This is exciting, and about time. Finish your bloody book, Palk

Yay, congratulations!

Laptops with replaceable batteries and hdds. The ability to use old iMacs as monitors.

Was it more like a soap opera that just worked at the time, but coming back to it just feels… dated and irrelevant? Been a while since I watched a soap mind you, not sure the analogy entirely works

I’m assuming the OP is from someone born after 2000, because Madonna was the biggest female artist in the world for nearly 20 years and had an *insane* run of bangers, endlessly trying new things. I think she’s a bit of a prick tbh, but she’s also an undeniable icon

ok I really wanna make that. Just need to learn stone carving...

In Somerset, there's a subset called Hunky Punks, my wife's slightly obsessed with them in her printwork

slowly morphing into michael gove

As ever, two-sidesing the argument produces insanity, right? You have to get halfway through before the article admits incredibly expensive GAS sets the price we pay for electricity - and yet it consistently claims the cost of upgrading our grid for renewables is too expensive

But if my wages grew by 0.5% my £150 food shop would feel 75pee cheaper, which means that by the time humans have colonised Neptune I’ll have enough to buy a heat pump

I mean they’re so nice. I guess if you can spring for an extra solar array and battery, it wouldn’t actually cost much to run an electric one

We’ve got one on the edge of town, upwind of us. Every three weeks you know when it’s changeover day as the automatic cleaners flush out the stench and it washes out over everyone. Apparently there’s no human involved in the process at all - all automated barring drops of chicks and end pickups

Ha, I’m reading that this week! Of ever there was a time for a comfort read is now. Re the allbirds thing - every company is just there for a big investor buyout. Not the product, just rinse the market, cook the books, hype the train and go full bore for that sweet billion $ windfall

God that takes me back to some dark and sweaty rooms

Yeah that would make sense - you’d need a pretty solid structure to deal with wind stresses I imagine

Always been good at picking people to work with I think - has kept her pretty relevant despite her being somewhat prickly to work with, or so I've heard

I loooove the production on her earlier stuff, it’s so good.

Yeah I’ve had a look, but the camera isn’t good enough for what I need - my work needs endless photographing, often in low light, and it needs to be quick and easy - Apple’s the best for that priority. The rest of it, I can take or leave

Apologies for car chat especially, is so boring but also, so frustrating

Yes what happened to the right to repair directive? My new ish phone and laptop don’t look any more repairable than the last ones! And never mind my car with its ‘life of the car’ wet belt that needs changing after 50k miles….

I've been wondering a fair bit about enshittification of physical objects recently - problems with our car and van, but also things like phones, computers, attached devices. I wonder if it's a problem of complexity - everything is made to be so many things at once, there's more points of failure

ooo, did you go to the botanical gardens? they're so much fun. Found my favourite ever tree there.

Oh god, is there an actual discourse?

I was thinking that. Animals feature in a lot of animistic worship, pagan religions, even organised ones (ancient Egyptian, Hindu etc). We almost all kind of revere animals in some way, I think

My wife had a comment on one of her insta posts this morning (post was about one of her linocuts that she’d eventually had a tattoo of, calling it her spirit animal). Comment accused use of the term ‘spirit animal’ of being cultural appropriation and therefore racist. I mean… is it? Really?

I’ve got nothing against as much local generation as possible - as well as large scale sites. But it is a fact that in the UK, we really need to improve the grid to make use of it - as I said, it can be overcome but it needs work.

I think one of the main issues right now is one of grid connections - distribution and overload, if I’ve understood correctly. Can definitely be overcome, but in the UK at least, our grid is lagging behind the installing of renewables right now

The next president of the United States, everyone!

Stephen Collins cartoon about Michael Gove

Always reminds me of the situation we’ve had over and over again with senior parliamentarians in the UK

BREAKING: Viktor Orbán concedes defeat in Hungarian elections after 16 years in power - with opposition Tisza party on course for landslide victory.