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bethgilchrist.substack.com
Beth
@bethgilchrist.substack.com
59 followers 44 following 68 posts
librarian // avid reader // horror film enthusiast // she/her
https://linktr.ee/bethgilchrist
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bethgilchrist.substack.com
valid reaction
retired-librarian.bsky.social Retired-Librarian @retired-librarian.bsky.social · 6d
Back in the day, I had a professor who would fail a paper for even just one comma splice. He would also drop the lowest grade. A bunch of us failed the first paper. Every time I see a comma splice, I remember that F.
November 26, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by Beth
samthielman.com
Goodness me, I stayed up late reading and it’s already Partially Muscled Skeleton Screaming by the Perimeter Fence Day. Hope you’ve all been good this year!
A panel from Watchmen no. 4 drawn by Dave Gibbons. Script by Alan Moore.
November 14, 2025 at 5:34 AM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
the new Rosalía album is absolutely incredible, apologies to my neighbours
November 8, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by Beth
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social
OK guys, post your best signs from today for entry into my Top 15 No Kings Sign Contest.
October 18, 2025 at 7:34 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
it’s been three and a half years since I left, but I honestly still miss living in Gyeongju so much that even just looking at a map of the city makes my heart ache 🥲
Gyeongju Tower, near Bomun Lake, at twilight our favourite pizza restaurant in Gyeongju, Domi, with the golden hour sun streaming in the windows colourful passageways at Bulguksa Temple Cheomseongdae, the oldest observatory in East Asia, which is often used as a symbol of the city
September 25, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by Beth
rethinkcharity.bsky.social
Mental illness is not a trend.

A reminder that just because more people are speaking up doesn’t mean it’s fashionable.
September 23, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Beth
louiscoiffait-gunn.bsky.social
What do we want? Investment in #AILiteracy. When do we want it? About 3 years ago.
AI chatbots are the ‘go to’ for millions of children | Internet Matters
New report reveals how risky and unchecked AI chatbots are the new ‘go to’ for millions of children
AI chatbots are the ‘go to’ for millions of children | Internet Matters. Report reveals that the majority of children are using AI chatbots.
www.internetmatters.org
September 12, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Reposted by Beth
richardcarr.bsky.social
AJP Taylor: not a referencing guy
Extract from Taylor’s Course of German History: “It will be apparent. no doubt, to the reader that I have written this book by lifting facts from a great many other books and, from a few, even ideas. The American method, in such cases, is to list all the books that have been pilfered; I prefer the English method of mentioning none. If the reader does not accept my credentials, he will not be induced to do so by a display of the sources from which my plumes are borrowed.”
September 10, 2025 at 11:41 AM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
I am now on a self-imposed book-buying ban but here is a selection of recent purchases ✨📚💙
8 books laid out in a 3x2 grid. The top row, left to right, is Father Figure by Emma Forrest, Emma by Jane Austen, and Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley. The bottom row, left to right, is The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, and Autofiction by Hitomi Kanehara.
September 10, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Beth
csmfht.bsky.social
Serenity now!
September 8, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by Beth
carolinepennock.bsky.social
Absolutely shocking to hear that @sheffcitycouncil.bsky.social are forcing trans staff to use repurposed disabled toilets, imposing a discriminatory policy which effectively makes trans staff out themselves (and reduces disabled provision). Important reporting from @sheffieldtribune.bsky.social.
Exclusive: Trans council staff told to use converted disabled loos
Plus, a Rotherham hacker jailed and a ridiculously lavish £3m home for sale
www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk
August 18, 2025 at 3:50 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
got a whole tuck shop going in my desk drawer at work
an open desk drawer holding a variety of food and drinks, including tea, coffee, and snacks
August 18, 2025 at 8:59 AM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
accidentally lost about half of my weekend to Tiny Bookshop
August 17, 2025 at 8:38 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
this ad makes me die a little inside because you know there are medical staff out there doing this 😭 please do not put any sensitive or confidential information into ChatGPT or any other AI platforms!
A reddit ad for ChatGPT encouraging its use to summarise patient notes. The caption on the ad reads “AI that supports clinical operations - from summarising notes to finding answers faster. Learn more today.”
August 9, 2025 at 11:54 AM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
we spent a long weekend in Amsterdam 🇳🇱 I went on so many family holidays to the Netherlands as a kid (my mum grew up there) and it has always felt like a second home - currently trying to work out how we might go about moving there 🚲
a patch of grass by the edge of a waterway. tall buildings can be seen on the other side. Van Gogh’s painting ‘The Bedroom’ a colourful building on a street corner in Amsterdam, near Nieuwmarkt houseboats on a canal in Amsterdam, with trees and buildings in the background. the photo is taken from a bridge across the waterway.
July 30, 2025 at 9:41 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
recent book purchases 📚 have also been dipping a toe into annotation - mostly particularly striking passages or quotes ✨
a copy of The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner and a copy of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (the Penguin Modern Classics edition with a non-weird cover design), and some pastel-coloured book tabs
July 22, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Beth
timharford.ft.com
We all know about the hallucination problem but it's quite extraordinary to see it invent such a detailed, plausible fabrication. I'm in the privileged position of being able to saunter into the Bodleian Library and check - most people could be forgiven for believing the machine.
timharford.ft.com Tim Harford @timharford.ft.com · Jul 11
Still trying with GPTo3. I asked it to help me confirm and find a half-remembered anecdote from philosopher Jonathan Glover probably his brilliant book "Humanity".
GPT found it, gave me page refs in 2 editions, and listed other sources. Impressive! Only problem: the story is not in the book.
July 11, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Beth
standplaatskrk.pl
liminal dachshund
a dachshund is standing in a hotel or hospital hallway, staring intently at a spot on the wall
November 7, 2024 at 3:50 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
honestly hilarious that Stuart Heritage’s editor equated the video nasties of the ‘80s with the absolute depravity of 2006’s Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, of all things, and had the poor guy watch it for what amounted to a relatively brief mention in the finished article
July 3, 2025 at 9:21 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
turned 30 a couple of weeks ago and got some waterstones vouchers from friends who know me well - spent some of them in the paperback sale online and they arrived today 💙📚
a book stack featuring Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson, The New Me by Halle Butler, and You Are Here by David Nicholls - they are on a coffee table with a desk and kitchen in the background
July 2, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Beth
anonopin.bsky.social
Girls Aloud were far more important to music than Oasis in the 00's - the girls were changing pop music for boy/girl groups from dreary ballads to inventive and catchy songs like Biology and Love Machine. Meanwhile Oasis were doing dreary ballads like Let There Be Love.
July 1, 2025 at 8:55 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
I was on a roll with my book reviews - so here's what I read this month! 📚💙
open.substack.com/pub/bethgilc...
What I read in June
I had a good month for reading this June - partially as an escape from work!
open.substack.com
June 30, 2025 at 10:05 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
I am very very late with this (will be writing my June round-up very soon!), but here's what I read in May and some brief, unedited thoughts on each 📚💙
open.substack.com/pub/bethgilc...
What I read in May
I’m quite late with the previous month’s update of recently-read books - pretend it’s not the last day of June!
open.substack.com
June 30, 2025 at 8:51 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
I grew up in Bradford and have many happy memories of reading through the children's section at Shipley Library - in a city with such a high rate of child poverty and deprivation, it's sad to see funding cut where it is so needed
June 30, 2025 at 12:35 PM
bethgilchrist.substack.com
I keep seeing more and more health librarians talking about using AI for various lit searching purposes, including to summarise papers, and it makes me cringe - the worst was one who openly admitted to using Chat-GPT to find references for a lit search request 💀
nkalamb.bsky.social Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · Jun 19
Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds
Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.
June 19, 2025 at 12:56 PM