Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s the time of year in North Dakotaland when you realize that you haven’t left the house for days and have begun to confuse the meager light of the full moon and the sun. My motivation levels are so low that I’ve begun to finish lingering book reviews just to do something. Long term research projects are just too existentially taxing. When I way poetic (which is rare), I call this the North Dakota Midwinter Acedia. Most of the time, I just wish it wasn’t so frigging cold outside.

Despite the malaise, I have managed, in an endearingly half-hearted way, to assemble a little gaggle of varia and quick hits:

• If you’re in New Orleans for the Archaeological Institute of American/Society for Classics Society meeting, you should get up, get dressed, and head over to hear our paper.

• A palindromic amulet from Cyprus. The translation is difficult but it seems to read “I can see Turkey from my house.” Wait, that’s the Sarah Palindromic amulet.

• Toward a History of Byzantine Psalters.

• Some cool Byzantine shipwrecks.

• Acidic Soil and the Greek Dark Age Diets.

• Public Punk Archaeology at the SAAs.

• Some great top tens lists for folks who like to binge read their blogs. First from Corinthian Matters (check out what made #1!) and then head over to the ASOR blog for their top 10.

• The architecture of Neoptolemos Michaelides.

• The life and death of American architecture in the year 2014.

• Some new GIS data from the good folks at the Corinth Excavations.

• Debates in the Digital Humanities Series.

• Landscapes of the American west.

• Rethinking Atlantic’s In Focus as The Atlantic’s Photo section.

• 1970s rockers in their parents homes.

• For folks who tend to only read posts once, you should head back to my Atari Game as Artifact and check out some of the updates. 

• Scroll slow and have fun. Could be the motto of my life.

• Need to feel lazy? Read this. 

• What I’m reading: Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press 2013.

• What I’m listening to: D’Angelo and the Vanguards, Black Messiah.

Let’s just agree that it is difficult to know what exactly happened here.