Member-focused, intellectually curious, creative, and political spaces _are_ still possible where we have the will (and resource) to conjure them into being

Sometimes the ‘we are the university/managers are the institution’ dichotomy feels a bit glib. It’s not that simple. But having spent 3 days having animated, passionate, nerdy, technical chats with people about… well, everything, and hearing some fab research at #baftss2026 it certainly _feels_ true

The Conversation Us Inc - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from millions of nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as...

In 2024 The Conversation had 8.3M in revenue and 7.8M in expenses and paid $0 to writers. Is that really ok with you?

projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/o...

(Oh, and just seen that The Canary have run something, too)

We should all know about the politically motivated arrest last week of activist Lisa Minerva Luxx (beyond The Greyzone sharing details, news outlets are, unsurprisingly, eerily quiet).

A photograph taken outside an apartment window. The sky is clear and blue, and an indigo sea can be glimpsed beyond nearby holly and pine trees

Arrived in Bournemouth a day early for the #baftss2026 conference. Hard to concentrate on finishing my presentation when sun and sea beckon

Thank you! And yes, definitely. Plus no one seemed especially angry (my feeling is people of many political persuasions care about the environment?), and they shared the prelim findings wider than I could. So kind of an own-goal on their part.

The tl;dr - practical making with reused materials is probably 'greener' (even today) than CGI. Hybrid practical-digital techniques help. Bring back shared asset stores at studios. Stop overprotecting IP! Oh, and blockbuster-scale production simply isn't sustainable, and tech won't save the day...

It includes interviews with former Star Wars crew, loads of archive stuff, and emissions assessments of two Artoo units. (Massive thanks to co-researcher Siti Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus for all the quantitative datasets)

Current mood: recalling right-wing national newspapers and F*r*ge getting wound up about my research, and feeling even more proud of it being published as a result

Artoo-Detoo’s Footprint: Star Wars and the Environmental Impacts of Practical and Digital Filmmaking 📽️
mediaenviron.org/article/1586...

I know the 'cutest' threatened species get the attention but knowing we've collectively driven emperor penguins to near-extinction hits hard. Short of systemic change I wonder what it will take to make us stop overproducing/consuming. Threads-style docs? Corporate and personal emissions rationing?

Have used Pillow Talk for teaching (on queer film history/comms networks/tech). Students seemed to enjoy it as much as me

And very much themselves over anyone/thing else.

As @suchmayer.bsky.social says, the devaluing of knowledges and practices that mythical *employers* consider irrelevant has been happening in universities for decades. If students get experience beyond factory-line learning it's likely down to principled, rebellious, and under-resourced workers

Obviously there's a place for industry-specific skills training. But that never needed to be at the expense of critical thinking and academic study, censorship of students (and by proxy, staff), and university finances.

One example: there's a clause in ScreenSkills HE contracts that says students can't make films that harm business interests. The org has taken an anti-intellectual stance on degrees in evidence to govt. They charge ongoing fees for unis to get their industry-skills focused course accreditation.

I urge anyone who cares about their blood pressure on a Sunday morning not to read the Guardian piece on intellectualism in pop culture. I thought pitting ‘wearing pink’ against ‘reading books’, and ‘pole dancing’ against ‘intellectual thinking’ had fallen out of fashion but apparently not

The librarian in this case - curating work by queer, global majority, feminist, and neurodivergent authors - was no doubt beloved by the teens she supported. The bullying and censorship from school managers (some definite parallels with HE…) is chilling. She and the students deserve better

So the BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister is bothering me. It has Female Friendships™️ that don't appear in the novel, yet cuts back on the complexities of women's relationships, and adds racialised Women In Competition™️ tropes. If I wasn't writing a book I'd be writing about why this sucks

Especially the ones with page numbers that don’t line up with the paper copy.

I’ll take them over no books or inaccessible books but yes, they do

The National Trust going where The Beaver Trust seems to studiously avoid (if I were in charge of their marketing/fundraising I would 100% have a range of 'in beavers we trust' merch)

Wait, what kind of beaver does he think we're talking about here

I had someone give me AI-generated feedback on an article. They proposed factually incorrect changes that countered their own earlier arguments! What really got to me was the over-confidence of it. LLMs generate text that reads like a royal asserting they were in a pizza restaurant, actually.

Thank you! (That was much easier to ‘like’ in return)

The fact I only remembered because someone on here happened to mention it tells you a lot about the system, too. You'd think RF/UKRI would email reminders to non-institutionally affiliated account holders given that they expect us to submit data, too?

Just finished my Environmental Impact of Filmmaking project report for ResearchFish. I guess the first submission post-academic job is always the hardest? Anyway now I'm in my feels about the huge amount of work, the enormous potential to make a difference, and the unsustainability of it all

Here's a link in case of interest. reelnews.co.uk/2025/07/30/a...

There's definitely a 'selling things (including sex) is bad/immoral, actually' throughline that's realllllllly classist (rather than, say, critical of capitalism or corruption).

(and there's little/no work). It's also interesting because people in, e.g., screen industries don't typically say 'freelance' in front of their job title because freelancing is a given. The fact we're talking about distinctive terminology maybe just reinforces the institutional gatekeeping?