Lambchop aren't my favourite band but sometimes I wonder why not

So ravaged by mosquito bites that last night I woke up to one goading a newcomer like Daniel Day Lewis to Paul Dano at the end of There Will Be Blood

It's good, I think, every couple of years to pick up a book everyone is raving about, read a few pages then quietly and respectfully return it to the library box it came from having concluded, with enormous restraint and magnanimity, that you are not the target readership.

Emotional log flume

Oh oh oh but *this* is magic. The depth of it but way he writes, like it's carried on the breeze. @saltpublishing.com releasing some absolute gems

Dooneen by @rid9way.bsky.social is such a special book. Makes most modern fiction seem anemic in comparison. It's completely inimical, but I think Christian Petzold's adaptation of Transit by Anna Seghers (another masterpiece) would make a good companion piece. Anyway, the point is: read it.

Second viewing of Marty Supreme. I can't tell you how moving it is to see a deeply flawed Jewish character, who faces, historically, what are only homeopathic levels of persecution, get to the end and decide "Nope, I've absolutely had enough of this antisemitic bullshit." A masterpiece.

Couldn't agree more. The amount we're getting is an insult. 91% take-up because we'll never see another penny from these thieves and we can't afford not to, but if you'd have offered us 10x to help build the illiteracy engine, 91% of us would've told you to go fuck yourself.

Adam Christopher@adamchristopher.me · 2w ago

It should have been $150,000 per title. It should have put Anthropic out of business and made me and other authors financially secure enough to keep writing and keep creating and keep fighting. We’re getting a token gesture. Anthropic won here. They pay a pittance (for them) and can do it again.

Momentous day: just showed the nine-year-old the Brian Butterfield Detective Agency sketch.

Trying to cut down on my reading so I can spend more time sitting on hay bales listening to travelling troubadours

They should invent 4-step authentication but only for if you're trying to order a pizza with no tomato sauce

The thing is I am actually quite a thoughtful and engaged person who believes in thinking critically and giving real consideration to what I say but I do also think - and I absolutely refuse to expand on this - that the fact I'm expected to have an Instagram account is fascism.

It's nice to be wrong about things. I didn't like the first two episodes but The Comeback S3 is really, really good, and Lisa Kudrow's central turn remains an all-timer.

A very specific bugbear but if you're dressing a set for a film and you want to convey that the featured character is a mathematical genius please, please, please dig deeper than putting the quadratic formula on a blackboard. This shouldn't be something I've seen happen more than once.

Toy Story 5 absolutely wrecked me. An unfair and possibly absurd comparison but I saw it on the same screen I saw Sirat and boy can you track the amount of time spent on storycraft through to the relative emotional payoffs

Gianni Infantino looks like the flipped image from the Thatcher effect illusion.

You should think very hard before you agree to be a witness at a wedding because if they get divorced you've got to go into protection and it's a big upheaval.

There's a local icecream seller round ours who's managed to insert himself as a community fixture. He's outside the school if it's over 17 degrees and must be in at least one of the class WhatsApp groups because this week he knew to be there at 12.30. Let's call him Mickey, because that is his name.

It must be pretty devastating that cinema never writes back to all those love letters to cinema.

As I trudge to school to collect my son and his friend on day 3 of the heatwave to bring them back to our 35 degree fan oven of a home, I can't help feel how short-sighted and frankly insensitive it was of Paul McCartney, in 1979, to sing about simply having a wonderful Christmastime.

The brain will do some crazy things in the name of efficiency. For the past ten years, mine has conflated (not confused, just stored together) Paul Daniels and Graham Taylor.

So hot that I'm putting suncream on my legs (usually too far from the sun)

Son's nursery offering an "optional 1pm pickup" for the rest of the week and, yep, fair enough, but also, you're a nursery, there's always an optional 1pm pickup.

Checking the weather like Larry bargaining with Cheryl on the drive back from Porno Gill's. "36? Can we get it down to a 35? We could have a very pleasant Wednesday at a 35"

Catching up on some World Cup highlights and I'm enjoying how hard "Weston McKennie"belongs on this roster

This is commonly misunderstood but MC originally stood for Mauratis Cornelis. The root of this misunderstanding is that the artist Escher, famous for his impossible architectures, was the occasional front man of a rotational hip-hop trio.

It's a small thing but people should be discouraged from calling their fear of snakes or heights a phobia. That's a precaution.

Productive insomnia last night. Composed a lament from the POV of a 40-something Leeds fan for a hypothetical relegation to the tune of James' Sit Down: "Now that we've gone back down again it's worse than it was before / If I hadn't seen Mike [Michael] Bridges, I could live with Okafor"

In the 90s you could be doing data entry in an office, someone would come in and throw some papers about and the next thing you were part of a horde marching through the car park, tearing off your tie on the way to watch a boxing match on a cliff. That's what kids these days will never understand.