Oh stop it, you absolute muppet.

ebay promised they would end transation fees for private sellers. So I'd love to have these transaction fees explained to me.

The Trump administration just declared that no one should take paracetamol because it supposedly links to autism. (It doesn't, thays bullshit.) Let that sink in: paracetamol (brand name Tylenol in the USA) THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING MORONS.

This is meant to be a video undermining Kat Abughazaleh, but now I'm just: wow, check out the new member of the Scooby-Doo / Mystery Machine team in her roll-neck and mini skirt. COOOOL!

Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert... etc All looks very familiar.

Fascism. It's real.

Where do i sign up?

There's a glimmer of hope in this video youtu.be/RP8Oxe6OxJc?...

Followed for the name alone.

Would the person who shelved the book on The Cockleshell Heroes under Natural History please take a bow!!

Orwell was right that mass media manipulation would control the people with their leader's every whim. He was wrong about Memory Holes. The populace's amnesia is not achieved through an act of volition. It is wiped by constant distraction through relentless social media.

A note to myself, sitting on the Phoenix pub, Southsea...

If this happened it would send quite the message to corrupt CEOs...

The only thing better than Arthur Lowe (BOTD 1915)...is two Arthur Lowes! As the geologically dense Dr Watson, with John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes, in The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (1977)

Elon Musk has now taken on the full mantle of real life Bond villain megalomaniac to such an extent that I'm now expecting MI6 to send Daniel Craig to put two bullets in his ketamine-addled brain.

Reading about recent sharp drops in solar panel prices, and wondering what difference it will make to Africans and South Americans to have more cheap, decentralized electrical power than anyone else.

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

Charlie Kirk admirers: "We can't be fascists because we love free speech"

There's an equation going on in Charlie Kirk supporters' minds that they can't be fascists because they support free speech. If you use your speech to pressure universities to sack academics you disagree with, & you dox & intimidate people under the pretence of free speech, yup you're a fascist.

In Trumpian terms, truth is an obstacle to power. Once a baseline of truth is eradicated, the power one can take is limitless.

delusional headcanon: everyone is acting all sad about charlie kirk because they think he's the star trek guy

I met a dog who told me that Kirk's last words to him were: "we have to make sure all the cats are annihilated, because they are furry little messengers of Satan, and cat ladies like them." Not sure if the dog is that reliable, tbh.

Today i learnee what a groyper is. Boy is America fucked. If this what the right is doing to itself because it regards people like Kirk as not right wing enough, anyone in the centre right to far left is in danger.

Am absolutely certain this guy is now going after Nick Fuentes fans.

Genuinely hilarious seeing rightwing trolls try to start arguments on bsky. This one makes inflammatory challenges then takes the silence as evidence he's right rather than others seeing through his bullshit. On his timeline the only person to respond to ANY of his posts is himself. Well done bsky!

VocaMe's recording of Kassia's Doxazoumen Sou Christe is one of the most sublime sounds I've ever heard. It's more ethereal than Gothic Voices' cult "A Feather On The Breath of God" by Hildegard of Bingen that was so huge in the 90s. An extraordinary out-of-body highly spiritualised sound.

This was so obviously fake news. Like something from a bad movie. I mean think about the logistics and effort on doing this. So why did the WSJ fall for it? Because they wanted to.

A thread of classic Charlie Kirk quotes, in case we forget: “Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?” [Rumble, The Charlie Kirk Show, 3/21/24

Its perfectly acceptable to point out that a victim of political violence was pro-violence. It's not acceptable to pretend that someone who suppressed academic and feminist thinkers, whose actions made opponents fear for their lives when his followers turned on them was an advocate of free speech.

Not only is this 1897 book of Mother Goose written by the creator of The Wizard of Oz, who is revered particularly among American book collectors, it also marked the debut of a young illustrator called Maxfield Parrish.

Well, America, you've now seen what a functioning democracy does to people who plot to overthrow the government. (Hint, it isn't vote him back as president.)

The zeitgeist of the 2020s appears to be one of social-media-manipulated-mass-hysteria. There will be a reckoning for this, but we are going to have to wade through a lot of shit to get to it, in which the under-educated will be conned into acting against their best interests by the elite.

Life Is Amazing publisher The Press are building up another everyday shooting in the US as a "watershed moment" because the previous actual political assassinations (rather than the murder of a narcissist influencer) had Democrat victims and this one will give Trump a pretext to get more oppressive.

It's absurd that Starmer got behind Mandelson in the first place. It made me ask "was he selected as US Ambassador because of his and Trump's mutual friendship with Epstein, and how much did Starmer know about that?" Mandelson should have been sacked immediately. More ineptitude from Starmer.

My latest conspiracy nonsense: trump had kird assassinated to deflect attention from his epstein connections. I quite like that one.

Because I use history a lot in my work and celebrate past writers, I often encounter people who think I must be conservative. My heart sinks when I meet them. They're a dead weight dragging us backwards. I love history because it's full of the whackiest ideas I can play with to my heart's content.

Russia has been waging war on Europe for at least 15 years, and somehow Europe hasn't noticed, because it has been wrapped up in debating the far right politics Russia uses as one of its main weapons against Europe.

Is Charlie Kirk dead counting or not counting gang violence?

This is perfect. Social media drama is exactly the right phrase. The problem is, it's addictive and it takes a while to learn how to see beyond the emotional feedback loop that's forming it to get back in control of your life (to some extent).

Is he dead counting or not counting gang violence?

I've said it before. NEVER PISS OFF SWIFTIES.

Well, this will stop them talking about epstein, I guess.

Wondering if there are 42 virgins waiting for this martyr, because that's how unhinged this sounds.

The conspiracy theory is the religious instinct expressed in a post-religious world. 18th Century: "The Devil is responsible for all our ills". 21st Century: "It's the shapeshifting lizards / immigrants, etc." The function is the same: to make a chaotic world explicable & hence rational & safer.

Sherlock Holmes was created in Portsmouth by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1886 - and that's why I've organised Holmes Fest - 10 days celebrating Arthur Conan Doyle and his greatest creation, as well as his other work! I would love you to come along, it's going to be great! www.lifeisamazing.co.uk

Keir Starmer learning that all that sneaky managerial bullshit that got him into power is not what will keep him in power.

Hear, hear.

Wings of Desire. I last watched it in the 80s. It strikes me that there are few people in the West now left alone to their thoughts, to explore their inner lives - in the empty moments walking across a square or a field. Social media has put an end to that, and it's a profound change for humanity.

Been reading Kipling's "Army of a Dream". Not a v enjoyable story, it's in dialogue form as a soldier of the future discusses how society is organised. It hits themes often later used in sci-fi, such as earning the right to vote through military service, as in Starship Trooper. Unexpected.