Mecatol Rex. A blasted hellscape, scarred and pitted, haunted by the ghosts of ancient custodians who await the next fools to aspire for lordship over its husk-corpse. A million billion xenos of species innumerable have spilled synth-blood and soul across flagstones that have witnessed aeons of death, sacrificed at...

Continued from Sussex Stories 6 More time I've always felt on the borders of mainstream capitalist and bureaucratic society, able to have one foot inside but unable to avoid one foot outside too. I've never felt comfortable in or out, with the balance more in participation than exclusion. But as universities became...

Continued from Sussex Stories 7 This is the 8th and final part of these Sussex Stories 1990-2024. Zoom: COVID-19 and lockdowns When COVID hit in 2020, VC (Vice Chancellor, university CEO) Tickell incredibly pushed on with face-to-face learning even though it was clear this was putting lives at risk. I don't know how...

I. This Escalated Quickly I mentioned one post ago that this blog has done approximately 2M+ lifetime views, with over a million of them being in the past two weeks in response to the now-infamous rant about AI, then I went out of my way to not write the most maximally viral thing possible for personal...

Continued from Sussex Stories 5 So, when you're near me, darling, can't you hear me, S.O.S Many universities were following Universities UK (UUK) guidance and rewriting staff statutes in their constitutions, and Sussex followed suit. After I did a bit of research on the UUK website it became clear that following UUK...

Continued from Sussex Stories 4 The dream is over The interdisciplinary structures had gone. But more was to come. The university motto 'Be Still and Know' became rarely seen in any public face of the university. There was very little 'Be Still' in the post-2007 period. 'Knowing' also went on the back burner....

This blog did so many hits last week that the host platform experienced timeouts. I've been invited onto podcasts, and offered both small technical projects and journalism work, of all things. It was a crazy time. But the internet moves on, as it always does, and I am left, as we all always are, to figure out what...

Continued from Sussex Stories 3 New appointments and equal opportunities: this is the real world I said the university I arrived at was 'beautiful' in the early years. But it was not beautiful for everyone. The student body was disproportionately white and middle-class. In the workforce, women were crammed at the...

Continued from Sussex Stories 2 New Labour, New Britain In May 1994 the Labour leader John Smith died. I bumped into my colleague Stephen Driver on the stairs at work very soon after and we were speculating on who would be the new leader. I said Gordon Brown, but he said no no it'll be Blair. Stephen left Sussex but...

Synergy Greg would like to see you in His office, it is the one down the hall, past the cubicles and dreary faces, uplifted only when He deigns to venture forth. You will know Him when you see Him, He is the one composed, of a thousand writhing forms, of a thousand professions, and a thousand colours, though mostly...

The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself. I myself have...

“I would describe myself as a socialist. I describe myself as a progressive”. These were Labour leader Keir Starmer’s words in May 2024 shortly after his first speech of the election campaign. Labour’s constitution defines it as a democratic socialist party. So, in theory, Starmer is a socialist. But what is...