Thank you to @karriefransman.bsky.social @rikworth.bsky.social and @paulfisherdavies.bsky.social for the extremely insightful chat and thanks to everyone who came out in the characteristically inhospitable weather!

Join us on Wednesday 12 November for a roundtable discussion about comics and research, featuring @karriefransman.bsky.social @rikworth.bsky.social and @paulfisherdavies.bsky.social, plus art to look at and snacks to enjoy! Book while you can, tickets are going fast!

I sure hope the state will compensate me for the administrative labour I'll inevitably have to spend time and effort on in supporting my parents' and 94-year-old grandmother's acquisition and use of the digital ID.

Turn on telly, Nickelback is on. Guess I've arrived in Belgium 👍

Damn, look how many of you have filled in the survey in its first week! (Yes I *have* made a respondent-meter like it’s a village hall fundraiser - let me have my little whimsies) If you have ten mins to join in the fun, the link is here: ukcomicscreators.org.uk

Something special today at BF! Raging Against the Machine: Comics and Generative AI “Art” (Interlude) – Read @tomhumberstone.com Tom Humberstone’s Comic ‘I’m a Luddite! (And So Can You!)’ on AI Art, Luddism and Activism Here at BF. www.brokenfrontier.com/raging-again... #NoToAIArt

Thank you again for having me Tim! Not sure "fun" is the right word, given the grim moments in the series we were talking about, but admittedly there were several occasions during this when I had to stifle my own laughs to avoid soiling the feed with incessant chuckling.

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

Can't believe I had to verify my age on here like a big baby.

😢

I did not have a Department of Education x Fantastic Four collab on my weird shit in 2025 bingo card but here we are.

PUBLICATION DAY! Non-fiction, comedy comic aimed at 7-11 year olds, designed to encourage reading and critical thinking while supporting the KS2 curriculum and with brilliant artwork is by genius @jordancollver.bsky.social ? What are you waiting for? #KidsLitUk uk.bookshop.org/p/books/pets...

Commentary on Lorde's album cover not even referring to the correct body part, smh

Good morning

Time to shamelessly promote this new #comicsstudies collection ‘Horror and Comics’ - edited by me, @barbarachamberlin.bsky.social and @komkunyosying - and packed with #horror themed goodness and looking at a global selection of comics! Due to be published by university of wales press next month.

Spotted in the wild @kaysohini.bsky.social's graphic memoir (among the classics) at the Book Hive in Norwich

Bleak. nymag.com/intelligence...

Watching y'all use SkyNet AI

m8, I just wanna help people make stuff and express themselves in meaningful ways ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I'll be running my annual ecofemist craftivism workshop at UEA's @greenfilmfestival.bsky.social on 3 May at @norwichcastle.bsky.social It's a free, fun, gentle crafting session with a feminist environmental ethos. Booking essential www.tickettailor.com/events/green...

Weirdly alarmist take, this: (1) the "studio system" hasn't existed since 1948, what are they on about and (2) the thought that Ryan Coogler negotiating a favourable deal for his vampire movie is making "Hollywood execs" tremble in their boots is oddly making me want to see it more.

Please consider supporting the Comics Cultural Impact Collective’s report asking DCMS for investment in comics forms.gle/mk6iTZK9yUDV...

I get right-wing trolls doing the Ghibli AI images but seeing so many people generating images of their babies and pets... Like, you know you could pay an artist to do you an anime family portrait, right?

Taught comics for the first time since 2019 this week and last. Students spent a good portion of this week's session just making comics. It was nice interacting with students over something they'd materially created with just a pen and paper. A little piece of them I hadn't encountered before.

PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not an unemployment benefit. PIP is not a

Whaaaaaaa.....????!!!!

ChatGPT is down, you say?

You can tell how much Google search has degraded. When I used to suspect a student essay to contain copied text, I'd Google a sentence of it and it would throw up a match. Now, it searches for those words and every synonym for every word in the query, leading to much less targeted results.

Forgot to post in the excitement of last year finally ending, but happy to announce my article on Black Widow, gender and genre is our now, open access: doi.org/10.1080/1050...

Finally

Miriam Margolyes and I have so much in common, we both hate Christmas and have terribly weak bladders and are Miriams.

"Is Ted Lasso Just Boring or Is There Something Wrong with Me: An Existential Contemplation"

The Creator's Guide to Comics Devices is OPEN!!!!! comicsdevices.com An online library and meronomy of visual-narrative devices that are used in the medium of comics and other sequential art. 🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨

How your email finds me

Not the UEA alumni newsletter asking me for cash donations towards their new science labs. Meanwhile:

For a moment I was thi king David Mayer is the guy who directed the American Idiot music video, but that is, in fact, Samuel Bayer.

It's amazing how the writer of the article DOES acknowledge the widespread funding crisis but then uses that as a springboard to flip back to the woke-gone-mad default. Plus the only reason they're mentioning any of this is because they've finally cottoned on to the fact that no subject is safe.

Who or what is writing these headlines?

If you read one thing today make it Amy Kurzweil’s comic that thinks through conflict, loss and revenge, and through the cross-cutting of Palestinian and Israeli narratives: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Have we reclaimed HE yet? If not, it might be time to consider how we can ensure they here is maybe some HE left to reclaim. Like yesterday.

Did you know? Black Friday is named in honor of Rebecca Black, who invented Friday in 2011.

It's the two year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT and still nobody can actually say what it is or why it's the future

Aren't the ones clamouring for a general election also the kinds of people who don't like cancel culture? Not really following the logic...

Can vouch for this, it's a very good podcast 10/10 A++ (full disclosure: I'm involved)

In response to OpenAI’s recent ‘A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT’, Arthur Perret (maître de conferénces, Jean Moulin Lyon 3) writes a line-by-line rebuttal — A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2024-11...

I take it there's been another mass exodus of X?

institutions taking steps to ensure students aren’t sexually harassed is going “too far” because ~*social media*~ right wing press latching onto this story in the most myopic, intentionally inflammatory way