Yes everything is terrible but let’s not lose sight of the fact that someone has written the Headline to End All Headlines.

Just don't set things on fire unless you have a professionally built non-portable fire pit with a proper surround. Even if nothing catches at the time, the heat goes downwards and stays in the soil, and a fire can start hours or days later.

Repeating this annual - and futile - appeal to employers... Today's reference form has 21 mandatory questions (on most of which I have no knowledge - I was the applicant's tutor, not his probation officer) and also demands a separate reference addressing exactly the same points...

Jesus christ just say girls and gays this is taking forever

This is brilliant: the re-introduction of beavers in the nature reserve next door has basically eliminated flooding at Greenford station on the Central Line. They could perhaps now set the furry engineers to work on getting the station’s inclined lift to work more reliably.

I cannot take anyone seriously who thinks that "working in an office" makes you some kind of out of touch elite. Services are incredibly important for Britain's economy! Lots of us work in services. We're just regular people.

This. God, this. It is such a manufactured panic and it started the moment they lost the fight over gay marriage. Support trans rights because it’s the right thing to do and also because this is all just a fascist push

Also (sorry, but honestly) if I had to make a list of places cis men couldn't go to because a cis man had made a women "uncomfortable" there, it would be very long and there would be literally nowhere for men to go.

This is written for laypeople and goes through the main points from the Code. It's written like a Q&A between me and the trans woman I invented to have the conversation with, who is as fed up of this shit as most of my trans woman friends.

This story, insofar as it deals with the National Railway Museum, is utterly absurd. If you rock up to a museum event expecting to dump a load of stuff on the staff, and are then surprised to be politely refused, then you clearly have no idea what museums are for. www.cityam.com/a-state-of-t...

Paging Sir Chortlemuffin. Sir Edward Chortlemuffin to the white courtesy telephone. Thank you.

I don’t know what to tell you, man. I’m a medieval historian, and, in my field, if you don’t check your sources (and your sources’ sources) you are just asking to be taken for a ride by some bored 19th C. aristocratic English antiquarian with a penchant for inventing history.

This appeared on my timeline amid more shocking news of university redundancies and honestly it fits quite well, as a metaphor...

they're replacing libraries with a guy who just says shit

Is AI better at coding than a junior engineer? Maybe! Will we ever have senior engineers if we replace all junior engineers with AI? We will not Is AI better at writing then a 6th grader? Maybe! Will anyone learn to write of all 6th graders use AI? They will not

Tremendous stuff. 10/10

Actually, I shouldn’t write this in the passive tense. This is an active choice by these people: sheffield.ac.uk/ueb/team-pro... We should take steps to revoke the professional recognition of colleagues who are destroying our fields. They are not worthy of membership of our communities.

This is a shocking example of one of the big reasons why, right now, there is no way I’d use AI for any of my historical work. If you don’t look at the documents yourself, and if you don’t know how the AI you’re using was coded, you have no idea what it may be leaving out – or adding in.

On the other hand, if you’re suing a billionaire, start demanding their AI logs in discovery

I GET LOGGED OUT. BUT I LOG IN AGAIN

Two visual puns I hadn’t been aware of until yesterday. The vertical elements of the City of London School for Girls resemble pencils, and those for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama represent tuning forks.

I can accept the Muppets being in commercials because they’re showbiz people. I cannot accept the Sesame Street Muppets being in commercials because they’re educators.

If the actor with British accent is evil then you’re watching Sci fi. If the actor with a British accent is good then it’s Fantasy. If the actor with a British accent knocks something over then it’s a Rom com.

What is an educator without hope? Futures that they can put their typically immense energy into making real, or trying for? Not just hopes for their own careers, but for all those they teach or work with? How many of us stuck around in this sector because it represented that kind of hope?

It is astonishing* that Angela Rayner's tax affairs - in which the Standards Commissioner found her to have acted "in good faith", in an attempt to protect her disabled son - is STILL a bigger story than Farage trousering £5 million in secret or Tice's taxes. *It's not astonishing, but should be.

Maybe we'll get some spoons in our tearoom with all the extra cash...

We can also work with our students on attention and strategies that work for different people, all of whose beautiful, neurodiverse brains need different cues, work habits, and strategies. If we want people to employ attention, we have to teach it.

Hello, I'm on the academic lit search again - is there any writing out there on trans lives* in Northern Ireland? Thank you! * specifically trans people, I've found tons of great sources on LGB people. @hleehurley.com

Another strike day, and this is the context: www.heraldscotland.com/news/2610095...

The last time I was turned down for Arts Council funding, they sent me a model application for a project to demonstrate what they were ideally looking for. The model application was by me a year earlier. And was also turned down.

Andy is from my constituency, I get on well with him, he's done great things for Manchester, and it'd be pretty cool to see a Culcheth lad in Number 10 - all this is true. Beyond that, the rest is bollocks. Can we finally put this to bed now?

“nagging feeling that the cambridge school is nesting in the attic? demographers using all your wifi? postmodernists under the floorboards attacking collections and possessions?” who you gonna call? that’s right: the 1 and only science-backed historiography pest control business” historyonics.com

📢JOB ALERT 📢 We are looking to appoint a F/T open-ended Lecturer in Late Medieval / Early Modern History (1400-1700) @lancasteruni.bsky.social. This is an amazing opportunity that we are very proud to announce, so please spread the word far and wide! www.hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

"This will transform historical research!" Cool but it's already being transformed out of existence by the same forces pushing these transformative technologies. Forgive us if we're skeptical of a moment that's telling us "This will help you do your work--which we despise--faster and better."

I didn't choose to be trans. I just am. But here's the thing: whether or not being trans is innate is *completely irrelevant* because bodily autonomy is a human right. Abortion is a human right because everyone has the right to decide what to do with their own body. Same with gender affirming care.

no offense but this might be my finest work

UD IT, you have not read the room

Every time Canvas is in the news I'm reminded of this excited statement about its massive stores of "data assets" from its ceo in 2019 eliterate.us/instructure-...

Ah yes Edinburgh Zoo, the measurement all Scottish people understand - the weight of a six pack of ginger.

Question for fellow UK HE folk having to enrol their personal devices with Company Portal/Intune: I've just been told my device won't work because it's a Motorola. Is anyone else getting this? Can't find any similar support tickets online, and it worked fine at another place.

We’re very pleased to share news of this research fellowship position, working with our wonderful CECS / English Literature colleague Prof Mary Fairclough @maryfairclough.bsky.social on the collected works of Mary Wollstonecraft: 🔗 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRL782/r...

So the UK is trying Fucking Around again. Brilliant. Went so well last time.

On Friday afternoon before the Bank Holiday, colleagues in the Humanities department were called to a meeting on Tuesday. They were informed that the University Portfolio Review had decided that English Language, English Literature, Philosophy, History & Creative Writing UG degrees would close

With @romanpalace.bsky.social apparently being told to knock it off, it quietly seems @maryrosemuseum.bsky.social had also gone dark. If this is a wider trend in the museum space it's to be regretted. Museums don't just exist to hold stuff. They tell stories about the past - and ourselves now.

'a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user's disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.'

Have been on the same dose of Prozac for 22 years, after doctors trying different SSRIs/dosages throughout my teenage years. SSRIs have saved my life: they're not 'happy pills,' they're not shameful, and eugenicist bastards like RFKJ are precisely that - eugenicist bastards.

Got an oddly autumnal 'first day of new school' feeling as I head off for my first day in the new job at Middlesex. Starting as I mean to go on by spilling some coffee already. ☕

Adulthood is just cycling between "If I don't say yes to every opportunity, no new opportunities will ever be offered to me" and "Oh no, I have said yes to too many things" over and over until you die.