Ankaret Wells

That's supposing all 50 survived. Let's assume that.

And of the other 12, some don't need mobility aids, some use crutches or a walker... and then there's at least one who needs a wheelchair but can't afford one and one who pushes herself to manage at work without her crutches because her co workers are dicks about it.

Also, while I'm at it, watch out for correlation and causation. If out of 50 children who use mobility pushchairs, 38 grow up to use wheelchairs, the problem *might* be that the pushchairs are causing spinal damage but it's way more likely that some people just always need a mobility aid.

But expecting to get the same population data in times when we have more and better information as we did when we had less and worse is just... bafflingly unscientific.

There actually are ways the world used to be better. There was a period in the late C20 when a politician who was a loud, unapologetic racist or a blatant thieving liar could expect to lose their job, for example, and the Vimes Boots principle applies across the board to clothes made of plastic.

'There didn't used to be all these people calling themselves neuro-whatever'. Because some were behind the walls of institutions and some were living rough and the others got called eccentric if they were lucky and difficult or lazy or insubordinate if they weren't.

'There didn't used to be all these allergies'. Because what they had instead were family trees that people paused over with 'and then there was a baby in between your aunt and your uncle but she died'.

I know I keep saying this, but: if there seem to be a lot of people around now who you didn't notice before, the likelihood is that either

(a) more of them now know there's a name for what it is they're experiencing

or

(b) more of them are surviving.

So apparently the UK government's draft guidance on safeguarding trans kids is just this .gif.

Did you ever watch the Mark Gatiss version of Dracula? Similar levels of complete waste of paying to use an intellectual property.

The stupid thing is, if it was a standalone fever dream like Crimson Peak, or even 'some rich, pretty moderns go to Yorkshire and riff off Wuthering Heights, very possibly while dropping acid' I'd probably give it a shot if I was in the right mood. But this is just annoying and pointless.

I suppose that's one reason to be glad they cast a white dude.

I had a great-aunt Ena, also known as Auntie Rosebud (no, I have no idea if she ever saw Citizen Kane) who I always assumed was called Rosina. Nope, Rose-Ena with a hyphen.

And on the other side a great-aunt Christine who was named Chrissie by her parents and changed it by deed poll.

I bet the bag searchers encounter a statistically unlikely amount of tissues, painkillers and granola bars In Case Anyone Needs One.

This lady speedrunning 'can you give software prions?'

Somewhere a terf just woke up wanting her haircut back.

His precious pinecone shaped tail!

I have just realised this is why no one adapts Shirley.

I got one last week breathlessly inviting me to address a book club in Manhattan. They'd left all the [AUTHOR NAME HERE] prompts in.

He always strikes me as someone who really wants to be JD Vance. And I don't think even JD Vance wants to be JD Vance.

He is the best little puff of smoke ever to interrogate a windowsill.

Blimey. I've only ever found earring backs and the occasional toast crumb in mine.

Image shows a newspaper story with the headline “Woman caught with £67,000 of cannabis in bust”.

She’s a THC-cup.

I do not want to go back to a world of sticky-fingered, emotionally disregulated small people! I've already done that and I had more energy then than I had now!

(No shade thrown on actual kids, who I am now on the whole mostly quite fond of)

Bullies can yell lies, they can assert that everyone believes the way they do, and these days they have deepfakes too, but they have no ability whatever to get in my skull and make me believe it. It was true then and it's true now.

Many of the coping mechanisms I acquired at school are maladaptive, which is why I'm in All Of The Therapy, but one has stuck with me and is useful in these political times.

It's the knowledge that there is *nothing* they can do to make me take myself at their valuation.

Maybe people think AI could also grow up? I personally doubt it because it's basically just massive scale pattern matching. Useful in the same sort of way a search engine is useful and open to misuse in similar ways. You might as well expect the Mona Lisa out of a kaleidoscope.

Disclaimer: I was probably a profoundly irritating child for other children to be around, I imagine most of my former schoolmates have grown up into reasonably decent people, and none of us could have had adult decision-making skills when our brains were still developing.

It instilled ingenuity, perseverance and a rock solid core of belief in myself, but I still don't want those days back.

Generative AI wants to copy my work without credit, answers questions with a confident mishmash of groupthink and outright nonsense, and people in positions of unearned authority keep telling me I should *like* it.

If you too were a former socially inept misfit kid, maybe you too recognise this.