This is Cathy Rutherford, Glasgow born trade unionist. I love this clip, but even more for knowing that it stems from a core of lifelong political activism

I'm giving a keynote 4/9 on speculative+experimental kinds of peer review, built on my "Organized Futures: Speculative Design for More Just+Joyful Scholarly Infrastructure" article journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/... For Experimental Publishing Practices conf: copim.pub/online-confe...

The latest poll has the Scottish Greens as the 2nd largest party - overtaking Labour & the Tories and ahead of Reform. Let's demand better. On May 7th vote Scottish Greens.

Mentally preparing for our upcoming panel on infrastructuring for publishing.

📢 Our online conference - Practicing Experimental Books: Celebrating Copim’s Book Pilots - is just about to start! 👉 buff.ly/4GI05kP Join Simon Dumas Primbault @openedition.bsky.social @cnrs.fr for the keynote and stay for the panel discussion after! @simonxix.com @openreflections.bsky.social

Similarly, Voyager 1 and 2 contain recorded messages of peace from UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim — who hid his Nazi past and complicity in war crimes.

Unite on strike on 10 April at Glasgow, Strathclyde and Edinburgh Napier.

this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!

A very dramatic backdrop for the @copim.bsky.social Experimental Publishing Retreat.

⏰ Not long to go now until our #ExperimentalPublishing group’s online conference! 🗓️ 8-9 April 2026 Register now 👉 buff.ly/Ca1Q6dj Full programme 👉 buff.ly/4GI05kP #OpenAccess #OpenBooks #ScholarlyPublishing #ExperimentalPublishing

"troubled coder who died by suicide" is such infuriating phrasing, he was a 26 yo, sentenced to 35 years in prison for downloading academic articles!! they murdered him.

watch the free youtube stream instead 🥰

NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.

“I will NOT sacrifice the Oxford comma. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They assimilate the em dash and we fall back. They capture ‘not just X but y’ and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

[The Apollo 11 plaque] reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. - Carl Sagan

Sometimes readers are skeptical when I tell them that retailers would rather pay for self-checkout kiosks and product lockup systems and all manner of other questionable in-store tech rather than staffing because of an ideological preference for capital spending over labor spending and, well,,,

There's something a bit poignant about a Bluetooth device failing to connect to another device right next to it when they're the only Bluetooth devices for hundreds of thousands of kilometres around.

yep, Nestlé had their sales reps *dress up as nurses* and give out free formula *in maternity wards* to make families dependent on it, in countries where many didn't have access to clean water for mixing with formula. researchers estimate that 10.9 million babies died.

All dressed up with nowhere to go (for approx. 15 minutes).

Now I'm no expert on government efficiency but couldn't that frame very easily be used again?

Basically you have to understand that you’re here as a sort of parasite on someone else’s grift where they make vcs pay for their hobby. You’re black mold in the wall of an adult daycare. Embrace it but know it is transient.

when we're all unable to connect to use the internet, send emails, pay our bills, use our toasters, and god knows what else if AWS goes down, i want you to know now that i blame our lack of antitrust laws far more than i'll blame a foreign missile

I read aloud what Spotify considered to be a potentially legally actionable amount about Ring-Wraiths.

It's going to be wild if humanities & social science departments start moving en masse to software like LibreOffice, Zettlr, and Scrivener in order to avoid the incessant & unavoidable AI pleading & nagging built into Word. Like if this prof wasn't an outlier? Wild.

Great article—if you want to know why so many universities, even across oceans, are singing the same tune, look to the consultants selling them the same plans! I like this point that the same-ness distills down to the department and class level too. we all become fungible units.

[reading a book in first person] i dont remember doing any of this

It's a claim that's true. "Independent GREEN Voice" is a paper party, run by a holocaust denier, that got thousands of votes 4 years ago despite no campaigning, no manifesto and no press. It's a fascist project to redirect votes intended for the actual Greens

jonny over on masto doing god's work: > anthropic [is running] an ENTIRE AD CAMPAIGN around "Claude code is written with claude code" and after the source was leaked that has got to be the funniest self-own in the history of advertising because OH BOY IT SHOWS. neuromatch.social/@jonny/11632...

Now that's what I call open source.

I mentioned my work on Edinburgh Diamond during this presentation but I am on strike as a @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social member, Edinburgh didn't pay for me to be at #UKSG2026, and I replaced my slides with this. Please donate to our fighting fund if you're able. www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/hff-fundrais...

why the hell would we put windows 11 in space

Coventry University didn't have enough money to keep me and my colleagues employed to continue our high-quality, socially important research but they have plenty for neocolonialism.

Dramatic scenes this morning as University of Edinburgh Principal Peter Mathieson was temporarily trapped inside Black Medicine Coffee as striking uni staff members on the picket line surrounded him while chanting ‘shame on you’. VIDEO: www.instagram.com/p/DWlm6OAjGtq/

There are toilets everywhere for those with the eyes to see

Checked in again on the new Met Office Android app. The ability to choose a location for the widget – a feature that was in the previous major version – is still not available. I guess "soon" doesn't mean within two months.

I was keen to watch the Artemis II launch since I've never been able to see a crewed lunar mission launch in my lifetime but the 2324 – 0124 BST launch window is definitely too much after days of conferencing.

Also tagging #UKSG2026 participants 😉

👇 🙌 aside from cybersecurity discussion we also need to engage honestly with why sci-hub is genuinely appealing

Great thread here. Don't get me wrong, I hate shadow libraries, I think they undermine everything i do. BUT they're kind of yesterday's problem, not our cutting edge issue. They're also a symptom & we can work on those problems. V different from the criminal orgs we should really worry about.

Bold move of a commercial publisher to be questioning the morality of people working in libraries.

Can't imagine what may have caused this very worrying increase in the last few years

Looking forward to this plenary discussion on cybersecurity for libraries given my own writing around this subject: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #UKSG2026

The statement "we shouldn't be using software from companies that are complicit in genocide" should not be controversial! And yet in my own workplace, and I'm sure many others, feels taboo and almost pointless to say. I really appreciate @simonxix.com's moral clarity on this.

Really important post! I've been struggling with the embeddedness of profoundly unethical companies in knowledge infrastructure, great to see that acknowledged and with achievable suggestions of how to move forward.

I've been very critical of Scottish Labour but even I have to admit that their plan to dismantle Trident one nuclear submarine captain at a time is working.

Cheers Gemini, sons crying now

Max Planck Digital Library man pointing out that there is enough money in the system, libraries just need to redistribute it in the right way. For me, that's away from Big Deals with commercial publishers and towards smaller OA presses and community-led no-fee OA initiatives. #UKSG2026

Small(ish) OA would be significantly more financially sustainable if libraries divested funds from regressive, legacy, mission-misaligned publishers and instead invested that in partnerships with values-aligned publishers.

At #UKSG2026, "maximising the value proposition."