The farming of men's anxieties is very lucrative business and one done with very little care for the actual men it targets. Mens wellbeing discussion often comes served with a huge side order of biological essentialism, often leaving out the actual wellbeing bit www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

"So now I sleep in ditches And hide away from nosey kids The wings rot and feather under me The wings rot and curl right under me A small alteration of the past Can turn time into space Small touches can alter more than a mere decade" #fallfriday youtu.be/6m2lfk4Bm34?...

There is something hugely endearing about the peerless Steve Dillon's inability to draw dogs and cats and the sheer amount of times he had to do so in his career. Him and Carlos Ezquerra: best faces in business.

If The Doctor in Doctor Who had been a time minimum wage employee rather than a time lord, the time lords would have cracked down on them right away and given them a time lord equivilent of an ASBO. Instead, as they were a fellow Lord, they could just be an eccentric gentleperson adventurer

Now that we have BBC Sounds, it would be amazing to have a website that reviewed BBC audio drama because those dramas have a longer tail then ever before. Like: there's lots of it and you can listen to it for ages after broadcast. Audio and Radio drama is amazing but few pay it much attention

It's amazing the extent to which people swallow the lie that if 'normal' people propagate and vote for extreme right wing policies it's only natural but if 'normal' people propagate and vote for even moderately left wing policies they are either under malign foreign influence or misguided

All Souls' Day, and in the blue dusk light, carrying a lantern, Old Fox walked down to the churchyard. A barn owl called down from the tower, and was answered somewhere in the trees.

This is interesting, mainly because the AI apocalypse is experienced in Internet enabled knowledge machines the majority of us have in hands, pockets, bags or on our desks. We're experiencing the great adoption as much as the AI apocalypse where change can be pushed out rapidly globally at scale

Our monthly titles cover four London boroughs in print. If we had a team of 85 we'd be able to do so much more!

Met the former editor of the York Evening Press last night, who said in the mid-90s he had 85 people working directly for him, including nine staff photographers. All that to serve a city and surrounding area of about 200k people. Local news was wilddddd.

An annual report by the care regulator has highlighted how the continuing social care crisis is impacting disabled and older people who need support in their own homes. #SocialCare #StateOfCare #AdultSocialCare #CQC www.disabilitynewsservice.com/regulators-a...

"if I do not have the right to expose you online to my snidey, hateful and self serving right wing views how am I either going to wear you down until you agree with me of make your life so shit that you stop being in public at all? Signed: a significant minority of people who you avoid in real life

Thinking about the way that AI generated content is the final dream of Web 2.0: platform content that you can sell advertising in that is user generated but you as the platform never even see and thus can disavow completely in regulatory or legal terms.

Sharing this a lot tonight - donated items in disaster only make things worse (pretty much without exception and anywhere in the world). There is a long history of this going very wrong particularly after hurricanes www.theguardian.com/books/2023/m...

I do like a good boardgame. Favourites include Santorini, Azul, Patchwork, The King is Dead, Harmonies, Photosynthesis, Agricola All Creatures Small and Big and I can never get enough Stratego. Happy times in front of the fire

The character of Michael Flowers in the last couple of Adrian Mole books by Sue Townsend is one of the best drawn / most prescient portraits of the hippy/fashy/brexity/snobby/wellnessy types of England.

Must have been mint being a Journo in the early 2000s. You got to go on telly on Saturday nights remembering things and if you were a bit more highbrow you got to go on BBC4 to remember things at other times then you got to write a book remembering being you but younger remembering things.

Every year on #Halloween we carve a #Pumpkin from our collection of Penguin Books. 🎃 We're up to our elbows here in juicy plots and seedy characters. Luckily there's not much pulp fiction. 🎃

"Black windows And smokey holes My head is full of lead And the beer is so weak Since they got rid of time around here" #fallfriday youtu.be/g007Y9nkeY4?...

To supporters of our community newspapers, I'm happy to announce your digital edition is now in your inbox, with printed copies going out when they come back from printers tomorrow. For all of our readers in Waltham Forest, Newham, Barnet, Enfield your free copies will hit the streets from tomorrow

Lewisham 21st May 2022

This is weird. I went to a big comprehensive in Newcastle in the mid nineties and we absolutely did talk about those things as part of learning at A level. Absolutely set me up for a lifetime of interesting readings of things and not being a reductive pillock scared that culture isn't a monolith

This from X is a striking example of what I argue in today’s column. Reform and the Tories are out here gleefully saying disabled people on Motability should be forced to drive a 3-wheeler, like a scarlet letter. The stigma is not an accident - it’s the design.

This is weird. I went to a big comprehensive in Newcastle in the mid nineties and we absolutely did talk about those things as part of learning at A level. Absolutely set me up for a lifetime of interesting readings of things and not being a reductive pillock scared that culture isn't a monolith

Farage can, as an MP introduce legislation to the House but I as a member of the public can introduce the idea of making a gigantic vibrating tit full of beer to all my neighbours. We both have the same standing in whether it will happen and we both know it.

We really should talk more about men who have hard ons for hard men. Divorced Dad in excelsis Musk is a little man who wants to be liked by hard lads. A very rich man but a very small man. He could build hospitals and libraries, could help change the material conditions of those with least, but no

I wonder why it's only some people who have amazing powers of, and enthusiasm for, prognostication when it comes to 'civil war' and its inevitability in a country they don't live in. I'm obviously missing something because to me it doesn't look sage or insightful, it just looks like a tit stirring

I wonder if you were to ask Reform UK councillors these two questions what their response would be: 1. Why did you want to be a local councillor? 2. Did you think you'd actually be elected? Because I wonder if doing racism was, for some at least, part of the point but they never expected to win

The cost of the Covid Inquiry so far amounts to 0.01% of annual Gov spending. The likes of Nigel Farage and Ian Duncan Smith are now saying this is too expensive, and it should be wound up. That's 0.01% for an inquiry into the worst public health crisis in a generation. 1/4

Just imagine how much energy it must take to keep a running tally of non-white, non Anglo-Saxon, non-straight faces you see on telly and as you go about your business. All of that counting and all of that ill-feeling for absolutely nothing.

Is saying that the Jews run the world antisemitic or just vigilant? Tune in for next week's episode of "is it racist to be racist"

I wonder if you were to ask Reform UK councillors these two questions what their response would be: 1. Why did you want to be a local councillor? 2. Did you think you'd actually be elected? Because I wonder if doing racism was, for some at least, part of the point but they never expected to win

Mould remains a huge risk, yet is frequently ignored or literally patched over. Inadequate and unsafe housing + poverty = danger to health and life, particularly for children and seniors. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good to see Trump acting like the shit property developer he is. It's like someone who wanted planning permission to convert the grade 2 listed pub into flats who had a 'misunderstanding with the builders' and hoyed all the tiles in a skip and knocked the windows out then had a mysterious collapse

I think that any potential damage to the social fabric of the UK caused by a massive programme of council house building would be massively outweighed by the actual benefits to the social fabric of the UK of there being enough homes to go round. Have a referendum on that dick heads

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

"Vimto and spangles were always crap" youtu.be/zEg9LygbA9M?... #fallfriday

This is worth your time. Far too many people for my liking hate the people who live in HMOs rather than the conditions, people and policies that make such things happen.

Psychologists’ charity fails to raise concerns over job coaches in surgeries, weeks after £640,000 #DWP contract @Shrink_at_Large @ScreenedOut @RITB_ @DisWelS www.disabilitynewsservice.com/psychologist...

A museum of museums is an amazing nesting box of an idea and one that I would visit in a flash.

There's something interesting here in the way 'style' as in avantgarde presentation, and 'authority', as in broadcast by a national broadcaster placed a protective cordon around stuff like Blue Jam. In a world of watersheds and stylistically off-putting presentation you could speak to a 'chosen few'

In an attention economy advantage comes from saying things with certainty even when they are bollocks. As implied below, one of biggest bits of this strategy is prejudice and the confirmation of already existing ideas. If it's bollocks but is doing numbers, it's because it has a prejudice at heart

This.

This obsession with reaching across the aisle to people who want to tear your arm off will kill democracy. Find everyone who doesn't want to do that and work with them, there are plenty of them.

I read this piece and thought, in the way tech bros keep inventing buses and vending machines, that the author had in fact just invented small talk in their effort to avoid small talk.

I don't think you can underestimate the impact of gaining and losing 'the red wall' on Tory weirdness at present. Going for 'we hate Birmingham' and also 'we hate The foreigners' is a sort of displacement from 'we hate northerners'

I feel like one of the great unwavering rules of history is that when you decide to organise things so people live in squalid conditions because you don't like them, the fact they forced to live in squalid conditions becomes justification for hating them more.

Have you noticed the gradual and accelerating way in which the discussion of the rights of people who live with mental ill-health, distress and trauma has been pushed into the background in favour of surveillance, manipulation and erasure? The lives of those with mental ill-health as testing ground

Increasingly feel like think tank think-y thoughts should come with a mandated label like food packaging does, detailing ingredients, sources, where it was grown, best before. People forget think tanks are an influencer model with purpose of getting ideas into action by influencing policy and law

This is an extremely good point: "I want to be very clear on one last point. This isn't about the technology being old. It's about the people maintaining it being new." As for AWS, as for many things. Institutional memory is important.