Des Fitzgerald

It's a bank holiday here so I'm doing my ~biannual listen to the BBC's Today programme, and delighted to report that the current item is an earnest discussion about the good points of the British empire.

Just sitting with the fact that the data centre industry's top guy in Ireland took some time out of his day to see how many books Sally Rooney had sold, and then checked how many carbon emissions that represented, and thus imagined that he had alighted on an excellent point.

You think English class discourse is bad, and then you encounter American class discourse.

We need a study of why Ireland has so many bafflingly famous hack novelists from Wexford.

Maybe the 60-euro lidl deluxe serrano ham could fix me

Ugh, bastard clocks

Tooth fairy, this is for you

This new CMF speaker is ♥️

We're mere days away from Great British AI

Gabby's Dollhouse is such an incredibly weird programme. Every time I glance up there's a new character who's e.g half cat, half chair, made out of felt and lives in a biscuit tin. And Gabby will casually say, "that's chair cat."

It will never not be incredible that this person chairs the governing authority of the University of Limerick.

Really feels like the larger issue here is that our politicians are still taking their cues from discourse on "x," a website largely built around the interests of racists and csam enthusiasts, and from which all normal people have long since fled.

Thread (up & down). This is outrageous.

Hey-ho, just making a grant application for my medical humanities project

There needs to be a setting on this app where you don't have to wake up every morning and scrolls past 80 posts containing some version of "what a play by the corndogs! it's curtains for nebraska" etc

I'm convinced this weird thing where USians blithely talk about a place called "Europe" is a social media artefact no more than 5(??) or 10 years old.

My baby 😍😍

This week @stephenroddy.bandcamp.com published research exploring the role that sound and audio technologies can play in addressing water scarcity challenges in Cambridge Prisms: Water More at the link: www.ucc.ie/en/radicalhu... @universitypress.cambridge.org

Hot take: if it rains on your graduation you should be entitled to a 25% rebate on your university fees.

Another funding scheme producing net negative value in the sector (once we factor in the time in writing and reviewing all those applications). If you want to support academia/academics either close it or move to random allocation.

This website SIGNIFICANTLY overestimates my interest in the internecine debates of the "democratic socialists of america."

I keep seeing photos of this guy and thinking it's Bruno Latour

Good to know that You Can See Everything will release in Ireland on the first of January, 1 AD. Thank you Super Intelligence.

Did Jonathan Swift predict AI Nice piece by @claireconnolly.bsky.social in today’s Irish Times @uccresearch.bsky.social

Even by the standards of anti-EDI British academy this is extraordinarily fucked. How far gone would you need to be to think this is a normal or reasonable thing to do?

This stuff is stupid, but it's bad to respond with "it's a medical diagnosis, who care what the public think." Much of the history of autism is of course the history of non-medical activists & experts forcing the medical profession's hands - often with the canny use of publicity. That's good!

Deafkids last night were unreal

Big sunset tonight

This is helpful - and oddly performative, in the technical sense - insofar it shows how public feeling about Palestine in Irl is significantly animated by also living beside a colonising state whose establishment regard us an irrational & atavistic people who can be freely slandered.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is marked around the world on 15th October. I'm very glad to be able to contribute to this important day by sharing the podcasts from Locating Loss: Histories of Infertility conference @unioflimerick.bsky.social in May 2026. soundcloud.com/real-smart-m...

<can't talk, I'm off to the UK border to swap a set of Sally Rooney novels for some Uniqlo basics and an Argos catalogue>

<humourlessly> Nothing at all against Kate Bush but the reduction of the life of Wilhelm Reich to this kind of "cor blimey he was a bit weird innit" pop trivia shit is a morbid symptom indeed.

Love to travel on a British train where every ten minutes a recorded voice points out that you're being watched on CCTV and also if you leave anything on the train the police will blow it up.

Mark Zuckerberg nearly throwing up Guinness is arguably the first likeable thing ever done by Mark Zuckerberg.