Just to say, I hate cute robots, and I am reading a story where there is a cute robot whose name is actually “Sweetie”.

2026 Hugos: Best Professional Artist fromtheheartofeurope.eu/2026-hugos-b...

New relative.

A weird line to draw in the sand, I know, but I think that proposals for what NATO members should do with their naval assets come more convincingly from people whose countries are NATO members and which also have navies.

Ian Watson obituary, by Lisa Tuttle www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

I've read 67 out of 100 on the list. How many have you read? www.theguardian.com/p/x4f9v5 Totally agree with putting Middlemarch top.

From @davekeating.substack.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A brief look at the big picture from Dan Levy. open.substack.com/pub/danielle...

Yup. Is the problem that PMs keep getting pushed out, or that the calibre of people being appointed PM is so low they don't last? I don't think it's recency bias to suggest that In future historical rankings of British PMs, the last decade is going to feature heavily at the bottom of the table

Something I find incredibly irritating is how people criticise a supposedly new British habit of flippantly ditching prime ministers. Literally everyone here agrees it was great to ditch Johnson, absolutely vital that Truss should go, and cheered the defeat of Sunak. All show the system working!

Sad news from Kosovo - we have lost Alush Gashi, at the age of 75. www.gazetaexpress.com/en/Alush-Gas...

I think @caseynewton.bsky.social summarized the current state of platforms perfectly in these two paras: www.platformer.news/threads-blue...

I'm hearing Keir Starmer doesn't want to turn up for his regeneration scene so Andy Burnham is just going to lie on the floor in a wig

Buka Petriashvili, former minister of European Integration in the first Georgian Dream government for the Free Democrats, sentenced for standing on the sidewalk in front of parliament and thus "obstructing" pedestrians. An example of the Kafkaesk legislation GD introduced. bm.ge/news/buka-pe...

I remember organising postal Diplomacy meetups in the Bot in the mid-1980s… www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/comment/im-s...

Glorious!

I had missed this fascinating story from 2021: hand and foot prints, left by children in the limestone mud of Tibet somewhere around 200,000 years ago, may be the oldest surviving "human" "art". theconversation.com/we-discovere...

Very pleased with my score today on GeoGuessr. Got all five within 10km, and one of them practically on the nose. Two African, one European, one Latin American and one in a country where I don't even read the script (though luckily it was a tourist area with bilingual signs).

The symbolism of the meeting place. www.ajupress.com/view/2026051...

From @pkrugman.bsky.social : open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Unexpected fellow passenger: the hawthorn shieldbug, Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale (meidoornkielwants / punaise de l’aubépine). I hope this was the train it wanted to catch.

Well expressed.

Congratulations to Alyn Smith, who I think is only the second person to be elected to the European Parliament, the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament - and I think the first to do it in that order!

I thought this was an Onion-style spoof, but it is true.

‘The greatest ambassador for life on Earth’: Tributes paid to David Attenborough on his 100th birthday

#ThursdayArt It isn't a pipe.

I just did a count, and there are sixty Novels (and five novellas) In the Hugo Packet this year. And that's probably low, but I'm not sure how many of the October Daye books come with a bonus Novella Attached.... but @seananmcguire.bsky.social does that kind of thing, often.

And an important extra point: WorldCon members get access to the Hugo Voter Packet, with a couple of dozen novels, novellas, graphic novels and non-fiction monographs for free!

Congratulations to the Honourable Louise Arbour, who will serve as Canada’s 31st Governor General.