I can only agree with you.

There is also the corruption of the managerial class who collaborate in the erosion of public services. The management of schools, for instance, some of whom are recieving salaries of up to £500k.

You are completely correct.

Give it it’s clearest name: corruption. Permeating every aspect of life here. So normalised that it’s pretty invisible to 51% of country.

I’d not heard of this before. Most appropriate.

Not sure I understand what you mean er - dude - but thanks anyway. Be excellent.

Help me out here? Aren’t these the same groups calling for freedom of speech and against cancel culture. It’s all so confusing.

Episode was trash and a waste of talented performers. The show needs a rest for a decade and a complete overhaul with showrunners completely unconnected with RTD and his circle.

My 13 year-old son watched some of it. Said it was cringe and pissed himself when he saw the AI “face”. He thinks the show is stupid.

If you haven’t read it, Emily St John Mandel’s last novel, Sea of Tranquility, is excellent and tackles some of the themes if Station Eleven. It’s a time-travelling SF novel mixed with autofiction and ties in with some of her earlier writing. Super-recommended.

It’s interesting that terms like “Awful April” and “Cost of Living Crisis” are so rapidly adopted. I’m convinced they are thought up in something like a Civil Service or lobby group PR panel and then given to media. Both terms assure us that these things are short-lived and not usual when we know that “Austerity” (a less reassuring one) is now a permanent state of affairs. This is the way it’s going to be forever. Unless we go for the pitchforks and torches.

Doctor Who Derangement Syndrome.

It’s the condition of watching an erzatz version of a much-loved tv show and, despite it being mind-meltingly awful, believe that it is always amazing. Where objectively it is cringingly shit, they see profound comments on the nature of life, the universe and everything.

Doctor Who (rightly) ended on 6th December 1989. There were three incidents of a brief, distorted achronologous reversed polarity event with an Eight Doctor on 12th, 14th and 27th 1996.

Everything after that has been an ongoing fanfiction written by soap opera writers who could vaguely remember a show about a time-traveller in a blue telephone box.

The downside is that I’ve virtually stopped writing blog posts and rely on the “microposts”. Not sure if that’s why I started a blog.

I’ve tried all sorts of things and have settled on using Wordpress with a rss widget which publishes my rss feed from Mastodon (it picks up certain hashtags to avoid publishing everything - eg. #blog). It publishes pics and everything. It also works with Pixelfed (maybe not Bsky). There’s probably more elegant ways to do this - and ones involving activitypub - but this one works without much effort setting up.

Work kills. Those it doesn’t immediately finish off are made mentally ill. Only a society without Work would be a well and healthy society.

Thank you. You are absolutely right and it was right there in front of me!

Could you set up a Cloudflare tunnel and make sure the security rules are tight enough to keep others out?

Can you export playlists from Navidrome? I’m running it and can’t see a way of doing that. (The workaround I’m using is building playlists in Synology Audio Station and then setting up Navidrome to import them. If you know a better way of doing this I’d be interested.)

If the rumours that DW is going to be put on hiatus for 10 years and the sets taken down and production staff let go I can only say… it’s about time.

The (original) show was never about cartoony, fizzed-up comic action without subtlety or nuance that tried to pick up the audiences of Strictly and Love Island. It didn’t need a budget of $1 million per episode. It didn’t need Disney. Time for a rest and then a regeneration.

Politicians on the radio already saying they will need to cut welfare budgets to pay for “defence” increases!

Big bonuses on the way for bosses of arms companies everywhere and dividends galore for investers. Whatever happens all this pantomiming will only benefit the already excessively wealthy.

State schools have been run by grifters at the top for quite some time now. Everything outsourced. My youngest son has a CEO who earns £300k with a chauffeur-driven car (presumably so he can do “high-powered” stuff while being driven between school sites). It’s all normalised (or hypernormalised!)

And yet they’ll be millions of UK voters who will raise their Weatherspoons pints and cheer this on. Most likely 51%. All the same ones who hate foreigners, hate woke and hate anyone to the left of Enoch Powell.