Worrye not about 'being productive,' for thou art not a product. Thou art a star daunsinge yn a hopeful skye. A signal blinking across centuryes and worldes. Thou art a song performid just once and perfectlye.

I spoke to the Secretary-General of NATO, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni. Together we stand firm in our commitment to uphold the sovereignty of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark.

The Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition, which I have seen many times on DVD, was such a great experience at the cinema today. No interval, plus Peter Jackson spiel at the start, but it really rattled along. A proper cinema event, and the boys were absolutely buzzing.

Cleminson Street, Salford. Salford pioneered play streets, traffic-free from 8am till sunset (borrowed from New York) in the 1930s. Legislation followed: there were 700 in England and Wales in the 1950s, all but forgotten by the 1980s.

This week, us northern hemisphere folx will have made it through the darkest ten weeks of the year. The light is returning!

So next weekend Netflix will be live streaming Alex Honnald free climbing a skyscraper. One of the most interesting parts of Free Solo was the film maker's engagement with the ethics of filming something like this. I'm struggling to imagine Netflix similarly struggling.

No, these are very serious comments. ChatGPT has absolutely no goddamn place in graduate education. It steals from other authors, routinely gets major facts wrong, hallucinates sources, and generally makes the prose flat and boring as hell. And if you shill for it in my mentions, I'll block you.

Watching Sinners one night and then the next day sitting in your classroom as the lesson start time begins and the class is hovering outside seemingly unable to cross the threshold unless you explicitly invite them in and...

Don't sneer at Trump claiming someone else's Nobel if you're using chatGPT for academic or creative work.

Writing-wise, my sense of last year was one of not-doing, or at least, when doing, of chiselling rather than writing. Life and work and kids and mental health in the way at every turn. But I totted up, and I wrote 40,000 words. That's not nothing. So I'll keep on keeping on.

I like their style

We have the LOTR Extended editions at home and have watched them many times, but the boys* are really excited about going to see The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen tomorrow. *Me. I'm excited. The boys are excited, but so am I.

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking? Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me. 1/

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 2165: Writing well for children is no easier than writing well for adults. You don't start off in one area and then move on to "proper" books.

The one use I've found for chatGPT & the like is that it has helped me deepen my understanding of what I value, & how that differs from what others value. Not through using the bloody thing, but through it, & its proponents, standing as a neat litmus test of all that is anathema to what I hold dear.

This isn't satire. This is a real headline published in the UK.

the European mission to Greenland was fourth in the BBC news running order this morning, which feels a bit like doing a light "and finally..." item about the archduke's motorcade taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 2680: Don’t be afraid of failure. Failure means you tried something. No one ever succeeds without trying and failing - often, many times.

Crazy and sad situation, this. The winter spine folks do nothing without good cause. So sad that it has come to this for this competitor. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

PHOTO OF THE DAY. Johnny Cash just before going on stage for his live concert at Folsom Prison (1968) 📷 Dan Poush

Why Michael Sheen put his money on the line for a new Welsh national theatre. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Lovely moment of shared amusement at the petrol station today as the tannoy calls out to the kid on the motorbike: "it is not permitted for customers to fill empty oasis bottles with petrol," then, two minutes later after the lad has sheepishly gone inside: "update: customer admits he is a muppet."

Having seen both #Andor and #ThePitt, they are both great and I can see no useful metrics through which they can be compared which would allow their relative quality to be assessed. Happy just to be glad they both exist.

In the old days, good writers got famous for selling books. Nowadays, bad writers sell books by being famous.

"to be an exception a painter...needed to recognize [their] vision for what it was, [then] separate it from the usage for which it had been developed [...] to contest the norms of the art that had formed [them]" John Berger gives a good instruction for writers, artists et al wanting to work NOW

COLOURSCAPE: An ottava rima in iambic pentameter, intersected by a sonnet in iambic monometer — such that the third foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet.

As a parent who has had to negotiate the SEND system for both children, and as a teacher who works with SEND students who have been shortchanged by successive governments to damaging effect, those who sneeringly suggest ECHPs are some kind of gravy train can piss right off. Makes my blood boil.

Milk delivery, Manchester, 1946 (Daily Mail).

I met David Prowse as a kid. He came to my primary school to talk road safety in his Green Cross Code Man role. Of course, all our questions were about Star Wars. Give the man his voice, I say (though I do like James Earl Jones, tbf)

Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), sculptor and artist, was born on this day in Wakefield. One of the foremost modernists of the 20th century.

I miss Victoria Wood. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...

On some level, I am that girl.

I know I'm on the other side of the pond, but I like this Mamdani guy, and some of our politicians could learn a lot from him.

To anyone who needs it right now: If a woman gets shot in the face and your first reaction is to say: "yes, but did she provoke it?" you need to give yourself a shake.

I am glad Trinity Hall's decision is being responded to with wide-ranging criticism. How bloody dare they. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I go by service stations, Watford Gap is Sarf, Welcome Break Woodhall is where the Norf begins, Tebay is a lateral move, it's where you go to have an existential crisis with posh crisps.

One of his rarer quotations that I like: "Imagination, not intelligence, made us human. Before we could change the world, we had to be able to imagine it other than it appeared."

Great photo, this

"I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." 🔥🔥 anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

"What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it" anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

I'm about three months late to this, but I read it today, and after a term of teaching students to care with their lives about reading, and writing (and feeling, and experiencing, and creating) it hit really hard. Every single line. anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

You're right. @trinityhallcamb.bsky.social is damaging its own reputation and that of the wider university. Oxbridge has moved in the right direction over the past two decades, creating a positive impression to the wider sector. This news undoes that

Lads, its Tit Hall, what do you expect! And they're in it for the future legacy money from rich alumna, its just a banking strategy with a 30 year payoff.

I absolutely deplore Cambridges decision on this. I also stand by my opinion that going to a private school does not mean you are the best of the best, far from it. There is so much untapped potential in students from different backgrounds and their voices are just as important

I was a first generation university student from a working class background who went to Cambridge and have gone on to teach in State schools in areas of significant social deprivation, with a specific remit of increasing aspiration and supporting students in 1/ www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Working men's club, Middlesbrough, 1976, photo by Philip Jones Griffiths, Welsh photojournalist.

Lots of discourse recently about how Muppets Christmas Carol is the best version of A Christmas Carol, but we should talk about how this is the best version of the story of Robin Hood.

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 383278: Your characters need to eat, sleep, play, and do things that don't serve the plot. Characters that exist only to serve the plot seldom come across as convincing.

I am really not sure why, but I am loving this pie chat thread.