I have made a really good and detailed list of all the work that I need to get done this week, structured it, and ordered it by urgency. It's now 3.30pm on Friday.

Joining Mastodon is easy! You just find an instance (not that one, not that one, not that one) and then you set up your farble to interact with the jibcrank but be sure to hide your content automatically behind a yuwving or you'll be in violation of the instances TOS and can be banned.

It seems to not have been mentioned in a lot of the discussion I've seen, but H1B visas in the US are how US colleges/universities hire international scholars. They will not spend $100k on a junior hire. If this proceeds, US universities will become even more insular.

People seem to assume that this has to be taken on the same level whether people are acting with love or hate. Let people love things. Speak up when they are espousing hate. It's not tricky. They are not the same thing, and we all know it.

I spend too much of my time these days reading obituaries of people who I will now never have the chance to know as their eulogisers did, and that gives me my own grief.

I feel like this fits into a bigger moment that I need to process a bit before I write about... But also... Fascinating.

Feeling a little bit like things at the moment are 'Do Better, Be Better, Keep Going - choose two'. Some days, it's just choose one.

Was exhausted last night, and decided not wait up and watch the Men's 3000m Steeplechase final at the World Athletics Champs, and now absolutely furious with myself...

Our universities are going to throw us under the bus for one thing or another

there is something so disorienting about living in a world with miraculous progress in all kinds of stuff, including an Industrial Revolution-scale transformation of industry and energy, while US politics is *consumed* with the dumbest, most pointlessly awful shit imaginable bsky.app/profile/ryan...

I think I have a new tshirt.

reposting with alt text because this feels incredibly significant. the right-wing disinfo machine means a lot of the people grieving Charlie Kirk never heard any of the things he said that would have tarnished his brand as Guy Who Just Wants to Have Dialogue Across the Aisle

Lying on the couch, playing my third 'dopamine-injector/don't-let-my-mind-be-left-to-its-own-devices' phone game of the morning, and I wonder how different my life would be if the public health system included better mental health support...

Also, I stayed up to watch the Black Ferns, and it was such a good match, from both teams. The Springbok Women played out of their skins, it was a *gruelling* first half, but it was also played in such incredibly good spirit. Fostering teams like SA through matters, matters to the players, and fans.

As a Wahs fan, I would really love to know if it just feels like we end up on the wrong side of line ball ref's calls more often than not, whether we cop more ref mistakes, or if there is actually some quantifiable evidence. Not suggesting anything nefarious, but I do wonder about unconscious bias

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

This sucks. This sucks SO much. Between this and media studies it's almost like the government of the day fears people who can inquire, question, interpret, and critique visual media. And people who want to learn from history.

The biggest thing I've learned from the birth and rise of the podcast: most people have terrible opinions about popular culture, and have no idea that they are wrong.

Re: news, I have nothing nice to say, so I'm not going to say anything at all. It's going to get shittier before it can possibly get better...

I've been raising this at work as they continue to move us from offices to open plan. One thing that my parents (who worked in universities) always said, I've come to 100% agree with: universities see staff's time as not having value. We'll get the work done anyway, so who cares if we are sick more

i understand that our attention is divided as a nation but i do need everyone to know that henry winkler is on a fishing trip

The book I'm currently reading is set in Victorian/Edwardian England, and just had the most delightful turn of phrase: “Why consign scandalous acts to the dark? They can and should be committed in good light.” It just tickled me.

I spend more time than is good for me thinking about digital privacy, digital security, and security theatre. I know just enough to know how much I don't know, and when I think too much about it, it terrifies me. But also, I'm aware that there is a QoL barrier to entry. We haven't got that balance.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, a group of scientists and researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand dropped everything they were doing and rolled up their sleeves to help the response. This response ultimately saved around 20,000 lives 🧪 🧵

Oh HELL yes

Hearing that another colleague working in HE in the UK has taken 'voluntary' redundancy and is leaving the UK. We are going to come to a reckoning with how we have treated HE, at least in the anglophone world, and it is going to be messy. It is going to be bad for our culture and societies.

Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

Nothing makes me more annoyed than governments or governance groups investing significant time and money in expert panels or working groups, waiting til they return a detailed, rigorous, and complex set of findings, and then just going ahead with what they wanted to do ideologically anyway.

I missed that we had fixed the problems we had. That's lucky!

I have many things I'm meant to be writing, that will actually help me get promoted next year. But I'm considering writing an opinion piece for The Conversation applying both moral panic theory and readings of techno-optimism to the current debates around AI in higher education...

I got to be on a panel yesterday, talking about AI and Academic Integrity to 300 librarians in higher ed (and related spaces), and honestly, I need to find more reasons to surround myself with librarians on a daily basis.

I know Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has become a punchline, a whipping boy of TV critics, a footnote in the story of 30 Rock, but it still contains some of my favourite performances from each of the main 7 or 8 actors in it. It was earnest, but sometimes I'm here for earnest.

Louder for those in the back row.

Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon

Gig planners, some seating is really essential for some of your attendees. (Having said that, Roundhead were awesome, immediately dashed off to get seats so we could sit in the foyer just outside the doors, and still enjoy the gig)

Really sick of life being shitty to some of the best people I know. If it could stop doing that, I'd really appreciate it.

I do sometimes complain about New Zealand feeling boring but it has its upsides. newsroom.co.nz/2025/08/05/p...

Journal Articles I Want Someone Else To Write So I Can Read #327: "Do You Think Love Is The Right Word For What Goes On On That Island?": The Conflation of Love, Marriage and Sex on Reality TV

Helsinki (pop 657,000) has not had a single traffic death during the last twelve months. poliisi.fi/-/helsingin-...

Feeling pretty paralysed with work at the moment. Have a light teaching semester, and it's when I'm meant to get 2-3 new journal articles out. Also trying to get work/life balance back to manageable, plus trying to build some admin processes to make future semesters manageable rather than reactive.

I don't remember the last time I went to the movies to see a DC film... I think it might have been The Dark Knight... But we're here for Superman , because they seem to have remembered what it means to not be grimdark...

No, *you* absent-mindedly pull hairs out of your eyebrow when you're stressed or anxious...

Free tertiary education in the 1970s+ in Australia lifted lots of people out of poverty & into productive, highly skilled professions. Those people earned more, paid more tax, contributed more to their communities & society in general. It was dumb to stop free tertiary when huge corps pay NO tax.

A MASSIVE WIN AT NEWCASTLE UNI ICU

Is there any "good" way to read a thread on here if it has various replies to each post? Because I seem to have to scroll to find the next post from the orginal author, click on that, for every single post in the thread...

Taking the opportunity while we're travelling to read a bit. Decided I wanted to go back to @jodimca.bsky.social's Valentine series, because I'd only read the first book. 36 hrs later, I've re-read Valentine, blasted through Ironheart, and started Misrule. They are *so* good.

Again, I couldn't recommend this bundle more highly to SFF nerds. Well worth paying enough to get the bonus books too. And if it needs saying, you absolutely don't need to be extremely gay to get a lot out of these books (they're just really good writing) but it wouldn't hurt either!

Masking is so easy, you can make risk-based decisions on the airflow and density of people, and it's the best possible way of keeping your community, yourself, and the people you love safe.

My parents' house. I swung on that tree when I was 4. It was solid as a rock. For scale, the room you can see is the third storey of the house. (Everyone safe, missed my car which they are looking after, and remarkably little damage to house)