listen.

I have no side blog, this is my dumpster fire I have been recklessly curating for too many years. Medieval history PhD candidate. The Pie Hero.

[goldengirlschildhood]

10 Books for 2026 & 5 History Books for 2026

I did not finish my 2025 list for various reasons, but 9 out of 10 isn't bad!

The goal: to read 10 books on my shelf right now. No other restrictions this year. I'm tired.

The Merchant of Venice by Willie Shakes

2. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano

3. Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason

4. August 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

5. Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments by Sappho

6. The Misfortunes of Virtue by Sade

7. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

8. Moonflow by Bitter Karella

9. The Cloisters by Katy Hays

10. The Aeneid by Virgil, trans. by David Ferrry

Honorable Mention: Lady Pamela by Clare Darcy

5 History Books

I also have many (so many) non-fiction history books on my shelves that I want to challenge myself to read. There are no rules for picking these. I just need to select 5.

The Ghost Map: the Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts by Robert Bartlett

What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Mary Louise Roberts

Doing Digital History by Jonathan Blaney, Sarah Milligan, Marty Steer, and Jane Winters

The Devil Is Here in These Hills by James Green

Honorable Mention: The Devil's Historians by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant

Previous Lists:

2024 | 2025

[werewolf-transgenderism]

oh my god I just saw the cutest thing in the world. little Black girl with beads in her hair for the first day of school and the beads were pink then silver then a bunch of yellow then beige then grey to make them look like pencils 🥺🥺🥺 brb I will draw an artist’s rendition

[werewolf-transgenderism]

^ like this. waaaaaugh 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

[amoraando]

[tineiya]

[genderoutlaws]

Never read Baldwin before?

Nonfiction

The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)

The Fire Next Time (pdf download)

Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)

Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)

The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)

Fiction

Giovanni's Room (pdf download)

If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)

BONUS

Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)

Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)

Another Country (pdf and epub download)

Sonny's Blues (pdf download)

Going to Meet the Man (pdf download)

[creatingblackcharacters]

My next Black History Month request:

Pick one of James Baldwin's works and read it!!! The Fire Next Time is an excellent essay, most of us are familiar with the quote on gay white people from The Last Interview but not the rest of it. If Beale Street Could Talk even has a movie!

[elierlick]

Remember when a UK bookstore offered visitors the opportunity to vandalize Harry Potter pages for 25 pence? They raised over £4,000 for transgender healthcare! And now they need your support. Emily, co-owner of The Bookish Type, is fundraising for her own gender-affirming surgery that's covered in every Western European country aside from the UK and Ireland. Let's help her like she helped dozens of other trans people access care in an increasingly hostile nation. Support her on GoFundMe here.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Not enough water for UK’s datacentre plans, trade body says

Industry says government’s failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed’

“There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs,” the briefing said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” In May, a House of Lords report said England faced a 5bn litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055. Water UK said datacentres were already being built in water-stressed areas, with more than three-quarters located in the south and east of England. Millions of people in these regions have been placed under a hosepipe ban by water companies after prolonged extreme heat and lack of rainfall.

[...]

The government has designated datacentres as critical national infrastructure, on the basis that their loss or compromise could result in “major detrimental impact on the availability, integrity or delivery of essential services” and “significant impact on national security, national defence, or the functioning of the state”. Oliver Hayes, head of big tech and campaigns at the campaign group Global Action Plan, said it was not clear why datacentres had been given this status, but that water companies may be powerless to restrict their water use as a result. This could risk datacentres being prioritised over households at times of peak water demand. “I think it is highly likely that we’re going to end up seeing datacentres that are actually running chatbots, or enabling people to do benign and very wasteful, pointless things, protected and given favourable treatment when it comes to resources,” Hayes said.

21 July 2026

[tiktoks-we-like]

[callunavulgaris]

I fell in love with this chicken on sight....and I knew I had to draw her. What an iconic, confused little lass.

[sartorialadventure]

A gun hidden within a bible, made for Francesco Morozini, Doge of Venice (1619-1694). The owner of the bible could pull the silk bookmark to shoot while the book was still closed. Now on display at the Museo Correr in Venice.

[smokingrozanov]

T shirt that says “I ❤️ getting laid” & then on the back it says “to REST” with a photo of a coffin + the name & phone number for a local cemetery. Please follow for more advertising ideas

[nathanielthecurious]

sappho translations really have the rumi translations problem

[nathanielthecurious]

all i am saying is

the grammarian Aelius Herodianus in the 2nd century CE writes "οἱ δὲ Αἰολεῖς... ποθέω ποθήω οἷον καὶ ποθήω καὶ μάομαι", which means "and the Aeolians... [spell] potheō 'I long' as pothēō, for example, 'and I long and I seek'"

and the scholars look at that and say "the dialect sounds like Sappho and Alcaeus, and those four words sound like the sort of thing that Sappho would write" and they slap a fragment number on it and say that that's Sappho Fragment 36

and Dan Beachy-Quick translates it "and longingly I long and searchingly I search…"

and different people do different things with those four words and some of what they write is good poetry and someone on instagram attributes "longingly I long and searchingly I search" to Sappho

and is that Sappho? is that really Sappho?

[goldengirlschildhood]

Garden Update, 08.11.2026

The relentless thunderstorms have turned it into a jungle, knocked my freshly tied up plants over, and threaten to burst my tomatoes. Wet. It is all so Wet.

[thememedaddy]

[goldengirlschildhood]

i have finished the full day of training i had to do for this adjunct position. tell me why i had to spend an hour learning about stormdrain pollution at construction and industry sites

[sexybritishllama]

just finished this month's book club book, went skimming goodreads reviews afterwards as you do, got my breath taken away by this absolutely brutal ending to one of the multi-paragraph 1 star reviews

[leonardcohenofficial]

this did make me legitimately cry with laughter

[not100bees]

I know that Ea-nasir is like a meme these days but it is wild that we have complaint letters from 1750 BC. That's over three thousand years before the release of Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up the Jam".

[lustcannibalism]

they invented a new low just for me