🤓🤓 Robert Redford film-watching with total camera geekery: Spy Game 1980s Beirut section with Brad Pitt as photojournalist. Leica M6 √ but not with ?un-CLA'd Canon A1 shutter sound dubbed in! (Tbh all the camera shutter sounds are the same!) 🤓🤓 #believeinfilm

'Graeme Atherton, head of the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (Rise) at the University of West London, said the policy “is giving with one hand and taking with another” and will “exacerbate” the problems being faced by humanities and arts departments and disadvantaged students.'

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

"single-use plastic of the mind" had me GAGGED

Sounds as if international student fee levy is staying in place to fund maintenance grants for underprivileged students "on courses in line with govt's industrial strategy". What a mockery. What a nonsense. Utter failure to understand the HE sector, across the board, as an international success.

My tribute to Tony Harrison number 2 here www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

@ancient-tokens.bsky.social Warwick Classics Xmas/Saturnalia etc Cake prep!

Wonder if the proposed new student migration scheme suggests that govt will scrap the idiotic and spectacularly damaging levy on international student fees that still appears to be on the table?? Answers on a postcard.

Reform will apparently pledge today that they'd abolish indefinite leave to remain - including retrospectively, to people already granted it. Obviously this is a moral abomination but it is also a practical and legal impossibility.

Is the BBC political team going to grow a pair any time soon? Answers on a postcard.

Nice to see the volume published, with the second piece, 'Olympic Trees', by me. www.tandfonline.com/toc/rgrl20/2... doi.org/10.1080/1468...

Thanks for this one @guardianheather.bsky.social Captures the utter hypocrisy and bizare unthinking amorality (... 'Morality? That's for other people who aren't doers...') that captures so much of what's rather more widely wrong.

Why the uk govt is still on X (even with its announcement today) is another part of this general vv deep malaise.

Absolutely blistering, and rightly, righteously, so. New York Times review of books.

The first Augustus themed coin box of enlarged 3D printed replicas is off the manufacturing line and ready to go into a school next week! 🙌 a joint project between classics and design studies at Warwick. ☺️

An actual quote from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’ Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations' or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

Q: Why is big tech so thoughtless about human-environment relations? A: Because it lives in its own productivity bubble. Even if the UK's national grid were to go fully green, that wouldn't touch the sides of the problem.

Delighted that I have reared a young man who loves practicing playing Bach and Beethoven on the piano. 😍😍

I say 'NO' to AI in all its forms of environmental destruction, exacerbation of work challenges (corporate doubling down rather than trust in real people for solutions), pedalling of falsehoods, and theft.

For some reason I have recently become obsessed with antique clocks (not that I own any). I am convinced that I would, in another life, have been a clockmaker. Slightly bonkers!

An afternoon reading & listening: a colleague's book; new poetry I'm discovering; to Angela Hewitt playing Bach, making the piano (presumably her Fazioli) sound like a marimba. My research day, so admin that comes on like the snowfall of the Iliad 12 simile can wait for a little while.

NOW what, ffs

Currently reading poetry by Peter Riley from 2019 and wondering what the stones would say today.

Anyone heard from the Prime Minister?

Couple of my favourite trees from last weekend. #Derbyshire

More pics from Scotland in August. Slockavullin, Kilmartin Glen, DArgyll Leica M11/21SEM

Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates...!

Glenvoidean Chambered Cairn (the non-phone version) Isle of Bute, Scotland, earlier this week Leica M11, 35mm

Yep. I constantly fight against the tail that tries foolishly to wag the dog. Constantly. (Except when I’m on holiday lol.)

Currently reading @julianhoffman.bsky.social Lifelines & reminiscing about my own trip not just to Prespa in 2015 but also to Ioannina in 2008 and its magnificent Lesser Kestrels (Falco naumanii), my 1st encounter with the species. A record shot from back then: dainty as parrots not raptors.

Current location. One of the better parts of the world ❤️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Chapeau to Côte brasserie for this GCSE results day offer! And many congratulations to anyone who has done well in a languages GCSE and is carrying on with it at A-level ❤️

The Work Is The Point

We all need to learn some ... humility???? WTAF #Chicago

Department of Philosophy at Warwick celebrates its 60th anniversary in Senate House @uolpress.bsky.social with speeches on why #philosophymatters by Qassim Cassam, Heather Widdows, @guylongworth.bsky.social and @mmmccabe.bsky.social

Few more pics from Venice. #Venice #Leica

Grasping in class yesterday for a way of describing the situation where institutions deliberately have procedures in place to slow things down and deny responsibility, I landed on the phrase ‘motivated structural inefficiency’. Widespread and growing, I believe.

Few pics from a short vacation in Venice. Bit of a de Chirico vibe perhaps. #Venice #Leica

It's also been noted elsewhere that departments/groups make a university's reputation, not the other way round. I'm not in marketing, but IDK: isn't trying to sell the institution first and the programme second entirely backwards?

Not least because small seminars are a major antidote to AI essays; it’s hard to hide behind superficial AI analysis and summaries of novels when there’s only 10 others in the room and you’re going to have to participate in conversation

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

Jubilee time : hugest congratulations to Paul!!

A few more Pompidou pics from the other weekend. What am I Looking at? That's the actual theme, and the point. #WolfgangTillmans #CentrePompidou #Paris #Leica

If you're going to not read a book, at least have the courage to admit you've not read the book. Getting a machine to mangle it for you is doing both yourself and the author a disservice. "I don't know" is not a dirty phrase, it's the start of all knowledge.

Every day I feel a tiny bit more certain that LLMs represent a moral evil and will ultimately lead to societal damage to an extent that we are currently unable to begin to imagine

REF2029: concerns about the implications of decoupling | The English Association : Please read this important joint letter we have written (on behalf of us, our chair @jennyrichards.bsky.social ) along with @ies-sas.bsky.social & @univeng.bsky.social englishassociation.ac.uk/ref2029-conc...