Soft Materials @ Liverpool

It’s been nearly two years since I began a lectureship at the University of Liverpool, setting up a research group in the School of Engineering (which only recently has consisted of more than just myself), and, most importantly, secured the softmaterials.co.uk web domain. Two years and I’ve still not pulled the trigger on documenting some of my thoughts on what’s going on in my world via this platform. I cannot bring myself to engage fully in social media; X (formerly twitter) is seemingly a cess pit  and alternatives with the same format, e.g BlueSky, don’t interest me in the slightest; LinkedIn seems like a necessity, professionally speaking, but is also a source of the worst sort of brown-nosing and narcissism (c.f. The State of LinkedIn) and I cannot shake a slightly shameful feeling posting there, especially for things I’ve got a lot of self-interest in (promotion of PhD/PDRA positions). Longer form writing on this platform seems a little more palatable. This is not for attracting engagement,  and thankfully I’m not at the whim of the algorithm. I want to force myself to time stamp and document some of my thoughts as I go through my career and force myself to write a bit more – hopefully improving along the way. Posting these thoughts in a (semi-) public forum seems to have the right level of incentive and healthy fear to achieve that.