Dr. Alexis Turner
@surliertexan.bsky.social
Taking the scenic route through life. Formerly: Harvard PhD in the history of science. Currently: beekeeping in Wales Tarot, historical research, writing & editing, tutoring & consulting at drturners.com
Conversation in Greek class goes something like this every week: Them: I went to a restaurant with my children and husband. I went to work. Teacher: Brava! Me: I picked hawthorne and rosehips wild apples & made jelly. I researched traditional environmental knowledge. Teacher: .... Teacher: next
Hey #skystorians and soc folks: any recommended readings about imaginaries of past relationships to Nature and knowledge thereof (whether romanticized pasts or nasty, brutish, short, and superstititious ones)?
Conservatives in the UK: immigrants! Brown people! Losing our way of life!!! Omfgbbq1!11! Liberals in the UK: We are so diverse here! Diversity is amazing! The whole world lives in Britain! UK demographics: 83.05% white
"Each pair had a bleached and a healthy fragment. He set up five pairs so that their fragments touched each other, and five with their fragments separated by a few millimetres. In the touching pairs, the bleached coral recovered within eight weeks."
‘Incredible’: bleached corals thrive within days when touching healthy neighbour
A coral fragment can form a tissue bridge with a dying counterpart — and provide it with crucial microalgae.
nature.com
Worked for one overnight shift as a theatre tech painting sets when I was in college. I painted too slow. I never got invited back and I never got paid.
Better Things Are Possible@internethippo.bsky.social · 2d agoIn honor of the fired lady tell me about your shortest job tenure. I worked at a candy store for less than 2 weeks when I was like 16
This is the rudest, most savage thing I have ever seen
Evan@evansmithhist.bsky.social · 4d agoToday I found out that Umberto Eco crafted a version of this meme in the 1980s…
I mostly avoid saying things about people's appearances, but I am absolutely HAUNTED by Susan Dell and I cannot stop thinking about why the fuck someone would make themselves look like Nosferatu on purpose.
Getting packages in Wales is like "your package has shipped! Delivery is estimated at 10am tomorrow! Please be present to receive the package" Three days later: package shows up three doors down, sitting on the stoop.
Fascinating observations from trying to learn two languages simultaneously: There is actually very little difficulty keeping them separate. Everyone in class seems to "get" material at roughly the same pace. Waiting to converse til significant grammar & vocab are attained sucks pedagogically.
We have to talk about the weather in a city we know for Greek class today. So far for Houston I have "There is no spring and autumn, only summer and not summer."
I mostly love where I live, but getting consistent access to scholarly monographs in the hinterlands sucks.
No, clearly a trans guy who still hasn't quite realized he is a dude is still merely a Lebowski
🔞Galileo🍉@galafterdark.bsky.social · last wk."eggman" is a trans guy who dont know it yet
Well at this point it's been like 30 years, but I always got a good reaction back in college when all us cool lesbians were eating fire
Alice Sheppard@penguingalaxy.bsky.social · last wk.Quote this with something you can do that is funny or impressive, but absolutely useless. I do a really good imitation of a pigeon.
The only style of beans that are allowed to be eaten for breakfast in this house.
It's decorative gourd (and wild apple and berry picking season), motherfuckers!
Whoopsie, my AI bought off & forgave all US medical debt Oh no! My Claude accidentally went rogue and deleted every student loan file MY BAD, my Gemini hacked into every immigration database & updated the files so everyone is legal now What do you mean my bot deleted every GOP voter registration?
Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave@wolven.blacksky.app · last wk.Some enterprising hacker collective could test this: throw some vibecoded OpenAI Astra & Claude Opus bullshit together, train it on stats about student loans & what would happen if they went away, & then instruct it to free up spending power for millions of americans, & just like, see what happens…
My Welsh teacher said that the only socially inappropriate language in Welsh is blasphemous language and I can't tell if he's trying to get us all in trouble dropping "piss" and "sea cunt" in the workplace or if he is telling us the truth. Please help.
This is why I am more inclined to be strict with history and humanities students than lenient when it comes to their thinking. Because they are the ones who get hired at mega consulting companies, and entire countries will be mismanaged if they cannot do basic research and analysis properly.
I'm very poorly today, very stupid & hate everybody & everything@voxexsinister.bsky.social · 2w agoIt's worth mentioning that in Margaret Hamilton's day, programming was REAL nuts & bolts engineering, where sloppy coding would screw up a million dollar mission, & maybe kill people. The closest thing we have today is embedded systems running medical devices, & frankly, current coding is less good.
Is it just the Brits who turn historical execution houses into cutesy pubs and theme parks to play with the kids and go on romantic dates, or do they disrespect the dead this bad in other cultures, too?
"I can't overstate how little he wanted to talk about this," as if it were a mysterious deep seated pathology or conspiracy against her instead of it being the same discomfort that comes when a toddler wants to ask you loudly about your poops in the middle of a restaurant, except it's a grown woman.
☀️ Starshine@starshine.bsky.social · 2w agoimagine if she was on set all the time lol like I 100% believe this story and the key part is its a captive audience type situation
Calls for "civility," in the present political moment, is a straight-up Trojan horse for white Christian ethnonationalism. Please stop opening up the gates of the city and rolling out the red carpet for this. These people are not your friends.
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2w agosome descriptive statistics here on the civility industrial complex on college campuses that I haven’t seen analyzed before www.uncivilcollective.org/resources
Currently trying to figure out if shou sugi ban would be a safe way to finish wooden beehives for fungal, pathogen, & mold resistance while also improving humidity & winter insulation, but the only discussions I can find are how pretty it is & how it lessens maintenance time & y'all. We need to talk
Today's lore drop: This was prompted by telling a friend that I was the first person in my high school to ever come out & then 2 years later another girl came out & she got put on the cover of Houston's gay magazine for it, and I was soooo pissed. Also my lesbian "grandmother" was Morgan McFarland
Dr. Alexis Turner@surliertexan.bsky.social · 3w agoSometimes people disbelieve me when I tell them the most simple thing about my life and I am unexpectedly reminded that, contrary to my own experience of my day to day, my life has probably actually been really fucking weird
Polarization is not the problem. The problem: ethnonationalists threatening vulnerable citizens' rights. "The people who are the most 'polarized' in the U.S. electorate are those who are racist and sexist, and those who oppose racists and sexists." @lilymasonphd.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/a...
Things Gavin Newsom has vetoed this week: -A ban on secretly recording people with smart glasses -A ban on ICE agents working for the state government -A ban on websites selling your data -A bill giving native tribes more say over water rights -A bill protecting transgender healthcare providers
Sometimes people disbelieve me when I tell them the most simple thing about my life and I am unexpectedly reminded that, contrary to my own experience of my day to day, my life has probably actually been really fucking weird
Today I read that every generation in the US is drinking less than they did in the past, except for Gen X. Yeah. This tracks.
