alice

Who can reply: anyone, nobody, people who can be normal about it.

trying out a new feature, lmk if it works

Small Talk

one of the cool things about moving countries has been discovering all its indie acts – ofc I could've gone looking before, but having a friend put something on as you cook dinner is nicer

not v underground but new to me is this Soda Blonde album – for fans of Wolf Alice/CMAT/Divorce/Sundara Karma

*i’d never read anything of his until last week – even being vaguely aware of his unsavoury takes um wow was i unprepared

the last paragraph of The Night Ocean by Lovecraft and R.H. Barlow: แวดะนก Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters. And these shall beat on dark shores in thunderous foam, though none shall remain in that dying world to watch the cold light of the enfeebled moon playing on the swirling tides and coarse-grained sand. On the deep's margin shall rest only a stagnant foam, gathering about the shells and bones of perished shapes that dwelt within the waters. Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish life extinct. Then all shall be dark, for at last even the white moon on the distant waves shall wink out. Nothing shall be left, neither above nor below the sombre waters. And until that last millennium, and beyond the perishing of all other things, the sea will thunder and toss throughout the dismal night.

essaying on Lovecraft, half-against my will, and am writing on the sea, boundaries of perception/consciousness, speculative realism – things i care about – to get through it

i don’t love his genre, and obviously dislike his racism, but the guy is pretty good when it comes to big bodies of water

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Just Nick Robinson casually asking a guest on BBC Today if protests against the war 'should be allowed to go ahead' or 'ought to be banned in this country'.

the bio of @poeticpupptets on ig, 'banger poems brought to you by your favourite puppets'

a post by this account: lines from Scheherazade by Richard Siken laid over an image of Kermit in a tux 'Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. / These, our bodies, possessed by light. / Tell me we'll never get used to it.'

found the best instagram account ever. sorry! www.instagram.com/poeticpuppets/

Dunno. you're hot and you have mummy issues. That's prime lesbian material

Part of a tube station that says "private ate" which, to me, evokes the snuffling at a sweetheart's gruffles

Tired: Would you enjoy some cunnilingus?

Wired: who want they

Gareth Southgate posting about winning the League Cup with Middlesbrough. He says “22 years ago we broke a 128 year wait for Boro’s first trophy. I will never forget the emotion within the stadium and the bonds formed within the dressing room”.

Bless Gareth, but man. He manages to make the greatest day in our history sound boring.

ofc everyone should do as they wish as long as it's not harming others, and I'm lucky enough to have great friends, committed to mess

but it does feel slightly askew from the early 20s I was promised. there should be MORE of you to have fun with! more of a collective will to love and lose and feel

especially in Dublin

yes classmate I am very sorry that I rocked up to our 10am after abandoning the latter half of the reading to go and have five pints last night but there's really no need to look at me like that

being a 23 y/o student in a city is strange atm

clean living/eating and celibacy trends have hit a very high no. of people who should really be allowing themselves more fun at this age, more room for mistakes, later nights, etc.

...and the sheer prevalence of them makes the rest of us look AWFUL

Doors open wherever you go / in that furious place; / for you are the light / rising on lost islands

Nigel Farage lied multiple times at his press conference today - including saying no-one who voted Green in Gorton and Denton has a job and he's "certain" Reform won most British born voters in the by-election, based on zero evidence, and yet not a single journalist there pushed back on them

Hiring established scholars to junior Oxbridge roles imperils disciplines As lay-offs continue elsewhere, postdocs’ inability to land permanent roles will block the pipeline of future faculty, Cambridge academics argue

Raises some important issues but also ignores the fact that many Humanities staff outside the magic circle are facing redundancy. They are naturally willing, indeed desperate, to apply for entry-level Oxbridge posts. The situation is grim. 1/2

A possible indication that his career as a writer was appreciated came when Edward III granted Chaucer "a gallon of wine daily for the rest of his life" for some unspecified task.[28] This was an unusual grant, but given on a day of celebration, Saint George's Day, 1374, when artistic endeavours were traditionally rewarded, it is assumed to have been for another early poetic work. It is not known which, if any, of Chaucer's extant works prompted the reward, but the suggestion of him as a poet to a king places him as a precursor to later poets laureate. Chaucer continued to collect the liquid stipend until Richard II came to power, after which it was converted to a monetary grant on 18 April 1378.[28]

Me waiting at the start of the four-nations Teams call for Chaucer to join, but Chaucer is too wrecked to get on because the king has recognised the importance of getting all poet-civil servants hammered every day

the odds of me killing a plastic plant are low but not impossible

an excerpt from the intro to Mary Douglas' 'Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo' (1966): 'My other source of inspiration has been my husband. In matters of cleanness his threshold of tolerance is so much lower than my own that he more than anyone else has forced me into taking a stand on the relativity of dirt.'

new relationship goals just dropped: dissing husband's hygiene habits in my seminal anthropological monograph on dirt, pollution, and purity

It's fascinating how all the people who insist it's just a phase also insist on aggressively repressing and crushing that phase rather than just letting it play out.

a picture of a rained-on front square of trinity college dublin in the evening light

having a very I walk through walls / I float down the Liffey kind of day

have become academically obsessed with someone. almost finished a novel completely irrelevant to all the work i'm supposed to be doing solely because they wrote a paper on it that i want to read. i forgot how good/bad this is for me

I Keep Trying to Leave but the Sex Just Gets Better and Better Ali Shapiro This is not what the door's for—slamming you up against, opening your legs with my knee. And it isn't leaving, the thing I keep doing with my shoes still on, or in the car in the driveway in broad daylight after waving goodbye to your neighbors again. But my body's a bad dog, all dumb tongue and hunger, down on all fours again, tied up outside again, coming when called but then always refusing to stay. I know what I'm trying to say, but it isn't talking, the thing that I do with my mouth to your ear, even though we got the orifices right. To leave I would have to put clothes on, and they'd have to fit better than all of this skin. To leave I would have to know where to begin: like this, pressed up against the half-open window? Like this, with my foot on the gas? If seeing is believing then why isn't touching knowing for sure? I just want my nerves to do the work for me, I don't want to have to decide. There's blood in my hands for fight and blood in my legs for flight and nowhere a sign. Believe me, I'll leave if you just let me touch you again for the last last time.

Ahh, the Lancet, which took 12 years to retract the Wakefield rubbish that helped deliver us Kennedy.

Casio-First Again! with the New Combination Compact A Calculator, An Alarm Clock and A Lighter. CASIO QL-10

Look how far we have fallen

detecting a hint of 'there's an inherent humour in your northern accent so I will laugh at your perfectly reasonable and accurate comment' in some of this morning's coverage

:') my eyes have been opened

i mean, honestly, if this person picked up Joyce with zero prior knowledge, just attempting to raw-dog it, this isn't that upsetting