Discworld QOTD, from Sourcery “He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest.”

The Adelaide Writers Festival now wrecked by the Adelaide Festival Board, half of which was appointed late last year: a marketing executive; a former politician; a local councillor/real estate agent; an airport manager; a lawyer; a media consultant; and a banker. Another public arts takeover fiasco.

Please repost if you love Tim Walz and Jacob Frey -- and if you despise the the Mango Mussolini!

Seeing exact same defences of X that we saw when there were calls to pull the plug on the dangerous poison that was Russia Today. I'm not even going out on a limb when I say that X is far, far worse than RT ever was and that's a very low bar indeed. The case for it to be shut down is a no brainer.

Buckminster Fuller’s “dymaxion” projection is maybe the best look at Greenland because the other equal area maps squeeze it into a pancake. It’s pretty big regardless, and it belongs to the Greenlanders who are still fighting Denmark for their independence.

Brilliant article on the grave threat to European security, and how unprepared our political elite are to deal with this situation. It has massive ramifications for Australia, as our wealth relies on maintaining regional peace, and supporting peace & security in Europe.

Amanda Gorman wrote this poem for Renee Good and that’s it for me tonight.

Anthropogenic Global Warming & Fire 🧵 www.theguardian.com/australia-ne... From 1987... “Beer says the devastating Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983 had driven interest inside CSIRO for research. A national bushfire research unit was established, and he moved to Melbourne to work.”

For every minute Britons spend on Twitter, they spend: 35 minutes on YouTube 35 minutes on Facebook/Messenger 11 minutes on Instagram 7 minutes on TikTok 5 minutes on Snapchat. If the UK government wants to scale down on Twitter than it's really not a problem for directly reaching people.

The richest man in the world invented a child porn machine. He could have ended hunger.

DIFFERENT WARS, SAME PROPAGANDA ...a montage showing the direct parallels between the rhetoric around the Iraq war & the current rhetoric around Venezuela. Jon Stewart 🎥 #IraqNeverAgain

New world order AFR fill-in

Colin and Sophie Hortman, the children of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, are asking Trump to remove the false posts about their parents' killing:

There was no RC after Port Arthur, nor after the Lindt Cafe. An RC cannot take place before the surviving perpetrator is tried. That's likely to be some time because there will be numerous witnesses. This is just a concerted campaign by the conservative media and LNP operatives to wedge Labor.

There are people who are eligible to vote now who were at primary school when the referendum was held. To suggest that there can be no revisiting of Brexit is to disenfranchise those people - millions and growing - who were too young to vote in important ways that tend to affect them most.

Deputy Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney, Jess Miller

Chevron donated to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration fund. Chevron’s CEO publicly praised trump’s energy agenda. Chevron donations: 94% Republican, 6% Democrat. Chevron is the ONLY foreign oil company allowed to operate in Venezuela. Follow the money.

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss: 🇦🇺 0 🇨🇦 0 🇩🇰 0 🇫🇮 0 🇫🇷 0 🇩🇪 0 🇮🇸 0 🇮🇪 0 🇮🇹 0 🇯🇵 0 🇳🇱 0 🇳🇴 0 🇵🇹 0 🇪🇸 0 🇸🇪 0 🇬🇧 0 🇺🇸 530,000 There’s a lesson there.

Heed the message. - Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It's just prescient, and eerie, how this fits what's happening right now. #movie #messagefromthepast

As the year draws to a close, I’m signing off 2025 with a magical find! An ancient amber bear. Carved some 10,000 years ago, it washed up on a beach at Fanø, Denmark, from a submerged Mesolithic settlement in the North Sea. ✨ Happy New Year all! ✨ National Museum of Denmark 📷 by me #Archaeology

You might find this interesting substack.com/@alanrusbrid...

How dads comment on someone leaving the lights on, around the world...   5. It’s like the Blackpool illuminations in ’ere (UK English) 4. Are we living in Bethlehem? (Croatian) 3. We’re not in Versailles (French) 2. Is it Diwali again? (Hindi) 1. Was your grandpa Nikola Tesla? (Serbian)

My survey of the first quarter of the 21st century www.independent.co.uk/voices/uk-po...

I do not like your AI slop I do not like it, make it stop I do not want an AI house I do not want an AI mouse No AI box. No AI fox— That AI slop can go kick rocks I would not AI here or there I would not AI anywhere No AI car, no AI czar Your AI slop is killing trees I do not like it, let me be!

The sales have been counted and verified... We can now reveal we served an amazing 2.7 MILLION SCONES over the year. Plus, every single bake and brew you've bought at one of our cafés directly supports our work looking after the places you love. Thank you.

My final newsletter of 2025: We're in The Enshittifinancial Crisis, the fourth stage of enshittification, where companies turn on their shareholders. Unprofitable, unsustainable AI threatens future of venture capital, private equity and the markets themselves. www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshitti...

Another First Nations woman dead in police custody taking the total to 59 Indigenous deaths in the hands of police in just 2 years. We have shown how quickly we can act against racism towards Jewish Australians. Why has that same urgency never existed for First Nations ppl?

Amazing that this review paper from 2021 just became my most cited paper of my 30+ yr career. I am honored to have been the lead first co-corresponding author with @ChiaWang8. COVID is indeed airborne--as are most other respiratory viruses. @ucsandiego.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/full/10....

The former ambassador to Denmark for the United States, Rufus Gifford, posted this video on his Facebook account: Ht: @hpsc24.bsky.social

It took 9 years and 3 billion miles to get this shot. Pluto’s icy Mountains. Thankyou NASA ☺️

That time Barbara Walters destroyed Trump. 🙌💪👏✊️👇

99% of what you need to understand about the relentless murder of our living planet, in one word: CAPITALISM

Another beautiful Shchedryk performance amidst ruins. It was set in what used to be a DTEK thermal power plant — now destroyed by russia. The contrast between russia’s destructive nature and the Ukrainian will to create beauty even in the darkest times is palpable.

Something else that will be a little bit triggering for racists, my favourite thing. #auspol #AlwaysWasAlwaysWillBe

Premium: How The AI Bubble bursts in 2026 - The largest funder of AI data centers is pulling out, OpenAI and Anthropic need more money than ever during a massive VC liquidity crisis - and NVIDIA's debt-powered customer base is quietly shrinking. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-...

CEO of Lush says that if you don't agree with his stance in support of the Palestinian people and Gaza Shop somewhere else I've been a fan of Lush for years, just wish isn't wasn't so expensive! - Still, another reason to keep shopping there ☺️

The power of China’s industrial chokeholds was shown in 2025. The country’s share of global manufacturing value added exceeds one-third, giving it the power to disrupt supply chains overnight

Source: Time Out Worldwide search.app/AwG1m

Ancient woodland flattened. Protected species ignored. “Compensation” that may never work. If this is Biodiversity Net Gain, who is it really for? Rachel Fuller reports eastangliabylines.co.uk/environment/...

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Do any of us know the rough costs of a privatised national health system? Well here are some of the wild costs that you could actually pay if Farage gets his way. I shit you not, We should all be so grateful for our NHS which under the SNP will always be free. www.newsweek.com/watch-britis...

🤖🫧💥 futurism.com/artificial-i...

Have you ever heard someone go off, and their words are so perfectly chosen, so well said in that moment, that you’re in awe? You think, “There’s nothing to add here,” and you applaud in your head. That’s exactly this. Pure perfection. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Came across Clarissa Dickson-Wright’s autobiography in a charity shop. It is everything a devotee of weird history could hope for

Around half of San Francisco is without power right now and something like 1/3rd of intersections I drove through had waymos stopped in the middle of them making a dangerous situation even worse. Do not let Waymo into your city.