Congratulations to Zack Polanski. A win like that must make your chest swell with pride.
Occasional editor and writer. Purveyor of half-baked opinions. Intermittently able to make my nieces laugh. (SnoozeInBrief on Twitter) My blog on usage, editing and suchlike: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com
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Congratulations to Zack Polanski. A win like that must make your chest swell with pride.
My enthusiasm is also flagging.
Interesting piece on how message is inseparable from purpose. If you can't set out your thinking, then your thinking probably isn't up to much.
"Yeah, David Cameron actually offered me a cabinet job, but the commute wasn't convenient for me"
"Congratulations! You may already have won £5,000 and a pre-med place at Stanford!!!"
This is the most charitable explanation possible for the leader of the Conservative Party apparently telling people for years that Stanford University sought her out aged only 16 and offered her a place on a pre-med course it didn’t run.
I've got a gro- **gunshot**
"The mattress I sleep on actually has a St George's cross spray-painted on it. Both sides."
Starmer talking about immigration is possibly even more agonising to watch than Starmer talking about gender
Today is Labor Day in the US. Pretty weird that they only work one day a year, it can't be great for the economy. Anyway, hope you lazy assholes have a nice day at the office
I would simply put a time-limited backstop on the ECHR
Wow, that's a lot of money, I hope they can af-fjord it
Feels like the main appeal of this is "it'll annoy the wokes" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Hon mensh for Bill Newton-Smith, who managed to make the potentially dry topic of formal logic compelling. Worst lecturer I had was Richard Swinburne, whose philosophy of religion lectures were essentially "I shall now summarise a chapter of my 1979 book, because it is correct"
Kia Nobre (psychology, Oxford, 1990s) was fantastic: a sharp sense of humour that was not an add-on but perfectly integrated with her love of the subject matter; felt more like a conversation. And Nick Rawlins (ditto) marvellously combined vocal languor with energetic strutting around the stage.
23 Amazing Facts You Never Knew, And Never Will Know:
Failing to enforce the law against an attack on democracy wasn't an act of magnanimity to heal a divided nation, it was an act of cowardice that suggested to the public that Jan 6th wasn't really a big deal and emboldened the perpetrators to keep trying
Looking back, those Enid Blyton books were actually pretty racist
Graham Chapman, for one, is not returning my calls
You couldn't make Life of Brian today because it's already late afternoon and there just isn't time to fit in all the scenes. Plus it's Saturday and a lot of studio people probably aren't working today anyway.
Amazing story: one of the organisers of the group putting Union Flags up around Manchester previously did time for being part of a people smuggling gang. manchestermill.co.uk/manchester-f...
Really anxious to hear from him. I'm so worried that I haven't been able to pay attention to any matters
BREAKING: proof that Donald Trump has dyed
It's ok, RFK is making sure he gets the best possible healthcare
Was just idly wondering if there was any volcano with a cooler-sounding name than Krakatoa, and I came across this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_M...
Yeah, I remember wincing my way through the first few paragraphs of Da Vinci Code, and then an hour later I was 100 pages in. A mad conveyor belt of tripe, with an explosion every few minutes
Weird that the Typepad homepage is still cheerfully touting for new users even as the site has a month left to live
Britain stands ready... to do what? Squeeze onto the next Tube train that arrives?
Someone on the radio is pronouncing Nvidia as "Nuh-vidia" rather than "En-vidia", and I quite like it
Hope @chrisdillow.bsky.social's Stumbling & Mumbling can relocate without too much hassle. Hell of a lot of good stuff there. And it kind of feels like Norm Geras's headstone is about to be smashed to pieces.
Ugh, Typepad is shutting down. All blogs there will be deleted on 30 September. everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08...
Feels like Reform are going for the group of people who don’t like modern Britain and Labour are going for the same group of people, but don’t like them either.
Soon the government will announce that a pilot programme of Discomfort Nodes will launch in 2028
Just bought a very nice-looking fancy chocolate chip cookie for pudding tonight but now I'm back home and the cookie is right there and pudding time is a few hours away and what the fuck
Oh yeah, I've no idea what any of that stuff is either! Some kind of chemicals or whatnot, I guess. For me it's like the difference between reading Jabberwocky while riding a bike and reading Jabberwocky while sitting in an armchair
From Writing Science in Plain English by Anne Greene. A very nice little book
A lot of the specialist terminology is inevitable (unless you add hefty glossaries) but aside from that, there's a lot you can do with sentence structure to make ideas of any complexity harder or easier for pretty much any reader to process, eg:
"They're terrible at comms" is true, but that's only the surface symptom of the real problem. An attack line like Josh's below is easy to say, but first you need to decide where you stand. This government doesn't know what it wants to be; if it can't do that, then what it'll be is a footnote.
This is a vg point that exposes a brittleness in govt comms. Willing to go into battle to defend a policy position that began life under a Tory govt, unable to swing into action to defend democracy against fascistic troublemaking.
Pretty extraordinary that the Times editorial says it's "neither here nor there" that the policies wouldn't work and "it hardly matters" how they'd be funded. They just fixate on the strength of the anti-immigrant mood, mumbling token caveats even as they choose to keep talking it up and up and up.
The Grumblies: They want to be in a sieve, they do, in a sieve they want to be.
oh no
I think a lot of the LLM horror stories are downstream of the fact that they feign having personalities, feelings and opinions. That is just false information, every time, and it coaxes impressionable users into strange, dark places. These things should be as bland as the computer from Star Trek.
The finest endorsement since Ghislaine Maxwell
The crucial distinctive word being, well, word
I searched for budget speeches word and it came up fairly easily
This, I think? bsky.app/profile/dunc...
It is kind of extraordinary that the two main parties have chosen to follow a strategy of simply cowering
I mean why would you even store crackers in a barrel, it's just impractical
Let’s be honest here: they were hoping the anti-refugee protests turned ugly because then there would be sexy telegenic violence. The reason that the progressive protests aren’t news is because they don’t. Which shows the warped priorities of our tv news coverage and is not a great signal to send.
omg, so embarrassing that we spent all that time fighting Hitler when we could have just negotiated a peace in 1938
Just had to fire my lawyer because he kept trying to stop me using my "attempted murder is a victimless crime" defence, reckon it's gonna go great
See also:
WB YEATS: The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity KEIR STARMER: Wow, so that means I'm the— YEATS: *scribbling hastily* And the terminally mediocre / Also lack all conviction STARMER: Drat, that's annoying. Or maybe it's fine. Who is to say
In a bold new experiment with AI journalism, every time you load the page for the BBC article on Lucy Connolly it generates a new headline
Institutional timidity is probably the biggest threat to the BBC. Incompetence runs it close.
Find myself idly wondering how much Connolly could have changed the terms of debate if, instead of signing up as a victimhood bandwagon for far-right pundits and politicians, she had come out and been contrite, taken responsibility for what she did wrong, and apologised without trying to shift blame
Two more small details: The most-quoted line didn't come from Connolly but was fed to her by Pearson, as the summary news report (but not the interview write-up itself) makes clear. And in the last line, Pearson, the teller of this tale, can't resist obliquely patting herself on the back.
That Allison Pearson interview is nauseating. A meticulously cynical study in far-right myth-making. "The much-loved Northampton childminder" … "In a country that felt like it was losing its freedom to speak, Lucy was a hero to millions" … "Starmer doesn’t know what a formidable enemy he has made"
And the qualified term "bogus asylum seekers", very common during the Blair years, has pretty much vanished. Today the bogusness is taken as given - or the merits of an asylum claim are seen as irrelevant to the need to deport.
I dunno, maybe they're looking for the Iraq WMD
ME: I'm feeling kind of listless at the moment MY BRAIN: How about doing some work on your big writing project, which you've been massively neglecting for months ME: Hmm, so you're saying I should rewatch the Sopranos
Thanks, looks interesting!
Any recommendations for a good long read (book or article) on how information revolutions, from the printing press to social media, have caused social and political upheavals?
Seeing this on the news last night and just thinking: really, well done, you've bought the hammer down hardest on the thing the country most needs, just congratulations to everyone involved.
Calling for buildings full of human beings to be set on fire is evil, but I think the campaign by far-right politicians and journalists to turn her into a folk hero is probably even more evil
Actually crabs spend a lot of their time on the sidewalk
Any recommendations for a good long read (book or article) on how information revolutions, from the printing press to social media, have caused social and political upheavals?
Most of what the Tories complain about these days is their own legacy www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
If I don't want to start paying to subscribe to an over-complicated version of some software that I paid to own outright 5 years ago, will anything bad happen? Would a lack of security updates cause me problems?
Most of what the Tories complain about these days is their own legacy www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
If it's true that Labour wants to fight the next election on the basis of "Look, it's us or the far right", as Macron did, then they're going to have to start explicitly denouncing the far right, as Macron does
Less obvious in Latin, but still so easy to avoid
The verb-noun combination here is giving me conniptions
Not saying this looks like a Crimewatch reconstruction but also not saying it doesn't
"It's not a war that should have been started. You don't do that - you don't take on a nation that's ten times your size." The see-saw that is Trump's brain is already tipping back towards Moscow.
Duckling showing off #NewRiverBirds
The main aim of diplomacy seems to be: delay the point at which Trump gets fed up and eases sanctions on Putin, allowing Europe time to bolster Ukraine enough to give it the edge in a long war of attrition
If we could mine and use literally all the physical substance of the planet Mercury, that wouldn't be enough.
A much smaller Dyson sphere, halfway to Mercury, would be 23 million km across. If we made it just 1 centimetre thick, we'd need 66 billion billion cubic metres of material. If we made it out of steel, at current rates we'd take 280 billion years to produce enough.
"Yes, we feel safe now," said nobody, ever, "because Donald Trump has given us a security guarantee, and he is trustworthy."
if i was an investor and some guy i was investing in said, on the record and in public, that his shit needed a *dyson sphere* to work, i would turn those funding taps off so quickly you'd be able to hear the clang 50 miles away
If Kemi Badenoch weren't such a useless coward waiting for her leadership to crumble to dust so that she can join Truss and Johnson in has-been punditland, she'd kick that vicious little mob-baiting xenophobe out of the party
Who would ever have imagined that an event designed to intimidate a group of foreigners and blame them for crime on the basis of the foreignness would attract some thoroughly nasty people? Anyway, it's now a simple statement of fact that Robert Jenrick is a nazi sympathiser.
Tweeting a photo of yourself at an anti-asylum rally alongside a veteran of the BNP, National Front and Combat 18 and praising the "peaceful, patriotic protesters" is at least an 8.4 on the Corbyn scale. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
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"My Source News Opinion World" sounds a teensy bit "Person Woman Man Camera TV"
At this point the only workable option for the government is to ban the Streisand effect
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Jenrick has decided that the Tories were rejected because they were seen as establishment centrists who were soft on migration, so to counter that he is trying to present himself as more extreme than Farage. In effect, he's working to legitimise the violent far right
I really think somebody needs to sit the tech bros down and explain to them that they talked to the computer in Star Trek because that made for better tv than typing, not because it's actually a good UI strategy
Anyway, congratulations to Trump on talking Putin down from "surrender a load of your country and I will probably stop killing you quite so much" to "surrender a load of your country and I will probably stop killing you quite so much", a real triumph of negotiation there
That actually kind of works as three lines, reading across
Hey, here's a fun challenge for the many criminals of London, which as we all know is the most crime-ridden place ever: why not steal the clown horn from the guy who recently started cycling around our neighbourhood honking a fucking clown horn every 10-20 seconds for no discernible reason
Just randomly remembered this hilarious 2007 interview in which Geoff Hoon suggested that the Iraq occupation went wrong because an otherwise highly effective man-marking operation by the UK government forgot to involve John Prescott
Donald and Vladimir at Tanagra. It's a beautiful place, really beautiful. We had some great conversations. A lot of people are saying Temba's arms were wide. But then the walls fell. I'm not kidding, they just fell right down. On some guy called Shaka. So we're gonna get some contractors to fix that
Yes, let's cover the Trump-Putin meeting as if either of them is approaching it with anything resembling good faith, that will help people make sense of it
The extent to which the Conservative Party is going in to bat for Lucy Connolly demonstrates how it has refused to psychologically engage with its defeat, and has been corrupted by the most online elements.