@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

A rough thing about being stuck at an airport for going on nine hours is the constant noise.

I just want to be somewhere quiet.

Quiet and cool.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@RogerBW
Heathrow is vile. Though I think Gatwick is worse somehow.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Just accidentally read a whole mess of replies to a couple bad posts, in agreement with/filling in the thesis of the bad posts, and hoo boy there are some bad takes on here

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@inquiline On the Internet?!

elysegrasso, to random
@elysegrasso@historians.social avatar

May 19. How did you settle on your MC’s appearance?

I'm not sure I have.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@elysegrasso
Something I’m never quite sure how to handle, if writing in a tight third-person with only one POV character, is how to describe that MC’s appearance—unless there are noteworthy things that the character is notably either vain or insecure about, such that it would show up in their inner voice.

nyrath, (edited ) to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

New book on worldbuilding.

Author says: "Architect of Worlds is what happens when the guy who wrote three different solar system/planetary generation systems for GURPS is told he doesn't have a word count and spends 7 years tracking every paper on exoplanet systems he can find."

Dead Tree edition: https://www.adastragames.com/products/architect-of-worlds
PDF edition: https://www.adastragames.com/products/architect-of-worlds-pdf

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
It’s hands-down the best I’ve seen. I don’t think you can do much better without running fairly advanced simulations, or at least doing math that’s more complicated than will fit in a book like this.

tkinias, to history
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

An addendum to my post about the 15C breviary using <ç> for <z>: It also shows up in 16C Italian inscriptions which affect a medieval style, like this one from Santa Maria Novella. But, notably, it never seems to be used in inscriptions which use roman letterforms.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Google translate between Icelandic and English has gone from 75% useful, 25% laughable nonsense to mostly unusable in the space of a year. You used to be able to use it effectively as a dictionary. Enter a single word and you'd get the most common dictionary translation

Now, half the time you'll just get nonsense.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@baldur
“plausible-sounding nonsense” is really where we are these days
@karlhigley

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 idolatry a la Fidel 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

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.

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,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@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...

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