Tom

How a Small Welsh Town Tried to Save a Popular Sea Shanty Band from 'the Captain' When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored—until they learned that the band's leader ruled with an iron fist.

Well, this is a hell of a story, spinning out from that weird viral sea shanty trend from the pandemic.

magazine.atavist.com/2026/sea-sha...

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Argh

A brightly illuminated shopfront in Birmingham for a fried chicken and bubble tea joint called Mr Egg

And is there a Mrs Egg?

I mean why *wouldn't* you be listening to House To Astonish? It's always a fantastic way to spend an hour, and episodes are now released so sporadically that it gives newcomers a great chance to catch up housetoastonish.com

Finally got rid of our poaching pan that could only do two eggs and didn’t really work, but I miss it every day

By 35 you should have at least one really shitty beat up pan you have an unhealthy attachment to

It’s Ditto! A perfect black and white cat, dappled in sunlight and looking up at the camera from a chair by the window

I think she’s been enjoying the sun being out lately

I started looking from the right so it took me a moment

Also I gather it captures the feel of UK prisons, which is mainly everyone being incredibly bored and everything being extremely knackered

Greg: What’s next?

Alex: Well, sometimes we like to set a task for just one of our contestants. Or, in this case, twelve different tasks.

Hercules: Oh for f -

Greg: Roll VT!

Who up sketching the bittern at Minsmere

It’s written by Dennis Kelly off of the excellent dystopian sci/thriller Utopia, and has a lot of themes in common with that, even if it’s completely different in tone

What *are* dads, and what do they want? We just don’t know

Can’t recommend highly enough Waiting For The Out on BBC iplayer, a show about teaching philosophy in prison, but also about masculinity, identity and fundamentally about the Mystery of Dads

we talk about carcinization, but never about the many, many times plants have invented the “tree.”

Tree is not a kind of plant, it is a thing plats do, and they are by and large unrelated.

Surprisingly good wings, mind

Image of an orange and silver vessel, floating in the artic.

Image of an orange and silver vessel, floating in the artic.

Image of an orange and silver vessel, floating in the artic.

Image of an orange and silver vessel, floating in the artic.

Appreciation post for the French Tara Polar Station
(@fondationtaraocean.bsky.social), a drifting scientific base designed for long-term Artic missions to study biodiversity and the effects of climate change.

More info: fondationtaraocean.org/en/schooner/...

RIP Brewdog. Your beer may have been bad, and your pubs pretty bad, but also the worst people in the world were into you

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

my latest column in @nplusonemag.com: on Iran, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, why no one wants to learn anything, and how the repressed returns regardless www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

See, magnolia I’m used to from a lifetime of renting, it’s the dazzling white that I find off-putting. I guess these things come in cycles

Also why Foxtons seem to think that calling me every other day and leaving voicemails (!) will make me use their services instead of never contacting them again under any circumstances

Wondering why so many people when re-decorating a property for sale choose to have them done up with white walls and grey carpets. I do not want to live in the office thank u

PrEP uptake was already low – and then came the cuts Even before the Trump government slashed its overseas HIV budget last year, with prevention facing some of the deepest cuts, very few countries in the world had enough people using PrEP to substantial...

PrEP is not reaching enough of the people most at risk, to end the HIV epidemic - and Trump’s aid cuts have made a bad situation worse.
It was hoped that new infections could be almost eliminated by 2030, now it’s projected that more people will acquire HIV in 2030 than in 2024.

In the style of an industrial warning sign — WARNING Cognitohazard: Do not think about it

I kept needing this, so I finally made it.

Assume Starmer is currently gaming out what to do if Streeting calls in the Navy SEALs on him over a dispute about the Chagos Islands

Realise it goes without saying, but why would anyone negotiate with the US or Israel any more when they repeatedly kidnap or assassinate heads of state mid-negotiation

YouTube video by Johnny Foreigner - Topic Undevastator

Reflecting on how Johnny Foreigner wrote a song about the thing you most dread actually happening, and then wrote one years later about getting over it, and that’s why they’re the Greatest Band In The World

out of interest, does anyone have any good historic examples of foreign adversaries killing a head of state and said state going "gosh, you win, guess we'll do what you want now"?

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive