Frank Podmore

Knowing how many block lists you're on or who blocks you is loser behavior. I imagine I'm on plenty. That's none of my business. Why would I give a single shit?

Yes. Interesting idea but all the characters are such broad brush cliches that it grates after a while

Some of it is envy (justifiable, but still ugly); some of it is the cognitive dissonance of a racist hatred of cosmopolitanism being faced with the fact that it works

Wirral care workers continue strikes in dispute over pay WIRRAL care workers are continuing to strike following a dispute over pay.

Wirral care workers continue strikes in dispute over pay

Related (and *very* depressing): suicide is more common in places with loose gun control, because it's far too easy to kill anyone - including oneself - if guns are easily accessible

Solid as a rock

Just found out that among his many other faults, Enoch Powell was one of those guys who don't believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Why are these people all the same?

They're blinded by their (odd definition of) individualism, so they fail to see violence/crime/anything as social problems. 'I would simply solve crime by battling all the criminals single-handed!'

How HS2 built a bridge to nowhere A state-of-the-art road bridge has been built deep in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire. Designed to carry traffic over the HS2 railway, there's just one tiny problem - there's no actual road.

My latest: Move over bat tunnel, here’s the wild story of how HS2 were forced to build a multi-million pound bridge for a road that… doesn’t actually exist.

Here's that thing again.

You never hear that a sex offender has been arrested and it's a "white British national" (Ian Watkins) or "a white British national of Czech descent" (Ghislaine Maxwell).

You only get these precisions if they're a non-white British national.

Funny that.

#EverydayRacism

Another one for my thesis that Conservatives have lost their minds because they can't accept that Thatcher failed *on her own terms*

Re: Alan Moore's 'read bad books' thesis, I genuinely think George Lucas did SFF a favour with the Prequel Trilogy, because we all spent years arguing furiously about what made them bad and what made the OT good. It was comparative lit crit for the masses (of nerds)!

Alan Moore knows the score

Is the universe conscious? Philip Pullman thinks so… It’s fun to entertain the possibility of panpsychism – that all the physical things around you have some level of experience. But that doesn’t mean it’s how reality works

Is matter conscious? app.thenewworld.co.uk/story/144378...

M.W. Rowe | But is it Marlowe? In late 1952, builders working in the Old Court of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, removed two boards from under an...

‘If the violent, sexually transgressive, atheistical and generally self-destructive Marlowe had had a motto, then “What nourishes me destroys me” would have been more than appropriate.’

M.W. Rowe evaluates new evidence concerning the playwright’s only known portrait.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

Good morning. Today I learned about the "trans women" vs "transwomen" distinction in usage. Sorry about that! Here's the fixed version, which I also changed on the main site.

I Will Grind In Final Fantasy Tactics Every Single Time And You Can't Stop Me - Aftermath I will turn leveling jobs in Mandalia Plains into a tremendous slog and there's nothing the cops can do to stop me.

I understand why people think grinding Mandalia Plains in Final Fantasy Tactics is a bad idea that sucks the life out of the game, but I simply disagree. aftermath.site/final-fantasy-...

Current Issue: Fall 2025 Forgotten Ground Regained: A Quarterly Journal of Alliterative Verse

In the current issue of Forgotten Ground Regained, I have the poems carefully ordered to illustrate different kinds of alliterative poetry. So if you want to learn about Old Norse (Viking!) poetry, read the poems in order in the links given below, or read this thread!
alliteration.net/current-issue/

Text readng: SM: There's really only one rule in terms of the things that Mario does. Generally, it's that he's more on the blue-collar side. He's hard-working, and certainly much more physical in nature. So, I think that a doctor is sort of an unexpected and perhaps unbelievable role for Mario. Perhaps the Dr. Mario you're thinking of was maybe, in some way, not necessarily legitimate.

Came across this old interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in which he (inadvertently?) implies that 'Dr' Mario is guilty of some sort of medical malpractice:

Can I still not watch it but get annoyed about it anyway?

All foods can be fried.

Preach.

Clearly *deep* frying was the issue. You should have shallow fried it

one of the points consistently mixed is that when we hear the Orcs they talk like British infantrymen in the trenches (including, as Tolkien notes in the Appendixes but leaves out of the main text, punctuating every sentence with "fucking")

I think he was aware! He struggled with the characterisation/origin of the orcs becuase he needed them to be irredeemably evil so that the heroes could kill them with impunity, but he also couldn't have them so for his own theological/philosophical reasons. Hence the tension you & other readers feel

Like, yeah, that's the problem with men. We read too many books.

That and all those weird lists of 'red flag' favourite books that were doing the rounds a while back, which similarly suggested that men in particular shouldn't read novels in particular

This was mostly inspired by the Guardian recently publishing two different articles which tacitly agreed with the suggestion that it was a bit weird and cringe for men in particular to read in public

In the most cringe variation of this possible, I now make a point of not looking at my phone in public beyond what's absolutely necessary and instead always read a book

The... the what?