I love travelling by train. But booking trains over flights for international travel is something that I’ve always assumed is complex, difficult and expensive. I’ve taken the Eurostar a few times and I’m no stranger to hopping on trains within a foreign country, yet planning something like London to Barcelona by train, for instance, isn’t something I’ve seriously contemplated.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been living in the French ski resort Flaine. It’s a bit different to most ski resorts. Whereas the general aesthetic of a ski resort is picturesque wooden chalets with smoking chimneys, Flaine is a brutalist concrete paradise. The Barbican of the Alps.
A great post from Mightybytes about the sustainability of the internet and data they’ve collected from their Ecograder tool. It includes this excellent infographic:
About two years ago, I decided that I wanted to “take back control”1 of my data. I had been mulling over the idea for some time, conscious of arguments that had been raised by web celebs like Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman. I became aware of a growing movement known as POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
A reblogging of this post:
The man in the middle of the photo below (in the baseball cap) is Thomas Muir. Thomas was a member of Britain First, and last year he murdered Jo Cox MP while shouting the name of this organisation.
In France, a road has been named after Jo Cox in honour of her life and in memory of her horrific and untimely death.
Yesterday Donald Trump, the so-called President of the United States of America, retweeted three anti-Islamic videos – at least one of which is proven to be bogus – from the deputy leader of Britain First, a convicted racist and fascist.
Theresa May issued a statement saying that Donald Trump shouldn’t have done this.
Donald Trump’s response was to use his little hands to tell Theresa May via Twitter to focus on problems with terror in the UK. And that the US is doing “just fine”… (Actually, prior to this he told someone called Theresa Scrivener the same, before realising she wasn’t Theresa May – demonstrating that he lacks the mental faculties required even to use Twitter responsibly.) Theresa May is currently on a tour of the Middle East and has just become the first major foreign leader to visit Iraq since the fall of Mosul.
I’m not exactly a fan of Theresa May, but here I am sort of defending her.
What really troubles me is I don’t know where we go from here. Donald Trump has passed down through every threshold to now represent the deepest dregs of civilisation. There are no more words left to describe what he is or what he’s doing.
(Update: It turns out she also didn’t bother to actually write a letter to me either, see the bottom of the post.)
For a multitude of reasons, I support proportional representation (PR) systems of voting. The UK currently operates a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system of voting. This means that almost every Government in power in the UK rules without the majority of the country’s support (in fact, far from it).
Although the Greens have become known for their irreverent take on party broadcasts (see last year’s one at the primary school, or the boy band the year before), this year’s local election broadcast is altogether more sombre and hard-hitting:
Last Thursday, history was made as the Conservatives took the Copeland parliamentary seat from the Labour Party. The seat had been held by Labour for 82 years, and it’s the first time a governing party has won a seat from the opposition in a by-election since 1982. And as the Conservatives have been proudly touting, it’s the first time a comparable by-election win has occurred for well over a century. While undoubtedly a seismic event, a closer inspection of the numbers, and of the events that took place during the by-election campaign, reveals a host of curiosities.