In the latest in a fifteen year exercise in ‘naming all the devices after an appropriate Culture Ship Name’, please meet Zoologist. (There is *always* an appropriate Culture Ship Name)

Book project stocktake, with help from Artefact Cards.

Some men would rather build an archipelago in the sea rather than admit they were wrong about Brexit

This is how Timeshares were sold - lock everyone in the room, and claim there are lotsa people who would love to be in the room instead. Truly, the dumbest timeline keeps getting dumber. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Oh. Not good. Is there an alternative platform?

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have received the new 28th Amendment to the #usconstitution, and it’s a doozy…

It is just endlessly funny to me that the remaining men in this are basically just Star Trek redshirts.

Full-on Welsh Brexit Boomer Daily Mail energy this, innit? #thetraitorsuk

Amanda Gorman wrote this poem for Renee Good and that’s it for me tonight.

Forensic analysis of objective video evidence. This is how you serve readers searching for clarity.

keep shuffling those ideas around

Good morning from our breakfast guest. #ukbirds

A rare beast indeed. @buttondown.com is a company whose values are pointed, sincere, and fully integrated with its business model. Founder and CEO, @jmduke.com kindly took time to discuss its values and style with me. newsletter.lowfalutin.co.uk/archive/thei...

Ok, bear with me. Now that being a football manger in the Premier League appears *entirely unrelated* to knowing anything about football, they should go for maximum entertainment value next season. Make all teams appoint a manager that played for them during England’s ‘Golden Generation’.

Can’t wait for the US to argue that ‘old documents signed by dead people don’t matter now, and you can’t ignore how contexts have changed in the centuries since” #usconstitution

Can you all stop using Substack already? If you were mad about Bari Weiss becoming editor-in-chief of CBS News, why are you willing to hand over actual substantial support — your time, money, and energy — to the platform that literally partnered with her in December? www.theverge.com/2024/12/17/2...

“We’re making our own driverless cars” is the tech industry’s “Youth hostelling with Chris Eubank”… #CES #Nvidia youtu.be/rS1le_8ZhOU?...

It's so embarrassing to be an American these days: "In a late-night Truth Social post, the president announces that the Danish territory is now an American 'protectorate.'" 🙄

The absolute state of this. www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

This is dumb. Why is everything so dumb. Stop being so dumb, all the things!!!!

Why I Left Substack. A combination of “a good deal of gross misogyny, transphobia, and hard-right stuff” plus Substack “trying to deny this responsibility [as a publisher], to pretend that their decisions weren’t decisions at all”. [buttondown.com]

I finished watching ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’ last night. I watched the first one before Christmas, and thought ‘no, not seasonal viewing…’ - but in the late hours of early January, it’s perfect. Grim in places, hopeful in others. Shares something in its DNA with Trainspotting, perhaps.

It's also wild that this hasn't ended Trump's presidency immediately. We used to be a serious country, where things mattered. Or maybe we never were, & it's just the mask being fully ripped off. Hard to tell, frankly. Observationally equivalent. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

“The world “may not have time” to prepare for the safety risks posed by cutting-edge AI systems, according to a leading figure at the UK government’s scientific research agency.” If only someone had the power to regulate this, eh? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A company that's been locked out of major markets like the US and Canada has ridden its habit of "making good cars" to the pinnacle of the EV business, while Tesla, with full access and subsides everywhere, is declining due to its "an asshole company that makes bad cars for assholes" strategy.

The year is 2003. I’m 17 years old. I’m watching Democrats fail to appropriately oppose an illegal war for oil. The year is 2026. I’m 40 years old. I’m watching Democrats fail to appropriately oppose an illegal war for oil.

insider sports betting on regime change What a future

Winkleman’s Law: Reality TV game shows work up until the series where everyone applying has watched endless amounts of the previous editions, and think they know exactly what it takes to win. #thetraitors (So far, this is gash)

I have annexed The country Whose resources I wanted And which you Were probably Hoping I could identify a giraffe It was the best clock Anybody drew I like McDonald's Hey look, a bird

Get ready for Phase Two: a raid on Oslo to seize the Peace Prize.

Good evening.

I will go to my grave arguing OpenAI rushed GPT 3.5's release without having done adequate safety analysis (not even sure what that would've looked like tbh) and instead offloaded that work onto the public. And that set off an arms race among LLM developers that none of them were prepared for

podcasts

“We suffer from stupidity.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

you’re right! it feels mostly awful to Go Online™, these days. the internet in a sad state, for reason after reason after reason. but there is a way to fix it; to trade the voidful howling for a quiet & joyful song. here’s how to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

If you don't know why substack is such a problem, do some research, bc in addition to who they specifically chose to platform & partner with (& subsidize), the funders are some of the same people funding attacks ON science AND they promoted Nazi propaganda through push notifications on the app!

I mean, could be worse. Preeminent WHAT is the question, though.

#StrangerThings stuck the landing. No mean feat.

Set out six months ago to investigative some dubious evictions. Ended up writing a sprawling story spread over 450 years about London property deals, the ethics of money lending, Tommy Robinson, Barbary pirates, Jacobean earls, and wealth in the capital. www.londoncentric.media/p/henry-smit...

THERE ARE FOUR LIMES #startreknewyear

The sharpest of critiques nailing the odious Allison Pearson to the door of whichever imaginary castle she thinks she is defending.

Open up ‘Words with Friends’ for its annual festive outing, and discover that the Enshittification has utterly consumed it. Like an explosion in a coupon warehouse.

Our doorbell has packed in, after ten years. We are replacing it with this near identical normal doorbell. We are not going to spend the next ten years staffing our own mundane security service via an app on phones, staring at delivery people as they approach our door to leave a parcel.

We have spent the last three days decorating. The downstairs hall, stairs, and upstairs hall. All ceilings and walls finally done. Full on mundane betwixtmas DIY madness. Broken.

After reading Louie Mantia's blog post "And Stay Out", some of my thoughts about Alan Dye leaving Apple, Jony Ive's influence on Apple's interface and hardware design before Dye, and the general lack of playfulness in everything Apple makes these days. karbonbased.io/posts/2025/12/...

""What happens when everyone abandons safety margins simultaneously?" The experiment is running live right now, and it's expanding all the time." Recommended read on evolving forms of social and political risk from @changeist.bsky.social

Ian Dunt on Liz Truss: "Her primary social contribution to the life of the nation now comes as a kind of ad-hoc psychological experiment in which we discover what life is like when you have literally no self-awareness whatsoever." open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

Having had a day to think through everything about El-Fattah, here's where I stand. Yes, it's possible to believe all of these things at once! In fact, it really shouldn't be that hard.

Turned on #r4today, immediately infuriated by the Mustafa Suleyman interview, as he wilfully misleads on how GenAI can ‘create’ an image from scratch (“a purple dragon with wings” or whatever) with how all AI can *therefore* create new academic Research papers fully sourced. FFS, no. More challenge.