Been watching Small Prophets and Detectorists recently and I can’t help but feel that Mackenzie Crook is one of our greatest living pastoralists

Just in case you're wondering if this is you... By personal tutoring, I mean a system where a student is allocated to a member of academic staff with pastoral responsibility for them. Other titles include academic tutor, college advisor, academic advisor, academic support tutor & academic mentor.

A day of pedagogical experimentation today: making defixiones in Beginners’ Latin to practise relative clauses (and subjunctives) and trying out a Latin Consequences game to explore sentence structure in Intermediate.

Do u think they did an equalities audit before deciding on a two-tier workforce because I have some wild guesses about who is most impacted here.

Plotting and plotting: what are the best ways to get my intermediates more confident with Latin word order and sentence structure and improve fluency? I am thinking a variation of Latin consequences, maybe some kind of prediction drill. I have dreams of convoluted card and online games. Any ideas?

I reviewed again!

There were 250 people in the audience, at the biggest available room for our #awp26 panel, Resisting AI in Writing and Teaching. It was invigorating; hearing about how writing instructors are pushing back against their institutions was inspiring. Thanks to my co-panelists Carmen and Umair.

Not sure my students like Horace 1.5 as much as I hoped they would :/

Oyin in Traitors Ireland is amazing, a regal clairvoyant in a fantastic pincer movement with Vanessa.

once your email storage is full you should be allowed to graduate from it. no more emails for you. you’ve seen enough emails. you’re free now

Do we think my students will remember the formation of the Latin pluperfect indicative if it is accompanied by a picture of Taylor Swift Eras tour?

We have the next RHUL Studying Classics at University on 2nd July (not June, sorry!) and it's titled 'Of Gods and Women in the Ancient World'! Do pass on to any sixth formers of your acquaintance who might be interested.

Had a lovely time speaking to classics and English students at St Grammar School today about imagined invasions, Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquity and Victorian and Edwardian performance. Had the pleasure of answering some brilliant questions!

This is cool as hell: An app designed to ping people about nearby smartglasses. Also cool: The creator was inspired by @404media.co coverage, a great illustration of why their journalism is so essential. This kind of work is funded by paid subscribers so become one of those if you can.

Any recommendations for podcasts that leave you feeling upbeat? They can be about anything. Can’t seem to shake off the late-Winter blues.

Fascist #slopaganda isn't about seducing anyone. They're aware that their nostalgic images are ugly & fake, and that their promise to return to an imaginary past is a fraud. They're proud of the shallowness of their nostalgia, because their real promise is to legitimize cruelty against others

‘No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week!’ - my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this. academic.oup.com/res/advance-...

Love that the latest series of What We Do in the Shadows has a nod to The Warriors. This means that it now is not only a reception of the Prometheus myth (Laszlo’s monster) but Xenophon’s Anabasis. #ClassicalReception

Love that the latest series of What We Do in the Shadows has a nod to The Warriors. This means that it now is not only a reception of the Prometheus myth (Laszlo’s monster) but Xenophon’s Anabasis. #ClassicalReception

DOG AT THE OLYMPICS FULL COMPETITION HIGHLIGHTS

Someone I really care about worked themselves into chronic illness - a disability they still have, by helping their institution maintain services during lockdown, working all the hours while they themselves were suffering from Covid. I’m sure they’re not the only one.

i'd like to see AI do this!!! [draws a convex function which i label concave and discuss as if it's concave for the entire lecture despite the vague feeling that i've made some kind of error, only realising next week what happened]

Traitors Ireland has some of the funniest episodes since the Aus 2 finale.

Pinterest CEO says in layoff email: "We’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach – prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working" So it's time for me to move to another platform to save images

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

The largest infrastructure projects currently being built in the US appear to be data centers and detention centers. The AI boom has coincided with ICE becoming the most heavily funded government agency. It's hard not to see a connection: This is the architectures of digital fascism

Kate Rowland might have created her best classical jewellery yet: Trojan Horses with little secret soldiers on the back.

Need une personne qui me fait fait un câlin comme la neige fait un câlin à Lénine

In 2016 7% of biographies on #Wikipedia about classicists were about women. Now @richardnevell.bsky.social's wonderful analysis shows that 10 years later, that number is now almost 20%. That's a huge achievement! #WCCWiki

Today is Quartidi the 4th of Pluviôse in the year 234. Pluviôse is the month of rain. Today we celebrate snowdrop.#JacobinDay More information on snowdrop

This is all making me think of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which I read in my early teens. Might be interesting to revisit it and see how it holds up.

this is weirdly mesmerising to watch

When someone suggested using AI to translate work this week I found a graduate student with the expertise and the institutional funds to get them paid to do the translation. Everyone was happy in the end. It’s a tiny thing but an example of a small difference one can make.

Ever relevant, this poem by Mary Oliver, especially today.

The older I get, the more baffling I find the first Bridget Jones movie. She’s in her early 30s with a massive flat in central London, a series of interesting jobs, family wealth with a lovely dad and a gang of fun and loyal friends she has the disposable income to go out with. What’s not to love?*

I currently have borage growing in my garden. Anyway, we need more action now!

Historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, technology and medicine are all very familiar with the near impossibility of teaching outside our narrow school/college in UK HE. I may even eventually be made redundant because I was put in a very narrow pigeonhole.

My Christmas gift - panto for FREE 🌟♥️🌟 10 yrs ago I made Panto! for BBCStoryville. A feature doc about an am-dram group staging a panto - Puss in Boots at the Nottingham Arts Theatre. A tiny budget, a punishing schedule & a ramshackle donkey costume are just some of the challenges they face

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Robin Ince reveals to last night’s audience at a recording of Infinite Monkey Cage that the BBC has forced him to resign over his support of trans people

A standing commute made worth it by arriving to see homemade kourabiedes and melomakarona on my desk from my lovely Greek colleague.

I was diagnosed with #HIV in 1998, when I was 30. Many of my friends had died of AIDS. I did not expect to live to 50. I’m 58 now. HIV treatment works. Treatment also makes it impossible for me to pass HIV on during sex. Ensure HIV treatment for all. End HIV stigma. #WorldAIDSDay

I am proposing for TalosCon 2026 that part of our conference budget is hiring an artist to help create speaker slides We will ask speakers to not use AI and have an artist available to brainstorm images and create them I’d love to do this for Kubecon and @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social too #noAI

So tired I just started talking about Christmas baking with “marmozan”, which I can only assume is a portmanteau of marmoset and marzipan or is maybe is marzipan made out of marble?

Here's the DfE consultation document on international student fee levy, just gone live. "Providers will pay a simple flat fee of £925 per student per year, which will not be introduced until 2028/29." consult.education.gov.uk/internationa...

Looking forward to this tonight!

Just have the need to share that I achieved new PBs for squats *and* bench press yesterday

😬🫣🤪

If you witnessed a hate crime against a member of staff but the victim said they weren’t going to report it because they said it wouldn’t be taken seriously, what would you do? Asking for me.