beachlass | up the shoreline

For the first time this year I've left the office and it wasn't pitch black outside. Dark, but not *night*.

(Sunset was at 16:56)

andrewducker

1998: Geoffrey Robinson loan affair

Peter Mandelson accepted a £373,000 unsecured interest-free loan from businessman and fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house. He did not declare this loan or inform Prime Minister Tony Blair about it, or his permanent secretary. As the story emerged, he gave false and misleading statements to the Commons Committee.
This led to his resignation as Trade and Industry Secretary.

2001: The Hinduja passports affair

Peter Mandelson, then a government minister with responsibility for the Millennium Dome, denied any personal involvement in supporting successful UK passport applications made by Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja, super-wealthy businessmen brothers, who had expressed an interest in contributing to the costs of the Dome after their initial passport applications had been refused.
Mandelson is revealed to have lied, and is forced to resign for misleading conduct.

2009-10: Epstein relationship

Peter Mandelson downplays and minimises his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in ways that were shown to be false around 2019-20, when press investigations revealed that he had had multiple meetings with Epstein, had stayed at his home, and had been introduced by Epstein to major figures in global finance. This relationship was shown to have continued after Epstein’s conviction.

2024: Keir Starmer appoints Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the United States.

2026: Keir Starmer expresses shock and outrage that Peter Mandelson lied to him.

mekare posting in

unclutter

I really need to do this, so why not make it an event where people can join in?

February here is all about carneval, Valentine's Day and unending winter weather. So, let's look at a couple of new areas (pick and choose):

STUFF TO MAKE YOURSELF LOOK DIFFERENT: old make-up, hair accessories, brushes, combs, hairclips, dried out nail polish etc.

BATH PRODUCTS: out of date creams, lotions, oils, bathing salts, old tooth brushes etc.

CLOTH: that towel with the holes (repair or put it to some other use), washcloths, reusable make-up pads, cleaning cloths (the ones that almost fall apart),...

PERFUMES: that gift someone got you, but really you never wear it, or maybe it's so old the scent changed

Let's free up some space in the space where we get clean! Or alternatively, let's clean those brushes and combs, replace that mangy toothbrush with a new one and throw away make-up we never use anyway.

Optional: if you have plants in your bathroom (I do), let's give them some love.

I'm open to more suggestions! Let me know what immediately came to your mind when you read the challenge.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

andrewducker

I came in the front door to find Sophia lying there waiting for me.

(She leapt up, gave me a hug, demanded to know what was for dinner, and then lay back down to watch videos.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

1. Scottish government confirms it will not back prostitution offences bill and make life worse for sex workers: (tags:sexwork GoodNews scotland )
2. Who wants to see a sperm whale eat a giant squid?: (tags:whales squid video )

rydra_wong

Artorias is a DLC boss.

Beating the final boss of Dark Souls puts you straight into New Game Plus, so you need to do the DLC first, but yeah. I have in fact completed the base game up until you enter the last area. And there is a general consensus that the final boss is not the hardest in the game.

The DLC bosses are all substantially harder than the base game ones, and I have two more left, so it remains to be seen whether I can beat them, but at this point the odds look decent that I will at least be able to finish the base game.

I would like to remind you all that my initial goal was to see if I could beat the tutorial.

andrewducker

1. Vitamin D cuts heart attack risk by 52%. Why?: (tags:vitaminD heart )
2. Democrats flip Texas state Senate seat in shock upset: (tags:politics USA )
3. Evidence beats ideology: What Hampstead Ponds tells us about trans inclusion: (tags:LGBT transgender UK )
4. Who Goes Nazi? (A newspaper article from 1941): (tags:nazis history viaKenny )
5. Why was the Puppet Masters movie so bad?: (tags:movies heinlein scripts writing )
6. I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026: (tags:dilbert history politics obituary )
7. Following the link about a "running a bookshop" holiday, I was recommended the game "Tiny Bookshop": (tags:games books shops )
8. A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words! |: (tags:words game doom )
9. Did people drink water in the Middle Ages?: One of the oddest myths about the Middle Ages is that people did not drink water.
(tags:water history )
10. Inside the Salford secondary school where every pupil gets a job when they leave (because they're properly supported): (tags:school children )

fred_mouse posting in

unclutter

How goes the decluttering? Have you shifted anything out of the house? Found something to sort through? Had thoughts on things you can let go of?

Comments open to locals, lurkers, drive by sticky beaks, and anyone I've forgotten to mention.

Congratulations to everyone who has found and/or disposed on any clutter in the last week!

Optional extra, for those who did the low key January challenge: was there anything you want to comment on? Shall we look to do it again next year? I very much appreciated that there were people willing to get involved, and it helped me with focusing my uncluttering. I have a whole area in the main room that is now clear of junk!

In case you need to hear it: if you have a challenge you want to run, or you need a buddy for something, this is an open community. It is absolutely fine for you to decide to run something! No permissions are needed. I only checked in for this one because I needed the motivation of knowing other people were going to be involved.

renay posting in

ladybusiness

This week I learned about the Golden Poppy Award! I'd never heard of it before.

The California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) presents the 2025 Golden Poppy Awards in recognition of the most distinguished books written and illustrated by creators who have made California their home.

There's tons of categories, I made a direct dash to the Octavia E. Butler Award for science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Winner: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Kill the Beast by Serra Swift
The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
Red City by Marie Lu

I dug into the Intergalactic Mixtape archives to see what reviewers were saying about these books, because this is one of my most favorite nerdy things to do. I had reviews for Automatic Noodle, The Night and the Moth, Notes from a Regicide, and Red City. Alas, I had none for Kill the Beast, which is interesting because it came out in October, after I had expanded my review sources. But! The mixtape is still a baby.

If you like reading multiple opinions of books, this may interest you! ( Read more... )

andrewducker

There's been a bit of a fuss today about the unveiling of a third Edinburgh tram line route. And my thoughts about it aren't simple enough to stick into a link title, so I thought I'd ramble a little.

Firstly, it seems to me that this is not a council announcement of anything. The map is plastered with the repeated word "concept". It contains both Picardy Place and York Place (Picardy Place was created when York Place was removed, when the tram extension was carried out in 2023). I've seen discussions that it's based on an old version of the existing routes taken from Wikipedia.

The source is a Scotsman article, rather than a council publication. And even then the coverage is mostly taken from a speech given at the Rail in Scotland conference - where the council's transport convener said he "was excited at taking a closer look" - but it's not the main priority. Certainly there's nothing on the council's news page mentioning it.

So I'm not convinced that this is more than a "Here's an interesting possibility"

Secondly, I'm not convinced it's viable financially. Which isn't to say that trams, in general, can't be worthwhile. If Edinburgh hadn't badly botched the construction of the first tram line then it would be well in profit now. But that tram line runs from one of the most densely populated parts of the city (Leith Walk) to one of the business hubs (Gyle and Gogar), through some of the most touristy stretches (Princes Street).

Much though I love the idea of a tram that literally stops in my road and goes to both the airport and Portobello, nearly the whole route is low-density. The bus route that is closest to it is the 38, which is so low-use outside of rush hour that it's a single-decker that has to be subsidised.

Admittedly, it's cheaper to build than a new tram line, as it's mostly a question of re-using the old train line. But I'd like to see a concrete business case for it, that checked that the number of potential users would support running tram-trains along that route.

ravenna_c_tan

Yes, it's National Shutdown Day, but when we rescheduled last week's book launch party at Pandemonium because of the two feet of snow bearing down on us... we didn't know that today would become National Shutdown Day. So the party is going forward at 6:30pm tonight, at Pandemonium Books & Games, and I hope folks come out even if they don't spend anything. :-)

The party is for the launch of Bound by the Blood, my BDSM-meets-urban-fantasy thriller novel, first in The Vanished Chronicles.

https://pandemoniumbooks.com/products/author-event-with-cecilia-tan-bound-by-the-blood-vanished-chronicles-1?start=2026-01-01T00:00&select=2026-01-30T18:00

It's been a rough couple of weeks between the ICE murders in Minnesota and other things (remember invading Venezuela? yeah, and a list of other things), making it really difficult to maintain my focus on anything but doomscrolling or really brainless phone games.

I deleted all the games (except Words with Friends and Pokemon Go!) from my phone last week and hunkered down to finish the revisions on The Mystery of the Bitten Peach, the lesbian Ancient China time-travel fantasy romance novella I shared sketches from recently. I finally solved the mystery for myself of what was missing from act III, and I'm super happy with how it hangs together now. dave ring at Neon Hemlock is giving it the final editing pass, and the paperback book is now up for pre-order on the Neon Hemlock site! Here: https://www.neonhemlock.com/books/bitten-peach

The cover in all its glory can be viewed in the Patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/party-tonight-149532475

The art is by Jenn So (https://jennlso.com/), with layout and design by dave ring, the mastermind of Neon Hemlock.

I'll post an excerpt soon?

See (some of) you tonight.

andrewducker

Fairly sure that this used to be a bath.

Before Sophia watched a video on how to make the perfect comfy hideaway.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

rydra_wong

And I am still buzzing and I am so so so proud of myself and I need to talk about it and I only know two people who know what it means.

If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:

Watch on YouTube

Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.

Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.

(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)

The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.

He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that can rapidly make his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And after one or two power-ups, he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.

I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.

I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.

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beachlass

January 2019

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Page Summary

andrewducker - The light is rising
andrewducker - A brief history of Peter Mandelson
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 06-02-2026
mekare in unclutter - February Declutter Challenge
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 05-02-2026
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 04-02-2026
mark in dw_maintenance - Minor operations; testing new serving path
andrewducker - Photo cross-post
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 03-02-2026
rydra_wong - I FORGOT TO MENTION
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 02-02-2026
fred_mouse in unclutter - Weekly(ish) check-in
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 31-01-2026
renay in ladybusiness - Golden Poppy Book Awards 2025: Octavia E. Butler Award
andrewducker - Thoughts on the "Route for the third Edinburgh tram line"
ravenna_c_tan - Party tonight! And an art reveal
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 30-01-2026
andrewducker - Photo cross-post
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 29-01-2026
rydra_wong - Yesterday I beat ARTORIAS

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