Musical Jolly Chimp 🧙🏻‍♂️

أوروبا لا تعاني من "مشكلة" واحدة، بل من ثلاث مشاكل: ثلاث دول أوروبية تعاني من حالة "دوار ما بعد الإمبراطورية" الحاد. أولاً، المملكة المتحدة: تلك الأمة التي صوتت لصالح "بريكست" كي "تستعيد السيطرة"، لتكتشف لاحقاً أنها نسيت تماماً كيف تقود. إن أزمة الهوية البريطانية تشبه مشاهدة أسد متقاعد يحاول تبني نظام غذائي نباتي. لقد استبدلوا الثقة الإمبراطورية ببرامج تدريبية في "الحساسية السلوكية" تليق بقسم موارد بشرية. أرض "تشرشل" تُحكم الآن من قبل بيروقراطية "الدولة المربية" المترامية الأطراف، والتي تخشى الإساءة لأحد على منصة (X) أكثر من خشيتها من الانحدار الفعلي. أما الشرطة البريطانية، التي كانت يوماً ما محط حسد العالم، فتبدو الآن وكأنها تكرس مواردها للتحقيق في "حوادث كراهية غير إجرامية" وطلاء سيارات الدورية بألوان قوس قزح، أكثر مما تفعل في حل جرائم السطو. إنها أمة تتشبث يائسة بجماليات التقاليد — العائلة المالكة، المراسيم، الشاي — بينما نخر "العفن التقدمي" مؤسساتها حتى جعلها تبدو أكثر تطرفاً من حرم جامعة كاليفورنيا. إنهم يريدون "هيبة" القرن التاسع عشر، لكنهم مشلولون بالهشاشة العاطفية للقرن الحادي والعشرين. ثم تأتي فرنسا: العمة الغاضبة المدخنة بشراهة التي ترفض الاعتراف بأنها عاطلة عن العمل منذ عقود. يتجلى "دوار ما بعد الإمبراطورية" لدى فرنسا في حالة دائمة من التمرد التي تتخفى وراء قناع "المشاركة المدنية". هويتها منقسمة بين نخبة واهمة لا تزال تعتقد أن باريس هي عاصمة الكون، وشعب يعبر عن "بهجة الحياة" بحرق مواقف الحافلات كل يوم خميس. يعاني الفرنسيون من "عقدة نابليونية" بدون وجود نابليون؛ فهم يطالبون بمستوى معيشة إمبراطورية فاتحة بينما يعملون 35 ساعة في الأسبوع ويتقاعدون في سن يكون فيه معظم الأمريكيين في قمة عطائهم. ينظرون للقيم "الجمهورية" والعلمانية المتشددة، ومع ذلك فقدت الدولة سيطرتها على مساحات شاسعة من ضواحيها. فرنسا باختصار هي متحف جميل في الهواء الطلق، حيث القيمون عليه في إضراب، والحراس يخشون الزوار، والإدارة مشغولة بإلقاء المحاضرات على بقية العالم حول "العظمة" (Grandeur) بينما فواتير الكهرباء لم تُدفع بعد. أخيراً لدينا ألمانيا: العملاق العصبي الذي قرر أن الطريقة الوحيدة للتكفير عن تاريخه هي ارتكاب "انتحار صناعي" بطيء. إن "دوار ما بعد الإمبراطورية" في ألمانيا هو مرض مناعي أخلاقي؛ فالبلاد مرعوبة من ظلها لدرجة أنها استبدلت الفخر الوطني بجلد الذات العنيف وقوانين إعادة التدوير. هويتهم مبنية على كونهم "القوة الأخلاقية العظمى"، وهو ما يترجم عملياً إلى إغلاق محطات الطاقة النووية التي تعمل بكفاءة تامة من أجل حرق الفحم القذر، كل ذلك بينما يلقون الدروس على جيرانهم حول البصمة الكربونية. إنها أمة من المهندسين الذين هندسوا مجتمعاً لا يعمل. الروح الألمانية، التي عرفت يوماً بالكفاءة والانضباط، تحورت إلى بيروقراطية مشلولة حيث ملء الاستمارة الصحيحة أهم من النتيجة النهائية. إنهم مستميتون لتجنب الظهور بمظهر "التهديد" لدرجة أنهم تحولوا أساساً إلى منظمة غير حكومية ضخمة تمتلك جيشاً يستخدم "مقابض المكنسات" بدلاً من البنادق، خوفاً من أن يُفسر إظهار أي حزم على أنه انتكاسة للماضي.

@AntigoneJournal I've been following and loving your account for awhile and this is the first take I've seen from you that strikes me as, forgive me for saying so, rather dumb. There is obvious utility in having such transcriptions over not having them.

Transcription and translation are very different things. This is about the former, which would require every word to be checked as accurate if there is a one-in-ten-word error rate. We already know which texts are more and less interesting. Which is why this amount of output, with so high a level of error, doesn't help the cause much.

This touches a common confusion with AI errors. It's true you can't *rely* on translation that is wrong 10% of the time. But you can *focus* lamentably scarce human experts. Choose the 1% "most interesting" AI translations and have humans redo them. x.com/AntigoneJourna…

@TheUntranslated It's very good. Acquire and use the audio recordings. The Legentibus app is good for lots of excellently pronounced Latin audio, including Orberg.

I'm leaning towards Latin because I want to use this textbook

@kepano @obsdmd Media tracking mostly. It would be really nice to have summary tables without showing every row from which it is derived. For example, a Bases table of unique author names pulled from an "authors" list property with a count of how many books have this author.

what do you use @obsdmd bases for?

@grahamscheper @Ignorantiae Came here to say the same and I discover your dust jacket policy is even crazier than I thought! 😜

@Ignorantiae I actually have them all saved in a large drawer of my desk. Can’t bring myself to throw them away for some reason

Since I posted my “for fun” bookshelf, here is my “work” bookshelf. I like grouping books by publisher, and the visual result is somewhat mesmerizing.

@grahamscheper LOL! For a very niche audience perhaps, but I'm here for it.

At the very least he correctly observed that the second stress of the b-line (fur) cannot participate in alliteration, which many beginners forget.

“Baggy sweatpants | boots with the fur” scans perfectly as a line in the alliterative stress-based meter of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Sievers would call the first half-line a “type A” and the second a “type E”. Here is the scansion: / x / x | / \ x / With alliteration on b, of course.

@LizWolfeReason My wife and I traveled a lot with our kids too. Temperament matters a lot and is heritable. Chill parents have chill kids. People who aren't chill can't seem to fathom that some kids are actually pleasant little humans.

I took my first to 10 countries in his first 3 years. It's easy if you a) don't overpack & b) are highly adaptable by nature. But not everyone is wired this way, and I don't think it's a character flaw if you're not into it or don't think it's worth it.

@Cary_Bleasdale @AntigoneJournal This is the way!

@musical_chimp @AntigoneJournal Not lending but GIVING. If you aren't giving away copies of your best beloved books you are a poltroon, a neerdowell, a varlet of the first water

The proper attitude to bookbuying: one for reading and inevitably getting damaged; one for lending out; one for "best" on the shelf.

@AntigoneJournal Re-reading use cases: 1 great books I re-read for enjoyment (LOTR being the canonical example) 2 non-English books read intensively and extensively I find my marginalia distracting when it's not wanted.

@musical_chimp Nice. But when is the middle one wanted, if the third already exists?

@kepano outline plugin should support changing the H tag level on drag events so levels aren't skipped in the hierarchy. Should help me do so quickly to fix malformed docs.

give me one TINY thing you want fixed or improved in Obsidian — going on a paper cuts rampage

Happy Public Domain Day! An extensive of what notable works are entering the public domain in the USA today! 🧵

@grahamscheper Got most of my Loebs the same way, including this full run of Livy. Now if only I ran into used Dumbarton Oaks volumes with the same frequency!

The first thing you have to do whenever you find a new used book store is buy every single Loeb they have. Unless there’s a chance I will be at that bookstore in the near future in which case please leave them for me!

My first year at Michigan, I found a catalogue entry for an unpublished papyrus preserving portions of Odyssey 4.380-90:

Philology – a love of words – is at the heart of the Antigone project. And today, we're delighted to announce a major annual prize for Classical Philology. The winner takes home the *full* Loeb library, and £5,000. Please share this news, and do go visit: antigonejournal.com/2025/11/antigo…

'He has a point, but he's too blunt.' From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it's proved shockingly successful. Trans activists' shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they've been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step. Time and again, I've seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. 'Well, yes, maybe there's something in what you're saying, but it's hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can't you be nice? Why won't you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don't you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?' As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, 'it's not that I couldn't see your point, but did you have to say it that way?' We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it 'gender affirming care.' We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn't exist. Either a man can be a woman, or he can't. Either women deserve rights, or they don't. Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't. Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you're not. The alternative to being 'blunt' - using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on - was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We've always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

@robbysoave Revenge over Empire is a Millennial hate crime against Gen X.

1. Revenge of the Sith 2. Empire Strikes Back 3. Rogue One 4. A New Hope [big gap, and these next four are pretty close] 5. Attack of the Clones 6. The Phantom Menace 7. Return of the Jedi 8. The Force Awakens [big gap] 9. Rise of Skywalker 10. The Last Jedi 11. Solo

@AntigoneJournal I read the Classics one by Mary Beard and it sucked.

OK then. Here's a personal top ten* of the VSI series. Feel free to post your own! Animal Kingdom - Holland Beauty - Scruton Knowledge - Nagel Machiavelli - Skinner Mathematics - Gowers Music - Cook Ovid - Morgan Paul - Sanders Philosophy of Science - Okasha Spanish Civil War - Graham * From someone who has only read about 40% of the series!

TIL that for some weeks in 1946, the bestselling book in Britain was an edition of The Odyssey. Was that the last time a Classical work was *the* top bestseller?

A tweet that makes apparent that Tom knows stuffy Latinate words like occluded and sublimated.