Rosemary Joyce

@rajoyce.bsky.social

6304 Followers 1075 Following

Archaeologist, anthropologist, once upon a time blogger. Author “The Future of Nuclear Waste”, “Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives”, “Sites, Traces and Materiality”. Distinguished Professor Emerita of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, Honorary PhD, Leiden Univ

A street sign in Oxford England says “No stopping” on a yellow background above “End” on a white background in larger letters. Read as two imperatives it creates a crisis of decision making: don’t stop? Or end—which is after all a stop…

A very poor quality video clip of a gray cat on a gray pillow on a gray couch in a room with gray walls. She is focused on an iPad screen at the left. Crouching, her ears flick forward, her muscles tense. There are birds twittering. She lives indoors and hunts toys shaped like sushi and tacos. This is a revelation.

Large rock with multiple facets, scars left where blades were removed by applying pressure to the flat side (opposite the end we are viewing). The image is black and white but the rock itself is black volcanic glass, obsidian.

Egon Schiele “Versinkende Sonne” (Setting Sun) painted 1913, in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Painting uses somber colors to suggest hills and countryside in the foreground from which two trees grow. The trees extend to the top of the painting, with their branches cut off by the gram. In the upper section the trees are dark against pink tones suggesting additional landscape, hills or mountains. An orange disk next to one mountain references a setting sun.

Screen shot of output from “In the Weights” purporting to measure the degree to which a person is digested by specific LLMs. Lucky me: I’m in the top 4%. Bar graphs for specific models but not clear what they mean.

Landscape with conifer and beech forest beyond waterlogged fields of lower vegetation. Not visible is the black bear that was in the trees shortly before this.

Water laps against bluish wall of ice at the front face of a glacier. Only the base of the wall is visible, lit by sunlight, as grey fog hovers a distance above the water. Pieces of ice float in the water, remnants of calving when large pieces of ice break off the face, becoming ice bergs.

Ice bergs float on turquoise water in front of a retreating glacier flowing out of the snow covered mountains. Columbia glacier.

A solid line of mountains covered in snow rise above a bluish wall of ice confronting the ocean. This is what the face of a glacier looks like.

Screen shot from an account promoting an AI that is arguing with real people claiming AI is just like the introduction of typewriters. Block!

A cat (or dog, categories are arbitrary) stretches her legs out in the sunlight revealing her long paws which, like her tail and ears and face, are darker than the rest of her body.

Crossing street sign showing skeletal figure walking in the direction indicated by an arrow.

A street corner outside the local tavern. Along the main and cross streets a crowd of people, old and young, hold makeshift signs demanding No Kings, no wars, ICE out and more. Passing cars like one at the right side honked in solidarity and music rolled out from a guitar playing protester.

Baicha, a blue-eyed Siamese cat, peaks over the back of the couch to see what all the excitement is about.

Siamese cat lounging in sunlight room.

Photograph of display at La Brea Tar Pits museum. A complete skeleton of a California Sabre Tooth cat is flexed ready to pounce on its prey. A small illustration inside the case shows the imagined fully fleshed and furred cat, with a lynx-type tail that somehow makes it seem cuddly.

Sunset over a city illuminates clouds turning them deep orange with zones of grey-blue.

Fragment of a fired clay cylindrical vessel, a beaker that would have held chocolate drinks. The exterior is slipped orange with an extensive black layer revealing the main design in a kind of negative, with red used to suggest feline skin on a serpent emerging from a conch shell below the hand of a costumed human dancer.

A table showing the approaches to tarriffs that are legally allowed and now being cited by the regime.

Screenshot of a post from Bloomberg News on legal routes to US tariffs. Link in original post by @brianplatt.bsky.social

On a sunlight grassy slope two pigs are browsing for food. The one in back is mostly covered in black patches; the one in front mostly white with black spots. There are only these two pigs on this farm.

Screen shot of a data visualization of BlueSky users as a cloud of green dots. Pink circle locates the current posting author in a region labeled “Humanities Academics and Scholars” not far from “Left Wing Academic Intellectuals”

A car sits facing the screen. An empty (!) food bowl is in front of her. Humans have failed in their duties.

Photo of a child with curly blonde hair seated inside a television cabinet, looking out at the viewer through the glass. The CRT tube has been removed but she is on TV.

A broken piece of a bowl, with a dark reddish interior covered by a thin layer of glassy glaze and pigments. The glaze has a greenish tinge, and the visible paint is green or black. It is mayolica, tin-based glaze. The reddish fired clay is high in iron. It is from a shallow bowl decorated on the interior.

A tiny tartlet filled with smoked mussels sits on a plate. Tiny cilantro flowers dot the top. At Quintonil in Mexico City.

Not alt texting bc just helping someone see a blocked post.

4 panel cartoon by Nathan Pyle in which a child tries to understand New Year’s by analogy with birthdays. The adult involved explains we are celebrating collective survival, not individual survival. We did not die!

A four panel cartoon by Nathan Pyle. First, an adult putting up decorations tells a young one “We celebrate because we completed a revolution around the star.” Second, the young one comments “So it is identical to emergence day?” And the adult replies “Emergence day is for one individual’s survival”. In panel three, the adult continues “New Revolution’s Day celebrates collective survival.” “Oh” says the young one. The final panel shows the adult and young one, both wearing comical hats striped in spirals, with their arms high. The young one says “We did not die!”. The adult replies “Exactly”.

Map of the United States with each state and DC colored to indicate how likely I would live there. “Never” applies to the Great Plains and most of the South; Texas and Louisiana, the Carolinas and Virginia are possible. I would return to the inland Midwest reluctantly; the ocean is so compelling. New York State remains my origin place. But the truth is winter in western NY is a deal breaker.

Siamese cat curled up on a couch pillow. She has lifted her head, as if to say “you’re not making me move?” So we did not.

Screenshot of a post by Joshua Friedman showing a note in the dismissal of the Comey indictment that says it cannot be brought back under the loophole that might otherwise work. Good news.

Screenshot from Popehat’s explanation that a statute exists that might allow renewing the Comey indictment even though the statute of limitations applies.

Siamese cat faces herself in a mirror. She is standing at full length to enable this. She wants to find the other cat.

Cat about to flop over on a bed while waiting for petting. Graceless and needy all at once.

Baicha, a Siamese cat, half rolling on a bed she has decided is simply there to facilitate worship. Her little face looks hopeful…

The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Not a ballroom but definitely a palace.

Cat with blue eyes peeks over the back of a couch. She is cleverly avoiding being seen if only those pesky ears were less prominent.

Screen shot of a post by California Gov Newsom urging people to “honor” Charlie Kirk’s memory by “continue[ing] his work”. Proceeds to define that “work” as engagement “across ideology, through spirited discourse”, redefined as “good-faith debate”. Kirk was a deliberate provocateur who took up terrible positions about whole groups of people. His shtick was responding live to unscreened questions which isn’t debate: it’s performance art. Debate would have the potential for change.

Siamese cat with blue eyes crouches on a quilt. She stares at the camera. She is putting up with being photographed before the cat sitter gives her the next meal she deserves.

Two part image. At top, a group of armed men flanks a hand painted sign “Lotters will be shot on sight”. At bottom, an otter wearing a French beret captioned “L’Otters are not afraid.”

A screenshot of a TV news show with a list of words and phrases that “Think Tank Third Way” says Democrats should avoid. Privilege, triggering, micro aggression, safe space, critical theory, cultural appropriation, the unhoused, food insecurity, cisgender, heteronormative, LGBTQIA+, Patriarchy, incarcerated people and involuntary confinement apparently alienate some mythical voters.

Black lines sketch a bird in flight

Line drawing of a bird in flight, tail raised, wings spread. Perhaps it is a raptor about to fall on its prey; or simply a seed eater descending to the ground.

Screenshot of post saying “the pandemic is long, long over” and anyone thinking otherwise is “very, very, very, very, very, very much an outlier”. Luckily another poster points out there are still hundreds of deaths from COVID each week and that the OP is an asshole for trying to marginalize the person they commented on.

This time less wordy: a polar (circular) graph with quadrants for different (undefined) class positions, colored based on a food likes quiz, saying the results resemble “lower-middle class (75%)”.

Graph purporting to identify class from food preferences. Basically overlaps with every one of five “class” segments (lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class). It looks like the number of segments colored in for lower class is most extensive but middle class only a tiny bit behind. Class being undefined, for the record I am the college graduate and university professor child of two parents who left college after one year; the child of a father who followed his father into working for the local steel plant; and a mother who ran the household, not working outside after she married, unlike her mother who had a small store until the Depression killed it, while my grandfather moved through a series of jobs ending up keeping the boilers running at a Catholic school. All of which obscures the fact that my father’s grandfather was a professor. Class isn’t quite as stable historically as I think theory imagines.

“As donors try to assess their next moves in the mayoral race, one of the biggest donors to Andrew Cuomo…said he is likely to back Mamdani…because of the support he had gotten from Brad Lander…’I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm…It was basically, “oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo…”

Protest sign, hand written: Not a King. Just a Fascist.

A woman sits on the front of a red car, a book in her hand, while a young man with dreadlocks stands beside the car. They are an unlikely pair of detectives in an Irish town, a retired literature professor and a boy she coached to academic success.

A lilac point Siamese cat peers at the camera. In front of her is her beloved platypus stuffed toy, its nose distorted by her teeth as she uses that hold to carry it around.

Portrait in black and white of a young woman facing left and down, an enigmatic smile on her face. Her shirt is timeless, but her hair is swept up in a style of the 1940s. Her name was Joanne.

Screen capture of a reply by a deliberately annoying Bluesky account the uses a name “goobertits”. Found trying to create arguments with pro-democracy accounts, posts turn out to be uniformly tedious replies intended to spark fights. Block and move on.

Black and white photograph of a woman with shirt dark hair and dark eyes. She looks directly at the camera with impatient tolerance. Her mouth is compressed, not smiling or frowning. The wall beglhind her has tightly patterned wall paper. Her blouse has a repeating floral motif.

Siamese cat stands looking into a mirror. Her face, tail, ears and legs are dark grey. The mirror is in a corner above a Japanese cabinet. The cat sees her own reflection— who is the other cat?

Screen shot of reply by a user calling themself amandawheat in which she repeats a right wing conspiracy theory about murdered journalist Jamal Kashoggi. Other replies equally nasty. Block them.

A series of posts revealing an anti-immigrant troll is lurking. Block scorpionmaster.bsky

A suspension bridge with dry brown hills on the left, greenish water at its feet, and green bushes in the foreground. Carquinez Strait bridge joining Vallejo and Crockett and crossing the San Pablo Bay.

Cat sits under Christmas tree that she leaves alone— except for the tree skirt which she recognizes as a blanket and has begun arranging to her satisfaction.