🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.
This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.
Please spread the word.
🧵 1/4
I have decided, purely for my own amusement, to start a thread of critical quotes about Falstaff, but illustrating them with an image of Mr Blobby.
'...a character deeper than life, a wit unmatched by anyone merely real whom we will ever know' (A. C. Bradley)
The loss to Plaid in Caerphilly should have delivered this message to Labour leadership months ago; hopefully now it will land. They can’t keep taking progressives for granted while desperately parroting Reform talking points
It was so wonderful to see you and to hear more about your work! Thank you for coming
A real joy to put my work into dialogue with Roberta Magnani's at Swansea University's MEMO event today. Many thanks to @sally-barnden.bsky.social for the invitation to do so!
Flyer advertising my neuroqueer early modern Morris dancing event happening at 4pm on 7 March in the Taliesin Studio on the Swansea University Singleton Park campus. Spellings and formatting mimic early modern print. And composite image of Will Kemp morris dancing and the effeminate man on the front of Haec Vir is featured.
Welsh translation of the English-language flyer.
Delighted to share the finalized flyers for my practice-as-research event next month! 🤩 Concluding performance is open to all and will be opened by a critical/contextual talk from me. Happy to set up a Zoom link if anyone is interested in tuning in from beyond Swansea!
Sentence from lecture: “so we don’t really see Rosalind working at these alternative identities, as Wilder says she seems to have this kind of power of change fullness, that the different identities can just be presented wholesale and will be accepted by the people she’s speaking to” Panopto auto-generated Welsh caption: “Symuda re r Iesu am rodd o lyn cerfwedd cyn iddi ddod hen y defaid yn wael ar ddysg pawb Yr oedd teim ffon nes y diffynydd Anti Presented holds ail yn bobi eg stated sbecyn tew” Google translate: “the word of Jesus moves for a gift from Lyn cervewdd before it becomes old the sheep are bad at everyone’s learning There was a stick until the defendant Anti Presented holds ail baking eg stated a fat pack”
I gave a lecture on As You Like It yesterday and somehow Panopto was set to expect it to be in Welsh, so it has auto-generated Welsh captions based on its best estimate of what I was saying, and has generated some real nonsense (but sheep ARE bad at everyone’s learning, to be fair)
Beyond a tiny hardcore of rich universities, if you are an employee in UK Higher Ed you will be somewhere on the treadmill/ slippery slope below. You'll recognise exactly which step you are on at this moment. Take a look. 👇
trying to give appropriate focus to a very interesting research meeting while Howl's tail wiggles back and forth through my Zoom window and everyone politely ignores it
congratulations!
This is just going to always be my go-to response to this kind of thing anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...
Fantastic news Emily! Congratulations 🥂
amazing, thank you!
Raymond Briggs's illustration of 'The Snowman' - a tall snowman with three black buttons, a green hat and scarf and an enigmatic smile, in pastel shades.
a seasonal research query: does anyone know of any sources on the cultural history of snowmen? what's the earliest reference we have to temporary snow-sculptures? (humanoid especially, but also more generally!)
British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...
Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252:
Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email.
Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk
Attention #EarlyModern and #Shakespeare friends: join me on this Giving Tuesday in donating to an Open Access fund for Meghan C. Andrews’s book. Cancer took Meghan from us in 2023, but her legacy can live on. Share widely!
Thank you!
Amazing thank you both! Wish I’d seen the RND
my student has decided completely unprompted that she wants to write about Lust’s Dominion (or, the lascivious queen, etc). Suspect I know the answer here but—is there a decent edition?
Well worth a read. It’s so sad what AI is doing to students’ ability to think for themselves👇
Mary Baldwin University is embarking on drastic cuts of its liberal arts programme and of humanities subjects more generally.
A bad case of mishandled management, and colleagues and students will suffer as a result (including #AmericanShakespeareCenter!)
Sign the petition here: c.org/VmXd75Pf7h
ON STRIKE AGAIN BECAUSE THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH REFUSES TO RULE OUT COMPULSORY REDUNDANCIES!
You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out thatwhat a country values can change overtime. Sometimes, though, there's a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you've actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word - but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass - and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island - even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
With alt text.
Beautiful! Can’t wait to read it. Congratulations ❤️
As more of my valued colleagues face the threat of redundancy, here’s a quick reminder that it takes years and years of public investment to train an academic. Cutting someone with this wealth of experience loose isn’t “saving” anything. It is a massive waste of our collective resources.
Israel has illegally intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters, abducting British citizens and seizing ships sailing under British flags.
The government must condemn this attack on humanitarians, speak up for their safety and demand their immediate release.
“The former leader of Reform UK in Wales has pleaded guilty to bribery charges relating to making statements in favour of Russia while being an elected member of the European Parliament.” 1/
Your electricity bill is going up because data centers are raising demand, not because your utility started scaling out some renewables. Pass it on.
going to write a paragraph in my Two Gents review about how Lossi is unconventional casting for Crab because she's so elegant and has a mournful long greyhound face and generally seems like she might be the wisest character on stage
