My language learning web page (linguno.com) has gone all political today on this 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. This means I know how to say "I will abolish the death penalty".
I have got literally the happiest thing in the history of everything ever for you today! And that is no exaggeration whatsoever! In fact it is an understatement! Here is My Baby Goat! Get the mp3 f…
Michael O’Leary is a real life shitposter who plays the press like a fiddle, and here he is doing it again.
We live in a time where anyone could do a quick check to see if a 737-8200 could reach Rwanda from the UK (ok, fuelling stops are possible but it seems unlikely that would be favoured), and confirm that, no, it cannot.
But “journalists” don’t apparently bother to actually investigate … anything.
Ryanair Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary weighed into the UK’s controversial plan to deport refugees to Rwanda, saying he would “happily” do the flights if he had the available aircraft.
Suppose you are the judge in the fictitious case of Djarin v Skywalker. The parties each seek a child arrangements "live with" order in respect of a child, G. How would you apply the welfare checklist in s1(3) of the Children Act 1989?
But it’s basically Silo, if Silo didn’t take itself seriously, and also there’s no nuclear war in Silo, and everybody outside is dead in Silo (humans anyway, the rest of the ecosystem is fine as long as it stays away from Fulton County, Georgia).
And Silo is set in our future, not some 1950s retro future.
But other than that, same idea. I guess Silo was influenced by the game. It’s very much “what if Fallout, but hard sci-fi?”
@FoolishOwl Also, the reasoning for doing the bad thing was different: Fallout, capitalist excess; Silo, Thurman passionately believes that he needs to murder 7 billion people to save humanity.
They both probably draw from similar sources in many ways. I’d be surprised if there aren’t some Twilight Zone episode or similar around.
And while sharing a lot, they also are by all means distinct. Does feel like a copy, just shared inspiration. Which is good.
That said, Fallout was the spiritual successor to Wasteland, which isn’t a vault thing but more generic post apocalyptic. I still have my C64 original 😀
"The hearing was entirely conducted remotely by Zoom" says this judgment*. I wonder in some future era this will make as much sense as discussion of stannary courts or writing things down on vellum.
"Zoom", hmm, let me see: "magnification, especially with the aid of optics". Well, it was at the time of the great illness, so probably they were sat in different buildings and using telephoto lenses.
“Woke” is used as en epithet by those whose entire existence is trying to make reality conform to their simplistic prejudices, against those who live in the real, but more complex, world.
after lettuce-head said the other day that their constituency “has no woke hostelries”, and there being no desire on their part to define “woke”, I’ve decided to take that task on myself. From now on, “woke” means “great beer”.
Don’t quite know what to make of this. Either it’s Cass trying to gaslight us, or maybe she’s realised that beyond the shores of Normal Island and the US, having her name on this bag of crap basically destroys her career? thekitetrust.org.uk/wp-content…
@christineburns I suspect she’s just so lacking in empathy that she thought she was doing a good job. Her main focus seems to have been on NHS admin, completely failing to appreciate what it must be like for folk trapped in a hostile system with a clock ticking.
@Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 @Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖ none of these people even consider us human, if they consider us at all. To them, we are a failed outcome, to be avoided at all costs. It doesn’t even occur to them that we lead rich, fulfilling lives.
So first they feed the transphobes a bunch of crap they'll be running wild with for YEARS, then they're trying to feed everybody else the idea that they didn't mean it that way-- as if that's going to help. What a steaming pile of twisted crap.
To read the UK media you’d think Cameron was swooping in to sort the mess Brexit left Gibraltar in. Talking to a Gibraltarian friend though he didn’t have much part in it beyond bringing the tea. The hard work has been done by the Gibraltar government and the local government of La Línea just over the border.
UK new builds: the builders will tell you that the toilet flushes are “European style” to save water.
This is a lie. I live in two new build flats. One in Portugal and one in England. The toilets they put in in UK new builds are just shit at flushing. The ones in Portugal flush properly.
the UK blaming Europe (a continent of which it is a part no matter how much it insists it’s a continent of its own) for things it does to itself is a tradition going back to at least the early 80s but probably medieval times
I think I’ve put my finger on what coming back to the UK feels like. If an actual nation state could be suffering from clinical depression, this is what it would look like: Everything is slowly going to shit; the country seems to see no future for itself; it’s making decision after decision that is self neglect bordering on self harm; quite possibly the most unpopular government to be removed by democratic vote rather than bloodshed is about to lose an election by a cataclysmic margin, and when the opposition, who are set to clean up, are asked what they’re going to do differently, the answer is a shrug followed by, “nothing”.
And people here more or less accept it, because boiling frogs and suchlike, but then you go elsewhere (no, America, not you, sit back down), and it’s like the colour returns to the world and you didn’t even realise it was missing.
@S . G . A . @Ian Turton they’re not in any hurry to do any of that. It would involve the entire state changing its mind and there is a lot of inertia involved in that.
@danieldurrans Honestly I accept it because it’s that and move away from almost every human I know. If I had no family or local friends I’d be in Germany already.
you're 100% right. I felt the same way after recently returning to the UK from a trip to the Netherlands, only I couldn't have articulated it nearly as well.
I can't speak for the other UK nations, but in England it just feels like we've given up. I hate it.
@quantumjump I was in London for a mere 24 hours recently and it lived up to every stereotype I had in my head of it being the physical personification of a vague feeling of looming oppression. most other places Are Not Like That
@s31bz It's a total clown car of a country nowadays. Nothing works and no one cares. @goatsarah is completely right about boiling frogs - most people here have never lived abroad to know any better.
Musing on nationality and locality. Gibraltar, where I am right now, is a very strange place. It tries so hard to be British: literally the first thing you see when you step out of the border post is a red telephone box. The street furniture is British, the pedestrian crossings are the “WAIT until signal shows” type… and yet the driving is on the right and speed limits are 50kph. The feel of the place makes me want to go into foreign language mode and yet everything’s in English and the accents are mostly those of bits of the UK.
The aggressive Englishness is in the food too. Everywhere is desperate to sell British Fish and Chips, and on Sunday all the pubs do a Sunday roast. The policemen routinely wear old style helmets.
Compare La Linea just over the border, which is assertively Spanish. Little or nothing is translated into English on menus etc. and the waiters have only a little English. This is quite a contrast with Portugal where basically everyone under 50 has functional English. In the context of the competing claims to Gibraltar, thoug
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Musing on nationality and locality. Gibraltar, where I am right now, is a very strange place. It tries so hard to be British: literally the first thing you see when you step out of the border post is a red telephone box. The street furniture is British, the pedestrian crossings are the “WAIT until signal shows” type… and yet the driving is on the right and speed limits are 50kph. The feel of the place makes me want to go into foreign language mode and yet everything’s in English and the accents are mostly those of bits of the UK.
The aggressive Englishness is in the food too. Everywhere is desperate to sell British Fish and Chips, and on Sunday all the pubs do a Sunday roast. The policemen routinely wear old style helmets.
Compare La Linea just over the border, which is assertively Spanish. Little or nothing is translated into English on menus etc. and the waiters have only a little English. This is quite a contrast with Portugal where basically everyone under 50 has functional English. In the context of the competing claims to Gibraltar, though, it feels like an assertion of “we’re Spanish, cope with it”.
The atmosphere of the two places differs hugely too. Gibraltar has wavered when I’ve been here between a bit dead and utterly heaving when a cruise ship is in town. La Linea has this constant buzz and hubbub of people sitting and chatting outside in many street cafes. Everybody seems to be meeting someone and catching up.
The last observation is that when we’re at sea in Gibraltar bay, Jebel Musa in Morocco is clearly visible, closer to Gibraltar than England is to France. And yet Africa is somehow (in the popular mind anyway) distant and different.
The acquisition of a PICADE has me playing OUTRUN. This is a game that I remember from my youth with spectacular graphics. The graphics are, in fact, shit. It also has HGVs doing in excess of 180kph. I am questioning SEGA’s commitment to realism.
@Sarah Brown I remember it in arcades with the big cabinet you could sit in. It didn’t matter that the palm trees looked like stacks of cardboard boxes somehow.
@Alexandra Lanes Stereo speakers behind your head. Cabinet looked a bit like a Ferrari. It cost 50p a play when most games were 10p, but my god, it was such a sight to behold!
IAEA audits their fuel & waste chain & takes a dim view of nations outside of a very small group using power reactors to create weapons-grade material. Also it's hard & expensive & they have more immediate things to do with their resources.
Readers of a certain age may remember a fun but flawed vertically scrolling progressive shoot ‘em up game from the mid 80s called Slap Fight. I played it loads on the C64.
I today found out it was called something entirely different in the US, and I feel like part of my childhood was a lie.
Sailing lots today, getting lots of practice at taking the helm and tacking the boat. "Helm to lee!" is cried and then there is much winching and pulling in of lines as the boat turns into the wind. When we first did this it was a bit disastrous and chaotic, but after doing it several times the panic distills into a concentrated focus that punctuates the periods where we just sit on the boat and let it go.
Yes, there is still some development in "the brain" up to the age of 25, but it's mostly to do with the areas of the brain that deal with impulse decision making. The areas of the brain that deal with considered decision making are more or less fully developed at 15.
And despite how things look in transphobic fantasy-land, nobody is transitioning on a whim.
@Catriona If people under the age of 25 shouldn't be making choices because their brains haven't fully developed, then those over 35 shouldn't be making choices either, because their cognitive faculties will have started to decline.
Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.
The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.
This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.
If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.
We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.
I'm in my mid-30s now. I started HRT aged 19, had my mastectomy aged 20, hysterectomy aged 22 and phalloplasty aged 23. It was the best decision ever and I am sure I wouldn't be here if that hadn't been an option. There's no way I, aged 18 and suffering from crippling dysphoria, could have gone on another 7 years without medical care. The UK's plans to ban transition until age 25 makes me feel sick. It feels like an assault on my very existence.
@crocket2001 I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:
1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.
2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.
The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.
The public don''t need to "come round".
People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.
After about the first night or so it’s amazing how you get used to sleeping on a boat. The rocking motion and creaking sounds of the lines just become the comforting background rather than the thing that keeps waking you up.
Reminds me of a holiday where the B&B was right above the platforms of Lancaster station. The noise of trains quickly became the background. So much so that when there was engineering works in the last night it was eerily quiet and hard to sleep.
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