Somhairle Kelly

My perennial plan for the Royal Family: replace them with a random British family chosen by sortition. Pick a house in the UK at random; the people living there are the new Royal Family for the next five years, then they get to be dowager dukes & duchesses while the next family gets to queen it.

early modern Clippy popping up to suggest you use more random capitals and italics

Organ fundraiser for St John the Evangelist, Brownswood Park Help Kathryn Rose raise money to support St John the Evangelist, Brownswood Park

Good morning early birds!

My week has been mostly trying to deal with the organ at church. Long story short, it doesn't have a locking lid, someone messed with it, and now we need to a) get it fixed and b) create some kind of barrier to prevent further damage.
www.justgiving.com/page/sjebp-o...

And the thing is that they NEED it to be the only technology that matters

The growth-at-all-costs model is cancer and generative AI is the purest example of it. They need to eat all the resources they can get, all the investment, just to keep it afloat. They need other technologies to be starved

I'm suddenly feeling really good about getting the latest gen Fairphone last month.

Everything is falling apart and every fix or "improvement" is a botch job and finds a way to make things worse - and involves my having to spend far far too long on the phone as well.

Last night I worked out that sewer gas had been coming up into our bathroom and therefore the whole flat. Today has been spent trying to get the landlord/lettings agent/management company/plumbing company/Actual Plumber (theoretical so far) to turn up and fix things. I'm worried about tonight.

Read Nat's Celtic fantasy thoughts if you have ever read anything in which an elf fades, sighing, into the western twilight

1st print using an actual cabbage. Next one will use all the antifascist veggie puns, arranged around the cabbage print like layers of leaves (puns are inherently antifascist) #DHmakes

So that's what those are for!

"If we don't give Dave something to do he'll get bored and start breaking things."

A very trans course of action there!

“it is well to hear, to become aware of, the operations of water among whose spider lacings by chance we live…”

James Agee in 1941, superb on the life and liveliness of rivers.

A river as a “huge, casual and aloof creature”. That trifecta of adjectives (not to mention the choice of noun)…

Pour a circle of salt and iron around them just in case.

How White Elites Drained Ancient Art of Its Color The publication of “Chroma” represents an important shift by museums toward recognizing polychromy and its entanglement with white supremacy.

There is a fab new book out about the 2022 polychromy exhibition at the Met. It underscores 38 scholars who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 experts in polychromy today. Coming out of polychromy retirement to review _Chroma: Sculpture in Color from Antiquity to Today_ for @hyperallergic.com (edited by Natalie Haddad).

Mari Wyrdd!

Collection of paints, brushes and pots on an old table. In the corner a large very fluffy cat sprawls in decadence

this cat looks like one of the Old Master painters who's just slept with three servants, argued viciously with his annoying patron about the inferior ham he receives, and then painted his masterpiece out of spite

For me it comes through as a "patchy" flavour profile - like a pointillist texture instead of a smooth one.

I'd forgotten 5am Saint was theirs! I quite liked that one.

I've never been a Brewdog fan even before I found out about their attitude (when a friend worked for them briefly) - mostly because I found the hype/taste ratio terrible. And cost/taste as well! Mind you, I dislike grapefruit hops with a passion, so that won't have helped.

And you're in the wrong room.

The native population of the British Isles get everywhere, to everyone's detriment, so turnabout is fair play.

UBI for artists is cool, but easy to sell as “you people think the world owes you a living”.

The irony is that the world *does* owe artists a living. Tech corporations just worked out how not to pay it.

At last, we have invented the Seven League Boots from the cautionary fairy tale "Don't Try To Put One Foot Twenty-One Miles In Front Of The Other"!

"Maybe later" Considered Harmful. 1/23997

A dramatic pale gold sky, with hints of blue, soars over a silhouetted headland. Waves break on a pebbled beach in the foreground, and bright sunlight glows on the water to the right.

And looking southeast!

A stony beach under a blue sky with a few clouds. A wave breaks onto the retreating foam from the last.

Between the Great Gloom and tonight's predicted snow, we have blue skies and sunlight.

A dramatic pale gold sky, with hints of blue, soars over a silhouetted headland. Waves break on a pebbled beach in the foreground, and bright sunlight glows on the water to the right.

And looking southeast!

Oh, that's good to hear!

The proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful, but we also shouldn't forget that the manner in which the proscription was enforced was blisteringly stupid. Continuing to arrest grandmothers for holding signs was a massive waste of police resources and did nothing to deal with the supposed threat