miriam kent

Join us on Wednesday 12 November for a roundtable discussion about comics and research, featuring @karriefransman.bsky.social @rikworth.bsky.social and @paulfisherdavies.bsky.social, plus art to look at and snacks to enjoy! Book while you can, tickets are going fast!

My dad broke out in sweats yesterday because he was required to do online safeguarding training for supply teaching. He couldn't figure out how the pedagogically "innovative" interactive learning tasks worked. He nearly had a nervous breakdown.

I sure hope the state will compensate me for the administrative labour I'll inevitably have to spend time and effort on in supporting my parents' and 94-year-old grandmother's acquisition and use of the digital ID.

A television screen mounted too high on a wall featuring a shot of Chad Kroeger in the video of the Nickelback song "How You Remind Me"

Turn on telly, Nickelback is on. Guess I've arrived in Belgium 👍

A meter showing how many people have responded to the uk comics creator survey 2025. So far it’s at 289! The minimum target is 380 to be statistically representative, and 623 responded in 2020

Damn, look how many of you have filled in the survey in its first week! (Yes I *have* made a respondent-meter like it’s a village hall fundraiser - let me have my little whimsies)

If you have ten mins to join in the fun, the link is here: ukcomicscreators.org.uk

Raging Against the Machine: Comics and Generative AI “Art” (Interlude) - Read Tom Humberstone's Comic 'I'm a Luddite! (And So Can You!)' on AI Art, Luddism and Activism Here at BF – Broken Frontier Tom Humberstone provides the lead story from his comics collection 'I'm A Luddite! (And So Can You!)' as part of our series on AI "art".

Something special today at BF!

Raging Against the Machine: Comics and Generative AI “Art” (Interlude) – Read @tomhumberstone.com Tom Humberstone’s Comic ‘I’m a Luddite! (And So Can You!)’ on AI Art, Luddism and Activism Here at BF.

www.brokenfrontier.com/raging-again... #NoToAIArt

Thank you again for having me Tim! Not sure "fun" is the right word, given the grim moments in the series we were talking about, but admittedly there were several occasions during this when I had to stifle my own laughs to avoid soiling the feed with incessant chuckling.

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

Love this! (will include it in my essay workshop lecture in which I go off on one about ChatGPT)

Batman clutches a man on the ground, holding him up as he stares at the wall. Batman says, “Not ANOTHER puzzle! OK, what do these numbers MEAN?“ On the wall are the numbers 12, 781, 409, 14, 650, 123, 24, 341, 641. The person gripped by Batman replies, helpfully, “It doesn’t matter. We are ALL going to die in a NUCLEAR BLAST.“

Can't believe I had to verify my age on here like a big baby.

Photo of my TV paused on a shot of Ozzy Osbourne with the closed caption "SEAN CONNERY NOISES)"

😢

I hope for precisely that to happen 😂

Assuming the film will make an impression and people won't have forgotten about it by then 🥲

I did not have a Department of Education x Fantastic Four collab on my weird shit in 2025 bingo card but here we are.

PUBLICATION DAY!

Non-fiction, comedy comic aimed at 7-11 year olds, designed to encourage reading and critical thinking while supporting the KS2 curriculum and with brilliant artwork is by genius @jordancollver.bsky.social ?

What are you waiting for?
#KidsLitUk

uk.bookshop.org/p/books/pets...

Commentary on Lorde's album cover not even referring to the correct body part, smh

🥲

Plus half my database is still stuck in Mendeley, which I used to use before it got a terrible update and then never got round to properly copying over to Zot. It's a chaotic life.

I Zotero the first draft but then end up manually copying each reference over and editing it in the final draft because I do not trust the technology. And then any reference I add after peer review gets added manually because I'm too lazy to start the software for 1-2 citations.

a pizza made with a roast chicken, cheese, tomatoes, chocolate sprinkles, and M&Ms with the caption, "When you incorporate the feedback from every critique."

Good morning

My hand holding a Hardback book entitled ‘Horror and Comics’ with a cover picture of some battered copies of creepy and various Spanish comics on a rack at a flea market

Time to shamelessly promote this new #comicsstudies collection ‘Horror and Comics’ - edited by me, @barbarachamberlin.bsky.social and @komkunyosying - and packed with #horror themed goodness and looking at a global selection of comics! Due to be published by university of wales press next month.

A copy of This Beautiful, Ridiculous City on display among other comic books.

Spotted in the wild @kaysohini.bsky.social's graphic memoir (among the classics) at the Book Hive in Norwich

Text from article: It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction. The problem may be much larger than generative AI. The so-called Flynn effect refers to the consistent rise in IQ scores from generation to generation going back to at least the 1930s. That rise started to slow, and in some cases reverse, around 2006. “The greatest worry in these times of generative AI is not that it may compromise human creativity or intelligence,” Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University, told The Guardian, “but that it already has.” (Katie's added note: the sentences about reorganization of abilities and telling fact from fiction have been highlighted.)

Bleak.

nymag.com/intelligence...

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in The Terminator 2: Judgement Day, smoking a cigarette and giving deadly side-eye

Watching y'all use SkyNet AI

Anyway, support the arts, fund universities and promote education and media literacy for everyone ✌️

Things are terrible for this vaguely comparable profession so things should be terrible for everyone!

Another central argument is that teachers do basically the same work in worse conditions for even more shit pay so academics shouldn't complain.

Yeah, I got sucked in, I read the whole thing. This is working on the assumption that all academics are profs on 80K+, work mostly from holiday villas abroad, and do about 3 weeks worth of research every 6 years 😂

Telegraph headline for a piece written by Michael Mosbacher: This must be Britain's most ungrateful profession Unjustified complaints from those paid to pursue their passions are ceaseless. Preview text: Anyone who has had even the most passing acquaintance with university professors will have learnt one thing about them as a breed - they feel hard done by and are not afraid to tell you...

m8, I just wanna help people make stuff and express themselves in meaningful ways ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯