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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 8h

God help me, even the Finch self-care app is Gibbposting now. I started a joke...

A screenshot of the Finch self-care app, with a cartoon bird saying "I heard a song clled 'Stayin' Alive' today. I think it eould make a great soundtrack for when I go on adventures, cheep!"

But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 06/10/2026

Sadly my Amazon "About Me" is just dull and accurate. Other things they've noted include "drinks coffee regularly" (because I bulk-buy coffee beans), "reads comics and graphic novels" and "lives in Manchester". No information on my buttocks at all.

Interests and Hobbies
Collects music extensively across genres

Product Preferences
Favors 4K Ultra HD and premium video formats

Product Preferences
Invests in anniversary and special editions

Product Preferences
Prioritizes premium vinyl releases and anniversary editions

Home & Family
Likely owns a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 tablet

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 01/10/2026

I get radical left "Council Communism" apparently. Also in morality "No ideology in the catalog leans as far toward progressive as you do."

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 22/09/2026

I never delete anything from my hard drive in case it becomes useful (with *very* few exceptions) and looking through my Plex server I am repeatedly struck by three thoughts 1) I didn't know I had that 2) Why would I ever have that utter shit? 3) But of course I do

A screenshot showing the films Expresso Bongo, Fahrenheit 451, Ferry Cross The Mersey, Fierce Creatures and The Final Programme

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 19/09/2026

Unfortunately for my pedantry, I saw someone reskeet this comic *right after* I happened to reread what Lewis *actually* said about allegory and Aslan, and now I am compelled to be a pedantic dick about it (at least not quote-skeeting them though).

Comic by reparrishcomics

TOLKIEN Vs. LEWIS: ALLEGORIES

TOLKIEN

PROFESSOR TOLKIEN! IS IT TRUE THAT YOU WROTE YOUR NOVELS AS AN ALLEGORY FOR THE
FIRST WORLD WAR?

NO. NEVER. ASK ME THAT AGAIN AND I WILL CALL THE POLICE.

LEWIS

IF EVEN ONE PERSON READING THIS DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THE BIG LION IS JESUS, I WILL SET MYSELF ON FIRE.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 29/08/2026

This made me go into Tidal and look what my current algorithmic suggestions are (as someone who uses streaming primarily just on bus/train journeys and hardly ever touches algorithmic playlists). Almost, but not entirely, quite unlike my actual tastes.

Rhapsody in Blue, the Pink Panther theme, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Dueling Banjos, Green Onions, Flowers on the Wall, He'll Have To Go (Jim Reeves), Coal Miner's Daughter and Baby Elephant Walk

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 28/08/2026

(I again point to this lineup from a summer 1966 show as an example of how the borders between what we'd think of as "rock", "pop", and "soul" were far more porous at the time than now -- especially in LA)

A poster for The Beach Boys Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday June 25 1966. The lineup is The Beach Boys, "special guest stars" The Lovin' Spoonful, Chad and Jeremy, The Outsiders, Percy Sledge, Sir Douglas, The Leaves, Love, Captain Beefheart, and "extra added attraction" The Byrds. All except the Beach Boys have the name of their most recent hit or semi-hit single above the band name.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 27/08/2026

It's pretty bland stuff, this kind of thing. Not radical trans-affirming shout-from-the-rooftops stuff, but *at the very least* not going any further down the rabbithole like a Glinner or a Rowling, and trying a cautious retreat back out of it instead, as I read it.

“Without it intending to be, it’s become a kind of haven for people who feel different sexually. We all know that nobody asks to be born straight or gay. We seem to be going backwards slightly, don't we, on this whole issue. I thought we'd have got over that. I thought we all understood now that people are born gay and people are born transgender. It's not a choice. I thought we'd all agreed on that. But lately, we're becoming confused by the whole subject once again. I prefer a more tolerant society.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 26/08/2026

From an interview with scriptwriter Samy Burch embed.letterboxd.com/journal/coyo...

When Dave and I started the process, one of the key components was thinking about all of the Looney Tunes in the archive as basically actors on contract, like a theater company. Who would be great here? In an earlier version of the script, the scientist’s character was actually a human. But at some point, [this way] felt like a really good idea. Because if you have Peter Lorre—Dr. Lorre—why put him on the bench?

That was something that we had to fight to keep—all the cartoons have job insecurity, they’re so vulnerable! There were a couple of situations where cartoons got recast in post-production, in animation after shooting—one for the absolute better. Taz got upgraded to a really funny scene that was [played by] a different Looney Tune before. So, once it was locked, I was so happy: Peter Lorre—in.

He’s so unique, he’s electric. There’s a vulnerability to him that’s in interesting contrast to some of the roles he plays. You cannot take your eyes off of him. He brings so much emotion and beauty. I really do think he’s one of my favorite actors of all time.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 02/08/2026

He doesn't come down unequivocally on the side of trans rights at all. He does the opposite. It's an argument that the Supreme Court judgement was right, but that it should have been decided in Parliament rather than the courts, along with the tired "dignity and respect" bullshit.

nor its immediate effects, which will be covered comprehensively elsewhere. Suffice to say that the judgment, in a legal sense, settles the question that trans women will not be given access to women’s only spaces, including hospital wards, prisons, refuges and so on. For the record, I don’t believe this is an absurd outcome. It is probably simply a matter of practicality to recognise that trans women and men will in some circumstances have to be treated differently to biological women and men. That is not

That will be traumatic to many, and the media would do well to remember that, which they won’t. There were no easy answers here: it is true that women and lesbian's groups’ right to association would have been undermined had the judgment gone the other way. But the complexity makes a political process more important. If our

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 28/07/2026

Seeing this book across the room I remembered that bit in the V For Vendetta foreword where Alan Moore talks about them not being able to find a Guy Fawkes mask that looked like their imagined version, and now vaguely wondering if Lloyd was inspired by Jimmy Carl Black...

Part of the cover of "Necessity is", a book on the Mothers of Invention, showing Jimmy Carl Nlack looking very like David Lloyd's illusrration of V in V For Vendetta.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 23/07/2026

I think the new season of @rememberthispod.bsky.social looks like it's going to be relevant to the interests of every single one of my followers...

The new season is called "The Bisexuals," and it’s about torch singer -- and accused murderess -- Libby Holman, and her sexually-fluid group of friends and lovers from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s, which included Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Nicholas Ray and many more.

Members of our Patreon at the Hedda Hopper and Barbara Stanwyck tiers will be able to listen to all new episodes ad-free in a private feed, while Judy Garland-tier members will get new episodes 24 hours early, at 12am ET Mondays beginning September 14.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 20/07/2026

Reports that I just put the exact same songs by the exact same artists in every episode of my podcast no matter what the ostensible subject are completely unfounded and I will sue anyone who says otherwise

A screenshot of the Tidal playlist for my latest episode. It contains Batman by the Who, Batman by Jan & Dean, Batman's Batarang by The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale, Grief in My Soul by Tim Buckley, Flying Home by the Herbie Mann-Sam Most Quintet, Star Collector by the Monkees and Cool Cool Water by the Beach Boys.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 18/07/2026

If it helps you see the kind of thing you were dealing with, I screenshot this quote-skeet earlier as just a random example of the stuff I was dealing with from the same people. You've seen the stuff I actually posted (and I've not deleted anything).

A quote-skeet from the now-blocked braindrill.lol saying "This guy only attacks women. Wonder if he does that in his personal life too"

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 18/07/2026

Yep. And now because I posted this thread I'm getting this shit. 197 quote-skeets like this, all while I was asleep.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 16/07/2026

For those who weren't around at the time, this is why the term became "skeets" for everyone who was around at the start of Bluesky (I joined literally days after this, when this was still the main Discourse on the site)

a skeet from Jay, the then-CEO of Bluesky:

Guys, please don't let "skeets" stick
The experiment in decentralized naming decisions has resulted in the worst possible term
How about skoots? Can we bring back skoots? Bluesky OGs, help me out here, remember skoots?
Apr 27, 2023 at 10:45 PM

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 15/07/2026

Oof. I've only read one Connie Willis novel, which was the literal worst book I have ever read to the end, and which still makes me angry when I think of it fifteen years later, but people tell me her earlier stuff was better. This... suggests not.

One of the many questions for which professional historical researcher Jeff appears to lack answers is how it was two stalwarts like Lincoln and Lee ended up on opposite sides of a seeming causeless conflict.

On an unrelated note, the following words do not appear in this American Civil War-centered novel: “slave,” “slavery,” “black” (save as a color of blisters, objects, and animals), African (save in reference to violets), “Negro,” or “abolition.”

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 14/07/2026

Ah, so *that's* where Neal Stephenson got Zelrijk-Aalberg in Fall, Or Dodge In Hell from. I knew it must have been based on something.

$“So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium and the Netherlands but has never quite belonged to either of them,” Enoch reported. “It makes Andorra look like Siberia. Its total size is barely large enough to play a regulation game of cricket—supposing that all of its territory could be collected into a continuous oval. But it can’t. The length of its borders is enormous compared to its area. Someone described its map as a doily that had been attacked by moths. It encompasses eleven separate enclaves that are not part of Zelrijk-Aalberg. Four of those are Belgian and seven Dutch. One of the Belgian enclaves contains a Dutch subenclave, and one of the Dutch enclaves contains no fewer than four subenclaves, of which one is Belgian and the remaining three are all parts of Zelrijk-Aalberg proper. The largest of those contains a Belgian sub-subenclave consisting of a single root cellar measuring one by two meters.” “Do they sell a lot of fireworks there?” Phil says. “This is jogging a memory of when I was driving around Flanders with my family and we came across this incredibly illegal-looking fireworks stand in the middle of a town.” “Most of its revenue, until recently, came from selling fireworks that were illegal in the neighboring countries,” Enoch agreed. “What Julian here is referring to, with the fractals, is a thing that happened when a former count of Zelrijk-Aalberg paid a visit to the property to engage in the ancient custom of beating the bounds.”$

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 11/07/2026

Don't think I'd ever seen a photo of Jim Steinman before, but weirdly he looked *exactly* how I would always have assumed he would look.

In front of a dark-blue background a man in his forties (with a vague facial resemblance to Alec Baldwin, to my propagnosic gaze) wears large sunglasses indoors, a black leather jacket with metal studs on the excessively large collar and some sort of (maybe demonic? hard to tell) white line drawing on the sleeve. He also wears black leather gloves and has a long flowing grey mullet.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 10/07/2026

Yep. The first-of-the-month drop, regular as clockwork, with no new people coming in to counteract it.

A graph of Amanda Palmer's number of Patreon backers from mid-April through mid-July, showing lines essentially horizontal for all of every month except the first of each month, at which point there is a precipitous drop of about 200 backers.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 05/07/2026

I am so infuriated for this that I actually went looking for the image rather than just typing "hotdog guy dot jpeg" as I usually would

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 23/06/2026

(If you've not had the "pleasure" the lyrics read like Proper Binmen until you get to the "clever twist")

And there's only two teams in this town
And you must follow one or the other
Let us win, let them lose, not the other way round
In a northern industrial town

And the street lights look pretty and bright
From the tops of the hills they rise dark in the night
If it weren't for the rain you might never come down
To your northern industrial town

And on payday they tear the place down
With a pint in your hand and a bash'em out band
Sure they'd dance to the rhythm of the rain falling down
In a northern industrial town

And there's plenty of artists around
Painters steal cars, poets nick guitars
'Cause we're out of the black and into the red
So give us this day our daily bread
In a northern industrial town

But it's not Leeds or Manchester
Liverpool, Sheffield, nor Glasgow
It's not Newcastle-on-Tyne, it's Belfast
It's just a northern industrial town

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 20/06/2026

This from the follow-up the next week about Roach's work with Mussolini shows how the more things change the more they stay the same. You could change a couple of words and this could be the "apolitical" artists who signed up for Freedom 250 or the "ally" actors taking Harry Potter money.

“You don’t know but that I might have dinner with Mussolini when I go back to Italy. Maybe I can suggest to him that Hitler is not going quite right about things and maybe Mussolini will write Hitler a note and tell him so. . .I never made a move in Europe in this matter at any time without the advice and cooperation of some of the most prominent Jews there who told me I was doing the finest thing ever done in their estimation—tying up with Mussolini’s son and taking the boy back to Hollywood. . . .” Thus Editor Maurice Kann of Manhattan’s Motion Picture Daily recorded his version of what Hollywood’s Hal Roach excitedly called up by transcontinental telephone to say last week, after both Jewish and Gentile cinema folk had criticized Producer Roach’s partnership with Son Vittorio Mussolini (TIME, Oct. 4).

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 20/06/2026

Just in case anyone was under the illusion that a Burnham government would be any better

Burnham and Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, are expected to hold talks over the coming days about what should happen next.
The two men are friends and some allies of Streeting expect him to strike a deal with Burnham, dropping his leadership bid in exchange for a top cabinet job. Some have suggested he could be offered the chancellorship.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 03/06/2026

Doing my Patreon Q&A and one of the questions was about real gigs I wish I'd been able to go to. The NME poll-winners parties of 1964 and 65 are always among my go-to choices, as is the TAMI Show, but I suspect this one just has the edge (if nothing else because those others were at least filmed)

Poster for The Beach Boys Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl in 1966, Show lineup is The Beach Boys, The Lovin' Spoonful, Chad and Jeremy, Percy Sledge, The Outsiders, The Leaves, Sir Douglas, Love, Captain Beefheart, and "Extra added attraction" The Byrds.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 09/05/2026

Still, it's not like appointing massively unpopular figures associated with New Labour who have been accused of covering up paedophile conspiracies has ever backfired for Starmer before... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedoph...

deputy leader, Harriet Harman, had been employed by NCCL as an in-house solicitor and met her husband, the MP Jack Dromey, then a member of NCCL's executive committee, while working in this capacity. In addition, Patricia Hewitt was NCCL's general secretary for nine years. The former chair of PIE, Tom O'Carroll, claimed the three had not attempted to expel PIE out of fear for the impact this might have on their careers at the NCCL.[54]

Harman denied she had supported PIE while at NCCL and the specific allegation that she supported a campaign for the age of consent to be reduced to 10, and expressed regret at the involvement of the NCCL with PIE.[55][56] Dromey also denied the accusations.[57] Hewitt apologised separately, saying she had been "naive and wrong to accept that PIE was a counseling and campaign group".[58]

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 06/05/2026

I think those of us who really listen to a lot of music sometimes forget how little music the average person listens to.

XKCD cartoon. Below text is taken from explainxkcd.com . "Ponytail" is a stick figure with a ponytail, "Cueball" is a stick figure with no visible hair.

[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.
Cueball: And quartz, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 09/03/2026

As with most things, Pratchett had the explanation for the lack of money in the arts

“The money in the chorus isn’t very good, is it?!” she said.

“No.” It was less than you’d get for scrubbing floors. The reason was that, when you advertised a dirty floor, hundreds of hopefuls didn’t turn up.

“But it’s what I’ve always wanted to do! Besides, there’s the status!”

“Yes, I expect there is.”

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