Aiming for a Brambly Hedge-ish January

my wish for the new year is for stuff to stop happening so much

Happy to let you know that in the northern hemisphere we’ve now done the darkest two weeks in the year. All the other 50 weeks will be lighter than this.

Our newest episode of Absolute Units is here! Join us and special guests Prof Paddy Bullard (Uni of Reading) and Isabel Hughes (The MERL) as we explore Jane Austen, farming, breeding, and wrong'uns. Also, not one but two poems get read in this episode! merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

Alice is the gold standard of what Twitter was when it was great - how you could just find these brilliant, remarkable people with the kind of voices that rarely get platformed or taken seriously, and hear about their lives in their own words without intruding on them or demanding emotional labor

Solidarity to anyone else who experiences seasonal nosebleeds. Mine began today 🥲

‘Death remains my intimate shadow partner. It has been with me since birth, always hovering close by. I understand one day we will finally waltz together into the ether. I hope when that time comes, I die with the satisfaction of a life well-lived, unapologetic, joyful, & full of love.’ —Alice Wong

The panic that kicks in at 2pm every day when I realize it gets dark in two hours

I have been confronted with an ad for Advent calendars and so it is time for the annual PSA: THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS BEGIN ON CHRISTMAS THEY ARE NOT ANY OF THE DAYS LEADING UP TO CHRISTMAS THAT IS ADVENT WHICH BEGINS FOUR SUNDAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

I had a surprise hearing test this morning, and it made me wonder what a hearing tests sound like to those with perfect hearing. Like do you get a lil gap in between a set of beeps like I do? Or is that just the deafness lol

I passed my driving test today! It was my first time and I only had one driver fault! 🚘

What a great few days. See you again soon, Cardiff 👋

All around me are familiar faces @oldenoughtosay.com... Thanks for a great talk @adamkoszary.bsky.social👏📢

Twenty years since this... 📍Pride and Prejudice (2005), filmed at Stourhead, Wiltshire

once again profoundly exhausted by the framing of autism, and disability in general, as something to fight against, prevent, and scare people about. it is extremely objectifying

We're 300 followers away from 70,000. 300 more would be really nice. But you know what would be even better? 300 plus 30,000. Bluesky: help a museum out

My favorite linguist Jon Henner (who followed me on here before he passed!) changed my perspective a lot. If communication is happening, who cares how it's presented? “How you language is beautiful. Don't let anyone tell you your language is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.”

We need to teach people the difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe. Because the discomfort of the safest people is endangering the most vulnerable, all day every day.

‘We live on a floating rock just get on with it’ 👏 👏 👏

Some of us have been using bananergy to go bananza for years but I guess it’s nice that you’re all catching up now 🤷‍♂️

I see the "we cured deafness" injection is making the rounds in the UK now. Let's discuss 🧵

I don’t want to ask CoPilot, I am making a Word document. I don’t want to search with Meta AI, I want to search Instagram. Leave me alone

Train travel is also incredibly stressful for deaf people. Last minute platform changes announced on a loudspeaker? Not knowing what is happening as everyone starts running? Genuinely awful.

ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.

You may very well meet a deaf person listening to music with headphones someday, or meet a blind person looking at something on their phone screen. Most deaf people can hear things. Most blind people can see things. No one is faking it. You can actually just leave us alone. 🙏

Step into the world of Georgian high society with a new audio tour, voiced by the inimitable Adjoa Andoh, now live in the Holburne Museum guide on Bloomberg Connects! Explore the museum made famous as 'Lady Danbury's House' and discover insights into real-life Georgian history: ow.ly/Fans50VRV5b

News | Bridgerton star narrates audio tour at The @holburnemuseumbath.bsky.social Museum

Not the Pope???

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

‘The only thing we can’t do is hear’: the deaf pupil who beat Fife council in court

For @jmhenner.bsky.social. We — @savithry.bsky.social and I — wrote “How to crip your sign language linguistic theory”. Open access. academic.oup.com/jdsde/advanc...

Ah, beautiful irony. I've just watched an advert for Code of Silence - a TV show with a Deaf main character - with no subtitles!

Emma Fearon explored the work of queer history and object story-telling at Nottingham Castle. An under-watched talk but really interesting especially from a heritage work perspective youtu.be/m69o6ruuSek

This is a remarkably cruel and horrendous thing to do to trans women and for no other reason than bigotry and mean-spiritedness towards a tiny minority. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Trans friends: you improve the world and make my life better in so many ways. I am determined to return the favor. We're in this together. 🏳️‍⚧️

You should go to musuem or an observatory or a botanical gardens or a zoo or an aquarium or even the library and learn as much as you can while you can. Learn about things you have never experienced. Learn how people and places and things are or were far across time and space. Revel in experiences.

And once again... WE. SHOULDN'T. BE. HAVING. TO. BUY. THE. HISTORY. OF THESE. ISLANDS. TO. PAY. OFF. A. LUCKY. INDIVIDUAL... FFS.... www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-the-m...

I put on one of those tinnitus masking videos to try and get some relief and my tinnitus just got louder instead 🫠

At the heart of every attack on disability benefits is the myth disabled people “get perks”: a free car, loads of cash, a life off work. It misrepresents the reality of disability, whilst exploiting low wages and high living costs to make the public envy people in daily pain.

There’s been a lot of chatter online about a so-called ‘benefits test’– but let’s set the record straight. Right now, no such test exists. There are no immediate changes to Personal Independence Payment, and nothing has been confirmed. If any changes do happen, they won’t apply before Nov 2026. 1/3

📢New Immersive Experience 📢 Be duty manager for a day! For just £250 a ticket we will - provide you with very limited training - issue a set of keys (some of which won’t open anything!) - train you to use a radio with patchy coverage. - provide you with insufficient staffing #Museums

This is Convent Thoughts by Charles Allston Collins. I saw it on a recent visit to the Ashmolean Museum. However, I knew I'd seen it at another museum at some point last year.

Happy International Women’s Day to the most international woman of all: the woman trapped on the International Space Station

Yet again I am sat here - late at night - using pliers to remove my hearing aid tubing because I've left it too long. Do I ever learn? 🤦🏻‍♀️

TONIGHT on The One Show I present a piece very close to my 💜, 7pm BBC1

I've been blessed 🙏

BSL community: have we established a sign for this app? I was just thinking that BLUE SKY wouldn't really work because BLUE is regionally variable. BUTTERFLY would work, but I wouldn't want to assume anything without asking first!

When you use alt text, I'm thrilled. I love reading what people write. I love to read how people interpret what they see, what they think is important, the details I might not otherwise have known to see, the piece of knowledge you're introducing me to. It's a flexible, fabulous tool.