“Captain Video” From Outer Space

❓ Is this person a John Le Carre character? ❓

✅ embittered misanthropist
✅ looks exactly like a Le Carre character
✅ does not enjoy sex with his wife

Also fwiw I’d expect that he’ll let them rampage to the end of his term, giving them as much time as available to recruit, arm, gain experience, cohere as a force. Then try and steal 2028. I don’t seem him caring enough about the midterms, though I could be wrong.

Feel like it’s kind of resonant of Mao taking years to work out he could simply mobilise the peasants instead of the industrial proletariat. These guys were both just following the “rulebook” for their revolutions without realising that they needed to use a little imagination

Try to resist the urge to America post but it feels very obvious that J6 was the culmination of several real autogolpe attempts, which largely failed because Trump was trying to use the US army, which largely wasn’t onboard. Mad to give the guy a second go and a private army

Acid and Phlegm: Ingredients of a Future North Beth Ansell reviews The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands by Alex Niven (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Now feels like a good time to share Beth Ansell’s review of The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands by Alex Niven

Acid & Phlegm: Ingredients of a Future North
scottishleftreview.scot/acid-and-phl...

Receipts on that haunted-doll-looking nazi guy that the american press seem determined to launder into respectable company

Love the concept of a public broadcaster, great british institution etc. Don’t find any value in actually engaging the BBC as-is, still less providing it with the cash to continue its journey to a state broadcaster run by telegraph alumni

Just a reminder as the baftas thing starts to blow over in the discourse, it’s easy to stop engaging with the BBC and to opt out of the license fee

www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ265

(sea monster bio)

You've probably seen my writhing in The Atlantic

i hate talking about immigration in terms of what benefits immigrants bring to the UK because people shouldn’t have to prove their worth to be able to live wherever they want, but surely it’s transparent how much it benefits the UK to be one of the top destinations to study, teach, and research in

Cat is mocking my insomniac state by snoring loudly on a beanbag while I’m trying to work. Meanwhile I just texted “sandwhich sounds jummy” which gives a sense of how well my brain is doing

Relatedly

bsky.app/profile/geor...

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vigorous” and “Alert” One potential drawback of genius, it seems, is restlessness, a mind perpetually on the move. Of course, this is what makes many celebrated thinkers and artists so productive. That and the extra hours ...

In my Dymaxxing era

www.openculture.com/2026/01/buck...

The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps' For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear?

Pretty good article on biphasic sleep (lots of good stuff about sex and murder) www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Possibly a hustle culture angle in here too, maybe related to Buckminster-Fuller. Imagine how much more productive you are at 1am! Nobody around to bother you! Who needs to sleep through the night? Normies, that’s who!

Have decided to reframe my insomnia as “biphasic sleep” (getting in touch with my medieval ancestors) or possibly “reverse siesta” (northern Europe’s yin to the Mediterranean yang)

Flexicology, by Hillbilly Motobike 14 track album

jazz combo finally getting back in the studio for the first time after the pandemic last week, extremely pleased, since the 2019 sessions got shelved, its been almost a decade since we put anything out: hillbillymotobike.bandcamp.com/album/flexic...

Big bowl of ramen with a slice of crispy pork belly in it, among other goodies

Close up on the slice of crispy pork belly in the bowl of ramen

Arguably worth it tho

Think the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods as a by-the-numbers heist movie would be an absolute banger

Issue was that I ate an enormous bowl of delicious ramen early in the evening and then crashed at about 9pm, resulting in my being wide awake from midnight - 5am. Stupid bodyclock

Trying to decide if it makes sense to take a sick day due to insomnia? Can’t see myself doing anything productive tomorrow, sorry, today in a couple of hours lol

We need a new bathroom because the old one was leaking through the celing into the kitchen. Also we need a new kitchen for the same reason

The natural order? It's genetic engineering and surgery and augmentation, atlatl and horse nomads performing animal-sinew jaw surgeries and the creation of maize. It's terraforming: Mayan construction of reservoirs to make the Yucatan peninsula inhabitable year-round, fire-stick farming, terra preta

These do look unwieldy and the intro hasn’t aged well but I still WANT the folio soc versions v v much

Insomnia, so I’m picking out stuff for the bathroom. Thinking a small space plus small child basically needs to be a wet room, right? It functionally is already, it just wasn’t designed with a sufficiently waterproof non-slip floor

my boss at the southern reach told me expeditions keep going missing in area x so i asked how many theyve sent in and my boss said they just find new people afterwards and i said it sounds like theyre just feeding people to area x and lowry started crying

What Elon Has Done Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has faded from public consciousness in America, despite leaving death and destruction in its wake.

"500 metric tons of high-energy food, intended for child refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the age of five, were incinerated, as were ten million dollars of contraceptives"

If only the local university hadn't shut down the archaeology department that had been advising on the project

absolutely there are cases where you do the research and there shouldn’t be anything and then you dig and there is. That’s what the watching briefs exist for.

But they are rare instances and they don’t generally happen when you’re building on a site called *castlegate*

Chronic pain is the worst - feel better soon