The Diplomat is top tier TV. Watching the West Wing these days feels hopelessly naive and a relic of a lost era, but watching The Diplomat makes me feel how I felt back then... clever people trying to save the day, no matter what. Plus the bad guys are SMART which is so much more fun than reality...

Look, it was obviously Lupin.

📣 Hampstead Heath Bathing Ponds need your help! 🏊‍♀️ 🏊🏊‍♂️ They’ve always been firmly trans-inclusive, but now this is under threat. Please respond to their consultation to show how much public support there is for trans-inclusive arrangements. hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds.commonplace.is/en-GB/propos...

I have come to the conclusion the EHRC guidance on single sex spaces should not even come to Parliament. It is misleading and has caused distress for my trans constituents. I urge @bphillipsonMP to reject it on grounds of practicality and human rights. sianberry.org.uk/publications/l…

4Screenwriting is open for applications to the 2026 cohort. Polish that script and send it in - still genuinely one of the best writing schemes in the UK and can launch careers overnight. #scriptwriting

It's shit like this that makes you feel like you're actually losing your mind. Nominative determinism on FIRE.

Bruh

The address to target is: Disney-ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution 500 S. Buena Vista St. Burbank, CA 91521-3515

BREAKING: Disney+ is to replace the two-season run of Andor with a recut version that runs for only five minutes, and is just Mon Mothma apologising profusely to Darth Vader for any inconvenience, and letting him have whatever he wants.

When you’re the paper of record and have definitely understood the franchise up until this point

If I were the UK Government I would simply not route all my communications through the platform whose owner just called for regime change in Britain and said "fight back or die"

Transphobic media bias in action. The Guardian has a massive front-page splash about the fascist demo taking place in central London. Trans Pride London was more than double the size and got nothing like this level of coverage, and then not until afterwards.

Have made a formal complaint to IPSO about this... probably won't achieve anything, but it's pretty quick and easy to do, so if you're as pissed as I am about the constant demonisation of trans people, why don't you do it too? www.ipso.co.uk/making-a-com...

An assassin writes Bella Ciao in the same breath as a Notices Your Bulge meme on his bullets. One of the government responses is a practicing Hindu asserting that the fundamentalist Christian victim will join him in a Norse pagan afterlife. Welcome to the epistemic collapse.

This is a really neat summary of why I'm now technically a terrorist, and Linehan is getting multiple sympathetic articles a week on the BBC... Stop killing people = terrorism Physically attack a minority group = free speech It's all fucking insane.

I am not seeing this news spread on Bluesky yet, so just wanted to share. Truly fantastic that this is happening.

Can't believe I'm a contributor to this *terrifying crime wave*... definitely must have been terrifying for the police on Saturday, seeing us sat amongst priests, veterans, a fucking choir singing all day... hardened stuff.

This is the thing. I'm not someone who has ever voted for Labour, but I am someone who should be persuadable to vote for them. I'm not sure which of Lib Dem or Green I'm going to vote for next time, but I know I'm *not* voting for a party that's made it illegal for half my friends to exist in public

So many people supremely relaxed about inciting people to violence - and strangely none of them with a skin colour or gender or immigration status which makes them routine targets of violent people.

grotesquely comic to have high ranking politicians coming out swinging in defence of *Graham Linehan*. guarantee if you showed most normal people a selection of Graham's tweets from the last decade (and told them it's all he's been doing all that time) they'd agree he should be punted into the sun

Labour is fundamentally dead as a party. The lack of credible politicians in major parties out there offering a HOPEFUL vision of the future depresses the hell out of me. How fucking hard is it to believe that all people are equal, and that we should be trying to make things better for EVERYONE?

Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”

what part of "We will take the fight to Farage" has convinced them they should never in any way fight Farage

Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority".

- When they say 50%, that's a *rise* so it's actually less than 10% shift in over a decade. - If you read the article, it calls out Brexit as a key cause of the shift. Obviously neither of these facts help if you're trying to be sensationalist, racist cunts stirring up hatred with misinformation.

This is a really great essay that's very close to how I feel about AI... this final paragraph in particular will stick with me, and not in a nice way. :(

Free speech means it's a GOOD thing when he copies recipes from Zelda for his literary novels, actually. What a prick.

Reminded today of this timeless adage

One of the things that has pretty annoying is that if you have any kind of bullshit meter, if you have anything inside of yourself that doesn’t enjoy being lied to, the last couple of years of almost every area of public life have been driving you up a fucking wall

In a burst of excitement ahead of Alien Earth, I finally caught up and watched Romulus tonight… Jesus fucking Christ. The last little chunk of that film is a NIGHTMARE.

It honestly keeps reshocking me that the bloke who had a row with the Holocaust museum about his dogshit Holocaust book, the bloke who went TERF after being criticised for writing a similarly awful novel about trans kids, and the bloke who plagiarised Zelda by mistake, are all the same bloke.

1. Coverage of arrests re: Palestine Action, passing reference only to 10,000s who went on the march today. 2. Coverage of the REASON FOR that march, framed to cast doubt on veracity of information. 3. Sympathetic coverage of a few hundred violent protestors... Fuck you BBC News, this is a joke.

I will never forgive the rotten bastards we have in charge. 14 years of things getting worse, a huge mandate to change things in a meaningful way, and what do they do? Go after marginalised groups for no fucking reason other than spite and appeasing the ghoulish press. A generational betrayal.

On the one hand, if you want to work on a TV show that funnels money towards the world's most famous TERF, that's a choice you have to make for yourself. On the other hand the UK is about to try and ban trans men from public life. So fuck you, your choice is evil, and I will not forgive you.

👀

It's almost like... this is a weird moral panic that has no basis in reality? And trans people are just trying to fucking live their lives? And the latest attack line appears to be because someone working in a shop asked a customer if they needed help????? I feel fucking INSANE.

If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.

1. Give trans people rights. 2. Protect those rights. 3. Live your own life.

Made the mistake of reading through this report and the behaviour and bigotry of this nurse's lawyer cross examining the witnesses has floored me. Unthinkably vile.

Dealt with a fiendish kidnapping over the weekend to celebrate my birthday... thank god @nateraerae.bsky.social got home safe and sound.

I'm trying to think about how I would have reacted if shown this headline five years ago

Game's gone. 😅 Genuinely though, I've hated the forced Americanisation of this tournament - this opening nonsense, the walkouts, and then the US military get to do a llittle parade with their flags? What happened to keeping politics out of sport? The World Cup is going to be insanely embarassing...

Very excited about this. If you (or someone you know) is a Northern Irish screenwriter who has got a couple of credits and is now looking to make that step up into having your own show... GET IN TOUCH! Please help spread the word, and get applying. northernirelandscreen.co.uk/news/motive-...

Can someone explain to me how a protest from a band at Glastonbury can be headline news with threatened prosecution etc as an 'incitement to violence', but Twitter's AI calling for a new Holocaust isn't?

Seen across the span of fifty years, it does look like an embarrassingly obvious plan to put as much of the state as possible far beyond democratic control, reducing government to easily bribed administrators who award licences to a new class of rent-extractors, to suck money from the public.

We finally got here

six months ago Zohran Mamdani was the answer to a trivia question I probably couldn’t have come up with. But the more concerted and desperate the attacks on him become the closer I am to feeling Iike this

I may not love her writing, but fuck yeah Sally Rooney is awesome.