Helen Macdonald

having the voice actor for daffy duck & bugs bunny on your picket line must have felt like having nuclear capabilities. peace to a legend.

Genuinely I don't know that it comes across to people who haven't been here to watch how almost unbelievable this was, just people taking something that looked impossible and dragging it kicking and screaming all the way to inevitability.

And, most importantly, thanks to the vital mobilisation of young people. Students took to the streets the day after the first round elections, kickstarting massive movements that saw the largest public demonstrations in Brazil since the days of Diretas Já at the end of the military dictatorship.

Thirty years ago I was on a high-volume high-aggro mailing list, and when someone lost it like this the tradition was for someone to take the text of the message, alphabetize it, paste it into a reply, and say “these words didn’t appear to be in any particular order so I alphabetized them for you”

Cod size shifting baseline moment at the end of Netflix’s BELOW really got to me

My dad was such a quiet prepper. About 2002 I was in the garage with him and came across a stack of boxes of bottled water and cans of soup etc. Looked at him enquiringly. He shrugged, said "millennium bug"

Me, looking at the Bond hopefuls BUT THESE ARE CHILDREN?! Getting old is such a trip

Solid metaphor for the entire administration, honestly

Went for a walk saw a Bonelli’s warbler and a Seismosaurus. Didn’t get a picture of the Bonelli’s but it was flitting about a stand of oak saplings and was very pleasing

My friend Christina just called me at 2am her time because this made her so mad she couldn’t sleep. I understand her pain.

Just sent a parcel from Switzerland: genuinely amazing to be in a post office that's calm, clean, well-staffed, beautifully appointed, and does not look like everyone working behind the counters has serious work-related depression :(

I hate this so much the abyssal depth of my hatred surprises me

!!!!!!!!!!!

Not a companion as such but

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

I was saddened to hear about Ian Berry's passing. Such a wonderful photographer. I'll post my favourite Berry pictures here. #RIP Berlin, 1963, Christmas time. Two brothers meet after being separated by the wall

This is my shit

When Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens begins playing “Old Corn Liquor,” a traditional Black American folk tune, acclaimed Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man recognizes similarities to Chinese pentatonic music and spontaneously joins in. The joy on their faces says it all.

once again reminded how the designer of the furby sincerely believes they are alive radiolab.org/podcast/more...

Bound into three exquisitely colored volumes, Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods (1860–1902) features hundreds of species, collected across 42 years by a female mycologist named M. F. Lewis: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fungi-of-shropshire

Anthropeum.com · Oct 15 2026 🟩🟨🟦🟩🟩🟨🟩🟨🟨🟩 64,515 · top 52% of players today!

28 Weeks Later - how did the zombies build the new Wembley Stadium in the interval between the two films?

SCRIB DOOOOOOOON

A Little Owl (mochuelo in Spain, mussol in Catalan) kindly sent to me by Lucy Brzoska. It had flown down to inspect these items left by gardeners working in the Fossar de la Pedrera, Montjuïc , the mass grave of the victims of the Franco regime in Barcelona. Like a surrealist painting.

Sure it's strange to seek inspiration from a fiver but there's something even more bizarre about viewing the natural world as being primarily for very young children.

According to Cloudflare Data Explorer the amount of russian bot traffic has dropped to 49% after Ukraine struck a yandex data center. yoda69 / twitter

Yesterday @sinblache.bsky.social pointed out that I'd uttered the most neurodivergent sentence imaginable, namely: "I had to stop reading the cyberpunk sex novel because there were just too many fluids happening, so now I'm reading a collection of ghost stories about trains."

The term everyone is dancing around is "secret police", a hallmark of totalitarian regimes.

Ils étaient mi-cerf mi-escargot, et re mi-cerf derrière

Industry regulations back then said they couldn't use rats, so the makers of Dracula (1931) used possums

"All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name."

Oh absolutely fucking not @london.gov.uk. Khan has been vocally on the side of the trans community; this is two fingers up. www.timeout.com/london/news/...

There are so, so many. But it'll settle for this one because it reminds me of a childhood listening to weird stuff on a short wave radio early in the morning before school. The world lost something when radio interval signals stopped being a thing. youtu.be/F6XFt4XLi60?...

the solution to the Monty Hall problem is simply to offer the host a handjob and then the rest works itself out

feels like at least part of what is happening is that a lot of people want politics to solve the "my life feels empty" problem and the populist right is directly appealing to them