It’s so quiet on here, and it feels impossible to build momentum around any campaigning posts. But if you like live music gigs or appreciate the value of the arts & culture & community spaces, please support this. We’ve lost so many venues. These people want to save one.

Me: really busy day tomorrow. Got to do chores, get kids to/from places, get to work, do work, get home, pack, and drive 150 miles in the evening. Devil (wearing binoculars) on my shoulder: have you also considered getting up at 330am to go birdwatching?

4. You have (in most cases) to have an alternative source of income/wealth.

Truth bomb

To cut a long story short, at 7 this morning I found myself hacking through nettles, holly, and brambles in search of a lost Pikachu, who was none the worse for his overnight adventure.

Counterpoint: Yes they are, and that is good

These include: * word docs where the formatting fucks up if you enter anything * PDFs that you can’t edit * PDFs that you can edit but can’t save * multiple pages of MS forms where you don’t know what’s coming which is really shit if you want to draft an application * many many online portals

One thing that unites universities across the world is a love of producing poorly-designed forms that are a nightmare to complete.

“The wallpaper is flaking, carpets are frayed and doors are broken. The children's home is unregistered and therefore illegal but the provider is charging a council elsewhere in the country £13,000 a week to care for a vulnerable teenage girl”

Bought this book at Wicken Fen last week. It is super interesting on the expropriation of the commons by the wealthy and also on concerted resistance to the enclosure and draining of the English fens over centuries.

My university: hey, it's summer, it's bank holiday weekend, it's half term, we're going to give you an extra day off on Tuesday because we value our employees ... there's just one small caveat Me: great ... what's the caveat? My university: you will need to spend the day marking

You can also play a part in their survival by enjoying these wonderful breeding waders from the hides, and by keeping to the public footpaths and taking notice of our signs at this crucial time of year, when we need as many chicks to fledge as possible - thank you @yorkbirding.bsky.social

All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that Gen AI remains a poor and unreliable tool for humanities research. Very sad to see students encouraged to use it and producing less interesting (and sometimes downright awful) work as a result.

I've got to say that I'm becoming a bit sick of ecocritical readings that are basically celebratory: "Ooh look at the ecological ethic promoted by this novel!" What happened to looking for tensions, contradictions, the unsaid? Reading against the grain tends to be a lot more interesting.

My daughter’s latest masterpiece: ‘This Book is Crassy! [Crazy]’. Green dinosaur and purple unicorn cavorting on the cover. Mayhem within, including a weird monster swallowing the word ‘crassy’. 3/10 for spelling. 10/10 for creativity.

This is a Greater Honeyguide. Like a cuckoo, it lays its eggs in the nests of other species, often destroying the host’s eggs in the process. If any of the host’s chicks hatch, the honeyguide chicks, still blind and featherless, will PECK THEM TO DEATH. Nature is murder (to paraphrase W Herzog).

Jesus Christ this is the most chilling thing I've read in ages. The "new understanding of truth" described here is not new in any way, it is basically a return to pre-literate dark ages & the inevitable result is going to be fascism.

Visited some John Clare haunts on my way from Suffolk to Yorkshire. Heard a cuckoo in Rice Wood and a nightingale at Swaddywell! (The latter lamented by Clare as an overextracted landscape but now a nature reserve.) Then my luck ran out and I sat in a traffic jam on the A1 for three hours…

Minsmere is an amazing place. Today I had fine views of a bittern creeping around a reedbed. I also saw my first ever green hairstreak butterfly.

Yesterday I saw a cuckoo in Bedfordshire. Today I saw a common crane in Cambridgeshire. Tomorrow I hope to see a bittern in Suffolk. (And if I don’t, the Nature Writing Gods will get what’s coming.)

It’s the year 2026: Universities allow students and academics to use computer programmes to do their work for them, Reform are the guest speakers at an anti-semitism rally, and ballmaxing is a thing. God fucking help us. I don’t know if we’ll survive to get to 2027.

ancient semi-natural, gasflames of bluebell, woodsorrel lemony on the tongue; blackcap loud & well-concealed in a waking oak; on the fringes, & distantly, a single frame of a cuckoo

E.g. the only way to get appointments at my GP surgery is online. Can't ask at reception by phone or in person. The system is only available briefly at 8am. From work, I'm used to annoying online interfaces but I still struggle with this one. I wonder if it's even legal, given obvious access issues.

7am and I’ve already shoehorned a gratuitous and pretentious literary reference into a group chat.

"iPads often become a barrier rather than a learning aid. Basic skills such as sustained reading of books and face-to-face discussion risk being sidelined when almost every activity is mediated through a screen" Excellent letters. Horrific over-use of technology ⬇️ www.theguardian.com/education/20...

The Lost Elms by Mandy Haggith wins the 2025 Richard Jefferies Award for Nature Writing

There was once an idea that it was a good thing for people, regardless of social background, to study the arts and humanities because those fields address what it is to be human. That idea was always under pressure, but to see its near destruction in recent years has been depressing.

Useful info here. If you don’t want to be governed by the far right it is important to vote on Thursday in the local council elections - last time around (2024) 70% of eligible people couldn’t be bothered to vote. That attitude tends to help the far right.

An act of bravery not seen in the Telegraph since someone defended cyclists.

Here’s how the AI Boom, such as it is, has impacted my life: it has been used as an excuse to lay off my friends for bot equivalents that never came. It has made mass culture and art immeasurably worse. I have a stalker with AI psychosis. So, no, I don’t more data centers. I want less of all that.

Roused from my bed at daybreak and forced against my will to draw a mouse tending to her cheese tree.

Rocket Cress (I think) at Eccup Reservoir, West Yorkshire. A new plant for me. #wildflowerhour

Annual birding trip to Swaledale tomorrow. Well worth getting there for dawn, but I slightly dread the alarm…

I’m sure that, when Kraftwerk released this song, they would have been delighted to know that, on a bright May afternoon in England nearly 50 years later, two small girls on a trampoline would be singing along to the chorus while pretending to be robots. m.youtube.com/watch?v=D_8P...

bimble down the bigriver, grey wagtails feeding a single fledgling & a heron riffling their cloak, orange tip (the red bedrock) 1/3

31 bird species at Eccup Reservoir this morning, including my first common whitethroat of the year. Yellowhammers and skylarks in fine voice.

Lovely spring weather this week and I have time for a birdwatching trip tomorrrow morning. What could possibly go wrong?!

Who fancies sitting in a bookshop on a lovely Sunday afternoon, drawing with me? Any reposts would be lovely, thank you! www.waterstones.com/events/child...

Do you know of a ~5-10 minute video around 'trust in science' from a #STS perspective? Is for a *non-specialist* audience. I'm coming up empty so far. Any suggestions gratefully received!

Study finds that students using chatGPT learned and remembered less than students who did not use it. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

like the global geo-political climate, public discourse around AI is fast deteriorating and I feel it everyday 1/

Just heard my first lesser whitethroat of the year, emanating from this hawthorn at a park and ride near York. I love an unexpected bird encounter.

After years of research, I can finally reveal the top 5 opinions (not mine, of course) likely to get you cancelled on Bluesky: * Terry Pratchett is mid * Ditto Mary Oliver * Gen AI is quite useful * Dogs are annoying * It’s okay to post on X

Critical social scientists - our voices matter. Unfortunately there is a burden on us to develop thick skin to deal with comments about 'fluffy' science or questions about the point of our research. Don't hesitate to acknowledge that there may not be comfortable solutions (eg to climate change) 1/2

Just replied to some institutional AI boosterism by outlining concerns e.g. * Unethical training and development * Environmental costs * Misinformation * Cognitive offloading * Financially unsustainable I have no special insight; this seems obvious stuff but strangely not within many universities.

I'm all for criticising bad university leadership, but behind it is a massive policy failure ensuring that most universities are, or soon will be, in serious financial trouble. University leaders have been dealt a losing hand, which some of them play very poorly (and not with their own dosh).

I mean: why? If the idea is that they’re testing ChatGPT against verifiable knowledge, then they need to understand that knowledge and how it’s made, not use ChatGPT.

It's happening! I have a launch event for my debut fantasy novel! July 7th, 7pm, Waterstones Sauchiehall Street (Glasgow). Please do join if you can, and any shares are much appreciated! Tickets can be booked here: www.waterstones.com/events/an-ev...

Thinking about mortality a lot at the moment, for several reasons. While this has obvious disadvantages — e.g. it’s depressing — it’s helpful when it comes to letting go of petty anxieties and grudges and focusing on what really matters.

Something shocking and out of the ordinary is happening in the UK. While in most comparable countries, healthy life expectancy is rising, here it is plunging steeply. Q. So what marks us out? A. 47 years of extreme neoliberalism, culminating in austerity. www.health.org.uk/reports-and-...