When the clock strikes midnight on January 1, creative works from 1930 & sound recordings from 1925 will enter the public domain in the US, like: 💄 Dizzy Dishes, first Betty Boop cartoon 🕵️♀️ First 4 Nancy Drew novels 🚂 The Little Engine That Could 🎩 Morocco 🍑 Georgia on My Mind and many more! 🧵👇

"I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had fucking happened."

December 25th. The day the Fellowship departs Rivendell to destroy the One Ring. Whatever you celebrate, may you have the courage to take the first steps to defy and endure against the dark, and rekindle light into the world.

CHARLES DICKENS: Marley was dead, to begin with TWITCH CHAT:

Did you know you can just buy tiny standees of anyone?

Merry Christmas It's a Wonderful Life, Guy from It’s a Wonderful Life, Who Convinces Another Guy to Open the Gym Floor So Everyone Falls in the Pool www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its...

props to this christmas lad I’ve just spotted on @flightradar24.com

Extremely funny to call the pope “holier-than-thou”

The most honest part of It’s A Wonderful Life is when Bert the cop tries to murder George Bailey just for causing a scene in public

Begging the BBC to let someone other than Mark Gatiss have a pop at A Ghost Story For Christmas.

Playing that Indiana Jones game and you get to do all the iconic things that Indy does in the films such as showing a croissant to a priest.

At the end of MICKEY'S CHRISTMAS CAROL, Scrooge (a duck) brings a prize turkey to Bob Cratchit's house for dinner.

Listen to our final thoughts on the turbulent Mission: Impossible franchise. We return next year to cover a different blockbuster franchise.

Yes. We're spending £476m on the militarisation of Calais - where babies are being tear gassed. The fact people are hearing this for the first time is exactly why I made it the subject of the Christmas Day message. We could be spending that money instead on a fair and managed migration system.

Playing that Indiana Jones game and you get to do all the iconic things that Indy does in the films such as showing a croissant to a priest.

Merry Christmas all! @simonxix.com & I bring you our last episode of ‘TAKE ONE Presents’ for the year, and it’s our wrap up episode of The Impossipod, where we take a step back to reflect on the franchise as a whole and give our series rankings.

Listen to our final thoughts on the turbulent Mission: Impossible franchise. We return next year to cover a different blockbuster franchise.

The Impossipod wraps up: @simonxix.com & @jimgr.bsky.social discuss the overall trajectory of the #MissionImpossible franchise, what the directors went on to do, the politics, their franchise rankings, & how this ties into wider thoughts on blockbuster franchise filmmaking: buff.ly/MsIOxWa #filmsky

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

I think it's sweet that the oldest surviving printed book in the world - the Diamond Sutra - is also the oldest creative work explicitly released into the public domain, with a colophon at the end that says it was created for universal free distribution. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond...

amazes me that labour twats have the gall to whine on about how their tweaks to minimum wage etc aren’t being lauded by the populace while they’re doing stuff like this

notice how she wasn't even supporting palestine action. she was supporting the hunger strikers.

call us old fashioned but, if you've built a machine that makes child porn, we really don't care if can do anything else. unplug the machine.

Scotch "Whiskey". smdh.

Well golly gee, the Office for Students is too busy policing “wokeness” and corporatising universities to actually pay any attention to large-scale fraud. Who’d have thunk it? www.theguardian.com/education/20...

James Cameron must be stopped.

In my career, I've known librarians who were bullies, who were sexual abusers, who were racists, who were anti-vaxxers. Working in a particular profession is no indicator of virtue or decent politics.

If librarianship is the backbone of anything, it is that of the calcifying corpse of late capitalism's knowledge economy. Radical approaches are needed. (@sluginkpress.bsky.social, @simonxix.com, & I have a paper coming out in Jan. about our experiences in this space over the last 15 years or so.)

In context, the profession of librarianship has done *at least* as much to sustain the systems and operations that normalise the commodification of knowledge and the prevailing inequities (etc.) than any other profession across the informational ecosystems.

'Listen to me as I come to your neighbourhood and tell your trans siblings they are subhuman or I will use the wealth of billionaires to sue you into oblivion,' is a very late-capitalism form of free speech right.

muppet christmas carol (happy holidays!)

I think part of the problem is discovery system themselves. Their use encourages purchase and use of resources that agree to have their metadata ingested into the mothership. Like Google, perhaps time spent on the platform is the metric of vendor choice rather than patron satisfaction.

People are saying that this is a problem for all library catalogues but that's not true: this is a problem for, in this case, Ex Libris Primo and more generally for outsourced proprietary library catalogues that libraries don't control. The answer, as always, is to build and control our own tech.

I'd been tempted to play this but my antipathy towards JRPGs pays out once more.

The actor Michael Sheen used all his money to start a fake debt collecting business, buy 900 people in Wales's debt, and excused it. If Musk bought ALL $194 billion in medical debt in the U.S. and excused it in the same way, he'd still be the world's riches man by hundreds of billions of dollars.

I look after a few servers for friends and colleagues and I'm pleased to see that in 2025 I maintained an average uptime of 99.87%. Not bad for a lone developer doing some favours.

Elden Ring is about having a beautiful dream that you're Welsh. Bloodborne is about waking up in England.

It will surprise nobody that the cataloguing system that is slopwashing like this turns out to be Primo. (If you're not sure what system your university library uses: have you ever searched for a book and been offered three pages of links to reviews instead? That was Primo too.)

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Out for a festive screening tradition: seeing if Jimmy Stewart actually calls Mary an old maid to her face or if that's a misremembering.

Doesn’t feel good that the head of BBC News Content is instructing reporters to refer to trans people with slurs. If this leak is real it raises questions about who made this decision, who was consulted, and why the BBC chose to ignore its own editorial guidelines on slurs and offensive language

I'm 90% certain you could see David Walliams on #TOTP tonight dancing on stage for Vindaloo. Not the worst person to have appeared on Top of the Pops across the fullness of time but funny that he should be on today of all days.

Gosh! You fools! Why aren't you happy that a known pervert who has been protected for decades has finally suffered one tiny consequence?

Whether it's a publisher, a university, a radio station, the House of fucking Commons... *every single time* management knew about the predators and at best did nothing but usually actively covered for them. Every time.

It seems clear from the Telegraph story (which I'm not going to link to) that HarperCollins' senior management actively chose to protect Walliams despite the many allegations against him. Particularly Charlie Redmayne who left the position of CEO in October and has been replaced by Kate Elton.

This is the future, for Europe anyway. Publicly fund open source projects. Best of both worlds: non-market incentives, but still with the freedom sometimes denied by state monopolies.

The Enterprise-D is drydocked in its new home on the shelf above my desk.

This looks very enjoyable though I can foresee myself struggling with the uncanny CG sheep after a while.