Travel options for my annual Hertfordshire—>Manchester trip 1. Train: £15 into London, £100/£150 to Piccadilly, £6 to Ashton, £2 bus from there… whole trip about 5 hours if everything is on time. No seat guaranteed, very possibly an awful experience. 2. Drive: £40 in Diesel and there in 3hrs.

Remembering a simpler, happier time on the other place when there were recurring politico jokes like this (tannadicelad was BBC Scotland’s political editor and he famously never tweeted)

I did some research recently in local archives - physical copies of newspapers from 70 years ago, the only existing copies, which were never digitised and probably never will be. Also microfiche. This took many many hours. Someone asked me: "Why didn't you just ask AI?"

This aspect of LLMs is worse than just cringy - it confirms biases leading to bad analysis. It's one of the things that makes me wary of using it for research.

The questions being asked here are very serious, to put it mildly

Fukuyama here saying Chat GPT has passed the Turing test 🤔

These are the plaques Trump has installed at the White House, below portraits of former presidents www.nbcnews.com/politics/whi...

Note the dates.

These captchas are getting really advanced.

About 2-3 times a year I get suddenly and irrationally furious at the Busted lyric “not much has changed but they live underwater”. SOUNDS LIKE A PRETTY BIG FUCKING CHANGE TO ME, BUSTED. I AM NOT SURE WHY YOU’RE DOWNPLAYING IT JUST TO PERVE ON MY DESCENDENT. Anyway, today is one of those days.

Of course Stephen King's obit of Rob Reiner is perfect. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/o...

I thought it must be a typo, but no the US railroad trade union is called Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes. That was the spelling in the late 19th century and they don't want to update it and I respect that level of stubbornness.

You wouldn’t say it was looking good for Labour ahead of English local / Senedd / Holyrood elections would you

Judge a man not by the colour of his skin. But by how carefully he puts the shopping trolley back in the car park shopping trolley shed.

Headline caviar from Scotland's Sunday Post

Useful chart from CNN edition.cnn.com/us/mass-shoo... "There have been at least 391 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, leaving at least 325 people dead and 1,775 injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA)."

The quest for IP to monetize is endless

L. Frank Baum, 125 years ago: Fuck it. The shoes can fly. I don't know how else to get her home! The various writers of Wicked over the years: So the shoes fly. That much we know. But why? And how? That will be the audience's DELIGHT to FIND OUT.

Well worth looking at the split in GOP between people who are defending Trump's comments on Reiner and people who are not www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

Love to receive fan mail

There seem to be broadly two categories of people re: Rob Reiner 1. People who count RR movies as among their favourites 2. People are who do not actively remember the 80s / 90s 3. er, that's it

Rob Reiner: I'm going to make a coming of age drama, a fantasy adventure story, a romantic comedy, a psychological horror and then a courtroom drama. Us: Across your entire career? Reiner: In a 6 year period. Us: That sounds- Reiner: -Each one will be arguably the best movie in that genre.

GLASHEEN: Antifa is our primary concern right now. That's the most immediate violent threat we're facing BENNIE THOMPSON: Where is antifa headquartered? GLASHEEN: ... ... ... we are building out the infrastructure right now THOMPSON: What does that mean?

Studying the different checks and balances of power in a liberal democracy is good preparation for covering politics. It was hard to predict it would ever be this relevant.

Consequences. According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

The obsession with AI is going to date this era. Clunky not-quite-human language from early LLMs, crude image and video creation, the discussions about what AI will and won't replace and politicians talking about how it will "supercharge" economies... etc

What is the charge? Posting a meme? A succulent shitposting meme?

Look forward to achieving all three of these looks this festive period. Thanks to the Daily Mail.

Time again for my favorite christmas post ever, one that still makes me laugh every time i read it

Famous nativity characters in recent history include ‘Paul Hollywood’

"there's a new serif in town"

Where do they stand on comic sans www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Going back through tweets from The Brexit Years

Government has now - belatedly -published the impact assessment for the changes to skilled worker and care worker visas announced in May. Impact is estimated between -£2 billion and £-10 billion (central - £10 billion). assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6937e6...

The new Chrome split view feature is great - view two pages simultaneously in one tab.

It may not happen soon, but Mitch Bradley should remember that he can be recalled to duty someday and court martialed for ordering murder.

I'm tempted to think it's the last option - or the people here have a less aggressive form of ADHD to me

Is BlueSky designed to be slow to update? Is this a coding flaw? Or are there just not many people actually here?

Baby panda. 10/10 no notes. www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/f...

The number of global deaths of children under-5 is projected to increase this year (from 4.6m to 4.8m) for the first time this century. (FT) The price of aid cuts.

On a purely factual point, Trevor Phillips’s column in the Times misrepresents our reporting in casting doubts on claims that there were more boys called Patel than Smith at Dulwich in 1980 (we did not report 1976 as the year it occurred). 1980 roll shows 13 Patels and 12 Smiths.

It is surprising that Twitter/X has remained the main clearing house for businesses and governments to announce things, given what has happened to that platform and the politics of its owner.

ICE has arrested nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records, data shows www.nbcnews.com/politics/imm...

Europe will be 'unrecognizable' in 20 years due to immigration, White House strategy document claims www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

EXCLUSIVE MUST CREDIT: The Biden staffer wrongfully questioned by the FBI is NOT the pipe bomber. 😆😆😆😆😆 "My phone is blowing up haha. Omg," he texts me. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

A retro thrill from getting a press release claiming Blockchain can solve a massive unsolvable problem.

New York Times sues Pentagon over reporting rules, citing First Amendment rights www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

there are, ironically, quite a few news programmes that attempt to speak out against "groupthink" and "consensus" — shorthand for liberalism — and in many countries entire channels.

Tax and snails. I can't really summarise this, you should just read it from @jim.londoncentric.media www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...