@tkinias@historians.social
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

tkinias

@tkinias@historians.social

Assistant professor of history & #histodon. Research race and whiteness in the British Empire (especially Queensland & British Columbia). Teach European & world history with a focus on colonialism & empire.

Previous careers include teaching English as a foreign language and a variety of IT jobs (from Web dev to pulling cables).

Linux geek & SF nerd.

Views my own and probably ill-informed.

He/him.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

reads another story about Google

God, we need a phone OS that isn’t from Google or Apple.

(No, not you, Microsoft.)

Adam_Cadmon1, to random
@Adam_Cadmon1@mastodon.online avatar

Are there any films or TV shows thay you found interesting but don't necessarily want to revisit?

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@mikey
Oh man, Requiem for a Dream was a lot
@robotwig @Adam_Cadmon1

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

That fun thing where you’re grading and you realize that you’re hearing the student’s voice in your head when you read their work.

Jennifer, to scifi
@Jennifer@bookstodon.com avatar

I need some new science fiction to read, who has some suggestions? I don't like military sci-fi. For reference, my favorite series is the Expanse, I also enjoyed Scalzi's Collapsing Empire, I love Robert Charles Wilson's books. I mostly enjoy space operas and unique stories about technology, for example I really liked the recent book Mountain in the Sea about AI and intelligent octopus. Suggestions from the awesome Bookstodon community? @bookstodon

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@Cara
I really enjoyed that!
@Jennifer @bookstodon

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@Jennifer
If you enjoy space opera, then I have to suggest Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice books if you haven’t read them yet. The focus is more on culture (and language and gender) than on tech as such, but there’s some really interesting tech stuff as well (and I’ll be a bit vague because the start of the first book is much cooler if you don’t know where she’s going with things).
@bookstodon

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@Jennifer
(incidentally, I really don’t think of Ancillary Justice as military SF, but like the Expanse there’s a lot of armed conflict going on and ex-military characters...)
@bookstodon

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@Jennifer
AnnaLinden Weller, who write it under her penname Arkady Martine, is trained as a Byzantine historian, and I think it shows in how she the thinks about culture and empire...
@Cara @bookstodon

ChrisMayLA6, to random
@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

Its been clear for ages that many public service cuts are false economies.... as a friend of mine pointed out some time ago, if you cut early intervention & prevention services (which can be relatively cheap & effective), you then enlarge the demand for more expensive (and often mandatory) crisis services....

A new IFS study that looked at closing police stations, suggests, likewise that every £1 saved by closing a location increased social costs by £3!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/04/spending-cuts-are-often-false-economies-that-end-up-costing-society-dearly

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@ChrisMayLA6
that’s an interesting example coming from a US perspective, because police budgets are usually immune from being cut—but you see things like cutting other social services, leaving police to respond to things that are not police matters (e.g., someone is having a mental health crisis, so police are sent to deal with it—resulting in a mentally ill person being shot)

bookish, to Rutgers
@bookish@historians.social avatar

We (sort of) won! Hats off to the students who kept the peace despite provocation and the colleagues who negotiated without losing their cool. Wins: will partner with ; 10 scholarships for students from Gaza (OK, drop in the bucket); new MENA program, and more. @inquiline your ex-colleagues came through heroically. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/02/rutgers-university-of-minnesota-protest-agreement

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@bookish
“protesters have been met with police violence”: God knows the Grauniad has its problems, but at least they got this framing right (unlike basically all US media)
@inquiline

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@bookish
This is good news, because it shows that Brown isn’t a unicorn. (OK, maybe Brown is a unicorn, but their solution can be replicated elsewhere.)

From an amoral admin perspective, this is so obviously the way to go—I hope we see more imitation.
@inquiline

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

AP story on the reactionary momentum in U.S. Catholic dioceses <https://apnews.com/article/catholic-church-shift-orthodoxy-tradition-7638fa2013a593f8cb07483ffc8ed487>.

The thing that’s got me thinking is how this movement ties, on the one hand, things like Latin and incense, and on the other, hard-line doctrinal rigidity and broadly right-wing politics.

I’m actually curious, though, if there is a place for Christians who want a liturgically rich service (yes to Latin and incense) but more progressive politics (yes to Liberation Theology, say?).

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

Keeping your “ooh, I need to get this book” list in the form of open browser tabs is great and all—right up to the point where you inadvertently close the wrong browser tab.

philip_cardella, to floridanews
@philip_cardella@historians.social avatar

"Preposterous in an ethical society, but we’re actually not that anymore here in the land of feverish #Trump idolatry a la Fidel #Castro in 1959. The American right-wing caudillo, who tried to derail democracy and took off with secret military documents he shared and hid from the FBI, can do no wrong."

FABIOLA SANTIAGO writes for the #MiamiHerald

We need more reporters, columnists, politicians and activists linking Trump to Castro and Hugo Chavez.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@philip_cardella
Honestly, I think it’s not a very accurate comparison because left-wing and right-wing dictatorships aren’t the same—not that I’d want to live under either, of course, but it’s important not to conflate them.

That said, the Democrats need to be prepared to fight dirty to defeat fascism, and if that means painting Trump—somewhat disingenuously—as being akin to left-wing dictators when talking to conservative Latine voters, then so be it.

CitizenWald, to Israel
@CitizenWald@historians.social avatar

I realize that campus tensions are sky-high now regarding the issue of #Israel and #Hamas in #Gaza, so forgive me for raising a particularly sensitive and controversial issue:

Can anyone tell me why, all of a sudden, educated people are writing "protestor" rather than "protester" ?!

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CitizenWald
Hmm. That’s a good question, professer!

CoinOfNote, to random
@CoinOfNote@historians.social avatar

Apologies for many posts today - I was excited after the :) In any case, I also discovered another server I could log into & search for hashtags like & & see a whole bunch of posts I never saw before. I really wish the Fediverse had a simple way of seeing EVERYTHING posted anywhere on Mastodon with a particular hashtag!
(@FediTips do you know, will me sharing posts help me see future posts from those servers, or do I actually have to follow those accounts?)

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CoinOfNote
the posts won’t be distributed to our server unless somebody over here follows that account—we don’t automatically slurp up everything that gets posted on dot-social—so when you search a hashtag over here you only see posts that our server has seen
@FediTips

tkinias,
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@CoinOfNote
this is the tradeoff with choosing servers: we have a small, well-moderated server so we don’t see the trolls and Nazis and crypto scammers that they deal with on the big servers, but we also have less local searchable content

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@CoinOfNote
I think the idea is that part of the point of decentralization is that each server doesn’t have to be able to handle the traffic of a million active users, and the way this is done is that the server only fetches posts from accounts that someone on the server follows. This makes it possible to run a nonprofit instance without a massive budget, but the downside is that it makes hashtag searching less useful.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

An old classic "what if" question is What scifi novel or movie would you like to live in?

Adult me is skeptical of most of them, they all have drawbacks.

Child me instantly knows my heart's desire.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
Honestly, the setting that most captured my imagination when I was younger was actually Traveller—there was just so much romance to it, and the mind-boggling scale of it was so alluring. Not sure I’d want to live in it, though, since my odds of being an Imperial Knight are like one in a billion.

If I were going to be a nobody (like IRL), then it’s probably got to be Star Trek. I mean, idealistic post-scarcity socialism FTW.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
BTW, there are other settings that talk a lot about big scale, but the thing with Traveller is that it really felt like there were 10,000 worlds and limitless frontiers...

18+ reginasbread, to random
@reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

are mixed drinks with beer still a thing? I just remembered that once upon a time, beer with banana juice was a summer hit. before the time of radlers, bitter taste haters would add raspberry syrup.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@carrideen
This just made me remember how when I was a kid, older American relatives used to drink beer mixed with tomato juice. I have no idea if that’s still a thing...
@reginasbread

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

Every so often I’ll think about the U.S. defense budget (around $880bn this year), and wonder where we’d be with power technology if even one percent of that money every year had been invested in fusion research. That would fund an ITER-scale project every two to three years.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@isaackuo
yeah, we just don’t know what it would have led to—but it seems likely that another hundred billion or so in investment in the last couple decades probably would have got us something

(and this is just talking about the routine US defence budget, not the mind-bogglingly extravagant expenditure on the wars in Iraq etc.)

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Stirling E. Lanier, “Hiero’s Journey” & The Long Rumoured 3rd Book, “Hiero’s Answer”

https://reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1cd6eux/stirling_e_lanier_hieros_journey_the_long/

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
memories of playing Gamma World

the early 1980s were a deeply weird time, huh?

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
I never played Metamorphosis Alpha – I was young enough that it seems to have been gone and largely forgotten by the time I was gaming in the early ’80s.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/the-myth-of-propellantless-space-propulsion-refuses-to-die/

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
I saw the banner image (the Exodus advert) first, before my brain registered the headline, and I was briefly confused and wondered if somebody had hijacked your account.

Pretty sure if your account ever posts “propellantless drives are practical spaceship propulsion” content we know you are in danger.

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