Building Bedroom Part One - Sep 2025
My fractured wrist out of the cast but still weakand painful, work on renovating the bedroom begins,and the world slips further in to fascism.
Diary
Fractured Wrist
Went to the hospital and had the cast removed.
Should make typing easier.
More pain after that than when I first went there though. RSI aggravated by the cast. Thumb fucked up by the cast. Wrist hurtswhen moved.
Apparently I’m to stretch the wrist slowly and gradually recover mobility like wrist yoga. Physio exercises every day.
Do not recommend fracturing bones in your arm.
It’s a bad scene man.
Building Bedroom
It’s time for building work. Uh ho.
The bedroom that has remained undecorated and mostly dark since I moved in more than 20 years ago will finally be stripped and rebuilt according to my specifications.
What is my specifications? Humm. Well. I live alone and nobody can tell me what to do so I’m doing it Tardis themed.
Mostly I built the shape of it in Blender last year and the tardis theme only popped out when I readdressed that design this spring with an eye to actual colors. Adding the frosted glass to the windows on the top cupboards is the main thing that sells it.
Here’s the video I made for the builder.
A friend helped me empty the room ready for the actual professions. Took apart all the cupboards and the bed and packed it all into the van to drive to the tip.
Only just fit in the van really.
Spent more than half the day doing it which was knackering but as you can see, the room ended empty and ready for the carpet fitters.
After the carpet was fitted there was a few days gap before the builders started.
Sadly due to scheduling difficulties the room sat empty withcarpet alone until the first of October.
But then the build proper started with Lots of channels cut into the walls ready to be wired and have new plug sockets added.
The existing plug socket’s back-boxes are apparently stuck or important for the wiring or something so can’tbe removed. Can’t just expand those holes to have 2-gang sockets in their place. So the old sockets will remainas well as all the new ones. Won’t really matter at all, they’ll be behind the drawers or inside the sideboard cupboard anyway.
The Electric work apparently finished next day. Power only off for fifteen minutesor so.
Plenty of electric sockets in this room now! Fourteen! And eighteen USB power sockets too!
Face-plates not attached to the sockets yet, do that after the plastering I believe. So they look a bit shoddy for now.
Then was stripping day!
The builder came in and stripped all the wallpaper off of the walls to leave the mostly white and partly scarred walls. Also covered the carpet in plastic since plastering and painting begin soon.
The build is expected to take most of October.
More in the next newsletter.
America Buys Britain
A lot of media this month excited that US companies are “investing” in the UK with announcements timed with the visit from that wanker they elected over there.
But “investment” here means US companies buying UK land and staff and companies, right?
The whole press is celebrating more of the UK being sold to American owners. Like its a really great thing that UK workers will have American bosses and American companies will own and manage sites here.
Seems an odd thing to celebrate. I’d be happier if UK companies were repossessing US assets in this country and the country’s wealth was expected to remain with UK owners.
Oh well. Expect “investment” has already meant those media companies are owned by Americans eh?
Digital ID
Starmer talking about a Digital ID. There used to belike 30% of the UK in favour of them until he announcedit and now it’s net 16% against.
If you think the fact it’s “digital” will stop me burning my ID card in protest then you can think again!
Phones burn up nicely if you get them right.
They recently decided that company directors have to prove their digital ID. My company turnover is like 500 quid but I’m still a director of it.
So I had to prove my digital ID.
To do this, I had to take my driving license to a post office.
Which means it’s no more secure than the driving license I already had, surely?
Wonder if I can sell a digital ID on the black market and then keep getting a new one.
Of course ironically it’d be easier to sign Link this government petition against a digital ID if everyone had a digital ID they could sign it with.
Banning Protest
The cops and the government suggest that the protest against the proscription of Palestine Action should be postponed because a crazy person done some murders.
The home secretary says
If the point of protest is to stand up for something and persuade other people that you are right, then I think this is entirely the wrong way to go about it, but that is on their conscience.
That is not the point of the protest. The point of the protest is to show that the proscription of a non violent protest organization under terrorism laws is ridiculous and unenforceable as well as being a massive waste of police and court time.
Delaying the protest would harm that demonstration. The police are over stretched and can’t enforce this stupid counter-productive proscription without compromising their duty elsewhere.
Demonstrating that is the point of the protest, and police saying “We are too stretched to arrest all these demonstrators” just reinforces that point all the more.
You know what police and government? You could just not persecute non violent protestors as terrorists. That’d solve your over-stretched police resources problem in one stroke!
Since the protests went ahead despite the suggestions,the government said they want to crack down on repeated protest.
If at first your protest doesn’t succeed, try, try again. But after that you are legally obligated to give up or risk arrest. 😆
Hard to imaging those who are protesting by getting arrested for bogus terrorism laws giving much of a shit if instead they are arrested for protesting too many times.
What a joke. You can’t just legally define a false thing as true. Palestine Action are not a terror group, even if you define them as one in law you authoritarian crazed lunatics.
I wish this government would just fuck the hell off. Imagine being more authoritarian and illiberal than the conservative party. 🙄
Your Party
Ah, the left, can’t even wait until there’s a name and a membership list before you split eh?
YourNameHere Party isn’t even a party yet and there’s fights. Sultana launches a full on membership join-up site and then Corbyn claims it ain’t the right one.
🤣 🙄
And there isn’t even any policy to argue about yet. Factions forming just over who is in control of organizing conference and taking membership fees.
Well done everyone ❤️
Join the greens 🟢
Fediverse
This week’s Mindscape podcast is with Petter Törnberg who has been running agent based simulated social networks to try and figure out why they’re so divisive and polarizing.
His models do apparently capture these features of thenetworks which promote the most popular posts to everyone.
Sad to learn that simply using chronological feeds apparently not only doesn’t help he reckons it makes things worse!
Maybe his agent’s just aren’t smart enough to follow the right people, but then probably nor are mere humans.
🤔
It’s odd coz I think the algorithm is very toxic.
“What do you lose by using Facebook”, asked a friend who is keen to keep his account there for some reason.
What made me leave was the manipulation. I mean: they started hiding your friends posts in order to show you adverts instead! Feeding you slop from their promoted posts and “viral” messages (that aren’t actually boosted by anyone, just picked out by their megaphone to show to everyone).
If you let the algorithm determine what you see than you let it determine what you are, who you become.
Even if you think it’s better at finding shiny things than you, even if you think it builds the parasocial relationships that you want, even if you think it’s saving you time to let the robot manage your reading-list: if you are letting Facebook, or any algorithm written by advertisers, do your reading selection then you are letting Facebook decide who you are.
On behalf of the advertisers who bribe them the most.
This is why you gotta use RSS. You gotta use the chronological timelines not the “for you” feeds. You gotta build follow relationships that you choose and understand because otherwise, you are letting the corporation and it’s systems determine these things. You are abdicating some control of your very self to the machine.
Not to mention that we have to stop feeding money to the evil multi-trillion dollar companies built to control and manipulate us through our relationships with our friends. They have enough money, they need less participation not more.
Reading
Murderbot
Read the first of Martha Well’s Murderbot books, “All Systems Red” in which a security drone rescues it’s crew from violence and death on the planet they’re exploring.
The robot seems barely distinguished from the cyborgs and the humans really. Certainly organic parts, autonomy, inner life. Seems to not particularly like the humans but also seems to be pretty much like one.
Seemed short, like the first episode of a show rather than the whole series. Which I suppose I should have expected if I’d noticed it was a novella. There is indeed a whole series of them. Given I bought ’em in a bundle expect I’ll read more.
Watching
Alan Partridge
Watched the new Alan Partridge show on BBC, “How Are You?”.
Got a chortle or two from every episode, he’s still that same embarrassing cringe character as always. Fun to watch him struggle with reality and, in this case, fail to really grasp mental health.
The character has come a long way since The Day Today and Brasseye. They never would have guessed it back then.
Releases
Word Cloud Tarot - Flag Shaggers
On the Sixteenth of September 2025 I did a five minutetarot reading on why a hundred thousand flag shaggers protested in London about wanting their country back.
Turns out the capital class are programming idiots with hate and white nationalism to distract from their looting of the wealth of the workers.
Watch at the website:
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2025-09-16-flagshaggerprotest/
Links
Some things I found fun on the web this month:
Big Tech Turn Right - Video
Cory doing a show about the hard right and big tech
How big tech took over the world and why Amazon produced a War Of The World movie in which Amazon and Google save the day, on a google youtube video with Cory
Your Party
Craig Murray on the fuss with the Your Party fledgling group splitting before they evenexist:
I cannot stress to you enough that this is not a glitch it is a feature. Nor is it a teething problem. Those who currently hold the reins are determined to make sure those reins cannot be voted out of their hands. I have had a number of conversations with people actually in charge of instituting all this, and the prevention of direct democracy and the structuring of the party instead through controlled committees and caucuses is for them a given.
Blender
Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as CEO of Blender,though he’ll still be doing lots of things there,just in a different role.
Ton Roosendaal is great, he is why Blender is so greatand why the organization he has built is so perfect anexample of Free Software doing well. Always wants to do theright thing the right way ever since buying his own softwarefrom his bankrupt company to make it free.
Interview with him is fun.
UKPol
Craig Murray on Digital ID cards and the real motivation behind them:
“The calculation is that Reform will oppose the measure on libertarian grounds, and that this will allow Starmer to show himself as tougher on immigration than Reform.”
AI Economics
The AI craze is a big old economic bubblewhether the AI itself is here to stay or not.Cory explains some of the economics:
Bain & Co says that the only way to make today’s AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta):
Green Party
Zack won the Green Party leadership, and is doing the media rounds and started a postcastto talk to people. Here he talks to Gary Stephenson.
He thinks we should look at economics like a car mechanic, no wait, like a medical system. They congratulate each other a lot and chat about Gary’s onetopic focus, inequality. Gary doesn’t want to reduceinequality he says, just stop it getting worse!
Around The Fediverse
Social Media doesn’t have to be run by massivecompanies trying to manipulate you for theiradvertisers. It doesn’t have to be owned bynazis who push facsism into your feed.
There’s the free, unowned, cooperative flotillaof Federated systems too!
Here’s some recent nice ones.
Fediverse
Bluesky’s CEO has been making bad moderation decisionsand posting through it. Dale has the meme:
Everyone in the fediverse whenever there’s bluesky drama
The joke of course is that despite Bluesky claimingto be decentralized, they are not, there isn’t reallyanywhere to move to.
Mastodon
I think that the “Mastodon is hard” vibe comes largely from folks who expect to be able to “find everyone on one app”. I think when we tell folks leaving Twitter/Bluesky/Facebook/whatever about the Fediverse, it’s important to address this disconnect with honesty and patience.
No, it is not “just like email”. Because for 90% of folks email is “just another app”.
It’s more like webrings.
Idenity Cards
In case you were wondering why some people don’t like identity cards, especially when they are used to divide some people from others in febrile times
“In Kigali, the genocide was led by the Presidential Guard, the elite unit of the army.[166] They were assisted by the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi,[100] who set up roadblocks throughout the capital. Each person passing the roadblock was required to show the national identity card, which included ethnicity, and any with Tutsi cards were killed immediately.[167] “ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
Signal Release
Until now, if you lost or broke your phone, your Signal message history was gone, a real challenge for everyone whose most important conversations happen in Signal. So, with careful design & development, we’re rolling out opt-in secure backups.
Secure backups will let you save an archive of your Signal messages remotely in privacy-preserving form, refreshed daily.
Now available in the latest Android beta release, rolling out to iOS & Desktop soon
Immigration
People on Threads talk about the ICE raid on a facility Hyundai was building in Georgia, which will not open now after nearly 500 people, mostly South Koreans, were rounded up out of the blue.
“Hyundai’s halt: Construction is paused, and Hyundai has signaled it won’t move forward with the plant. That’s a $4.3 billion investment gone.”
~ Trisha
Gaza
Good morning everyone.
One million people are facing imminent death and destruction at the hands of Israel in Gaza.¹
Israel has issued evacuation orders for one million people. These are people who have been displaced over and over again in Israel’s ongoing genocide. They have nowhere left to go. To move South costs thousands of dollars to rent land, a tent, and sanitation due to war-time profiteering.² That’s if they can get someone outside of Palestine to host their fundraiser and if they can keep their social media accounts from being shut down by mainstream Big Tech platforms and after paying half the donation amount or more in commission while withdrawing the funds that are sent to them.
Things are desperate.
Mastodon and the fediverse are the last lifeline for people from Gaza. It’s their last chance of reaching us in the outside world so that we might help them survive the genocide and famine being wrought out by Israel.
@joynewacc and I are having video conversations with people from Gaza who have Mastodon accounts every day to verify them in hopes that this will help them raise funds to live.
You can find the verified accounts on Gaza Verified:
I hope you will follow them on the fediverse, perhaps send them a few words of love and solidarity so they know they’re not alone but that there are some of us that see, hear, love and support them.
And, if you can, please support their fundraisers, boost their posts, and share their accounts.
Thank you in advance for making our friends from Gaza who are facing unspeakable horrors welcome on the fediverse and for showing that humanity is not entirely dead in the rest of the world.
💕
Several of my friends here asked me if I’m in a safe place, but I struggle to explain the geography of Gaza and people from overseas struggle to understand it. So I’m writing a thread.
Independent Media
This post is a guide to using some independent streaming platforms. It’s part of a series I’m working on about leaving the control of massive corporations. I will follow it up in a few days with a post about running a personal Video on Demand platform, and a couple of ways you can set up personal IPTV stations, and why you might want to do that. Until then, this is an article about leaving HULU+DISNEY+HBO+MAX+DISCOVER+FLIX in the bin, and what you might find instead.
Art
A little taster from my forthcoming ep…
I’m Your Computer, I’m Against You.
Made the video in iMovie because I’m hard.
Banksy
Gotta hand it to the authorities. At first, I was mad when they scrubbed the Banksy, but they have unintentionally made one of the most powerful artworks of all time.
Everything they do to hide or erase it makes it look more poignant than the original.
AI Cartoon
The Amphora of Great Intelligence (AGI) Part 2
Egan Story
In a future where the rich kids are being raised with a digital Cyrano beside them to sweet-talk their way into the best jobs, four friends train together for a battle to prove that other kinds of minds might still have the edge.
My new story “Understudies” in Clarkesworld.
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