Friends of Pudding

like the H6 plays are just perfectly cast, and the dual castings all feel really intentional. The BBC shakespeare set is such a testament to the depth of talent of actors of this generation. but also funny that no children could act back then

loved his Henry VI so much that I found benson's reappearance (as a priest) in Richard III genuinely emotional - I think because the company model of casting is no longer the economy of the stage, you forget that the plays were written with it in mind.

paul's take would have better odds of being true if the public hadnt seen starmer grovelling, even crawling around on the ground for bits of paper

quite hard to separate this from the fact that the UK right wing press is actively working against the national interest and is goading Trump into attacking the government for headlines

Ianto's Shrine - Wikipedia

what on earth en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ianto%2...

finishing the tetralogy with richard iii!

This may sound a bit unhinged but I'm writing this as so often Hunt was presented as the moderate candidate for Tory leadership
But he's absolutely endemic of the rot that ran through the conservative part of the last few years.
More palatable words hiding short termism and an absence of principles

would genuinely not enjoy being stuck in the war of the roses, my god. guess the smart thing would be to stick with warwick and then just find a way to stay in france during his ambassadorship

The creator of ChatGPT is named "Altman," as in "alternative to human" and he leads OpenAI, which is completely closed. His main opponent is the company Anthropic, meaning "human-centered" is led by "Amodei," as in "loves gods". Then there's "Gemini," meaning "two-faced," from a cmpany that says it will do no evil. Brilliant work as always Kojima! [picture of kojima, watermark of @mediocre_mason on tiktok]

An GE campaign with a genuinely competitive Green party (in say 70 seats) will be really interesting. Think the thing ZP has that corbyn didn't is he actually enjoys the cut and thrust, digging into and unpacking attack lines. was almost corbyn's defining weakness

on the one hand this is bleak, on the other would be useful to run some things by Symeon of Durham on occasion and i see no other path to it

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

i feel like you could sketch out a case for mediocre PM at best but effective as party leader. kept the Tories viable as a credible party of govt post-truss, and prevented a reform breakthrough. all looks more impressive in hindsight

fun post idea ive come up with: "keir starmers only do this when they're VERY distressed"

let that boy cook

just think its also a way basically only he would respond. I think the attack line that works is that the policies are well intentioned but soft and here's what the govt is actually doing on reducing harm or whatever. starmer unknowingly just made the whole thing seem absurd

cant stop thinking about how ridiculous starmer sounded in the 'they'll give my son heroin!!' election clip

i have a 12m fixed tariff for energy til December 26 and honestly wondering if i should call to see if they'll fix it for 24m instead

The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.

As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.

If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.

The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.

More seriously, this isn't mid-2019, this isn't the midst of Brexit chaos, with an ultimately corrective UKGE about to materialise, this is a flailing Labour government and a Twitter poisoned Conservative opposition dynamiting their own support every single day with some new insult or idiocy.

omg julia foster went on to star in ORPHAN 55!

And yeah peacock is amazing! So funny to see him effortlessly nailing Shakespearean language when as a child of the 90s I’m so familiar with him in dibley mode. And what testament to this production that there are a half dozen performances that match him here - couldn’t pick an mvp

No idea why I called the director Julia Mitchell - it’s JANE HOWELL

Multiple points watching it my jaw was just literally dropping. julia foster I did not know your game (and had indeed never heard of you)

Yep, cannot believe I never watched it before, nor had heard much about it! Should be heralded as an out and out classic of British tv, it is as good as tinker tailor, edge of darkness

I’m actually reeling. What an exhausting, gripping series. Looking forward to finishing off the run with Cook’s R3 tomorrowe

My god it took me all evening but what an astonishing production. Absolutely stomps The Hollow Crown’s compression.

The central performances are breathtaking. Ron Cook, Peter Benson, Julia Foster, Bernard Hill are not just good but outright astonishing.

julia mitchell is a wonderful director. Whole thing is filled with really satisfying compositions (and really understands how to move the camera, there's a choice in Hill's last scene to pull the camera back right as he straightens up and makes his last (rhetorical) stand that is *gorgeous*.

going mad because i did a bad apostrophe about ten posts up

ron cook's Richard (later RIII) is wonderful. it is a fascinating read on the character as he plays him as oddly innocent. uncovers a read on the character where he sees his bond with father above all, almost an obsession, that makes him more sympathetic but also more twisted.