Patrick Smith

...and leaving your office job to make art is The Rebel

A play set in the late 1980s in which Tom Good, Reggie Perrin and Hancock's The Rebel meet up and compare how the "walking out on the office" thing went for them

But it's not like he quit to pursue his art

I think it's an odd choice to make him a designer. If he'd been a manager in a food-processing factory, say, growing his own food would have been a rebellion

He was presented as "this man has a meaningless existence" when he was *making a living as a creative*

And - you know - clocked off at 5pm

Enjoy being artistic while you're subsistence farming in the rain, I guess

Invented by accident in 1931:
www.leesofscotland.co.uk/our-story/

Lee's were bought in 2023 and have discontinued them? At any rate, the "Original Macaroon Bars" you can get in supermarkets don't list potato as an ingredient

But the traditional recipes certainly do
@threadinburgh.scot will know

Oi, that's a Macaroon bar

A Scottish classic, you may not be surprised to learn
scottishscran.com/scottish-mac...

As in, the AI chin-strokers might call this "Chinese Room" but in physics it's known as "instrumentalism, and why you can stick it up your arse"

Guilty as charged (STEM education etc.) but any philosophy of science or metaphysics grounding would include the ultimate dependency of models on sense impressions

So physical sciences people should get this

They went to the Cinque Terre and saw a Subway, is my guess

The horrors that would visit upon you if you were to disturb Yaffle's resting place

high pitched squeaking, banjo music

The uniform that Braniff Airlines rejected

Doesn't ring any bells. Is it out near Ratho?

They've reversed the polarity entirely with things like the Haynes Manual for the Millennium Falcon

That's a real-world "how it works" institution being co-opted to play along with the fiction

Everett was the other person I thought of. There's a clip of him making his own jingles - he's a virtuoso with the studio equipment and gleefully wants to show you how it's done

I could totally imagine him doing kids' Saturday morning TV and deconstructing it in the process

Look at this cast. That's a heady casserole of rich voices

There was a running gag in Swap Shop about talking to the right camera: "The one with the light on!"

A chummy bit of business, but also a little twitch of the curtain. Perhaps because those ex-pirate radio presenters were used to operating the machinery

An eye-opener for me was that big venues mandate spending by their acts - you have to use their light and sound, but also publicity packages: posters, flyers, people to hand out flyers...

It's sounds like sitting down with a wedding planner

Poster for Ivo Graham's fringe show, which is a rip-off of Charli XCX's Brat cover with the word "Ivo" in lower case on an otherwise blank background

Agree, although I do like Ivo Graham's effort this year

I remember that scene. Severian's friend turns out to have a top made out of rubber and bottom made out of springs

I don't know about haters. The hype cycle is "new thing will solve everything" - which is bollocks - then there's a backlash, then if it *is* good for something it gets used for that

Fair enough I think to call out the over-hype, but you're right the actual adoption then happens invisibly

I was on a boat off Hunterston B recently and the sea there is full of jellies but I think Scotland was historically wise to their tricks

Come on The French, we're letting you run our nuclear plants you can't let the coelenterates win

Perhaps he was in an upright and locked position?

The logo of Thums Up cola, sold in India to replace Coca Cola after US companies withdrew from the market

Thums Up to this

Literally the plot of all "team of specialists" nerd media - superhero crossovers, heist films, tabletop gaming, MMORPGs, Star Trek

This is nerd bread and butter. How are AI bros getting away with selling "you don't need those guys"?

Yeah good luck sleeping when The Beast comes down off the mountain and moves towards Castle Rock

You'd think that people raised on Justice League and X-Men would understand "bring together people with specific, complementary talents and skills"

Uniball for gel pens, Pentel for mechanical pencils

Gotta have a system

I ran into someone at the weekend who was working on blockchain to do something interesting and I thought "how nice, now the circus has moved on, to be able to get on with it"

I think there is a kind of nerd who is genuinely resentful that anyone else might have skills they lack. Those nerds want AI to make them Good At Everything as a way of dealing with that perceived inadequacy

Casuals. Come back when you have an opinion on the Pentel P205 vs the P207