lady: Please stop singing Backstreet Boys fella: Tell me why

some things about becoming a parent are radicalizing in ways I expected - e.g being reminded viscerally how screwed we'd all be if childcare and other care work disappeared. but other things are radicalizing in ways I didn't - like experiencing constant spontaneous solidarity in ways big and small

At some point this stuff stopped being fun tie in easter egg shit and became homework

midlife by Claire Taylor I wish I could go back hold that girl in my arms & tell her sing your off-key songs the world is deaf to the pleasures of women no one's listening anyway

41 today. Woohoo.

If you’d like to help me celebrate, consider getting a copy of my book, or if you’ve read it and liked it, recommend it to a friend, or request a copy through your library. Or just go out and be kind today and try to enjoy your Monday.

www.publishinggenius.com/catalog/apri...

VERY COOL PERSON: It's four-twenty, you know what that means?

ME: Hell yeah! [starts shoving blackbirds into a pie]

Sitting here crying while after getting WhatsApped the photo on the right, so let me tell you a little story about how we got here from the photo on the left and why repatriation research matters!

Hookland was made by Soviet science fiction and cosmonauts. It was made by pulp novels my mother didn’t want me to read, but that my Aunt Barbara still lent me. Made by countless bad films surreptitiously watched on an old black and white TV. It has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at the work of Stephen King because Salem’s Lot was brilliant when I read it at 11 and still is. In fact, it has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at anything that generated a sense of sublime, awe and terror in childhood – even being forced to perform interpretive dance to Tomita. It has been made by brilliant writers – Aickman, Machen, Jackson – and it has been made by bad ones. It owes large debts to comics, goth, punk and movie soundtracks that is will never repay. Its substitute parents are free public libraries and Radio 4. It comes with a childhood place soaked with fear of ghosts and UFOs, it comes from a place of love for those exact same engines of terror. It comes from a revulsion for how psychogeography has increasingly became an academic and art language that excludes people from their own primal experience of landscape. It comes for a raging dislike of commodity writing about place and nature. It comes from an absolute refusal to allow fascists to easily occupy their cherished grounds of myth and folklore. It comes from the cunning, the ghost soil, the landscape of England as experienced by this broken body for five long decades. It comes from being a Fully-grown Changeling. Fay Godwin, Paul Nash and Dame Laura Knight are always muttering about it with disapproval in the imagined afterlife. Nothing in it is made up, just remembered differently. It was designed to be a permissive space, a common ground where people could explore and find their own hauntings. You all own it, you all make it. You are all marching with the spirits of dead spaceman, wood sprites and a thousand lost childhoods. You are all scuffling up your memories, your own stories as you navigate across th…

Today's answer to What is Hookland?

Picture shows a totally green garden through the bars of an iron gate. A small patch of moss surrounded by woodland planting and a yew hedge.

Through the garden gate. A small, green space, woodland planting, moss and ferns. Once the primroses have gone over, it is almost entirely green. A tiny, peaceful sanctuary.

My son's new favourite film is The Little Mermaid (1989) so naturally despite being a screen limited household we've watched it about 50 times in the last few months. Some observations:

Legal advisers help migrants pose as gay to get asylum, undercover BBC investigation finds The BBC exposes a shadow industry charging migrants thousands of pounds to help them cheat the asylum system.

Disgusting reporting by BBC using a tiny number of cases to suggest widespread abuse of a system which routinely denies LGBTQIA+ individuals asylum and forces them back into environments of persecution. This article massively distorts the reality of the situation. 1/
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Screenshot of the 2025 Area Prize-winner announcement: Madelaine Joyce (Royal Holloway University of London, UK) “Sensing the sky’s edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean demilitarised zone” With this innovative article, Madelaine Joyce pushes cultural and political geographers to attend closely and creatively to both affective and material atmospheres. Taking the anticipation of an encounter with the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea as both prompt and problematic for rethinking borders across fog, radio signals, and no-go zones, Joyce’s article is a deserving Area Prize winner.

🏆Area Prize Announcement!🏆

This year's Area Prize for the best paper written by an ECR has been awarded to 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐲𝐜𝐞 for her paper 'Sensing the sky's edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean demilitarised zone' ⬇️

doi.org/10.1111/area...

@maddiejoyce.bsky.social @rhulgeography.bsky.social

Full-funded (home or international) collaborative PhD studentship (Kew and Royal Holloway, University of London) available. Deadline 8 May.

Topic: ‘Just acquisitions? Law and ethics over time in Kew’s overseas plant collecting history’ #Skystorians

Take Part — FI WI ROAD

Good news! Applications for the 2026 Fi Wi Road Internship are still open.

An exciting opportunity for Black and mixed-Black heritage geography students, the Fi Wi Road project supports you to build networks, develop your voice, and gain experience.

Apply by 20 April 👇
https://bit.ly/4undzvM

Set of boxed lunches on a wooden table

Exciting day in the RHED office - conference sample lunch tasting #rgsibg26

Bright orange circular sign on a brick wall reading 'Welcome' with Royal Geographical Society branding partially obscured by green foliage.

Welcome to our research and higher education Bluesky! 👋

Follow us to stay up to date with our work in geographical research, including events, funding opportunities, new publications and more.

Learn more about how we promote geography in higher education and beyond: https://ow.ly/CMgN50YI795

oh god oh fuck I took the metro to the Tisza rally and all these kids POURED OUT of the train at the stop and started running up the escalators chanting, and briefly held hands with the older people leaving the rally and going down on the escalator, and I think I may actually just cry

One for #Skystorians, @histassoc.bsky.social , @royalhistsoc.org and curious minds more broadly.

A hawk from a handsaw In which I scratch an itch that started bugging me nearly three months ago, and sadly hasn’t gone away: the film HAMNET. Which I did not like. 1. An Oscar-Winning Performance I don’t be…

Some thoughts on HAMNET, because my blog is nothing if not timely*. A longish thread on a longish blog post.

gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/a...
*Actually no, my blog is a number of things *and* not timely.

Garden with bluebells, fencepost and ginger cat ignoring the camera

Brief garden break..

Troutman @robotrowboat Boss: Let's put this matter aside for the time being Me: [looking around nervously] Can only you see the time being? Boss: Huh? Me: Is it standing near me? Boss: Who? Me: [on verge of panic attack] The time being 6:33 PM 06 Jan 18

This damn post has absolutely ruined my brain every time I hear someone mention "for the time being." Major kudos to the poster, if I ever meet you in person I will congratulate you and then punch you in the face.

Boar or bear, Hallie? Boar or bear? Come on, this is important! 🐗🐻

I genuinely can't stop thinking about the Iranian kids who spent yesterday wondering if they were all going to die and what that day will do to them for the rest of their lives.

enough!!!! fucking enough of this!!!!! enough!!! aaahhhhhhh

anyway this is how I discover that this dude has been getting 4 meals a day

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

Yes I wonder whether I’m the only person who didn’t get the BEST night’s sleep last night.

"It is not hope. It is the specific exhaustion of people who have been denied hope for so long that the mere postponement of catastrophe registers as reprieve. We celebrated nothing. We simply exhaled."

Welcome to the Hidden Almanac, I’m Reverend Mord. Today is November 11th, 2016.  My friends, it is a dark time now. And history is very long, but that is little comfort for those living through it. A year can be no time at all, but a minute can be an eternity. But civilization is a great work. And kindness is a great work. And decency is a great work. It is not given to any one of us, no matter how long-lived, to see that work through to the end. But neither may we give up working on it.  There is a proverb of a great people that translates…inelegantly. It says that if you are planting seeds and you learn that the world will end tomorrow, keep planting.  I promise you that the seeds we plant now matter. If you do not have faith in gods or saints, have faith in each other, and in us.  That’s the Hidden Almanac for November 11th, 2016. Be safe. You are not alone.  —Ursula Vernon

Some weirdo wrote a thing that I read this morning that still moves me deeply. I can plant the seeds I can plant.

the levels of elite impunity we are seeing now and the levels of war crimes we are seeing now are two aspects of the same path of historical development. right now they see war as our problem (and their investment opportunity). it is world historically important that we make war their problem again