My first Slack post of 2026 was in the #lotr_memes channel. Start as you mean to go on.

WalesOnline here with some breaking news from, er, 1581. www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-n...

Tell me we should trust AI to give us the facts. Tell me it's a future we can put our faith in. Come at me. I'm right here, waiting.

Parenting question: has anyone ever directly requested well-meaning family/friends to stop buying junk celebrity books for your kids? How did it go? We have a growing pile of David Walliams books people got us that just... genuinely suck, putting all the stuff about him aside.

New year is going great so far right

Neighbour got us this cool DEFORMATION CAR for the kids' Christmas pressie.

Starting a rap crew called Yung Lang Syne

Re-read the Silmarillion this month and absolutely love how Tolkien ends the entire thing (which spans thousands of years of epic conflict and lengthy, complex ancestry and plot expansion) in the space of about six paragraphs.

A man dressed as an elf asked my son (6) today what his favourite Christmas present was. "Pranks", said Ted, to the elf's confusion. "Like... coins?" he asked. Ted responded with a five minute summary of the fake vomit, dog poo, whoopee cushion etc that he was overjoyed to receive last week.

Came back to our holiday cottage to find the unmistakable sight of bird droppings in the kitchen. Searched high and low; no bird. While we ate lunch, an extremely confident Great Tit hopped in through the slightly ajar window, pecked at the carpet for a minute, then flew back out again.

Staying at a resort this weekend where you can hire these buggies to get around the (car-free) park. Rule 1 is: no child is allowed behind the wheel. Rule 2: the buggy may not be operated under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Wondering how many incidents occurred before they had to impose them.

Kids literally just ate the pigs in blankets. Why do I bother etc etc #humbug

77 year old father in law accidentally agreed to receive web push notifications from some junk website and now his phone is a perpetual notification machine until I disabled them in Chrome.

@pippayork.bsky.social I just finished reading The Escape and wanted to say thank you for a beautiful, painful, evocative & emotional work of writing (and David too). I hope tons of people outside the cycling world read it - they may not have opinions on Roglic but everything else is relevant to all

This is like when I saw the author of a paywall-breaking browser extension get angry at another developer for stealing his code to defeat paywalls

This essay by the author of a recent well-reviewed book about Tolkien starts modestly and then stabs you with a Morgul-blade halfway through, where you are pinioned by a twist in the telling. You may never recover. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

Another datapoint for @jim.londoncentric.media's list of misleading Reach headlines: "Alert for UK households buying Cathedral City cheese at M&S or Tesco" The "alert" is that... other cheeses came out ahead in an independent taste test. www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/sho...

Someone on Radio 4 this morning used the phrase "cyber gang" and all I could picture was this

I've either got the European mega flu, Covid, or something similarly miserable, and I foolishly agreed a week ago to host a departmental end-of-year social. Pray for me this afternoon as I run a trivia quiz while wishing I was lying in a warm bath and falling asleep to a Tolkien audiobook

Every now and again I start thinking about how people do ParkRun with their kids, or how that Zombies Run game makes running fun for newbies and stuff, and I start thinking "maybe I'll get into running" but then thankfully my cyclist brain snaps back into gear and shuts all that nonsense down again.

This is a great point. My local railway company still insists on posting service updates on Twitter, but when I visit (without an account), all I see in their feed is inane engagement bait about their pet cat (which presumably got lots of likes back in, er, 2021). x.com/WestMidRailway

The perils of building a year-end "Wrapped" feature when you rely on customer/merchant data to geolocate transactions: you end up retreading complex border disputes with your users: www.reddit.com/r/cyprus/com...

Just saw tickets went on pre-sale for Elvis Costello in Birmingham. Checked the stalls prices: £200. Are you fucking kidding me Elvis

Went to the GP recently and they booked my follow-up examination with a private doctor (covered by the NHS) because the waiting list was months long. Got the doctor's notes back today and he began "The lovely gentleman presented recently..." and this is why people go private isn't it

Has anyone written a clever grammar article about American English "mind you" versus British English because I'm just as interested/invested in finding out how the two usages diverged as I am with "I could[n't] care less"

Accidentally bought a BrewDog beer and feel like I need to do penance somewhere in apology

Genuinely unsure if this is new Labour policy to discourage people arriving from France

I don't know what this means or what it says about my usage of this platform, but when I click on the little blue butterfly icon on my phone or desktop bookmarks to open Bluesky, I still mentally think "Twitter" to myself when I select it.

I stopped using Instagram six months or so ago, and recently deactivated my account completely. It's been good for my mental health and being more "in the moment" (eg. removing the pressure to feed the content machine). It also reveals just how awful the UX is for anyone outside the ecosystem.

British parents of preschoolers: I can EXCLUSIVELY reveal that the upcoming Scarecrow's Wedding animated film has controversially replaced the canonical plot device of the illicit cigar with, er, a toasted marshmallow. Don't share this embargoed knowledge or I'll be banned from the BBC Alumni Club.

In addition to this: there's a Paul Simon song where he sings "I went outside and smoked myself a J" which is immediately followed by a cheeky little guitar riff that's so cheesy that it almost becomes cool again. No idea what these things are called but more songs should have 'em.

Had to do quite a lot of digging to work out what the inappropriate song referenced here was, because I was under the impression they performed a choral version of Sir Mix-a-lot or something. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Amazing Reddit thread where someone is looking for recommendations for London pubs with "really bad vibes" because they want to friendzone someone and don't want to risk "romantic auras": www.reddit.com/r/london/s/d... (Spoilers: the answer is basically "any Wetherspoons")

Partner just looked outside and said "the binmen are coming!" with the same level of excitement as when the Eagles arrive at the Battle of the Black Gate www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Excited to share my Spotify *Artist* Wrapped, because, well, look at these figures, baby. It's not too late to join the literally dozens of people who helped improve on my 2024 numbers - go listen here: open.spotify.com/album/59sDve...

I'm sick of how articles about How Spotify Wrapped Is Taking Over Our Feeds are taking over our feeds

Just added a new thing to my keyring (it's all kicking off here etc) and it occurred to me that there must be some new hipster way of keeping keys together besides a cheap ring which keeps expanding/splitting...? Is there some expensive trendy replacement for a keyring that I can pointlessly buy?

The ever-thoughtful @frankchimero.com captures a lot of the subtlies of the current moment. Embodies a lot of what is swirling around in my own brain, but in a much clearer and better designed way. frankchimero.com/blog/2025/be...

A former colleague once (innocently, from a place of genuine interest) asked our then-CTO what he did all day during an internal Q&A and the man was flummoxed, stammering, unable to even parse the question or understand what he was being asked. Was incredible to watch.

Incredible end to this date: Did you go on somewhere? No. Russell stayed behind to pick at the cold leftovers, insisting I was fine to go. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Posted a mildly-viral (by my standards) LinkedIn post as I pondered the one year anniversary of redundancy, and I've achieved the dubious LI milestone of having two strangers arguing in the comment section about something one of them said. Think this means I'm an influencer now?

As someone who fell in love with making things for the web all the way back in the 90s, I've always been a bit of a purist about experiencing it unfiltered, "as the maker intended it" – eg. with ads, popups, banners, whatever. I wanted to experience webpages like they were designed to look.

Realised recently that lots of Simon & Garfunkel lyrics would make excellent titles for H.P. Lovecraft stories: • Through The Corridor Of Sleep • Twisted Sightless Wrecks Of Men • Suckled By The Night • A Vision Softly Creeping • A Most Peculiar Man • Impaled On My Wall • In Darkness I Must Dwell

Realised recently that lots of Simon & Garfunkel lyrics would make excellent titles for H.P. Lovecraft stories: • Through The Corridor Of Sleep • Twisted Sightless Wrecks Of Men • Suckled By The Night • A Vision Softly Creeping • A Most Peculiar Man • Impaled On My Wall • In Darkness I Must Dwell

One year ago today, I released my second album of singer/songwriter/indie/whatever music. I play all the instruments ('cept drums) and think there's a couple of decent tunes on here. Give it a spin today on its first birthday! unfuture.bandcamp.com/album/masks

Just misread the phrase "rage room" as "reggae room" which I'm treating as as a subliminal hint to listen to Jimmy Cliff.

Agree x1000. Automated transcripts are like videos of gigs: thoughtless content produced for nobody. The way we do meeting agendas at GitLab changed my working life: handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/com... - you finish the call with a useful, representative doc that *everyone* contributed to.

Every Big Tech product aimed at kids that I've ever used has been so obviously, shamelessly full of absolute shit that I've immediately uninstalled it. You cannot hand off your parenting judgement and care to companies who demonstrably *do not care* about child wellbeing – just do the work, instead.

I was a pushy parent at today's swimming lesson: kid has been doing Stage 2 since September 2024 and the last update on his swimming record was months ago. I gently asked the instructor how much longer he'd be in this stage. 30 minutes later, every kid in the class miraculously passed Stage 2.

Just had a cringe flashback to undergraduate English in 2005 and the sheer number of young men in blazers submitting essays titled "I'm On The Pavement Thinking About The Government"