Bluesky doesn't do sports, although it's slightly quieter than usual because a significant proportion of UK Bluesky has just finished watching Mixed Doubles Curling in the Winter Olympics.

Alert! It's the curling at MiCo. #olympics

This month's DWM contains my own personal favourite piece I've ever written for our favourite mag, so do please get it. #DoctorWho #DoctorWhoMagazine www.panini.co.uk/shp_gbr_en/d...

And with that, I am up to date with Silent Witness. Fascinating to see the changes in TV drama storytelling over 30 years. As with so many shows of the time, the 2010s and 2020s are characterized by fast-forwarding through pedestrian plotting, largely driven by characters doing stupid things.

All the scaffolding on this house resting on a tiny xkcd bit of wood.

My best friend died 2 months ago aged 30. Yesterday we had his memorial. It was a beautiful day but, because he didn't have a will, his estranged family took his body away from us. His partner of 13 years doesn't know when or where he was buried. Please please make a will x

I'm encouraged by the number of faces we've seen from the Bill in the last couple of seasons of Silent Witness. I'm on the last 2 episodes of S28 just as S29E1 transmits. Skipped merrily through the incredibly boring "infection on a plane" story, to get to the "implausible wedding" season closer.

⏳A gentle reminder that our special offer ends on 10 Feb. The newest figure is inspired by a Late Bronze Age terracotta from Cyprus. Learn more about her mystery, and every order of a goddess figure currently includes a FREE Miniature Palaeolithic Figurine. potted-history.co.uk

Our annual New Comedy Writing competition is back, with three fantastic judges! Find out how to enter to be in with a chance of a cash prize and to have your work read by Holly Walsh, Andy Hamilton and Lucy Lumsden at davidnobbsmemorialtrust.org.uk

Speaking of reviews Tr-49 is on 495. 500 is a threshold value. Er, help!

IM BACK With a VERY highly requested video! Over the holidays I asked you guys what mini painting things stumped you the most and one question just DOMINATED my inbox which was... 'How to I Glaze?' So I decided to give it its own damn video :D ENJOY #warhammer www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtsZ...

I love talking to @durassisterspod.bsky.social; always a fantastic discussion, so generous in their readings and responses. Thank you so much, guys!

Braising chicken wings and duck legs in port and chicken stock is rapidly becoming my favourite thing to cook this winter.

"Triumph of the Dull". Well done The Irish Times.

I do a French Wordle every day. Today's was one of those words that I guessed from form but didn't actually know, even though it felt like it should be "common". Turns out it was the name of the stick in a butter churn. So "once common, now rare".

Ilkley Moor today, a haunting moment when I surprised a roe deer whilst looking for rock art.

Reading Saul David's "Tunisgrad" about the end of the North African campaign in WW2. "They survived on emergency chocolate rations and water" could apply both to the 2/4th Hampshires and @unamccormack.bsky.social in the latter stages of writing a book.

A Birds potted meat cob was a rare treat in my childhood. Pork pies at Christmas.

Particularly good solo effort this week.

Parker's piece is looking very good this evening. And not too cold, at long last.

1/4 We've been overhauling our data engineering processes as we got tired of waiting for clusters to spin up, bad web-based dev UX,& tests taking hours to complete. We migrated our dataframe orientated workloads from #Spark to #Polars and immediately felt the benefits. endjin.com/blog/2026/01...

Silent Witness S26 represents a considerable improvement on recent form. Something went wrong with TV writing in general when someone decided drama had to be all about "jeopardy" and that was further misunderstood to mean "physical threat". Post 2013 SW is a good example of this phenomenon.

Has the Royal Society kicked him out yet? Because he should never have been admitted.

I really enjoyed Wonder Man. Message ends.

This week's podcast is on the Wilton Diptych; what it's all about and who may have painted it. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/w...

- I work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, my life is devoted to fulfilling the global mission of this company and to ensuring we never miss an opportunity to dominate in our sector - What is it you do? - We make it slightly easier to order a takeaway from your phone

The leading companies they highlight as customers on their website include another y-combinator startup, y-combinator itself, and the nazi-affiliated newsletter platform Substack. We have to move past this culture. Sustainable innovation gets way better results with less waste.

This seems bad.

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

If any of this direct-to-consumer AI tech existed and actually worked, then the AI companies would be making money hand over fist, rather than haemorrhaging cash at a terrifying rate.

You can’t just say AI tutors are going to teach disadvantaged kids. You might as well say inflatable dentists will solve the NHS backlog. The casual anthropomorphising of AI has got to stop. They’re not ‘tutors’, it’s software. It’s not ‘one-to-one’, it’s a kid on a screen on their own.

Ha! Our launch discount just ended. Now it’s *one dollar more expensive*. You heard that right. One sweet dollar. Masterplan. That’s how we roll.

It’s the AI start-up dream. After years of slog, Nvidia offers a $500mn investment. No-brainer? Not if you’re Hugging Face. The FT reveals today the group rejected the offer in a sign of the growing divide over what, exactly, AI should be. An #FTEdit 🧵 on the “anti Silicon Valley” AI company 👇

it's been nearly 2 years since I wrote this (free to read) piece about Signal: why you want it, how it works, why it's better than most alternatives. I even included an example of how little information Signal can hand over if it gets a warrant for a phone number law enforcement already has

Quick lunch break to note that I finished S25 of Silent Witness last night. I was looking forward to seeing Sam Ryan again but by crikey that was a deathly 6 episodes of telly. The ongoing plot shoehorned into episodes that were otherwise forgettable. Once again the cast is universally fantastic.

In the words of another Labour leader, I’d rather have smallpox.

All their advisors and analysts are telling them this is a "big thing" like personal computers in the 1980s or the internet in the 1990s, and they are naturally frightened of being left behind. The fact that it isn't like that at all (for the general public) is unfortunate.

That last question reminded me that my first Primary School was so small, it had multiple years per class, rather than multiple classes per year. The classes didn't have names or numbers. Just "the one you were in". Looking at the website, they appear to have names now: Foxes and Squirrels.

What was your first favourite song growing up? Answers suggest the question implies pop rather than, say, "The Wheels on the Bus". So from January 1979: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick - Ian Dury and the Blockheads. My pal Trevor and I belted it out it in the playground of Risley Lower Grammar.

I've been saying 'get off facebook' for so long I've worn a groove, but maybe get off of facebook?

Is it about time that someone told @wiltshiremuseum.bsky.social that their "Tourmaline stone axe" is actually made of cheese?

The desire to question the attribution of Shakespeare's works is really fascinating, the latest being a new book about Emilia Bassano (who is well worth reading about; she's a brilliant and illuminating character through which to examine Elizabethan England).

My last @backlisted.bsky.social (for the moment!) and I think it’s an absolute belter. Ian Patterson is just incredible; I could listen to him talk about books all day. The rest of us are pretty good too.

You *definitely* want to hear the full explanation.

and then the sensible ones realise that the machine made to encode human knowledge and language as vectors has just shown that those vectors do in fact encode human knowledge and language, which includes man:woman | king:queen

there's a moment in the development of modern AI systems where they exhibit transfer learning (the system has built heuristics that make it more efficient) or they use vectors efficiently to encode man:woman | king:queen and the researchers building them have the hairs on the neck stand up...

100 years since John Logie Baird stole his first picanic basket.

As I reach S25 of Silent Witness, I have learned that I originally gave up after S20, with the "buried in Mexico" storyline. I may have seen one or two after that. There isn't enough investigation, but far too much "leads behave stupidly to create peril". I'm pressing on. The cast is always great.

Just to say you can spend your February how we spent our December switching between the pottery show and Traitors Ireland and filling your life with Siobhán McSweeney. Why would you not?