Pact - RS Thomas Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus...

Expecting us – with good reason based on history – to all thank them for their service. Fuck your service and fuck you. Saving a life is brave. Being instructed to kill and saying no I will not do that is brave. But killing like this? It is the least human thing you can do.

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

Every time I go out on a run I experience overt misogyny. Which, given that happens less than once a week, is kind of impressive. Today it was some teenage boys *barking* at me because they felt I hadn't moved out of the way of their bikes (on the pavement) fast enough.

<Emily Maitlis voice> Global online outrage? She was a _sex offender_!

oh man i risk being the biggest bluesky stereotype but ALT TEXT IS FOR ACCESSIBILITY. if you want to also include humour, sure (i do). but if the alt doesn’t actually describe what is in the image you are defeating the point

Huge news we finally have a wholly worthy target for EVERYONE to be mad at bsky.app/profile/kern...

Are you interested in Shakespeare, streaming and accessibility? Tamar Knott, one of the wonderful research students I supervise is working on the accessibility of streamed performances of Shakespeare and is running a survey. Your help is very much appreciated york.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Worth noting his objection to no fault divorce. I worked a bit on the campaign for that, and one of the striking things with the scholarship was the evidence that demonstrated allowing it led to a drop in suicides of married women.

Michael Phelps, famously, is basically a 2 metre tall human shark. Professional weightlifters eat 8,000 calories a day just to avoid passing out from hunger. Beautiful weirdos! Praised precisely because their bodies do not sit on the plateau of the bell curve! But women's bodies are policed more.

For women, one of the very difficult things about the Epstein emails is having all our worst professional suspicions confirmed. You wonder in darker moments if men say this kind of awful stuff about us (individually, and as a class) to each other, and here it is all confirmed in writing.

At least 70% of things I read about people doing with "AI" assistants like "Open Claw" are basically things people have been doing with deterministic, secure tools like Home Assistant for years. Oh you can tell your bot to dim the lights via WhatsApp chat? Welcome to 2015!

please RT! if you've ever contacted a journal or publisher to have your name changed on a publication, a friend and colleague of mine wants to hear about your experience! drexel.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #phdchat #academicchatter

The final #ucu VP hustings question asks whether we need a national campaign to defend the sector. Of course we do, but it can’t be just tacked onto a pay dispute as HEC voted to do last year, despite the evidence it wouldn’t work. Focus, strategy, creativity and unity. That’s what’s needed.

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it. Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

I’d like to apologise for my university’s craven actions, failing to defend staff and throwing the rest of the UK university sector under the bus on this issue. UCL had the resources others do not have to fight this properly in court.

Every year of UCU elections, I point out the voter turnout rate. Every year, it is like 12-14% of all eligible members who vote. Every year, I see people talk about how out of touch and frankly bonkers the decisions of the national union exec is. Every year, I explain that these are all connected.

Last chance to book tickets (in person or online) for my CCS lecture tomorrow on Compaq! I'll cover their rise to be IBM's biggest rival, and the extraordinary story of the industry rebellion they led to prevent IBM taking over the PC industry. www.computerconservationsociety.org/lectures/202...

Last year I wrote a paper on some successes our Australia sibling, the NTEU, has been having in bringing attention to governance failures. The UK also needs an inquiry into university governance, rising corporate influence and the erosion of staff/student voice. ucucommons.org/setting-the-...

Today’s clip addresses a question on excessive workloads, a problem for #ucu members from further ed to universities. This intersects with health & safety, pay, casualisation, etc. We can and should come at it from all these angles but ultimately need proper jobs. That’s the #1 priority.

The drunk uncle theory. You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there

Imagine saying to people to tried to hold shit together online during a time of trauma and death that it wasn't what they expected and they are personally upset about their experience in such a way that they ruin the institution for anyone else who might want to pursue a degree.

Like, who is covering the costs of this kind of ambulance chasing. In their FAQs they assert that Universities have big budgets and can afford to pay. They are lying to the students about what the impact would be, a well as about how this is justified studentgroupclaim.co.uk/faqs/

I'm voting for Mark and Suzi, as anyone who knows me in UCU will likely have guessed! I really believe that Mark is UCU's best chance to create change in the HE sector and build a union that can make a difference.

A reminder that if you live in England or Wales & were born between 1970-1990 – or even before 1970 – you can help protect your community by getting the MMR vaccine free from your NHS GP now. I did last year. www.nhs.uk/vaccinations...

A magnificent set of choices led to this. What a time to be alive www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center: If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

This, basically:

Nadhim Zahawi thinks London is now unsafe, because the other day a tired-looking man walked past him during the morning rush hour.

guy looking at institutions still structured around the lives and preferences of celibate men from the medieval period: of course the problem is that woman from my old department who did 75% of the admin roles

Kinder Küche Kirche From the guy whose boss also wants to return the two-child benefit cap to pay for a 5p discount on a pint.

They took my desk, now they want my pension, well NO: (On strike today and tomorrow, off to join @ucunorthumbria.bsky.social picket line outside the law school, itll be cold and wet but sometimes you have to stand up and be counted.)

"Your pets may not necessarily love it when you kiss and hug them" Yeah well I may not necessarily love picking up poop so I guess we're all gonna have to make some sacrifices.

Tangent: my Japanese tutor finds animal noises in English frustrating. Japanese has one verb for an animal making a noise. We have one per animal and often two, one of them onomatopoeia. Roosters broke her when I said the word for cock-a-doodle-doo is "to crow" despite that being a whole other bird.

Today in AI-slop spam: "Endometrial hair relaxer". The mind boggles.

Bad Bunny has a consulting historian. news.wisc.edu/pop-star-bad...

“I’m mad I can’t understand Bad Bunny’s lyrics because they’re not in English” my brother millions of metalheads around the world have been happily listening to incomprehensible Finnish shrieks and Japanese death grunts since we were teens, you’re just boring and racist

This is absolutely insane. The sort of Kafka-esque nightmare you would find in a Philip K Dick book set far in the dystopian future. A window on America tumbling into autocracy. www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Something really interesting about this is that she’s not posting any of this stuff over here on bsky. Her feeds there and here are very pointedly different

I wrote a piece for the CDBU blog with some low or no cost things our employers could do right now if they care about precarious staff as much as they say they do.

Happy anniversary to all historians who observe.

Where is the Dark Academia novel in which Dark Academics spend 80% of their time writing grant applications to the Dark Funding Council and most of the rest being harrassed by Dark ResearchFish (RIP)?

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I'm sorry but it's very funny to me that the legislature of a G7/P5 country of 70 million is currently drafting the "Fuck This One Guy in Particular Act of 2026." Also, imagine tolerating a system of privilege so entrenched you need to rewrite centuries-old rules just to get at one douchebag.

A reminder that if you are a Real Person* on here you absolutely SHOULD NOT start a DM chain just by saying "hello" or "hi". I know you think you're being polite, but anyone with a decent number of followers is going to block you instantly as it's what the bots do. *(Not that any of you are real)

Nothing must be allowed to get between you and your service to capitalism. Oh, you're grieving your dead father? Here's an AI slop simulacrum for you to talk to on your down time, now GET BACK TO WORK.

consider if you will: this cat and his fang

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism: