I went through that myself in 2020 and was reprieved at the very last moment. Best strategy is to question their selection scoring and adherence to the detail of the formal procedure.

When you use AI to do your writing, you are telling your audience: “I deserve your attention, but you do not deserve my effort.”

Kittens! Two black and white kittens watching snooker on TV.

We're coming up to the second anniversary of getting our cats (during the 2024 #WorldsnookerChampionship), and their first week in the house was essentially this:

That's what they call "an Egyptian snooker". Very tough position to get out of, might require some treats.

A black and white cat sitting in front of a TV showing snooker, shouting.

There's always someone in the way #snooker #worldsnookerchampionship

a man in a green jacket and tie is sitting at a table in a restaurant . ALT: a man in a green jacket and tie is sitting at a table in a restaurant .

Apparently they sell "workflow automation software."

Watching the snooker world championship and even after googling the sponsors I still have no idea what Halo is or does. At least when cigarette companies sponsored the #snooker you knew where you were.

A black and white cat watching snooker on TV.

A black and white cat watching snooker on TV.

A black and white cat sitting in front of a TV showing snooker, but the cat is looking straight at you because you've interrupted her viewing.

#Snooker cat.

There should also be a 2026 edit of *A View to a Kill* where James Bond finds out about the plot to destroy Silicon Valley, thinks for a moment, and then wanders off, hands in pockets, whistling.

"Jonathan Zizek": solves locked room mysteries by explaining Hegel (via examples from Hitchcock) to a confused looking Caroline Quentin.

"Psychoanalytic Jonathan Creek": Jonathan investigates how someone can leave a room they never entered (it's the womb).

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

The vanishing British horror: unearthing The Appointment The Wicker Man star Edward Woodward headlines this story of strange psychic forces from the start of the video nasty era. But since its release, The Appointment has been extremely difficult to see.

Interesting piece on *The Appointment* here, although Woodward's character isn't quite going to a business meeting; he's attending an inquest into an industrial accident, which adds to the sense of unease. www.bfi.org.uk/features/app...

I wasn't overly keen on *The Appointment* the first time because I was expecting a bit more plot, but the second time I'm enjoying it much more. It's a bit heavy handed in its symbolism at times, but the anonymous *Radio Times* film critic giving it 1 star is just absurd.

Saw that @talkingpicturestv.bsky.social are showing Lindsay Vickers' *The Appointment* (1981). Noticed that this screening is in 4:3 rather than 16:9, so looked the film up and it seems that it was never shown in cinemas. So was it always in 4:3, or are copies now taken from the home video release?

It's snooker eve. Don't forget to put a mince pie out for Steve Davis.

Fisher's hauntology is quite some way from Derrida's hauntology. Neither would have liked the way in which the term now gets used to mean sophisticated nostalgia, but Derrida's concept is certainly not that.

The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher Touching on everything from late-stage capitalism to Pulp, the work of the late writer is proving increasingly influential. Now a documentary on him is looking to live up to his ideals

This is an odd piece on Mark Fisher. I don't think there's any real sense in which *Capitalist Realism* was ignored on publication, and the article ends up inadvertently suggesting that Fisher was simply a populariser of Jameson and Derrida. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ap...

I ultimately found it a bit disappointing, unfortunately. Stefan Collini's *What Are Universities For?* remains the best discussion on this topic.

The book is absolutely correct to say that education has been instrumentalised into a matter of financial returns. But it swerves into a model of better education as leading to better democracy, which not only seems overly optimistic but is simply another form of instrumentalisation.

As I mentioned last week, the book also has a tendency to accept right-wing narratives about 'cancel culture' as if this actually existed rather than being a tabloid fever dream.

The Open University does get mentioned briefly as a positive model, which is strange considering the book's attitude to distance learning elsewhere.

There's no mention in the book of the increasing requirement for academics to spend time on writing extensive funding bids with low chances of success, presumably because this doesn't easily fit into the model of the commons which frames the discussion.

Some of the comments about HE seem to be based in odd preconceptions. The book asserts that academics are pressured into frequent research publication, but new REF guidelines are pushing universities into quality over quantity (oddly, the REF only gets a brief mention in *Human Capital*).

For instance, Standing is scathing about MOOCs, but this leads him to dismiss distance learning as some kind of inauthentic educational experience. He's also sceptical of the concept of 'lifelong learning', but the conclusion recommends that universities shift their focus from teenagers.

I finished Guy Standing's *Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons* yesterday, and while it's correct on the broader instrumentalisation of education, it didn't feel especially precise on the situation in higher education (which is odd because this is Standing's own sector)...

36. *And Then There Were None.* Controversy! It's good but I don't think it's quite as brilliant as it's made out to be; the twist relies on some people being spectacularly unobservant, to the extent of seeming unfair. One of the few Christies which would benefit from being slightly longer.

35. *Murder is Easy.* The tongue-in-cheek village serial killer plot. It's never dull, but a lot of fun stuff (the satanic rituals) takes place offstage, and it tries a bluff which makes the real murderer's identity obvious (and reuses a device from the previous novel). Good, but could be better.

The Architecture of Fear: Exploring the Gothic Imagination Explore the evolution of Gothic literature from the nineteenth century to today. This course traces how writers and artists transformed the Gothic to reflect cultural fears, from haunted castles to mo...

I'm teaching a week long course on the Gothic imagination from *Frankenstein* to *Starve Acre* at Brasenose College in Oxford this August: lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/courses/the-...

Cat: have you perchance stumbled across seminal mid 1970s album La Düsseldorf, by La Düsseldorf?

Dog: idk man Imagine Dragons kinda bangs