Die Hard was actually appropriated from pagans

My brother could not have got me a more “Best TV of 2025” surprise Xmas present unless he’d obtained a lock of Rhea Seehorn’s hair.

If you're looking for a short spooky story to listen to while wrapping Christmas presents, then you'll enjoy TOND, starring @carrieq.bsky.social. It reminded me how much I used to love the "Fear on 4" plays on Radio 4.

vibing with this chat support agent

So ZipCar's exiting London. Which means you can't plan to do anything past New Year's Eve. But it's OK! We can use @hiyacar.co.uk instead, right? Right? Nope. At just the perfect time they've got a bug with their app so haven't been able to process new drivers' licenses for weeks.

We ended up with another kid’s Christmas artwork so have sent their family a ransom note.

This kind of error annoys me. When commentators complained in the past that pupils at a particular school “can’t speak English” (but meant spoke it as an additional language) my first action was to pull up the school’s English test scores, which were normally above the national average.

Absolutely devastated by the news about Rob Reiner. By all accounts a good man, and an incredible director. I wouldn't be who I am without his run of '80s classics - and his wife Michelle shaped those because their love story fundamentally changed When Harry Met Sally, for the better.

"Post a favourite work of art from the year exactly 50 years before you were born."

I’ve long wanted to write an angry rant about how misleading Reform / GB News / the far-right have been using per capita stats - but, helpfully, @donmcgowan.bsky.social has written a better one. open.substack.com/pub/donmcgow...

The case review of Mossbourne is balanced, but I think it really shows that the journalists who pursued the story (especially @annafazack.bsky.social for The Observer) were wholly right to do so and the concern for childrens' wellbeing was justified.

Tried helping two kids with a story that combines their loves (one adores "Swallows & Amazons", the other "K-Pop Demon Hunters"). Suggested an earlier demon hunter iteration back in the 1920s. Then realised that sounded like a @stephaniehans.bsky.social + @kierongillen.bsky.social #WicDiv special

“Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known”

“How are you doing, fellow kids?”

This is what posting on Bluesky feels like #pluribus

I already have a long list of “Transport things that Dutch cities do brilliantly and London doesn’t” but never thought I’d be adding this. Zipcar going is a huge, huge pain in the arse for Londoners who deliberately don’t own cars (including me). www.londoncentric.media/p/zipcar-lon...

My colleagues have published a kind post describing my new gig.

Your universe is a photocopy of a photocopy of a… on.ft.com/4ahkNKa

If you want some good news this morning, I showed my three boys the PM doing the six/seven thing and now they have all stopped doing it.

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

some of what they hate is globalisation, which like, what do you want me to do about that? uninvent oil tankers?

"We grant people different rights based on their genetic heritage and on which scrap of land they happened to be born on. That’s mad, isn’t it?" I just think, when debating immigration and so on, that we should try not to lose sight of the fact that "nationality" is a made up thing.

An image I sent to a colleague earlier before the outage was fixed...

There were 93 homicides in London last year: population 9 million In New York - population 8.5 million - there were 391. London's homicide figure is 6 times lower than LA, 9 times lower than Miami, 17 times lower than Chicago. And it's falling year on year despite the population increasing

I was tagged and asked to take a look at this claim - cos, well just look at it!🙄 Does it seem plausible that THE Trocadero is going to be turned into a Mosque? It was pretty easy to debunk but I decided to do a deep dive into the reality AND the appalling press coverage 🧵 1/26

@annodracula.bsky.social Am I just imagining that the first idea here was something you were suggesting maybe 20 years ago? mrmichaelshaw.medium.com/my-obvious-p...

If writers really are struggling with what to do about the next James Bond film, after blowing him up in the last one, they're welcome to my plan... (Part of it lifts an idea that @annodracula.bsky.social had many years ago) mrmichaelshaw.medium.com/my-obvious-p...

After years of being told that Microsoft software works better on PCs than a Mac I'm finding baffling how many things are actually much worse on PCs. Like if you're a working parent with a family calendar in Google, Outlook on PC insists on blocking out your whole working day for no reason.

If you report on things that are true your organisation gets decapitated, but if you let people invent racist drivel on air you're fine. Every single aspect of our information ecosystem is so, so broken.

A national newspaper journalist went on a British TV channel to claim police stats showed asylum-seekers committed 44% of sex crimes in Dorset. This shocking claim was treated as fact by the channel which promoted the clip on social media where it was amplified by AI. Except... it's bollocks.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that a big piece of Mamdani’s campaign was simply “cities are cool and lots of people enjoy living in them” which in and of itself dismantles alot of rightwing talking points

Niche post, but as someone switching to a heavily Microsoft environment it is baffling how poorly Loop compares to @notion.com. Not just the absence of simple relational databases (Notions' USP) but basic stuff around subpages, page covers, etc. Makes me glad for the Notion team, I guess.

It’s fascinating comparing the front page coverage of the Huntingdon train attack (below) with how the British press treated another case 30 years ago. I’m referring to the 1995 Netto supermarket attack in Birmingham in which a man stabbed 10 people, killing one of them.

Ukrainian computer game-style drone attack system goes ‘viral’ www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

A majority of voters, and a plurality of white voters, think that Reform is a racist party with racist policies.

“We are spending scarce resources in ways that have little impact on the teacher quality needed to help pupils.” The findings from today’s @teacherdevtrust.bsky.social ‘CPD Landscape 2025’ report are concerning.

Trying to imagine what the reaction would have been if the Govt had casually announced they were replacing A-levels with no details, as they have done with post-16 vocational qualifcations today. Probably not total indifference.

The Bunny Vs Monkey event with @jamiesmart.bsky.social was a joy. Yeah, the kids there liked it, fine, but I got to spend an hour sketching stuff like the insane cat Looshkin and a FARTING TREE with a bum in it. So I was happy.

I finally read the 2013 Sun article about Zack Polanski the right is weaponising. Weird bits I'd not heard mentioned was that the writer 1) felt it worked and; 2) thinks Zack's a hottie ("He’s in dark slacks and a tight-fitting jumper but I try to ignore the resemblance to Marvin from JLS.")

Starts humming tunes from the opening act of DDLJ

No, it's not. It's all a lie. The blunt truth is across the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021 Census *every* ethnic group in the UK has become *less* geographically segregated and *all* groups, majority and minorities, are more likely to interact with people not like them.

The Conservatives’ plans to slash arts degrees shows a depressing lack of understanding about Britain’s creative industries. For crying out loud, it's 12 years since the “Next Gen” report emphasised that the games and film industries needed arts graduates as well as those who'd studied comp science.

feels like yet again time to mention that the *videogames* industry (that's a creative industry, which people do creative degrees in) brings in more than twice the amount to the British economy as the fishing and steel industries *combined*

Everyone who advocates for turning the UK into the UAE assumes they'll be the one with a marina penthouse rather than the guy working on a building site in 50c heat

I know statistics are poorly understood and are misused. But facts matter Between the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021 Census *every* ethnic group in the UK has become *less* geographically segregated and *all* groups, majority and minorities, are more likely to interact with people not like them

Kemi Badenoch on #R4today refusing to condemn Jenrick’s line about not seeing “another white face” in Handsworth then…immediately quoting Martin Luther King was peak cringe even for the current Tory party.

Sad to hear the news about Jilly Cooper. She was one of those rare public figures who was exactly as you’d hoped she would be in real life. Back when she was writing her 2006 school-set novel Wicked! she phoned up The Times Educational Supplement for advice on inspections and got put through to me.

Political reporters continue to cover the centre-left according to the old standards of honesty and legality while shrugging at the right: "Ah well, you know what these guys are like. What can you do?"

As a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson and Pynchon (plus someone who appreciates DiCaprio’s comic chops) I was surprised One Battle After Another wasn’t 5⭐️s to me. Didn’t help that the Odeon messed up the Vistavision projection so it flickered badly throughout.