Things I like: Doctor Who • History • Genealogy • accordions • interactive fiction • fountain pens • reading • Scots Gaelic • old museums • libraries • Scotland • Venice • Tolkien's books • coffee • archaeology • Terry Pratchett's Discworld • bookshops

And yourself?

(copied over from Bluesky)

I've read at least five books by each of these ten authors:

Douglas Adams
Agatha Christie
Charles Dickens
Terry Pratchett
Neil Gaiman
Enid Blyton
Ellis Peters
JRR Tolkien
Ian Rankin
CS Lewis

(picking up on a meme I've seen especially on Bluesky)

I'm just pondering some ideas that I may expand into a full blog post on my academic blog for my musings. I wrote a similar blog post some years ago and it may be a good time for an update.

I'm off Twitter now. My account still exists, and hasn't been closed - I'm reluctant to wipe it or remove the tweets, for historical preservation (haha right, yup in Musk land!) reasons. But I never login, and my latest post says I'm basically off it now.

Facebook is for family and friends. Largely to keep in touch with Martin's close family and also lots of my friends. I also help fellow vasculitis patients from time to time in our Vasculitis UK support group there.

Dreamwidth is for a mix of more fan based posts (e.g. what I'm reading, watching etc, thoughts about Babylon 5) and a place I can vent some more private restricted stuff (including that I can't post wider e.g. on Facebook). Rather a curious mix! But it is working for me. I was on LiveJournal for many years before then.

Mastodon feels like a rather shaggy dog of a social network. I mean that as a compliment. It's rather anarchic and chaotic, but friendly, and I like to post lots of informal things there. It's also a bit of a vent for me. I'm less likely to post serious history stuff there than genealogy things and - and above all probably! - accordion stuff.

I'm newly on Bluesky. I was surprised to find so many familiar faces and friends there. I'm thinking it's probably going to be more somewhere where I engage with fellow academic historians - there are a *lot* of them on there. But my thoughts on that are still evolving. And it will need to open more widely to truly work.

I did try Threads but didn't get on with it - though my account still exists. It doesn't offer as much to me as Instagram and seems more like seeing people interact with famous people rather than wider engagement.