Friday Quick Hits and Varia (and some Photo Friday)

After a mild week of springlike temperatures, we are once again under a winter weather warning and are expecting some amount of snow (5-8, 6-12, 7-10 inches or something). We got about three inches last night in a gentle first round and this afternoon round two is scheduled to kick off.

This weekend isn’t the worst time to be snowed in. There is the holiday. The Sixers continue their efforts to avoid the play-in tournament. The Phillies try to find their early season footing on a west coast road trip. The NCAA tournament reaches a crescendo as well. The highlight of the weekend is probably the Derek Chisora-Deontay Wilder fight which I’m not sure whether I’ll watch or not. 

I have a pile of reading to get through this weekend, mostly for the final push of the semester, a book to finish typesetting, and maybe some writing. We’ll see.

But first, a word from our sponsor. The Digital Press’s latest book, Sebastian Braun’s Bearing the Burden of Booms: Energy, Extraction, Communities and Landscapes on the Plains (2026) has received some nice attention in the local media. Check it out here and in the video interview below.

And now onto a tiny list of quick hits and varia: 

• Pasts Imperfect.

• Women who shaped archaeology in Greece and the Greek world.

• Academizines!

• Thoughts on Diamond Open Access.

• Twelve Days of the Year.

• Noodling’s Varia.

• A New President at NDSU.

• The watches on Artemis II.

• A guide to David Murray’s music.

• What I’m reading: Caroline Cheung, Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine. 2024.

• What I’m listening to: Cecil Taylor, Dark to Themselves. 1992.

Those who have been following my photography know that I leaned into my obsession with my Sigma DP2’s Foveon sensor. It is absolutely remarkable.

That said, I still like my little Ricoh GRIII especially for its high contrast b/w setting which renders scenes as if they were etched in metal.

This week, I got my Sony a7cr back from a thorough cleaning and I put on my Voigtlander “fast fifty” and took it on a walk in the flat North Dakota late winter light. I’m not sure any of the photos I took were good necessarily, but they did force me to think with a fully manual set up again. The details and dynamic range of this big Sony sensor is really amazing.

My next big step is to get a better sense for how these cameras capture what I’m thinking about doing each time I go for my walk. I want to be deliberate in how I use them rather than just grabbing whichever camera I feel like I want to use.