Michael Birtwhistle

Sonic I - up, down, left, right, A&Start.
Sonic II - Soundtest, 19, 65, 09, 17

Compromise is not necessarily bad - it can show that you've weighed up the different positions and incorporated strengths & concerns from other viewpoints - it can be refinement, not compromise.

However, if it's optics-based, window dressing lies, it's bad.

Jon Stone was very wise here

Wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Feels more relevant still after today. And it’s a deficit of self awareness which goes far beyond some members of the BBC board.

A packet of hedgehog flavour crisps from the 1980s

Uh oh

Refilled Norloch flavour.

This is my jaded opinion of all silly crisp flavours, now - they just taste like the other flavours that actually work. We need to dream bigger if we truly want results. Mint and mango crisps. Elephant and cane sugar crisps. Dirty Pint of Every Monster Energy Drink flavoured crisps.

Refugees who were months away from settlement now face 15-year wait Shabana Mahmood's asylum reforms will apply retrospectively, it has been confirmed — and it is claimed the bureaucracy will cost up to £1.3bn Matt Dathan, Home Affairs Editor Monday November 24 2025, 12.01am, The Times Thousands of refugees who believed they were months from settlement now face 15 years of instability after it was confirmed that Shabana Mahmood's overhaul of asylum rules would apply retrospectively.

Labour's anti-asylum policies are already fundamentally inhumane and discriminatory. Applying them retrospectively is pure cruelty though. It serves absolutely no purpose. Meanwhile it will increase the costs and bureaucracy of an already dysfunctional Home Office.
www.thetimes.com/article/6f83...

📌

We don't have to accept this slop.

A fiver a month you won't regret

Zohran Mamdani and Michelle Wu: raising expectations for Asian kids in politics by their parents

if you can fill the unforgiving main,
with 60 posts of decent horn,
yours is BlueSky and everything in it,
and which is more, you've manufactured porn

Inside you there are two dugs.

YES YES YES. This is ultimately what matters, and we need to do everything we can to create a world where this is a reality for people

It's crazy that we collectively permit such essentially human priorities to be overridden. I mean, what is our purpose on this planet, if not to look out for those whom we love? Life surely doesn't exist to be sacrificed to the enrichment of corporations.

It's amazing when you think about it. Such a basic thing like doing thing to fulfil our lives, over GDP, seems like something everyone should be saying.

But we have people who want to give everything up because billionaires want us to work harder and longer, for less.

Ash Sarkar, "What's your vision of the good life?"

Zack Polanski, "I think it's one where we can spend more time with the people that we love"

Reply misogynists: You don't understand, the women were the monsters.

Putting on a big audience that says “Contestant” and looking to the T-shirt for approval.

Don't make me T-shirt the contestant!

easy

like a T-shirt on the contestant is right

A quote from a book in which the author bemoans feeling old in the presence of younger people, juxtaposed with a quote from Moby dick below, 'God help thee old man thy thoughts have created a creature in thee.'

Superb juxtaposition from the @bsky.app timeline, once again.

Nothing was more of a revelation than a recent trip to Ireland, however. Each summer, I do interviews for the Belfast dance music festival AVA, and regularly end up surrounded by beautiful, positive and accomplished twentysomethings. At one point during my last jaunt, just such a room of young people began avidly swapping tales of disastrous Hinge and Tinder dates. I offhandedly mentioned I’d never used a dating app, because my relationship with my wife predates the invention of the smartphone by about six months. Now, I realised, it was me doling out the psychic shocks, as I looked up to find my youthful colleagues were staring at me as if I was a gnarled and toothless corpse they’d just pulled from a bog, one which had now gasped back to life, demanding mutton and hog’s blood. With something like reverent horror, they listened as I went on. Whiskers grew from my cheeks as I informed them that, for many years, text messages didn’t show you when the other person was typing. “You couldn’t even tell if they’d seen or received your message,” I told one, while another cast me a worried look and asked me I’d like someone to fetch me a chair.

👴

if you see this qtp with a picture from your gallery to describe your mental health

Here's my favourite way of visualising this 👇

(🔴L) The 15 min catchment of your station by foot.
(🔵R) The 15 min catchment of your station by bike.

Hundreds, thousands more potential passengers to sustain the railway. All within grasp, by providing bike parking and the routes to get there. 🚲🚆

Very dissatisfying. They have let you down personally.