Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 08/02/2026Can you though? I stand over them stirring them pretty much constantly, trying to make sure they don’t burn. Am I being overly cautious? 210
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 08/02/2026“An attack in the Pokrovsk direction, I think, where we’ve attacked on 87 previous occasions. It’s the last thing they’ll be expecting.” 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 08/02/2026Turns out our having a social structure built mostly around embarrassment and shame has some unexpected upsides 190
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 07/02/2026Trump’s lowered the bar so far that every single former president has taken on more of a “towering but flawed statesman” patina because they could string sentences together coherently and maybe even have fixed policy positions. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 07/02/202617th century Venetian merchants would have been way too busy with business to read about the 15th century Wars of the Roses, but they might have looked at the 17th century English Civil War(s) and thought they were dumb backwards shitheads, but hey, maybe there’s money to be made… 0160
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 07/02/2026In the InfantryDort army, all insignia of rank will be abolished, and soldiers will be led by their own revolutionary ardour to smash the bourgeois hierarchy. Death to the wearers of gold epaulettes! 030
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 01/11/2025The one place you’re never going to get into a brutal, endless, indecisive mess is the Sahel. Intervene at will, it’s totally fine. Ppl will be wishing they’d done it sooner. 110
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 28/08/2025These people *definitely* own more guns than books. I’m not saying there’s a direct inverse correlation between gun ownership and book ownership, but I bet the bibliophile/gunophile Venn diagram has a pretty slender overlap. 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 28/08/2025This ad heavily features a man’s crotch with his fly down. Not sure what the implication is here. 100
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 26/08/2025I want to hear this in voice mode with its chirpy little “hey there!” tone 1120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 25/08/2025I first read “dismissed his suit” as a menswear thing - like “listen Leo, I think your reading of the current political situation is gauche, and is that off-the-peg polyester? Ugh. We are never ever getting together.” 0120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 25/08/2025Books aren’t just ‘messages’ - you can write a message on a post-it. I can know Cervantes is mocking chivalric romance and still be inspired by Quixote’s idealism. In the end, for all his pratfalls and windmills, DQ is the book’s hero - in every sense of the word. 050
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025Isn’t it time we asked “whose idea was this moon thing anyhow? And was he a Jew” 120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025Surprised there aren’t more moon-based conspiracy theories actually. Way weirder than contrails. Fucking with our tides, inspiring poetry, popping up randomly in the daytime, waxing and waning when nobody asked it to. All extremely sus. 130
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025Ngl I think just choosing to live in a world of nobility and chivalry and goodness and the strong helping the weak and evil being punished, regardless of what the evidence of your eyes is telling you, is pretty based actually. Go Don Q. 1122
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025And that phrase is “I haven’t seen you before, stranger. Are you new around these parts?” 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025That one weekend every quarter where that quiet kid whose name we keep forgetting shows up and we take him to watch a superhero film and get mcdonalds 020
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025Yeah, if Cuban wants to make an ‘eye for an eye leaves the world blind’ argument then fine - norms of civility aren’t nothing! - but the anti-MAGA backlash is coming, and choosing to ride it would absolutely not be electoral suicide for the dems 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 24/08/2025One of the underappreciated evils of AI: if this thing that appears sentient actually isn’t (and it isn’t) then… maybe neither is this person? Maybe neither is anyone except me and my buddies? Gateway drug to pure solipsism. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 23/08/2025How long does it even take a leopard to eat a face? A while, right? I mean, a face is a substantial meal. You don’t just inhale a face and move on to the next face. You savour it. Let it digest. Have an aperitif. 0260
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 23/08/2025That was certainly my experience on twitter. You think you’re reading critically, but the general ambience (e.g. seeing everything through a racialised lens) seeps into your thinking regardless. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 22/08/2025C’mon man. I quit twitter to get away from this shit. Don’t be screen grabbing it and bringing it over here. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 22/08/2025Wait are you saying 🤣🤣🤣 doesn’t make something a funny joke? 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 20/08/2025Thanks, makes sense that it’s nuanced - and presumably that’s another area where if minimal grazing is introduced, ongoing periodic human management is essential, at least in the absence of apex predators. But imagine if we still had a handful of these picking through vast Irish rainforests… 020
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 20/08/2025“Ah, Dr Death, too cowardly to face me without your squad of hired goons, I see.” “Actually, Wonderboy, goon is now considered a slur, and means something else. They prefer to be called hired thugs.” “Ah, sorry about that. Your squad of hired thugs, then.” “Thank you.” 030
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 20/08/2025Also tbh a bit of a flex from the Brits at that point, officially ruling themselves out of single handedly conquering Ukraine for themselves. 120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 20/08/2025Eoghan what are your thoughts on large-ish herbivores as an integral part of rewilding, ecosystem diversity etc? I know invasive species (sika deer etc) are simply a menace, but would a rewilded space with all herbivores fenced out likely end up a bit less ecologically diverse than one with a few? 120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 19/08/2025In fairness if I’d helped someone with a task and they were like “great job! As a reward, I’ll let you tell me a story” I’d probably a) quit and b) pull some plagiarised shit out my ass too 0120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 19/08/2025“Cast it into the fires of Mount Doom! Destroy it!” “The ring…. belongs… in a museum…” 040
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 19/08/2025In fairness to the other signatories, it wasn’t clear in 1994 how utterly unreliable Russia’s word would prove to be, and if Russia’s solemn undertaking had been honoured… that really would’ve been pretty much the whole shebang. Not a lot of other threats to Ukrainian statehood in the region. 120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 17/08/2025They kinda already did - or at least would if we get a joint EU army. Then the level of federalism in the EU wd be about the same as between the two halves of the Dual Monarchy. I will say though I’d take the Habsburgs back as constitutional monarchy. Only non-reigning royal house I’d even consider 110
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 17/08/2025I’d even argue authorial intention isn’t enough. August Strindberg was a creepy misogynist but a great writer. He (I think) clearly intends ‘The Father’ to be a fantasy about a decent man undone by his scheming wife, but he somehow can’t help making it deeper and richer and more layered than that. 110
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 17/08/2025I dunno, I think it’s smart. The guy on the boat thinks he knows all about Assassin the assassin who assassinates. He’s hedged against that by getting on a boat. I expect he figured if this guy could actually walk/fly on water he’d have made that part of his superhero identity, not just ‘murderer’. 020
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 14/08/2025My own totally unsubstantiated version of this is the conviction that 60s counterculture rebelled against New Deal earnest striver masculinity as square and conformist, but had no model to replace it with except ‘project endless confidence and never take responsibility’. 1100
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 13/08/2025I think this comes from not having male friends, and the cope he arrives at is ‘women stole the places I could have made male friends’ or something. 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 12/08/2025What surprises me is that this is just endlessly replicable. There doesn’t seem to be a point where they just can’t muster the hate against the pink haired lib girl. But the thousandth time hating on the same thing hits just like the first. I didn’t know this about is, that it never gets boring. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 12/08/2025How did you find NI? Different from the south in any appreciable way? I love the little scraps of woodland around Belfast, but god they’re few and far between. 150
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 12/08/2025I come to Bluesky for the Mitterand content, but he wasn’t genuinely ashamed. He’d definitely want the algorithm to know he fucking loved ortolan. “Give me more of that sweet ortolan content” is what he’d say to his very French AI assistant 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 12/08/2025Me every time I work out. Yes, it’s Nickelback. We must never speak of this again, youtube music. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025I feel like I spent decades being told “when evil comes it’s not gonna be a guy in a Dr Evil suit, striking evil poses and gleefully setting out his evil plans to obliterate small peaceful countries while cackling evilly.” *Sigh* Cartoons still SHOULDN’T be good guides to how the world works. 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025You think Upper Egypt is bad, wait till you get to straight-up south-is-at-the-top map projections… 020
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025These helpful illustrations are not helpful. It’s not clear how these streams of water towards the vicinity of my butthole differ, and trial-and-error seems a risky strategy in the circumstances. 000
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025“The doctor could be a vet who dislikes goats” is a superb line tho 10/10 020
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025I wonder if this is connected to the new GPT5 tiered processing algorithm where it uses minimal power to answer ‘simple’ prompts. Could be on our way to creating AI that’s as lazy and prone to mental shortcuts as ourselves? 010
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025Weirdly, this feels like the most “human” failure of an LLM I’ve ever seen. Like, I could easily see asking a friend this and them being like “oh yeah heard this one before the doctor’s the mother or something” without actually properly reading the prompt. 120
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 11/08/2025The “/satire” genuinely made me lmao. You’re right, it was subtle enough I might not have twigged otherwise. I do think there’s a dilemma though - landscapes often benefit from very low concentrations of herbivores. But how to keep populations low? It’s basically between carnivores and culling. 200
Tom Sneddon @ts227.bsky.social · 10/08/2025…tiny amount of “real” meat at population scale. Only enough for a few niche aficionados. Or we could bring back large carnivores, but in the UK at least that would require a big change in how people interact with the natural world. 100
