Jonathan

"Why do you want to have a 1970s music pavilion at the Shakespeare festival?"

"It features wine made by the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party!"

"But how does that make it anything to do with Shakespeare?"

"Mao is the vintner of our disco tent!"

[Exit, pursued by a bear]

The spectator at the desk On the troubling emptiness of extraordinary productivity

New writing! On finding meaning in work, and the effect AI will have on that, and what to do about it.

blog.harrym.com/p/the-specta...

Dressing up as a fucking massive cockroach for world book day and phoning in sick because I’m a cockroach to see if they get the reference

One of the great things about how culture works is that a show that got cancelled decades ago has been experientially filtered into a load of other books and comics and movies by creators who were influenced by it so we don't really need it brought back, we have its descendants all around us.

So no

Ah good. An AI-written summary of an issue with AI being forced into everything

Photo of a pale book with the title the agile comms handbook. How to clearly, creatively work in the open By Giles Turnbull

This book is excellent

So clear and relevant. Easy to read (which is a big compliment as a dyslexic person).

Bonus is it's in a font size which doesn't make me feel I need to squint or hold the page next to my face

Tweet from Mat (@MatCro): [airport] GF: I guess this is goodbye ME: I told you, I'm not very good at goodbyes GF: [crying] Goodbye ME: [trying real hard] Hello

Greg Davies: Walked out of the underworld. Didn't look back once. Job done!

Orpheus: Thanks

Alex Horne: We did want to show you one more clip of when he came out...

Lord Nelson was 5ft 6in. His statue is 17ft 4in.
That’s Horatio of 3:1.

Greg Davies: Great task, well done. Didn‘t eat a thing.

Persephone: Thank you.

Alex Horne: Ah. Well. Let’s take another look at that pomegranate.

I am looking for something very specific and I'm wondering if a few people I follow might be able to help. I'm trying to find scientific critiques of automated "sentiment analysis".

I hate the re-soloing of development. We were so close to learning social skills, creating community, encouraging creativity & purpose, & applying empathy. Easier to manage if each of us is so busy with our genieswarms that we don't have time to talk & reflect.

These repeated attempts to "communicate" with AI left me feeling adrift from my own language. I thought of the opposite of poetry. Poetry sets you adrift from language in service of connection to meaning and other people; this is how it recreates language. This set me adrift in service of nothing.

yeah. I know it feels like you should just be able to write the perfect words first time. if you go slow enough, you should be able to just find each next perfect word.

but it's not like that. it's like a bicycle. too slow & you fall. it has to be in motion even awkwardly to get where you're going.

Kafka understood that an even greater indignity than being turned into a giant insect was still being required to go to work afterward.

I’m eighty percent sure this is ragebait but that’s still a one in five chance otherwise.

Things Hades would say

GOV.UK React | Showcase | Storybook An implementation of the GOV.UK Design System in React using CSSinJS

This week I saw a team show off their storybook version of govuk react that wasn't this one. When I asked why they were rolling their own they said this hasn't been touched for two years. Is this dead because departments are all rolling their own or did the team overlook something that is public?

I should probably write a piece about how I don't vibe code because I love writing the code myself too much and even when I run into friction, that friction gives me insight into how to change things (usually after I go for a walk). But honestly, who cares what I think?

UK bank holidays Find out when bank holidays are in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland - including past and future bank holidays

Are we all aware of Scotland's newest bank holiday, coming on 15th June? www.gov.uk/bank-holiday...

Immediately sung this in my head to the tune of "Goodbye Mr A". Do not recommend

A drop down menu for sex on a website booking form. The two select options are ‘bad’ and ‘female’

Ah yes, the two sexes:

OpenClaw’s integrations section showing a whole bunch of email clients, chat apps, note apps

Sorry, but if I find out that you hooked an AI agent up to a signal chat you’re in, I’m never trusting you with anything ever again

Read another post about how too many books are marketed as nice things to own, fancy hardback editions and such. We need a return to mass market paperbacks where you don't mind bending the spine, folding down the corners, scribbling on the flysheet and in the margins.

"Sometimes I give my slaves a little free time, and their little amusements in turn amuse me."

one thing I love to do is to type and type and type and think oh woah, I must have nearly written a whole article here, I've typed up so many things, and then look at the wordcount and stare at "283" for a while

in the year of our goddamn lord 2026, are you fucking joking

this is a very good summary of a particular set of tells. this is why it is often (ironically) hard to tell what the main point of an AI-written article is or when it gets there. it is constantly doing things to go "here's my main idea" that human writers do once per piece.

at last, we have invented retrophenology from the classic Discworld text Don’t Invent Retrophenology

also if this were real - it is not! - we'd have to tackle the ethical concerns about our army of SENTIENT ROBOT SLAVES