The BBC are accidentally running the subtitles to Mrs Marple over the Mercury Prize, and it’s rather wonderful. A few of lines could plausibly have been written by Jarvis.

Reminder that a significant component of all of UK HE’s response to AI boils down to “You must change your teaching so that students can use AI; you must also change all your assessment so that students can’t use AI.”

That’s nice, but since it expired before March 2023 he’ll have to get it renewed in person at St Pancras if he wants to order items in advance. www.bbc.com/news/article...

On that repost: I wish the BBC would still do this. There was an item on BBC Breakfast about the survey saying a lot of people feel ithe BBC doesn't cater for them, and in response Tim Davie kept coming back to *Blue Lights* and *Celebrity Traitors*; a cop show and a game show. Where's the ambition?

BBC Archive just uploaded The Lonely Shore (1962), a surreal 15-minute short that takes the form of a scientific report from an abandoned and desolate future Britain. Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, an actual archaeologist, and directed by Ken Russell, an actual madman.

It's always striking seeing other academics talk about their academic parents and be reminded that close to a quarter of all tenure-line academics have at least one PhD parent. That's not a critique, but I always wonder how different it would be to have a parent who already understood academia.

There's loads of capital L literature written by people who aren't "straight white (often older) men" and it's weird that people feel the need to pretend otherwise

Using ChatGPT

I see we're on the "it's not the physical properties of the book that matter, but the intellectual contents". But we read in material conditions, not as disembodied transmissions of thought. Or, put another way: good luck reading *Ulysses* printed in 6pt Comic Sans on toilet roll.

For reasons, it would be v. helpful to have information from a broad range of academic and non-academic (incl. GLAM) users of the BBC Written Archives OTHER THAN historians, briefly on: 1) What you've used it for and 2) How the proposed changes would impact on your research. Reposts welcomed.

So these companies are currently storing their cyber attack contingency plans... on their computers? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

BBC4 are repeating *The Great Philosophers* tonight. I’m old enough to remember when it seemed that BBC4 might make new programmes like that.

“I said ‘good day sir.’”

WHSmith in Southsea has finally fallen. Are there any high street WHS left?

Reminded of the experience of reading *Don Quixote* - I loved it, but was genuinely expecting the windmill stuff to account for more than four pages.

EXACTLY! ‘Where once there was a yearning to be “exposed to something extraordinary”, today politicians and arts administrators are besotted by the notion of “relevance”, of the arts as something with which people must immediately identify or recognise.’ observer.co.uk/news/columni...

My wife and I had our honeymoon in a basement flat in San Francisco. One day, the woman who owned the house said that the man next door was one of the founders of PayPal and was having a party that night. He had sent us a bottle of champagne to apologise for any noise…

Caught five seconds of an episode of *Rick Stein’s Cornwall* and was reminded of a conversation I overheard in a bookshop in Truro. “I was asked to be on *Fern Britton’s Cornwall* and I said no; then I was contacted by *Rick Stein’s Cornwall* and I said fuck no.”

*FIFTEEN THOUSAND JOBS LOST*. If this were in a sector in which the PM could go and do a photoshoot looking like One Of The People, we’d have had a government intervention by now.

Have found out that for Hallowe’en 2025 Neonraptor Brewing have released a set of beers based on 1970s/80s public information films… no Frisbee IPA, though. neonraptorbrewingco.com/products/hal...

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

It’s that time of year when the Nobel Prize committee releases a single sentence prize justification that sounds exactly like they haven’t actually done the reading. www.bbc.com/news/article...

‘Middlemarch of the Cybermen.’

Are you doing #19thC attribution research? Do you have DH skills and nowhere to use them? YOU could be the next editor of the Curran Index! We're still accepting applications thru next week on 15 Oct. Lead this ongoing + fully supported DH project into its next iteration! rs4vp.org/curran-edito...

Exactly. In my introductory Crime Writing seminar last week I showed exactly how ChatGPT had badly misrepresented my work on detective fiction, and told students that by not relying on AI they would be the people getting the jobs to fix its costly mistakes.

Happened to catch a repeat of 'The Flypaper' from *Tales of the Unexpected* this evening. It's brilliant how it lures you into thinking you've got the twist worked out, but you haven't. The cinematography is also excellent - Ely Cathedral looks positively malign in it.

I miss the days when higher education was seen as a social good, a national treasure. When the social, cultural and intellectual contribution of higher education was valued as highly as economic contribution. When students from poorer backgrounds had proper financial support. When the humanities 1/

Lionel Gadsden was an actor born in London in 1879, meaning that he lived in the same city as George Eliot and Wilkie Collins. His final acting job was on *Doctor Who.*

No reason for reposting today...

I'm old enough to remember the time when you couldn't go through Heathrow without seeing several massive posters about the cultural industries as a UK asset.

Yeah. Who needs English?

In a woodcut released today the Guild of Thieves and Cutpurses declared that enforcement of regulations against Thieving and Pursecutting would ‘devastate a growth industry’ and damage the economy.

"Why do so many young people want to go to university?" wails the mediocre leader of a party which spent 14 years in government telling young people that unless they got graduate jobs in finance they were less than human.

The Conservatives: “Tough on Books, Tough on the Causes of Books.”

Rishi Sunak’s drive to increase respect for maths in schools was strongly influenced by his not being able to compute fiction as a schoolboy. These fuckers resent the massive popular success of art.

Bought a (very highly rated) bunch of new canning lids after making applesauce (58 pints this year, and that's after cider fest). Honestly I'm a little nervous about opening it, since I don't wanna unleash the Götterdammerung.

I see that jokily unhelpful LRB bio notes are back. If Julian Barnes can take the time to explain who he is, so can you.

Reading a literary criticism/literary sociology book which includes diagrams with free floating categories, and to be honest it reminds me a bit of this.

Just seen that’s That’s TV 3 are showing a Christmas Music Weekend. It’s the 4th of October. This is insanity.

Last night I rewatched the Bryan Ferry episode of *The Mighty Boosh*, which reminds me: did anyone here actually see the Brian Eno documentary? It only seems to have been shown in ten cinemas and then vanished.

Tonight’s new Alan Partridge episode was the best since *I’m Alan Partridge*. I wasn’t overly keen on *This Time* because the format felt a bit limiting and repetitive, but this feels like it has more flexibility.

Just nailing up the sign about Hallowe’en being the beginning of the spooky season, not the end.

Brosnan is about to ask me if this was my card.

why are West Midlands police allowing flag hangers to block a public highway, exactly

I only recently found out that Palantir is named after the bad guy's fatally flawed method of surveillance in *Lord of the Rings* (which I last read over 30 years ago), and I wonder how tech bros 'read' novels. Do they just see them as collections of cool proper nouns, with plot as mere cartilage?

Patricia Routledge was one of those celebrities I've seen out and about just doing stuff. I saw her around Chichester Cathedral and thought "is that Patricia Routledge?" Then she spoke and yes, it was definitely Patricia Routledge.

Depressingly predictable. The Royal Society made themselves a joke when they appointed a non-scientist like Musk in the first place, but keeping him in the context of his enthusiasm for fascism is appalling. RS fellows surely have to act.

"i just use it to generate ideas"

Reading Doyle’s *The White Company*, and I’m utterly confused as to where the opening chapters are set. The map suggests the abbey at Beaulieu refers to the village in Hampshire, but there are also references to the river Exe as being visible, and the abbey bell being heard on Blackdown. Huh?