"the guy pooping in the reservoir is criticized by both sides, therefore he must be doing something right" please use your fucking brain

Does look like the govcamp crew are going to experience what I believe to be the UK's shittest intercity service, the Stansted to Brum three carriage sardine can. Hope someone from DfT is there.

I remember reading Hunger when I was about 22 and the guy who lent me the book just said "don't google him".

Coming to the point of thinking about external examiners. People who've gone through a humanities/soc sci PhD, do you have pointers or experience you'd pass on?

I do remember a brief period around the election where the question was whether the Tories would let Nigel in to unite the slate. And, well.

In tribute to Mark Longair: www.mysociety.org/2026/01/15/a...

Once more for the American crowd.

Reading the Communist Manifesto the way Marx and Engels intended

Moving organisations along is hard. I did a talk on it last year and now it's here in blog form. public.digital/pd-insights/...

This picture of laughable screens-are-killing-our-kids conman, Jonathan Haidt, in which he equates the Left's rejection of IQ pseudoscience with Rightwing fascism, gets funnier once you notice that all of the things in the LEFT column read like character labels in a Kelly cartoon.

Marketplace of ideas really wants to believe we aren't in fact in some horrible cave system of ideas with big caverns, steep drops, lonely sumps and pockets of dead air.

I have no doubt that under-16s will be banned from social media before the next election. For all its many faults, It's a bad idea to ban things that you have simply failed to regulate or educate about properly. But we will nonetheless.

Really wish we'd stop letting these lads fly around. No transponders, no following the rules, just bad neighbours. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's amazing how quickly a shop owner being rude to your kid can lose them any of your future business. Under 5 seconds.

The Road Safety Strategy lacks clear leadership on reducing speeds, fails to significantly improve safety for those outside of motor vehicles, or make pavements safe to use all year round. transportactionnetwork.org.uk/road-safety-...

This article has been stuck in my head for a while. If CPS aren't prosecuting basic cases and people are having to take on the burden themselves... www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Came off the cargo bike on ice going down a hill. Frankly amazed nothing broke (steering needed recentering) and I'm only on cuts, friction burns and bruises. Even better, only complaint from passenger was that some sweeties were lost.

Just had a thought. Crown changed on Gov dot UK to reflect King's preferred hat. Should it change on Parliament dot UK too or is it to do with grant of use of the crown being from the Queen?

Another day of it being far too bloody cold and pretty when you have to cycle kids places.

Does anyone have familiarity with trying to get a journal to allow you to include online meme images as figures without tracking down the originator and having them sign a license?

Some professional news: I'm now a qualified Lego Ownership Referee. If you're having an argument with a sibling about who gets to play with the Lego coffee cart (don't ask), I can help mediate a shared use arrangement. This recognises the hours of work I've put in. Feel free to endorse on LinkedIn.

Norwich earning the tourism photos today.

I'm not cycling today.

Flooding on the Wensum giving the ducks a small extension.

But also… guys, it’s an op-Ed in a paper none of us reads by someone only 5% of us have heard of

I am absolutely not reading that "stakeholder state" article everyone is getting salty about, but I will observe that most of the hand-wringing exculpation I hear from failing product managers boils down to looking inward at the org and concluding "it would have worked if I'd had more power".

Hasn't been an immensely easy season, didn't end up taking many pictures. Just a few from the last few days.

Last sunset of the year over the hill and trees.

Anecdata, but talking to another school dad, he got sent to a&e by his GP for 5 days of hiccups. Sometimes it feels like the issue can be that any sort of acute further investigation starts at a&e as it is the universal front door (compared to when there also used to be a "medial admissions unit").

This is also my experience of architecture. It's trouble from a product perspective: if what your team can do to build something valuable is artificially constrained by a separate team who don't have any skin in the game, then it just sets up pointless and boring conflict.

Love being punched and kicked because the bracelet plaiting didn't look like the picture on the box.

I'm sometimes surprised that ferries haven't made more of a comeback. Or that there isn't a night ferry doing London - Amsterdam or similar.

New threads.

Much like Labour, the BBC has burned its natural supporters to chase the populist right, who inevitably continue to despise it

Yer modern websites look like one of those new-build estates they throw up next to dual carriageways. Monotonous, bland and boring

Handy guide to the British Aristocracy from GDH Cole’s The Simple Case for Socialism 1936. Particularly like the fact that both ‘Poor Relations’ and ‘Company Directors’ appear to be ejected from the charmed spiral.

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

The Christmas mug is almost dead.

About to suggest to mine that Santa would probably like some calvados this evening.

Searched back through Blue Sky for this. Which is one of the best things I saw all year in any medium.

My dad (a former director of IT and Fortran programmer) has described and brought with him an Outlook problem he's already spent 3 hours on the phone with Microsoft about. He is not taking "Outlook will not fix this, use Thunderbird instead" well.

What a flood of messages to wake up to. It's not the dumbest idea I've ever seen, and it's not a battleship, but there's definitely a few people in NAVSEA crying over those renders. Naming it the Trump class is everything I expected and less. But, I'll believe it when they build it.

This year, Grok was reprogrammed to say Elon Musk is better than everyone at everything, including blowjobs, piss drinking, playing quarterback, conquering Europe, etc.

Extremely strong memories of listening to this walking down Deptford High Street in 2006 balanced with seeing the passage of time emphasising how much the past is a foreign country. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLUs...

Plea to stop using prehistoric monuments & peoples as a sub for present-day national identities. Past peoples are not ‘ancestors’, they had no idea of the concept of a nation-state & this archipelago has seen a lot of traffic since the last ice age

Foggy day out by the river today.

I love reading this list every year, because a) it usually tracks with what I've seen that I thought was incredible b) it always drives me (unjustifiably?) up the wall that there are all of these locked-away academic/art essays that you're just not allowed to see. www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-so...

These are the people the mainstream media is constantly telling us to understand and sympathize with.