Was at a Christmas party with a load of clergy last night and as some people were leaving they found a person collapsed on the street outside so the Verger took over and called an ambulance and sent all the clergy away because "if they wake up surrounded by priests that'll just make things worse"

When you tell a story - and even the hardest news piece is a story - who you cast as subjects, people with agency and feelings and humanity, is one of the most central decisions you make in the process of crafting it. People making stories tell on themselves all the time in that aspect.

it's BIG SHIP BLOCKS WAYERWAY but on an English scale

oooooooh bloody HELL www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Someone much more clever than I am pointed out that Frosty the Snowman could be considered a golem, so I ran with that.

An old Swedish idiom for someone who isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer is hjulet snurrar men hamstern är död. It means “the wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead.” * this is, of course, also the title of one of my books (and did I mention it makes the PERFECT last-minute Christmas gift?)

3yo: “daddy’s phone is in his pocket!” me: “that’s true!” 3yo: “why isn’t mummy’s phone in her pocket?” me: “… buckle up, kiddo, we’re gonna discuss five hundred years of fashion and misogyny”

Britain's finest news source

It's Julmust on the rocks

Russian logistics ship ADLER is at anchor IN Sweden. Possibly broken down. Usually runs heavy weapons to Russian bases in Africa / Middle East. Was inspected by military aircraft 2h ago. Swedish Coast Guard just arrived to area.

I'm going to start muting all the accounts who basically post things like "this nazi is a nazi!!” I consider it all ragebait for clicks these days. Yes they're Nazis. What shall we *do about it?*

All research is iterative if you're forgetful enough.

Playing Crusader Kings as the Kingdom of Cyprus, I finally defeated the Mongol Empire. Now I can get back to the real enemies: the other Greeks.

Every time there's a breaking story about a celeb's treatment of women, everyone in the book world asks, "Is it finally Walliams?" Well, it finally is.

At first I was afraid/I was petrified. I still am. But I was at first as well.

Tag yourself, I'm gone to the cheeses.

Thank you to the Fighting Fantasy game books for teaching me words like 'abeyance' at an early age.

Daydreaming phrases from five other languages… 5. Gone to the cheeses (Chilean Spanish) 4. Thinking about blue almonds (Polish) 3. Dreaming of green horses on walls (Romanian) 2. Cooking pulao in your mind (Urdu) 1. Swimming in watermelon juice (Egyptian Arabic)

For every person who is enabling fascists right now, there is a person who is enabling *them*. And a person who is enabling them, and so on. And eventually it gets to you, and you have to You, yourself make that hard decision to stop enabling an enabler.

Hi, I'm looking for someone who can edit video to collaborate with on a project. I'm not going into more details than that, because I above all want to find someone I already know, and who knows me. Is it you?

You lot need Dick Van Dyke singing Let's Go Fly a Kite on his 100th birthday more than you know.

CONFIRMED: Eileen Higgins, a Democrat, will be the new mayor of Miami. She'll be the city's first Democratic mayor since the 1990s. She flipped the office from Republicans, and does so easily. She leads the DeSantis-endorsed Emilio González 59/41 right now with most ballots counted.

Anarchy in the disUnited Kingdom.

one of the funniest pieces The Onion has done all year, and it's been a GOOD YEAR. theonion.com/oprah-pursue...

Exam is over now

I was not expecting so many likes! We're gonna need a bigger MÖP.

Re-reading Lord of the Rings at the moment, and I'd forgotten how relentlessly Gandalf drags Hobbits. "Of course, The Enemy has overlooked one thing: dipshits such as yourself, Frodo. Buffoons with fat feet and shithole burrows. Yes, perhaps your painful loser energy may surprise Sauron yet!"

There's a great similar story about how it was time travellers who killed Jesus by voting for Barabbas.

The entirely circular venn diagram between ableism and transphobia strikes again, to no one’s surprise.

A lot of people in Sweden point to Trump and say, "look. That's what we made an alliance with." And sorry, but if Sweden was *not* in Nato then it would probably be worse. Today's government would be making EMBARRASSING love to everything Trump says or does, in order to get him to protect them.

Back in 2005 I proposed the toast 'Vive la France' when they rejected the Lisbon Treaty. But far-right people hating the EU so much has definitely changed my views, in a way that the endless info-slop from The Institutions never could.

Feel free to add any that I've missed! I'll be confined and writing an exam for a few hours today, but I'll catch up when I'm released.

Broke: "I am a burner" Woke: "I am a freezer." Bespoke: "I am a military seal"

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

🇸🇪🪖 One like = one thing Swedish military professionals (and nerds) love to say.

This is the crux of the AI issue, and which leads us to what, I think, is a more useful question than "are you for or against AI?" Namely: Are you for or against this new version of the concentration of capital plus its dispossession of human labour?

New candidate for “Most Canadian Headline Ever” just dropped. (Truly, a “worthy initiative”.)

ripley: i have met dumb men but you are truly insane kirk, holding flower: it will work ripley: she is a xenomorph queen kirk: i have experience with single moms

I say it a lot, but if you want to make an immediate impact get involved in local politics, especially if you're in a smaller community. Attend a planning board meeting. Run for town meeting. Meet with town employees. You can *actually* change things and make your community better.

Even better, they used the Sylvester Stallone version, so all real Judge Dredd fans will laugh at them.

I'm sceptical about whether AI can use social theories accurately, but in this case I need to accept the word of Cas Mudde about whether chatGPT has deployed Cas Mudde correctly.

I hate it when people misuse the word “decimate” and one tenth of me will die on this hill

This is the classic elite British discourse, where something is always seen as more credible because it is shoddy in an elite kind of way. The iron cage of amateurism or something.

I need to do a line-by line syllable by syllable *discourse analysis* of this headline. Over a pint [!!] In Oxford [!!!!!] We may have [!!!??!!] Stumbled upon [!!!!!] The.... HOLY GRAIL OF AGRICULTURE [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

[Th]ree shumtugu-wood structures outside of Sh[uruppak?] St[ar?] -eight signs missing- [The] r[ise?/return?] of LUGAL Game of Thro[? ending unreadable/lost] bsky.app/profile/news...

Why do they keep putting pilots in charge of these projects? When will the sailors get a chance?

I buy this head canon honestly.

I'm just waiting for the longevity stem cell start-up called Ar-Pharazôn.

"AI will survive, but the speculative bubble surrounding it is a sign of a deeper structural problem — the cost of which, when finally realized, will fall most heavily on the working class." interesting analysis theconversation.com/the-ai-bubbl...