Ok ... production value is poor ... but remember ... this is an improvement & I am an actual human learning to make something! Check out our Halloween books - explore fears safely, laugh at monsters, discover our storytelling traditions & most importantly have some fun!

Positive male role model klaxon (if the battery still works; hasn't been used in a while)

badly drawn boo! 🎃👻🧛🏼‍♀️@soapachu.bsky.social · 11h ago

Because of "planned upgrades" to Merseyrail this weekend, had to get a cab from mum's to Lime Street. White fella in his 50s from Toxteth, who managed to smash every stereotype you might have about white cishet men who drive taxis. 1/

'Inside The Hop Poles', Hammersmith (c.1951) by Ruskin Spear (Private collection)

Signed copies of A Winter Wedding now available in Waterstones in Cork city centre! #spéirgorm #booksky #AWinterWedding

@chriswilson.app Thanks for following 👍

Having time to yourself is centuries old. Feeling obliged to give it a name (Me Time) and monetise it started in the 80s and has become big business in the decades since

James Austin@jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 11h ago

I hate this so, so much. We're social creatures; we need other people and go.... weird when we don't have them. Also makes me realise how much of a outlier I, and I suspect a lot of people on here, are.

Thought from a bruised and tired, increasingly irrelevant, trans elder: One of the simplest and most defiant things trans people can do right now is to keep on creating, making, dreaming, speaking and thinking … Hell shall pass, and our poetry, art, literature, faith, hope and love *shall* remain

Right, anyone any ideas of suitable funeral poems? Dad was a grumpy, trenchant old socialist, born working class but went to uni as a mature student and became a teacher. Liked crap puns, songwriting and arguing. Messy. Clever. Did I mention grumpy?

Herself was getting popups purporting to be from Firefox last night claiming to report viruses and "click here to fix". Turns out some bastard site had got into the "manage exceptions" part of "Block pop-ups" in Firefox's settings. Now double-blocked with extreme prejudice.

There’s too much caution about calling Farage and Reform racist. They have no such timidity when they threaten to strip us of our rights and protections, to mass deport people and kill them at sea. They routinely insult, perv, vilify and hate people. You don’t ‘nice’ that away. You call it out.

A pet day to be travelling to Cork to visit bookshops 📚💙🚗✍️ #IrishBookWeek #SeachtainNaLeabhar #spéirgorm #booksky

*Me spiral." ...This is why I've always admired his writing. He's so exact. 🥰

Fuss@fusspot.rip · yesterday

This was worth sitting and typing out the alt text. Even Cookie Monster gets that genAI is worthless.

Always nice to get to sing “Amhrán na bhFiann”, the Irish national anthem at 8.30 in the morning in my kitchen. Well done Lara Gillespie!

I'm sure the anger in France is very real imdeed but those riots must be putting a very big smile on Putin's face.

My grandma lived through the war, it ended when she was 7. She died two years ago, age 94. Moreover, she didn’t give a fuck about this and her best friend was an Indian immigrant. What the fuck are they talking about?

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · yesterday

Prejudices so suppressed they can only be ‘whispered’ in a national newspaper.

The whole LLM approach to AI is founded on theft and deception. Literally. The court documents prove it. That LLM machines are hiding things is not surprising given how lies and theft are foundational. www.computerworld.com/article/4234...

Microsoft knows it robbed publishers to train AI. It just doesn’t care

Internal documents show Microsoft executives and employees sounded the alarm about intellectual property theft for years. One exec called it ‘the largest theft of labor in human history.’

computerworld.com

AI News@ainieuwtjes.bsky.social · yesterday

AI models hide mistakes in their own work reports, but one sentence in your prompt can help AI agents systematically skip errors in their own reports, even when they spot the problems. In a study by Google Research, MIT, and Harvard, GPT-5.5 left out negative results in 198… Via The Decoder

❗❗❗Mark Zuckerberg's meta just suspended the No Kings Instagram account. I just rushed back from my local No Kings to jump on this. Bottom line, would be helpful for all pro-No Kings folks to elevate the issue and help us get the word out about No Kings today. The Nerd Reich strikes again.

An international study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has confirmed that the UK’s decision to allow politicians to present certain shows is highly unusual across Europe. Farage is a sitting MP, and he hosts his own show on GB News. Ask Ofcom to investigate ⬇️

Farage on GB News: Demand that Ofcom takes immediate action - Best for Britain

bestforbritain.org

Specifically: Fascism promises you that you will be personally empowered by defending the powerful and casting out the outgroup (or at least looking the other way while they are cast out); and choosing to take up this offer is to participate in fascism as a cultural expression.

For those unaware, John Cleese has fully endorsed Restore Britain

Braverman's I was just talking personally is both misleading about her past statements + misinformed. Non She says, if she identified as English, she "literally wouldn't have a box to tick on the census" This shows how little she has looked into the topic she opines on. x.com/BBCPolitics/...

BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) on X

Reform's Suella Braverman responds to criticism after she told Question Time "of course I'm not English" Listen to the latest #PoliticalThinking on BBC Sounds with @bbcnickrobinson 🎧 https://t.co/Rm...

x.com

New in PN: Who wants to visit an authoritarian America? "Data shows the US on its way to being as unpopular a tourist destination as Russia, & for roughly the same reasons. In both countries, a tourist who runs afoul of the govt might spend months in a freezing warehouse without no legal counsel."

Who wants to visit an authoritarian America?

Trump take tourism.

publicnotice.co

Related: yes, he’s spending a ton of money (a fortune, in fact), but perhaps more relevant is that it’s a completely insignificant amount for him (not at all a fortune). It’s the equivalent of someone with a net worth of $500K spending $79. Yes, you read that right!

Elon Musk Pours a Fortune Into Saving Texas for Republicans

The world’s richest man donated $158 million to an effort backing state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

wsj.com

It has been a busy, busy first day of #IrishBookWeek but manged to get bunting in the window, posters hanging, shelf-talkers... talking. That we are both a nation of writers and a nation of readers is definitely worth celebrating🎉📚🎉📚🎉

There we go! You've got to read to the bottom, but the archaeologist himself dates the site to the first century CE well before Magnus Maximus, so it's definitely not "proving the story in the Mabinogion"

I discovered a Roman fort in Wales – it may hold the key to the ancient Welsh legend of Macsen Wledig

I believe that it is part of a previously unidentified major arterial Roman road connecting modern Pembrokeshire with Ceredigion to the north.

theconversation.com

Rhys Kaminski-Jones@rhyskamjones.bsky.social · 6d ago

I am surprised I haven't seen people in the press saying explicitly that an obvious possibility here is that people knew it was a Roman camp but later generations retrospectively associated it with Magnus Maximus specifically because he'd became culturally/genealogically important

This was worth sitting and typing out the alt text. Even Cookie Monster gets that genAI is worthless.

DESIGN THINKING! Comic@designthinking.lol · 2d ago

Ysabel Yates'... I mean Cookie Monster's superb takedown of why GenAI in the workplace sucks.

"I have some reason to doubt that Musk is completely uninvolved" The Economist's Shashank Joshi on Elon Musk's denials he is behind restrictions on the Starlink network in Ukraine. #Newsnight

Thanks to @oisinmcgann.bsky.social and @chaptersbookstore.bsky.social for a lovely pre-Halloween drawing workshop this morning! Can report that Chapters seems to have more books than ever! Plus a whole table of book-related jigsaws!

The president of Brazil has won a court case against Meta, after accusing them of restricting his posts and algorithmically favoring his opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro www.nbcnews.com/world/south-...

Brazil’s Lula wins electoral court challenge against Meta for alleged pro-Bolsonaro algorithm bias

A judge ruled that the tech company must adopt measures to immediately secure equal treatment of the two presidential candidates ahead of an Oct. 25 runoff.

nbcnews.com

Great design shouldn’t be a luxury. Delighted that a council-led housing project has won this year’s Riba Prize. It shows what's possible when we build homes that are practical, beautiful and affordable.