Only last night I was complaining about class in the UK film industry and the restricted views we get of working class people and then bang! I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning comes along today to explode everything. The first film I’ve been blown away by in a long while. Cannot recommend it enough

That’s not flying, it’s falling without style

At a public LFF screening of Rogue Trooper and the gender ratio of the audience is making me feel like I’m in the press room of a 90s music mag

Lobbying for ‘ethical’ ‘sustainable’ and ‘human-rights centred’ genAI via a charter is a nonstarter. First, because genAI cannot meet those conditions of use. Second, omg charters. The Athena Swan charter (gender equality in universities) has been running 21yrs and has a selection process AND YET

The Society of Authors@societyofauthors.bsky.social · 3d ago

We understand the strength of feeling this AI Charter has provoked & that more explanation is needed. We will publish a blog tomorrow detailing why, in a vacuum of regulation, this charter demands more transparency & accountability from organisations on how they are using AI now and in the future.

I love it when institutions step up & face the challenges. And this is @ihr.bsky.social stepping up. Sure, will be directly helping only a few people, but what a solace to know clever people are trying to come up with support in the face of the overwhelming crisis. www.history.ac.uk/fellowships-...

Just learned someone who briefly supervised my PhD (I switched uni and supervisors) has been convicted of child sex offences. No one could have known, colleagues will be shocked. But the guy was so awful (domineering, screaming at students) that he should have been out of the sector long ago

I for one can’t wait to spend ages fiddling with iPlayer settings so I can turn off the annoying planet-burning genAI that keeps trying to recommend hallucinated ‘content’ that doesn’t actually exist yet somehow has replaced the people, programmes, and platform we used to pay the license fee for

Film Stories@filmstories.bsky.social · last wk.

The BBC's director general Matt Brittin outlines a Netflix-style vision for iPlayer, including an AI agent called Iggy that speaks to users. filmstories.co.uk/news/bbc-exp...

Had forgotten til yesterday how much of an overconfident man problem London has. No, it’s not ok to accost me and keep trying to hug me. No, you cannot have a moment to ‘just say’. Thought women were meant to gain invisibility in middle age yet here I am, two weeks off 40, still being perceived

My first film of the London Film Festival was The Fox, an Australian dark comedy about… I’m not sure, exactly. It was messy as hell and never got to the heart of its hinted-at gender or species politics. But Olivia Colman and Sam Neill playing fox and magpie puppets were fun, so there’s that #LFF

I’ve lost count of arguments with vegan pals (fwiw I’m veggie) about the comparisons some make between animal welfare and torture, enslavement, gender-based violence. These equivalences are racist and misogynistic, and risk re-traumatising already marginalised people. Speciesism is not a trump card

Jack Mendel@mendeljack.bsky.social · 2w ago

‘Next stop, the gas chamber’: London bus adverts to be removed www.jewishnews.co.uk/next-stop-ga...

Some recent musings on the gorgeous and very intimate natural history doc Super Nature, and the tensions that arise between romanticising super 8 and overlooking the animal materiality of film stock www.beccaeharrison.com/aftergloam-s...

Super Nature

A long-form review of the 2026 film Super Nature that covers the film's ethically conscious production, and the history of animal exploitation in the making of film stocks.

beccaeharrison.com

So I’ve just written a whole 90k-word book about why Lucasfilm definitely 100% should not do this. It has nothing to do with story arcs or Star Wars fan service and everything to do with ‘maybe we’d like a not-dying planet of our own instead of more samey-samey resource-intensive fantasy ones.’

Deadline@deadline.com · 3w ago

After eight years and countless entries in the expanding onscreen universe, 'Star Wars' is revisiting the Skywalker family with its next project.

I may not have a job and everything is terrible BUT my book (which I nearly gave up on, see above) just went into production. Following a decade of work 'Uncovering the Star Wars World: The Land, Labour and Nature of a Media Empire' will be out in May 2027. Excitement! Relief! And... copy editing.

If I were running a university where staff spent weeks and weeks of time putting grant proposals together only for UKRI to feed them into LLMs without informed consent—effectively theft of the time and work—I’d be taking serious action to defend those staff. But I’m not running a university, so

John Stott@jpsastro.bsky.social · 3w ago

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

Category is Books in Glasgow is in need of shutters to protect the shop - and presumably anyone who might be inside - from the people who keep smashing the windows. It’s a gem of a queer bookshop so if you can support them, please do!

So Mayer@suchmayer.northsky.social · 3w ago

Donate to Category Is's fix-it fund: gofund.me/8591b840c

My partner and me on the last full day of the holiday we put off for ages so I could write a book about Star Wars

A short piece I wrote about the Andrew Scott meteorology film Pressure, and the traps that an otherwise great movie falls into when it gets misty-eyed about fantasies of expertise www.beccaeharrison.com/aftergloam-p...

Pressure

A long-form review of 2026 film Pressure on the nature of expertise and power.

beccaeharrison.com

Just found myself in the weird position of turning down an academic job offer. I’ve decided not to apply for them before (recently enquiring about a research role I was told the ‘research budget’ came out of your salary) but never encountered t&cs so awful and exploitative that I’ve declined one

Hate to be right but I called the BBC dropping Drag Race before the ‘I kissed a…’ news was announced. There was only so long they were going to bother maintaining a veneer of ‘tolerance’ Drag Race co-creator warns of TV representation 'crisis' after BBC drops show www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Drag Race co-creator Fenton Bailey speaks out after BBC axe

The BBC is cutting the show because of financial pressures, sparking discussion about LGBTQ+ representation on TV.

bbc.co.uk

We’re on the inaugral @europeansleeper.eu from Brussels to Milan and it’s like travelling in a 90s adaptation of an Agatha Christie story or Hitchcock film and I’m very here for it (see also: greener and much much cooler than flying)

This review is making The Uprising’s treatment of the Peasants’ Revolt sound like Maidstone’s tribute to Wat Tyler — naming a grotty stretch of the one-way system between the big Sainsbury’s and a pay-and-display car park ‘Wat Tyler Way’

Marc Morris@marcmorris.bsky.social · last mo.

Spat out my tea reading this review of The Uprising. The what of what now? Popular understanding of medieval history has taken a hell of a pounding in recent weeks. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/se...

GenAI is ‘very good for animals,’ says Danny Boyle, as yet another data centre destroys the meagre land we’ve left for animals to live on and the light, noise and thermal pollution it creates puts all the animals in the surrounding area at risk

Deadline@deadline.com · last mo.

"There's about 30 seconds of it in our movie," the Oscar winner said about using AI to bring the Kray twins and Margaret Thatcher to life on screen.

You’d think Cambridge would have more vigorous recruitment policies than hiring such dodgy white men! DEI has gone too far!

Samantha Asumadu@samanthaasumadu.substack.com · last mo.

Two weeks ago I didn't know who Cambridge Professor James Orr was. Now I predict he is going to be very famous and God willing, unemployed.

One of the joys of finishing my book is that I can write about things that aren't Star Wars again. Here, I talk about the inescapable sadness of the very funny Coyote vs Acme - by way of corporate media, Roger Rabbit, and coyote-shaped craters in the ground. www.beccaeharrison.com/aftergloam-c...

Strange Beast: The Tragedy of the Toons and Toontown in Coyote vs Acme

In the wake of a long succession of origin stories based on studio intellectual properties that flip-reverse the hero-villain dynamic to eke out every last bit of audience cash at the box office...

beccaeharrison.com

This rocks, I am 100% getting involved

Mineral Cup & Ore Cup@mineralcup.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#MinCup26 Round 1 Match 1: It's carbonate-vs-carbonate with copper-rich #Azurite against zinc-rich #Smithsonite. Which has your vote? VOTE: www.mineralcup.org/2026/vote-re... RESULTS: www.mineralcup.org/2026/vote-re...

Visit to In Other Worlds at the Barbican (on for another week). It’s packed with multimedia stories but left me flat - some of the more emotive pieces about colonialism and climate change are smothered by the project’s overall tech determinism. Enjoyed its celebration of filmic world-building though

Can anyone point me to research or findings on the impacts of data centres on surrounding plants, animals, and/or fungi? Library catalogue search is showing stuff on water, heat, etc. but not specifically wildlife. Maybe I’m using the wrong search terms? Suggestions appreciated!

Yesterday we visited the Hold to This Earth exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The pieces are expansive, detailed, moving, provocative, so many things. The indoor space felt a bit small for the scale of the show but that aside it’s so worth a trip. On til April 2027 ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exh...

Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection | Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Headlining our 2026 programme is a major presentation of work by contemporary Indigenous American artists from Tia Collection. Bringing together 65 works b

ysp.org.uk

Currently writing about Coyote vs Acme, incl the tragedy of the commons by way of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, owning our narratives but not *owning* narratives via Greek myth, and what it means for a cartoon coyote to make an actual crater in the earth. The film is a strange beast, but a good one

The first album I ever owned aged 5 was a Dolly compilation. People used to think my childhood obsession with her was funny/weird. But now it seems more like evidence of her immense talent for crafting stories that spoke to so many people with so many perceived differences (age included!)