I enjoyed Project Hail Mary; it's feel-good and funny, yet also somewhat downbeat, and that's very much a film of our times. But while memorable and touching, the film adaptation was mid for me, and I keep puzzling over why and I think it's because: it has no ugliness, and that just doesn't compute.

#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

Good news; it'll still only cost you £540,000 to travel by train from Leeds to London if you book six weeks in advance during a new moon and on a Friday.* *Train may be a replacement bus.

I've started getting around 200 junk mails a day, but all from predictable addresses. So I blocked them. But now I'm getting hundreds of spam emails from a slightly different pattern of predictable addresses. Which seems highly unusual if it is indeed lots of spammers and not, say, just one ... 🤔

I don't care for the person the algorithm thinks I am. I have no interest in that person's interests and yet everywhere I look, there she is, boring me to tears.

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

Well, this is delightful - Tolkien's own melody for Chip the Glasses brought to life with an octave mandolin. www.youtube.com/shorts/PXrNi... #Tolkien

Wait, is it gnu ("new") or gnu ("guh-new")? Because it's always been gu-new for me, even if it's gnocchi and gnome and gnaw. Apparently, the g - of gnu - is anyway a descendant of "Southern Bushman !nu: (in which ! and : represent clicks)" [Etymonline], I say with a certain kind of desperation.

Logic puzzle: 1. Paid road tax online ✅ 2. Page gave payment error ❌ 3. DVLA email thanks me for successfully renewing road tax ✅ 4. Payment shows as pending in my bank account ✅ 5. gov uk status suggests I haven't renewed ❌ 5. Phoned DVLA to confirm - wait of 45 mins ❌ ... ?

Pardon me for not being in thrall to every little thing men say but who CARES what Timotei Chalamay thinks about ballet or opera or bellybutton lint. Maybe the world wouldn't be burning if we spent less time reporting what any random person thinks regardless of whether it's useful or even accurate

Sure are a lot of brands neatly side-stepping the implications of International Women's Day - structural change, now - in favour of trying to sell stuff. Brands are gonna brand.

I need every single male artist that follows me to read this. It's not very long. You need to bear witness to this shit. You have to see it with your own eyes because you never will in your everyday life. I'm serious, read it all please

I am the degenerate who doesn't do star ratings. Also, I've regressed to a teenage boy, apparently. #LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

If you're not buying an atlas today, you're doing World Book Day all wrong.

Really enjoying Edible Economics on BBC Sounds. Ha-Joon Chang's book tells the story of economics through memoir and meals. Fascinating to hear how food journeys - our now staple ingredients - are rooted in Africa, exploitation, and class. Worth a listen. 📚 #BookSky #AmReading

Drove home, realised the trees have their spring blossoms. Scrapped 20,000 words and started over. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMxR...

Think I'll go to the gym and practice running to the nuclear fall-out shelter (a mattress propped against a wall).

Found out a friend died, and even though we haven't spoken in years, it's knocked me sideways. She was a truly genuine person, a radiant human being with an amazing laugh and a wicked sense of humour, and so much love. The world was a better place while she was in it.

Watched Farewell, My Lovely for the first time and it's so eerily like a movie made in the '70s. It has a realism that even noir rarely nails. boxd.it/d2KScf

I'm struck, as I feel I am more often lately, how this piece doesn't confront an AI agent provocateur about his deeply racist ideas. Instead it asks if he's concerned about racist reactions to his creations, and positions him as an artist eliciting reactions. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Just heard the first ice-cream van jingle of 2026, which means snow next week. It's 8 degrees, feels like 4, by the way!

🚨 Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor Arrested on 66th Birthday A seminal moment for accountability. The King's brother is in custody and searches are being carried out at his Berkshire and Norfolk homes.

Wouldn't it just be easier for the UK government to just ban children from using the internet. Or just ban children. I'm not sure what the end goal is. It could be either at this point.

The book I was listening to on the BBC sounds app has, somewhat predictably, been removed with two episodes to go. I wouldn't mind but you can't run and read a paperback.

"Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded; there's a formula, a secret, I don't know what, that people who have been to public school or Brownies seem to understand." Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

I just find it astonishing that someone has been "writing about Nigella for more than 20 years." The interest in Celebrity has somewhat passed me by, I expect.

Having a "clear out," i.e., looking in boxes and drifting away, and found some signed books. One by Roger McGough - who was lovely! - and the other, which reads "Try to get further than this page. Good luck." Reader, I didn't, but I've prized it nonetheless :)

#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched #Filmsky

There's been a crop of think pieces on immigration, and why the robber barons aren't to be trusted. But they're in the kinds of outlets read by people who already think this, and in words that don't speak to all. Feels like we're having distinct conversations that never meet in the middle.

Reading a call for submissions for an anthology, where the prompt for writers includes "the migration problem."

Lovely news: my short story is runner up in the Northern Broadsides + @arvonfoundation.bsky.social Winter Tales 2026 writing competition. Congrats to the winning story, recorded by Julie Hesmondhalgh! Listen here: www.northern-broadsides.co.uk/winter-tales... #writers #writingcommunity #amwriting

Writers, have you read Sian Meades-Williams's piece on "The complicated business of writing prizes"? Like freelancing in general, writing competitions can be bit of a Wild West, with experiences varying wildly. Sian's piece is worth a read: substack.com/home/post/p-... #AmWriting #Writers

There are two types of people: those who return the trolley to the trolley park, and those who spit out chewing gum and leave it in the little shelf of the treadmill in a communal gym.

Tonight's success was @nigelslater.bsky.social's "A Potato Supper" hefted from the leaves of my twenty-year-old edition of Appetite - much falling apart and annotated now. I padded with onions and chilli, and it went down a storm. With pears & brie for afters. Honestly, felt like a king.

Substack data breach in February - unauthorised third party accessed personal data including emails and phone numbers. Substack says "it sucks."

This may be niche, but I love that I don't have to download, extract, and then run Open As on zipped spreadsheets and files anymore. I run `zless [filename]` in terminal and peek at the contents in one go. Handy!

Made this for my family tonight. Not only is it horrible but there's so much of the stuff. We clearly don't eat anywhere as much sauce as the rest of the UK, probably because of stuff like this. 800g of tomatoes! I must have been tripping. HORRIBLE. www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes...

I tell you who was good, very good: Barry Norman. Wish he was still around and talking film.

X is hiring a creative writing specialist at $40 an hour to make Grok better at writing and a true LOL at the qualifications

Also really good and worth watching on BBC iPlayer, if you have access, is the Talking Pictures series. Episodes cover the making of Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather trilogy, Psycho, Jaws, and more. I'd written it off at first, but now I'm hooked. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

After the Flood S2 on @itvx.com was really good in places; often as good as Happy Valley. A shame, then, that the finale is so touching and yet so abrupt. I had to check if there was another episode still to go! On the whole worth definitely a watch though. Will it be back ... ? 📺

"We're actively seeking" or "We strongly encourage" submissions or applications from marginalised groups. Yes, but HOW? These are just words and well wishes, rather than the recruiting groups doing things differently or accepting voices that sound and are sometimes radically different.

We’ve been discovering new voices for over five decades! Here’s just a snapshot of some of our many winners. You could join The Bridport Prize Family too – just be sure to enter our competition by 31 May. Enter at bridportprize.org.uk

My blog is ten years old. I've valued writing it immensely, but writing, essentially, for bots and scrapers has become so dispiriting - it's like Orwell's vision of publishing in "1984," and it's not something I want for myself and my words. So, ten years is amazing, but also so very sad.

"I passed holding cells filled with people who appeared to be of Latino and East African descent. The despondent faces and the screaming, wailing and pleading from these men, women and children – reportedly as young as 5 years old – will forever haunt me." eu.usatoday.com/story/opinio...

Entered a short story in a writing contest; disqualified for going 50 words over the word count. Entered a short story in a writing contest; missed the deadline by an hour. I can sometimes write, but perhaps reading is what ails me ...

Check out some of Jodie's great Closet Picks on the Criterion Channel! ✨ VISIONS OF EIGHT THREE FILMS BY MAI ZETTERLING LA HAINE LA STRADA ESSENTIAL FELLINI WOMAN IN THE DUNES WINGS OF DESIRE BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ JOHN CASSAVETES:FIVE FILMS

I am once again reminding you all that the UK government introduced an Online Safety Act that is effectively a porn ban on most adult porn websites, but is dithering over banning a website that is actually creating child porn.

Film theory: The protagonist of The Third Man wants to know who killed Harry Lime. The real conflict is whether he can avoid becoming him. www.thehaughtyculturist.com/films/the-th... #FilmSky #FilmNoir #NoirAlley