emmatonkin.bsky.social

It's almost shovelware, I suppose, as the games industry would call it: mediocre shite that is barely worth copyrighting and mostly contains flipped assets. Except probably even less coherent.

afaik she generally shouldn't be able to claim copyright on it, other than on any work that went into layout. Granted, this hardly matters in this instance because the results inevitably won't be worth reading and it's not as though these things were ever going to build a repeat audience.

☞ ☞ ☞ the index finger is a pointing gesture to be found in manuscript and print traditions. It was used to draw the reader's attention to a certain part of a text or image. This slow-moving thread highlight a few of them:

'Who's going to win," she says after explaining that she can't even mention the pen names producing books because it will tank what pitiful sales she gets if people know she's using AI to produce them.

LOL. Hear yourself.

BREAKING: Morgan McSweeney quits as Keir Starmer's chief of staff amid fall-out from the Mandelson scandal

A multicoloured roughly circular network diagram of how academic disciplines connect with each other. Humanities and Geology are kind of out there.

Writers, we must carve out an Arctic passage to Geology.

"Let me tell you about the Apocalypse-"

"Super, anyway, here's 240 NHS organisations' worth of pseudonymised data"*

* yes I understand Palantir is technically merely a supplier and all those caveats the NHS published.

Especially when "buying software" is potentially a process of "tying in data flows". One might conceivably purchase a physical widget from a wobbly organisation if it mattered enough, but would one trust someone yelling about the Antichrist with personal data, or classified data?

Lady Victoria Hervey on Her Appearance in the Epstein Files The MAGA-hat-collecting aristocrat also had a few run-ins with Jeffrey Epstein and is hoping to exonerate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Honestly, I feel like that remark sums up the experience of the last decade very neatly! www.vanityfair.com/news/story/l...

I think that's the emergency backup status, yes. But she would also like us to know that she has six MAGA hats in her Knightsbridge apartment: just so we know she still isn't a loser. Oh, and she says Musk "looks a lot better in person", so we know they've met, and hopes he remembers her.

It is. And she seems to have spent her life on the periphery of things, tbh. 20 years in LA, three small credits on IMDB. She told Vanity Fair she hangs out in Mar-a-Lago/golf club wearing a MAGA hat in hopes Trump offers to sign it. Honestly seems a very, very odd duck.

Sounds like a great starting point.

I thoroughtly agree with you that it isn't straightforward, but I do think it is important.

For AWS, which was what this comment was about, it should be straightforward to trial alternatives, and anyway it's best not to get too tightly enmeshed in any single provider.

For whatever the other thing is, that's a question for relevant people (such as) parliament to examine.

I mean, if all this had been done the answer ought to just be, roughly "yes we did all the homework and it's right here" and/or "yes we did the homework but can't share it openly for good reason so here's how we're managing transparency..."

I don't, hence uncertainty: since there is a question there, seems like it should be no great shakes to answer it.

And yes heartily agreed about procurement processes. I appreciate national security can require different approach but gov should be able to satisfy parliament of appropriateness.

"First Monday will cease publication, after 30 years, with the May 2026 issue, volume 31, number 6, scheduled for release around the first Monday of May, 4 May 2026" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

really good stuff and exactly what i was trying to get at here www.lazyandentitled.org?p=162658043

Also - amazon really isn't the only option for cloud services in general. They're just the most obvious option and a bit of a default. That's a nice example of a case in which looking around and trialling potential alternatives really wouod be a useful process.

Then it should be no problem proving the necessity of these services and the unavailability of alternatives via an appropriate process, which ideally would happen prior to procurement, but in this instance since that was not done how about via a suitable inquiry...?

Options include more transparency on party financing, ending revolving door, putting political roles and ministerial codes on statutory footing with independent oversight, reform Hse of Lords, and many more - drawn from cross-party Commission on Political Power commissionpoliticalpower.uk

Call for Contributions: Histories of Weather & Weathering Call for Contributions: A Sourcebook for Histories of Weather and Weathering (working title) Editors: Rebekah Higgitt, Tamara Caulkins and Lotta Leiwo We invite contributions to this planned open a…

Call for Contributions to a Sourcebook for Histories of Weather & Weathering teleskopos.wordpress.com/2026/02/05/c...
Full details linked and here teleskopos.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...
It will be edited by me, @lottaleiwo.bsky.social and Tamara Culkins. Please share! #histSTM #envhist 🗃️📜

I've read about it but not seen it (that I am aware of...)

Railway history is weirdly compelling. Like reading Edward Thomas's "Yes, I remember Adlestrop [...] No one left and no one came" and remembering that the station itself is now just a plaque on a bus shelter.

I19 Conference 2026 Hosted via Zoom, May 1-2. Submissions due April 4.

CFP
The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Fairy Tale
1–2 May, free online

Presentations invited on any aspect of #sciencefiction, #fantasy, or #fairytale in the Long #C19 as well as modern reinterpretations of the #C19 in literature & media
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Also half the length of Crystal Palace's effort, mind... barely long enough to chuck a frisbee. They turned it into a shooting gallery for a while after giving up on it, because what else do you do with a short chunk of tunnel containing a piano and some rusty metal. www.nypl.org/blog/2015/07...

Beach pneumatic transit! So genteel, so ornate, so bankrupt :)

On the plus side, two hundred years of practice building underground railways, pneumatic or otherwise, has provided a lot of info on how to do things safely, but it wouldn't be fun to read any of that when you're doing "disruptive innovation." Move fast and break things. Tiddly pom.

London tried the pneumatic railway - they had a segment in Crystal Palace park in 1864 which was somewhat comparable in length to the "hyperloop" segment they used to have as a testbed in California. It, er, sucked. And blew. But for sixpence a ticket, it was a fun distraction.

To be abundantly fair to the London Post Office Railway, the line was electrified and automated & the whole thing could at least be switched off if anything dangerous happened. Masterpiece of proactive risk management by comparison :)