Lauren Beehan

Me sitting beside a speech bubble that says "Hello, I'm a talking fish!"

Easily amused in Belfast

A bag of Swedish jellies called Salt Skum

Tasty

A sign in Estonian and English directing to "Endless Coffee Drinking"

Aka a career in media

A sticker saying "anticipate stupidity"

Always

Me, named Lauren, standing looking suspicious beside a lampost decked out in signs that say "LAURÈN LAURÈN LAURÈN etc" fifteen times

These were everywhere in Tallinn when I was there. Bit unnerving

A picture of a tree made of books with a sign in the style of cigarette box warnings saying "Reading can seriously damage your ignorance"

A sign in the same shop as above (Red Books in Wexford)

A red sign with "BOOKS" handwritten on it, stuck over a wheelie bin and pointing towards a low wall

This felt like a trap specifically to get me. (It worked)

A poster that sats "INTROVERTS: WE'RE HERE WE'RE UNCOMFORTABLE AND WE..." and then someone has stuck a label over the rest saying "don't want to go home but we are stressed and we need an adult"

Seen at Lost Evenings in Edinburgh. Valid.

Graffiti saying Freedoom is essential

When you log into Bluesky

A brass sign on the wall of a thatched outhouse saying "Ireland's Top Toilet Award"

What an honour to visit. In fairness, Gougane Barra's a great toilet setting

Me standing under a sign saying Low Defences

That year before my black belt grading in Taekwon-do when sparring was not going well

A sign in Estonian that has a cartoon pic of a suitcase with an X over it containing a bottle of poison, a bomb, toxic waste, a spilling carton, and three separate fish)

What intrigued me about this Estonian bus sign was that all the dangerous items are there once, but fish are there three times. ("No really, do not bring fish on this bus")

Paper stuck to a bus shelter saying "Are you missing a chicken? Call 086..."

Seen on a Dublin bus stop a few years ago. I have questions

A sign in Eindhoven airport that says "Kiss & Ride na 30m" "10min gratis" and has a pic of a stick person waving from a car

I think we'd, uh, call this something else in Ireland

A plaque stuck on a bench that says 'this bench is dedicated to those pruyd and true Irishmen and women who have lived with a terrible secret; they don't like Guinness"

A bench to commemorate a secret struggle (I think it was on the Liffey boardwalk)

Me many years ago standing under a shop sign saying ONDA RADIO

What was my first media job? Oh, I was

Screengrab of an email that says "IT'S COMING TO YOU" in ominous white font on a pic of a tea/coffee set

An email telling me my coffee order's been dispatched or a terrifying threat?

A large sign that's fading and chippping that says PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE PIGEON

I like to think this isn't faded and there was just one particular pigeon terrorising a Sligo carpark ("you know which one")

An A4 page sellotaped to a front door saying "Ceci n'est pas un pissoir !!!!. Merci! Les habitants"

Magritte's less good sequel

Yellow road sign against a fence saying "pedestrians crossing, stop and crawl"

Instructions unclear, knees are muddy now

A sign saying "Please be terrified responsibly"

I think if anywhere online is gonna appreciate my dorky 12-year-long collection of silly signs, stickers etc, it will be Bluesky... 😅

Here is a bus shelter ad from a couple years ago around Hallowe'en, but I think "terrified responsibly" is just my general vibe.

A photo of the crescent moon. The lit-up part is a bit blown out by the camera's ISO setting being up high, but you can see the shadow of the rest of the circle above it.

And a not-so-good pic of some earthshine as well!

A photo of the waxing cresent moon (approx 30pc full) against a black sky. Craters/pockmarks are particularly visible along the ridge

A power cut earlier this eve meant I couldn't cook dinner, but I *could* take some moon pics without the city light pollution... (Priorities)

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.

It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I'm not the only one.

I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior. It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post *on your own website*

I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself www.bbc.com/future/artic...

WOMEN👏DON’T👏WANT👏CHOCOLATES 👏FOR 👏VALENTINE’S 👏DAY 👏THEY 👏WANT 👏MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S 👏COLLEGIATE 👏DICTIONARY 👏TWELFTH 👏EDITION 👏

See also...

A selfie of me, on a train, holding up a copy of a book called "Everyone on this Train is a Suspect" by Benjamin Stevenson

Did I buy this book purely because I thought it would be funny to read on my 3hr train journey home? Maybe... (Yes)

**To be extra clear, when I say 'tidy up', I mean self-editing to make it more concise. Not using AI! This is an LLM-free zone: I'm perfectly able to write lengthy over-explained tracts myself, thanks 😁

*I'm not having a go at AmEng speakers either! I would guess that AI also flattens out regional variety and neologisms there too... And the flipside is that if LLMs are overusing writing devices, it may be because good writers did it first 🙃 (See: em dashes, rules of three)