John Self

"From the time she was fifteen it was clear that she had not only beauty, but the kind of beauty that makes men ready to put down hard cash." Me on Elizabeth Jenkins' 1968 novel Honey, where a woman gets very annoyed when her 16-year-old stepson doesn't fall in love with her:

First time using a drill to create my pumpkin design. Super-easy it is, too!

When I die I want a leaf blower named after me so that when people are woken up by it at 7am every morning they can remember me and think, "Rónán would have hated this."

subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz360bs

The Front Bottoms Half Man Half Biscuit The Flaming Lips

We were just discussing earlier how Dying for Sex is meant to be very good but we can simply never watch it because the title is so extravagantly terrible

The Beatles

Good things with terrible titles: One Foot in the Grave This Album May Contain Hope To Kill a Mockingbird Songs From the Big Chair Of Love and Hunger

Good news from Serbia, where the policy of “we’re not the current lot” has worked for Student List just as it did for Biden in 2020 and Labour in 2024. How their candidates will rule with no political experience will be interesting.

Everyone loves Mark Carney, the plucky prime minister who stands up to Trump and goes to Everton matches with Andy Burnham! [5 minutes later] We regret to inform you that Mark Carney wishes to “unleash Canada’s potential as a [fossil fuels] superpower”.

On first reading Eva Figes’s ‘Ghosts’ I found it captivating and beautiful. A book that has stayed with me over the decades. Rereading, with my children grown up and their grandparents passed, its lyricism has sharpened, its shadows have lengthened and wildness come forward. Currently out of print.

When I see headlines like this I feel as though I'm the odd one out for never taking cocaine, and then I check the stats and realise that less than 3% of people in the UK do. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Three bullshit categories is good going even by their #stupidgame standards Connections Puzzle #1232 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟩🟪🟩 🟨🟩🟨🟨 🟨🟩🟨🟨 🟨🟪🟨🟨 Boost? BOOST? And as for the green category...

Join my oven clock support group today at 2pm (3pm)

Something broke win my relationship with America when Trump launched his first campaign by explicitly proposing a ban on any Muslims entering the country and it didn't immediately end his political career on the spot.

V E R Y W I N D Y

“You’d like time to be as slow as it was when you were a child - each day a lifetime.” One of the great late works, it seems to me, having just finished it. Clear-eyed and big-hearted in its view of both life and death, but grief-stricken about all the cruelties of humanity. What a final statement.

I just want 12 posters in the windows of the empty carpet shop in town. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hALB...

Five years after starting with Herbert Clyde Lewis's little masterpiece, Gentleman Overboard, the Recovered Book series from Boiler House Press keeps chugging along. We don't get the exposure that fancier series get and we're happy if we can sell 300 copies instead of 3,000. But we're still at it.

The replies are an extraordinary catalogue of things that have objectively improved. If we didn't have the climate crisis and the far right authoritarians and the tech barons overshadowing everything I'd be whistling every day

How will we know if circus posters use AI? They’ve always been like this. THEY STARTED IT.

It must be galling to people working in sweets development that the pioneers of chocolate bars basically got it bang on with their first gos.

The latest in my reading of Brain Moore's novels, Fergus, which he based on his experience of script-writing for Alfred Hitchcock: 1streading.wordpress.com/2026/10/23/f...

Guillermo Del Toro dropping another one liner that’s exactly how I feel about AI slop, the “punishment” is built in

One of my favourite genres is lads on the bus who are too manly to share a double seat so sit on opposite sides of the aisle and then the bus fills up and they have some rando sat next to them and can’t chat shit to each other anymore and instead look glumly at their phones.

“The pope then addressed the Lord directly, stating that if you try to kill a loyal servant by giving them lung cancer, you’d better not miss.”

There's a new Year Of Listing Dangerously out, in which Charlotte Coleman takes on the education system, Irwin Allen takes on George Lucas, Ronnie Corbett takes on Kit Williams, and Noel Edmonds takes on far too much all at once. historyoftv.substack.com/p/week-68-24...

It makes me sick to the stomach to hear someone who voted for Trump three times in a row voice his “unease” with the things he has done. You, sir, are the cause - and the enemy.

It really IS a triumph. Science is the absolute fucking suds.

This must be my highest score as I got a little fireworks animation at the end. Saddened that only 3% of respondents knew number 2... catfishing.net #852 - 8/10 🎉 🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈 🐟🐈🐟🐈🐈

"In the converted ballroom that then housed his library, he stomped all over my poems like Gene Kelly in combat boots." Beautiful tributes to Douglas Dunn - who would've been 84 today - from @dharmabam.bsky.social, @nemoloris.bsky.social, Greenlaw, Muldoon, Hofmann, Armitage, &c.

Is it bollocks. Pulp are pop. Elbow are pop. Badly Drawn Boy is pop. Franz Ferdinand are pop. English Teacher are pop. My rule: if it’s got a tune and a verse-chorus structure, it’s pop.

Oh my god. They are like Magic Eye pictures. Just stare and new wonderful things magically appear.

Bernie Taupin in the Times today, which reminds me that his memoir showed how his experience in crafting a good pop lyric seemed to make him think long-form prose has to distinguish itself by being elaborate and convoluted. Examples in this thread 👇

The quiet hysteria of the instructions in bold…

This is genuinely really good

Beautifully juxtaposed

Those of us who have about one idea for a pitch every three months can only look on this thread with awe and envy.

I am fed up with people misusing the term podcast and it now meaning a cheaply made TV show with dickheads mouthing off with small microphones. It used to be a proper term where Hal closed the pod doors and cast Dr. Frank Poole into the cold vacuum of space.

It is very, very — exceedingly — funny to consider a 21-year-old's political support over "nearly a decade." Perhaps especially when he still looks 11.

Sylvia Plath’s annotated copy of The Waste Land. She’s like one of those TikTokers whose copy of The Secret History has thirty fluorescent post-it tabs sticking out of every page.