Zeb_Larson

Zeb_Larson, 6 months ago to random

Spent the last thirty minutes trying to write up how a Pascaline works and it's been a really effective reminder that I'm actually kind of stupid.

Zeb_Larson, 6 months ago to random

Anybody got any music recs? Open to just about anything today.

Zeb_Larson, 6 months ago to random

Mastodon periods of activity posting really come and go, and right now it feels like we're mostly in a lull. Outside of the handful of regular accounts I can count on, it feels sleepy around here.

Zeb_Larson, 10 months ago to history

Ok, I'm apparently getting a big follower bump for some reason, so...I'll do my best to make sure I have entertaining content? I post about #history and #music and share some of my published #writing here, but I also shitpost a fair amount.

Zeb_Larson, 12 days ago to random

Watching this guy (the assistant chief of the NYPD) accidentally pepper spray himself is only topped by his fellow cops trying to wash oil-based pepper spray off with water…on his forehead. Straight into his eyes.

https://www.amny.com/news/nypd-chief-pepper-spray-manhattan-bridge-protest/

Zeb_Larson, 7 months ago to random

Mastodon is a community divided between enjoyable weird nerds who know that they’re weird and proud of it and unlikeable weird nerds who insist that they’re normal and also you’re wrong.

Zeb_Larson, 1 month ago to random

One of the most tired genres of academic posting is complaining about your students. A lot of it is mean-spirited (how dare these kids not treat my exact passion with the seriousness I did!), but a lot of it is also just fucking lazy. Congrats, as a trained expert in your field you managed to nitpick a freshman to death, or discovered that they (gasp) skipped a reading.

Zeb_Larson, 11 months ago to random

I like the idea of social clubs as they exist in Britain (though the elitism behind many/most of them is a non-starter), partly out of the sense that it would be nice to have a community to go and socialize in, but also because it would be nice to have an actual professional network for once in my life.

Zeb_Larson, 10 months ago to history

Here's my piece in defense of the Yugo! Am I trolling? Not exactly. (Maybe a little). The Yugo sucked in a lot of ways, but was it the worst #car of all time? Why? And why are the many failings of American cars today given a pass in comparison to the Yugo, which was mostly just a cheap box on wheels? Should a car necessarily be more than a cheap box on wheels? #history #histodons

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/yugo-automobile-car-industry-yugoslavia-fuel-efficiency

Zeb_Larson, 10 months ago to mastodon

Alright, we’re experiencing a #mastodon resurgence and I’ll be damned if I don’t ride the wave for as long as it lasts. Time for a #music game.

1 boost OR 1 like = 1 new album I enjoyed (last ~5 years).

Zeb_Larson, 3 months ago to random

I don't think I can really go back to Bluesky at this point because so much of the discourse boils down to "what are we fighting about today?" and it's boring. Mastodon went through a phase of this last spring and it was obnoxious, but it was mostly fighting about Mastodon.

Maybe where I'm going with this is that I'd love for online discourse to be more than a contest to take something down and find the people who are secretly problematic.

Zeb_Larson, 2 months ago to random

One of my weird historiographical hills that I will die on is how poorly congressional records are saved. There is no requirement that they save their papers, and there are no requirements about how they make them accessible. It is honestly kind of a crisis; it allows our elected representatives near-complete control over their history and the history of legislative governance in this country.

Zeb_Larson, 2 months ago to random

I come back to this piece again and again because I think it gets at so many Americans’ blind spots about dictatorship. There’s an implicit faith that “it can’t happen here” because people would find it to be intolerable, but for a lot of us (those who tend to be more privileged) it would be tolerable. There were white Republicans in the South during Jim Crow: they were gerrymandered into meaninglessness and grumbled about their lack of power, but they got by fine.

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/9/14207302/authoritarian-states-boring-tolerable-fascism-trump

Zeb_Larson, 2 months ago to history

A former cooperante recently reached out to me about an oral #history project.

Cooperantes are people who volunteered to work in Mozambique and Angola when the Portuguese left in 1975. Basically all of the trained civil servants and others left with them, and as colonizers they never bothered to train anybody around them. It jumpstarted a lot of people's work in development spaces; it also created long-term links for people in Southern Africa.

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Zeb_Larson, 1 month ago to random

“People can just learn about history in their spare time, they don’t need to go to a four-year university to learn about it”

Buddy, I’ve seen how that generally works out and it ends with a 55 year-old man yammering to me about Erwin Rommel until I chew my arm off and flee.

Zeb_Larson, 8 months ago to random

I’ve been alternating between Mastodon and Bluesky and I like both (honestly, people I actually know are on the latter), but I’ll say this: not having hashtags is a pain in the ass. I don’t want to have to opt-in to multiple feeds.

Zeb_Larson, 9 months ago to random

The thing I always come back to about neoliberalism is that the state is actively complicit in mythmaking about its own weakness. If people recognized that it was strong, then it would be compelled to act (in theory), so the best thing to do is appear helpless before capital.

Zeb_Larson, 9 months ago to random

I’ve never been a great runner and never will be, but I was able to do 4 miles in 35 minutes today and I’ll take the damned win.

Zeb_Larson, 4 months ago to history

"Out of 1799 historians who received a PhD in the US between 2019 and 2020, 175 have full-time faculty positions."

Good to be in the majority, at least. The whole profession feels like it's dying. #histodons

https://contingentmagazine.org/2023/01/07/a-profession-if-you-can-keep-it/

Zeb_Larson, 2 months ago to random

Help hold me accountable, friends of Mastodon: I swear that I’m not doing anymore career conference panels. It doesn’t matter if the conference is free (because not having to pay to donate my time isn’t actually a perk of any kind). It doesn’t matter if I like the people organizing it. It especially doesn’t matter if they flatter me. No more. 2024 is the year I rid myself of this needless obligation.

Zeb_Larson, 3 months ago to random

In a high lonesome sound kind of mood, and I love Nick Shoulders. Almost got to see him here last November but he got sick and had to bail. (Not a total loss — even masked, I haven’t seen music at an indoor venue since before Covid). https://youtu.be/3I7ME1oacMA?si=g0TdEY3m-YFvOsqH

Zeb_Larson, 6 months ago to academia

@thesiswhisperer was kind enough to let me muse on why it is that so many academics still cling to Twitter a full year after Musk took it over. Turns out, replacing its as part of the credentials arms race in hiring or as the only genuinely open forum in #academia is hard.

https://thesiswhisperer.com/2023/11/01/more-thoughts-on-the-enshittification-of-academic-social-media/

Zeb_Larson, 4 months ago to history

I got bored last year at work and wrote a series of drinking games for people attending career panels at academic conferences. Since the AHA is going on right now, I decided to slap it together and write it up so that people can sit through them the right way. I don't have a whole lot of respect for these (which is funny, because I do them from time to time), and I'd like to see this as a way to call attention to their foibles. Or get drunk.

https://medium.com/@zeblarson/the-academic-humanities-career-panel-drinking-game-d7fcd8d080f9

#histodons @academicchatter

Zeb_Larson, 2 months ago to history

I went to give a talk tonight (something I rarely do anymore and was starting to miss) about the #history of mental healthcare. And as I was driving home, it hit me how much working in that sector radicalized me. I’d always been a progressive Democrat, but three years in community mental health really disabused me of pretty much all my faith that society as currently organized can provide care to marginalized people.

Zeb_Larson, 5 months ago to random

Aldi is the Linux of grocery stores.