Jonathan Potter

Excellent advice.

Get away from the desk, go for a walk.

Don’t listen to a podcast, just walk.

That’s when the best thinking happens.

Things You Can Make ChatGPT Write for You - Hayley DeRoche Your last words But before them What to murmur to a lover in bed What to say in the group chat when someone's Sister mother brother is dead and The apology you could never quite get right for a friend And hell why not make the robot compose your proposal Your wedding toast, too Your best friend's birthday roast You could ask it to write a custom lullaby For the baby snuffling at your breast. You can cradle to grave away Every warm human word You could ever have said And when they chisel your gravestone For your final rest We can ask ChatGPT Because it knew you best

Love it 🙌

As a chess fan this is a marvelous read. I had no idea Marx played chess, though I'm not hugely surprised.

“One person is an autocratic president of the university for decades” certainly wasn’t a flawless system but it’s clear that “admins hop from job to job scaling the career ladder by filling their CV with ‘accomplishments’ that are expensive burdens to the schools they leave behind” is even worse.

English lit - 6.4% unemployed

Maths - 7.5% unemployed

So kid, in your heart you want to study humanities but you worry about your job prospects? Let’s play a game.

On the latest data, who is more likely to be unemployed after 15 months after graduation. The English Lit grad or the Maths grad?

WRONG!

‘Doing the Readings’ Dr Will Pooley (Associate Professor in Modern History), University of Bristol The students, we often grumble, don’t read the secondary readings we set for class. Every year, we find ourselves press…

“Scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before. Indeed, cleverness is shunned at home and abroad. What does reading offer to pupils except tears?”

this guy has his finger on the pulse amirite

www.history-uk.ac.uk/history-in-p... 🗃️

Grant. Andrew. Stewart. Andre.
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What do UK graduates do? Lots of information in this annual report.

A reminder that Humanities graduates are quite employable. Compare unemployment rates for Biology (8.4%), Chemistry (5.9%) and Physics (8.0%) with English literature (6.4%), History (7.6%) and Languages (7.6%) for example.

A huge figure in Dickens Studies, his contribution to the field over the last half century is unsurpassed. @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social has lost a champion.

A walk through the stone defences of Mither Tap, Bennachie in Aberdeenshire for #HillfortsWednesday
I believe occupied in the early Middle Ages, don’t know how far it goes back? Whenever it was, I hope it was less windy than now.

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines

www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

Well it certainly doesnt help if you start your focus on things that bring people joy instead of decarbonising the energy grid, yes.

But lo and behold! I found myself famous. Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama, and was about to be repeated, for the twenty-third night, at the English Opera House. The play-bill amused me extremely, for, in the list of dramatis personce, came "———, by Mr. T. Cooke." This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good. On Friday, 29th August, Jane, my Father, William, and I went to the theatre to see it. Wallack looked very well as Frankenstein. He is at the beginning full of hope and expectation. At the end of the first act the stage represents a room with a staircase leading to Frankenstein's workshop; he goes to it, and you see his light at a small window, through which a frightened servant peeps, who runs off in terror when Frankenstein exclaims "It lives!" Presently Frankenstein himself rushes in horror and trepidation from the room, and, while still expressing his agony and terror, "———" throws down the door of the laboratory, leaps the staircase, and presents his unearthly and monstrous person on the stage. The story is not well managed, but Cooke played ———'s part extremely well; his seeking, as it were, for support; his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard; all, indeed, he does was well imagined and executed. I was much amused, and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience. It was a third piece, a scanty pit filled at half-price, and all stayed till it was over. They continue to play it even now.

For anyone who is like “the creature is also named Frankenstein”; Mary Shelley went to see a play version of Frankenstein and was tickled that they listed the creature as “———“ in the dramatis personae:

“this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good”

www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3...

A museum text display with more information on upcoming redisplays at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Next time you visit the Pre-Raphaelite galleries at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, keep an eye out for more information about my project, Victorian Art & Design and the Global!

More information available at: www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/about/what-w...

Three months ago

A link to a petition to save Geography, its staff, department and degree programmes at Leicester University, UK

SAVE GEOGRAPHY at Leicester University (UK) - We call on the University of Leicester to urgently reconsider the proposal to dissolve Geography. This is direct attack on the discipline of Geography at Leicester with likely loss of Geography staff. Please sign + share

www.change.org/p/save-geogr...

STARSHIP TROOPERS was released 28 years ago today. Among the most popular films of director Paul Verhoeven, and a classic sci fi/action satire, the making of story is as outrageous as the film. Would you like to know more…?

1/69

You may think this is an easy one, but what if you're a billionaire already planning to have retreated to an underground bunker in ten years, and need a technology which can persuade everyone else that everything is fine, really?

solidarity with all colleagues and students at Nottingham who are having their jobs and degrees destroyed by management. the relentless annihilation of language provision in UKHE is something that *every* academic should be calling out and pushing back against.

'mean-spirited'

The truly maddening thing is that, unlike when I was a young man in science and the materials and engineering just weren’t there yet, the future is *right there.* The problem is *solved*. What’s holding us back is not just greed, but this bizarre nostalgia, an obsession with petro- masculinity.

David Olusoga was interviewed on the radio this morning and now I'm really looking forward to watching this.

It has been my duty as a historian to record how smelly Che Guevara was. Honestly one of the stinkiest dudes in history. He was immensely proud of this & once showed off a pair of underpants he’d been wearing for two months. They were so filthy, he won a bet that they could stand up by themselves.

from A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, ed. Jane McMorland Hunter

Thursday #morningread
✨

For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.

Also good guidelines for life.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

There is still time to enter the Midland History essay prize
£400 first prize and opportunity to publish in a peer reviewed journal
Closing date for entries 31 October 🎃
#phd #ecr #postgrad

In Grok we trust...

Really enjoyed Catherine Belsey's chapter on textual analysis in Research Methods for English Studies, ed. G. Griffin (Edinburgh UP, 2013). Belsey talks readers through a reading of Titian's painting Tarquin and Lucretia, drawing on various interpretive modes while emphasising close reading.