Chris Till

I tend to think of myself as a minimalist, but is it actually minimalist to like small spaces?

When I think about minimalism, I think of a big room with almost nothing in it. But if you have a small room, with a normal amount of stuff in it relative to the room size, is that still minimalist?

I used to think Nordic Combined and Alpine Snowboarding were boring sports for a long time; but then I got into them; and I’ve been a fan of both for quite a few years now. So the IOC should think about that before removing them from the Olympic program. Bring women into NC and promote both sports.

I find it hard to believe that femininity and masculinity in general don’t play some kind of natural role in voting patterns. Even if it’s a small amount, it surely can’t all be nurture over nature.

That’s a pretty disingenuous response. But maybe? Are you a scientist? It does seem to me that women are inherently more likely to want to build things, and nurture things, and men more likely to destroy things in life generally. That corresponds to the left - right dynamic pretty closely.

I mean if they were pressured into playing a medley in which the most intensely political parts of those songs aren’t played, would that not count as a form of censorship?

If that’s true and they avoided even the basic lyric changes, then I’d be extremely disappointed and have a lot less respect for them than I did. But I need to see it in full first, before I slate them.

They didn’t show it on the UK broadcast, but from what I’ve seen on here and gathered from reporting, they either chickened out or were pressured out of even doing the basic lyric change in American Idiot. And I think even skipped the “representative has the floor” part of Holiday.

So disappointing

Japan now seems to have basically extreme neoliberal / fascist domination of their lower house. I would say the country is utterly fucked, and it probably it. But somehow they always seem to have a far better quality of life than we do in the UK; and that’ll probably continue no matter what.

I don’t know why, but I always gravitated toward Francesca Lollobrigida as my favourite speed skater. So pleased to see her winning gold finally in the 3000m. Such a great story for Italy on the first day too.

Graphic by Chris Mooney for ReportEarth.substack.com showing the growing and falling U.S. newspaper coverage of climate chnage from 2000 to 2025 for LA Times, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today.

(Climate) "Coverage is punctuated by bursts of attention to late-year international climate conferences, but the recent decline persists even when you smooth that out. And it appears poised to continue. The real question is how far coverage can fall."

by open.substack.com/pub/reportea...

The Green / Reform gender split still pretty big even with young people who are generally more progressive. Interesting to know if that is a current societal thing, or an inherent gender difference that will always be there.

Nice shoutout for Ubuntu (unintentionally for the OS, intentionally for the actual word and its meaning) by Kirsty Coventry in her speech.

Also where was Andrew Cotter for the opening ceremony for BBC? Did they replace him with a duller and more boring, less potentially controversial person?

I think I probably posted a similar thing before; but now it feels obviously worse. It feels like the entire establishment is fighting tooth and nail against the rest of us to preserve this broken system. It seems like there’s no one willing to step up who hasn’t already done so.

I think the Olympic spirit has lost all meaning at this point. It’s just pure tradition in the opening and closing ceremonies. There’s minimal, if any, application in real world scenarios.

Seeing Israeli athletes at the opening ceremony makes me sick. And similarly the way the US team in one of the other venues were chanting “USA, USA” was disgusting.

It’s hard to know what else to say. The establishment seem to have gotten away with all of it for the time being. But not for long…

Fierce heat in CHINA
With temperatures up to 35.6C and 11 records for early February (1-10th).

Very hot also in SE Asia,specially in Thailand with >37C in the Northwest,Northeast,Central,East and Southeast !
and possible record warm nights coming
It's still the cold season....

I find it funny seeing Zia Yusuf criticising Labour and the Tories over their numerous scandals. I’m sure any future Reform government will be squeaky clean of course…

Obviously hopefully it doesn’t get to that point. But if it does, Reform are going to be up to their eyeballs in scandals.

But I think it’d be just as great if they played a bunch of deep cuts from all over their discography. I doubt they’ll do that though.

All of us who were centrists / centre-left and graduated to becoming socialists / communists did anyway.

What is this guy on Question Time talking about. He’s first saying that he thinks Starmer is a man of integrity. But then starts talking about how great Green by-election candidate Hannah Spencer is. Just seems very confused. Maybe struggling to shake off his liberalism. We all go through it I guess

I wonder what setlist Green Day are going to play at the Super Bowl.

The obvious would be:

American Idiot
Holiday
Know Your Enemy
Bang Bang

Then change around the final two if it’s 3 songs.

If it’s more than 4, you’ve got to add Basket Case. Maybe Bobby Sox if they want to send a “woke” message.

YouTube video by The Humanist Report How Epstein Helped Ruin Gaming & Engineered the Modern Online Reactionary Movement

This fucker truly was one of the most evil people ever. He had such wide-ranging influence over society in general; not only his horrific crimes that we all know him and his associates for now. It goes so much deeper, into gaming, into fascist online culture. Everything.

youtube.com/watch?v=9LJW...

It’s so absurd how Starmer is trying to make it seem like he was misled by Mandleson. Which is obviously bullshit. He obviously knew about Epstein. And even if he didn’t; just deciding to appoint someone like Mandleson because you think he would be good at the job should be a sackable offense anyway

Thanks. I don’t know why I didn’t get notified of this reply by Bluesky.

Can they not just use something other than HTML 5? Seems like they managed with the iPlayer app. Although it is an awful app with terrible navigation. But it exists.

Teacher struck off for making 'granny' porn and OnlyFans content Lyndi Corston, 61, has apologised and admitted her behaviour was wrong, says a report.

Why? That seems like an absurd decision to me. Especially when teachers are underpaid. What does it have to do with the kids who would never have found out anyway?

Teacher struck off over 'granny' OnlyFans content www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

only for me. They don’t force shit on you. You’re freely able to choose to be notified by push notifications, email, both or neither. I don’t know if Medium has push notification options for individual accounts, but they should obviously. But at least Medium give you an acceptable amount of choice.

Fuck you Substack. I won’t be bullied into using your shitty notifications you can’t turn off. I deleted my account.

This actually happened once before when I used Substack, and I reluctantly went back when I had someone new I wanted to follow again. But now I’m really done, 100%. WP and Medium…

I turned off push notifications on Substack a while ago, and now that push notifications have “failed to be delivered” for a while, because they can’t be turned off, they’re now emailing me newsletters when I don’t want them again.

And then when you try and turn off the emails, it forces unsubbing.

Yes it happens. It’s happening in the by-election where two left parties stood aside for a third to have a clear shot at the win and to stop the far-right.