The Great British Baking Show is back! And series 17/collection 14's Cake Week was an excellent start for the bakers (despite their disasters) and new judge Nigella Lawson. Let's recap!

Enjoying another sunny day in Montreal. Exploring a different cool street and stopping for a Cream Stout on a patio. I’m at: Le Saint-Bock - Brasserie Artisanale / Bazaar Microbrasserie, Montréal, Québec Location map: https://misterchrisjones.ca/location/chris/7392/ Note tags: checkin, food, montral, qubec, brewpub

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This episode I speak to Christopher Chung about his performance as Roddy Ho on Season six of Slow Horses. We talk about Season 5 afterglow, an evolving Roddy, and a Roddy Ho spin off? Plus what Mick Herron thinks of his performance as Roddy, working with a new showrunner and why does Lamb keep Roddy around? Finally, Ho-mies? All that and more in this episode! For more on the slow horses, click…

Carole Bennett With The Satisfiers - He's Coming Home (direct download) *Record listed at Rockin' Country Style (no location). Nice record, but is it rockabilly? Singer from Long Island, New York. In 1955 she was a winner on the Arthur Godfrey "Talent Scouts" television show. As a result she was signed to the Rama label in New York and, shortly afterward, to the Capitol label before recording for the Hilton label in 1957. Record re-issued by Verve Records on the West Coast. See her discography…

Hi everyone. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare again today. It’s just past 7:30PM, so I’ve had my last cup of coffee for the day and will probably have my evening soft drink before finishing this post. Feel free to grab a cup of your favorite beverage too and let’s chat. If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. It’s been quite warm for September and we’ve hardly had any rain. On Tuesday and Wednesday next week, daytime highs over 25°C are in the forecast again. It’s a blessing…

Most soap operas take a while to work their way up to murder, but EastEnders kicks off with it from the very first scene, airing February 1985 on BBC One. A door gets kicked in; the characters Arthur Fowler, Ali Osman and Den Watts find the “cantankerous old man” Reg (who had been missing a few days) nearly dead. It is revealed later another character attacked him trying to steal his old war medals. (Reg dies. Conversation reveals Reg was too much of a “nasty old drunk” for people to care.) I…

Life Σσ was trained and ready to do a swim off the Arran coast but it was cancelled due to high winds. A small part of me was highly relieved that she wasn’t going to leave me alone with the kids for a long weekend, but I mostly felt gutted on her behalf – she’d been looking forward to it for a long time. I got the office lurgy which didn’t quite get bad enough to warrant any weekdays off but left me feeling pretty grotty over the weekend (another silver lining of Σσ not going away). Our sofa…

A super hopeful and super depressing week in the same. I seriously don't know what to do next because I was planning something major for my life and worked REALLY REALLY hard for it, but LUCK, LUCK, WHAT THE FUCK, why couldn't you on my side this time!? After I had ruled out all the possibilities of the failure, had put in the hours, had made sure I would not trip on even the most minute details, why did it have to be my bad luck which tripped me over at the end. I need to figure out what step…

📚️ Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino helped me clarify why I liked some authors and not others. ⊕ [Note: Incidentally, M. John Harrison’s latest book is on the short list for the Booker prize this year. I eagerly await October 13 and its US debut. ] There are in fact five memos, named in order Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity. The final one, Consistency, was not to be: Calvino died, aged 61, before finishing.

There’s many things I’d like to do with my spare time. Unfortunately when that time rolls around, all I want to do is to relax with something passively engaging, and multiplayer shooters are perfect for that. Helldivers 2, Team Fortress 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Mordhau. Whatever multiplayer game I find myself sticking to, they share the same qualities: Instant action: You launch the game, and you can find yourself in the thick of it within a minute. This is killer, it’s hard to avoid temptation…

Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility? I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given…

genuinely posting on twt has become a little scary bc of the visibility and pressure of having so many amazing and talented ppl following me ... like people i look up to so so much i .. i feel like im unworthy LOL. hgqwjwhgjhgsd sdgfhsdh ... im just a drawer i .. eihwieuhwiu

idk who to even tell but my kamioshi followed me on twitter im going to die of happiness......... i need to. make her so much more art. i. aiusyiueyriuwetrui esuhdgfjhgw eifgewrf uery f jkhgr jwehw ghjsdg fjhergjhgfgreg ahh ..

I've just launched a blyg at caseyjr.org/blyg. What is a blyg, you may ask? Click the link and learn. I learned about it during the Protocol Institute symposium this week, spun it up over a couple hours on a Saturday, and may use it as my own version of twitter. A directory of blygs is available here. _ Reply via email

The Steve Jobs Archive has published the second book after the Make Something Wonderful, a collection of Steve Jobs’ speeches, letters, and interviews. I enjoyed that book and expected the same level of inspiration here as well. But Letters to a Young Creator didn’t keep up with the promise. It features some big names, but only few of their letters worth mentioning or quoting. Here are some: …don’t do the right thing, avoid it like the plague.So, what am I suggesting you do, the wrong thing? Of…

Tech workers attempt to wield power responsibly when management will not.By JS Tan and Clarissa RedwineRating: 4 / 5.This was an interesting and at times gripping account of tech worker unionization struggles. The book sits on a mental shelf for me with Blood in the Machine for its rallying cry and You Deserve a Tech Union on the practical end. It began accounting for the duplicity of socially-progressive tech companies bending toward authoritarianism over time, leaving progressive workers to…

New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City. Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there. 1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish…

it is quiet enough to hear my own thoughts without following them. they come and go without asking to be understood, not as questions, not as things that need an answer, just little pieces of somewhere i have been.

Mushroom Lady poster (1967) by East Totem West. • “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” Composer Steve Reich talks to Flora Willson about his long career. More Reich: live performances from 1976 by Steve Reich and Musicians of Six Pianos and Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ. • At Aeon: Eric Leas on toadstools and toxins. “When I found the mushroom Amanita muscaria being sold in candy wrappers, I uncovered legal loopholes, dangerous…

There was some reminiscing going on earlier this week about old cinemas in the city. I remember there being a handful, when I was a kid, before the huge multiscreens moved in. But there used to be loads, perhaps twenty at any one time. The city is full of the old buildings. One was a theatre that started showing films in the 1890s. One doubled as a ballroom. Most were built in the 1910s or 1930s and there are many gorgeous art deco buildings. Now used as event spaces, conference centres, a care…

Happy Sunday, my fellow nerds. If you've been keeping up with my posts (all 4 of you - thank you!) then you know I've been experimenting with TypeScript (and Vite) recently. This past week I decided to try building a real "app", and of course by app I mean something incredibly small, but a bit "real world"-ish to kind of get a feel for what the development process felt like. I decided on a fairly simple weather application. The application would prompt you for a location. That location gets…

Ninety-year old Margaret Riley is a cantankerous old lady living alone with her memories. Her one pleasure is the weekly trip to the library where she always checks out five mysteries, tolerating the gossipy librarian, Sue. When she sits down outside with her library book, she notices the empty house on the other side of the pond has a new tenant, a blonde woman, also sitting outside. Margaret is very curious about her new neighbor but, instead of bringing banana bread or a friendly welcome,…

Anna Mahtani: "It was dusk when he was awoken by a fearful scream. He had never heard such unnatural sounds, such howling, wailing, grinding, tears, [...] Terror gripped his heart like ice, tortured him and numbed him." Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment (1866) embraces horror. Regularly cited as Silent Hill 2's biggest thematic inspiration, this Russian novel about guilt insists laying out in full the psychological torture that Raskolnikov puts himself through after murdering an old woman. The…

🍿️ The Last House (2026) was pitched, or so I would like to imagine, as a blend of Home Alone and a Lovecraftian apocalypse. Instead of Macaulay Culkin you get a whole picture-perfect nuclear family; Joe Pesci becomes Cthulhu. No surprise, then, that the ending is a soppy, schmaltzy mess.

Ninety years ago, a man named Oswald Mosley tried to march 3,000 Blackshirts through Whitechapel, where about 100,000 Jews lived. He did not get far. On October 4, 1936, thousands of East Enders blocked the route: dockers, Irish Catholics, Jewish tailors, communists, socialists, and a crowd of people who hated the thought of fascists parading past their front doors. The clashes that followed, mostly with police trying to force a path through, became known as the Battle of Cable Street. Mosley's…

Finished reading: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn by Will Harris 📚 I’ve been on a bit of a White Oak Pastures kick lately. It started with seeing a local screening of Groundswell where Will Harris was part of the Q&A panel after the film. Coincidentally, a few weeks after seeing the film we were traveling to the Florida panhandle with the intention of stopping at White Oak. After the stop, started listening to the audiobook which tells the story of how White Oak converted from industrial cattle…

Cute girls do circus. This was a very well made show, just not my genre and I need to recognize that and stop falling for the great, dramatic first episode followed by an entire season of much ado about nothing. I quickly lost all interest in this after the first episode, but I recognize that if a peaceful show about cute girls doing cute things is what you’re looking for, this show’s pretty great. Fun fact: I recently tried aerial silks and lyra (spinning around inside a metal hula hoop…

Gunnm (under its English title Battle Angel Alita) is one of my all-time favourite manga of mine, so it's a mystery why it's taken me so long to get around to playing this adaptation of it, when the fantranslation has been out a few years already at this point. Though I also haven't read the second sequel series, Mars Chronicle, so maybe I have some subconscious aversion to stuff with Mars in the title? Anyway, none of the sequels were out yet when this game was made, but it does apparently…