Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 10hpondering the official logo of the 2010 39th Chess Olympiad, hosted by the city of Khanty-Mansiysk 261
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 11hnever before has my interest been so quickly captured and then lost again in one single sentence 1194
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026"john swinney killed my fucking dad" is a WILD place to take this speech 3161
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026"a new national commission on electoral reform. to be headed by idk, Tony Blair, Keir Starmer, David Miliband, several other people i need to keep busy and off my back while ensuring they don't do any harm" 050
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026"we're putting a flat cap on AI and giving it a whippet" 060
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026he said "and we will be pragmatic in relation to the North Sea" and i got excited. but it was a bridge to a clean energy future. Andy Burnham too cowardly to do what Britain really needs: build a bridge to Norway 2170
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026"conference, the problem with pissing on Thatcher's legacy is that eventually you run out of piss" 061
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026"immigration control weakened by Brexit" five-dimensional dogwhistle triangulation-ass line 1287
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026does feel like he's winding up to a speech that's like "unfortunately, to restore hope and growth, 10% of you will be run through meat processing plants" 070
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026want to know something fucking gnarly? the Australian government is sending a ship to evacuate its near-Antarctic research base on Macquarie Island because they've realised that bird flu is about to reach the island and will cause mass death among the local elephant seal population. 2166
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 27/09/2026the Olympiad is - unexpectedly - in its closing moments. i say unexpectedly because play helpfully started 4 hours earlier than usual today, to make space for a closing ceremony, but this fact was essentially a state secret and barely anybody has managed to watch the last round 350
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 25/09/2026i sort of stopped properly spamming you all with the Olympiad (you're welcome) but Uzbek dominance is now so total that the Uzbek team from a parallel Earth-2 is in contention for a medal. notice how the US are not in the top 10 even 150
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 25/09/2026experts are working on a 7-dimensional quantum political compass to explain taylor lorenz 090
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 24/09/2026MothPrevention you've fucked up. MothPrevention i probably would have opened these if you sent them in the reverse order. MothPrevention you fools 081
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 24/09/2026i guess i wouldn't call it quite yet but it *looks* like the Uzbeks are about to hit their first real obstacle at the Olympiad today. Vokhidov is going to be their first game loss in the entire thing, which is wild in itself 010
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 24/09/2026look, it's simple. one of the creepy California sex cults is building a god that will destroy the world, and they think that's good. the other creepy California sex cult thinks it's bad. you life in Herne Hill and work in PR and this is somehow your problem. 1150
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 24/09/2026have you all been hiding Emma Ruth Rendle from em? this new album is jaw-dropping www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppb7...youtube.comDon't Delay HeavenYouTube video by Emma Ruth Rundle - Topic 000
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 24/09/2026this *is* very cool but imagine telling Otto von Bismarck that this is how his descendants spend their time. you would die from collateral damage after his exploding head sent dozens of extremely sharp moustache hairs through your own skull at lethal velocity 108118
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Olympiad had a rest day but it's back. top boards for the Open are the Uzbeks (who are now in the lead) vs China, US vs Armenia and India vs England, who are having kind of an unlikely run (it will 100% end today) 200
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 22/09/2026only read the M John Harrison, of the Booker shortlist, and fairly likely to not read the others. kind of surprised it made the shortlist. i really liked it but it's far from his best and it's very much Booker going "oh shit this guy has been the best prose stylist in the UK for like 40 years... 430
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 22/09/2026tragic to watch the Claudification of crank conspiracy websites. these people used to have the strongest, strangest design aesthetic that 2004 had ever seen. look at what we're losing! 5294
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 22/09/2026we were so young that adulthood seemed like a game and the computer seemed like the future 0120
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 20/09/2026it's the weekend and whatnot but just to say, we're at the Shit Gets Real stage of the Olympiad, the match-ups at the top of the tournament are now all top-10 countries playing each other. you love to see it 101
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 18/09/2026got called a Nazi in Target earlier lads tell us what happened lad i got called a Nazi in Target ye but why i was wearing an unbelievably sus Warhammer hat and fully deserved it 1184
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 18/09/2026you can tell when you've got a few rounds of Swiss in because the games get much less lopsided. third day has been going for over an hour yet but nothing very wild is happening 110
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Olympiad 2nd round just kicked off. we love a tournament that takes places in Central Asia and therefore starts and finishes at a sensible time for the UK-based. we've got Uzbekistan-Peru, USA-Mongolia, India-Indonesia, Chile-China, and so on. i love this shit 140
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 16/09/2026team pairings for the Olympiad 1st round today. the Olympiad is sort of fun - and sort of savage - in that you get situations like this where the Uzbeks, who are top seeds fielding five GMs, are playing... Jamaica, whose top rated guy is 2216 391
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 16/09/2026difficult to imagine anything more annoying than "racist village with faintly comedic name does something destined to trigger seven million anemic bluesky bits" 0100
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 15/09/2026the arc of history is long but it bends, confusingly, towards standing with Macklemore 0666
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 15/09/2026intrigued by how it is David's job to (mostly) make the other two fuck women 2197
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 14/09/2026i know we all like to laugh about it but actually the fact that this man is in charge and our only hope lies in getting someone called Kayleeigh to go on Fox News and repeatedly say "AI was invented by Iranian Mexicans" is...not good. it;s not good 091
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Eliezer Yudkowsky wondering how his activism has failed to slow the AI apocalypse 1182
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 14/09/2026was looking up Mankind Quarterly, the racist pseudoscientific "academic journal" that somehow still exists, and it turns out this was in the last issue. fork found in kitchen 1101
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 11/09/2026i don't think it's even true that Mamdani is exceptionally good at the communications aspect of politics. i think we've just forgotten what it's like to see someone who's even vaguely good at the communications aspect of politics 1100
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 11/09/2026my fav 9/11 fact is that cult gay novelist Robert Plunket was, at the time, making a living writing for a magazine in Sarasota, doing assignments like covering presidential visits, which is how the author of Love Junkie and My Search for Warren Harding happened to be in the room when this happened 274
Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 11/09/2026charlie brown but the football is assisted dying. is this anything 130
