Kirsty

Me (aged 4) on a London-Glasgow shuttle, 1989, "wheeeeee, Mummy make the pilot do that again!" Green faces all round from a horrendously turbulent flight and landing, apart from yours truly 🤣🤢

Best bit is, I'm now a terrible flyer...

This was something we said again and again in interviews and talks about the Ladybird books.

When you give a child something made carefully and skilfully, they feel it. A treat. “For me?”

We all remember that feeling.

When you give a child something half-arsed, you tell them they don’t matter.

Oh, this piece had me in *floods* at LNOP 2021 - it was to mark 20 years since 9/11, but it just really spoke to what we'd all been through with Covid (and especially us musicians).

You know those goody bag competitions on FB/Insta? Turns out they can be won!

Thanks to Visit Austria (the Grüner Veltliner is chilling 🥂)

Furthest I've been from home:

N Gothenburg, Sweden (I *think* this edges Elgin, Scotland)
E Kathmandu, Nepal
S Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
W Fort Ross, CA, USA

There is such a malicious game of telephone being played with the Telegraph’s M&S ‘trans’ shop assistant story. It’s gone from the anonymous complaint claiming the person was trans because they were tall to versions — notably in The Sun — falsely suggesting the person offered a bra fitting.

Estate agents' AI pics vs the real house Feature: Lightsockets lovingly hooked up to power supply by passionate, vivacious owners. Would suit professional who wants to read after dark

You can tell a lot about a technology by the kinds of people who embrace it. Exhibit A: estate agents.
www.theregister.com/2025/08/07/r...

One of the unintentionally impressive things about LLMs is that by dint of huge technical innovation, massive compute costs, and quite a lot of stolen data, they’ve managed to make computers bad at maths.

I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.

New Origin Story mini, by @dorianlynskey.bsky.social, on a fascinating subject. How do you self-censor when your music is purely instrumental? How do you know what will fall foul of Stalin when it's entirely abstract? A mad, mad story of music and power.

Huh, I never knew about those ones! Usually the ones next to Arena E entrance are empty because nobody comes in those stairs any more (used to be tripper stairs). Sometimes a PITA to get to if they've blocked off 1871 for a dressing room though.

Introducing the first British cyber-MP🇬🇧🤖

When local business owner Tobias Vaughn approached me with this idea, I was very excited to work with him. The cyber-revolution is happening and we must embrace it to see how it can be useful, in all sectors.

You-be-long-to-us. You-shall-be-like-us.

This is as good as that number would get, incidentally: when people realise it would include things like dentistry or physio etc where lots of people are forced to go private or go without support would plummet further.

Chances are it's still cheaper paying in the UK than when (hypothetical) you get home??

Three stunning and shaming paragraphs, by Rachel Wolf of Public First, in @theobserveruk.bsky.social

2024 Tesla with “I bought this before Elon went crazy” sticker.

Not in 2024 you didn’t you disingenuous prick

I feel like streaming could go further than that and allow you to select "TWs I want to be notified of" in your settings - it doesn't seem like that difficult a thing to code tbh.

Aw, that's how you know that the move was the right decision in every respect ❤️

This was a lovely, relaxing, drift-into-sleep Prom...and then the last piece started, all drums and heavy "scouring of the Shire" (Tormis, Curse upon Iron). Such a weird choice at the end of an otherwise fantastic programme.

Allan Ahlberg, beloved children's author, dies aged 87 Working first with his wife Jane, and later with illustrators including Raymond Briggs and Bruce Ingman, he wrote more than 150 books

Extremely sad to see the news about Allan Ahlberg’s death. Peepo, Each Peach, Jolly Postman are getting lots of love but my favourites will always be The Baby Catalogue and Starting School. Diverse, loving families, before that was really a children’s book priority.

*spicy* bacon gin!

Every crime show is all ‘look there are TWO glasses, there was clearly someone else in the house!!’
No, Sherlock. I just hate dishes.

There are some properly weird flavours of Whitley Neill gin (though most of their flavours are delish) - "banana and guava" and "smoky bacon & horseradish" flavours, I'm looking at you 🤢

May her memory be a blessing ❤️

Interesting...I tested this with @originstorypodcast.bsky.social (being my bookmark with the most consistent "Explicit" labels) & it doesn't seem to have reached me. Or is it being more nuanced than that??

Brilliant!

Then land-girl Thora Hird murders a bunch of Germans with a captured machine gun, taking to the barricades to defend the village until they can get word of the German invasion out.

One of the greatest WW2 (and suspense) movies ever made. Absolutely not joking.

Happy birthday legislation dot gov dot UK!

Welsh election law now requires local candidates to list their party memberships in the last year. That's good for transparency re. those listed as independents. It also gives us things like this... (Abermaw, Gwynedd by-election, polling this week)

that "VPN ban" story - I'd probably want better sourcing than the King of Reach (derogatory), James Rodger, content editor of Birmingham Live

especially since, after saying that "Labour could ban the use of Virtual Private Networks", the article doesn't include any govt source suggesting it