The High Court also heard RTC leader Ben Cullen had threatened physical violence to a resident removing flags, boasting that he was a “violent criminal” who had served 15 years in prison. Full report in today’s Clarion: oxfordclarion.uk/the-clarion-...

The Clarion, 4 August 2026

We're doing a rain dance. You? While we wait for some sorely needed water, here is some news, not all of it cheerful. Including less than savoury details about Raise the Colours; celebrating Oxford Ci...

oxfordclarion.uk

Had an incredible interaction with a guy over the weekend who went to see The Odyssey and told me he was pissed that Elliott Page played Achilles, a character Elliott Page did not play that was not in the movie

You can/should read Emily Wilson's latest take on the Odyssey, but I'm logging on to convey my hairdresser's reaction. She was AGHAST that Nolan, with his million $ budget, gave Matt Damon ONLY 6 hair extensions. As a result, his hair did not blow around properly, & that ruined the film for her.

Holy shit. www.wired.com/story/a-civi...

research has actually become a lot harder now that google doesn't really recognize booleans anymore

The destruction of all search engines is the tech story of the last decade imo

Comfortably Numb@numb.comfortab.ly · 4mo ago

WaPo website replaced search with AI and it's going great

So obviously this is another dumb ploy to keep Tilly Norwood a relevant thing, but I will say, at least this article does get at what's actually interesting about this whole story: A 40 year old woman, roleplaying as a 20 year old woman to get a second chance at a failed career.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2mo ago

Our writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner interviewed Tilly Norwood, a computer-generated character described as “the world’s first A.I. actress.” She left exhausted. “It was the feeling of being at a computer all day. It was a dehydration of human interaction,” Brodesser-Akner writes.

Most upsetting is that for automatic copyright claims, YouTube actually has a tool that'll remove the music while retaining your VO. Which would be perfect for this situation! But it DOESN'T WORK WITH MANUAL CLAIMS? WHY??

Scoring my essays using video game music was always one of the great joys of the job for me, because VGM skated under YouTube copyright restrictions (presumably) to allow for streaming and lets plays and stuff. Now it'll just be a dice roll every time I guess?

This hearing is driven entirely by Elon Musk's algorithm. Not a single normie voter alive today has thought about Anthony Fauci for at least five years. On X this is a pressing issue - maybe the pressing issue - of the day. It doesn't matter at all.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.

Moreno to Fauci: "Who the fuck did you think you were?"

a statement from Fauci's lawyers says Rand Paul has "an intense & seemingly pathological course of retribution, revenge, & obsession with Dr. Fauci ... The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable."

Gotta shut down the factory that makes this kinda guy

Ebay’s harassment spree against a perfectly nice couple in Massachusetts is one of the craziest stories I’ve ever covered. Six years later, the victims have finally gotten their due. from @laurengoode.bsky.social

Ebay Has to Pay $55.7 Million in Settlement for Its Unhinged Harassment Campaign

For months on end, eBay employees and contractors made life hell for a couple that had criticized the company. Six years later, the company is finally paying up.

wired.com

The couple accused eBay leadership of mailing a series of threatening deliveries to their home in 2019, including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig’s head mask and a funeral wreath. ft.trib.al/TIjx8FI

Elon Musk, owner of X, has called the editor of the Economist "a traitor to the West, plain and simple" after her recent interview with him. He now argues that "anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor" Musk has been socialising violence since Aug25: "fight or die, that's what it comes down to"

375,000 people evacuated, major cities under threat, and tourists turned away. France has never had a fire fierce enough to generate a pyrocumulonimbus before. The largest devastation of land since WWII. But net zero is very expensive www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Pedro Sánchez says Spain is suffering effects of climate crisis as firefighters battle wildfires in France

Blazes near Madrid coming under control but efforts to contain huge fire near Bordeaux hampered by windy conditions

theguardian.com

Includes blacksmithing equipment and leatherworking tools, which is nice.

rogueclassicist ~ david meadows@rogueclassicist.bsky.social · last wk.

Roman Gold, Barracks and Surgical Tools Unearthed at Vindonissa’s First Military Camp in Switzerland | Arkeonews arkeonews.net/roman-gold-b...

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

I mostly think everyone should get off Twitter but I may have found one use case

scha·den·freu·de@blisterpearl.bsky.social · last wk.

and then Andrew Tate closed replies 😂

okay. breaking an extremely long hiatus from making new bumper stickers for this. Ordering tomorrow, hopefully available to purchase next week!!!

Just if your days are filled by devising measures to stop the customers using your product to harass and secretly spy on others do you think you'd wonder if your product was bad? www.thetimes.com/uk/london/ar...

It's wild how someone will make a movie with real craft and care and love for the medium and experience and people will turn out and buy tickets and it'll be a hit and execs will learn exactly zero things from that and continue to greenlight derivative shit.

There is not any way Vance in 2016 talks about post menopausal women or childless women the way he did in 2024. That's the result of cooking in a particular online stew and having their deranged ideas validated as sensible.

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · 2w ago

I’d concur in part and dissent in part. I agree Vance isn’t really in a bubble, but “bubbles” aren’t the issue in the first place. The issue is audience capture. You can be exposed to many ideas but if you’re continually validated for expressing some subset of them, you tend to drift that way.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder is basically the defining feature of huge swaths of our politics now

Media Matters for America@mmfa.bsky.social · 3w ago

Fox host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the advice of the network’s own senior medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegle, by saying there is “not a chance” he will wear a KN95 mask.

Like did anyone doubt that the odyssey would be a smash hit. The new movie from the very popular director who delivers nothing but smash hits.

A good day's archaeological aerial reconnaissance today across north Wales, back in the R44 helicopter from Caernarfon Airport with #RCAHMW survey buddy Lou Barker 🔥☀️ Things getting very dry with some extraordinary archaeology emerging 😮🧐. Plenty of imagery to sort through when the summer ends!

everyone has an answer to this and they’re probably all at least partially correct, but mine is that he doesn’t understand art, he doesn’t value it, and he doesn’t think it’s worth paying for. that’s true of most of our tech billionaires but he’s the distilled version of their contempt for humanity

post malone ergo propter malone@proptermalone.bsky.social · 3w ago

i don’t really understand why Musk doesn’t just pay artists to make the art he wants.

The way Zero Parades exists culturally not as a video game but as a signifier of specific industry practices and drama and is engaged with exclusively through that lens is incredibly disheartening to me.

When journalists asked me "where we will see the effects of DOGE on outcomes?" one of my responses was "during crises...as long as media connect the dots." Well, dots connected: www.wired.com/story/cdc-cy...

The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year

“Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” the former CDC lab director tells WIRED.

wired.com

Really crazy to learn that JK Rowling once worked at Amnesty International as a bilingual researcher but she was fired because she was too busy writing books during work hours instead of documenting war crimes in French speaking Africa.