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Anyone want to hear me talk about books for fun rather than for work?

A morning of dealing with vendor licenses and publisher negotiations. Not my favourite part of my job...

If we spend money supporting research, education and practice in areas we're actually good at, there might not be enough money to throw at the long shot of being 'world leaders" in AI.

Moving into Libraries from Biology, people tend to be much better at this. Although there's sometimes a bit of aggro between libraries & publishers and we could all stand to remember that we're just people. Feels much harsher as I move a bit more into metascience events...

Publishers making their product measurably worse so that they can say they're using AI and charge everyone more money. It's not even niche behaviour these days.

Hearing even someone who likes summer saying they're tired of this heatwave makes me feel less like I'm a totally miserable person.

Saw Spiderman at the weekend. Lot's of posters everywhere asking for no spoilers 😍 So no spoilers here, other than to say I basically squealed in the cinema, and also may have had a slightly wet face. If you like Marvel things, go watch it.

Happy Augtober y'all. I fired up my annual new Stardew Valley farm yesterday (usually a Sept/Oct affair). I am all in on pretending it's not summer anymore! #Augtober #Gaymer #SummerSAD

Trying to write this morning (I'm so behind on the book), but it's boring and I'm very much at the stage where I wish I hadn't said I'd write it. Time for another coffee maybe.

Doing my compulsory cybersecurity training, it's classic stuff. "Phishing is a play on the word fishing", really? I guess every day's a school day 😂

This week I am holding onto my Eisenhower matrix for dear life. I may have reached the part of the ADHD cycle where all the cool things I've said I'll get involved with actually need work putting into them!

Why can't we be a global leader in something actually interesting that's going to help the world, rather than mostly making it worse? I don't hate AI, but I really do hate the obsession with it. There is so much that the money could have gone to, where we have an actual shot at being world leaders.

Starting to have meetings with publishers around subscriptions now that we're moving away from TAs. It is not my favourite activity. Always had a huge amount of respect for aquisitions librarians, but it's growing all the time!

Fancy helping get my wife to Canada to compete in powerlifting for England? This has been the goal since she got serious about 2 years ago and she's worked so hard for it. I'm doing my best in shovelling money at the dream, but any help would be welcome!

If you would like a deep cleanse from all things AI, there's an immense thread about Pride and Prejudice which is an absolute joy. (Quote thread is disabled, so I've just regularly reposted). It's years since I've read it and I'm very much thinking about going back to some Austen now...

The more I see of the CILIP website the more I think - Was this just a quickly done mock up to show someone the general idea and it accidentally got published? Trying to find some justification for the complete lack of oversight.

Absolutely not. The ghost of Christmas past gives us everything we need. In general I find Dickens boring, but I adore A Christmas Carol. There's no way in hell you could drag me to this movie.