Craig Grannell

Thumbsticks seem fine to me so far.

Most of the Squirrels are tiny. Duggee is hefty though. Maybe he can stand further back?

Fine – he can go on the £1 coin. :D

I’m fine with the CU thing. That felt like an “if not even this, then what?”
tactic to shift the argument. SM has been LD policy for years (the final part of the re engagement steps). But this culture war bullshit is just awful. And I’m sick of their illiberalism re tech.

OK. Here we go. British animals on banknotes:

£5 Bagpuss
£10 Feathers McGraw
£20 Sooty, Sweep and Sue
£50 Bunny vs Monkey
£100 (Scotland only) The entire cast of Hey Duggee

Even more baffling is just discovering that Ed Davey has leapt aboard the stupid bus. Good grief. I know his party is trying to attract Tories, but it’s not trying to attract flag shaggers who seem to think we should return to and permanently reside in the 1940s.

They say things come in threes. Lib Dems fucked up with the social media comms. Now this shitshow. I can only imagine tomorrow one of their senior figures will be yelling LEAVE MEANS LEAVE from the top of a bus.

Do better, Ed Davey. You shouldn’t be aping Reform and Tories in culture war twattery.

Oh, come on. They asked the public. The public responded. The British public like animals.

Yours is a ridiculous stance to take and another weird piece of positioning for you and your party (after the illiberal stance on social media and under 18s). It also whiffs of Reform. Stop it, please.

Native British Animals you say?

If we’re going for fictional animals, I’m thinking either Looshkin or Bunny vs Monkey on the 50.

Isn’t this essentially:

BOE: What would everyone like on their banknotes this time?

British public: Well, we really like animals!

BOE: Sounds good – let’s do th—

Badenoch: WHY NOT CHURCHILL? BANK OF ENGLAND AND LABOUR ARE WOKE GONE MAD!

Today’s Tories. Brits… like wildlife. The BoE did a public consultation and… probably found that Brits like wildlife. But, no, this also has to be culture war bullshit, because Badenoch is so buried in X now she doesn’t know anything else.

Isn’t this essentially:

BOE: What would everyone like on their banknotes this time?

British public: Well, we really like animals!

BOE: Sounds good – let’s do th—

Badenoch: WHY NOT CHURCHILL? BANK OF ENGLAND AND LABOUR ARE WOKE GONE MAD!

When I said 'Kemi Badenoch is so partisan, under her the Tories would oppose puppies and kittens if Labour said something nice about them', I didn't mean it literally.

Apparently, today’s the day when I discover that the overlap between British legal minds and 1980s gaming is well beyond zero. :D

We just need another British lawyer to pop up now in favour of the C64 (since DAG is a Speccy fan), to get a most surreal online playground scrap meets courtroom drama.

What is not happening with constitutionalism in the United States and the United Kingdom

A look at constitutionalism (and the lack of it) in the US and UK, with reference to a 1980s computer magazine column

By me at The Empty City

Substack:
emptycity.substack.com/p/what-is-no...

(Oli Frey print of Zzap!64 issue 3 to the left of it!)

Framed ZX Spectrum, alongside Oli Frey poster.

I was a C64 lad, but the Speccy definitely had more flexible underlying abilities when it came to game making, and the graphics could be fab in the right hands. The original 48k sounded bloody awful compared to the SID though. As a *machine*, however, it looked wonderful. I have one on the wall.

Probably don’t look *too* deep into Paul Sumner either.

Now wondering if it’s an oddity or somehow inevitable that great British legal minds end up referencing one of the best video game mags ever to exist. And that Oli Frey art still kicks bottom.

It says a lot that Yvette Cooper, of all people, is looking progressive and reasonable here.

Lego’s Luigi Mario Kart set finally gives Mario someone to race across your desk | Stuff Build your Nintendo Lego collection with the latest Mario Kart entry, Luigi and his Mach 8

These giant Lego Mario Kart sets look very nice, and I in some ways prefer the Luigi one to Mario. But… I’d much prefer Yoshi! www.stuff.tv/hot-stuff/te...

That’s more or less the current policy at mini-G’s school – and one I’m on board with. Next year is going to be… interesting. Local buses prefer digital tickets. Parents use phones for tracking. Kids need a device for homework and timetables. So *at best*, parents will need to buy extra gear now.

Yeah. I can’t see too many folks on Apple’s leadership team manually faffing about with devices. The nanny or subordinates probably deal with that.

My kid, eg, is very young when it comes to TV and movies. But as a reader, she’s very mature. Games sit somewhere in the middle. So we tailor access and suggestions towards what we know she will like. Apps exist in a somewhat similar space.

We did the same. Mini-G had used tech since she was a toddler (no surprise, given my job!), has long loved IPads and then got a smartphone at 11 – but it’s also pretty locked down. The ‘conversation’ approach also enables you to work out together what’s appropriate for *you*. Same with all media.

Given the age of your youngling, are you in an area where there’s a rolling ban coming in though? (Here, mini-G is the last Year 7 allowed a smartphone. As of next school year, there will be a total on-site ban for incoming Year 7s, which will then work its way through the entire school by 2030.)

She and you seem to be going about things the right way. And, yes, conversation and education is the way to go. Mini-G is not always happy with our decisions as parents (Roblox is a straight “nope”, for example), but she has relative and growing online freedoms as she shows she can be trusted.

Well, yes. I imagine there are quite a few illiberal and conservative people who’d very much be up for that.

These systems do need to improve, I agree. I suspect no one sufficiently senior at Google and Apple has to deal with these things themselves though. If they did, I imagine improvements would have come much sooner.