Helen McCarthy

Thank you, Ghibli fans of Hastings, for an absolutely epic evening at the White Rock Theatre. Such thoughtful comments and insightful questions! Thanks J for highlighting the difference between the soot sprites in Totoro and Spirited Away and triggering thoughts on Miyazaki and industrialisation.

Panta Rhei - Mandarin [Hungary, Jazz Funk] (1979)

Panta Rhei - Mandarin [Hungary, Jazz Funk] (1979)
https://redd.it/50sx32
https://youtu.be/zUnjr1bq4a8

On the front of the I paper today, a teaser for their Culture feature "Great love letters From Elizabeth I to Oscar Wilde" - on a pink background, an open pink envelope with a heart on its seal contains a deep pink rose with blue leaves

An unexpected discovery in today's i paper.

Reminder that the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail editorial pages exhibit a human version of what AI calls "model collapse"—if you feed a language model its own output its output rapidly deteriorates into self-parody. The owners of the right-wing press read their own media and it rotted their brains.

‘Embarrassed’ v ‘force to be reckoned with’: Americans on Trump’s foreign interventions From capturing Maduro to proposing a take over of Greenland – people respond to the president’s rhetoric

‘Embarrassed’ v ‘force to be reckoned with’: Americans on Trump’s foreign interventions

Hey y’all remember on Jan 6th when women got on Tinder in DC and honeypotted all those rioters and sent a good clutch of ‘em to jail based on shit they admitted to in the DMs? Look I’m just saying they got Tinder in MN.

From the Independent: "ICE is rumored to be heading for Philadelphia. Everyone is saying the same thing' Reaction from ben doyle (@thewheatgerm): "this is the equivalent of hitler sending you to stalingrad"

imgaine getting sent packing with your ass in your own two hands by some of the nicest people in the world and then showing up in a city that is famous for booing santa claus

Reform UK prepared to deport 600,000 under migration plans - BBC News The party outlines its plans to detain and deport all migrants who arrive in the UK on small boats.

It would be cheaper and more effective economically to deport the 268,000 paid-up members of Reform UK.

On the whole, migrants are much more productive and better integrated than Reform’s treacherous quislings.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Research shows that both watching footage of animals we find ‘cute’ (actual word used in academic paper) & watching someone else creating art induces relaxation & may ⬆️ levels of oxytocin, responsible for social bonding & empathy…so here’s a double dose of wren action for you
🧵1/2…👇🏼🪶

Good morning. Unless Starmer wants to repeat the disaster of 1980s mass youth unemployment, he should read to this before rolling too enthusiastically in the AI shite 👇

So is he for giving Hokkaido back to the Ainu and Okinawa to the Ryukyuans? Also, Fukui's population keeps shrinking, and making its government explicitly racist might not be the best strategy to attract people to the prefecture. But good luck with that monoculture, will surely be vibrant.

This is this week (in two days) (this Wednesday evening)

I actually keep forgetting, but hopefully that won't happen on the day and I will actually show up 💀

Please do come!

stop using AI to do your research. it hallucinates too often. if you want an answer to something, post something arrogant on the appropriate subreddit. something like: "this item performs 10% better than everything else. only idiots deny this." this will bait nerds into doing your research for you.

Let me rephrase the question: Should we support a world in which wealth flows upwards to the extent that people have to sell their kidneys to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table? Because that's the choice we make when we tolerate "trickledown economics".

Ben Jennings, The Guardian

Happy Burns Day to all who celebrate. Please take care not to overheat the haggis - they have been known to explode and make things a bit too literal.

My favourite Burns poem:

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43812/...

Amedeo Tommasi, Stefano Torossi ‎– "L'uomo E La Natura" [Synth/Ambient/Library - Italy] (1989) - Library piece that sounds like dialogue tree music from a Super Nintendo RPG.

Amedeo Tommasi, Stefano Torossi ‎– "L'uomo E La Natura" [Synth/Ambient/Library - Italy] (1989) - Library piece that sounds like dialogue tree music from a Super Nintendo RPG.
https://redd.it/60aq24
https://youtu.be/IoQFhgKOhqk

Quid Pro Quo.

We’ll use ICE to murder US citizens and terrorize your cities unless you give us your voter records so we can rig the election for Trump in 2028.

TBF, we Europeans haven't shown much Ukrainian grit either. Either lost to the fascist wannabes playing on our self-pity or lost to affluent class complacency & doing nothing useful at all 👇

Journalists!
Your job is not to report what the authorities say - it's to examine what they say, try to verify it, and report the results of that process.
Ergo, your lede is: Overwhelming video evidence shows federal authorities lied in the aftermath of the killing of a man in #Minneapolis.

And he didn’t. He tried to help a woman who’d just been assaulted. There was nothing rash, stupid, or radical about what he did. He showed kindness. And they killed him for it.

Review of the Week:World’s Gone Wrong by Lucinda Williams

The high priestess of Americana is getting more politically charged in her 70s – with guest collabs inc Brittney Spencer helping her address the moral collapse of the US, writes @katehutchinson.bsky.social

www.thenerve.news/p/review-of-...

I have to say that Megacon's website landing page video is one of the most fun things I've seen from a con in ages.

This quite literally should be all over the news‼️

I often hear people say Burns doesn’t do it for them (often based on ‘To a Haggis’ or the first line of ‘To a Mouse’; I thought I’d share my favourite ‘Is There For Honest Poverty’: you are not what you earn or who your parents are but what’s inside the heart.

Mark Carney: World Hero Mark Carney’s Davos speech lays out a post-U.S. world order built by middle powers through pragmatic trade and climate-focused cooperation.

Mark Carney spoke the truth and showed the world a way forward beyond Donald Trump's dementia cepr.net/publications...

Karoline Leavitt Gets Awkward Reminder After Complaining That Protesters Are Flashing Their Middle Fingers At ICE

We have the receipts, Karoline.

A selection of books relating to Robert Burns and Scottish poetry, arranged on a table around a poster titled “Celebrating Scotland”.

Today we are celebrating Scotland through poetry and prose to mark the birthday of #RobertBurns
It’s been lovely welcoming so many folk coming in with their Christmas gift vouchers and National Book Tokens throughout January - if you’re stuck for ideas on what to read, pop in for suggestions!

The reason the BBC coverage of Alex Pretti's murder reads like Fox News, while the likes of the NYT are reading the room and dropping the both-sideism, is that the BBC's news team is institutionally captured by people who are proud of only ever listening to the opinions of racists and transphobes.