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March 2026

If you ever need to know anything about juggling, Scott is the most interesting and knowledgeable guy I have ever met on the subject!

Oh, he also does some digital humanities stuff... :P

It's that time of the month again when I demonstrate by anecdote how creaking the peer review system is!

This week I have had 2x requests from funders and 2x requests from journals for peer review.

I peer review most weekends. I say yes to as many as possible. But this is unsustainable.

Does anyone know, please: do plain cables - not power cables, but just like network cables or other wiring - count as electrical goods on their own, for recycling/disposal purposes? Basically: can I bin them in the UK or do I need to take them to the tip?

This morning, after reading some PhD student work in bed, I felt I was working tech wizardry. Everything fell into place. I achieved a week's worth of work in half a day. Then, this afternoon, was panicky firefighting as our database decided to die and my confidence ebbed away.

But now I will sit down with my other half and our dogs and I will read about Shakespeare. Just because I can and because I want to.

Grateful to resume overnight haemodialysis. This gives me back my days and evenings.

However, as I approach my 3rd anniversary of dialysis, I do long to just get into bed without an hour of complex medical setup.

But it keeps me alive. Aiming for the world record for longest surviving HD patient!

This does not inspire confidence. Ask people with disabilities for responses then feed them to AI.

"The DWP will analyse and summarise responses and may use artificial intelligence to assist with the handling of responses - this will be under human oversight and will not replace human judgement"

I can see that they say it has human oversight, but that could easily mean that they will prompt an AI to give a whitewash summary, spinning the response as they want. The human oversight could actually be the most corrupting part of this.

Thank goodness for the UK clock change. The chaos interregnum is over and I can return to a fixed time difference with my US colleagues!

I am a little bit miffed. I read the aforementioned PMLA article (it's good), but I went to check one reference for follow-up. The one reference I checked had the wrong page number. I mean, this is the flagship journal of the flagship society in our field. In a discipline that ... 🧵1/2

... supposedly, at least in part, focuses on close reading and attention to detail. It just bugs me, that's all. 🧵2/2

I am getting excited about the fact that we are drawing close to the launch of the new Profiles system at Knowledge Commons. Just one of the features is this nifty chart of KCWorks deposits over time! (Do not ask how long it took me to get that drawing programmatically.)

A chart of KC Works deposits, showing the different types of deposit made by a user over time

A quite incredible revelation: you can hire 2Unlimited for parties or corporate events! I do not know their pricing, but I turn a significant age milestone this year and am SO tempted... #TECHNOTECHNOTECHNO

Love MusicBrainz. Suggest an artist as Mr. Tea. Best suggestion: Mr. Tea (featured on 'Massive Wanker' by Hellfish).

Suggestions for Mr Tea on MusicBrainz, including Mr. Tea (featured on 'Massive Wanker' by Hellfish)

It's really excellent that the next version of PyCharm, the awesome IDE from JetBrains, will include uv support. Such a great tool, uv. Hope the OpenAI acquisition of astral does not mess this up.

Just seen this site using Crossref data. https://nexus-score.vercel.app/ It's quite cool! One glaring flaw, though: assuming that no funder ID is a metadata deficiency and not a disciplinary norm. I also do not like the term 'Research Nexus', with which Crossref are obsessed. What does ... 🧵1/2

... it actually mean?! However, it's very good to see metadata standards being given some kind of priority. 🧵2/2

Ellipses is a very gollum-ey word. I keep wanting to say it in his voice from the LotR movies: ellipseses, my precious

Gollum, as in Peter Jackson's movies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He is glaring malevolently at the camera

Filed a bug or perhaps feature request on Janeway this morning. https://github.com/openlibhums/janeway/issues/5237 Realised that custom social media clients that post to multiple networks cannot get to the thumbnail images on OLH because Anubis is blocking bots. Had an idea for a fix. The only 🧵1/2

other option would be for me to implement Playwright or Puppeteer to drive an actual browser session to the URL, complete the proof-of-work, and then extract the image, so we get a nice thumbnail on Bluesky. That would be a total faff, though. 🧵2/2

An amusing note. Mrs. Eve presented me with an Easter egg this morning. She said it was a Valentine's Day gift which we do not celebrate. However, she'd forgotten that she'd bought it!

Eaten it all.

A chocolate bear from M&S

100% AI.

It's the snappy sentences that give it away.

Imagine being that insensitive that you can't even write a redundancy email without delegating it to a machine that knows only a textual simulacra of BW and TC's "compassion".

The Covid Module 3 report is out, saying that the NHS "coped, but only just".

I think this is an affront to the hundreds of thousands of people who died. It is an insult to people who suffered lasting harm from lack of regular health care. We did not cope.

https://eve.gd/2026/03/20/the-nhs-can-never-fail-there-is-no-circumstance-where-it-would-be-deemed-overwhelmed/

Thanks to @ernestopriego.com for discussions and for sharing the report with me in the first place, yesterday.

As the title of the piece says, and as it concludes, these type of formal inquiries will never say the NHS did not cope or it failed or was overwhelmed.

I suppose there might be a political reason for that. If you say it failed, there might be the political justification to tear it all down and withdraw our universal healthcare system. That would be a tragedy. More than a tragedy.

But still, it's clear that the NHS was totally on its knees and did not cope.

A bit embarrassing, but I'll tell a story anyway. I supervise PhDs at a number of institutions, including another London institution. I had to do their dire IT training when I came on board at this new institution. Yesterday, I got an e-mail saying they had updated their data protection policies.

The link to the data protection policies was genuine, and so I clicked it. I read the policy and thought, well this doesn't seem like it's changed at all. The email then demanded that staff complete a survey to say that they were aware of the changes and accepted them.

Anyway, close of a long day, I clicked the survey link, which popped up a Microsoft login pane. However, I then noticed that this was not on an official Microsoft login domain or on the university's website. I had assumed that the URL was some kind of "link defender" system in their email setup.

Anyway, there was no way I was entering my credentials on a site that was not official but that looked like Microsoft. So I shut down that pane, closed it all and thought, bad luck, I'm not gonna do your survey.

But oh no. A few minutes later I got an email from IT services telling me that I had failed the phishing test that they had sent, and that the previous email had in fact been initiated by IT services to catch people out. This is in itself quite infuriating.

Yes, obviously, IT has a task to protect against phishing attacks on staff members. But wasting everybody's time with this kind of nonsense is very irritating. However, it gets worse. They then told me that I had been signed up for a mandatory extra half hour of online IT training.

I had admittedly clicked the link, but I had not filled in any credential details and nothing was actually exfiltrated. I think that the first part of this, just them telling me that it was phishing and that I'd been caught, was enough to make me revitalize my digital sanitation procedures.

I am going to refuse point blank to do any more of this IT training stuff, though. The tests are pointless and can be answered without even going through the training itself. I know I should have checked that the link was on a valid domain. But in this case I noticed just a picosecond too late.

So anyway, this is embarrassing because I am moaning about being made to do additional training when I clearly messed up, when I was tired. Perhaps, you might, think I need the training. But I can guarantee what the training will say and what it will ask.

What it actually reveals, though, is that even people who deem themselves incredibly tech savvy, like me (I work elsewhere as a computer programmer) can make mistakes when they are tired. And no amount of training is gonna make up for that.

It is also a huge overreach by IT departments to entrap their own users and then demand more of their time for "training" when a problem arises. Yes, people need some initial training. Yes, it's important that IT protects the university from data protection breaches.

But this kind of ensnarement in a kind of "gotcha" way only makes people, like me, angry. IT are supposed to support staff, not try to catch them out. It makes me want to kick myself because I clicked the link at all (I am culpable). But it makes me want to kick IT services a heck of a lot harder.

Further, 1Password, my password manager system, alerted me that it could not fill this site, so I knew it wasn't a valid login portal. This was not only entrapment, but badly done entrapment, where the user (me) could not reliably be expected to succeed.

I just assumed it was a third-party domain that they were using to collect this information. Once I got there, I didn't enter any credentials as I identified it as dodgy.

"we coped, but only just".

This is survivor bias. We didn't cope for the hundreds of thousands of people who died.

The people with inappropriate Do Not Resuscitate orders who died - did we "only just cope" for them? Nowhere near.

https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/reports/module-3-report-in-brief-summary-the-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-the-healthcare-systems-of-the-united-kingdom/

Thank you to @ernestopriego.com for drawing this report to my attention.

Bit of a whitewash, isn't it? Yes, it's got some good recommendations. But I can't see what "not coping" or "being overwhelmed" looks like for our NHS. I mean, staff reported that it was like a warzone in A&E.

I had to cancel all my routine hospital appointments - I wasn't getting treatment, even as my kidneys failed. Real, permanent harm went undetected because hospitals weren't safe for me (actual doctors' words). I lost my kidneys and my life with it.

How. Is. This. "Coping"?

It's easy to say, in retrospect, "phew, that was close, but I'm still here, so we must have got away with it".

But so many people didn't get away with it. I was personally very damaged by it, because NHS supply capacity couldn't handle a pandemic on top of regular demand.

"I’d had my diagnosis for ten years before I realized I could use the word disability."

It took me almost 20.

I ended up reading some of his blog posts. He seems to argue that one reason why he must banish "wokism" is because left-wingers are intelligent, so they need to be "liberated" from "falsehood". Doesn't seem to consider that perhaps the intelligence might be linked to the views...

A facetious point, really, in that above post. But there's a heck of a lot of rubbish in what he says. "Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications"... That's not colorblind. It's just trying to proxy skin color through socioeconomic educational outcomes.

And, yeah, pretty obvious points, I know. But I only just encountered this and so am dealing with my own knee-jerk horror at such views.

Hospital outcomes:

* Campylobacter - food poisoning - infection is clearing. 14 days more antibiotics.
* I then have norovirus. May require antiviral treatment. Repeating tests.
* I then have a parasite called blastocystis that will be treated.

Not surprising that my bowel is misbehaving.

Spoke with the passenger assistance support person at the train station this am.

He said he regretted going to university, mainly on grounds of cost. However, the main cost he complained about was access to the textbooks and other academic materials he was meant to read! I swear I didn't prime him!

We then had a long discussion about the economics of scholarly communications and how things might be done better.

Just saw this! Incredible - in the sense of not believable - and worries me greatly as to how they will use such data, in the manner of Netflix completion metrics.

Just in case you didn't think London talk radio was right-wing enough, a contributor has just now suggested that shoplifting would be reduced if offenders faced "a good beating".

I was awake half the night due to health issues, with which I won't bore you, but I was thinking through the big chunk of work on the ID Management System (IDMS) stack that I have been re-architecting on Knowledge Commons. Obviously, I'll continue to think this through as the best work ain't at 3am.

However, the gist of it was: we made a flawed design decision at the start of this process. I won't say what it was, but suffice to say that it is confusing our internal test users, so external users don't stand a chance. I think we need to do the serious surgery to fix it.

Hopefully, this will only push us back by a week or so. But it's frustrating to have come so close to shipping, only to find, in testing, such a flaw. It also highlights the infrastructural difference between user preference in theory and implementation in practice.

Users *say* that they will be fine with a decision. But when implemented, they may change their minds.

Just had an upsetting call from the hospital. Gastro spoke w my kidney team and wanted to admit me to hospital b/c my weight is so dangerously low. For the past 3 days, though, I have felt better, and so managed to forestall this. But I am being taken off overnight dialysis for at least a fortnight.

The thing I can't convey is why this is so upsetting. I just get into a rhythm and know what things look like and feel we have a pattern and can get through it. But then I am just thrown these curveballs out the blue unexpectedly and it makes planning your life incredibly hard.

Probably gross ignorance, but I didn't know that the assumption of another person's name for publishing purposes (cough Grammarly) is called an "allonym".

I know this is just designed to get troll-bait engagement, but learning is not only social... but it works better when you give it, at least, real time. You need to think about what is being said and question it. You can't do that if you think it's just a series of facts recited at 1.5x speed.

My next writing assignment is a book chapter on AI and the Gothic. Thinking about the rhetorical use of Gothic tropes to render new technology as frightening and/or undesirable or vampiric on labour and life. Also, the whole Gothic lineage of "playing God" with respect to artificial life.

Can confirm that it is fabulous - I thought I was totally sick of Earnest performances, but this one totally refreshed it for me. Sharon D. Clarke is SO good!

This morning, I am listening with sadness to Y LLwynog by The Long Champs. The lovely Del, partner of LLoyd (who has done two remixes for me), whose voice makes an appearance on this track passed away last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btPryFJvk4k&list=RDbtPryFJvk4k&start_radio=1

The track has a sad story, with a hint of hope, behind it in the first place. Del had been going through cancer treatment and it had gone well ("it happened, it ended, like a shooting star"), so Rich Lane got her to record some lyrics over the phone and used them in his remix as a surprise to Lloyd.

I wasn't there, but I gather it was an emotional moment when it was played in the castle at Carcassonne at the Convenenza festival.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjSsxOxBkg&list=RDrDjSsxOxBkg&start_radio=1

Lloyd's original version is also a total belter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bOCqrkD3II&list=RD3bOCqrkD3II&start_radio=1

3x courses of different antibiotics down, now, with no resolution yet in sight. Campylobacter just won't go away. Next, I'm being moved to the heavy variants that only the hospital can prescribe. Just par for the course for immunodeficiency patients.

This is, indeed, excellent. Although I did question "Becoming unusually interested in build systems or CI/CD" as a symptom - I love a good CI/CD system.

I hope the class action against Grammarly proceeds, even though they have taken it down. It was there since last August apparently.

Five years ago I was experimenting with visualizations of the LRB contributor network. It became ‘The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist’, in The Cambridge History of the British Essay, ed. by Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 681–95

A red network diagram showing the contributors to the London Review of Books. It is not meant to be legible but provided merely for illustrative purposes.

Also hilarious: an email from our expenses provider offering tailored advice on AI fraud to me. It opens "Hi Rosa,".

This is what Grammarly looks like when it is impersonating you, in a fraudulent way, in order to generate revenue for its product.

I have contacted a law firm asking for an opinion on a lawsuit. However, in the UK personality rights are not well protected, so a US case would be preferable.

A screenshot of Grammarly using my name to provide "expert feedback", generated via an LLM.

Occasionally, I allow myself just the extra little treat drink that goes slightly over my kidney failure fluid restriction. Today, I just cannot get going without a second caffeine boost from tea. So it's one of those days.

This just means that, tonight, during dialysis, I will have to take off a little more fluid.

Difficult balance, because the more fluid you remove, the rougher it is on your body - and the harder the next day becomes.

Is the Grammarly "expert review" function only available in their app?

Anyway, someone who is imitated should contact a lawyer and ask about a personality rights claim and its chance of success.

Today is not much improvement on yesterday, health-wise. Apologies if I am overdue getting back to you on anything.

Perhaps the biggest indication of how stupid markets are - how irrational and gullible - is that Trump says "the war is almost over" and the markets rally. As though he has a great track record of truthful statements.

At the weekend, I was reading "Islamic Government", an influential work by Ruhollah Khomeini. I was trying to understand better the Iranian revolution.

An interesting passage: "Islam proclaims monarchy and hereditary succession wrong and invalid".

The recent choice of leader breaks with this.

It is, apparently, rare to see such a break with Khomeini's thought, which has been the guiding light of clerical rule in Iran since '79.

I should also say that much of "Islamic Government" does not make sense or appeal to me, at all. I lack much context to comprehend it.

Apart from my fall at the weekend - which has left me very bruised and, I think, with a rib fracture - I am still experiencing terrible bowel problems (up all night) and dangerously losing weight. I have been told to go to A&E if it drops even slightly further. I'm 58kg at 6' 2".

Desperately trying to eat and to keep stuff down. Or up. These renal clinic protein puddings are recommended. They are "nutritionally complete" apparently, so you could live off them alone. I would seriously not recommend it. They're fine at first, but sickening at 3 per day.

A picture of a Nutricrem chocolate orange protein pudding. OK at first, but when eating 3x per day, it's grim.

This is massively exaggerated. 1 the concept of a "clean room" implementation using AI is nonsensical. The models have been trained on the existing code; 2 the ongoing development of the Linux kernel, including drivers, requires novelty that LLM coding does not possess

https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-linux-kernel-will-soon-be-mit-licensed-and-copyleft-will-be-dead-within-5-years/

This is a more nuanced take that has me a little more concerned https://antirez.com/news/162

But it's exactly the same as in the creative space: LLMs undermining the fields they were trained upon.

'You hear that? “LOVE” is kicking someone, or four thousand someones, to the curb — while making sure they don’t land on the asphalt too hard, somehow.'

Had a bad fall this morning. Was walking to the kitchen and Robyn, our three-legged dog, bless her, darted under my feet. I went flying head over heels. I am now severely bruised and am worried I have, yet again, fractured a rib. I've done this several times before. It felt like this.

Poor Robyn is now all freaked out and scared.

Finishing up writing my current book chapter project, ‘The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss’, in Textual Ecologies: Media, Materials, Environments, ed. by Katharina de Boehm, Orietta da Rold, and Vicky Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2028)

"Hence, for many reasons, the supposed bibliographic dream of Alexandria finds itself unattainable. The archive at the end of the world is not total, complete, and whole. Instead, it is ruptured, spacious, constrained, and incomplete."

One of the things I miss most are baths and swimming. I have had neither for three years now because I have a central line (a tube going down from your neck to your circulatory system under the skin then out the front of your chest) for dialysis. I yearn for the sensation of warm total immersion.

I have found this to be amazing, too. It works best when you are really on top of what you want to write and can articulate it fluently and correctly.

It works less well when you are thinking something through and need to pause between words to consider the argument. Typing slows you down for this.

A threaded observation on holding guns and/or having an enormous military at your disposal.

At my school, from age 16–18, I had to do a thing called CCF: the Combined Cadet Force. It was blatant military propaganda. We were trained in military practices with guns. Real guns. Astonishing in the UK.

Obviously we used blank ammunition. But I did learn how to load and fire an SA80 rifle, and how to operate the Light Support Weapon (a mounted machine gun).

We were also trained in outdoor survival, camouflage, escape and evasion, and many other things armies do.

All of this is extraordinary in the first place. And, I think, horrific to teach to children in a school.

But it also taught me something about myself.

I did not like how I felt holding a gun.

I felt a surge of power and temptation. I felt empowered because I had a device that would give me forceful superiority over others.

It made me feel totally and absolutely powerful.

I had the same sensation holding my friend’s air rifle and air pistol. And also with my own BB gun that fired ball bearings.

I realised that I hated this feeling. It felt like a dangerous rush of violent power to my head. I hated what it made me into and how it transformed my sense of self.

So I swore I would never hold a gun again.

I can see how even just having the weapon transforms people — especially those without impulse control — into killing machines.

And I fear there is something similar about the US military (and other militaries).

Only Trump and his administration do not think the sensations I’ve described are dangerous things to resist.

Instead, they seem to think those feelings should be followed — that power through weapons is what makes them “strong” or “great”.

Anyway, this is hardly the main cause of this war. But it’s an interesting psychological observation for me. Having a huge military is like a loaded gun on the desk in act one. In act two, it must go off.

Were I well enough, I would be heading to London, wheelchair charged, to attend protests against the illegal, murderous, imperialist attacks on Iran.

Sadly, I am not. I am far too weak, the infection risk is too high, and my bowel problems are severe.

But I feel I must at least speak out on this.

Certainly, the concepts of international law and "legality" are dubious and constructions of the very regimes now violating these norms. That is: international law, the UN and all are might-is-right constructions with US centrality (veto etc). I'm sure there's a whole scholarly literature on this.

Stuart's site is simply a mine of treasures. He generously shares so much openly and is a truly deep scholar. His books - particularly on Foucault - are always must-reads for me.

This is, of course, only a rare subset of morons - but who do actually exist.

What's more chilling about their pronouncement of Claude's sentience is that it shows how these systems can get into your head. This is how people end up killing themselves after immersion in chat bots.

The "we" here is doing a heck of a lot of heavy lifting. If "we" all agreed on it, it would have happened. But many powerful people with the money that drives academia are staunch free-market libertarian capitalists.

At the weekend, I am looking forward to reading this.

Thomas, Sam, ‘Lines of Flight, Lines of Force: Thomas Pynchon & Star Wars’, Studies in American Fiction, 52.1 (2025), pp. 41–71

An open-access article available on Project Muse by the excellent Sam Thomas.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/984787

I do have some questions, though: why on Earth does this JHU journal not issue DOIs?

OK, it's in the API now: https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1353/saf.2025.a984787/

I wonder whether media genres will emerge that are specifically sculpted to be things that AI systems could not ever predict and generate. Retaining any kind of narrative coherence could be very difficult/near impossible. Would probably be highly avant-garde/experimental...

It's Friday and I have bounced up from an 8-hour overnight haemodialysis session bristling with energy. Channeling it into finishing writing a book chapter before hitting the tech-geekery at Knowledge Commons. Feels good to be energised!

I thought the actions didn't quite match the text, here.

AI could pollute the open science space, so contribute to open models? (Which could also do so.) AI scrapers are misbehaving, so do the bare minimum of blocking possible?

More than 4x the entire budget of the eliminated National Endowment for the Humanities, every day, if I'm reading their historic appropriations correctly.

I don't get out that much these days owing to terrible ill health/kidney failure, but I am still speaking on several occasions this year if you would like to hear my words.

Co-conspirators include @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social, @aileenfyfe.bsky.social, @kfitz.info, @alittleroad.bsky.social

All those events are, of course, subject to my health. Most/all are remote/online; travel is very hard/impossible for me.

I also have a set of book chapters in the works, in case anyone would like to read my words. Some of these will not see the light of day for a while. I will try to deposit AAMs.

I also have two books in the works. The Voyager book is back out for peer review after receiving a rough ride on the first round. This was fair criticism and I think it's much better now, but I just hope the reviewer who saw it before can forgive me and come back with fresh eyes.

Then I have a book with the MIT Press that I am writing. It's called (and is about) The Dark Web. It is in their Essential Knowledge series. One of the exciting things about this is that I get to work with @scholtom.bsky.social, who is doing the images for me. He is such a whizz at this.

There may be further speaking events this year. It depends how fatigued I am. Each one takes a lot out of me now and comes with a recovery cost. I don't assume that anybody needs or wants to hear my thoughts, but I am grateful to organizers for the opportunity to air them and to those who listen.

I am also involved in quite a few advisory boards at the moment. To name a few: the German Servicestelle Diamond Open Access; Promiscuous Print: Legal Deposit Libraries, Rejected Texts, and New Methods for Negative Bibliography; the Open Institutional Publishing Association.

I am also considering becoming an advising member of Kidney Care UK's Peer Support service. This offers those new to kidney failure and dialysis the opportunity to speak to someone who has been through it. Like a mentoring or sponsorship (AA) arrangement for kidney failure.

Of course, these all take my limited energy and time, when my main efforts are firmly focused on Knowledge Commons and the exciting new things we can do there. More on all that soon. But all these involvements are worth it and part of the academic community we want to build and see.

And thank you for the kind words.

I love reading and writing and thinking (research). It is what gets me up in the morning. I do it before hitting my desk at 9am for Knowledge Commons.

I have found writing more book chapters these days to be appealing. It gives an interesting pre-formed context.

That is, unlike a journal (except in special issue contexts), it gives you a frame and a negotiated topic. It also means, often, that you don't need to do the normal throat clearing background and definitional-type work at the start, because the eds can do it in their intro.

Indeed, for the first time since 2011, I do not have any journal articles queued up, planned, or in press. I must do something about this, but think I am OK for now ;)

(which encompasses comic books, novels, video games, and more recent television serials), argues that Voyager was greatly influenced by the ethos and culture of the late 1990s in which it was immersed and particularly how a post-Cold War split between individualism and collectivity was at the fore.

The book also focuses on how episodicity informs our reading of the program’s ethics, politics, and attitude. Indeed, episodicity drove everything about Voyager, even down to the fact that directors (as reported by Marvin Rush) were assigned to episodes without seeing scripts...

and without knowing whether the episode was the strongest or the weakest in the season; episodes, as far as directors were concerned, were interchangeable.

Yet the episodicity of Voyager is absolutely crucial. As Andrew Howe astutely notes, for example, the enemies in Voyager...

whether they be the Kazon, Borg, or Malon all have moral “defects” from the perspective of the audience. The short-form of the episode that structures Voyager and that had informed earlier Trek series relies on “short-term plans for rehabilitation at the end of an episode”.

That is, the episode requires a moral correction by the end of each week’s instalment, thereby giving a narrative drive for each week.

Further, there must be something conservative – or, at least, normative – about that drive, since each villain’s appearance must mark a moral abnormality that is to be corrected and normalised by the close of the episode.

...and I'll stop there. That's the gist!

As I said, the first draft got fair but very harsh criticism from an extremely knowledgeable and helpful reader, who constructively destroyed large parts of the work! I am nonetheless grateful for this and hope that s/he can forgive me with fresh eyes when it comes back to them.

Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss’ (presented at the Textual Ecologies: Media, Materials, Environments, Passau, Germany, 2026) Eve, Martin Paul, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, ‘Martin Paul Eve in Conversation with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’ (presented at the SHARPIES 2026, Online, 2026) Eve, Martin Paul, Lucy Barnes, and Aileen Fyfe, ‘Open Access Books: Rights, Ownership and Control’ (presented at the London Open Science & Scholarship Festival 2026, London School of Economics, 2026) Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, Martin Paul Eve, Bonnie Russell, Scott Schopieray, and Ian Scott, ‘The Ethics of Open Scholarship’ (presented at the Ethics Week, Michigan State University, 2026) Eve, Martin Paul, ‘AI and the Gothic’, in The Gothic World, Expanded, ed. by Xavier Aldana Reyes and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2028) Eve, Martin Paul, ‘AI, Copyright, and Open Licensing’, in Handbook on Critical Approaches to Artificial Intelligence in Library and Information Studies, ed. by Merisa Martinez, Melissa Terras, and Anna Foka (TBC: TBC, 2028) Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss’, in Textual Ecologies: Media, Materials, Environments, ed. by Katharina de Boehm, Orietta da Rold, and Vicky Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2028) Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Atomics’, in George Orwell in Context, ed. by Nathan Waddell (Cambridge University Press, 2027) Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Rage Against the Machine: The Politics of Open Access, Large Language Models, and the Reaction Against Open’, in Digital Inequality: Transcultural Perspectives on the Digital Divide from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, ed. by Bas Groes, Alex Goody, and Asami Nakamura (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2027) Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures’, in Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities, ed. by Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026), pp. 96–110 A diagram of a Tor hidden service, showing how a client and a server go through three hops of onion relays before meeting at a rendez-vous point for the hidden site.

My kind of research! That said, I have not been to a pub in 5 years now because of infection risk and also that kidney failure means I cannot drink a whole pint of any fluid.

But the pub as a space, and place for conversation. Nothing beats it in my mind.

"It would, indeed, be surprising to find anyone today who has not “infringed” on the exclusive rights listed in § 106: reproduction, distribution, making derivative works, public performance, and public display."

Reading this excellent piece on the Internet Archive.

https://law.unh.edu/sites/default/files/media/2025-04/IDEA_Hatchette_v._IternetArchive.pdf

Michelle M. Wu, ‘Hachette V. Internet Archive: How the Courts Broke Copyright’, Georgetown Law Faculty Publications (Washington, DC), 65.2 (2025), pp. 1–38

Who do we exclude in this model? Probably a set of older learners who never had original academic opportunity but wish to return to study.

Enjoying the Tony Joe White enthusiasm in my feed after posting the desert disco remake of an unheard reel-to-reel. #swampfox

Preachy geeky time - I switched to Linux in 2008. Have never looked back.

But: if you hate learning how to fix computers when they go wrong, it may not be for you...

So, I confess, I have a dual-boot system. I can hop back into Windows when I want to jam. But day-to-day: everything is Linux.

Also: Wine is able to run a large number of Windows programs under Linux, although it isn't perfect. I can even play many new Windows games with it!

Out of interest: what is the specific software that you would need to run?

Finally, I'll just add that assistive tech is probably better in Windows, although I do audio dictation using Whisper just fine.

Flying Mojito Bros are absolutely kicking it at the moment with their swamp funk desert disco. They have an album of Tony Joe White reworks coming out soon; I can't wait.

This track was crafted from a previously unheard TJW reel-to-reel called "Woman Jam"

https://flyingmojitobros.bandcamp.com/track/woman

If you don't know who Tony Joe White is, he wrote Tina Turner's "Steamy Windows" and "Undercover Agent for the Blues"; both superb tracks. His album Closer to the Truth is excellent IMO.

I have had it before, but I had forgotten just how nasty the constant taste is that you get from clarithromycin, the antibiotic I am on.

I am on the antibiotics now. Well, I'm on the FIRST set of recommended antibiotics. If these don't work there's a whole cascade of others. Hoping to feel better soon though! Disgusting antibiotic taste meanwhile...

This is a good understanding of the situation. If the hype is to be believed (hmmm), then AI would need to show it can synthesise new knowledge, rather than just model what is. But because people believe it CAN do this already, the work of creating true new knowledge comes under threat/is devalued.

Last night my GP called me at 7.30pm(!) She had spotted my test showing persistent bacterial infection. I emailed my hospital consultant last night and she called me this morning to discuss. I now have a plan.

Absolutely incredible. These docs are going above and beyond and I am very grateful.

Was sorting books on Saturday and found three copies of Democracy in America. World of Books didn't want them. I guess democracy in America just ain't worth very much.

Last night, I was violently ill - the nausea overtook me and I collapsed into bed. This morning, I can barely do anything. Every movement is painful and I have no strength. I am exhausted yet must somehow find the strength to get upright again.

If I look at the text above this image, so the dots are in my peripheral vision, they seem to be blue. When I focus upon them, they are purple. Interesting!