- 400 jobs to go at Lancaster University - 1 in 4 people will be made redundant But where's the financial evidence for this extreme action? Please read 👇 Sign the petition 👇 chng.it/7F52bThYqn

me shouting at my chicken

Clearly Starmer is being played by the esteemed actor Patrick Barlow, of the National Theatre of Brent.

this may be the flu talking but does anyone else think keir starmer no longer looks like keir starmer

tempt them back to room with banana

Scrappy Doo has been found dead in Miami

apart from anything else it's so fucking weird that we're still sending people to the moon

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

i've gone back and forwards on whether I want it to be a Muppet production that we're watching. pros and cons either way

the only thing you have energy to do when you have flu is to lie in bed refining your bucket list. happy to announce that I've figured out exactly how I want my meeting with Kermit to go

Do check if your workplace offers free flu jabs/ reimbursement for them! (And ask for a receipt and keep your booking email as proof).

bristol has stopped offering free flu jabs for its staff and guess who has promptly got flu, one week into term

Students want to create! With their own brains! UIC English is hiring a TT Assistant Professor in prose fiction. As we are one of the very few PhD programs in Creative Writing, PhD is strongly preferred. Happy to answer questions; please share around. uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

I’m looking forward to seeing @saranahmed.bsky.social in conversation with @noreenmasud.bsky.social tomorrow evening in Bristol. I’m not even halfway through her new book, and already it’s essential reading! 💙📚💡 www.thesmallcitybookshop.co.uk/event-detail...

good thing it's nearly christmas

proud paid-up member of the Nice Things for Cats party

can't believe i didn't get raptured

Incoming 18 year old undergraduates have never known Pluto as a planet (ousted in 2006!) and that makes me sad all over again for Pluto - and the students with an impoverished solar system - and me as I’m so old.

if you are in a professional or personal situation where you cannot fully divest yourself from something being rightly boycotted, you've got an easy out: shut the fuck up. no one asked. you're free. i'm not your priest.

eBay’s been writing poetry again

why do universities love "hubs" and wtf are they

driven to the edge by the climate of this city, I roam the streets dragging my faithful dehumidifier behind me, trying and failing to dehumidify the whole of bristol

Presumably they're not expecting it to replace university tuition for people at Oxford and Cambridge - only for the proles.

the only consolation is that we are back in dehumifidier season, and every few days my gallant little robot delivers me a neat cube of free water

“it seems probable that the few historians who will still be able to have meaningful academic careers in, say, ten years’ time will all be able-bodied, childless British citizens from upper-class families.” This is so real. The situation really is this bleak.

Raising £10000 to support UCU members facing financial hardship taking industrial action to protect jobs. Donate if you can. Thank you! #JustGiving www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding...

a support group for people mesmerised by the fact that the clumps from their cat's clumping litter look exactly like sesame brittle

It's IT Professionals Day! Many happy "have you cleared the caches" to everyone on Bluesky x

you know who doesn't get enough love? IT departments. my laptop cable started glitching, so I went to the IT desk, and before I'd even finished explaining the guy pulled a new DELL charger from out of thin air like a rabbit out of a hat and banged it on to the table

alfie wrote a skeet

the spudshank redemption (2025)

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

You can use ChatGPT instead of your own brain to write your paper if I can talk about ChatGPT instead of you in your letter of reference

get me a big tardigrade stat

Can we shift away from low-quality UUK leadership?

We want robust, enormous research that is SUCH good research, you already know how important and right and insightful it is before you even start it. We want research so predeterminedly world-changing that there is hardly any point actually doing the research at all.

Next thing you know, it’ll be ‘hobbyist’ to make sure that students are functionally literate.

Do any lovely medievalists know of good medieval descriptions of hangovers? Thank you!

september is here and I'm happy again

can recommend being on a train next time they schedule an emergency alert

I do steam quietly about Bristol's very complex and multi-rung promotion processes, but one thing it gets *very right* is that it explicitly recognises peer review and 'service to the discipline' as well as service within the university, collegiality, and contributions to working environment

PHONE ALERT TEST at 3pm. A final reminder for all those hiding a phone for whatever reason.

Quick rundown for non-US academics of whether you're likely to be eligible for the Anthropic payout: 1. you have works published in or before 2022 2. which are registered for US copyright (most likely if you had a US publisher, not otherwise): check here publicrecords.copyright.gov 1/2

Not to sound cynical but it’s hard not to think that a lot of costly projects undertaken by universities that can’t afford them function mostly in the end as CV-builders for senior admin on the rise up and out. Meanwhile things they might have kept or built on collapse

stay floppy, pals

"We have asked them to stop being floppy"

huuuuugh bonneville! huuuuuuugh bonneville! HUGHHHHH BONNEVILLE