It really should not be as stressful as it is proving for me to be paid for work I'm doing.

An employer wants to pay me for some work, I want to do the work, my Institute/employer is happy to help facilitate, the work won't take me over any working time regulations, and the money is there to pay for the work.

And yet, still quite possible that I'll be faced with a choice between not getting paid and pay with levels of international tax complexity that'll make me physically ill from stress.

Good morning folk and friends from far and near!

Today I wish you motivation and the energy to use it ✨️

With Microsoft shutting down Publisher and apparently making it fully unusable someday very soon - I was still using it as I had access to it anyway via a family 365 subscription - I need to work out what to make posters with now.

Anyone got any suggestions? Ideally, you know, functional and reasonably simple, I don't like event making posters and I'm bad at it but I have to do it regularly. And free or at least not on a subscription.

Boosts welcome!

@JubalBarca @electricarchaeo "SASA (in the USA) is seeking a part-time Video Game Researcher to join the Archaeogaming Education (AE) Team and contribute to the development of these innovative educational resources. The Video Game Researcher will identify appropriate video games, play and evaluate selected titles, and capture high-quality gameplay footage that can be incorporated into Archaeogaming Education Modules." https://www.saveancientstudies.org/apply-with-sasa #ancMedToot

Reading update! I read The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale, which is a very light read and has a cosy, observational Pratchettianism about it which I enjoyed.

https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=173712

#Books #AmReading

Anyway if you're interested in games and gaming, medievalism and history, game dev and role-playing games, or anything like that, the Middle Ages in Modern Games blogpsot-conference has just finished, it's all freely available so please make some of the Very Many Hours I put into this stuff worthwhile and go read things that look interesting and comment or tell people about them and stuff:

https://middleagesinmoderngames.net/mamg26/2026-programme/

Boosts welcome etc!

#games #gaming #medieval #history #gamedev #indiedev #ttrpg

Daily birds 48 - Northern Lapwing

The most tiring moments in life are the ones where you go "huh, that felt like a solid day's work" and then look at what needs doing and realise that in the hours between this time and sleep you probably have another 'solid day's work' worth of work to get done.

Forthcoming lecture! The End of the "Silk Road" by Philip Slavin -

A 2022 Nature study established the Central Asian origins of the Black Death, but research on the demographic, economic, and social consequences of plague remains overwhelmingly Eurocentric.

This lecture will address this by examining biological and ecological crises in the urban, and socio-economic transformation of Chinggisid Central Asia. Philip Slavin identifies biological and ecological crises in textual, archaeological and bioarchaeological records from the Volga to western Xinjiang. He argues that these played a central role in the demographic decline and nomadisation of Central Asia, demonstrating that these processes began decades before Tamerlane’s campaigns and cannot be explained by military destruction alone.

13th October 13:13-15:10 Central European Time
Central European University, Quellenstrass 51, 1100 Wien
Or join online by (Zoom): https://bit.ly/4zcCJ1X

#medieval #centralAsia #history

The final day of #MAMG26 is starting over on https://middleagesinmoderngames.net in just a few minutes! Please head over and join in the discussions - panels on gender, nostalgia, and ideas of deviance in game medievalisms all to come today!

#Gaming #GameDev #Medieval

The No AI List now has a category "Books, Authors & Writers", where my homepage is currently the only entry.
http://noailist.org/books-and-authors/
If you are writing books without the help of AI, why not add them to the list?
#noai #books #writers #authors

Last, but certainly not least, is our third paper, 'Designing around medieval sources: a thought experiment' by James Baillie, demonstrating the possibilities of informed design experiments in this space! #MAMG26 James is online and keen to discuss this more in the comment section at: https://middleagesinmoderngames.net/?p=1472

#medieval #gamedev #indiedev #caucasus #byzantine #history

Masto question - if you edit a post and add the hashtags in after it has been posted, will those still propagate and be visible correctly across other servers etc?

RE: https://mementomori.social/@juergen_hubert/117371451723895923

Is anyone who follows #MythologyMonday interested? I still have a few open slots for beta readers!

It's the Middle Ages in Modern games conference this week! MAMG is a public, fully text-based conference with blogpost-style contributions and comment discussions so everyone (yes, including you, dear reader) is welcome to join in, comment, ask questions, etc.

If you're interested in games, medieval history, or both, please check out @MAMG and the website at:
https://middleagesinmoderngames.net/

Boosts appreciated!

#medieval #gamedev #history #gaming #games #histodons

There's a lot being said about this atm. I have various thoughts, but I wanted to make a point as a polling nerd -

Backing a unitary one-state Palestine seems to be now an article of leftist faith and is now English/Welsh Green policy.

But who isn't backing it..? Palestinians! It barely scrapes polling in double digits: (E.g. PCPSR this August: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/1014).

I'm... dubious at the western left advocating a future for Palestinians that they're not asking for.

The feeling of writing things that are basically in an attention competition with a mix of better positioned professionals and infinite bullshit machines is getting to me today.

I genuinely have no idea how many people ever read my stuff (whether that's actual academic papers, blogposts, stories, forum posts, whatever), but it doesn't feel like most of it makes any impact, which then makes it harder to push myself through the barrier of writing more things to put on the dust gathering piles.

RE: https://social.lol/@thetonearm/117372323808043630

I think a thing it's hard for almost any modern person to wrap their head round with premodern religion is the extent to which it is *everything* - the medium through which past people expressed authority and radicalism, love and hatred, closedness and openness alike. We (religious and non-religious alike) today are so used to religion being a more separable sphere, one much more strictly dominated by its institutions, not an undercurrent through every aspect of thought.

https://mein.aufstehn.at/petitions/menschenwurde-statt-misstrauen-fur-ein-faires-begutachtungssystem

Like almost everyone with me/cfs I have talked to, I got a completely wrong disability assessment and have to continue fighting for my basic rights for months and months.

Barely able to walk small distances, almost completely impossible to do most of my hobbies or work, and yet they think that's 20% Grad der Behinderung and blaming it on mental health issues.

I had no idea about this - the company Historic England outsourced digital image provision to has gone bust. There is no way for the public to now access the images. Absolute travesty

https://www.sarsen.org/2026/09/historic-englands-photos-didnt-vanish.html?m=1

"SmartFrame did not store the Archive. It streamed it: zoom, captions, right-click protection, screenshot blocking, anti-scrape. A public body wrapped a national collection in a start-up’s DRM. When the start-up died, the pictures went with it"