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April 2025

The discoverability of book chapters is very frustrating in the digital age (and for someone with a limiting disability). This morning I was looking for a chapter on Star Trek and disability that I knew to be by Hanley Kanar. I only found it thanks to a secondary site that cited the book it's in.

Pretty amazing dog training progress with Luka! The trainer managed to get him eating from my hand, doing sits and downs on my command. This is unheard of. He is normally terrified of me, but only in the house 😔 He's fine with me on walks!

I think we will get there though with this breakthrough.

A picture of me - a 40-year-old man wearing a stripey jumper - lying on the floor with two dogs. One is large and black the other is smaller and brown and black. The black dog is looking at me.

I find peer review reports incredibly anxiety inducing, even when they're good, for some reason. My strategy is to read them once straight through, then a second time making bullet point itemisations of all the requested changes, in my own language/tone. Then I never look at the report again.

It's difficult not to get overloaded on research. I currently have 1 whole book review, 2 book proposal reviews, a book chapter, book revisions, and a sample chapter for a new book to read and write. Already had to turn down several journal article reviews. Sure others have this. Hard to say no.

#catharticmoan

I have had a catastrophic dialysis failure, with a high "pressure before entry" alarm. I tried all known remedies, but could not clear it. I have attempted the next stage of the fix, which is to put a substance called "tauralock" into the central line in my chest. This should unblock any clots.

I will have to try again tomorrow. If not resolved, I will need to contact the hospital.

Quite traumatising when this kind of thing happens. Plus, it's the middle of the night.

I've been critical of peer review before and I've had some shockers, including errors of fact in reports.

However, this week I received a 16-page report that was the most thorough engagement I've ever had. Some painful truths, many thoughtful comments, and only a few things with which I disagree.

When peer review works like this, in the spirit of improving work, written by someone who really knows their stuff, it can add so much to a work.

It's just a shame this doesn't happen more often.

The sick thing about this is that "grumpy cat" only achieved global fame and recognition through virality - sharing and spreading - and the derivative memes created of it. Once that died down as a commercial prospect, they seem to have resorted to lawsuits.

This Labour government intends to harm the ill and disabled more than the previous Conservative government. Disgusting.

I spent a significant portion of the night awake, dealing with dialysis pressure alarms on the blood lines. Great.

Organ donation should NEVER be a financial transaction.

But, as someone with kidney failure, on dialysis 5 days per week, 8hrs each time, I do implore healthy people to donate a kidney. You'll be fine, but it will utterly change a life.

Not mine - I can't have a transplant - but someone's.

UK universities are only set for further battering. The only way they can stay solvent right now is international student fees, but the political headwind is blowing in the US direction of xenophobia. If Reform have any say, those students will be out. And universities will be suffocated.

I mean, it's terrible anyway, using overseas students as cash cows. Sickening. But that's the reality.

I took Luka to his first training class tonight. He was a VERY GOOD BOY and did loads of tricks with me. He wagged his tail and bounced around! Which is amazing, given that he is normally terrified of me.

A picture of a big old black dog called Luka

You too can see a fascist blogger (main attraction) speak with a serious academic (in second billing, tiny font), taking place in Harvard "Sqaure". For just $50.

Sorry to bang on, but it's cathartic.

Hard to say how much my neck and shoulders hurt from rheumatoid arthritis attacking them. It's like someone drilling into the bone. And it never goes away or stops. Such bad pain that it's making me be sick.

If only there was some way they could find that involved taxation of those who can afford it. Ah well. Better take more welfare away from the already impoverished disabled.

We saw /The Penguin Lessons/ at the cinema. It's not very subtle as a metaphor of apathy in the face of fascism, but I enjoyed it and its sincerity. It also gave me a chance, after dialysis, to place this humorously next to Mrs Eve's side of the bed this morning. 😂

A model penguin, about a foot high

"The papers before us, while alleging that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, provided little concrete support for that allegation"

And was no other evidence available, beyond the papers in front of them, that might have substantiated such a claim?

This has always been the logic about disability, no matter what people say aloud. There is a rife secret societal belief that somehow disabled people must have done something to become so or somehow deserved it. Being disabled is subconsciously thought of as a moral failing.

A taxi driver wanted to know why my kidneys had failed and kept asking me if I'd eaten certain things or smoked or taken illicit drugs. There had to be a cause that was my fault.

Overnight cardiac stress with rheumatoid arthritis is quite extreme. Sleep should be relatively calm, like the blue graph here, where the levels of heart-rate variability are high (so "stress" is low). When I am flaring, like last night, it spikes up radically and I wake up exhausted.

A graph showing low levels of cardiac stress, in blue A graph showing high levels of cardiac stress, in orange

Accidentally joined the "I love my border terrier" group on Facebook, which wasn't deliberate, but turns out not to have been a mistake.

Damn. Was really looking forward to seeing my brother play in Canterbury at the weekend with Creedence Clearwater Review. Trains all cancelled and bus replacement that takes hours. Sigh.

A picture of Rich Hinks playing bass guitar. He has long hair and white skin and a beard. He is wearing a pink shirt.

@svejky.bsky.social so I asked someone I know in publishing where to look for jobs, and it's Guardian Jobs, The Bookseller, and LinkedIn.

Love how the US gov is demanding "viewpoint diversity" (aka MAGA faculty lines). But this isn't *D*EI. Of course. At least there would be some comeback as every other faculty member could say to the new hires "ah, so you're the new diversity hire".

Also, I don't mean to moan, but: aaaaaaargh. My neck and shoulders are taking an absolute battering from my rheumatoid arthritis this morning. Utter agony. Like someone is drilling into my neck.

Work on new KC Profiles continues to advance. The chart is looking good in our colour scheme. Got it rendering responsively for mobile now, too 😁. The CiteProc rendering of citation styles is fairly snappy, too.

An academic profile page, with a graph of number of publications each year.

Urgh.

This is worth signing.

But it's also so worrying how dependent we are on The Internet Archive for cultural preservation - just one lawsuit away from oblivion.

"The Clinician of the Future team at Elsevier are excited to invite you to take part in our exclusive survey."

If I am a clinician of the future, we're in trouble.

Much to be done on the colour scheme, but today's tech work was graphing KC Works deposits on members' profiles.

A graph of KC Works deposit for the user martin_eve. It is bright and garish.

This week my reading time is devoted to a student's PhD thesis. It's great when a thesis gets to final draft stage, but a lot of work to read and critique properly. Light reading, it is not.

Intercostal inflammation with my rheumatoid arthritis tonight. Feels like someone has taken a baseball bat to my ribs. The first time this happened, I thought I'd broken a rib and went for an x-ray (I hadn't). Another time, I thought it was RA but they found I'd broken two ribs. Urgh!

I conclude reading Engels's The Origin of the Family, The State, and Private Property. The anthropology is clearly premised on some very dodgy unilinear thinking. But Engels's reversal of civilization along that line is great and the harsh description of merchants alone was worth it.

Plus, just the level of free thinking about marriage and women's rights, at that time, is great to see. Of course, many bold women paved the way beforehand and he follows in their footsteps. But it's still radical thought.

This is sad news. I met him at several conferences and could see how highly he was thought of in the digital library world.

Harvard redid its website to make a good case for HE research. It's quite persuasive.

But this was my first observation, too: not a single piece of humanities research.

Love how Harvard wants to protect only "private" universities from federal interference. I'm not saying they're not right re this encroachment, but ALL universities should have academic freedom. And Harvard should proclaim this. Not shut down the protection only to "private" universities.

I mean, how "private" are you anyway if losing all your government funding poses an existential risk?

This morning, I'm heading back to work on my Dark Web book. I've finished drafting several book chapter commitments that have occupied me these past few weeks, and now it's onwards!

Total kidney failure wreaks havoc on your appetite. Sometimes I just can't eat. Makes it so easy to accidentally lose weight - and as friends will attest, I was pretty thin to begin with. I have these unpleasant calorific supplement drinks to compensate.

This is my favourite part of the Great Gatsby - especially when teaching it. Most students miss the narrator's queer encounter, veiled by the drunken ellipsis. But one minute they're in the elevator, the next in the bedroom in underwear.

A portion of the Great Gatsby that reads: “Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator. “Where?” “Anywhere.” “Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy. “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.” “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.” … I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

Yesterday and this morning I added full dynamic citation rendering using CSL to the in-dev, forthcoming Knowledge Commons Profiles app. It's working well!

A list of books in the MHRA format A list of books in the Vancouver format

A worrying relevant paragraph that I wrote in 2023. "Today's good guys in the present may be tomorrow's 'baddies'."

Text that reads: How would we know when we had reached the point where we had learned all we could from the stored virus? How do we balance that uncertainty against the risks of keeping live, immensely dangerous pathogens in biocontainment? Indeed, the retention of such biological agents poses an abrupt and immediate threat to world security if and when the geopolitical situation rapidly unravels, as happened, for instance, with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today’s good guys in the present may be tomorrow’s ‘baddies’. That only two samples of smallpox remain attests to the lack of enthusiasm for its ongoing preservation.

This morning is proofing my chapter for this volume...

My chapter is called: ‘Contains Scenes of Mild Peril’: Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives

The inside front cover of the proofs for Library Catalogues as Data: Research, Practice and Usage. Edited by Paul Gooding, Melissa Terras and Sarah Ames. It is published by Facet Publishing.

The reality is that people will be checked for immigration status only if they have visible signs of foreignness - aka, racism.

Nine dialysis alarms overnight. All venous pressure alarms. Terrible sleep!

It sometimes does this arbitrarily with no seeming cause. I will change the "tegos" (infection-proof caps) on my central line in my chest and hope that fixes it 😬

Well, yes, but this is the entire history of school-level IT provision. Teach corporate products with no critical engagement or foundational knowledge. "Learn how to use Microsoft Word." Where's the "on" button?

I know they mean well, but I love it when people say "you're looking well! Your face is much more filled out!"

That's because I need dialysis and fluid and toxins are accumulating in my body.

In honour of the 100th publishing birthday of The Great Gatsby, I present this Lego classic.

Note: I did not make this 😂

The front cover of The Great Gatsby with a Lego man lying in a swimming pool, with another figure with a gun, and another looking on

I'm enjoying reading Engels on the origin of the family but would like to find a good criticism of its patently dodgy anthropology.

Suspect, like reading Foucault, that you sometimes need to overlook total historical accuracy and enjoy the ride.

This was such a great idea, with excellent implementation. I feel so sorry for those who would have applied, BUT infinitely more sorrow for Scott and his team who worked for YEARS to put this in place. All violently thrown down the drain at a whim of cultural barbarians who never read.

New forthcoming Thomas Pynchon novel!

"Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the PI business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind."

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316427/untitled-6108-by-penguin-publishing-group/

It has a title! Shadow Ticket: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316427/shadow-ticket-by-thomas-pynchon/9781594206108/

This is exactly why we need decentralized, distributed platform governance in multiple national jurisdictions backed by open content that cannot be removed.

They're using "disability" as a factor to predict murderers.

"“health markers which are expected to have significant predictive power”, such as data relating to mental health, addiction, suicide and vulnerability, and self-harm, as well as disability"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/08/uk-creating-prediction-tool-to-identify-people-most-likely-to-kill

The obvious comparison is "The Minority Report"'s "precrime". Can't believe they're actually doing this.

My equivalent of other people's browser tabs is Linux terminal emulators. I do it with browser tabs, too, but just found I had 50(!) terminals running, because I just fire up a new one for every new set of tasks :P

It's a year since I had a right total hip replacement. Had I not broken my foot and suffered an arthritis flare, I'd be in a much better state now than then. In fact, the replaced hip is probably the least painful bit of me!

Got up and forged on with some editorial work this morning. Battling extreme pain in my neck and shoulders where the rheumatoid arthritis is going berserk. Far worse pain than the broken foot. Urgh.

@ianmulvany.bsky.social hey Ian - could you please drop me your email address? Have something I'd like to send you. Cheers, M

Superb sleuthing! I had wondered about this for some time during my PhD. Curious that there are two seeming claims to it.

Spending this morning creating a cryptic crossword for my sister in law's birthday (she's not on here, so no surprises spoiled!) Crossword Compiler really is a great piece of software. Just for the help getting a grid finalised, it's so useful.

Awful nightmare. Was doing overnight haemodialysis and dreamed that an alarm had gone off on the machine (it had earlier). I dreamed that I'd seen 5 huge air bubbles in the return bloodline. This would be very dangerous! Took me ages to realise I could not have seen this. Because it was pitch black.

Finished the Eleanor Marx biography. An extraordinary life lived among extraordinary people. But it prompted me to realise that I haven't really read much Engels, except to the extent that Capital was a co-production with Marx (and "The Communist Manifesto"). So I've got this next.

The cover of Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It shows a sepia photograph of three children and a woman, with one child sitting on her knee. The photograph is called "A Starving Family" taken by an unknown photographer around the turn of the 20th century. All the photographic subjects appear grubby and look miserable.

Our mutual birthday present that we bought each other arrived! An Alison Friend print called "Found a Friend" 😁

A picture of me holding a print artwork of 2 dogs hugging. I am wearing a black Star Trek t-shirt. The original image of "Found a Friend". It is two comically stylised dogs hugging. A big brown dog and a small white dog.

Recovering from being knocked for six by the covid booster. Hoping to finish reading the Eleanor Marx biography.

One of the other things about "open standards" like Word's Office Open XML is that the standard is so complex that only powerful commercial entities can interpret it correctly - or extremely concerted efforts like OpenOffice. It's technically an "open" standard but de facto impossible to use.

Had a horrific night reaction, for the first time, to a Covid booster jab. Was shivering uncontrollably. Woke up and rheumatoid arthritis was going crazy - horribly painful all over. Now I'm boiling hot and feel like I have been hit over the head.

Still better than a month in hospital with Covid.

AND JUST PATENTLY ILLEGAL.

These things are CONTRACTS. People take jobs and rearrange their lives on the basis of these agreements that funding will be provided.

Imagine if a certain politician had run on the platform "I will make 280k people unemployed."

Had to do a range of blood tests to get the go-ahead for new biological therapy for my rheumatoid arthritis. There's some good news! I do NOT have latent TB! (Actually a serious risk with these meds.) Less good news: the kidney-destroying virus is still there. Sigh.

There are lots of blockers to me having a kidney transplant. The inability to clear the BK virus is a big one, because it would just destroy the new kidney, as it did my original ones. It's also very hard because of my other conditions and their treatments - RA for example.

Just read that "widening participation in higher education is one of the five ‘pillars’ of the [UK? English?] government’s forthcoming post-16 reform plan".

Given their treatment of universities and its economic crisis, this is surprising. Which universities do they imagine this influx will attend?

I got to end of work today and meant to read some book. I fell fast asleep. This also happens to me frequently at weekends - I work all week and remain, I think, pretty efficient. Then the weekend comes and it's like narcolepsy. I am very severely anaemic, so I have an excuse, but it's frustrating!

The real kicker for US federal grantees who are having already awarded grants cancelled is that it's clearly contractually illegal and actionable. But universities are unlikely to want to step out and sue the government. Particularly in the case of smaller grants, such as Hums grants from NEH.

Got a $100k grant? Quite a lot in the humanities. But probably not big enough to make a university want to draw attention to itself in a culture of intimidation and threats. And so a good chunk of this illegality looks likely to go unchallenged.

A great post by @gbilder.com that argues that the recent traffic surges experienced by OA infrastructures are probably not just central training scrapers... but amateur bots coded terribly by AI.

https://gbilder.com/posts/2025-04-02-bots-behaving-badly/

"the most realistic threat from AI [is] that more and more of our systems are going to become infested with subtly buggy data and code that has unintentional, unpredictable, and damaging downstream effects"

I'd say the slight problem with the Eleanor Marx biography I am reading is the biographer's very transparently strong aversion to Marx's partner, Edward Aveling. He was deeply flawed and seems quite unpleasant, but Holmes hasn't a good word for him. EM must have seen something in him, though.

An example: she says Aveling gave a boring/dry lecture on scientific historical material and then EM came out with lively material that the crowd loved. But there's no source to say who found him boring etc. It's all quite impressionistic.

Gotta confess, I've got peer review jitters for the first time ever. It's well past the deadline when I'd expected to hear and suspect it's gone to a third reader, meaning someone tore it apart. I've had plenty of rejections, but never on book-length work and I'm now anxious!

The US cuts are just absolute barbarism. Beyond terrible to see a nation tearing itself apart so violently in the name of self-interest and wealth, above culture and community.

Luka's second "gotcha day". He's still not *best* friends with me, but he loves Helen and I love him nonetheless.

Luka. A large black dog, sitting, with a white face from age. He is wearing a red harness. There is a wooden fence behind him and the corner of a house.