I always say I’m a winter person - I like the dark and the long nights - but even I’d started to forget what the sun feels like.

Nothing quite like walking into your kitchen to find one of the cats has unpacked a mouse across the floor

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

The Paralympics start today and WE HAVE A HEIST????

Today I learned that in the late 1840s ‘exploded’ was used as a term for something that had gone out of style and was Over (as in, ‘shiny grey velour sofas are exploded’) and I love this

I really don’t like the video of the ship being torpedoed. It’s not particularly graphic, but when you know exactly what a torpedo does to a ship and you know people in the navy, it’s the kind of thing you wish you could unsee.

Everyone in Bath today is wearing the wrong clothes. Tights and boots? Wrong. Shorts? Wrong. Light jacket? Wrong. Full-length padded coat? Wrong. Waterproof? Wrong. Everyone is either too hot or too cold. Nobody knows what to wear. We have come to know only rain: anything else is mystifying.

A friend of writers in the #HouseOfLords - thanks to our Chair Tim Clement-Jones for highlighting the need for an #AI license to better protect the work of creators 🙏 We're keenly awaiting the government's report and economic analysis of #ArtificialIntelligence and #Coypright due later this month.

This is exciting: I’ll be on a panel talking about the Fight Like A Girl anthologies at Llandeilo Lit Fest in April. I haven’t done any events for AGES so I’m really looking forward to it - especially as it’s on home turf, just down the road from where I grew up 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Imagine if the media got behind efforts to make our country a better place to live. Imagine the pride we would feel if our country was considered one of the happiest places to live. If we were known around the world for equality, the environment, health... rather than misery, racism and transphobia.

Actor David Walmsley (whose work you might have enjoyed in The Terror or Slow Horses) is raising money for two mental health charities and one supporting people in the entertainment & events industry, by running 30 marathons in 30 days - with no rest days. www.givewheel.com/fundraising/...

It occurs to me that if the government did force UK writers to hand over their work to the big AI companies, that would now among other things mean contributing to the development of US advanced weapon systems.

Greg Davies: Great task, well done. Didn‘t eat a thing. Persephone: Thank you. Alex Horne: Ah. Well. Let’s take another look at that pomegranate.

It is truly insane that a Doctor Who *spin-off* created this. Not even the main show. That's how powerful the Whoniverse brand was in 2009. Not trying to make a wider point here, just, yeah, maybe I am. That powerful!

I'm watching the SAG / Actor awards show, and it's striking how different the tone is: so many of the speeches talk about the importance of unions, of peers supporting one another, of art, of empathy and joy. Harrison Ford's lifetime achievement acceptance speech was so beautiful, it made me cry.

In the Museum of Night, sunlight is held in tinted jars, muted, just enough that vampires can stand and stare. Such a dangerous pleasure!

The ongoing issue of LLM training chipping away at copyright is exhausting. So many writers whose work has been stolen to train these LLMs responded to the government's consultation, and with every single question it was made abundantly clear that our views & rights didn't matter. Just our words.

I’ll just leave this here… (Btw, if you listen to Susan’s War vol 1, you can double up with Assets of War - written by me and directed by brilliant Lisa Bowerman) www.bigfinish.com/search_resul...

Damn Harrison Ford should get an Actors Award for Best Actors Award speech

Welcome to another week of fresh whatthefuck

Nope. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Plebs League pamphlet Do Your Own Thinking, 1930s

‘The world’s top AI models can be prompted to generate near-verbatim copies of bestselling novels, raising fresh questions about the industry’s claim that its systems do not store copyrighted works.’ www.ft.com/content/e4b7...

While we sit around to find out how bad exactly it all is, a bit of cheer: the best baguette of Paris competition was won by a Sri Lankan who appears to have started as a dish washer in restaurants and eventually trained as a Boulanger. www.paris.fr/pages/la-mei...

Quentin Tarantino should have been run out of town for speaking ill of this man

The reason The Terror is such a remarkable piece of not just television but also of both storytelling and art is because it was sensitively yet radically adapted by David Kajganich, who treated it (and still treats it) as a real labour of love.

Breaking: *Asif Aziz's mass evictions of Londoners appear to be BACK ON *Sadiq Khan personally demands immediate response from the landlord *Leading homelessness charity cuts ties with the Aziz family and refuses donation *Questions over legality of paperwork www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...

I love how this reads as if Ralph Vaughan Williams’ was intent on reviving the dead villagers and creating an undead horde of zombie folk singers.

It’s funny how you can have “concerns” about the election process when you lose, but if you win then it’s “a great victory for democracy and the British people”, isn’t it?

just stumbled upon an antique shop named 'the past & the curious' which

One of our cats lost his collar the other day. He does it a lot - but he just came in through the cat flap CARRYING his lost collar, dropped it on the floor and stood next to it howling until I came to tell him what a clever boy he is.

The envelope was pretty funny too

This is really cool. I didn’t know much about stepwells - other than they existed - but any kind of proactive water management (supplying grey water to data centres instead of letting them drain aquifers? Revolutionary!) right now can only be a good thing www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

30

Hellraiser chic is here and I’m honestly not mad about it

[Out in the street] Me [chanting]: swifts swifts- Passersby: SWIFTS Postman, waving his letters: SWIFTS SWIFTS SWIFTS!

With stories by Danie Ware, Juliet McKenna, Anna Smith Spark and many others, Fight Like A Girl #2 was a feature on award short lists this year. Find out why people love it so much: wizardstowerpress.co...

Genuinely one of the weirdest books I’ve read in a very long time. Annihilation meets Picnic at Hanging Rock and Midsommar, with a little bit of Lockwood & Co, Wicker Man and Midwich Cuckoos. Everyone knows you don’t go to Almanby - but that’s exactly where Rachel, Heather & Antonia are going.

Fantastic interview. Everyone should read it:

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

Bath Abbey lit up in the Ukrainian colours tonight

New rule: if you go back to someone's house and they have no books, not only do you not sleep with them, you invite them over to your basement for a wonderful cask of Amontillado. It's fine. They won't get it. They won't be missed.

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

I’m posting too much about serious, real life stuff and I hate it. Have a photo of this rather lovely portrait of Matilda Blanche Gibbs that I took in Tyntesfield instead.

“The Reform slogan is family, community, country.” Look, even if you ignored *literally every other thing they’ve been saying* this very specific phrasing should set all your alarm bells ringing. Because we’ve heard it before.

Oh, it sucks when someone steals your shit, doesn't it www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/t...

Niles: And what does this serum of yours do, Cousin Jonathan? Scarecrow: It’s an airborne compound that causes fear and terror. Fraiser: Ah, just like Niles’s new aftershave.

I accidentally tapped on a publishing ad over the weekend, and it seems to have retrained my instagram advertising algorithm (at least for now) to just show me loads of books. It’s wonderful.