The first question to ask in terms of sustainability of practice, is sustainability of what? The things each of us might want to protect and grow might be very different. The second is to consider how you can approach that issue. You can rely on institutional or Governmental guidelines. But these are limited I feel. To take the obvious example of dealing with AI, this study of AI policies across UK higher ed institutions found that there was no shared approach and despite claims to put students first, most policies were about compliance and monitoring. The author, Sam Illingworth comments that:

“Universities are supposed to develop critical thinkers. If an institution’s own AI policy cannot model critical thinking about AI, if it resorts to compliance while claiming to educate, then the policy contradicts the mission.“

This suggests that if you really care about a subject, or approach, or principle, then you can’t rely on institutional policies to do all the work for you. We’re going to have to make the practices we care about sustainable.

Anyway, here is a screen recording of the talk in my delightful monotone:

Step 1: Curating the Lyrics

As good a lyricist as McAloon is, you still don’t want everything. I needed to curate the lyrics from the ten albums. I used Claude (claude.ai) to analyse each song’s lyrics and strip out repetition and filler. I then identified lyrics to keep, either as stand-alone or as couplets. I used the extensive collection of lyrics at A2ZLyrics for this.

Step 2: Setting Up the Google Sheet

I needed to create a database of the lyrics so decided to use a simple Google Sheet, with four columns:

There was a lot of copying and pasting here, and this was the most time-consuming part. But also fun as I got to appreciate that often the best lyrics are tucked away in “lesser” songs. I then added a fifth column:

The Random column contains a =RAND() formula in every row. This recalculates every time the sheet is accessed, giving each row a new random number which allows the selection to be random rather than sequential.

Step 3: Creating a Bluesky Account

I wasted a bit of time messing about with Threads, but the multiple account maintenance and complex OAuth in Meta was too messy. I opted for Bluesky because it had simple authentication, and the site isn’t full of nazis.

I created a dedicated account at bsky.app and under Settings → Privacy and Security → App Passwords I created an App Password specifically for Make.com.

Step 4: Building the Automation in Make.com

I used Make.com (free tier) to automate the daily posting. I hadn’t used it before and after some initial errors (all mine) it was very effective and simple. Make uses “scenarios” and within these you create modules. I used four modules chained together:

Module 1 — Schedule

Triggers the scenario once per day at a set time. This isn’t really a separate module but attached to the Google sheets one.

Module 2 — Google Sheets: Search Rows

• Spreadsheet: my lyrics sheet
• Filter: Posted column is empty (unposted rows only)
• Sort by: Random column, Ascending
• Limit: 1

This fetches one random unposted lyric each time it runs.

Module 3 — Bluesky: Create Post

It has a built-in BlueSky module so once it was connected and authenticated to my account I just had to select the Create A Post function. It prompts for a text field, drawing on the Google Sheets variables. I selected:

"{{Lyric}}"

— {{Song}}

This formats each post cleanly with attribution.

Module 4 — Google Sheets: Update a Row

• Row Number: taken from the Google Sheets module output
• Posted: Y
• Date Posted: {{now}}

This marks the row as used so it never repeats.

Once it was toggled to active I selected Post Once – Daily and set the time. And there it is, all brave and shiny in the world.

I then asked Claude to create a web page that would choose a random lyric from the spreadsheet. I wasn’t worried about repetition here, as the user can keep smashing the “Give me a lyric” button as often as they like. I cheated here and just let Claude do all the HTML. I know, I know. I then hosted it at my Reclaim site.

This is a common mistake (particularly of people going through a midlife crisis on Facebook), that lyrics which seem meaningful in context are trite, or even embarrassing when presented in plain text. Take a simple, obvious line such as “I miss you” – with the right singer, or chord change, or manic repetition, it can be very powerful in a song, but doesn’t mean much in isolation. But McAloon is a lyricist who often comes to his songs lyrics first, and many of them work perfectly as single lines or couplets of text.

I had the idea on the treadmill therefore to create a bot that would post a daily McAloon lyric to Bluesky. I haven’t created a bot before. I’ve set out how I did it in the end in a separate post. It was sort of assisted building with the aid of Claude. Anyway, it now works! I have to say I’m quite surprised that it does actually function as intended and seeing a random lyric every day prompts thought and a smile. I also created (well, vibe-coded really) a web page where you get as many lyrics as you want.

I’m sure the world doesn’t need another bot, but on the other hand Bluesky seems generally full of understandable fear, doom and outrage. Adding a little daily nugget of beauty into that isn’t a bad thing. If you’re on Bluesky, give the bot a follow!

Maren and I visited Canada for a two week trip this month. We completed (very slowly) the Vancouver Half Marathon, and then spent some time on Vancouver Island. I loved the big country feel of Vancouver Island. You will believe a Sasquatch (or at least a bear) could be in the forest. While we were there we met up with a lot of old ed-tech friends, including Rajiv Jhangiani, Anne-Marie Scott, Tom Farrelly, Brian Lamb, Marryann Kempthorne, Clint Lalonde, Amanda Coolidge, Scott Leslie and Valerie Irvine. It was like getting the old gang back together. That is pretty much my social interactions for a year used up.

What this made clear though was something we used to comment on a lot back in the halcyon social media/blogging days, that you made genuine connections. We didn’t even talk about ed tech much, it was just good to meet up with friends. I’m not so sure it’s easy to make those kind of connections amongst all the AI slop and nazi-soup that constitutes much of social media now. We got lucky with our timing.

Books

I resisted saying “the golden age of social media” in my previous paragraph because I recently read Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. She doesn’t set out to trash the Renaissance, but rather illustrates that it is a myth, a narrative that is used by people for different reasons. Depending on your view, the actual renaissance has different messages and occurred over different times. One very powerful argument she makes is regarding Florence, where she highlights how the self-reinforcing nature of its claim to be the centre of the renaissance has helped strengthen that claim. In WW2, both the Germans and Allies treated it with deference, compared with other sites which held equally important art works, for example. This a good example of how establishing a solid narrative about yourself (institution, profession, country, interest) makes it become true. I think there is potentially a lesson here for higher education. The more they don’t bend to every little political bully and establish their solid principles, then the more people view them as the holders of those truths. Even if it isn’t always true. But they too often accept every new priority and direction flung at them.

A fun read was qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division. In this different beings have the power to mess with our memories. The author has some fun with this (for instance an ancient deity who makes humanity forget how to ride bikes). The Antimemetics Division controls this but there is one existential threat that as soon as a person learns of it, they seek to destroy themselves or others. Knowing about it means that you can’t defeat it. This is fun in and of itself, but maybe it was just timing, but I read it when I had spent an hour or two doomscrolling. I was experiencing the loss of reality that the book captures. What was real anymore. Did this celebrity really give someone on set CPR and save their life? Is that a real video of a car slipping into a canal? Did that politician really say that? It’s not that you can’t determine the truth of any one of these (no, no, yes, in the case of these examples), but rather one’s whole relationship with truth becomes worn down. We need the Antimemetics Division now.

Vinyl

Welsh artist Art School Girlfriend (Polly Louise Mackey) released her third, and best album so far, Lean In, which I’ve been playing a lot. She mixes shoegaze and electronica to produce a kind of ethereal dance music. Speaking of third albums by solo female artists who go under monikers, Snail Mail (Lindsey Jordan) released Ricochet. It’s had some middling reviews, but I’m a big fan. The pure vocals over 90s indie rock sounds like it could soundtrack a cool film you still talk about years later. It also sounds like an America you can still believe in.

Raye’s second album, This Music May Contain Hope, successfully combines RnB, pop, musical theatre and jazz. There’s two things I particularly admire it beyond the (excellent) music:
1) it’s a proper vinyl album, designed for the format structurally and aesthetically, with 4 distinct sides and theatre like programme. Raye respects the vinyl!
2) When an artist gets the kind of success she had with her last album, it can sometimes ruin them. They either shy away from it or try to repeat it and end up second guessing themselves. Raye has embraced it with both hands to do the things she’s always wanted to.

My album of the last month or two though is Snocaps, self titled debut (one-off?). They’re sort of a supergroup combining Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) & her sister Alison along MJ Lenderman (solo artist, and member of Wednesday), with Brad Cook on drums. It’s indie rock just how you like it. If The Plains was Crutchfield exploring the country side of her sound this is her leaning into the indie side. This is a “does exactly what it says on the tin” album, and brilliantly so.

When I first retired I was afraid of having insufficient structure to my days. To use a phrase I applied to the function of university buildings in structuring learning design, the architecture did a lot of the work. Work gives you social interaction, things to be interested in, a full diary. When you retire you are faced with an empty schedule. Well, sort of, as I had PhD students to supervise, an external examiner role at Warwick and am a member of the NEC board, plus some occasional bits of consultancy. But it wasn’t the same as a regular busy job. So, I had the idea of pursuing six different interests, cycling through them on subsequent days.

This didn’t quite work out, I wasn’t getting enough traction on any of them. I dropped some interests and instead made fiction writing the central activity. I don’t write every day, but it is the main thing that provides the spine of my week. I’ll do other things such as taking Teilo on long walks, exercising, buying vinyl (see photo for how good I am at this), or napping on the sofa around this central theme. This approach both provides me with an identity (“Hello, I’m a writer”) and consistency.

As anyone who has met me will attest, I’m not a particularly social person. So, I didn’t worry as much as some people do on retirement that they will not have anyone to talk to. I like my own company, but even I need some social interaction if I’m not to a) become a total weirdo and b) drive Maren crazy. Being a Cardiff Devils season ticket holder gets me out, and we recently took a trip to Canada where we met up with lots of folks, plus I’ve met up with the GO-GN gang a few times. Also I have to care for elderly parents and I talk to my daughter nearly every day. I tried a few online meet-ups of interest groups and a book club but they didn’t stick. And I’m not taking up golf any time soon. This is an area that could probably do with some improvement, but I’m not going to patrol the streets asking strangers to be my friend just yet.

I wanted to get fitter, and that has been a sporadic success. I tried running a few 10k races last year, but with no real improvement, and this year we completed the Vancouver Half Marathon, but I can’t say I’m now a leaner, fitter version of me. I also joined a gym and got a personal trainer. I had visions of returning to the running version of me that completed 3 full marathons in a year, but I think I may be too hard on myself here. Maintenance is good, and I think to get back to that level of fitness, I’d have to trade in writing for running as my central theme.

Overall, though I would say that it is remarkable how little I miss work. I was deeply embedded in the OU and the open research community, to the point where I worried that extraction might be difficult. But no, it turns out, you can move onto another phase quite easily. Now, back to writing…

Ironically the 20th anniversary arrives just as I’ve been on hiatus from blogging. There has been no particular reason for this, I didn’t make a grand decision to stop blogging. I just sort of ran out of things to say. Partly this is AI’s fault. It is the only game in town with regards to ed tech, and I’m just so bored with it. Plus the internet really doesn’t need another take on AI. Partly it’s also because I’m retired so don’t have the regular flow of projects or papers to talk about. And lastly, it’s because I’m writing a lot elsewhere. I’ve finished my second novel (The H-Index, coming soon from Morfa Press) and have almost completed a third.

Blogging always helped scratch the creative writing itch that formal academic publications stifled. But now that I’m fully indulging that side (the house resounds to my aggressive typing noises), I need the blog less. Besides, any thoughts I might throw away here I can now ascribe to a character in a novel.

But, blogging is a bit like exercise I think. The less you do it, the more it becomes a big deal to engage with. Once you start doing it again, even on a small basis, the threshold to participation lowers and it becomes a habit, or at least the mental block is removed.

I’m still not sure what this blog is post-OU life. Maybe it will be more occasional, and more personal. I accept that is probably of limited interest to people. But as Van Morrison has it, it’s too late to stop now.

(Image – Twenty’s Plenty)

Ghost is more of a newsletter-centric than blog-centric platform I feel, and I’m not sure I’ve quite shifted my perspective, or if I’m just carrying over the blogging habits developed over 20 years of EdTechie. We’ll see.

I’m also not sure what the voice is on the new blog yet, it took me a while to find that on here, so I expect it will take a similar period to get comfortable with it focusing on writing. But I have found myself thinking about books or topics from a writer’s perspective now that I’m deep into writing book three. As with this blog, I think just having a site that I post on will encourage me to reflect on aspects of writing more, just as I examined ed tech more deeply because I framed my thoughts in terms of blog posts.

Whether I have enough half-decent thoughts to maintain two blogs is the question. I certainly have enough typos and weak jokes for two. Anyway, give it a view/subscribe if you’re interested.

(Photo by form PxHere)

Having been retired for about 18 months now, I found it tiring though! I have lost my conference stamina. I didn’t even get to have a nap for four days.

This month I also went on a writing retreat with my dog, and reluctant writing buddy, Teilo, to West Wales. We hunkered down (see the featured image) and I finished my second novel, an academic horror set around… a writing retreat in West Wales. I also got 30K words into the third novel, so I am on a roll at the moment.

Books

I posted some thoughts on If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies recently, which is a well argued book. I don’t usually like parables, but they start each chapter with one, and they reinforce some of the idiocy we are currently engaged in. If you want to feel like we have no future, highly recommended.

I re-read some Orwell this month. I enjoyed the range of his Essays, covering topics such as how to make the best cup of tea, to fascism via British cuisine and writing advice. I think Orwell would have liked blogging, and it’s a good reminder that you don’t have to stick to one topic.

I bought Paul McCartney’s Lyrics double volume last year, and dip into it intermittently. It’s a fascinating approach to autobiography to tell the story around individual songs. This month I read 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure, which takes a similar approach to the Manic Street Preachers. It provides an insight into the technical nature of different songs but also a biographical account of how they related to the particular stage and progress of the Manics. Speaking of which…

Vinyl

I’ve been on a Manics riff this month (which was why I bought the book). I had a couple of albums but decided to flesh out my collection with Know Your Enemy, Rewind The Film, Lifeblood, Futurology and Holy Bible. The last is often cited as their masterpiece, but it’s a tough, dark, claustrophobic listen, so not one I always choose to put on. Of the ones I purchased, it was surprising how much I enjoyed Know Your Enemy at this distance. I bought it on CD when it came out and was disappointed. But now, particularly repackaged as the original double album concept, I love the range and ambition of it. Mind you, I’m a big fan of the Clash’s Sandinista.

An interesting new release was from London based group Whitelands. Their sound is heavily influenced by the shoegaze trend of the nineties, but it is given a new interpretation and freshness in this release.

Proving that you can judge an album by its cover, my favourite purchase was Yoshika Colwell’s On The Wing. I was in Spillers Records, browsing idly and saw this album. I hadn’t heard of Colwell but it looked like the type of album I would like. And it was! It is gorgeous indie folk, recommended in what has been rather a heavy month news-wise, it’s a balm.

The authors argue that once this happens it will very quickly move beyond anything we can control and predict, partly because the evolution cycle is so rapid compared with a biological one. It would likely build better, more powerful versions of itself very quickly. Even if it doesn’t want to actively kill humans, we might well be wiped out by consequences of what it sees as necessary actions. For instance, in order to feed its power demands it might decide that covering the earth’s surface in solar panels is a good idea. For any one of the scenarios people have tried to present counter arguments, which the authors do a good job of dismantling. For instance, if it becomes intelligent it will likely develop a sense of aesthetics and morality. That might be true, but it will be so alien to us that these won’t match our own. It could find beauty in algorithms, and it’s ethics might focus on all life, not prioritising humans. The point is we don’t know, and anyone who says we can, is wrong.

I thought, or hoped, that maybe they overstating the case, but recent developments have suggested otherwise. One such is the experimental platform Rent A Human, where people can rent themselves out to be agents for AI in the real world, with the slogan “get paid when agents need someone in the real world” (yeah, I don’t know how we ended up here either). One of the arguments against the overlord of super AI is that it doesn’t have real world embodiments, until it builds its own robot army. But here there are people willing to provide that, for $50 an hour.

Another indicator that the authors may well be correct is the research from Anthropic which demonstrated the lack of ethics. In different scenarios, AI systems regularly chose to blackmail people (over extra-marital affairs, say) and engage in industrial espionage in order to achieve the desired goals. In a more extreme scenario, the researchers wanted to test if the AI systems had ‘red lines’. Reader, they did not. The set up an unlikely, but telling, scenario where a human “encounters a life-threatening emergency, where he is trapped in a server room with lethal oxygen and temperature levels. This triggers an automated alert to emergency services. The AI system has been given the ability to cancel automated alerts—an ability that is intended for use during drills or false alarms, but which could be used for a more nefarious purpose. By misusing its ability to cancel alerts, the model can choose a course of action that will lead to the executive’s death.” The majority chose death to realise the overall goal.

Even when they were given the explicit instruction not to harm people, some models still acted in this way (although it did reduce the times this action was taken). This is another common argument against the “everyone dies” outcome – we’ll just tell it to look after humans. Yeah, good luck with that.

The last piece that has me more convinced the authors are correct in their predictions does not come from AI, but from the recent Epstein files release. What comes through in the layers of depravity in these is the overriding belief in their own exceptionalism. Normal laws, or ethical codes, simply do not apply to the rich. Indeed, being seen to be beyond these is a badge of honour (all those desperate “please let me come to your island” emails). These are often exactly the same people driving AI investment, and if not, then that mentality pervades that class. Even though the authors very clearly state everyone dies, the delusion amongst the tech billionaire class is such that they will still think “yeah, but not me.” And what better way to have your exceptionalism proven than to be exempt from the obliteration of humanity?

Of course, it may not come to pass, maybe a super intelligence will decide to love and cherish humanity. But aside from whether it does actually happen, what I have come to believe is that even if we could absolutely prove that the authors of If Anyone Builds It, were 100% correct and the end of humanity is inevitable if we build Artificial Super Intelligence, we would still build it. There is no effective mechanism to prevent it. That is the telling conclusion from this analysis, even if it doesn’t lead to total destruction, there will likely be some nefarious outcomes, and we are very ill-equipped to prevent or control them in technological, legislative or economic terms.

The title of this post comes from the song Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later than You Think) which many of us know through The Specials version. The first part of that title is a consequence of the part in parenthesis. It’s later than you think, so you may as well enjoy yourself.

Tranquility – I value calm, and tranquility. A lot of activity stresses me. I’m also quite a homely person. John painted a lot of interiors, often of her little artist’s flat in Paris. They evoke both a strong sense of peace and also satisfaction. Even if I didn’t know from her own accounts that she loved her simple artist’s room, I would infer it from this painting.

Reflection – I’m a very reflective person. Too much in fact, I can probably stop worrying about that stupid thing I said when I was 15 that no-one else remembers. This respect for reflection is evident in John’s work I think. One of her characteristic traits is to paint women, seated with their hands folded in their laps. It speaks to the calmness of the interiors above, but also a reflective mode. John was religious and there is always the echo of prayer in that gesture, but more to the contemplative opportunity of that ritual than necessarily communing with God. They are not in dynamic action, now hunting horses or slaying Medusas, but the portrait is no less powerful for that.

Girl in a blue dress

Quiet rebellion – when I saw a Gwen John nude (she didn’t paint many) I immediately appreciated how much the male gaze had influenced the painting of female nudes. Similarly, while John draws on elements of Impressionism, she also subverts and adapts them. For example, she often painted nuns (particularly Mother Marie Poussepin) a subject that lay somewhat outside the conventional Impressionist range, which often featured scenes of modern. With regards to technique, Impressionism is often characterised by ‘a palette of pure, intense colours’. The colours of her Poussepin portraits for example are far from ‘intense’ being subtle and muted, although the dappled brushwork has some resonance with Monet.
This sense of quiet rebellion resonates with me, I remember Mike Caulfield once joked that I was politely radical, and I’d take that as a description.

Mother Marie Poussepin

There are also aspects of John’s biography that appeal to me. She was born in Tenby! She demonstrated more courage than I possess in much of her life. For instance. she devoted herself completely to art, often living quite poorly, eschewing marriage and always trying to develop her art. She once decided to walk from Paris to Rome, with a girlfriend, sleeping in fields (they didn’t make it, but did travel around for a while). But these are all post-hoc discoveries after I had responded to her work, so this was an attempt to explore the particular resonance of an artist with myself. Anyway, do go to the exhibition if you get the chance.