John Berkeley Grout 🏳️‍🌈🔶

a woman in a white hat sits at a table with a plate and fork Alt: Mary Poppins drums her fingers dramatically on a table, while pursing her lips sternly. This is the scene where she's being waited on by the penguins at the cartoon afternoon-tea.

Woke up with a stonking opening scene in my head for... something.

Will at least write it to see if it can go anywhere, or whether it needs to join other things in the rosewood box for the time being.

Happy birthday, AK! 🎉

A cartoon of a 17th Century plague doctor with the crow's beak mask, holding a pink balloon with RIP written on it. They have pink feathers in their hat and pink and grey spherical decorations in the background.

Ah, yes, Pink Hallowe'en, per @nigella.bsky.social. This is your annual reminder that Saint Valentine is (also) patron saint of the plague. And bees and epilepsy.

(Artwork by the talented Ludwig van Bacon, who doesn't appear to be on Bluesky)

Good old autocourgette.

Memes were doing the rounds the other day about how the Winter Olympics are the death-defying night to the Summer Olympics' day.

And even so, I was *not* prepared for the drone's-eye-view of the skeleton runs - you know, the one where they go at 74 mph head-first down an ice slide. Yeah. ...Gods.

Sigh.

Like, I'm ready for my fully-automated luxury gay space communism now, but honestly, right now, I'd settle for partly-manual mid-range bisexual air social democracy instead.

If you know anyone who's ever come to the UK to live alongside you, and you'd either miss them if they were gone, or at the very least reckon they deserve to be treated humanely, please put aside some time to fill this in.

Fascinating and deeply satisfying resolution to why adenovirus-based vaccines produced blood clots in 1 out of 200,000 people.

Two factors interacted:
a mutation in an antibody gene + weak similarities between a viral protein & a human blood-clotting protein = induced clotting cascade.

Khaless wept, if this isn't a fucking word.

"...that place you're softly stepping your way towards is full of the bodies of our dead friends, put there by folks just asking questions about our humanity."

Someone on Threads coined ai;dr and YES YES YES!! Brilliant.

AI is sold as if it’s going to make our lives better but all it seems to do is steal the lives we have and want. Less an opportunity and more an intruder. “You know all those things you already do fine and maybe even like doing? YEAH NOW AI’S DOING THAT, DIPSHIT. ISN’T THAT AWESOME? NO? SHUT UP.”

The problem is, the hype of AI is always so clearly manufactured. It’s sold as essential but mysteriously so — rarely is it portrayed as making life better; it’s sold as doing things WE want to keep doing. We want it to inventory our fridge and detect cancer, not make music and replace us at work.

Don't give anything an Emmy until it's as good as this.

Yup. We're having our longest consecutive run of rainy days since records began: not are we only the most February of countries, but by many measures we are also currently experiencing the most February.

People Keir Starmer has hired, then fired for stuff he knew about when he hired them, a thread and a list:

1. Tulip Siddiq, given the economic crime brief, despite her aunt being PM of Bangladesh and mired in corruption allegations. Siddiq herself had faced questions over London properties.

Said it before, and I’ll say it again, but for people like me, this would be transformative - it would stabilise our incomes, and allow us to plough more time into creative work and less into stuff anyone could be doing.

AND it’s a net economic benefit to the country.

Introduce yourself with the name your parents almost gave you:

So, my parents argued about a girl's name for 7 months before finally settling on Eleanor...

...and I was promptly 2 months premature - so in a mad last-minute rush, Mum gave me Dad's first name with her family name as a middle name. 😅

Good. Now do the Home Office.

I had an informative chat with Not in Our Name in Parliament about their work to support for the Trans+ community. I have signed their pledge. @nionwomen.bsky.social

SARWAR: [loudly] I AM SPARTACUS!

[awaiting applause]

SARWAR: [quieter] I...I am Spartacus?

[crickets]

SARWAR: Anyone... Anyone else feeling like Spartacus right now?

REST OF LABOUR: lol get a load of Spartacus over there

This is for 18+ groups for now. But we all know how this goes. The 18+, then the queer groups, which are considered 18+ by default. This killed Yahoo Groups and LiveJournal.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Vexed?

Bah, that should read $6k US - but the thrust is the same: please back it if you can!

What Elegant Stars Queer Tales of Impossible Style, a fashionable space opera anthology.

I've just backed @neonhemlock.bsky.social's What Elegant Stars on @kickstarter.com - and you should too if you like the sound of queer space opera with a fashion bent.

They need to raise another $4k US / £4k Sterling and it'd be a tragedy if they fall short! 🌈🦚💃🚀📚
#booksky #queer

the idea that making art is embarrassing if you don't do it well enough to make a career out of it is an objectively harmful and toxic brainworm.

I'd love to see them not deliberately scupper the arts & ents industry, the industry full of self employed & small business traditional left wing voting professionals, which they decided to break bc Sam Altman winked at them once or something

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