Claire James

CrowdFarming | Farm fresh food directly from the farmer Adopt a tree, an animal or part of a garden, receive fresh food cultivated just for you straight from the farmers and help fight food waste.

Depending what it’s for, this company might be able to link you up? www.crowdfarming.com

Yes, all the possible escape routes were surrounded by crowds of shouting people, poor thing looked terrified.

Flying saucer (confectionery) - Wikipedia

"The first flying saucers were produced in the early 1950s when an Antwerp-based producer of communion wafers, Belgica, faced a decline in demand for their product."

Thought this was a great obscure fact - turns out all my friends already knew it. Downside of having friends who like obscure facts!

I'd have said they were mixed - good in parts but, like so much of the media, completely uncritical about things like airport expansion, so not really properly understanding the implications of the climate crisis.

But then they published this batshit guest article a couple of weeks ago...

47% of people think immigration is primarily illegal. There were 4% irregular arrivals in March

New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation

"Jeremy Kyle leads emotional tributes..."
Same audience

Yes, my future plans are mainly ‘tough but ornamental perennial flowers’ (and my little apple tree & fruit bushes) and less those vegetables which require lush soil, regular watering - but not too much rain (because snails). I’m glad I’m not actually a subsistence farmer!

Mine is still very much a work in progress after almost 3 years, and it has grass paths which have started growing again now we’ve had some rain. And so has the horseradish... Meanwhile the things I want to grow mostly don’t!

That makes me twitchy wanting to give her a bikini top that fits properly.

How does a rag-tag volunteer army in need of a shower
Somehow defeat a global superpower...?

Or (slightly more boring) from that report on US job losses. Or both.

Is that not just because spelling in English is a hot mess?

It would help if we used more honest descriptions. One of the best I’ve seen was ‘text generator’ for ChatGPT etc. If you get a text generator to turn your bullet points into a formal letter it’s probably quite good at that. Providing reliably accurate information… not so much.

Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.

We are probably going to look back with nostalgia on the days of hand-made artisanal misinformation.
Two examples, not even particularly malicious as these things go:

Horrific article/thread.
I wish I couldn't see the parallels with other articles on my timeline about climate change. The history of warnings about pushing the climate beyond tipping points / denying a population adequate food ignored. Acknowledgement only coming when it's too late for so many...

Great illustration of the early 1960s being not 'swinging' at all and for most people pretty much like the 50s.

It was just funny as it sounded like 'gotcha, that's not a real photo!'
imo GenAI can get in the sea but most people aren't that confident in their own drawing skills.

are you saying that the picture in the original post is not a genuine documentary photo of Clacton? 😲

Please familiarise yourself with the Offensive Weapons Law before carrying this tool in public. Under section 1 of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, it is an offence to have a weapon in a public place unless you have lawful authority or a reasonable excuse. This might include carrying tools for work or transporting gardening equipment. We strongly advise that you keep this tool concealed, sheathed, and out of sight in public spaces – preferably in a gardening bag or toolbox rather than on your belt.

Can’t help wondering if the product page always said this or if it’s a recent update.

"This really important bad thing (e.g. military carbon footprint) is getting ignored" - yes
"No one is allowed to talk about any other issue (e.g. rising emissions from any other source)" - really?

Jet2 isn't the best example to pick, since their business model of cheap flights is actually based on people not taking climate breakdown seriously!

He'd have needed to have amazing skills to negotiate a fractured Labour Party & hostile media and I think the description I saw somewhere of him as 'not a leader, he's not even a team player' is probably accurate.
But a lot of his policies were sensible & popular, e.g. nationalising water companies.

A significant result of the hostile environment is to stop people without permanent rights to be here getting out of situations where they are being harmed, whether that's dodgy employment, even worse (cannabis farms, domestic slave labour) or domestic violence.

Well I for one can't see what about this messaging would make people who are immigrants and/or have brown skin feel unwelcome...

‘We have everything in hand. Also you should live in paranoid fear of asylum seekers and Deliveroo riders. But definitely not vote Reform even though they are right about everything.’
WTF…?

See also the ‘videofication’ of everything. Reading is way quicker, podcasts lets me do other stuff at the same time, if I wanted loads of short videos of people explaining stuff to me I’d join TikTok thanks algorithm.
I should probably just accept I’m past it and go and live in a hut.

I want to get “illegitimate concerns” into political vocabulary.
“People have illegitimate concerns, like not liking hearing foreign languages on the bus.”

Actually I’ll stop the list there as I don’t have pretty pictures to represent things like ‘fewer people smoking’.

Hibiscus bush with purple-pink flowers

Things that are better now than they used to be… it’s a short list, but:
Municipal planting. More Mediterranean, fewer bedding plants.
This lovely hibiscus bush was in a random street flower bed not far from Whitechapel station (East London).