I bet no-one can even remember why the guy did this. (It was a veteran who claimed the DEA was using anti-gravity drones to commit war crimes in Afghanistan)

any discussion of city transit improvement online ever

Accidentally messaged the subaltern periphery group chat "may your new year be full of imperial superprofits" and the metropole labor aristocrat group chat "may Babylon finally fall this year," so 2025 is starting off great 😒

NY needs whatever a constitutional monarchy on a municipal level is so it can have him continuing to do this in perpetuity while a string of sewer-socialist prime ministers actually govern

update

Watching the London New Year's Fireworks on repeat, and my main question is: why did Elphaba from Wicked turn to the audience and say "my fellow Londoners?"

A lot of us having been saying for years that oceans are battlefields. Welcome I guess, but don’t act like it’s big news.

“OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS.” …Um, why are you surprised?

If you start playing “You Suffer” by Napalm Death at precisely 23:59:58.684, it will end just as the new year begins. youtu.be/9Z1IGjr2cT0

This reminds me of my favourite Age of Empires 2 strategy - just an armada of cannon galleons, defended by some fire ships, scouring the coast of enemy cities.

Attempting to explain AO3

I'm also going to do a best of 2025 thread, but with the caveat that we have a toddler and had a second baby in summer, so I really only watched and read about 3 things in the whole year.

Parenting tip for those with young children (mine are now all too old): show them a YouTube video of fireworks between 8 and 9pm, sing Auld Lang Syne, declare it midnight and put them to bed.

To counter the decline narrative: I'm back on the Lache, where I went to school 25 years ago. A rough estate back then - whole streets of boarded up houses - and it's really night and day. So many houses have new roofs with solar and repointed brickwork. Public realm is materially better too.

I'm tired of tech companies naming their dystopian surveillance products after concepts from Lord of the Rings. That's why I'm delighted to see some tech companies are taking a radically different approach, and naming their dystopian surveillance products after concepts from Harry Potter.

Be gentle… my @theguardian.com debut. All about levenslied.

Modest proposal: forget redevelopment grants and levelling-up funds. Every couple of years, councils should compete to have the government detonate a truckload of semtex and fertiliser in their town centre

Manchester itself is doing fine nowadays because it had an extremely strong university presence that served as the basis for new industries and growth. But when I was a kid large swathes of town had been deserted for years - if you’ve read Elidor it was basically that.

The story, time and again, is that gains are broad and small and losses are localized and deep. There are towns in northern England that are generationally traumatized from the shutting of coal mines forty years ago.

Guten Morgen!

"Tracy, you are going to die." "What? No!" "...when I tell you who I'm dating! Squeaky Fromme. She is...difficult. Anywho,"

"its not clear what kind of move I was trying to do" is one of my all time favorite tweets, but as a public service I share this tumblr collection of the entire 26-tweet reply chain it was part of (courtesy of haywire4) www.tumblr.com/haywire4/173...

For anyone who thinks that being unable to understand jokes is a new Bluesky thing: I just remembered that this classic tweet got dozens of angry replies from people who it was a) pro-incel and b) pro-eating hot dogs off the ground

about to watch one of the all time greatest action movies

A master at work.

Tomorrow marks 10 years since the greatest piece of art of our generation

truly one of the geniuses of posting

One of the best to ever do it

When I was a kid, I thought the bit in Matilda where Trunchbull says she hates children and never was one herself was a funny surreal joke. Now I realise there are people who literally think that.

I asked if anyone knew any Hello Kitty trivia

Sad that he didn't more accurately liken it to the 2017 British heist film The Hatton Garden Job (probably not the worst Guy Ritchie ripoff Cockerney gangster movie I've ever seen, but definitely the worst one I've ever seen in a cinema)

German bank heist: Thieves use drill to steal €30m from savings bank

Coming to quite like the patented Parents' TV On Factory Settings look. Gives Paddington In Peru the crisp overlit digital ambience of a Children in Need skit broadcast live c. 2007.

Then: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Now: SimCity 4

Bad news for the people of Braunschweig – Tesco's trademarked your name

It’s the most powerful online sexual harassment tool ever invented and it’s driving people insane with parasocial relationships but the most prominent critics lie about water use.

(if you are getting jaw surgery and leg extensions to change your body to fit your imagined ideal racial form, it's clearly not "in your DNA")

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

The Second-Order Streisand Effect is a social phenomenon where if a party makes an effort to censor information, discussion and news about the censorship paradoxically leads to an increased awareness of Barbara Streisand, a musician whom most "Zoomers" would probably have otherwise never heard of

My parents are watching the Death in Paradise Christmas special. Totally unbelievable nonsense - why would there ever be a direct train from Swindon to Leeds? What, does it do the whole Cross-Country Route and then reverse out of Bristol onto the Great Western Main Line? *snort* highly unlikely

They say that, but I have hard photographic evidence of alien beings in Canary Wharf tube station

tfl.gov.uk/corporate/tr... reassuring news for anyone scared of meeting aliens while travelling in london

Then and now: Burnout 3: Takedown The only other game that came close that year was James Bond: Everything or Nothing, weirdly enough. Haven't played it for years, I doubt it's held up, but at the time I thought it was better than any of the actual Piers Brosban Bond films

Just noticed these two towers in Leeds, with the new one being built right next to, and slightly taller than, one with the brightest anti-aircraft strobe I've ever seen. Under/over on how long it takes the residents of the penthouse flat to go mad?

Interested in how you square the circle of “British people who post ‘burn down a migrant hotel’ during race riots shouldn’t be arrested” with “someone who posted pretty objectionable and racist things 8 years before they became a British citizen should be deported” and am sure someone will ask Nigel

Oh God, don't let the Americans see this headline/photo combination. We'll never live it down

Call me a purist, but I prefer my wine without the blood

(I think if you were fined 3% of your net worth, you'd probably think that was a pretty big fine. Median household wealth in the UK is just under £300k - if you assume that's split between 2 adults £150k each, the equivalent fine for the average Brit would be £4,500)

A fascinating case of "what variable have you actually accidentally measured?"