880, hunting a tiger on horseback with his mistress riding him in the meantime. Probably late 1830s.)

Chastising Paarthurnax after he relapses.

Things are going well, but I expressed that I wasn’t quite satisfied with my ability to identify mosasaurs and asked semi-jokingly if she wanted to learn more with me. She laughed it off and I looked down to remember I had the Mosasaurus shirt on. Seer, what does this mean?

Narrative history of human-animal interactions.

Old-people Bluesky is incredible.

I love these. I’m the one on the left because today is gonna be a good day despite everything.

Sweater weather.

Quality thread on one of my favorite murals in the world.

One of my favorite incidental details I learned reading today is that the Roman military outpost that would become Strasbourg was called Argentoratum, but in Medieval Latin this often got rendered as Argentina. So we had a good visit to Argentina today.

Highlights of our little day trip to Strasbourg, where I met up with some old internet friends. This city was founded by the Romans, was the first city with a printing industry, was a center for the Protestant Reformation, and its cathedral was once the tallest building in the world.

Gorgeous piece!

On the train from Paris to Strasbourg. Choo-choo! Taking a little day trip to have a group meet-up of some internet friends. Have a goofy window photo of the French countryside. Send train-ride memes and articles.

I was sent the news of two Scottish museums taking Egyptian mummies off display after deciding it was improper. I’ve worked with human remains and don’t have a fundamental problem with displaying them but I don’t really think the contrary view should be given the culture-war beatdown. Here’s why.

I appreciate that every scientific field I’m interested in is advancing constantly and that I can often know things the very day of publication via the researchers putting it out there or the friend groups I’ve built around the topics that share these things fast.

Truly we live in the realm of a wicked Demiurge and our only hope is gnosis.

I love the zoo-builder genre deeply and know that a wave of disappointment posts are natural after any very anticipated release, but the fact that everything I see about Planet Zoo 2 is talking about glitches and uncanny animations is very disconcerting.

With spooky season well on its way, I’d like to shoutout the ice mummy Ötzi, who lived in the Tyrollean Alps before his death around 3230 BC. Ötzi was a Chalcolithic man who carried a copper ax and stone tools and made use of both wild and domesticated plant and animal resources.

One of my Muslim friends said he once had a Mormon therapist who tried to explain Mormon concepts in Islamic terms and that she said that the children of Nephi fleeing to America was sort of like the Hijra.

I’m cooking up some Halloween stuff right now and testing some things. I just wanna say that writing in cuneiform on your own chest while looking down on it is hard, as regards visibility, keeping text straight, and not making the characters accidentally backwards. Nobody will notice but I will.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... I’m gonna be publishing sample chapters of the thing I’m writing soon, one of which takes place on ancient Flores, but hello to Megapodius rokusi, a 3.9-kilogram ground-laying bird that apparently also lived on this island, scientifically published today!

I was saying on r/writinghelp yesterday that there’s just no need in my writing for AI in the draft phase because having my own voice and a story, fictional or non-fictional, that I am capable of telling at a good quality requires my sincere capacity to command and mean it from the start.

Shamash not quite impressed with Nebuchadnezzar II’s handiwork until a little door bolt goes 🥺 🥺 🥺.

Skircle time!

O, look, it’s the next weird and morally dubious arc for the Colossal Biosciences crew.

This seems like a fun book.

Many years ago I went to a short traditional opera show in Ulaanbaatar. It wasn’t a particularly large venue, just a well-decorated stage room within a larger Soviet-style block building within the city. But the vocals were so powerful and grand. There’s nothing like operatic throat-singing.

Finishing up a chapter that takes place on the Eurasian Steppe and so it’s another Mongolian music night. Shit goes so hard. I wanna ride across the steppe with a falcon on my arm and carry messages for the örtöö to organize the conquest of all under the Eternal Blue Sky, guys. I’m so productive.

Choose your familiar, y’all.

Always impressed by how ornate Indian cultic statuary is and how it captures form so well in a way that implies movement.

Thank you, official WikiHow YouTube channel, very cool.

Isn’t this the title of that Matt Walsh documentary?

Both are extremely common names so it’s not actually that cool when someone points out a Jacob or an Alexander in a piece of media. Yeah, of course you know one or two or seven, which is why I must always redirect the conversation back to here.

Baby, what that pachycephalosaur hyoid apparatus do?

How I wanna be, getting cozy and enjoying a nice view.

Dinosaur tree! Dinosaur tree! Araucaria is a very old genus of tree, dating all the way back to the Middle Jurassic Period. Back in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they had a global distribution, but they are largely just in the southern continents today in the Age of Mammals.

For a bit I thought I’d compare my administrative struggles to Sisyphus and have a joke about that but then I remembered the type of followers I cultivate and you’d probably just quote Albert Camus at me and I really can’t have you all imagining me happy about this.

God closed Noah and his family in and for two million years the Carnian Pluvial Episode came down upon the Earth.