it’s a shame we did a joke in noncensored a couple of weeks ago where someone said “i’m not racist, i’m just prejudiced, discriminatory, or antagonistic against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group” because it would have worked this week as well

This thread is so good. In the US, the UK, and Australia the centre-left parties find their actual multiracial wine mom laptop class college educated voters cringe, while yearning for the votes of unionised blue collar factory workers who make up 3% of the electorate and mostly hate them.

I made a short documentary! It's about Fee Warner, who for over 25 years has maintained the shrine at the site of Marc Bolan's death in south-west London. What makes someone dedicate so much time and effort to preserving the memory of a rockstar? youtu.be/mc7b27PQTd0

A great example of the pitfalls of implementing AI: people who would never mess with/prank/manipulate a human being will, entirely reasonably, happily do so with an AI. From when Anthropic tried to get Claude to run a vending machine:

I realised recently that, while I'd seen the amazing freeze-frame end credits a million times, I'd never actually seen even one whole episode Police Squad. I will now correct that

And, once again, if you still haven't bought my Sleng Teng version of Somethin' Else (or anything else on my the Rongorongo Bandcamp page) then I could sure as hell use the the money! rongorongorongo.bandcamp.com/album/someth...

I made a short documentary! It's about Fee Warner, who for over 25 years has maintained the shrine at the site of Marc Bolan's death in south-west London. What makes someone dedicate so much time and effort to preserving the memory of a rockstar? youtu.be/mc7b27PQTd0

I'm not au fait with D&D lingo and so I read this thinking it was, like, a suggestion for prison reform. "Why megadungeons are the humane and cost-effective solution to prison overcrowding"

It’s the politicisation of the midlife crisis and I’m only half joking. Loneliness, divorce, redundancy/not getting the deference they feel is due at work, loss of power + seeing that decline reflected in your town. What’s more startling in a way is the over-50 female reform shift

One of the best things I've read on music criticism in absolutely ages, and the perfect final word (hopefully) in the whole "poptimism vs rockism" debate

This is great. "Ditch 'we will' in favour of 'we know' and 'we don't know'" is a great mantra and I like the idea that strategies should be living, evolving things. (Down with decks!)

The flip side is also that by focusing on net migration, the UK counts its own brain drain of young talent *as a positive* in its own numbers. It's like the economic version of a death cult

🚨New Research 🚨 Ahead of the release of Wave 30 of the BES Internet Panel, the team has examined Labour's decline since the 2024 GE. Labour's support has splintered into mostly indecision or left-liberal parties, but they've also lost their few right-wing voters. 🧵⬇️ tinyurl.com/3m62exph

One more share for this. The sea, refugees, flags, and helping the people who are helping.

It's just one of many points made in the article, but this is probably the best argument against the supposed genius of Dominic Cummings and the idea that he has some sort of telepathic link to the British electorate's subconscious or some dark political skill: www.economist.com/britain/2025...

I wrote about my stance on AI. tl;dr: AI has "original sin" from its theft-based training that we shouldn't forget, and using AI for creative work is both immoral and shit; but it's a mistake to think LLMs are useless or to leave them to the techbros and the sociopaths: roblog.co.uk/2025/08/ai-s...

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

Suddenly getting the urge to rewatch The Death of Stalin…

[Yeats seperating his clothes on laundry day] OK so that pile there is embroidered cloths These here are the blue and the dim and the dark cloths. So those should be washed separately. Oh those? [Yeats blushing] Those are but my smalls.

In recent days we've heard so much news regarding protests about asylum hotels, but who is reporting what's it like to be living in such a place? MiCLU lawyer Esme Madill shares some of her clients' experiences: miclu.org/news/asylum-...

I wrote about my stance on AI. tl;dr: AI has "original sin" from its theft-based training that we shouldn't forget, and using AI for creative work is both immoral and shit; but it's a mistake to think LLMs are useless or to leave them to the techbros and the sociopaths: roblog.co.uk/2025/08/ai-s...

It’s Goethe’s birthday. Here’s a photo of a window in Tübingen out of which he threw up.

I think true crime is basically just bad and morally corrosive most of the time, and I appreciate that people tried to do "oh it's about women trying to process living in a violent sexist world" but I actually think that's only a small part of it, true crime is mostly just dehumanising and grim

I hate the human rights record of the Saudi government for diluting my enjoyment of what should be the purest and simplest of joys in life: Liverpool pissing away a two-goal lead against ten men

When your employees are also content creators, the line between “authentic storytelling” and “massive infosec risk” disappears faster than you can say FYP. Case in point: the LAX employee fired over a “day in the life” TikTok feat her work badge, pin & the exact schedule for carrying shop cash.

Evan Ferguson: For Rome (and Ireland) _ Roma's new centre-forward comes with great expectations, and even greater potential. _ by @cmcmenamy.bsky.social

On how a story mutates as it spreads across the British media… The Telegraph's M&S trans shop assistant tall tale turned into a malicious game of telephone... brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/the-telegr...

Someone asked me to take this out from behind the pay wall and I - unlike the British housing market - am nothing if not accommodating. So: no, empty homes won't solve the housing crisis

A remarkable 1987 article about “Q5”, a consultancy that, i’ve now learned, seems singularly responsible for the mass bland-izing of cartoons when i was a kid. I remember the sudden and mysterious Jeanine swap-out in The Real Ghostbusters! this explains so much. www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

🤣 Get your laughing gear around this! Click https://bgfn.sh/cpnews to read all about the six brand-new Comedy Playhouse pilots coming in November 2025 and available to pre-order now! 🤣

I posted some more Hackney Wick photos from last weekend, the first time I've been back since the Lord Napier re-opened. Its slow but seemingly unstoppable transformation continues reldn.co.uk/hackney-wick/

Went to the Dennis Morris exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery yesterday. Bob Marley and Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Sex Pistols and countless slice-of-life photos of Hackney and Southall and elsewhere in the 60s/70s. Great stuff thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/den...

Entirely predictable. Presumably traffic will also be channeled towards less scrupulous providers who ignore the need for age checks, which *definitely* won't have any other terrible consequences

As a Bluesky user in good standing obviously I love TheModernHouse.com. The best bit is working out where the TV normally sits, which they've removed for the pictures. Bonus points here for proving it with an accidental glimpse in the fourth pic

The Cornish village of Shop does in fact have a shop, but it has insanely chosen to call itself "Furze Stores" rather than "Shop Shop"

This piece, by Jack Beaumont, on working at a SEND school in particular is brilliant, and searing in its anger at the state of education for kids with special educational needs

Has anyone else started getting calendar invite spam recently? A vector that was previously surprisingly unused and is quite hard to think how to block…

This is the end result of anti-trans bigotry: more harassment of girls and women, more policing of gender roles, more gender McCarthyism.

A lovely illustration (literally) of “the doing is the point of it”, as an antidote to AI dependency: youtu.be/1d577v_XBKA

One other 7/7 thread today. Because I think how the bus network got running again is a real testament to some serious heroes that day: The bus drivers and staff who got that network running again and got London home that night. And TfL/the Mayor disobeyed the Security Services to make it happen /1

I know I’m going against the grain, but I do with we’d stop obsessing about people having to have contributed before they can get benefits. Benefits come because of need. Need can come from lots of reasons. Do you want a disabled child to have contributed before you deign to help them?

For weekend readers: I wrote a long read on Labour’s five missions for Sam Freedman’s Substack to mark a year since the 2024 UK General Election. How’s it going, why does Whitehall find missions difficult, and how could Labour be bolder? samf.substack.com/p/why-are-mi... @samfr.bsky.social 1/n

The unholy alliance of "government-gutting tech-bro DOGE" culture and "build fascist state capacity in order to build concentration camps more quickly" culture is going to have odd ramifications, and looks weirder with each day of additional hindsight

I just watched Four Seasons in a Day, which follows passengers on the Carlingford ferry in 2021, amid uncertainty about Brexit, the border and the peace in Northern Ireland docked.blog/films/four-s...

Seeing like a place. A weekend share of this. Some reflections from great summit on child poverty last week. More local approaches can be more intelligent and intentional, but can they rise to the gravity of the political moment? medium.com/@jamestplunk...

I just watched Four Seasons in a Day, which follows passengers on the Carlingford ferry in 2021, amid uncertainty about Brexit, the border and the peace in Northern Ireland docked.blog/films/four-s...

The Gecko List. #Eggcorns

What a hollowed-out fucked-up corporate “local news industry” we’ve got, reliant on disillusioned poverty pay graduates rewriting dodgy press releases that are gamed for SEO by a casino, all enabled by Google pushing this shit through its Discover tab. pressgazette.co.uk/news/the-pr-...

A thorough deep dive into the "white British people will become a minority by [insert date]!" claims that various folks on the right have recently, and disingenuously, been making. Yet more depressing evidence for Brandolini's law