My answer is Ballard. Not only the perversity of "Crash" is chillingly parallel to that of LLM-generated atrocities, but this passage from "High Rise" describes a strain of sociopathy all too present in the narcissistic strain of people who are Very Online

Found this quite interesting (in Danish but you can hit translate in the browser) on the Greenland situation, how it isn't as clear cut as it might appear, with the Greenlanders and Danes not exactly in lockstep www.dr.dk/nyheder/poli...

Absolutely top notch WTF paragraph from a footballer's Wikipedia biography

RIP King

Noticing an uptick in will/inheritance dispute posts on Reddit legal advice subs after Christmas, wonder if it's a coincidence or a result of vexatious family dinners

Catching up on Stranger Things and can't take it seriously because every time they say Vecna I just think of the Vectron sketch from Mitchell and Webb

Alan Clark always comes to mind when this topic is raised

Fascinating thread this. For me the ones that drop off quickest are comedians and comedy writers - and it's not even because the comedy is offensive by modern standards, it just quickly becomes forgotten

there are no limits to what you can do with a car and still be allowed to drive again one day

Two ways to read this. One is “she lost on every substantive claim, completely failed in her attempts to ban trans staff from the workplace, and won mild procedural victories against her employers handling of her case”. The other way is, I guess, “point one is longer so it must be more important”

Really struggling to like Pluribus. It feels very much like Lost (pejorative), as opposed to e.g. Severance which feels very much like Lost (complimentary)

What is up with the thumb on the middle hand. What is it doing up there

Absolutely sensational if this is the Pagliacci origin story

sickos.jpeg www.itv.com/news/meridia...

BBC website's standards have been dropping through the floor of late but even I'm shocked at how bad the state of literacy is, not knowing how to spell palate correctly

I think at this point if you're including Diane Abbott - a woman who has never held government office, has been a backbencher since 2020, and is scarcely a government ally - on your list of political wrongdoers, we all know exactly what your real concerns are

Four boomers on a table in my train carriage. All of them with tones enabled on their phones. A cacophony of pings, whistles and boings. How do these people live

Saw the Running Man tonight and it was... okay. And that's fine. More films should be just okay

Can't believe I haven't seen a single pic of Mamdani and Trump with the green lines drawn in yet

Possibly the worst epistemological mistake of my life was, as a 90s/00s atheist, assuming that because I disagreed with religious people on matters of faith, they had nothing worth saying on matters outwith faith

Walts are absolutely fascinating characters. If he rocked up in an old regimental blazer and a couple of medals no one would have clocked him, but its not enough so he has to go full-on Admiral and pretend he's Lord Lieutenant as well

Another incredibly confusing day of getting the news via BSky when you have the 47th president's name muted in your feed

Heard about this over the years, but never watched it until now. Absolutely fantastic, they literally don't make them like this any more. 40 years old so slower paced yet also at a breakneck pace at the same time, in a way that modern series absolutely refuse to do

Perfect home if, like me, you dream of becoming an annoying brutalist version of Jonathan Creek

James Watson absolutely in the category of "I thought he was already dead", for me

I love my football, but seeing this banner makes me seriously want to reconsider the obsession

Just called across a cafe to ask my other half to pick up some napkins while she was at the counter, and the gesture I made for them was as if I were a freakishly giant referee signalling VAR

Phenomenal thread

Sadly I think the other reason for this is that a lot poppy sellers & RBL volunteers are now either too infirm or have died of old age in the last few years - fewer places to get them from

The Mary Earps memoir is extraordinarily awful, or at least the extract in today's Guardian is. Appallingly self-centred and vindictive. Does her absolutely no favours, I cannot understand why she thought this was a good idea

*Rio Ferdinand voice* Legion d'honneur! Legion d'honneur! Legion d'honneur!

Probably earlier this week. Was scanning some documents with my phone camera, did one side, needed to turn the page over, so I swiped the phone screen and then got puzzled when it didn't work

Constitution nerds: doesn't this sort of thing need an Act of Parliament? Like the titles stripped from German princes in WW1?

It's that time of year again

Surely everyone is by now familiar with the Viz magazine house style and can spot this for what it is?

It's increasingly obvious that Labour's strategy - call it Starmerism, Blue Labour, whatever - has got it badly wrong. It has alienated the party's core vote while failing to win over those leaning to Reform. There was no shortage of people warning them they were getting it wrong either.

The funny thing about this saga is that she was already famous, found the body and got him a state funeral and herself an MBE. Absolutely didn't need to make a libellous film to say "needless to say, I got the last laugh", but did it anyway, which ironically was a very Alan Partridge thing to do

One of the worst changes Britain last twenty years has been the ever-growing miserliness of our national character, the moneysavingexpertisation of an entire nation which is now convinced you can scrimp and save yourself to success

Editor: You get those photos of Chris Tarrant and Cookie Monster? Photographer: Sure did boss, real fuckin respectful just like you asked

Think one of the key things why adverts are such a thing with them is that people in ads are usually enjoying themselves and having a nice life; seeing non-white people be happy is something that drives your typical racist absolutely mad

Idle enshittification anecdata: restaurant we went to tonight got slammed with a string of Deliveroo orders just as we ordered, and they lost our order in the chaos, and were so slapdash we decided to cut our losses and leave

Lol @ someone forgetting to pull the AWS ads during half-time of the football tonight, where the semiautomated offside isn't working because of the AWS downtime

Walking past this place in Forest Gate always made me double-take

Makes me really sad that Heist Podcast is on indefinite hiatus, it would have been a hell of an episode this week

Need to know if they were as hard done by as they say, or if the food/service was actually just plain bad

us-east-1 going down seems to come earlier and earlier every year

So lots of people defend Starmer as a proper football fan but this is an argument against - fans all across Europe know that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans make Millwall look like the Quakers

The BBC are accidentally running the subtitles to Mrs Marple over the Mercury Prize, and it’s rather wonderful. A few of lines could plausibly have been written by Jarvis.

Attitudes to generative AI in C21st are like television in C20th - some people have become clearly addicted to it, while others will performatively declare they don't use it all