Disco Elysium being free on the Epic Games Store is truly a Christmas miracle. This is such a singular and superb video game. store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/disc...

December 25th. The day the Fellowship departs Rivendell to destroy the One Ring. Whatever you celebrate, may you have the courage to take the first steps to defy and endure against the dark, and rekindle light into the world.

Go check out Bob for Wired!

We are delighted to be co-sponsoring this event alongside @ihr.bsky.social and @royalhistsoc.org. Details and sign-up information is below!

Its all over Threads www.threads.com/@permanent_o...

Amazing 😳 digital archaeology How AI’s annoying blandness “accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire”

💪🏽💪🏽

Happy 100th birthday Dick Van Dyke!

The world's richest 0.001% now control 3x as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity combined. 56,000 wealthy individuals have more than roughly 4 billion people. Read that back.

Excellent advice. Get away from the desk, go for a walk. Don’t listen to a podcast, just walk. That’s when the best thinking happens.

Love it 🙌

As a chess fan this is a marvelous read. I had no idea Marx played chess, though I'm not hugely surprised.

“One person is an autocratic president of the university for decades” certainly wasn’t a flawless system but it’s clear that “admins hop from job to job scaling the career ladder by filling their CV with ‘accomplishments’ that are expensive burdens to the schools they leave behind” is even worse.

So kid, in your heart you want to study humanities but you worry about your job prospects? Let’s play a game. On the latest data, who is more likely to be unemployed after 15 months after graduation. The English Lit grad or the Maths grad? WRONG!

“Scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before. Indeed, cleverness is shunned at home and abroad. What does reading offer to pupils except tears?” this guy has his finger on the pulse amirite www.history-uk.ac.uk/history-in-p... 🗃️

Grant. Andrew. Stewart. Andre. Four vendors equipped to earn this winter. A Vendor Support Kit gives them the tools to work their way to a better future: ♨️ Warm hat and gloves ☕ Hot food voucher 💳 Cashless payment support 📈 One-to-one sales coaching Buy one online at bigissue.com/supportkit

What do UK graduates do? Lots of information in this annual report. A reminder that Humanities graduates are quite employable. Compare unemployment rates for Biology (8.4%), Chemistry (5.9%) and Physics (8.0%) with English literature (6.4%), History (7.6%) and Languages (7.6%) for example.

A huge figure in Dickens Studies, his contribution to the field over the last half century is unsurpassed. @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social has lost a champion.

A walk through the stone defences of Mither Tap, Bennachie in Aberdeenshire for #HillfortsWednesday I believe occupied in the early Middle Ages, don’t know how far it goes back? Whenever it was, I hope it was less windy than now.

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

Well it certainly doesnt help if you start your focus on things that bring people joy instead of decarbonising the energy grid, yes.

For anyone who is like “the creature is also named Frankenstein”; Mary Shelley went to see a play version of Frankenstein and was tickled that they listed the creature as “———“ in the dramatis personae: “this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good” www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3...

Next time you visit the Pre-Raphaelite galleries at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, keep an eye out for more information about my project, Victorian Art & Design and the Global! More information available at: www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/about/what-w...

Three months ago

SAVE GEOGRAPHY at Leicester University (UK) - We call on the University of Leicester to urgently reconsider the proposal to dissolve Geography. This is direct attack on the discipline of Geography at Leicester with likely loss of Geography staff. Please sign + share www.change.org/p/save-geogr...

STARSHIP TROOPERS was released 28 years ago today. Among the most popular films of director Paul Verhoeven, and a classic sci fi/action satire, the making of story is as outrageous as the film. Would you like to know more…? 1/69

You may think this is an easy one, but what if you're a billionaire already planning to have retreated to an underground bunker in ten years, and need a technology which can persuade everyone else that everything is fine, really?

solidarity with all colleagues and students at Nottingham who are having their jobs and degrees destroyed by management. the relentless annihilation of language provision in UKHE is something that *every* academic should be calling out and pushing back against.

'mean-spirited'

The truly maddening thing is that, unlike when I was a young man in science and the materials and engineering just weren’t there yet, the future is *right there.* The problem is *solved*. What’s holding us back is not just greed, but this bizarre nostalgia, an obsession with petro- masculinity.

David Olusoga was interviewed on the radio this morning and now I'm really looking forward to watching this.

It has been my duty as a historian to record how smelly Che Guevara was. Honestly one of the stinkiest dudes in history. He was immensely proud of this & once showed off a pair of underpants he’d been wearing for two months. They were so filthy, he won a bet that they could stand up by themselves.

Thursday #morningread ✨

For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.

Also good guidelines for life.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

There is still time to enter the Midland History essay prize £400 first prize and opportunity to publish in a peer reviewed journal Closing date for entries 31 October 🎃 #phd #ecr #postgrad

In Grok we trust...

I'm back teaching English lit after a very long break and I'm curious what critical texts people are using. For anyone happy to share, would love to hear your recs for close reading fiction/poetry in general and for the Victorians specifically. One from me below.

We all know that the UK could have a well-funded university system without heaping debt on the heads of students, if politicians wanted it to. That's the only thing to say, really. Every dysfunction is a choice. A choice made by politicians, not by lecturers or students.

Really saddened to see this. Danya brought a kindness and passion to the chess world that will be very much missed. Always loved his videos/lessons/commentary, and never failed to be amazed by his talent and seemingly magical (to me at least) ability to calculate combinations.

A reminder that pg researchers and ECRs working in Romantic Studies in the UK are invited to apply for a Stephen Copley Research Award (valued up to £500) The late Stephen Copley supervised my PhD and I appreciate seeing his name live on like this #Romanticism www.bars.ac.uk/main/index.p...

This sounds great! The format could allow for some really timely, provocative work too.

Reading a book from the university library and found this

Today is the birthday of both Nietzsche and Foucault, which means it should really be some kind of Continental philosophy holiday.

Read Barbara Newman on Boccaccio’s ‘dirty book’ here. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

When Farage told the people of Clacton that he would spend his time working I imagine they thought it would be for them and not for 12 companies.

Pleased to announce @univeng.bsky.social small funding scheme now open to members. UE will fund up to 20 projects up to £250 each to support research/pedagogy/continuing professional development activities in Lit, Lang, Creative Writing. See details here: universityenglish.ac.uk/englishcreat...

It is always the Reading Room of the Special Collections where the magic happens.