Turns out I was giving Polanski too much credit on Ukraine. What the fuck is he talking about here? Putin has an ICC warrant for the industrial kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian kids & rewarded the soldiers who massacred civillians Bucha with medals for their ‘bravery’

Orbán used to sink other people’s campaigns… the torch has been passed on

So, BlueSky, one of my passions is the study of tea in WW2. I need you to watch this oral history from three ex-tea ladies from the Bermondsey WVS. Because you could guess for ONE THOUSAND YEARS and you would not guess where it is going... #skystorians #history #tea

came up in my Facebook memories last time I shared it... man, this SMBC @zachweinersmith.bsky.social cracks me the fuck up

wet_haybale joined PeasantChat. <puddlesipper> wellcome ye back <wet_haybale> ta <puddlesipper> hast tha seen the moon this eve <wet_haybale> nay be it ftrange ? <HimWhatEkes> tis red <wet_haybale> that be new ? <gleanmachine> Zounds man do ye ever look up? <wet_haybale> not unlefs it pleafe milord

He has been very unfair to Bowser, very unfair. Bowser is a very good friend of mine, Bowser. I call him Koopa. We golf together all the time, did a lot of deals together, collected lots of coins. His son went to school with Baron.

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

distracting us from corruption which is distracting us from January 6th which is distracting us from Trump-Russia which is distracting us from ivermectin which is distracting us from Access Hollywood which is distracting us from… I think at the very bottom of the list it might be Trump Steaks?

She says ICE agents mocked her: “The ICE agent who had pepper sprayed into the vents of my car said ‘you guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian b—— is dead,’ verbatim, speaking of Renee Good. Which filled me with absolute rage and shock..." www.mprnews.org/episode/2026...

Top trivia!

the vice president is a klansman

I heard there was a mighty fish With solitude its fervent wish When hungry, their demeanour's even ruder They're known to bite their prey in two They'd even have a go at you The silver and the salty Barracuda

DONALD TRUMP FIVE MINUTES AFTER MEETING ME: And, you know, the Game Awards, they gave Best Music to God of War instead of Xenoblade 3, and it was very unfair

tomorrow's newsletter is literally called "aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?" and boy isn't this a darling example, a phrase popularised by full-on racists on Elon Musk's Twitter now being bandied around in the mainstream press and sold as a Labour term

Seen in Boston, Massachusetts in 1854.

Timeline clenser

In fairness if you showed that picture to people 300 years ago they wouldn’t have known who those guys were

@nintendoplayers.uk #NPUKZASNAP Week 4 entry: Mega Bigleo the Alpha Mega Pyroar lights up my day :)

twitter being bought and turned into a propaganda machine for fascism, which is directly pumped into every journalist in the world's brain, is one of the worst things to happen in the last few years. we might not survive it.

Legends ZA main story completed, official verdict: Mons Good

Can’t help but worry for Malala’s fellow bong users, thinking, ‘shit, I’ve killed Malala!’

STATLER; "This funeral is so boring, I'm jealous of the guy in the coffin! Ah ha ha ha ha!" [Statler turns to the empty chair next to him and sheds one tear]

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

Keeping Mandelson would mean Number 10 thinks not following a recommendation to take specialist tax advice is a resigning matter, but believing the world’s most notorious paedophile over his victims and lying about your post-conviction contact with him isn’t. That’s…not a sustainable position.

Tennessee Williams died in 1983, so he was alive at the same time as Venus and Serena - the other tennis-y Williams

And this was done as part of any coherent geopolitical strategy, legal or illegal: it was done to create a fan-service snuff film for social media.

I was just reading a book which covered the US reaction to the Lusitania sinking, and while of course it was always hypocritical and self-serving at times there was a lot of genuine horror being expressed at this German ‘frightfulness’. And then this

What a low, despicable person Starmer has shown himself to be, and for nothing.

This is nightmarishly bad. Like this is no longer a joke, someone has to take action. He has to be fired from the premiership.

'Is it time for the Government to drown innocent human beings for political advantage?' and other questions now apparently deemed acceptable in the British media

god I hate this I hate this I hate it I hate it, I hate that the mainstream right has gone this mad and racist and radicalised, I hate that no one seems to know how to stop it from getting worse, it worries me so much and I hate it all

I write a lot about miserable game development stories, so it sure was a pleasure to hear that one of the reasons Silksong took so long was that Team Cherry is having too much fun making it and didn't want to stop

Bare minimum for holding a conversation: Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, Venusaur, Charmander, Charmeleon, Charizard, Squirtle, Wartortle, Blastoise, Caterpie, Metapod…. …Hydrapple, Gouging Fire, Raging Bolt, Iron Boulder, Iron Crown, Terapagos and Pecharunt.

The demo version of Mario Kart: Double Dash contains an unused Game Over screen. Notably, the smoke graphics used here are humorously called "smork" internally. It is unknown if this is a legitimate misspelling of "smoke" or if the word was deliberately spelled in a funny way.

I know I’m not telling anyone anything new here, but this is a massive “Show me who you really are” moment for America’s mainstream media institutions: Faced with a naked authoritarian power grab, the Washington Post has decided to look for ways to normalize rather than oppose the regime.

The biggest and worst thing to happen in politics over the past decade is the mainstream right losing its mind. Actual reasonable centre right conservatives are like giant pandas. We’re going to have to breed them in captivity

Ralph Richardson is in Doctor Zhivago which gives me another excuse to share this, my favourite ever theatre anecdote

This is true and also, increasingly, I am less and less understanding of a public that indulges these lies - because what is meant by illegal in too many minds is "inhuman". And that belief is encouraged by the media, yes, but at some point citizens have to take responsibility for it too.

me when I get beaten to a wonder in Civilization: it's plain to see that someday the video game industry will soon be taken over by Emperor Qin Shi Huang

I'm currently in immigration exile, see below. Since I'm stateside, I'll be talking to the Morbidly Curious Book Club tonight at 7 pm EST about Victorian surgery and my first book, The Butchering Art. Please come and distract me with your questions. Link below 👇 www.youtube.com/live/Hl3OO7p...

Incredible article about a bunch of children - now in their 50s and 60s - who were taught to read using a doomed alternate alphabet invented by a Tory MP www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Look there’s a lot of competition but tagging @jamellebouie.net in a post about a random diplomatic maneuver in Africa may be one of the most racist things Vance has ever put his name to. He even doesn’t cover foreign policy! It’s literally the VPOTUS declaring “you people are all the same to me.”

Numbers unclear: organisers hoped for 35k to 40k to defy the threat of legal consequences. “We believe 180,000 to 200,000 people attending,” Viktória Radványi told AFP. “It is hard to estimate because there have never been so many people at Budapest Pride.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

According to media estimates the participants to the Budapest Pride may have been in the hundreds of thousands defying the ban 📸: Gábor Tenczer, Balázs Ivándi-Szabó

Austria-Hungary, July 28, 1914

No one wanted this!

I don't want to live in David Frost or Matt Goodwin's country, that country would be shit.