dr. cat

Everything old is new again

If you aren't familiar: think Broadcast News but more dramatic and Australian. It's brilliant and you can see it all on BBC iPlayer.

Catching up on series 3 of The Newsreader and I just want to say:

ANNA 👏 FUCKING 👏 TORV

Reminder to all UK academics that if you're not already registered with ALCS you are missing out on very easy cash on an annual basis. And it's retrospective, so you can add all your entire back catalogue of pubs and get paid what you're owed for your works having been scanned by a library.

Black-and-white photo of a beautiful medium haired white cat, who seems to be standing with its front paws inside of a toilet bowl with the high legs up on the seat. It is looking towards the photographer as if caught in the act.

Toilet detective. Photo from my collection, ca. 1960s.

The Greatest Movies of All Time (According to Trans People) — From the Front Row What makes a great film? Does film hold an innate greatness - or is greatness in the eye of the beholder? Cinephiles love lists. Critics make annual top ten lists. Sight and Sound magazine holds its p...

The Greatest Films of All Time (According to Trans People)!

I polled more than 40 transgender and non-binary filmmakers, film critics, and cinephiles to find out which films trans folks connected to most. Check it out below!

Guys being Dudes

Chat gpt is slippery. It's slippery in the way that it seems to make things easier while making us dependent. In how the tech companies put it in everything even when we don't want or need it. And in how even a seemingly reasonable use, like project management, can turn into addiction and delusion.

This is incredibly sad. A recurring theme in these tragic cases is the way genAI removes friction from our lives, which Rebecca Solnit touches on this very good recent essay (also available as a podcast if that's your thing)
www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

A thing about studying children/children's culture is how often you see scholars referring to children as in flux, unstable. By contrast this constructs and assumes adults are stable and I'm sorry but have these people MET adults. They're a mess.

Oh, sad! Red Dwarf was staple childhood viewing for in the 90s and 00s and so crucial for my early understandings of sci-fi.
I've said before that it still feels remarkably progressive in certain ways: its only 2 living protagonists are black men, while every white character is dead or artificial.

Academics who are overdue research leave:

Going to send this to my mum, who not only rinses plates but *also* gives them a quick wipe with a washing up brush

Did it look brave?

Tales from research leave: I got so far down the rabbit hole of meta/'state-of-the-field' children's lit scholarship that I reached the point where all the major players are just sniping at each other and making tenuous links to 9/11. So that's enough of that, I think.

Tonight's of Drag Race UK is an all-timer.
The lip sync song is Crazy Frog and that's barely in the top 3 most surreal moments of the episode.

@mattdenny.bsky.social sent this to me the other day, if you're at all curious about what that might look like

Grounds for divorce

bsky.app/profile/cine...

I saw Starlight Express at the weekend, which was ... fine (they're trains 👍), but importantly the experience has triggered my Cats the musical hyperfixation again (NOT the movie I must stress).

You're welcome? 😂 It is such a lovely film and easily deserving of its own entry in the Collection

I'm still mad that they published My Life as a Courgette - an Oscar nominated feature film!! - as a special feature on the Petite Maman disc.

On one hand, I'm glad that Criterion is publishing this on physical media when Netflix clearly doesn't care. On the other, Criterion's animation range is still tiny and more than half of it is from this century, in English. Publish these, yes, but more quantity and variety would be amazing.

Activists hang photo of UK's Andrew in Paris' Louvre after arrest Activists from anti-billionaire campaign group "Everyone Hates Elon" on Sunday (February 22) went to the Louvre museum in Paris where they hung a framed photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, taken...

Thy literally put it in the Louvre
www.reuters.com/video/watch/...

Whoever made the decision that Gillian Anderson would walk out on stage at the BAFTAs to Chappell Roan's 'The Giver' absolutely knew what they were doing.

It was during these conversations that Karen was told repeatedly that ICE agents are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “I was told this by multiple sources,” she says. “There is all the incentive in the world to find a reason – any reason – not to let someone go.”

don't travel to the us
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

This is absolute gold

Image of former-prince Andrew in the police car with the headline "Now he's sweating" in the Sun.

The Onion "Heartbreaking" meme image but it now reads "Heartbreaking: the worst newspaper you know just made a great headline"