In deeply unsurprising news, I attended a public lecture tonight for the first time and I am wondering why I should do anything else with my free evenings. What a brilliant way to follow up a workday.

Number of LDs signing the EDM opposing the bathroom police guidance should be 72/73, and that's only not 73 because the dog isn't allowed to sign.

I made this Pride flag using only NASA images and our team thought it would be cool to share on social (I work on the NASA heliophysics communications team), but it's getting all sorts of hate on the bird app and Fbook. Thought y'all might be more appreciative of it here. ☺️🏳️‍🌈💖

Lowering platform fees generally is badly needed - Valve's defences against why not for their platform is just "monopolies happen because customers like them" and "the walled gardens are worse". Less landlords = more money for devs = more game variety.

Bet for the Steam Machine is $1199/£979 and it disappearing into out-of-stock immediately. Any more than that and it's completely pointless vs just buying a laptop with a 5050 in it.

Actually I'll repeat this in its own skeet - _if you are thinking 'man these gaming handhelds look cool and I could do with a portable games console for the summer holidays' then buy it now_ Buy the fan before the heatwave.

The Deck is now an incredibly, incredibly stupid buy whilst the Legion Go S can still be found in the UK for less than £500 (Costco has it for £400). Valve is also paying for the Claw A8 to get good Linux support and you can find that for £850 (Currys), and it has 2x the performance.

Read @edzitron.com 's free piece today and I just ended up thinking of my experience leaving Develop Brighton in 2022 or so - listening to gaming execs proudly explain how they built companies by spending VC money. I called it "Posh Southern White Guy Syndrome" but didn't like the term. (Thread)

Laptop shopping sucks right now: after a lot of searching I am down to two options: 1. A refurbished £1.5k Lenovo which is stuck with 8GB VRAM (not future proofed or VRChat-safe) 2. A new £2.1k HP with 12GB VRAM :(

I'm not gonna finish this but I was testing out using some HMD glasses to put reference on when drawing. So I drew the Endmin from Endfield. Really rusty digitally but it was good to bust out the tablet and stuff

I was talking to someone at drinks tonight and I got onto a topic about British game dev, and it was interesting to hear the pushback - it should not matter where the game is made or who by, individuals collaborating is king. Really important to hold that perspective in mind IMO

Actions, not words. Any Labour MP or peer that opposes this appalling transphobic policy by their government should not be sitting on Labour's benches.

If the anti-trans guidance Labour are now hawking becomes law, I don't see how I can remain in the UK: it enshrines bigotry and hate within the equality system to such a degree as to render equality law basically meaningless for sex/gender/trans purposes.

Labour's strategy for growth: 1. The UK's key assets are its tech and creative industries 2. _checks diversity numbers in these industries_ oh oh no

I want this framed. This should be the cover of the novel adaption of the movie about when this bubble explodes

"British food is bad" meanwhile _waves hands as Bake Off being one of the most influential and universal food programs of the 21st Century_

"British food is bad", meanwhile the extremely high standards Brits expect of their lunches has lead to the ubiquitous knowledge of the Tesco meal deal and Greggs within the Anglosphere

I swear to God if Burnham wins and it turned out the thing that finally kills the Whitehall death grip on politics is a goddamn _metro mayor_ I think I will move to a mountain and become a nun

Sidenote, disagree with @stephenkb.bsky.social view that it is unclear if anyone else could win Makersfield. I doubt "generic local Labour politician OK being placed in the Wicker Man" would have clangers like this come up when campaigning in a Leave constituency

I just want to flag here the absolute circus that Makersfield is going to be: A 65% Leave constituency being asked to vote for its own metro mayor to be its MP, which would almost certainly result in him as PM, which the current PM obviously opposes, where the majority is not even that big.

I spent way too long on this joke so I am promoting it to my main feed

Given Rayner has briefed she can run, you can pretty much predict moves from here:- leadership process vote triggered, Starmer runs to the vote and loses, Streeting vs Rayner goes to the membership because neither camp has any reason to want Burnham on the ballot. You get a third no-hoper candidate.

Charitably: if you are Streeting, you run even if you lose, because time travel is not possible and a leadership campaign is now his only real choice of being able to tell members/skeptical PLP MPs that he is not actually the boogeyman.

Something to be said for everything being web app in a brower: I can use one Firefox plugin to shut down my lazy browsing of Reddit, Discord and Youtube. Got loads of work done today by just adding a "oi, this page is blocked" speedbump.

Could write a book on what the LDs should think after the locals tbh but for me it just comes down to "come on, do you really think this Corbyn cosplay of a Green movement doesn't rip itself to pieces in the next four years? Go find out where the Green wave came from and figure out how to beat it."

There are two policies the LDs could enact that would be very firmly counter-Green measures and align with LD values. 1. Abolish tuition fees. 2. Rejoin. The former needs a generational change in leadership, which is a bad idea at this time. The latter (as proposed by Cable on LDV) is a brick.

The chatter on LDV is not surprising - there are a lot of Lib Dems in London - but: 1. We have benefitted from being the destination for left-wing protest twice (Stop The War/Bollocks To Brexit) and those voters retreated to Labour/DNV rapidly 2. Just removing Labour is half the fight done for us

Last week: Labour clobbered at elections This week: everyone in Labour going "we need to change" Next week: Mahmood announces drone strikes on small boats, trans people made illlegal

Either Labour MPs can find someone (Ed Milliband is the only someone, IMV), a new Mandogate headline hits, or I think you might be looking at intractable paralysis in Labour going forwards. I.e. defections to LDs/Greens starts being on the cards.

As improbable as it sounds I think the advantage here lies with Starmer. Either ministers resign or they don't. Either West or someone else has the numbers or they don't. The right of the party simply is not getting anywhere close to power again if he goes.

I think you might have to just come to the conclusion that the PM is not personally very good at politics. He and Badenoch are very similar in that regard.

Makes sense why Streeting hasn't called for the PM to go. He's not much of a fan of transitioning.

I think if you price in Streeting as winning in a Labour contest (by lieu of being the only real candidate - see T. May, V. Cable, J. Swinney...) then you also factor in that being the last straw for a lot of progressives in the party. Also, don't give ex-student politics people the PM job!

Really looking forward to my inglorious return to the FGC with Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls. Now 25kg lighter! :)

Whelp, Haringey is hilarious.

Starmer survives this. No good mechanism in the Labour rulebook to remove him, no viable challenger, and enough held councils in London to point at and go "look, we didn't lose everywhere".

Haringey could end up being split in three depending on how the rest of the results go: LDs in Hornsey, Labour in Wood Green, Greens in Tottenham.

I now have three Green councillors and I can see Tottenham Hotspur's stadium from the end of my road. In fact the Spurs stadium is now entirely surrounded by Green councillors.

Looking at these results now from a LD perspective: interesting to try extrapolating what a "Lib Dem containment breach" scenario looks like politically. It'd be a strategy for head office to pick a ward in every area that the LDs are absent from and the Tories have survived in and go "that one."

Oh my god London counts slowly

As a LD I think you give Davey one more year without anyone rioting, then you need to assess if that Green surge is stable or drifts. If it drifts, then there's a lot of progressive voters there that the LDs are really compatibile with.

If you're Labour at this point your only real move is to recognize the Greens have gone from "those weird ecology cranks" to creating electoral mathematics that means "Labour has no route to a majority next time". I think this is as unsurvivable for Labour as 2024 was for the Tories.

Overall thoughts (cont) 4. Hackney mayor is the first earthquake. Greens activated about 15,000 new voters - would not have won without people who DNV last time. 5. Labour are completely, completely fucked.

Overall thoughts so far: 1. We already know that Leave areas badly want to vote for Farage and will do so if Farage's vehicle is not currently on fire. 2. Tories being squeezed out anywhere another not-Lab party is viable is also not a surprise. 3. LD cul-de-sac politics is strong and stable.

I love it when random skeets line up

In the grand scheme of things the most surprising thing about the news cycle atm is the underreporting of the RAMpocalypse. Inventories are drying out and simply won't be replaced. Wombo combo of energy shortages is not going to help that either, LLM bubble or no.

Yesterday I did some gardening, today I am trying to somehow salvage a FOSS project that has had its leader attempt a self-coup. Tomorrow maybe I wake up on a spacecraft ten thousand light years from home with no memories. It's been that sort of day.

We're not living in an AI bubble, or a private credit bubble, we're living in a platform bubble - the concentration of the production of a vast number of enterprises into the coffers of a small number of tech firms who are believed by the market to be a better choice for the cash.

Here in the UK, we should, as a matter of urgency, take the steps needed to make sure that businesses here have the fair, cost-effective platforms they need to operate, and that our citizens have fair, open, and cost effective platforms to live their digital lives on. Openreach for datacentres.