Louise Fletcher

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

Absolutely incredible.

NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II, took this footage from the far side of the Moon with his iPhone.

Watch with sound on.

The Robert Johnson recording in question. It’s so clear I feel like I time-traveled.

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

Not once in the 80s, 90s or 00s do I recall a politician urging the public to embrace email, mobile phones, texting, two factor authentication, online banking, air fryers, or to replace all their cassette collection with a CD collection.

So forgive me if I smell a rat.

Headline in today's Guardian that reads "Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40 percent, study finds. Cognitive health in later life is 'strongly influenced' by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments, say researchers."

This is why you need to be reading books and writing your own emails, by the way. When you outsource your thinking abilities, you risk turning your brain into soup. Heavy dependence on AI has already been linked with severe cognitive decline. What you don’t use, you will lose.

Two doors - the ‘male’ entrance is wide and square like a door. The ‘woman’ entrance is a cutout of a very thin long haired woman in heels.

This cartoon by Naked Pastor is SO GOOD. Sums up what I’ve been saying for ages about what happens when you start gatekeeping womanhood (and spoiler alert it’s the opposite of feminism).

Tried to sort out Virgin Media again. I'm reasonably IT-literate. I want an ntlworld email account to work on an email app on a mobile phone. VM have managed to make this impossible so far. Different agents providing contradictory information is not helping 😒

I walked into one playing Pokemon Go. At least your reason is intellectual.

Speaking to Research Professional News, Marcus Munafò, deputy vice-chancellor and provost at the University of Bath, said: “I think there’s a risk we could end up in a situation where some technologies or certain disciplines fall off a cliff—go past a certain threshold because they don’t have a critical mass of funding to support them. “That bit seems to be missing from the debate; we need to think about the research ecosystem as national capability and infrastructure that we need to keep healthy to allow us to react to unknown scenarios in the future.”

There's definitely a reshaping of UK research going on

Some of it is intentional - govt encouraging unis to specialise, UKRI directing funds for applied R&I to industrial strategy areas

Some of it isn't - unis taking individual decisions to save costs that add up to impact on national capacity

🧵

Just trying to process that the new way to find quality information is going to be filtering search results to pre-2022... so many implications, not least of all currency is turned on its head.

Katharine Hepburn by Ernest Bachrach for Sylvia Scarlett (1935).

Hungary election live: Polls in Hungary close in tightly fought election after 16 years under Viktor Orbán Prime minister has been trailing in the polls to Péter Magyar in race that could have repercussions for Europe, the US and Russia

BREAKING: Victor Orban has CONCEDED to Magyar www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

Even if you are testing negative for COVID, nobody wants your hideous flu either. Normalise masking in public when you are ill!

The very basis of quantum computing and quantum information theory was built on the PPAN physics that the government is now cutting.

Each edition of Question Time should have a Susie Dent type fact-checking expert at a separate desk with a big pile of books, pointing out the lies of the last panelist.

Science is good. We should fund it.

On April 20 Craig Mazin and Johan Renck’s TV masterpiece Chernobyl is being shown for free across five nights on Sky Mix and Sky Atlantic.

Thought I'd rewatch a little bit, see how it's aged in the past seven years... 1/2

Bunnies in a raft pull up next to a spaceship capsule, which has just splashed down and is floating in the open sea. Visible in the capsule, two bunnies wave at the ones in the boat.

Daily bunny no.3285 made it home safely

Here’s the story of one of them. Awful www.thestranger.com/forced-out/f...

Astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch in their orange astronaut suits as they sit inside the side of a helicopter after it has landed

LOL, trying to stay offline and do my work, and friends are sending me

"LOOK AT THIS NEW PIC!" texts ....

This one is worth it.

First PoC and first woman to go around another world. Don't stop talking about this point. It's important.

#ArtemisII

Estonia the only nation living in the real world on this issue.

Call for ministers to curb ‘excessive risk-taking’ at universities - Research Professional News Former government adviser says Office for Students should be given “significant new powers”

Broken record here, but we cannot fix, save, improve, renew or whatever English universities if we only attend to taught students, DfE and OfS. Universities are major engines of research, innovation and civic good. Minimally DSIT must also be centrally in the frame.

They're not big schools.

This is so well done. 👌

oh, this is very important to know!!

Oh no. I need to contact Virgin Media's help desk. 😞

A screenshot of a post on X by Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) quoting an earlier post of his. ​The main post reads: "UPDATE: Letters from Leo can now independently confirm that the meeting took place — and that the Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that Pope Leo XIV shelved plans to visit the United States later this year. Many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See." ​The quoted post reads: "NEW: A stunning new report claims that the Pentagon summoned Pope Leo XIV’s top American diplomat and threatened him after the U.S.-born pontiff gave his January state-of-the-world address." ​The bottom of the post shows it was last edited at 3:22 PM on Apr 8, 2026, and has 1.5M views.

The Trump administration threatened to kill the pope to the Vatican's ambassador and install a antipope in the US.

Well this is unfortunate. An account calling itself "NASA | ESA Space Updates" (@nasaupdates.bsky.social), not apparently affiliated w/ either, has been posting NASA images without alt-text & blocked me when I said the images should include it. (NASA itself is usually pretty good on accessibility.)

You must learn to hate the aristocracy as much as it hates you. It changes shape, tosses aside old husks like "divine right of kings" and "bloodlines" and slides right into slick new shells like "meritocracy".