Shoutout to my fellow lower case ‘r’ republicans. Big day for people who don’t think you can be better than anyone else by birth.

youtu.be/rp8vS6KEE6A?... I think I've watched this five times already. "Did I tell you that I'm married? To the leader of my cuuuult! It is not a happy marriage. :|"

I need you to know about Nyaight of the Living Cat, the anime about a virus that turns humans into cats if they are licked by a cat. the MC is a guy who really loves cats and he is not having a good time. he can't rub their bellies! he has to use the spray bottle on them! it's his personal hell ;_;

Sheen aside, this is a good example of a microgenre ITV does particularly well: drama based on a strange true story where the mundanity/normality of the people is part of the point. See also Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jeffries.

Watching Quiz on Netflix and it's pretty good but for once I'm not super impressed by Michael Sheen! The real Chris Tarrant is a much larger personality, and while Sheen has the cadences of his speech basically right, there should be about 50% more energy in everything he says.

so much clothing is marketed as "conversation starters" but as an introvert, i want "conversation enders." no more talking. let me go home.

this may be the most English man ever to exist.

someone figured out exactly how tall the local fascist is by process of elimination

Everyone Else Burns is now on Netflix UK & Ireland! I can't recommend it highly enough. It's one of the funniest shows I've seen in the past five years and also a genuinely moving and sharp portrait of a family in an extremist sect starting to break free of its influence.

God I love immigration. Ireland is so much more interesting than it used to be. #speirgorm

A recent cartoon for @newscientist.com. p.s. my new book of science cartoons, ‘Physics for Cats’ is out now. Links at www.tomgauld.com

James Frey, it's your time to shine!

guys i am so tired of logging in

and now I'm watching Isekai Office Worker, where the fantasy is: what if you did the exact same job as before but you were better paid and respected and had good work-life balance and a magical cure for your indigestion?

The evening walk. I missed the best color, which happened while I was driving to the trail & Argyll doesn't have the right digits to operate the phone camera. #beautyinwinter #winterjoy

This is an excellent analogy, because my recollection from grade school is that the pen on the right looks fun and exciting, and then you play with it for a few minutes and realize it's not actually useful for anything and in fact makes some tasks more cumbersome, and never think about it again.

RT if you don't even know how the hell to open a ChatGPT tab

I realise I'm just a freak, but living in a multicultural city is the best thing of all time, it's just the best possible human experience and i can not understand why anyone on earth would be like "weve got to destroy this"

Robert Heindel’s 1969 cover art for "Orion Was Rising," by Rose Palmer

someone with more time than me should do some sort of essay/analysis about alcohol use in video games and how designers create mechanics that reflect their culture's attitude to alcohol (specifically thinking of Afterparty and wondering if it would have been more fun if it wasn't made by Americans)

every episode - every single one! - has a scene where someone new is bowled over by Catarina's magic powers of Being Nice To People and it charms me every time.

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

The entire Ace Attorney franchise is propaganda for the superiority of inquisitorial legal systems.

getting back into My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom and reflecting on how, unlike many isekai where the fantasy is that by being a nerd you could become ultra-powerful, the fantasy of this one is that by being kind you could make people fall in love with you.

A message for you all to carry through the year

2026 is about affordable homeownership. No more "policy" this year. Feed the local fauna, befriend them, and then use them to overpower homeowners so you can occupy their dwellings.

Wondering whether I'll start tracking again. I had a sense that I was reading more in 2025, but no way to prove it even to myself, and of course no record of what I read and when, which means I can't do any kind of year-end roundup. Hm.

I note that they claimed that in other countries 50% of the population was using ChatGPT, but when asked which countries those might be, they didn't reply. Do not trust these motherfuckers.

Do I have this right? A Wall Street financier is shaping opinions for a newspaper owned by hedge funds to manufacture consent for technology built on intellectual theft to consolidate wealth and power into the hands of narcissistic billionaires while pouring gasoline on a climate crisis? 🤔

I'm a poet and I teach poetry at a university! Not bad.

I just finished Small Rain by Garth Greenwell and now I feel like I need to read more poetry and pay more attention to birds and also take better care of my health because life is precious and fragile. (It's a really good book!)

by the end of the year you will realize it’s not say Star Trek (important: that’s an eg. I have nothing against Star Trek) that’s rich and dense and incredible. It’s your own engagement that creates the incredible thing. Have fun with texts don’t ascribe god powers to them

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

It's infuriating when this happens, and it KEEPS happening. Queer media pioneers of previous decades get erased so the most recent favourite can get credit for being "first" when it's more like 546th. And it happens because low-budget indie media disappears by default, and people don't look for it.

I had already given notice at my job when I fixed a problem for our department head. He jokingly asked me not to leave, I said they'd be fine without me. He said "When Garrett Fitzgerald left the board of Aer Lingus, they had to replace him with three people!" I was, no joke, moved to tears.

Most recent musical discovery: Annabelle Dinda, "The Hand", on repeat in my mind since I first heard it three days ago.

Advice to all writers from my most fucked up character.

check this shit out. gonna write a song contrasting your guy macheath with a shark. that’s right a fuckin shark. whole compare and contrast deal. ppl gonna be singing this shit for a hundred years. see if I lie —Bertolt Brecht, to Kurt Weill, over drinks, 1927

Into the woods

my body every time I eat a kouign-amann: tastebuds: Mmmm, buttery sugar! brain: Mmmm, buttery sugar! heart: OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN

IT'S HERE!!! :DDDD

It's worth sticking around, I think.

today for work-related reasons I had to spend time in a room that smelled of cigarettes and I Did Not Care For It. >:(

Now it's time for Two Nickels, or Oddly Specific Media Experiences I Have Had Exactly Twice: -Asian movie about woman with cerebral palsy exploring her sexuality -m/m Regency romance where one of the leads is secretly dyslexic -2015 video game about game design featuring a character named Coda 1/2

I wish more people I knew, or just English-speaking people on the Internet, knew about David Castello-Lopes, because then I could say things like "aaaah il a établi un norm arbitraire le fils de pute!" and people would get what I meant.

there is something oddly cheering about the way people have reacted to Tarantino's comments on Paul Dano. just a cavalcade of "screw you, he's great!" and an article in the Guardian about his 10 best performances.

new internet peeve: person who claims to be pointing out a "grammatical error", when the "grammatical error" is the use of singular "they" for a nonbinary person. >:(

Gonna be even more earnest than usual on main, but I wanted to share. Because I have a bunch of pain stuff I was in my thoughts about it, and I said to myself, “I have to show love to my body. My body is doing the best it can.” so if anybody needs this, it made me feel good to say that

y'know, people memed the shit out of this but it probably saved lives? I for one have stayed at home in a storm more than once because I could hear Teresa yelling DON'T MAKE UNNECESSARY JOURNEYS!!! in my mind.