Not sure I've ever witnessed a news cycle so incomprehensible and inconsequential as Elon Musk's Royal Society membership.

I've been watching a lot of AI video recently. No matter the generator they all have the same milky movements and weightless, frictionless, otiose zombification. They're dead media and I think, once the novelty burns out, they'll be as culturally enduring as Magic Eye stereograms.

The most Brexit thing a person can do is sing "Home of The Picky Bits / Home of The Picky Bits / Three for Eight Pound" to the tune of God Save The Queen.

Just once, I'd like someone to buy me a field so I could look at donkeys.

This is a lovely, unexpected obit for Keith McIvor. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/s...

Not wholly surprising that he's never met a scientist.

Their only way out of madness is to do the same monologue. Every word, pause, beat is identical. It was a mediocre bit the first time around but they now have an opportunity to make it art.

"I spat coffee all over the screen", no but you didn't, please don't involve me in your disgusting little fantasies.

It honestly surprises me that we're in such a tiz about immigration when the common enemy is obviously Royal Mail parcel tracking

First Kirk, now Kimmel. What a month it's been for people I was only vaguely aware of by clicking on links by accident.

For the rest of your life, you're only allowed to eat food from one of these regions. Which would you choose?

Today I turned "don't recognise a Coachella headliner" years old.

Look at this menu, it's like the fox/chicken/grain thing but with pie and mash.

The Flag People are in town. They all seem so unhappy. Not angry, just radiating misery.

This post, from 2017, is a scared text. medium.com/@DaleBeran/4...

Weird how the "video games promote gun violence" debate went away just before it became relevant

This button has saved my life this week more times than I care to remember

No one watches football as a neutral, so it's daft to enforce neutrality on commentators. Whether it's a World Cup final or a game on Hackney Marshes that they're watching on from the top deck of a moving bus, it's basically impossible for a person to not form a view on which side they want to lose.

LONDON'S BEST AIRPORT IS SOUTHAMPTON, APHEX TWIN'S NOT THAT GOOD AND ALL FOOD IS BRITISH EXCEPT MEXICAN WHICH IS SPANISH, COME AT ME

never tweet

# Team Seagull.

1. 99 Luftballons 2. 99 Luftballons 3. 99 Luftballons 4. 99 Luftballons 5. 99 Luftballons 6. 99 Luftballons 7. 99 Luftballons 8. 99 Luftballons 9. 99 Luftballons 10. 99 Luftballons 11. 99 Luftballons 12. 99 Luftballons 13. 99 Luftballons 14. 99 Luftballons 15. 99 Luftballons (Andrew Huang) 16. 99 Lu

Endo at the Rotunda's still on fire. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Every time this comes around I check just in case I wrote a book then forgot. Still no.

Why did I do this?

Hypothetically, if a parent puts part-ownership of a house in their 17yo child's trustee account, can they reclaim a second-home stamp duty surcharge within the standard one-year grace period when the child turns 18? Because to me, a local imbecile, that's how the law reads.

this website will die of boredom

Sources telling me he fell down the stairs and made a noise on every step like when you pour out a can of tomatoes

The water sommelier leading indicator:

Can calculators suffer? Users have been making them say boobs and that must be a bit humiliating for them.

Going to stop pressing this button on my phone, it brings nothing but tribulation

This is correct, clearly, but I'm clinging on to the idea that it's all because it's August. Reporters had nothing else to do but follow the front pages and the person employed to tell them "it's a trap, our editorial policy is to give all types of protests minimal coverage" was in Faliraki.

Welcome back to the "Extrapolating Universal Ideologies From Small Gatherings in Cities" World Championships. Britain's been a strong contender all week, but let's see what America can do ...

In case you want to own this t-shirt, it's sold by a Hong Kong dropshipping company called FashionLili, for people who "want to join the Goth subculture".

None of this matters because it's August. It's when we always go nuts. By next month we'll have memory-holed all of this. August's a national Rumspringa.

Can someone more ... y'know, no need for labels .... explain to me how OnlyFans works? A man sees a woman on TikTok/Insa/LinkedIn and thinks "she seems nice. I wonder what her bum looks like?" so he signs a subscription agreement and pays £9.95 a month to access photos of her bum? Is that it?

I've just realised something

Relatable.

Date of search: August 17.

Yesterday I went looking in my dead twitter acc for a thread of fake Fringe stand-up comedy reviews from 2019 and was reminded of a few other threads that I don't entirely hate so I'm going to preserve them here. If that seems solipsistic, idc. Fringe reviews: twitter-thread.com/t/1157382593...

I've just spent a week and several million pounds at the Edinburgh Festival. Here are a few types of comedians I think, with every respect, we have enough of now.

Two spare tickets for Kitson work in progress, 10am today at The Stand if anyone wants them. (Yes, I know this is niche content.)

Business idea: shut up about AI for five fucking minutes.

I've read lots about how this experiment failed but not much about why. The why is probably the interesting bit. A person in charge of a vending machine will introduce biases. Maybe the Pepsico sales rep reminds them of an old girlfriend. Maybe they order Snapple because they liked Seinfeld.

I like how the punctuation here makes it read like a colleague's note about missing a phone call.

Wait, how's this measured? A user doesn't know before searching if there's an AI overview attached to the result. It's not something that can be A-B tested. Does the stat mean "users who were delivered an AI overview were 10% more likely to try again"?

Dunno, maybe give asylum seekers the right to work? Maybe we could start by reducing the UK's one-year work ban on applicants to 60 days (as it is in Italy) or three months (as it is in Germany), or even six months (as it is in US, Canada, France, Spain, and Japan)? Maybe that's the thing to fix?

One like = one person I think less of for engaging with this