A nice thing about steak is that, compared to eggs, you can be systematic about cooking just one of them – buy a big steak, use a temperature probe, use the "reverse sear" method (oven first then sear at the end), and you're guaranteed replicable + perfect results every time
Direct empirical confirmation of my theory of the "immigration doom loop" in UK politics.... ☹️
Everyone keeps saying "serving cunt" and it's making me feel really old. I still call them waiters.
Familiarity, patriotism, deviance, colonialism, notoriety, and glorified pack shots.
newsletter.lowfalutin.co.uk/archive/get-...
Imagine if a geologist spent half their career writing about how to fold blankets. Would you think "ah yes, the general intellectual toolkit of understanding structures formed out of layers" or would you think "this guy just couldn't handle rocks"
"Mary's been kidnapped again" "Shall I put out the ransom bucket?" "Good idea, bit of initiative"
This was great! Also: Three Salons at the Seaside ❤ I love it so much, for much the same reason as you (child of the late 80s who grew up in the North West). I'd recommend the Documentary Now! parody of it, which is pitch perfect and very lovingly done: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPaC...
“You can ask a lot of questions about Avebury but the answer you will get will depend on who you ask, when you ask them, and what time they answer from.”
I circle the stones: open.substack.com/pub/sillylit...
Beautiful! Have ordered the postcards and the absolutely magnificent "Danebury Gothic", too ❤
Mackenzie Crook’s magical suburban folk tale, #SmallProphets published by #PenguinBooks and #PuffinBooks down the years. A 🧵
1/
If Matt Goodwin wrote The Very Hungry Caterpillar 🐛
Reform going absolutely spare at the thought of crypto donations being banned like a sweating bloke watching a copper try the door handle on his locked shed.
I was pretty worried about AI-generated video, because of misinformation/poisoning the commons/generally looking totally shitty. I really hoped AI companies would not do it for ethical reasons, but I'll accept them not doing it for economic reasons too www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
How many children could possibly affect? Just wanton meanness to appease a group of adults roleplaying that they're being oppressed by a small minority of people
Things I desperately wish existed: Figma but for word processing. Basically the typography and aesthetics of Pages with the collaborative editing of Figma. "A version of Google Docs that actually cared about typography" would also be acceptable
The perfect visual accompaniment to this song: youtu.be/7xs_VlWAmJE
This is quite astonishing. Can’t pretend I understand it all, and am not sure I 100% agree with conclusions, but a social studies academic analyses pub closures in a totally different way from anyone else ever has and comes up with some extraordinary insights. laurenleek.substack.com/p/britain-lo...
It’s how emojis work under the hood – they’re compound symbols, where colour and gender and other variants are made by combining different emoji: emojipedia.org/emoji-zwj-se...
I find this so common in critiques of LLMs from professionals in non-tech domains; as if "an LLM can do X" can only mean "you can one-shot this in ChatGPT with a vague prompt", and any scaffolding you put around the LLM is somehow cheating. (cf. @ed3d.net's recent "can an LLM index a book" posts)
Honestly the collective national level of disdain for Brits living in Dubai on all my social media platforms today really is bringing the UK together as one in a way that's hard to achieve in the modern era.
And for example, DuPont had safety ingrained in the culture since the very beginning of their foundation. DuPont started as a gunpowder company and gun powder companies, they have the problem that they have lots of explosions. And the way that the founder managed this risk was that he had two principles. The first one was that he the CEO lived with his family inside the premises of the company, which means that if there was an explosion, there would be a chance that he would be affected. Number two, he had the principle that every time that a new machine was installed in the plant, one of the directors had to operate for the first day so that if the machine was unsafe. Then the director will be the first one suffering from it. This is great because it's a perfect incentive to keep things safe.
I always love this story, about the DuPont gunpowder factory's culture of safety, from Luca Dellanna. 1. Make the factory director live in the factory, so they're personally invested in its safety; 2. Make someone from management the first person to operate every new bit of machinery
Meteorological (mists, clouds, wind, rain, storm, tempest, smoke, darkness, shadows, gloom). Topographical (impenetrable forests, inaccessible mountains, chasms, gorges, deserts, blasted heaths, icefields, the boundless ocean). Architectural (towers, prisons, castles covered in gargoyles and crenellations, abbeys and priories, tombs, crypts, dungeons, ruins, graveyards, mazes, secret passages, locked doors). Material (masks, veils, disguises, billowing curtains, suits of armour, tapestries). Textual (riddles, rumours, folklore, unreadable manuscripts and inscriptions, ellipses, broken texts, fragments, clotted language, polysyllabism, obscure dialect, inserted narratives, stories-within-stories). Spiritual (religious mystery, allegory and symbolism, Roman Catholic ritual, mysticism, freemasonry, magic and the occult, Satanism, witchcraft, summonings, damnation). Psychological (dreams, visions, hallucinations, drugs, sleep-walking, madness, split personalities, mistaken identities, doubles, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, death, hauntings).
thinking about Nick Groom's suggested "seven types of obscurity" in Gothic novels, forming a handy "is it goth" checklist lmao
I think this is the gold standard for "how is AI going to affect this industry?" analysis; the "AI as Normal Technology" guys taking a look at law roblog.co.uk/2026/02/ai-l...
An interesting use of LLMs in the newsroom: the New York Times' tool for tracking right-wing sentiment in the (awfully named) "manosphere" roblog.co.uk/2026/02/new-...
One of my favourite YouTube channels at the moment: saintcavish’s thoughtful and beautiful films about Chinese cooking roblog.co.uk/2026/02/sain...
I enjoyed this Elizabeth Goodspeed piece about the growing prevalence of "analogue" aesthetics and craft-fixation in creative work: roblog.co.uk/2026/02/faki...
"everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.
There's a labeller that does this! It's great bsky.app/profile/xblo...
We did a rewatch of all the StudioCanal-restored Ealings at the back end of last year and, while they're all brilliant, this remains my favourite I think. It also made me go out and get Alexander Mackendrick's fascinating book "On Film-Making"
