Gilbert Townshend

I had to wait 9 months for a phone call from the DWP but now it’s happened I am intensely, euphorically relieved. I never thought I’d say that about having to pay pension money but here we are and I am now officially middle aged.

Also yes, why not.

Magic: the sex gathering?

I did not expect the cat to bite my nose but then I don’t expect a lot of things.

I saw him perform once and it was honestly the worst paid for gig I’ve ever been to. He kept making mistakes, talking about vans and starting over. I wanted to leave but stayed out of sunk cost feelings.
Hope he practices this time?

Somehow today has ended up being very fish heavy.

A counter to current ‘AI’ doom. They should build it because I want all the tech companies to absolutely diarrhoea money away as fast as possible. When go tits up, we can prosecute their utterly corrupt management consultant leadership and break up the monopolies that are melting society.

‘We and our 965 partners store and access personal data…
We'd also like to set optional cookies to help us improve our website and help improve your experience whilst on our website.’

Yes, I follow you home from the supermarket with 14 of my buddies to help you get the best dairy experience.

also IF the AI doomerism was correct and we are in the process of building literal Skynet the ONLY ethical way forward would be to deploy lethal military violence against the AI industry and it's researchers worldwide.

If you aren't suggesting that, you don't believe this is end-the-world serious.

Fell down a hole reading up on the 1834 fire of the Houses of Parliament, caused by burning medieval tally sticks to record debts on. I still wish they had let John Soane do the redesign instead of the ugly (yes it’s ugly, fight me) Charles Barry Gothic Revival cake we have now.

I sent a bug report about a completely repeatable crash on the iPhone version a few years ago and got brushed off by their support people until I got what must have been an actual developer question months later, by which point I had got fed up with being free QA tester for them.

In a long line of tech just is broken now: Discord has had, for as long as I have owned an iPad just straight up not worked right. The input selector gets stuck on images/emoji if you select it and none of the keyboard shortcuts work. Does nobody actually use the things they work on there?

Why are they not mega aggro about some dude coming to mess with their egg?

Why the fuck does the Apple ‘app’ ‘store’ even need ads at all?

It really feels like a choice, not a necessity. I’m aware Google deliberately made things worse to get more ad impressions so one wonders how much is malicious and how much is losing a battle to endless waves of almost nothing at all.

It’s also not helped by having forums die and everything become lost in discord servers that nobody can index. I genuinely don’t know where to look for help with things anymore. Do I just start buying even more books and die when my already overloaded shelves collapse the building?

I switched to DDG a while ago but the results are the same anywhere. A long, ad interspersed (though blocked but the signs remain) article with basically no information in at all from a place with a weird website name.
If I find something with actual information eventually it’s a massive relief.

I cannot get over the fact that I, like the proverbial frog, did not notice when all search engines went from being useful to completely rubbish. I started keeping track of things last week and unless I specifically already knew essentially what I wanted the results have been LLM generated spam.

My iPad preview is incapable of doing something as complicated as KEEPING THE PAGE I HAD OPEN WHEN TABBING OUT, how the fuck did this go into a release? Did nobody bother to check actually using the application for basic tasks and just called it good?

Realised I still had Teams installed from my MA four years ago. Felt so good to uninstall that bloody thing.

The psychic assault of clicking a link and getting one of those in app browser windows to YouTube with no ad blocker reminds me how horrible the web has become without one.

Called and spoke with Adobe customer support and the guy told me Adobe is discontinuing Animate because apparently the company can't think of any new features to add to the program and they feel it's gotten stale.

So they're just GETTING RID OF IT???

I’m also petty but I hate that the media calls them ‘forever chemicals’. Call them what they are, it’s important people know actual descriptive terms, not innacurate euphemisms.

We already did something like this with lead in petrol until we realised that the correct amount of heavy metals in your blood was not, ‘a little bit’ but zero. The same is true of dioxins or freon. We do not need compounds that basically never, ever degrade in dishwasher detergents etc.

Forever chemicals: the problem and our plan 'Forever chemicals' - or PFAS - have been making headlines. PFAS are used in many products we rely on every day – cookware, clothing, packaging. Their durability is useful, but it also means they stay...

It’s also really pathetic, as is the original defraenvironment.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/03/f... in which the only comment as of writing has probably the best point one could ask for, criticising it for having zero regulatory enforcement and just being about monitoring.

'Forever chemical' testing to be ramped up amid growing concerns. Increasing testing for PFAS is part of the UK's first ever national plan for tackling the substances.

It’s interesting to me when I know something, even a little bit, about a subject and there’s a news article about it. Case in point www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... about fluorine compounds where you can tell with a quick search it was off the back of a government press release.

I love medieval Moomintroll.

This thread is a perfect encapsulation of the idea popularised by the obscenely wealthy that it is & should be a ‘choice’ to enter into indentured servitude because society as a whole has put you in a circumstance where you are forced to do so. What’s wild to me is how many involved support it.

I realised that my parents 23 year old fridge died when the beans my mother bought decided to go fizzy (do not recommend). The replacement not only has a horrible blue led (which I immediately gelled to be warmer) but also WiFi and a Jewish sabbath mode. It also has less space inside. Progress.

I actually think the idea of ‘convenience’ is a really interesting one to consider. The amount of atrocities done to our world in the name of ‘convenience’ is staggering. Too lazy to clean up? Convenient plastic cutlery. Don’t want to walk? Convenient car. Don’t want to think? AI. Repeat until dead.