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

I've waited 3 years to make this post

Along with the racist fake grievance of "apologizing for being white," there's also the fact that a bunch of white folks seem to believe (and/or are willing to suggest) that even acknowledging systemic advantages they get for being white is the equivalent of being "forced to apologize."

British citizens and UK-based folks: please consider signing and sharing this petition: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/75... #RefugeesWelcome

Talking to a relative over Christmas who said she was leaving the WI over "this trans nonsense". It sent a cold rush through me, until she continued; saying that one very loud transphobe on committee was dominating meetings & she & many others were sick of it. These ghouls ARE hated by their peers.

pour one out to an icon www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Bill Bailey: Who did they give the honours to? Paul Chuckle: to me, to you

No. Next question.

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

Without references or citations, anything an LLM purports to tell you about the world should be taken no more seriously than if you heard it from the guy next to you on the bus on the way home from work.

Why is it that tech and AI boosters keep saying "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" when making arguments about AI's supposed inevitable dominance? Did they not read the story? The genie does, indeed, go back in the bottle. Maybe we should start there.

Happy to let you know that in the northern hemisphere we’ve now done the darkest two weeks in the year. All the other 50 weeks will be lighter than this.

one more thought: some loser is going to say "oh you're not supposed to look that closely at it" and like, no; if you put a high fidelity-looking image in your slides, then you are signaling to people that they should pay attention to it. if you want it to look like a crude sketch, sketch it crudely

What do you mean endometriosis behaves like a cancer (starves your organs and spreads) and is extremely painful and eventually leads to other complications that kills you and its also severely unstudied belittled underdiagnosed theres no cure forever not even for pain management

I asked ChatGPT when is bins

Thread. Human connection is a necessity. It is one reason I’m not entirely anti-social media. You get to read things like this.

I have to admit the only podcasts I bother to play the video versions of are those where the hosts have style I admire - I play them on YouTube so I can check out their outfits at the start. It annoys me when a podcast includes content you *have* to watch, as I often miss it and have to wind back

will also add - yes, this is my personal crusade - that turning podcasts into videos implicitly asks women to once again make more effort than men, as the bar for "camera-ready" for one gender is obviously higher than for the other

Oh I see! You underfund and run down unis & crash the economy so you have money to bribe young people to do this instead. I get it now. (Very important they don’t have independent questioning minds, analytic skills or any knowledge of history!)

Just gonna say this again for games sphere cus we get the same question: Networking doesn't mean schmoozing up to famous people, it means making friends with your peers. Then in 10 years, 20, one of you might be famous? And sure you're still helping each other cus well yeah friends. Make. Friends.

That time of year again!

Odd that Gender is a biological, immutable certainty AND something you can lose if you own the wrong dog.

Was talking to a kid and she’d never heard of cooties. What a lucky generation. All those cooties shots worked.

Die Hard was actually appropriated from pagans

In the middle of singing a hymn in church, my tiny Goddaughter climbed up onto the pew next to me, gently placed her hand on my chest, and said "Don't worry, I can teach you to sing."

12YO girl signed up to do “stand up comedy” at the talent show. 13YO boy decided to heckle her. Teacher started to tell the boy to leave her alone, but the 12YO comedian said “no, no, let him go, this is the closest he’s ever going to get to having a conversation with a girl.”

i post this story every christmas, and will keep doing so until it stops making me cry merry christmas xx

The Onion, non-stop winning

Merry Christmas! Not sure I've posted it for a couple of years, so here's the one festive comic I ever wrote, with art by Robert Ahmad and letters by @dchopkins.bsky.social.

Oh, I really like this interpretation. Of course it relies on the historic western misinterpretation of Palestinian houses and their construction and what the words ‘inn’ and ‘barn’ mean in that context, but. The point holds and I like it

Huge news.

Everything old is new again today!

I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?

[first day as a shepherd] boss: where are you going? me: [pointing] star boss: what? why me: [shrugging] baby

COMING IN 2026 - the return of Courier Z, criminal postwoman of the future. 7 new artists deliver their version of the character, including @tiredsai.bsky.social (see below). Pre-register now to track its progress. www.kickstarter.com/projects/nic...

Drew this Santa in @juliannebenford.bsky.social's Christmas card, copied from a stock image I found online, but still, quite pleased with it. Look at his little festive face and, more importantly, his not-too-awful-looking hands. Original included for comparison.

This slightly reminds me of this other story: woman has a heart attack on a plane, cabin crew ask if there's a doctor on board, 15 cardiologists on their way to a conference all put their hands up. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this...

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"

The statement, released in response to The Christmas Song (1945), advised non-autistic holiday enthusiasts to roast their chestnuts in controlled settings, such as ovens. Roast this and other exclusive articles on Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/115979...

Wider question aimed at all authors published by a big 5 publisher, have you heard anything from your publisher about their AI plans and how they'll impact/benefit you? 1 - Nothing 2 - A few things 3 - Everything, all very clear

I suspect that this one is unavoidable and just due to old canal workings but I do like the Cameron Clegg coalition big society genius idea of hiving off 2000 miles of these large linear things to an essentially unfunded make do and mend charity

My end of year newsletter up now! Including reflections, media reviews, a picture of me kneeling on the floor of a comic shop, and Hard News about the return of everyone's favourite morally dubious space postwoman. mailchi.mp/230936796823...

The actor Michael Sheen used all his money to start a fake debt collecting business, buy 900 people in Wales's debt, and excused it. If Musk bought ALL $194 billion in medical debt in the U.S. and excused it in the same way, he'd still be the world's riches man by hundreds of billions of dollars.

what’s the best audiobook you’ve listened to recently?

This is my most searched video on TikTok, it’s how to use physics to open a chocolate orange without banging it on anything

Does anyone have any Christmassy props we could borrow for the weekend and who could get them to Turnpike Lane? We have a bunch of families booked and we're going go try and do what we can to build some magic. In a plain white room.

remember, if you have a winter cold, eat more clementines than it seems like you really should, and then eat a couple more. it will make you feel better, not in the sense of health, but just in the sense of "clementines are so good and eating them is great"