4:30am. Phone starts vibrating. Notification: 'The following apps have been slated for deep sleep'. Well, at least someone is getting a deep sleep. FFS. What kind of dickhead thinks a) I need to be notified of this fact in the 1st place b) I need to be told in the middle of the fucking night?

You don't need a Christmas tree here; you can just visit one. The view this afternoon...

Out for a walk and just came across this unit. Idea for a new game show: 'Goat or Foot Pouf?'

The #1 movie when you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go.

Surely we live in the dumbest time in human history. And I include our earliest ancestors who had brains the size of apricots and took a million years to work out how to make pointy sticks. That this idiocy is coupled with rampant narcissism is just the cherry on the species-extinguishing cake.

2025. Searching for a demo of a trending product. All video results are Tiktok/Insta. Young people with too much fake tan/makeup/video filters filming themselves for 18 secs saying 'Oh. My. Gaahd. A-May-Zing' but not actually showing the product. No interest in it at all. Just jumping a # band wagon

8am. The Christmas demons have arrived... Good morning. #photography #landscape

If you want to know how Google #AI Overview is doing, it just identified wallpaper on the kitchen wall of a derelict, slum-clearance house in 1960s Manchester as "rare, valuable Chinese silk fabric from the early Qing dynasty."

Oh. And now my monitor has blown. Great.

There's nothing quite as demoralising as spending two-plus years writing a novel, a further two unfruitful years looking for a publisher, only to see someone else publish a book with the same very specific themes, time period, location, etc, etc.

There's so much work I need to get finished before Christmas and... ...oh. #PS5

Me, reading online auction listings that claim the item is 'rare', 'original', 'an antique', 'in mint condition', 'a 1st pressing', 'a 1st edition,' 'definitely not a reproduction.' Them: 'Super-rare 1953 original' [Ask The Seller A Question] Me: 'Why is 'Reproduction 1991' printed at the bottom?'

I'm guessing #Duolingo has now moved over to AI. One bug after another; crashes; non-functioning buttons; exercises that randomly end mid-exercise; sentences that don't always make complete sense; clumsy grammar; written dialogues (that you're expected to speak/repeat) that disappear off screen...

Today is the 55th anniversary of the official opening of the silliest pub the world ever saw, the Windsock in Dunstable

#NowPlaying Vivaldi in a despairing attempt to stop myself slipping (even further) into misanthropy.

Mass market paperbacks were always my favourite format. Made the idea and the feel of a book so exciting - a compact self-contained world you could carry round in your pocket. Genuinely sad they’re going. Trade paperbacks are just the ‘cheap’ version of a hardback. Not their own thing at all.

Same! Absolutely fucking dreadful.

Music auto-tagging has become a pain since AI. Even if I switch it off, my albums are constantly updated with the most ludicrous imagery. This supposedly represents Bach's St Matthew Passion. AI is like irreparable cognitive impairment resulting from severe brain trauma. 'hEre'S PASsionATe mAtthEw'

Indiana Jones & the Archive of Truth (2877). A descendent of the eponymous hero hunts down a long-lost, early 21st century artefact believed to be the last ever object created by an actual human. Is the object's existence a fairy tale, as the World AI Police insist, or is there more to the myth?

Feeling rough (mouth ulcers from hell and swollen glands), so sitting in bed with a cup of tea, listening to Bach concertos. Don't remember the last time I had a 'lie-in'. Probably years ago.

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

#NowPlaying Pretty much perfect music.

🧵 It's almost a joke. Entshittification by @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy - I order the book, but it doesn't ship for weeks, despite being 'In Stock'. The expected delivery date is changed to May 26, even though the book is still allegedly 'In Stock'. - It suddenly arrives. The postman doesn't...

It's #sketchpadvent – celebrating amazing modernist concept drawings and models. December 1: Milton Keynes from 1981

Don't you just miss cheap tat that was probably carcinogenic?

Frankenstein: Not bad. Certainly one of the better renderings. Bit too Catholic for me, but I completely get why that concept made sense. Frankenstein's monster resembling Frank-N-Furter's monster, in their respective golden speedos, was jarring at times.

#NowPlaying Arguably, quite Christmassy* *Caveat: It helps if, like me, you're the sort of person who favours Krzysztof Penderecki's Christmas Symphony (which sounds more like a massacre than a mass) over Christmas carols about rhinally-flushed reindeer and the repeated gifting of game birds.

Current research obsession: I thought I'd tracked down this Babes in the Wood #pantomime poster, but I was mistaken. I'm guessing it dates from sometime between 1883 and 1900. Likely a production from the Manchester area, although posters were recycled by theatres all over the country.

#NowPlaying I always seem to find myself in a #radiophonic mood in December.

The teas I normally drink taste strangely generic, flavourless, or just plain wrong in other people's cups. Never understood why.

At the moment, it feels like every BBC producer is compelled to feature Mary Berry rambling on about Victoria Sponge in their programme, irrespective of format or genre.

#ADHD 'activists'? What, the people with the attention spans of Wotsits? The people who suffer anxiety and executive dysfunction, which causes debilitating procrastination and the inability to make decisions, the polar opposites of activity?

A periodic reminder that Ian Nairn made 30 films for the BBC, all of which are extant, but none have been released on DVD/Blu-ray, etc. This is an Outrage. #architecture #subtopia #nairn

Happy 60th birthday to Rubber Soul by the Beatles, released 3rd Dec 1965. Here is my intern deciding which of my copies of the LP I should listen to tonight.

I'm contemplating listening to #TheBeatles *complete* Get Back sessions. January 02 - January 31, 1969. 83 CDs. Not sure how far I'll get. I imagine that 50 takes of Don't Let Me Down or Octopus's Garden might send anyone a little doolally.

"iT's BegiNNning To LoOk a LOt LikE ChRistMAs..."

Back from the framers. A rare, original cinema window card from Hollywood's #GoldenAge, for the 1930 film Shadow of the Law. Yet another unexpected/bonkers vintage movie find in a Swiss charity shop. Previously, I also found 3 half-sheet posters from the 1940s/50s. #Cinema #design #Hollywood

Initial attempts to remove print 'moire' from old photos/scans.

Fs, stop asking people to vote for things. I'd only keep It's a Wonderful Life and Christmas Carol (1951). The Thin Man (& After the Thin Man at new year). Eyes Wide Shut. Brazil. A Charlie Brown Christmas. The Apartment. On Her Majesty's Secret Service. What else? Fanny/Alexander? The Thing?

*squints at Ellis Island. "As many as two-fifths of Americans may be descended from the immigrants" processed there. Stephen Miller, of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, whose great-grandparents to migrated to America to "escape Russian pogroms and the Holocaust".

Swallowed a tangerine pip and now a tangerine tree is going to grow inside me like one of those insect parasites that hijacks their host's nervous system & brain, forcing them to do their bidding before destroying them. I don't want to become a tangerine zombie. The Xmas season is fraught with peril

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen: Ornette Coleman Steve Reich Godspeed You! Black Emperor Carla Bley King Crimson

Reading William Gibson's Neuromancer from 1984. He seems to have predicted...*gestures at everything: Cyberspace, VR, neural implants, AI. Just came across this line: "How smart's an AI?" "Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs." Oh, and The Matrix shamelessly ripped it off wholesale, right?

Watching the new #Beatles Anthology series on Disney. Looks like some of the older footage might have had an AI facelift. Every now and then there's a brief eye/head/hair movement that doesn't seem completely natural. And a couple of times John and George have an almost set-in-aspic sheen.

For me, Thanksgiving Day isn’t complete without William Burroughs’s “A Thanksgiving Prayer” youtu.be/sLSveRGmpIE?...

Love sci-fi films, but always struggle with novels. My brain can't get to grips with: "Jake awoke in Neu-Croydon and trip-shifted his Snow6. He'd been zamping the Decortex Line long before the Tokyo Dataspleen Protocols, unnerving the Neuro-Eidolon Body who had once declared him an ultra Cyberpug."

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”