I went to a gig where he just stood at a MacBook and pressed play

Love on the Spectrum on Netflix is absolutely delightful. Not entirely sure if it’s very moving or I was just in a sentimental mood but at least one of those two things was definitely the case

They are going to be allowed to pull a big lever connected to nothing and given a go on the Taoiseach’s chair. They’ll come out and tell their followers that they’ve brought the government to heel, but the observant few will notice they now refer to him as “Mr Martin”

"So you're saying I was wrong to enjoy that exciting portrayal of crime and transgression, staged with the cinematic élan of a master?"

Replies are full of people who want movies to conclude with a 5-minute lecture by a priest who says “Now some of you may be tempted to feel that the criminal activities portrayed in the preceding moving looked like ‘fun’. But nothing could be further from the truth.”

I've seen journalists, activists and politicians openly orienting their reaction to the fuel protests based on what they're seeing on social media, and it's driving me crazy. what do you mean you're basing what you do next on what it says on the addictive perception manipulation machine?

social media is not a window, it's a keyhole, it is a tiny sliver that only lets you glance a fraction of some things as they pass by your static viewpoint. the idea that it is giving you any insight into general sentiment is marketing copy and we need to move past it.

Can anyone advise on the situation with getting to Dublin airport from southside at the moment? Either M50 or via town

Looks like the far right are trying to manufacture a fuel crisis to boost whatever warped agenda they’re pushing.

Kanye West – the Ezra Pound of our times?

It is entirely possible that bipolar elation caused Kanye to act out of character and impaired his ability to fully understand what he was doing. But unfortunately for him it will take a lot more than an apology letter to demonstrate that his expressed opinions are not his true opinions.

Embarrassing incoherence from a “representative” of the fuel protests on the radio. Not that he‘ll have the intelligence to realise he should feel embarrassed. Very clear they have no strategy or objectives and this is just about stringing up politicians.

Not convinced anybody could stand to listen to his voice for more than a quarter of an hour

If you dig Pope Leo I can unironically recommend the Inside the Vatican podcast. No I am not being held hostage

you can get to say slurs or you can have freedom of navigation, but it's one or the other boys

just witnessed an exchange on tiktok live where a tractor driver was explaining the reason for the protest to an american tourist who said “well i’m sorry for our president’s role in causing this” and the tractor guy said “trump didn’t do anything wrong”

If I was a Hansi Flick I would simply play a normal sane attacking formation and win the champions league

They think Trump is Magic, and as long as they align the market with what he says, he is

the poster child for "y'know, your face is going to freeze that way"

I quite liked the Refik Anadol installation at the Guggenheim in Bilbao (it didn't blow me away but there was some interesting stuff in there). He trained the model on exclusively Frank Gehry works - photographs, blueprints, sketches etc - and used it to produce these kind of shifting abstract

A commenter notes that "Trump managed to be both Hitler and Chamberlain in the same negotiation. An unprecedented feat." 😭

So if I understand correctly Anthropic have built a cybercrime machine so powerful only Anthropic’s own AI can defend against it?

This is a truism of social media and not exactly some deep, revelatory observation, but it's worth remembering salience is driven not by saying things that are true or correct, but by claiming to be right and people will invent inscrutable new realities to maintain the appearance of being so.

This whole ridiculous episode further legitimatising Bitcoin is a real crotch kick, tbh

Open the Strait of O'Connell

I am calling on the Irish publishing community to block the Samuel Beckett bridge with a load of books in order to demand, idk, cheaper paper

Last night I dreamed I was a reporter sent to a Dublin Synagogue to interview people about the bombing of the synagogue in Iran. Maybe I need to log off

Don’t want to be too follow-the-money conspiracist here but I do think any accounting of what’s occurred should include the fact that someone made a load of money out of this (including the Russian state) and will continue to do so (including weapons manufacturers as US builds back its supplies)

This is also not how Irish agriculture works. We're an export business because we have a climatic advantage in growing grass, same as Spain has for growing veg. Everything else, including our marketing comes from that #speirgorm

If it was elons company or a chinese lab that made it to this level of capability first, we could very quickly end up in a sort of doomsday scenario with the internet and all digital infrastructure being effectively destroyed. We may still see such a scenario.

If climate protesters had blocked roads for as long as the fuel protesters did, there would be people on the radio demanding the army be called in to shoot them all

Had a look at one of the speakers' social media, and it's all I love Charlie Kirk/And Enoch Burke Too/Climate Change Is A hoax/English Has Fallen stuff. This has little to do with tax and is more a get-together for the dads who went nuts post-COVID.

also probably worth noting a truck / tractor convoy converging on Dublin has been a dream of the Irish far right for ages and they're eagerly glomming onto this one. they saw the spectacle of the Canadian trucker convoy and the farmer protests on the continent and they've wanted their own ever since

Like I get what he's saying but Ireland actually mostly exports high value luxury items like dairy and meat and ingredients like milk powder. We actually import most of what people actually eat

I find it infuriating that they’ll believe that the threat worked. And then there’s this ⬇️

Iranian drones are blowing up in Ukrainian cities every night. They have been for years.

The art of the deal

We didn't deserve this day.

They’re hanging a bicycle by a noose. Because bikes are the cause of high oil prices, apparently. That’s some high quality protesting there. #SpeirGorm

The "convoy" in Cork was led by a well known fascist for one. Even the original fascists/ nazis took advantage of current topics to get followers, it's their M.O.

the various Irish small business owners protesting today don't believe in taxation or climate change and the yankees pumelling Iran and choking global oil supplies is a useful wedge issue for them to try and get those two things off the table permanently

responding to the looming risk of a catastrophic disruption to global supply chains that could last for months if not years by shutting down the national road network to demand tax cuts is a more cutting indictment of the pettiness of Irish politics than I could ever write

So these cost of fuel protests caught me by surprise today. Are they still going to be happening tomorrow? Cos I have to make one of those car journeys.

Surely someone incapable of imagining the world continuing after their death would be more relaxed about inheritance tax?

Adam Curtis talks about how Boomers are a generation of solipsists incapable of imagining the world continuing after their death, so they’re incapable of worrying about long term things like climate change. Also means that faced with their own mortality they get enraged and want to destroy the world

The guys who would need to invoke the 25th are the same bitches that have been wearing the shoes. Come on man

there isn't much documentation of the Basque–Icelandic pigeon language that formed among whalers in the 1600s but at least we know these phrases

Suddenly those iodine tables don’t seem like such a silly idea