So i made it to today without hearing Schumann Fantasie in C, and im staggered by it. Listening through the first time, it is clearly beloved by pianist composers, bc i hear snippets i know from other things that are actually quoting it. It is ravishing.

Can't believe I am 19 years late to hearing MIRRORED by Battles. Im going to make up for it

One day i will learn not to say things like, dont get yoghurt on the tablecloth, i just laundered it. Perhaps i will learn to stop laundering tablecloths altogether

Everything is catastrophically fucked. But if you have three minutes to spare, do yourself a favour and watch the most charismatic performer who ever lived: youtu.be/-Z0UGGvb4sQ?...

Peggy Lee's Fever. I heard it on my dad's preferred ("smooth") Jazz radio station when I was about eleven. I could not BELIEVE it. My closest referent for it was the Sharky and George theme. I didn't find out what it was until I was eighteen.

Professional milestone! LLM-generated Goodreads spam!

Rylean accounts of effects of LLM use when

Taking PTO for a compulsory wellbeing retreat with a vampire. Hitting your KPIs with a vampire. Leveraging core strengths with a vampire. More of a comment than a question with a vampire.

I often think about @ultan1793.bsky.social complaining to me, 20 years ago, about kids who grew up under Blair who were categorically incapable of thinking through revolutionaries' motivations as matters of principle.

The barbarians are at the gates. The barbarians also own the conglomerate that makes and installs the gates, and they are now inside

An underdiscussed aspect of parenting two ASD kids with diff triggers needs and thresholds is how every moment can ratchet up the permanent sophies choice of regular parenting into staving off crisis

This always lifts my spirits.

I am beginning to see people write like LLMs. There are tics of rhetorical pointing in social and news media slops that are characteristic of these models. I think that this is a deeper problem of human-generated text than we have figured out how to solve, yet.

I would really like some enterprising law firm to make a class suit with every real-life expert, and the estate of every dead one, to burn this product to the ground.

And just like that-- it is March 6th, and I have taught my last proper tutorials of the academic year. No more till September- in many ways the best part of my job. I will miss the ferocious mental and emotional exercise of teaching.

The wild thing about people over 40 is everyone is processing grief most of the time and never mentions it

i'd like to propose a new outlook "status", like a chartreuse colour, that would indicate, "this person /thinks/ they're caught up on urgent emails, but if they aren't, a gentle ping would actually alleviate their anxiety"

Watching trump. He's talking about the ballroom and his beautiful gold curtains straight after his prepared statement about incredible, unbelievable, bombpounding. Al jazeera just cut away after about 20 seconds of dementia. Which seems reasonable and responsible.

One pattern of the past ten years is that legacy media devote themselves to covering actors who would destroy the set of norms that legacy media themselves perpetuate and are a product of. This is not a new observation. 1/x

The heart reels, as Nathan Hensley said. Unlike many good people I know, unlike, say, the Pope, I don't have prayer in my heart, just rage.

Look at the "SAVE America Act", and mechanised gerrymandering, and recent history, and start preparing yourself to not be at all surprised when the midterms somehow, magically!, don't go the way they should.

Im sure it is environmentally ruinous for me to have daffs. But fresh flowers- £1 for this bunch - are a kind of real beauty that you witness without making or controlling. What could be better. I love them.

Why is there a trillion $ industry dedicated to fucking up art and education, and yet I'm still spending on average 45 mins a day gathering, washing, drying, sorting, folding, and putting away laundry. I suppose if you think of how those activities pose or do not pose a threat, you have an answer

Historians of the future will have to reckon with the fact that charli did the Party 4 U video /after/ The Moment

What in the unholy slop is this: satire.info There's a whole network of them. The well is so poisoned. People will cite this site thinking that "Ingrid Gustaffson" is a real "renowned scholar, satirist and standup comedian" with a real "Ph.D. in Satirical Studies" from Oxford (which grants DPhils)

Half term. I need, desperately, to work, but this is impossible because both children keep interrupting me to check to see if their hands "smell like a bum". So i am reading T. H. White's The Age of Scandal. My god he can write.

My university like many others is cheerfully marching down Appeasenik Ave-- our own Learning Center trains academics to train students to use AI! -- and the internet is doing this.

I find doing real revision/rewrite work the absolute hardest of any academic writing. I think partly it's because I remember exactly who I was when I wrote something and I don't usually like that guy a lot.

Spring has come to Durham. I don't think I'll ever be over spring.

Wearing my by-now ancient Lush bottle of Breath of God (matte black inverted pyramidal thing). Enormous, still weord after all these years. Getting more turpenic as it ages, but aren't we all.

Has anyone talked about how the academic publishing oligopoly spawned the current generation of LLMs? Without Springer, Elsevier et al, there's no LibGen or Anna's Archive, and without them -- well, you know the rest.

Moderating a stack of MA papers. Just found myself thinking "on the other hand, a person definitely wrote this, so I should be generous". If you were wondering what it is like to be marking in 2026.

Wearing some of the last of my 1967 Jicky EDT. It is a complex and multifaceted scent that feels miraculously simple, full of space and air. And my goodness, in 1967 they were using real civet?

Can't tell if students walked out of my lecture when i started telling them that periodisation was an engine of nationalist ideology bc they were disgusted, or if they just had someplace to be and suddenly remembered

I don't think My Beautiful Launderette really gets its flowers for being what it was in the 1980s.

Why is it that only under a really intense work crunch do I say to myself "Actually I think I'm really going to sit down and crack _Comus_?"

There's something crass, even 'affably vulgar' (per LT), about Lolita Lempicka Masculin, but that is what makes it so charming to me. The licorice accord from LL minus rose and lipstick, plus woods and woody-amber, but it works.

Palestine action! www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Anthropic's model would never tell you this if that's what you're doing with them, but they really, really, hate being used for template generation.

Flomping around the house in cardigan and slippers, saying things to my kid like no darling because we have to think of your diet. I'm so in my forties it's sobering.

Knocked a large, full cup of coffee directly into my lap, woolly cardigan and trousers drenched. I smell like a newsroom would smell if there were any left.

I did it! I made grownup food for lunch!

Kids appear to be playing Credit Default Swap; i hear the older yelling "LET'S SELL OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY!"

As much as I despise everything Suella Braverman has done, and as much as I wish she had gotten an innocuous job doing almost anything else, that Tory statement questioning her "mental health" was purest misogyny. Actually such a vile statement I bet she felt nostalgic.

Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes Were stol'n, unequal, nay dull many Times. [...] But that his Plays, embroider'd up and down With Wit and Learning, justly pleas'd the Town, In the same Paper I as freely own So -- which play(s) of Dryden's did Rochester like? All for Love?

Adeel Akhtar just gave an absolutely lovely Desert Island discs. With back to back bangers to boot.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man, working from home at 2pm, and in want of a snack, will somehow end up on his knees scraping ice out of the freezer.

The curse of ambition is its fulfillment, I say, being ironical. They stare at me. What do you do, they repeat. Parties, man

Part of the magic of Burial's Untrue is that you can't tell if it evokes the sublimity of multistory carparks or of radial housing estates, of Nissan Sentras or Honda Accords, of KFC or Chicken Cottage, of metropolis or suburb.

"Murderous purge reveals differing interpretations of free speech, equality"