I'm still browsing mid-70s Argos catalogues. "Blind your friends for three quid"

Apart from the After Eight gun carriage, this also fascinates me because it's that brief period when digital watches could have red LED digits. By the time kids started wearing them to school, they were all LCD.

Please be upstanding and bow your heads, express maximum respect as the silver plated After Eight gun carriage transports the box of empty wrappers to their final resting place in the green bin

Reform is a private Limited company majority-owned by one man, in the interests of making money for that man and the shareholders. We should casually talk about the inevitability of a Reform government the same way we’d talk about casually selling the country to Dyson or Wetherspoons.

I'm guessing Gove also wouldn't use these words to describe a white person of either sex.

Do Americans think that recorded history began with the beer-hall putsch?

Friday.

Nobel committee going "well, normally we wouldn't... but hey, maybe people will now stop reminding us of the Kissinger thing"

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Bloody hell. Farage seems to have taken money for a tribute to Ian Watkins without doing even the most basic research.

🔴 Last week the Free Speech Union got a High Court writ to prevent the publication of a list of its donors So we decided to investigate who *does* fund Toby Young's outfit Wanna see? 🫣 New on Democracy for Sale: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/who-funds-...

Whoever came up with the name “Ewok Powell” to describe Tommy Robinson should take the rest of the year off.

This lad doesn't need a dinner party, he needs counselling.

You may have heard of Enheduanna, the princess, priestess, and poet who is also the earliest named author in history. Well, a tiny broken artefact made of lapis lazuli preserves the name of Ilum-pālil, her hairdresser. It is a fragmentary cylinder seal, excavated from a tomb in the city of Ur.

😮

I think the only advice I'd give to people new to Bluesky is that maybe you don't need to repost 50 pieces of Bad American News every single day, particularly if you're not actually an American

There is always an XKCD

Old tweets being deleted now

Nothing says "party of normal people" like signing up a multi-millionaire who, without the money, would be the sort of person you want to deport.

Post a pic of the venue where you saw your first concert and the band or artist

Today in “Dudes Rock”: A dude playing Dire Straits’s “Sultans of Swing” guitar solo on…a recorder.

Considering it a sequel to the Werner Herzog dream I had a few years ago, where he was giving a lecture about wanking in the Coventry branch of JD Sports: sat in a wingback chair, trousers round his ankles, joylessly pounding his lad, intoning “we do whatever we must to encourage the seed to emerge”

9th anniversary of this extremely confusing headline

I learned about it as a child, as one of my aunties emigrated to America, but I'd not thought about it in ages. A bit like some of the language differences, the Americans maintained the older approach, while we changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_utensil_etiquette

Well, these are the kind of scenes we don't want to see. *snigger*

I think it's very important that Rupert Lowe's "Million Nonce March" gets widespread media coverage. Critical to amplify diverse voices.

A lot of smoke but some fire here. thedreydossier.substack.com/p/trump-isnt...

This is ridiculous. Macclesfield are 6th tier.

It's the 3rd of January 1939, your name is professor James Smith and you are staring at a drawing of a fish. It's not a regular fish. It is a completely impossible fish.

People are talking about starter packs again. It'll be block lists next. Can we get Ofcom to ban Bluesky?

So... I've learned that "grok" was already a word*. Am I really slow and everyone else knew? I just thought Musk was trying to make up fake SF-type words, like when we used to play Doctor Who as kids. The Brain of Zeligoxx etc (*coined in a 1961 Heinlein book, but it seems to have gained traction)

Very heavy cormorant

Latest series of Shetland has two fairly major actors from Guilt and I can see this is going to be slightly confusing.

Once upon a time there was a case called TwitterJokeTrial and on that case was a defence solicitor (with whom I worked on the appeal) and that defence solicitor had a daughter. And this is what daughter has (righty) to say about Twitter/X now.

These people are utterly deluded. The BBC has been getting hardly any sincere engagement on there for ages. It's pure bile. That flood can't be stemmed.

Re: the Bhutan food video... it sounds trite, but honestly, trying food from different countries in a deliberate and curious way* could fix so many of our too-online social breakdown issues. (*i.e. not just your "usual" at the local Indian, and definitely not ordering egg and chips, Terry Collier)

The "foods of the world in NYC" guys are on Instagram, another platform I can't be arsed to use. Someone in a position of influence, get them on Bluesky!

This is wonderful. Are these guys on Bluesky, I wonder?

Oh, shove your 'smart speaker' up your arse, Radio 3. "All without touching a button!" I DON'T MIND TOUCHING A BUTTON! I CAN COPE WITH TOUCHING A FUCKING BUTTON! Good morning.

Forgive me I have deleted the tracking parameters you added to the share link So invasive Tiresome And long

We're going to be seeing a lot of this, and in every case, look for the blue-tick income. They'll only protect the lovely precious (*cough* white) girls when it pays them in social media engagements.

I started series 1 of Listen with Other a couple of days ago, and can definitely recommend. Perfect for summer strolls, cosy winter evenings or apocalyptic storms.

Oof, stay safe, west country friends.

Make it viral.

I call on my party and my government to remove themselves entirely from X and communicate with the public where they actually participate online and can be protected from such illegality.

Eurgh, back to mild, grey, damp, still... meh weather.

A country that blows up foreign fishing boats for no reason is one that will shoot its own citizens for no reason.