Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Mission patches ↖Aliens (1986): Dropship crew ↗Mission to Mars (2000): Mars Recovery ↙The Martian (2015): Ares III ↘Deliver Us the Moon (2019): Fortuna I

Show us the last four albums you listened to.

I find it interesting how articles like this* don’t include service design, civic design and people using tech to improve society. Is not relevant? * I would say design criticism in general but also I’m not that well versed overall

on.ft.com/46M9mXI Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. Free to Read.

Just dropped 3/4 of a rich tea biscuit into my cup of tea. Tried to fish it out with the remaining 1/4 and that fell in too. Now drinking a biscuity tea smoothie I guess.

@thequietus.com it would be great if your monthly subscriber playlist pages included a tracklist with links to the relevant articles/reviews — hard to find what you've written about some tracks/artists as they don't show up in your search. 👍

Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone's company, PPE Medpro, has just been ordered to refund the Government £122m from a PPE contract. There are two very odd things about PPE Medpro that may affect the odds of the Government ever getting that £122m... Thread:

Google just wiped EU data from its political ad library. Meta’s ban on political ads in the EU starts soon and we're worried they might do the same. We need a backup of the EU Meta Ad Library now. If you have data (2018–present) or skills to help, let us know: ir96l7a6vsf.typeform.com/to/fIk9XMZT

Between 13 and 19m adults in the UK experience some kind of digital poverty - more than a million don't have a smartphone or a laptop. There are promises for consultation with digitally excluded groups, but from a build perspective this means backwards compatibility - needs to work on old phones

A while back Historic England asked for my opinion on which was the oldest pub in London. The result is a new online article that outlines the variables, busts some myths, and points to a couple of genuinely ancient pubs in and around the city... heritagecalling.com/2025/09/25/w...

this is very good www.gov.uk/service-manu...

To quote Marisa, the wife of #JDTwitch, in her post: "the most meaningful way to honour Keith is to keep playing his music, sharing your memories, and supporting the causes he cared about." In this thread, please find a series of links that will allow you to do just that. Please share widely:

This is the thanks we get for lavishing him with a full state visit - more racist lies and smears about our capital city and its mayor. I assume the condemnation from Starmer will be coming any moment now?

I think the evangelical Christians in the US saw The Rapture on the Coachella 2026 line up and got confused.

My getting my talk show cancelled opinion is that Kirk's shooting happened because there's an absurd amount of guns in the US. They outnumber people. If all you've got is hammers, then everything looks like a nail.

I had to the make the text size on my phone bigger.

Kirk’s Posthumous and Paradoxically Fitting Employment Reign of Terror talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/kirks...

Anyone else feeling completely overwhelmed with despair and dismay at the state of the world?

Geodesic genius: Nicholas Grimshaw brought futuristic grandeur to trains, planes, gardens – and shopping

Absolutely !!!insane!!! to me that the UK government, lobby and newspapers litigate at length every minor infraction by the BBC, rival newspapers, or what some random columnist has posted. But all of them just carry on not even commenting about this media owner. He’s not hiding, he’s telling you!

Elon Musk spoke by video to Tommy Robinson's anti-immigrant rally in the UK today. "You're in a fundamental situation here where, whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you," said Musk. "You either fight back or you die."

I can't tell you just how feeble, artificial and embarrassing the foundations of modern British far rightism are. It is literally just copy paste internet Americana with fish and chips and football shirts.

What iOS photo editing apps do you recommend? I had a free trial of Adobe Lightroom and have been using it to touch up and improve my phone photos and it works great but £48 / year seems a lot for what I use it for.

“Gort, Klaatu barada nikto”

Heard a fizzing sound in my living room. One end of a USB cable had fallen into a plant pot and was sizzling away in the water reside at the bottom of the pot.

Being surveyed about your girlfriend

This bottle of screen cleaner in my office is a touch anachronistic

Streaming services should have a “live mode” that’s just constantly showing different shows for when you’re not sure what you want to watch

I'm quoted in this paper about the problems with #What3Words. arxiv.org/pdf/2308.160... W3W is a proprietary and for-profit system which shouldn't be used anywhere near government or emergency services. It is prone to catastrophic failure and their business model appears to be unsustainable.

I actually thought Ade Edmonson was Robert LLewellyn for a couple of episodes of Alien: Earth

In Kochi City Station there’s a statue of Berobero No Kamisama, a nude, pink, spiral-eyed figure who is the local god for drunkards.

What was the number one album on your 16th birthday?

Dropped my son off at a local secondary school for football camp today. The names of the classes were printed on the wall, named after notable (and I presume inspiring people): Hawking, Mandela, Banksy and err … Rowling.

Have any fellow “tableful of junk” musicians, by which I mean people who play solo gigs with a wide array of gewgaws such as synths, melodicas, mixers, toy guitars, electronic sound makers and other unclassifiable gadgets, toured the EU since Brexit, and what ludicrous hurdles have you surmounted?

Should departments only ever publish content on GOV.UK? What happens when the content they want to publish isn't guidance and doesn't fit the GOV.UK proposition? What should GDS's position be on departments creating their own websites? Read my blog post about it www.tpximpact.com/knowledge-hu...

My mum: “Have you heard of Labu-bus?”

Furthest I’ve been: N: Reykjavik E: Sydney S: Melbourne W: Los Angeles (Sydney is further east that Tokyo!)

Name another song that mentions the word ‘girl’ youtu.be/cyWB9WPLT1s?...

Don't start a newsletter on Substack! It's not hard to move away from Substack if you're on it.

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

I am so extremely tired. Those poor, poor girls.

think this is sort of interesting as actually.....no you probably didn't need to do "more research" into it? you just had to trust the state and local authorities to know better than you when it came to vaccinating your child? not good that the internet has killed faith in institutions!

But it's not OK to protest against climate change or genocide? Who are these people?

perfect albums that came out when I was 16

The BBC News website has pages & pages of coverage related to farmers protesting inheritance tax, including events where only a few hundred turn out. In London yesterday 100,000 people marched for trans rights, and nothing. Imagine if it was 100,000 anti immigrant activists, they'd cover that.

Let them eat take(away)

I’m here at the intersection of art and technology

more evidence for “a bunch of AI cultists dismantled large parts of the federal government because they believed that their LLMs were intelligent and could do the work better” thesis

If I wanted to read a list of things about you I would have read your Livejournal