Charlie Mayer

I'm from a pretty comfortable background and went to the grammar pictured above. I was told by multiple teachers that my comprehensive friends who got better GCSEs than me couldn't possibly be smarter than me because they didn't benefit from a grammar school education. The system breeds snobbery.

Hey that's my old school in the picture. Presumably that entitles me to say Farage is a twat and this is a bad idea

YouTube video by triple j Turnstile cover The Stone Roses' ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ for Like A Version

Great cover. I picked up the Stone Roses debut when the 20th anniversary edition came out, having never listened to it before, and it blew my mind.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZgZ...

Fascinated by the fact that three times as many Lib Dems as Greens are so anti-Labour. If it's the Home Counties ex-Tories, they seemed remarkably relaxed about a Labour government 18 months ago. If Starmer has disgusted them that much it's not a great sign for them continuing to vote Lib Dem

100 World Days Until Cup

There were presumably Lannister motifs in the first two and a half seasons of GoT before Rains of Castamere was even introduced so they could just... use those?

Can't even imagine how weird the politics of a rump PLP would be in this scenario where we lose every seat in Greater Manchester but hold (*checks notes*) Macclesfield and High Peak?

We should make VR headsets more of a thing again so they can walk around in an AI-generated 1950s without having to ruin life for the rest of us

One of the maddening things about knowing you're living through history is not knowing what's going to happen next

Hey now he might have been onto something with the latter

The irony that the Greens are going to go hard after seats like Walthamstow while many of the architects of the current mad strategy will probably be fine

Especially as Help to Buy was bribing people literally like five years older than the students they were screwing over

AV would be great for preventing endless tactical voting arguments and would help legitimacy for individual MPs but I do wonder if the final results would be just as weird looking as FPTP's would be if we end up with five parties between 10 and 30%

I don't see how it could be a straight fit between the two without some extremely weird shenanigans - there might be room for a Blue Labour and a New Labour candidate but there surely would be a soft left one on the ballot as well given the PLP's leanings

Maybe they are trying to do different things?

There is also a cautionary tale for what could happen to Polanski in recent Lib Dem history that Davey very much lived through (as did Polanski, funnily enough)

I was already an AV advocate because all the tactical voting jockeying is extremely unedifying but the Green crowing this morning that Labour should have stepped down and given them a clear run has really sealed it

Does beg the question as to why they hid the river under a massive shopping precinct in the town centre

"By the way the UK economy doesn't look very good" in NOVEMBER 2009 really adds to this

Who do you think you are fooling?

Maybe something about the likelier chance of them becoming an MP if they're Labour means we're more likely to go "not this prick, absolutely not"?

I think there's definitely something in this - everyone I know with teenage kids says they listen to music from the 70s onwards fairly indiscriminately. Spotify etc have definitely helped flatten things

Didn't help that the 2012 tuition fee changes roughly coincided with both main parties panicking about Farage, going after authleft voters but mainly through vibes because their policy preferences aren't really deliverable, it not working so trying again at the expense of libright, rinse repeat

I always think about this regarding pop culture stuff I enjoy that was made well before I was born (93) and introducing it to my kids would be like my Mum trying to make me listen to Glenn Miller

I really want to give it a go but straight after the Winter Olympics does not feel like the time

Curling has a lot of filler but god it's great sometimes

This is true but feels less egregious somehow?

Idiots online have negatively polarised me into broadly liking The Last Jedi but it's infernally frustrating that Johnson had clearly put loads of thought into certain aspects of it but also doubled down on the worst, most reductive worldbuilding issues that Force Awakens had

This is far from the biggest issue with the film but... since when could Force ghosts catch stuff?

I've had to do asbestos training several times. It hasn't changed how I do my job but it has made me slightly terrified of doing DIY