Some reflections and process on working with our Advisory Group on Design and Disability - “generative friction” and how we meet to create access and ideas. www.vam.ac.uk/blog/project...

Valentine's Day is in 4 days time...👀 🛩️

(begging that perimenopausal folx / trans folx are just given a box filled with hormone-infused soil to bury ourselves in for the duration, like Dracula in his ocean crossing to Whitby)

And 'The Bone Temple' is even better again; more unsettling but/and more measured; first time in an age I've been in a cinema where the audience has spontaneously applauded during the film (and again at the end).

Bought a metronome.

And may I suggest also, Chapter 5 of 'Systems Ultra' (Verso) on payment processors and the adult industry? :)

(friends in Toronto, NY, Vancouver, N Carolina - everything is bad *but* Wet Mess is coming to yr cities & I cannot recommend their show enough; astonishing, filthy, life-affirming. Think I've seen them perform 4 [?] times on the past few years and they are 🔥 💦 👑 ) www.instagram.com/p/DTGWaucDfA-/

The 20mm Oerlikon cannon was a deadly weapon in the right hands. It also made a fantastic climbing frame for cats, as Pussy and Mickey are demonstrating on Polish merchant ship SS Kordecki off Normandy, summer 1944. 📷 IWM HU 128285 🧵10/17

anyone know of any good papers on how the vocal tone/inflection of the ChatGPT voice interface was/is trained?

(every Christmas card handwritten in my illegible, Guy-Fawkes-after-torture scrawl is a poke in the eye against the frictionless perfection of AI!!)

Guildenstern: I don't believe in it anyway. Rosencrantz: What? Guildenstern: England. Rosencrantz: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

late to the game (literally) but having a very nice time with Hades II

And whilst I'm here! If you're thinking of buying SYSTEMS ULTRA as a festive gift (neon cover also doubles as SAD lamp), I'd be happy to mail you a set of bookmarks and holographic stickers to go along with it - please get in touch [1/4]

Systems Ultra! 'A delight to read' says MIT Tech Review. Despite aiming for a work that wasn't bound to the present moment (no AI / algorithms), the parts on payment platforms, automotive technology, adult entertainment, supply chains, have proved horribly timely www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

"there are no third spaces anymore" wrong. blast furnace

delicious writing from @gsvoss.bsky.social about undelicious food photography slop

Keeping it real.

For @vittles.bsky.social, I wrote about what happens food photography - a practice steeped in stagecraft - meets the synthetic horrors of AI images. Gorgeous original illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/you-want-t...

For @vittles.bsky.social, I wrote about what happens food photography - a practice steeped in stagecraft - meets the synthetic horrors of AI images. Gorgeous original illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/you-want-t...

Any suggestions of good STS scholarship (journal articles, book chapters, other) on disability and technology? never been quite satisfied with ones I've used before in teaching...

As many have pointed out, Mamdani didn't stand apart from our trans brothers and sisters. He didn't play the "Gee, gosh, it sure is complicated," milquetoast moderate card. And he crushed. The way forward is together, not over the bodies of our own.

(please show me the Halloween costume from the hero who decides to dress as the mechanical ladder used in the Louvre heist? ty)

www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/we-eat-the... FYI the very excellent artist and writer Crystal Bennes is taking pre-orders for her next artist's book, which is a documentary project on global industrial fertilizer supply chains, if you follow me on here you're probably into this sort of thing

The appropriate reparations for centuries of extractive colonialism is freely providing the resources — technology, tools, money — to build out local renewable energy infrastructure globally, so that every human community has access to energy ample to meet all their needs so they can thrive.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2025)

Checking my 'great ideas' notes from the pub last night and the one new item is "Dr Butter's Boardroom Bones" - a velvet bag of scrying bones, for you to throw on the table and consult yourself every time a colleague says they "asked chatGPT and..."

It is very annoying to have to keep pushing back against thie targeted and weaponised hatred trans folx but on we go. Please do respond to this consultation if you can x

ROSENCRANTZ: Let's play questions. CHOTINER: How do you play? ROS: How do you think? CHOTINER: I don't know that's why I'm asking. ROS: Statement, 0-1 me. CHOTINER: What? ROS: What don't you understand? CHOTINER: I'm trying to conduct an interview and you - ROS: Statement, 0-2 me. CHOTINER: OK wait-

ME (crawling under the bed to pet the cat who is trying to nap there): I LOVE you. CAT: [grunts] ME: You are the PEFECT little man!!!! CAT: [horrifying gurgling digesting noises]

(if you would like a film with a lot of pups in it, a gentle nudge towards 'The Company of Wolves' - lots of v charismatic Belgian Shepherds with dye jobs running around, together with a few of the big guys)

NEW book review! James Dyer reviews Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World, published by Verso. Read now at academic.oup.com/jdh/advance-...

There is a lot for disabled people to be enraged about. I partnered with artist Finnegan Shannon on #DisabledRage public art. All graphics are downloadable & feel free to share and wheatpaste all over your community disabilityvisibilityproject.com/disabled-rage/

'[America By Design] proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country...digital design intended for the privileged few, actively excluding people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of “eligible.”' +++, from @ethanmarcotte.com ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/a-noti...

what other utilities do you know that would host a zine reading in the bowels of a treatment plant

Very much enjoying the Timothy Olyphant -> Malcolm McDowell pipeline, since you ask.

[extremely on-mushrooms voice] hear me out. what if we destroy capitalism by feminizing having money

Together: small vine tomatoes, nectarine, green olives (Perello gordal picante), red pepper, a little finely chopped red onion, burrata, balsamic vinegar + good olive oil + salt + pepper. (You may also accompany with bbq'd chicken thigh with crispy skin).

Thinking a lot about Winnie Soon's Unerasable Character Series, on the horrors of erasure and the scale of unheard voices within the contexts of digital authoritarianism and the 'blank paper' protests in China (calls.ars.electronica.art/2023/prix/wi... / transmediale.de/en/event/the...)

The chapter on 'Deviance' in my book is on payment processors in the adult entertainment industry, spurred by going to b2b pr0n trade fairs and being 🧐 about why?? the fair's main sponsors were all processors??? www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

Shannon has been such a support & lodestar for me over the past decade; a brilliantly inventive scholar and astonishingly generous human. So much of what she writes so beautifully here is resonant, of being (a woman) in arts/humanities academia, and of carving weirder paths through the green 🌿

In an extremely specific way, '28 Years Later' feels like a sister-piece to 'Isles of Wonder'

Full fat Cherry Coke with an original Magnum chopped up into it (large pieces) + massive ice-cube, you're welcome

Had some Proper Feelings seeing these posters in the tunnel up to the V&A today - an essential show at any time but especially in the current moment, and by such excellent folks.

You may not like it but this is what 2 high agency males look like.

Apropos of this moment: in a creative writing for performance group I was in we went round the room & described what we wanted to dig into. 'Care', 'queer joy', 'clowning' from other folk [genuinely great!]. From me, truthfully, it has always been 'men being terrible little bitches to each other'.

(Happy Pride month!)

Lads this looks so good ✨

i dont care what AI can do "better" than me. the point of me doing something isn't to be the best at it. it's for me to do it.

Been thinking and working so much over the past years about living in (often hostile) systems and how to communicate and work with that complexity as it unfurls; and I'm so looking forward to seeing what work the @unbreaking.org crew will do.