It was 30 years ago today that BBC Two transmitted the opening episode of Our Friends in the North - one of the greatest television dramas the BBC has ever made. For the anniversary, I've been down to Caversham to take a look through the show's files and explore some of the tales they tell...

I don't make a lasagna very often, so I always started with your lasagna tutorial, which thankfully I've located on the wayback machine: web.archive.org/web/20250910...

Posts from Minneapolis residents read like they'll be read in voiceover in a Ken Burns-like doc one day

it's a brand new day let's get to it people!

And our last free article of the day comes from @lopatto.bsky.social: Vice was once promised to become the brash young voice of news. But wild expenses, shady deals, and greed turned it into ‘a fucking clown show.’

Want weird obscure RPGs from the late 90s? Want maybe some Shannara to top it all off? Good then visit my stream say hi and enjoy some quality gaming. Or not I dunno, I'm not even sure myself what is going on half the time. 9.30 PM (CET) on www.twitch.tv/thegenesiste...

ICE keeps separating gay and lesbian couples at routine check-in appointments. www.advocate.com/news/gay-cou...

watch captain power the dread bots sometimes make a really freaky noise when they go down

what do you mean the stranger things documentary shows them writing the script on a computer with 3 chat gpt tabs open

found this hard to read

As I've said elsewhere, my next book The Knight Watch won't be published in the US. My former US publishers told me it was unpublishable, that some of the queer characters were 'stealing the show' and that the reader would 'get confused' about which characters they were meant to be invested in 😑

BREAKING: Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife has made a “transformational” donation to the LGBTQ+ advocacy group. This large gift comes just months after the Trump administration shut down counseling services for queer youth. My latest for @wired.com:

14 million Britons watched Noel's House PArty and it still got axed.

Sorry but you really need a taster or just how eye-popping this is. From 1971. NINETEEN SEVENTY ONE.

People are being asked to walk out everywhere at 2 pm on 1/20 - www.freeameri.ca

Rowling is obviously a bully and a bigot and a genuinely corrosive cultural force, but it's also hilarious how she views the children's books she wrote as her sole lens for understanding the world. Then again, transphobes aren't known for their eagerness to expand their horizons.

Warner Bros deleted my Matrix Resurrections essay ages ago, but I remade it and it’s up at the patreon www.patreon.com/posts/147833...

These kids have no other help—can you pledge spare change and click "weekly" or "monthly"? This is our only ask. Their weekly expenses include cancer treatment and winter supplies as they struggling through this winter in a tent. Anything helps.

Please share and donate if you can.

This generation of British Labor politicians really need to learn to be brutally frank when talking to the press. And not sound like they are giving speeches or rehashing talking points. Say what’s fact with the authority of someone challenging a liar to their face.

it's deeply funny that the "Free Speech Union" sued to stop someone from publishing their donor list. none of these fuckos believe in free speech

For years and years I used an invaluable site to send myself email reminders, regular & one-off. Recently it stopped working; I fear the owner may have passed away. Now I'm trying to find a similar site or app. (There's an add-on for Thunderbird, but with scary privacy implications.)

Maybe people will listen for a change if someone other than @dankaszeta.bsky.social says it. Why would we want to listen to world experts on a topic when we have them?

Everyone has gone insane

A tale of contrasting principles forced by budgeting and poor planning into becoming opposites. The cafés and screens of the pragmatic business-focused city should have been able to accommodate the now lost British Library of the North.

To anyone who needs it right now: If a woman gets shot in the face and your first reaction is to say: "yes, but did she provoke it?" you need to give yourself a shake.

YES without being over dramatic this is literally something so important and something the left can never forget. We need to fight for joy and enrichment in life as well as the vital bare minimum to live stuff.

In 1998, the (bad) Italian movie Cucciolo somehow managed to do something important: they shot quite a long sequence in the now-defunct SegaWorld London, located inside the London Trocadero. The park opened in 1996 and closed in 1999. Here is the entire sequence.

Shit Yeah.

I'm at least 1k behind. Bills are doubling up ♥️

The way the “news” media is now “interviewing” Grok, a thing that doesn’t make any sense to do, and readily accepting its false information that conforms with the self-serving view of the world they want to report to confuse their readers is *precisely* the point of LLMs as a new form of knowledge.

The DG of the BBC said this week that it remains on X because it has to reach a worldwide audience. 40m followers.... 40k views and 92 likes. A local Facebook group has more reach.

Hey, FYI, AlphaNews has Jonathan Ross's own cell phone footage of him killing Renee Good. It's clear that the right wing thinks this footage is exonerating. It's not. For one, he calls her a bitch when he shoots her. Second, he's clear of the car when he shoots. Third: why did he have his gun out?

So a CBS Evening News reporter actually did a pretty solid breakdown of the ICE murder video, talking to a former agent who details all the ways Ross messed up. And yet: It didn’t air on the actual show tonight. CBS did post it to YouTube—and it has nearly 800k views already youtu.be/6ywLEESFDu0?...

I will reiterate that I've never had cause to regret abandoning the former Twitter more than two years ago now, and have suffered neither personally nor professionally for doing so. Since I left it's become more toxic and, yes, evil. The people who are still there should really consider moving on.

I reached out to more than three dozen X advertisers, xAI investors, politicians, and government agencies about the growing library of sexualized deepfakes generated with Grok—now including Renee Good. I only heard back from four, with three declining to comment. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-deepf...

Defaming a murdered woman and shrugging off her death with a lie is about as evil as it gets and no journalist who gets within shouting distance of this vicious troll should let him have a moment's peace about it.

Fuck Amy Kobluchar.

We've removed the paywall from this guide so everyone can access it. 👇 Stay safe.

Our thread of ICE and CBP rapists, sex pests, and child molesters continues below. Our thread was so long that it broke Bluesky.

Alt txt: a tweet from Sam_D_1995 on X: The Everything app reads: it's probably worth noting that for all of the right-wing narrative around Minneapolis being unsafe, there has only been *one* homicide in the city so far this year. it happened today and was committed by a masked ICE agent

These people will fire and deport you for insufficiently glazing Charlie Kirk but openly celebrate killings against perceived ideological enemies.

They killed her, they orphaned her toddler, and now they defame her.

I don’t know if a flood of calls at this moment asking for dissolution of DHS and abolishment, investigation, etc., of ICE and Noem will matter, but I made the calls - it’s easy to do, and it can’t be a flood without us.

i simply will not vote for any Democratic candidate who does not promise to prosecute the members of the regime responsible for these atrocities and I’m confident many other Democratic voters will feel the same. It’s up to Democratic politicians in 2026 and 2028 if they want these votes or not.

NOW: Crowd continues to grow in Minneapolis at a vigil where a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good this morning. “SAY HER NAME!” “RENEE GOOD!”