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Weirdly, I think the most vivid memories are probably the positive bits - bike rides around empty streets, time sitting out in the garden because there was nothing else to do. Rationally I'm aware of a lot of fairly shit stuff - my partner's family are mostly highly vulnerable in one way or...

I just had my manager ask, on a public teams channel, "is Dave back on the wagon again?" I was off yesterday with food poisoning (blurgh) and it turns out that she's always thought that "back on the wagon" just meant something like "back to normal". She's now trying to work out how many people...

I don't think it's directly quoted in the thing, but that title is basically a lift of the amazing quote about Sergeant Pepper being the sound of "four scousers taking acid to explore inner space and just finding more and more scouser down there", isn't it?

Look, "shops" and "amenities" and "community" all sound very nice if you're living in some sort of latte-sipping metrosexual Hampstead liberal bubble but what Real Ordinary British People want is a box with a roof, two parking spaces and for property developers to make as much money as possible.

Randomly, a friend of ours is actually the mayor of Northstowe - him and his partner were one of the first households to move in and he's always been involved in organizing stuff and trying to make things happen. AIUI one of the issues there is that the land for commercial properties has already...

Funny that this thread started off talking about the historic grimness of the 70s - I'm feeling like grim is increasingly the defining state of 2020s Britain. Maybe it's an actual post-Covid, post cost-of-living crisis, post-Brexit, post-Tory effect, maybe it's just that I've moved from...

I recently saw a van belonging to Sheffield's finest dog-walking service: The Human Lead. What I particularly like about that is that it's not even a good pun, they just figured that they'd go with it because it was the best they'd got.

It feels increasingly hard to argue that the current government are interested in anything other than appealing to bitter pensioners who don't like the idea of young people having nice things.

The British train ticketing system is such a clusterfuck. Totally gold standard example of why you don't get a coherent system by breaking things up and privatizing them and then introducing regulation piecemeal to try to get the privatized operators to do what you want. They're looking at...

https://www.reuters.com/business/thames-water-has-strong-financial-liquidity-uk-regulator-2023-06-29/ Is that a polite way of saying that the Thames is basically sludge or something?

In a way it's weirdly like the original Ali G interviews, insofar as politicians and other public figures are being obliged to give straight and sincere answers to obviously stupid questions because questioning the basis for what someone is asking you to comment on is somehow against the rules...

I mean, I don't have an in depth analysis but this feels a bit like someone's set fire to the wasps nest that was in your shed - sure, the wasps nest isn't there any more, but now your shed is on fire and your garden is full of angry wasps.

I'm assuming that things are just a different flavour of fucked now, though, right?

One thing I still see hanging around is the permanent lockdown and the comprehensive Chinese-style social credit system that our vaccine passports evolved into. If only we'd listened to the warnings!

Don't really agree on boxes - there's stuff that I do that's very important to me that needs a relatively large amount of kit that only comes out occasionally. Like various outdoor things - trad climbing, camping, winter hillwalking etc. An axe and crampons and bivi bag and four season sleeping...

I've been down a bit of a Youtube rabbit hole on this stuff - slow living / decluttering / minimalism etc - mostly through the medium of the inevitable "I still consider myself a minimalist but all these people shaming each other for owning three forks rather than two is kinda toxic actually"...

Yeah, thinking about it quite a lot of management seems to basically consist of generating statements that are well put together and read nicely and are full of all the expected words but whose relationship to reality is kind-of incidental, which is a very LLM-friendly task.

It's kinda hilarious how "personal responsibility" is this big underpinning idea of Tory ideology, but as soon as they actually start having to deal with the consequences of their own actions, they start whinging about how it's unfair and they're being victimized and it's all the fault of the...

Insert jokes about the North Circular here.

I think a lot of it is just going for a goth / metal aesthetic, to be honest. Black Metal Brewing are the only ones with this sort of look that I've heard anything concretely dodgy about, at least in terms of actual fashiness.