Herald of Opera asks:

Do you like penguins? (Same question goes for Jim the Editor; I always ask this whenever an opportunity for an unbounded question arises, including careless wording.) (Also, whenever speaking up in favor of Sword & Shield’s National Dex removal, I make sure to mention the absurdly slim chances of Piplup getting in as proof that it hurts me more than it probably hurts them)

Penguins are fµ¢£ing great (and this is our shared opinion, by the way).  They’re birds, but instead of flying they swim!  And on land they’re so waddly and dumb and cute, but in the water they’re so… so… M A J E S T I C.  Piplup remains to this day my favourite Water-type starter, for reasons that I’m not even going to pretend are based entirely in sober design analysis.  And there are gay penguin couples who adopt eggs and chicks, acting as aspirational figures for the LGBT community and filling the hearts of the entire world with warmth and fuzziness.  As long as we’re on penguins, I’m going to direct readers to the Instagram account of the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier, home of a colony of New Zealand’s native little blue penguins (scientifically proven to be the smollest and most adorable of all penguins), one of whom each month is designated “good penguin” or “naughty penguin of the month.”  And, of course, I would be doing you all a great disservice if I didn’t tell you that New Zealand is also where several of the oldest species of fossil penguins come from, some of them gigantic fossil penguins as tall as humans, like the new species Crossvallia waiparensis described just a few weeks ago from fossils found in Canterbury.

…so I guess what I’m saying is the answer to your question is “yes.”

A Dragonborn With a Trident On His Back Playing a Syrinx asks:

This is definitely Heracles https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dzvmPjWMKLaiNG6MOLkOgjcveh2lnEja/view?usp=drivesdk

…I mean, I can believe that it’s trying to be?  Heracles almost always has a club, though, and the ears of his lionskin aren’t usually that pointy; these look more doglike.  Honestly it kind of reminds me of an Age of Mythology Ulfsark.

Reviewing the glass from the Eretz-Israel museum

On Thursday I went to the Eretz-Israel museum in Tel Aviv, and because I am a huge glass nerd (and, y’know, I’m doing tourist things as well but I am technically in this country to study ancient glass) I spent basically the entire time in their glass gallery ogling pretty Phoenician core-formed alabastra and Roman mould-blown bottles. So my reduced posting schedule this month doesn’t sting too much, here’s my definitive expert review of all the things there that most stuck out to me:

Continue reading “Reviewing the glass from the Eretz-Israel museum”

Dinosaur Reviews

In addition to reviewing Pokémon when I can get around to it, I also occasionally review dinosaurs, for the amusement of my friends on Facebook.  Please note that the following are only my opinions, however please also note that my opinions are always objectively right. Some of the animals reviewed here are not dinosaurs, but assorted other reptiles of the Mesozoic or earlier; not being dinosaurs they are technically ineligible for ratings on the 5-star scale, but I have applied a range of other rating systems as appropriate to each one.

Continue reading “Dinosaur Reviews”

Anonymous asks:

I have to read a paper on “Celtoscepticism” for a Middle Welsh course I’m taking. Archaeology is such a bizarre discipline. How do you guys get anything done?

Well, I don’t know what Celtoscepticism is because Celtic civilisation is very much not my area, but to answer your question with another question… what on earth makes you think we get anything done?

Anonymous asks:

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

It’s kind of an odd question to ask, really, because who the f&$% dreams about sheep?  Well… except, like… sheep farmers.  We count sheep before we fall asleep; we don’t dream about the damn things.  What kind of lame-ass android is so myopic that it can’t think of anything better to dream about than a sheep?  Although… I guess it is an electric sheep, which implies that the android is a Pokémon fan, so at least it’s got that going for it.