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Roy Lonergan

@roylonergan.bsky.social
629 followers 485 following 11K posts

Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Son of immigrants. Not integrated. East, east, east London. Some photographs: t.co/B0HT8DtgRg

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Reposted by Roy Lonergan
Cathy @cathyby.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Number go up.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 23h
If the models were so smart they'd have changed their model numbers to hack this chart.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Good wikipedia page. What it doesn't cover is why STV? Well - it was introduced by the British in response to the 1918 general election result - the first election under the extended mandate. The problem was that Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 Irish seats on only 46.9% of the vote.
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Adam Kinzinger @adamkinzinger.substack.com · 30/09/2026
Trump’s new AI chatbot wasn’t hallucinating, he lost the 2020 election. But when the newest rollout from the White House contradicted Trump’s rhetoric, they pulled the plug. Now when asked about it, the AI tool says “I do not offer political commentary on elections” and dismisses the question...
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Semi-interesting except they seem to do things like treat London as a single 75 member constituency for STV which would be crazy. www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...
theguardian.com
How could Great Britain look under proportional representation? See the results for your area
These visualisations from exclusive polling modelling show how the UK parliament could change under different voting systems
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Another Cinna @anothercinna.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
For fans of Michael Powell & Thelma Schoonmaker: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... #LoveOnTheCuttingRoomFloor
bbc.co.uk
Thelma & Michael: Love In The Cutting Room - BBC Sounds
Cinema's great love story - UK director Michael Powell and US editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
These are AI legs
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Wanstead weather @wansteadweather.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
October 1819 saw four 75 Fahrenheit days in London before a week-long Arctic plunge brought deep snow toward the end of the month. wansteadmeteo.com/2019/09/30/t...
wansteadmeteo.com
The year snow fell in London in October
Two hundred years ago this October the extremely rare phenomenon of lying snow in October was recorded in London. A likely plunge of Arctic air on the 21st saw rain turn to snow which lay nearly 8c…
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David Higham @oldtrotter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A lot of people are going to find out the hard way that a gold plated inflation linked state pension is actually an excellent deal, particularly as the legacy DB occupational schemes run down.
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Alexander Rooksmoor @arcrooksmoor.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Sunday marks the 90th Anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street in East London. There are events across the weekend to mark this important milestone in opposing Fascism in Britain. #CableStreet90 togetheroncablestreet.com www.unitetheunion.org/news-events/... 1/2
Image of sticker produced by Unite the Union to advertise events around the 90th Anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, 4th October 1936.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Don't Look Up 2. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/se...
theguardian.com
Digger review – Tom Cruise’s loudmouth oil tycoon goes hard in Alejandro G Iñárritu’s eco-satire
One man’s irresponsible drilling causes a global crisis in Iñárritu’s exasperatingly laborious, self-congratulatory film
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Scott Wortley @scottwortley.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
10/10. No notes.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I'm very happy that youngsters will be paying for my social care and all I have to do is take a - possibly - slightly reduced state pension. And I'll be long gone before they work out how compounding works over the long term. They'll probably realise when they retire though.
theguardian.com
Burnham says he would put PR in Labour manifesto and scrap triple lock to fund social care – UK politics live
PM, in first speech to party conference as leader, insists his plans are a ‘good deal’ for older people
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Kate Bevan @katebevan.com · 28/09/2026
Unexpected update on this: thanks to my video, a suspect has been identified, apparently, and next up, she hopefully gets arrested. Copper I'm dealing with has been really engaged and said he's glad you lot all encouraged me to report it.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957. Congratulations to SpaceX for repeating the feat 68 years, 11 months and 24 days later.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3JR...
youtube.com
BENIDORM ST. PATRICK’S DAY 2026! 😱🍀 INSANE Crowds Pack Streets & Bars!
YouTube video by Benidorm Now
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Rafferty @rafferty-bs.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
It's amazing to see people that claim to be liberal demanding compulsory voting. It's one of the most illiberal ideas imaginable, we don't even compel MPs and Lords vote on bills in parliament
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Jake Callaghan @jakecallaghan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
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Cathy @cathyby.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
If your dog worried sheep, it could be shot & you would be liable for the damage. That you were careless would not be a defence. It is outrageous that AI companies do not control LLMs, but there are zero consequences for them. (Suing is understandably unattractive, since they are richer than God.)
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Grodaeu @groda.eu · 24/09/2026
This will only stop when criminal charges are filed against Sam Altman. That this is not happening is *only* because he is a billionaire
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is a very bad piece. www.ft.com/content/2848...
ft.com
Britain’s union reforms are a risk to business dynamism
Labour’s expansion of workers’ rights adds to pressures on the private sector
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Exactly right. They want regulation - which they will capture - to move the enormous contingent liabilities hidden in the businesses onto the state. Just apply tort law and introduce a new criminal strict liability for the board.
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Tanita Tikaram @tanitatikaram.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
How I feel right now about the British/ 🇬🇧English( whatever) political landscape is that some one wrapped in a Union Jack could whack me over the head with a flag pole & the BBC would shove a microphone in my face asking why I provoked the attacker & the Home Sec would invite the attacker for tea .
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Crowdfund a private prosecution? Wouldn't cost much to get that going and it would force the CPS into a decision about adopting it.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Telegraph gets it right for once, www.telegraph.co.uk/books/booker...
telegraph.co.uk
My tip for the Booker Prize? A very English weirdo
This year’s longlist was odd, but with the shortlist the judges have made amends. Here’s who should win, and why he deserves it at long last
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I assume that they're being fired at fifty because the employer's health insurance makes it rational to do so?
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Strange Horizons @strangehorizons.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison  reviewed by Ryan Elliott Link ⬇️ strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
cover of The End of Everything by M. John Harrison featuring a melting title revealing a watery landscape with small island like formations within it. 

Quote
It may be the most technically incredible work to date from a writer whose oeuvre is rightly held up as an exemplar of craft and yet, its rigour takes nothing away from but only reinforces the emotional core of the story and how viscerally its images and ideas haunt.
reviewer: Ryan Elliott

14 September 2026
Reviews 
Strange Horizons S H logo
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The good is not original and the original is not good.
Poster for Hidden Fortress.
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Joachim Boaz @joachimboaz.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Keith Roberts (1935-2000) was born on this day. Bibliography: www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.c... L, Diane and Leo Dillon, 1969; R, Paul Lehr, 1966 #scifi #sciencefiction
Cover for Pavane. Drawn in the style of a stained-glass window, a man with the signaler sigil blesses the crowd.  There are stained-glass windows in the backgroundCover for Furies. Giant wasps fly around huge nests. Humans mark at the base.
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Mike Batt @mikebatt.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
A little conversation I had on Twitter 🙂
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Respect the vote. Build a wall around the village and turn off the utilities.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Capital Aquisitions Tax. You have a lifetime nil band and with gifts/inheritances above that are taxable as income of the recipient. Here's an intro to the Irish version. www.revenue.ie/en/tax-profe...
revenue.ie
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Watching the weather and ignoring the climate.
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Al Mac @innsegall.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
we’re so successful at integration that some of our second generation immigrants are now prominent far right anti-immigrant politicians.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Utterly fucking disgraceful.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Black Saturday. Followed by fifty-seven consecutive nights of German bombing. Small scale compared to the allied bombing of Germany later in the war. www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/...
londonmuseum.org.uk
Black Saturday: The first day of the Blitz
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I‘m old so I grew up on TOS. Shatner is great but that show benefitted from some excellent writing from real SF talent: Spinrad, Matheson, Sturgeon, and others. And the personally appalling Harlan Ellison for City on the Edge of Forever. That wasn’t the case for later series.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Funny clip. The best bit is where he admits it was a problem that he didn’t know much about radiology and had based his prediction on a former student who hated people.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Hopefully some collars are felt for this down the line. A much more worrying act of terrorism than the sledgehammer poshos in Bristol for example.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This proves that Burnham does hate London.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
The scuttled German ships at Scala Flow were a popular source of such steel at one time.
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Daniel Sugarman @danielsugarman.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
The world's most notorious custard-pie thrower is dead. What an obituary. He got Bernard-Henri Lévy seven times.
​Known to his army of fans as L’Entarteur or Georges le Gloupier, Godin launched his career as a serial deflator of egos in 1969, when he planted a tarte à la crème on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras (“She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” he complained), and he went on to “pie” a cast list of celebrities for sins ranging from pomposity to “choosing to function in the service of the capitalist status quo”.The same could not be said of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose provocative views on sex, frequent appearances on television and penchant for white silk shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, had made him a cult figure – and one of Godin’s most satisfying victims.

Levy once declared: “I am the most gifted writer of my generation,” and often boasted of his reasonableness and tolerance, but he was forced to endure footage being repeatedly shown on French television of himself, covered in cream, during a visit to the Belgian city of Liège, trying to strangle Godin and shouting: “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”Noël Godin was born on September 13 1945 and came to pie-throwing after a rebellious youth in which he scandalised the priests in the confessional by speaking of his “horrible sexual life”, and was thrown out of Liège University after emptying a pot of glue over the head of a law lecturer who had helped write the constitution for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.

He found work at Friends of Film, an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League. It had a tiny readership, which was just as well, as Godin made up most of his articles. In one he claimed that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive.

In another he conjured up a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named Vivian Pei, describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down.“We’re very careful not to hurt people,’’ he explained. “Well, they are hurt, but always in their amour-propre.”

In 1995 Godin published an autobiography, Cream and Punishment. His other targets over the years included the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard (who charmed his assailant by hailing the attack as a homage to silent film), the French politician Nicolas Sarkozy, the choreographer Maurice Béjart and the Ryanair chairman Michael O​’Leary. He tended not to pick Belgian victims, he explained, because few would notice if he did.
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Future Revisitations @futurerevisited.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Caught up with this fine podcast interview with M. John Harrison today - some wonderful observations on his current Booker-nominated ‘The End of Everything’, along with reflections on three influential works by J.G. Ballard, John Wyndham & Robert Aickman. Perfect 🙂
Title graphic for the BBC Radio 4 Podcast ‘Take Four Books’ featuring an interview with M. John Harrison. Link as folllws:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0030c1f
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
A thin-skinned Brexiter. Betting the house on the vote in some outer-London boroughs.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Who is the best player that Spurs have bought and destroyed?
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Wow! Exquisitely drafted - a strong spine supporting diversions into the future and arriving at an increasingly inevitable conclusion. A two-hander for Sandy and Jean. Both great and memorable characters - but how much do we really know of them at the conclusion?
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Don‘t think I’ve been keeping up. Must check. Anyway have read Zweig’s Chess. Very nicely written. On a small scale - we see the details of one man’s emotional breakdown in the face of confinement. But, in a short book, nothing more than that. Fair enough.
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Roy Lonergan @roylonergan.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Slightly odd piece. Quotes from Amitav Ghosh’ criticism of the modern novel: “…unlike other genres, novels can’t range freely over space and time.” But nowhere acknowledges the long history of SF doing exactly that. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...
theguardian.com
‘It is not only a future certainty – the disaster is already here’: why we need climate fiction
As wildfires rage across Europe and Britain swelters through its hottest summer on record, literary fiction has a vital role to play in capturing the severe consequences of climate crisis
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Colette Willis @colettewillis.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I stan the Emenem dash —–—
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