The lilac is here for one glorious smelly week and then gone..but oh how beautiful that week is. ✨

Thinking of @praxisprojects.bsky.social service users who live in unsuitable housing, struggle with destitution and poverty, who are at risk of homelessness or rough sleeping. Extreme temperatures are unmanageable in these conditions and it's dangerous/scary. Migrant justice is climate justice.

That’s it, the worst podcast has arrived. Let’s shut up shop now.

Neil the seal is back, bigger than ever, and that's a problem for his wellbeing

New report! Published by @nuffieldfoundation.org today shows the need to move beyond individual casework and develop holistic approaches that address the systemic inequalities driving these families' needs in domestic abuse and child protection cases: centreforcare.ac.uk/updates/2026...

Is it normal to make a throat slitting gesture to indicate that a store is closed in the UK, or does the woman at Tesco really hate me?

A small chunk chipped off my tooth a day or two ago, and I was determined to be chill and not bothered about it at the time, but now it is aching.

I am once again begging universities to realise that staff - academic, professional services, estates, all of them - are the product they are trying to sell. Without staff there is nothing to sell. No amount of flashy buildings will replace staff in universities. UKHE is in freefall.

When officials say shit like this, they're not thinking about Oxford and Cambridge. They're thinking about the post-92s and the lower-ranked Russell Group schools—in other words, the universities that serve working class & BIPOC students whom the "political strategy" would love to ignore completely.

I remember one day in Year 6 we spent lunch avidly watching the wall thermometer in the hall, until it reached 40 degrees. We ran to tell the teacher so we could go home, but it turned out to be an urban myth after all. www.theguardian.com/thefilter/20...

Irony is dead.

Noticed on this 17th-century map the spelling "mershe" for 'marsh' – this is the older spelling, before the 'ER > AR' sound change that affected 'starboard', 'darling' and the pronunciation of 'sergeant' too. The change obscures the etymology of 'marsh': as literally 'mere-ish', a lake-like thing.

Less is more. Students needs key action items, not a laundry list of faults.

So the problem is that every morning I pick my cat up like a baby and he puts a paw on my cheek and puts his forehead on mine and then the whole rest of the day is just downhill from there

one of the worst things academia has done to workers worldwide is to normalize the idea that before one works in a job, on needs to find the money for their epmployer to pay their salary

On the BBC they’ve got a camera waiting for Burnham on the platform at Euston and the journalist said “there’s a lot of speculation about what he might be wearing, will it be his usual t-shirt?” and I think it’s nice to live in a joke country.

🌞 Hot Weather Reminder 🌞 If you're taking antidepressants or antipsychotics, your body might struggle to regulate heat. Stay cool, drink water, find shade 🌳 #Summer #Weather

Just my two cents but I reckon if you get voted in as prime minister and you're from the party of organised labour, people will probably want you to do something to improve their material circumstances, and if you don't do anything to do that, or you make things harder for them, they'll hate you.

forest dogy

sorry for what I said when I was caffeinated

Seems bad that there’s no good way to know if anything’s real anymore

Will hand it to CNN: talking about Socialsm vs Capitalism in the exact same tone as any electoral horse race as if the concepts themselves were in a primary is a great, if unintentional, bit.

citations are what tie you down to a shared reality and a shared discourse--to the inconvenient facts which discipline thought--instead of just spinning off into that gauzy mental space where everything is just the way you need it to be

CRIME AGAINST PROPERTY IS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT

My childhood bestie of nearly 40 years, who I learned to write *with* for 12 years, finished reading DATA EMPIRE and saw herself in the prose. it’s so moving to think about whose fingerprints are all over our writing and how it connects us. (And, conversely, what gets lost when LLMs do the writing.)

So Russia is banned from FIFA because of their invasion of Ukraine, but America is allowed to host World Cup games after the invasion of Iran and bombing schoolchildren? How does that work?

#Onthisday in 1837, Queen Victoria ascended to the throne and so began the Victorian era. Of the vast amounts of Victorian content on our site, this is perhaps our favourite — a dictionary of Victorian slang: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-dictionary-of-victorian-slang-1909

Sunrise over the Twin Ports. Duluth, Minnesota

Magnificent: they've read our counterproposal + our offer for the SLs to go part-time (rejected: too much HR effort), and decided instead to delete MORE posts than originally planned. We're going to teach out the 3 old courses, introduce 2 UG degrees + supervise 25 PhDs with 3 FTE posts.

You can’t make a child abuse and violence against women machine then be surprised when it does those things surely? Also the idea that they are against deepfakes is so dumb, all this content is generated based on stolen video and images of people who haven’t consented. It stinks the whole way down

Apologies for the bed mess, but I thought you deserved another Moira phot. We are just hanging out in bed because it is too hot today (by UK standards).

well, I found out what an eyed agate ring is but I wish I hadn't V&A, 1680-1720

They’re calling it the quote on British politics that ended the need for all other quotes

I learned yesterday there is an Ant cafe in Thailand, somewhere, probably in Bangkok. I’ll have to look it up. Like a cat cafe, but with ants. In glass aquariums of course. But whenever I’m back in the kingdom, I’m going to have to go there

love how every app has to periodically inform me that push notifications are disabled. damn bro who do you think did that!!! history's mysteries

If interested in algorithmic practices and imaginaries in the context of wellbeing, check in out latest publication based on the TRAVIS project data. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10..... It's OA!

The other major platforms all algorithmically reward ragebait, and so bigotry gets amplified, even/especially when people post to dunk on it or call it out.

Shift drink: Reflecting Pool 1oz rum 1oz mezcal .75oz lime .75oz honey barspoon matcha muddled mint

theconversation.com/is-ten-too-y... Yes.

Not only can I take a hint, I can imagine them when there are none to be taken.

I said this in private but will repeat here: The 2024 riots were a reaction by the right to feeling like they'd lost, and were largely inevitable because of it. The 2025 riots are a consequence of Starmer abandoning any kind of robust anti-racism and ceding to "legitimate concerns."

"The taxation statistics confirm that a tiny number of people are hoarding an enormous number of homes. They show that just 1% of taxpayers own 25% of all rental properties" writes @mattgrudnoff.bsky.social Read the full piece on The Point: thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

Edvard Munch, Girls on the bridge, 1901 #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

'Over London - By Rail' (from 'London: A Pilgrimage', 1872) by Gustav Doré

Here's a #HigherEducationPostcard of @uniofhull.bsky.social The brick building on the left is the Venn building, named for the eponymous mathematician and diagrammist, who came from Hull If you like this image, I’d really appreciate a repost - remember, BlueSky has #NoAlgorithm

University of Lincoln staff have delivered an overwhelming no confidence vote in the senior leadership team. www.ucu.org.uk/article/1454...

I dislike that sleeping poorly becomes an individual failure instead of one symptom in a constellation of others and we don't just *treat it*

Out here doing some Luddite praxis.

This, but Teams chat notifications. All the livelong day.