The boating lake at Mill houses Park in Sheffield. Stranded swan boats cast a sequence of shadows over the ice.

AND, 1st time *ever*, as we have a decent supply of them small-patch printed, we put our Doctor Who (4th Doctor Tom Baker) scarf lanyards 10% off! Overseas folks: I put 2 in the package for price of 1 since shipping is so high. Link torchandarrow.etsy.com/listing/8227... Shop torchandarrow.etsy.com

Wow! Matty's been so quiet all series and then comes out with that. Also, that first question was technically two questions, but then the next question was more of a wish, so it all balances out. #TheTraitors

I was uncertain about how much to say about this in public, but I do have a small platform here and on this occasion I guess I’ll stand on it.

Daniel Levy on what’s really happening. open.substack.com/pub/danielle...

Reminiscent of the time the Archbishop of Canterbury said maybe poor people should be fed and was accused of “virtue signalling”

If you’re in the UK & are so inclined, from Dec 25 to Jan 5 you can get the Kindle edition of THE RIVER HAS ROOTS for 99p as part of their 12 Days of Kindle event! This means in the UK you can also get that price matched at other etailers, like Kobo! Merry Christmas! www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/...

I remember Christmases dealing with mum's dementia, from the "your turn to explain why it's called Stinking Bishop" rota to trying to explain that my niece didn't hate the keyboard she'd got her, she'd just forgotten the hour she spent watching her play it. Adding in fake memories too? Horrific.

Tasha Suri's The Isle in the silver sea

🏳️‍⚧️✊ #OnlyConnect

Ok so The headline is a bit misleading. AI shows racist bias in that psychiatric model (not surprising) The slides issue is more complex--the AI detects markers that are correlated with race and then can't diagnose because it's been trained on too many white ppl (1/?) futurism.com/health-medic...

7am train from London to Sheffield, and it's one of the new 810 fleet! Very shiny and comfortable (OK, I'm in First, but Standard looks nice, too).

Mais je lis quasiment partout : "And is Wife" "Et sa femme" Elle avait un nom, cette dame : Michelle Singer Reiner Elle était actrice, productrice ET photographe. MERDE.

Rob Reiner, le producteur de Princess Bride, Misery, Stand by me et Quand Harry rencontre Sally est mort, possiblement assassiné. C'est bien triste, j'aimais son boulot à ce monsieur.

He ran towards the gunfire. He ran *towards* the gunfire.

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

When this guidance is published (given legal standing), as it almost certainly will be, as a trans man I will not be allowed to use non-unisex public toilets. Which is almost every public toilet. Just want that to sink in, there. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

At Barnsley to watch Leyton Orient play. Slightly ashamed to admit it's my first live match of the season. The afternoon sky is very pretty, but not that conducive to seeing any action on the pitch. #LOFC

This, by the way, is not a BBC problem. Sure plenty of people will respond happily to Robin’s stance as if it’s “anti-Beeb”. This is a problem with the world at large, a cruelty which has been stamped into the face of the compliant BBC, cos it knows its precarious place.

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett casually confirming that 2D of Gorillaz is non-binary now is not what I expected from this album promotion cycle but y’know, yeah, cool, good for them!

That’s it. I’m on the train home after the last of, what, 200 gigs this year? Thank you very much to every single person who has (voluntarily) watched me in 2025. I’m about to get hammered*. *I have just one of those little wines you can buy in M and S

Love is infinite. And we do not have to live in a cage.

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

One from September when conditions were right for #rainbowwings 🌈 Hummingbird #birds

I love all of this take. Also "frustration tolerance" is a wonderful turn of phrase, and it sounds less intimidating than the one we often use in Education, "productive struggle".

This is a genuine move against DEI, as the article points out, albeit a laughably petty one. Font readability matters to a lot of people, and mandating a (supposedly) less readable font is a statement of intent.

The Ladykillers was released on Dec 8th 1955, so turns 70 this week. Here’s John Finnemore celebrating Alec Guinness’ gang of Ealing ne’erdowells… pod.link/1614879928/e...

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. “Where the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. “People made of smoke, and cities made of song. “Somewhere there’s danger. Somewhere there’s injustice. And somewhere else, the tea is getting cold. “Come on, Ace – we’ve got work to do.”

Before he became one of the biggest names in literary SF, John Scalzi was a movie critic, and this post is a pretty good demonstration of why he was good at it Trading Places is/was an excellent film, it's a royal shame that Landis is such an utter shit

You gentlemen who think you have a mission to purge us of the seven deadly sins, should first sort out the basic food position, then start your preaching! That's where it begins.

This is such a kind and thoughtful thread. Minnesota Nice at its finest! Ya, sure! Read the whole thing for lots of helpful hints!

The fact that a second strike like that in an armed conflict is definitely a war crime should not completely negate the fact that *there is no war* and ALL the strikes are cold-blooded murder. The whole chain of command are murderers.

New post: a talk I gave at some years ago on Gallifreyan Constitutional and Criminal Law is now online! Because sci-fi legal systems are cool, damn it. Or, in the case of the Time Lords, quite the hypocritical mess. lmmyles.com/2025/12/03/t...

It me. I'm the light blue one, and @tkingfisher.com is the dark blue one....

ICYMI: new covers for Dominion of the Fallen in the US! New editions with introductions by @aptshadow.bsky.social and @kateelliottsff.bsky.social, plus bonus short stories Preorder now and save your receipt, there will be a preorder bonus.

This is all true but 1) under no definition are we currently at war with Venezuela under domestic US law 2) since we aren’t, the initial strike was just as much a murder as the follow up The failure to understand this by a huge range of actors is really driving me up the wall.

Introduce yourself with five animals you've seen in the wild (seen in very domestic circumstances but still made me go Wow!): Hedgehog Squirrel Rabbits Shrew Dragonfly

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild (Exotic list - things that made me go 'wow!') European praying mantis Purple gallinule Horned lizard Bearded vulture Ibex

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen. Amy MacDonald Carter USM Melrose Quartet Pet Shop Boys Pulp

This is a powerful gut punch of a letter, all the more powerful because of the clear force of love that lies behind the punch. To say more would be to lessen its impact. Read it.

Just arrived in Miami, FL for the Miami Book Fair. First bird I saw was a Muscovy duck! There were three standing in green around the highway ramp goes around. I was like, “ooooh, who is that!”, then I googled. They’re common here and look like this:

"Even pretending it makes me feel sexy and primal..." #ICYMI this week's stunning guest blog is about a topic close to my heart: #breeding! www.girlonthenet.com/blog/childfr...

Regret to inform you all that at the tender age of 40 I am becoming a train guy due to the magnetic physicality of anti-Nazi reverse-heist film THE TRAIN (1964)

President Elect of the @libdems.org.uk the wonderful @joshbabarinde.bsky.social says trans rights in parliament (and gets a non answer from the government spokes)

I would put it like this. Minority communities and the majority of the majority community have integrated v.well. However, a significant minority of the majority community and a significant majority of the political class are stubbornly refusing to integrate, and that is where the real problem lies.

*blinks* If it’s any consolation, this is the first time I’ve heard about this… I might have repeatedly memory-holed all references to it. I have never liked the Time Lords making Zoe and Jamie forget their experiences with the Doctor, but this case might be an exception.

I’m reading the John Higgs Doctor Who book as I’m falling asleep and there seems to be a whole section about a nearly-produced Troughton sex farce on the lines of “The Worm that Turned”, and I can only assume:

One of the things that the “immigration debate” in the UK really reveals is how little people actually know about how other people live. So much of immigration policy fails to work, even on its own terms, because it’s trying to solve problems that mostly exist in peoples heads

The Government's proposals for performative cruelty to migrants are awful, and will do nothing to unite Britain. To the extent that immigration is dividing Britain at all, it is not immigration itself, but a largely unfounded _fear_ of immigration that the Government is only stoking further.

Forgot to announce it, but I sold a short story to @jonathanstrahan.bsky.social which has weird time aliens, scholars and the fall of empires. Not sure when the book is coming out, but it's going to be one to watch.