In which Sam Pepys falls for a cryptocurrency scam.

Did not realise this use of the word ‘fancy’ was so old.

Proposed long-term solution to the Burkes: build a potemkin school. Enoch can wait outside the gates of the fake school for as long as he pleases. Costs can be met by selling the reality tv rights. I mean, it’s not great, but it seems as likely to work as anything else.

Q: How do I unlock Sunglasses Macron? A: It's very difficult to unlock Sunglasses Macron in the course of a normal game because it requires a specific and unlikely sequence of events. While default Macron is ruler of France, the USA must choose the monarchy path and then lay claim to Greenland.

New 2026 fear: What if parrots eat your house?! www.bbc.com/news/videos/...

The Nobel Peace Prize becoming so prestigious that wars are fought over a head of state coveting it is some real monkey paw stuff for Alfred Nobel.

As it was in Britain, so it is now in Ireland; the Pret A Mangers are slowly spreading out along the rail and tram lines. It is, however, unclear how the infection started, there being no rail link between the islands. (There’s one in the airport too, presumably due to the future metro.)

With his receipt of the gift of a Nobel medal, Trump has joined a very exclusive club; previously it was just Joseph Goebbels. (I'm kinda surprised Stalin didn't try this, tbh.)

Interesting case where Musk unintentionally sabotaged ol’ minihands. Trump used to be quite good at Twitter; the 160 chat limit worked for him. Whereas even his fans are presumably not going to bother to read all this nonsense; transparently the ravings of a crazy old man.

Evil laughter emanates from Dublin Bus headquarters, as the opportunity to give a major bus stop a confusing name arises. www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dubl...

Current political defcon level: three-drink minimum. www.politico.eu/article/eu-c...

Argh, how on earth am I supposed to fit this into my podcast-listening budget?!

It's Weird Duck Time again! I made this comic a few years ago, and I was unsure if anyone else felt like winter was best characterized as the time of the weird ducks. The term has caught on and I've heard people using it without knowing where it's from, which is the highest possible honor.

It's the 3rd of January 1939, your name is professor James Smith and you are staring at a drawing of a fish. It's not a regular fish. It is a completely impossible fish.

Things stepping up. ICCL and Digital Rights Ireland have written to the Garda Commissioner calling for an urgent investigation of X.

Most sandpipers, presumably, are tax exiles.

Let's talk about generative AI, contaminated information, and rhubarb. Once upon a time, Europe was at war. Food was scarce, and the government of the quote-unquote United Kingdom looked for alternatives. 1/

Arrived home at one in the morning after a severely delayed flight, to be greeted by the outraged chirping of the smoke alarm, demanding to be fed a new nine volt battery. Somehow managed it without breaking my neck.

In what's now become an annual tradition, I've written another piece for The Gist about how and why I hate A.I. On a bubble about to burst, a future rotted to its core, and the limits of the Mrs Doyle Theory of artificial intelligence. www.thegist.ie/guest-gist-2...

His pettiness didn't end there. 66's Mugby Junction was a spooky Christmas anthology set at a specific train station that Dickens himself admitted was solely so he could dunk on a waitress who worked there and didn't recognize him and made him pay for his coffee before she passed the sugar.

An old thread is making the rounds again, so here's an updated version. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the most enduring and adapted works of literature in history. But did you know that he wrote 22 sequels? Some are great! Some are trash! Some are bizarrely fascinating.

On a German intercity train (despite DB’s fearsome reputation it showed up more or less on time). Every now and again I notice the rails going by out the window, and they are _too narrow, damnit_. Irish gauge is apparently burned into my brain after 40 years, so this is a bit uncanny valley.

So, anyway, the Democracy Manifest guy is a milkshake duck.

I switch my Kindle off airplane mode for the first time in a while, it works for about half an hour then unexpectedly reboots to install a software update. Grumble mutter.

I had to open LinkedIn today to approve a link request, and glimpsed this. I nearly broke my cardinal rule of never commenting on LinkedIn out of sheer indignation. First, obviously we care if assembly is wasteful! Decades have been spent improving that. And compilers are not bloody LLMs.

comrades, i have deeply sad news. the Fourth International has fallen. www.wsws.org/en/articles/...

Finally, an explanation for Linehan-Rowling syndrome. It’s toxic solvents, apparently.

Valve has now rejected my complaint, confirming that "I don't like muslims" is a valid reason to leave a negative review on a game on Steam This is where we're at now.

Met Eireann currently has most of Ireland under status orange for wind. The UK Met Office instead has an amber warning for Northern Ireland, status orange in that region being reserved for Zombie Ian Paisley.

"We regret our lackluster support for your hobbies. In hindsight, pickling vegetables and making sourdough starter are two of the more benign things a guy can do with his time. Our bad, Millennial Man."

Pet peeve: there seems to be an arbitrary time cutoff for what is scifi. For instance, Gulliver's Travels is clearly scifi. Guy goes on journeys, meets weird aliens, makes some minor political points. That's basically just Star Trek TOS. But it's rarely categorised as such. Also, A Christmas Carol.

Sam Pepys, Proto-Brexiteer

The future, apparently.

Two of Putin’s subs, conversing amongst themselves.

every time i see that water tower i remember the animaniacs are trapped in there by david zaslav. Yet every story leaves it out

Is there a term for a pun name that is so good that a business must exist to use it, even if the business does not necessarily otherwise make sense?

> The new [Irish govt] infrastructure [acceleration] plan will “identify” AI tools that can be used as part of the planning stages for infrastructure projects. "This is difficult to fix, so let's do some AI bullshit instead" - Not just for the private sector anymore, apparently!

Going through the Dáil transcript on Labour's trans healthcare motion, and Labour TD Duncan Smith called Independent Ireland TD Richard O'Donoghue a "gobshite" after he went off on a weird Twitter brain-rotted rant about self-indification

we actually life in hell

It is December, and thus time to swap my normal, everyday anxieties for my carefully-curated set of FESTIVE anxieties.

It is that brief, wondrous time of year when Tesco's buyers of unpleasant fruit are unable to obtain the dry, paper-y oranges for which they are justly famous, and are forced to temporarly inflict actually nice ones on the public. Normal service will be restored as soon as possible.

Ways in which my brain is broken #47235: anytime I read the phrase ‘private banker’ I start coming up with lyrics to the tune of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. I cannot help it. It is a problem.

I am shocked, shocked, that there is astroturfing going on here!

On the bus to Alicante airport. There’s a sign saying that the AC is ‘99% bacteria free’. I do not find this as reassuring as the operator presumably intended.

Given that the American far right believes that Mamdani is a communist, and that minihands is very suggestible, the Trump regime will presumably now be embracing collective farms, gulags, very silly military hats, etc.

Exit row aisle seat with the middle seat apparently not in use. This is the best plane seat I have ever had.

Cue the far right insisting on doing everything in Roman numerals.

In Dublin Airport. There’s a big ad for a Rolls Royce Trent 1000 jet engine. Are they… expecting me to assemble my own plane?

I guess one difference between me and Elon Musk is that, if I was gaming an AI to say these things about me, and everyone could see that I had done this, I'd have simply no choice but to set myself on fire.