Pretty uncomfortable w the implication in some of the chat today that British Muslims’ concerns are somehow less electorally valid than those of people from other backgrounds. Quite a lot of reductive implications that gaining the support of Muslim voters is somehow dishonest or gaming the system.
Matt Badlose
I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.
@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:
tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...
A few further comments, 🧵>>
Hey! Scholars! If you're using someone's work in your class, sometimes it's nice to email them and tell them, because then they might feel good about their research instead of entirely crushed by the academic humanities' ongoing descent into the grave
I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.
And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.
A green and blue background with four photographs of people’s faces in a column. The first photo is a black and white image of a person with short dark hair, and dark leather jacket laughing with their mouth open. Beside the image is the text ‘Shannon Yee’. The second photo has a person leaning forwards with long green curly hair swept over to the right side of the body. They are wearing a green jacket with badges on it. Behind them are trees and greenery. Beside the image is the text ‘ Ash Jones’. The third photo is a person with long dark hair, wearing a black blouse with a subtle smile towards the camera. Beside the image is the text ‘Sarah Murphy’. The final photo is a person with short brown and grey hair wearing a black t-shirt with a yellow circular logo on the chest. They lean against an orange wall. Beside the image is the text ‘Elly Makem’.
Meet our panel of artists using creativity to drive social change: Sarah Murphy, Ash Jones, Shannon Yee and Elly Makem.
Join us Friday 20 February, 11:00am–1:30pm for coffee, conversation, and insight into their creative process. Book your free spot.
Contemplating the immensity of what Frederick Wiseman brought to documentary filmmaking is too dizzying a task to take on the same day he leaves us. Put it this way: he lived to be 96 while never ceasing to find new ways to see & film & show the world around him in all its complexity. A+ job on life
So when thousands of women (and children) were being duplicated--including in non-consensual AI porn--it was no big deal. But it took "only a 15-sec clip" of these two famous white men to draw outrage and fear. Gotcha. Cool cool.
"everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.
The image shows a logo. A bright blue Circle with the words Atypical Generation Find in black letters. Both dots on the letter i are highlighted in pink and yellow.
Atypical Generation Fund is open!
£1,000 grants for D/deaf, disabled & neurodivergent artists in Northern Ireland.
Applications opens: Monday 2 February 2026 at 12:00 pm
Deadline: Tuesday 10 March 2026 at 4:00 pm
More information on our website. buff.ly/tsCvV1C
Yet another example of how cancellation is not really a thing if you have the right friends and supporters
Wait the Melania film is directed by *Brett Ratner*?? I thought that hack creep was finished during MeToo??
Chris Rufo is so upset about the Minneapolis protests that he is resorting to anti-Nordic racism christopherrufo.com/p/the-curse-...
Aha! Thanks!
Now imaging what ‘boxes of lucifers’ look like 🐳📘
And then, just to maintain that tone, the selfsame captain makes a fart joke in the next chapter: “What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady”.
Shades of cosmic horror & romantic sublime in The Candles. Ahab faces the overwhelming, implacable, inscrutable otherness of nonhuman nature, finds a kind of… kinship? with its wild power, becomes inhuman, and sets his—and the crew's—fate. A dense, rewarding and also incredibly evocative chapter. 🐳📘
In the end, Moby Dick is a novel about the importance of asking the right questions regarding your direct manager, their management style, and the culture fostered by their leadership during your job interviews. 🐋
It’s so extra.
(This chapter beginning is one of the sections that led me to realise I love this book on my second reading.)
“… both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage”. 🐋📘
A writer: “The carpenter arrived”.
Melville: “Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates…” 🐋📘
Let us all aspire to being “ponderous profound beings” going round with steam rising off our heads as we think our thoughts! 🐋📘
10 years of this shit
Your yearly reminder that “Blue Monday” was made up by travel companies to sell more holidays at the point of the year when we’re all poorest and the weather is shit. Depression is real all year round.
Comic book rendering of Marlborough house and the Albert clock
Vault Artist Studios presents...
A comic in 5 pages.
In little more than two weeks, Vault at Marlborough House will be no more as our tenancy in this home for the last 2 years and 8 months comes to an end.
Marlborough House was a temporary building for us as the site is due for redevelopment…
The ferocity with which the vile phrase “a biological male who identifies as a woman” is being embedded across multiple media in Britain is horrifying. It shows how quickly support for eliminationist attacks against trans and gender diverse people is being solidified
Amazing how people still think you discover the truth by finding the midpoint between two yelling groups of people.
Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea about the Pink Ladies (NI or otherwise).
Vile stuff. The state as your little app in your pocket, maybe with points and algorithmically-deduced personalised offers. The demos as content.
