Dr Sarah Byrne

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

🦈 Animal #955 🐒
I figured it out in 8 guesses!
🟥🟥🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟩
🔥 4 | Avg. Guesses: 10.9

metazooa.com
#metazooa

The whole AI debate around jobs and UBI is fascinating. I keep thinking - what if we focused less on replacing work and more on freeing people to do work they actually love? What would you do with your time if money wasn't a concern?

nigel farage tweet: The Bank of England is replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on our bank notes. This is the definition of woke.

i, for one, am delighted that we finally have a definition of “woke”

Dear everyone,

As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included.

A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

🐝 Animal #954 🪳
I figured it out in 12 guesses!
🟧🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟩🟩
🔥 3 | Avg. Guesses: 11.2

metazooa.com
#metazooa

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

🐱 Animal #953 🫎
I figured it out in 9 guesses!
🟧🟧🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🔥 2 | Avg. Guesses: 11.1

metazooa.com
#metazooa

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

🦒 Animal #952 🦋
I figured it out in 10 guesses!
🟧🟨🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 11.4

metazooa.com
#metazooa

Feeling chuffed about this one!

What's worse than using 'content' to describe artistic work?

Using the term 'content industry' to describe basically all art.

I can't believe nobody was prepared for Vittorio Angelone calling Penny Mordaunt a warmonger to her face live on The Last Leg.

i'm also going to add my concern that these are also the authors for whom travel to the US would be most unsafe and who have to pass on attending cons/events. US remains the largest readership. having name recognition in the US helps tremendously.

.@resprofnews.bsky.social has featured the work I've done looking at HE's slow departure from X.

I ought to run a sweepstake to see which uni is the last to cease posting on the platform.

Imagine having that honour 🤣

And this is such a lovely thing, too! :)

Asked if MPs should get a vote on UK military action, Badenoch says that given the number of left wing MPs with "silly views" she thinks it's best if not. 14:08 • 2 Mar 2026

Kemi here saying the quiet part out loud: the business of parliament is ensuring that the great looting and death machine rampages on, unimpeded by the views of silly people who don’t matter and must be ignored.

Series of three tweets by Zoe Gardner taking down Nigel Farage's support of attacks on Iran.

Apologies to @zoejardiniere.bsky.social for crossposting her tweets from the nasty place, but I felt this deserves airtime on bluesky because of how emphatically they prove the nasty, immoral, opportunistic politics of Reform.

The Green Party has 200,000 members but fewer than Reform, which has 270,000.

Wrong.

Reform is a limited company entirely owned by Nigel Farage.

So it only has 1 member.

The other 269,999 are just a mailing list.

Unlike Green Party members, they do not elect leaders or determine policy.

Ha, joke’s on you, Spectator writers, because by 2050 all the pubs will have been repurposed as madrassas, it’s all part of the secret plan

When you were a kid, did you ever meet another kid who was clearly out of their mind, and incredibly troubled and destructive, who made you really uncomfortable to be around, and you just hoped that they would grow up to… Not be like that?

And then they grew up to be even worse?

as tumblr turns 19 today, i’m thinking about how it has re-ordered our online visual sense, curation, and how internet users talk to each other.

tumblr remains the map the internet uses as a guide, the fountain virality drinks from, and the basis of algorithmic understanding of culture.

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

I have been really bad at the last couple of Metazooas I've done but this one was really fun!

🐈 Animal #942 🐁
I figured it out in 11 guesses!
🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟧🟨🟨🟩
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 11.8

metazooa.com
#metazooa

I really loved the latest installment of @sachajudd.com 's What You Love Matters. It's a fab dive into fan culture and "scoreboard watching" as engagement.

Check it out!

A British tradition worth celebrating

Having a bad case of the thinking-thursday-is-fridays

I see a lot of confident (or doomy) posts about how AI is going to replace this or that element of work, and it’s alway in a context where you need a human to have a nuanced conversation with other humans, or you need a human to closely factcheck an AI’s output. Try again folks

What is a Digital Humanities PhD?

What is a Digital Humanities PhD?

Monday 9th March 2026, 16:30–18:00 GMT. Online only. Discussion with Jonathan Blaney & Ryan Heuser (Cambridge), Lucia Michielin (Edinburgh), Luca Scholtz (Manchester) & myself (@dh-researchhub.bsky.social).

www.sas.ac.uk/digital-huma...

shotgun not me but think there's scope here for a proper, lengthy, meaty feature looking at every single policy area in Britain that's currently fucked specifically because of a decision George Osborne took, reckon you could make it an actual mag cover, his fingerprints are everywhere

When will the madness end

Streeting orders NHS to bolster workforce with the restless souls of the dead Headline by Sarah Amero Health secretary Wes Streeting has announced plans to bully the NHS into giving him data on the nation’s deceased in order to get them out of their eternal resting places and b...

The measures, which are reportedly as infeasible to implement as they are gratuitously evil, will attempt to use NHS files to find out who’s been skiving off of work while using “no longer walking this mortal plane” as an excuse.

In any other sector this would be front page news along with government funding announcements.

The UK just seems to not value higher education.

Grateful to @nataliegreenpeer.bsky.social for pointing out the *financial system* is the problem. Horrified at the evasive response by the minister; Bennett didn't query the fees, she queried the entire instability and reliability on chasing funding.

♥️ the @qmucu.bsky.social shout-out #UKHE

Official Team GB Paralympic photo, with the the crests and everything, and a professional headshot, but it's for "Pickle, A Very Good Girl", who is a black labrador, with a hi-viz harness and a red collar.

Some of you like dogs, in which case you may appreciate that guide dogs of Team GB for the Paralympics get official photos