Mat Bowles (He/Þei)

@matgb.uk

600 Followers 1050 Following

Displaced Devonian in Yorkshire, ageing goth who yawns a lot (2 sleep disorders and chronic fatigue). Never been a "real man" so a little bit NB, here for the SF, history, science and friends Icon from Doomtown, best card game ever made

Talkie Toaster: I have a third question. A sensible question. A question that will test the limits of your new IQ to its very limits and stretch the sinews of your knowledge to bursting point!
Holly: This is gonna be about waffles, isn't it?
Talkie Toaster (sounding hurt, as it's been caught out): Certainly not. And I resent the implication that I'm a one-dimensional bread-obsessed electrical appliance!
Holly: I apologise, Toaster, what's the question?
Talkie Toaster: The question is this: given that God is infinite, and that the Universe is also infinite...would you like a toasted teacake?

A product screenshot of a mousemat that's clearly chatbot generated, most have some weird artifacts on and apparently ctrl + I means Relic (and not Italic)

Many are completely incomprehensible and there are 'office exercises' at the bottom with instructions in non-latin text but probably are non-readable text

Tesco aisle with chillers on each side and milk trolley bays at the end

Nothing in any of them, turned off

Close shot of brindle sighthound flolloped on fake grass in middle of cool mini golf spiral

Brindle sighthound looking alert sat in mini golf spiral, fully shaded so nice and cool

Wide shot of brindle sighthound laying on cut grass with fenced tennis court in background

Foreground has grass and green trees, behind the hills roll past a busy M62 and up to a high moor

On top of the moor, and my camera doesn't do it justice, is a tall narrow tower with a white top, tallest building in England

A picture of a Gravity Battery from the citybuilder game Timberborn, it's a large block of rubble hoisted up

Game card from Warlord CCG: "Swift: Move this rogue forward or backward one rank. Flavour: I don't have to outrun the Nothrog, old man. I only have to be faster than you. — Black Tom of Corinth"

Screenshot of the Wikipedia Bradford disambiguation page with a list of many places called Bradford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_(disambiguation)

In the United Kingdom

City of Bradford, a metropolitan district of West Yorkshire, England
Bradford (UK Parliament constituency), a former constituency in West Yorkshire, England
Bradford, Cornwall, England
Bradford, Derbyshire, a location in England
Bradford, Devon, England
Bradford, Manchester, a district and electoral ward in the city of Manchester, England, two miles north east of the city centre
Bradford (Manchester ward)
Bradford, Adderstone with Lucker, Northumberland, England, near Wooler
Bradford, Belsay, in Belsay, Northumberland, England, near Morpeth
Bradford, West Yorkshire, the namesake city, 1 of 7 post towns, and the largest of the many towns and villages which make up the City of Bradford
Bradford Abbas, a village in Dorset
Bradford-on-Avon, a town in Wiltshire
Bradford-on-Tone, Somerset
Bradford Peverell, a village in Dorset
West Bradford, Lancashire

In the United States

Bradford, Alabama, an unincorporated community
Bradford, Arkansas
Bradford, Illinois
Bradford, Indiana
Bradford, Iowa (disambiguation), multiple places
Bradford, Kansas
Bradford, Kentucky
Bradford, Maine
Bradford, Massachusetts (now part of Haverhill)
Bradford, New Hampshire, a New England town
Bradford (CDP), New Hampshire, the main village in the town
Bradford, New York
Bradford, Ohio
Bradford, Pennsylvania
Bradford, Rhode Island
Bradford, Tennessee
Bradford, Texas
Bradford, Vermont
Bradford, Wisconsin
Bradford County, Florida
Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Bradford Township, Minnesota (disambiguation)
Bradford Township, Pennsylvania (disambiguation)
Bradford Plaza, a shopping center in West Chester, Pennsylvania
Bradford Island, California

Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, stood in a library saying "stay cool my friends". He has stubble, dark glasses and is wearing a suit. He's grinning

Two fluffy labubu toys stood next to a toy table, they're like a fursuit with a monster face and really weird

Small lobster like thing crawling upstream in a shallow stream, rocks pebbles and organic detritus camouflage it well

Small lobster like thing crawling upstream in a shallow stream, rocks pebbles and organic detritus camouflage it well - it's in the centre with a leaf floating past towards camera

Graph showing rise and fall of live births in England and Wales over last 50 years. There are high points in 1970, 1988 and 2010, low points in 1977, 2002 and 2025

Sighthound flolloped in sun on dry green-brown grass

Patrick Troughton as The Doctor looks over the console, text is "Look at the size of that thing Doctor / Yes Jamie that is a big one"

Streetview picture of a fountain in a roadside park with the sea in the background, it's a lovely, but small, ornate Victorian thing. There are palm trees behind it, some sort of birch in the foreground and a couple sat on a bench enjoying the place, can't say I blame them

If it looks familiar it's probably because you've watched an Agatha Christie adaptation it's in lots of them

Packet of "Blue Sky Hal-Moo-Mee" cheese displayed on a counter

Wikipedia screenshot:
Recent history

In October 2014 Michael Birch and Xochi Birch, founders of the social networking site Bebo, through a hospitality group named The Collective bought the Farmers Arms public house and Manor House properties in the village. Michael Birch's grandmother was born and lived in the village, and he spent many childhood summers there. The pub, which had closed in December 2012, reopened in September 2018. The Manor House is to be restored and put into use as a hotel. They also own the chip shop, village stores, and several residential properties.[7][8]

Brindle sighthound lounges on dry brown patch of grass in sun

Patrick Macnee and John Colicos in Battlestar Galactica

Faux gothic font text: "If you're really a Goth, where were you when we sacked rome"
Famous t-shirt from the old Steve Jackson Games website

Artwork depicting pink and yellow toy thing that's a bit like a Labubu with a similar face, but the body is in the shape and colour scheme of That Damn Blobby Thing everyone's always on about

Melanie Scrofano as Wynonna Earp pointing Peacemaker, a magical Colt Buntline Special at a demon, it's glowing because it does that when pointed at demons

Kitsune Diro, a card from Legend of the Five Rings Jade Edition, a Fox Clan character, he's running, wearing very little with a fox

Symbol of the Horned Rat from Warhammer Old World Fantasy Battle
https://warhammerfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Horned_Rat

SQUEEEK!

Chart with age as the Y axis and year as the X
Dots start at ~25 in 1938, go down to 23 in 1970, then climb steadily and smoothly to 29 in 2024

Picture of Norwich Castle, then the 'view full thread' link then Alice saying "scrolling past I initially thought this was a moth" and Ian saying "I can see why"

Map highlighting the range of the Swift Fox, "western Great Plains grasslands of North America, such as Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It also lives in southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada"

IMDB screenshot, Jake Wood, Other Works
1980s TV commercial for Prudential
1989 TV commercial for Yellow Pages

Bar chart of local ward election results showing Reform candidates way ahead of all other parties, Tories second and Green third, full breakdown at link
https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/council/democracy/electionresults/results.jsp?election=817&area=1

Arcimboldo's Vertumnus, a portrait of Emperor Rudolph the second using fruit and veg to assemble the image, he has ears of corn, an asparagus mustache and other stuff, it's a deliberate display of wealth and power-maize corn was new to Europe, etc

Map of Britain circa 886 correctly showing Cornwall/Dumnonia unconquered and reaching up to nearly Exeter

Map of Britain rotated 90degrees clockwise with a red line linking the mouths of the Exe and Tees, above it is proper rocks, below it weird sedimentary stuff and mounds with pretentions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tees%E2%80%93Exe_line

Phil struggled when left with his own thoughts, and in a worrying scene, he picked up a lighter. He carried his armchair into the Square and set fire to it which scared his family – but Grant knew that this was Phil’s way of ‘setting fire’ to the fear that he would retreat back to a solitary life after Nigel’s death.

Please note that catering services for the House of Commons are provided by an in-house team who do not provide a subsidised service in the commercial sense of the word. Some venues make a profit, referred to as contribution because it contributes to reducing overall costs. In other venues, the cost of providing the service does exceed the income received in sales due to the irregular hours and unpredictability of parliamentary business. The contribution or cost of each venue is calculated by subtracting the food and operational costs from the catering sales. Rather than a subsidy, the House monitors the contribution or cost of each catering venue, which include cafeterias, dining rooms, restaurants and bars. Prices of food and drink are regularly benchmarked against appropriate external comparators.

Comic: 1) Woman opens mailbox "Bill, bill, pottery barn, bill..."
2) looks quizical "...opened bill?" "It's been resealed"
3) holds op to light "What the... ALL of my mail has been opened!" "Damn, they did a good job. Who they hell is reading my mail? And how long has it been going on?"
4) Ghost of Benjamin Franklin (really) appears in a *poof* "Ironically I'd wager it started around the same time you spoke out against emerging civil rights violations." Woman (Hope): "No Ben, we've gone over this. I refuse to discuss conspiracy theories with an old LSD flashback. If two crazies made a sane, I'd still have the twenty grand I blew on therapy."

book page photographed

They discovered that they could run around the track, just like mice in a squirrel-cage, to produce a result visually indistinguishable from that shown in 2001. And they televised the whole exercise back to Earth (need I name the accompanying music?) with the comment: 'Stanley Kubrick should see this.' As in due course he did, because I sent him the telecine recording. (I never got it back; Stanley uses a tame Black Hole as a filing system.)

There is also the strange case of 'The Eye of Japetus', described in Chapter 35, where Bowman discovers 'a brilliant white oval so sharp-edged that it almost looked.. painted on the face of the little moon' with a tiny black dot at the exact centre, which turns out to be the Monolith (or one of its avatars).

Well... when Voyager 1 took the first photgraphs of Iapetus, they did indeed disclose a large, clear-cut white oval with a tiny black dot at the centre. Carl Sagan promptly sent me a print from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the cryptic annotation 'Thinking of you. .' I do not know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Voyager 2 has left the matter still open.

Size chart showing 4 known raptors against a human, they average at knee height

Large brindle sighthound lounging on grass in the sun

Large brindle lurcher sat looking at camera in a grass park, behind him is his shadow and that of the photographer, pointing to a line of trees, some of which have blossom but are all very green, clear blue skies above them

Two obvious bots rehashing the OP, crucial part is the bot detector labels, both have 'over 100 posts yesterday', 'replies over 20 times per day on average' and most tellingly 'no break greater than 1 hr yesterday'--that plus either of the other two is normally fairly conclusive

list of tracks from Tidal of songs by Republica

right front overhead view of a yellow MG Midget softtop with a roadrunner decal and Beep! Beep! On the bonnet

An old leather trunk is strapped to the boot

Tumblr screenshot, post by literaryreference dated Feb 21, 2024

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

Wikipedia screenshot "Under the Chatham House Rule, anyone who comes to a meeting is free to use information from the discussion, but is not allowed to reveal who made any particular comment. It is designed to increase openness of discussion. The rule is a system for holding debates and discussion panels on controversial topics, named after the London headquarters of the Chatham House, where the rule originated in June 1927. " Also has a picture of the House itself, a large townhouse in central London

Arcimboldo's Vertumnus, a portrait of Rudolph II using various fruits and vegetables to create the face and upper torso, several chosen as they were rare and/or new to Europe plants

Peter O'Toole as Jeffrey Bernard in the 1999 TV version of the play, sat at a bar next to a phone obviously very very drunk and dishevelled

Wiki screenshot text: The release was shrouded in controversy after reports that the song was actually inspired by a trip to Rhyl, another town in North Wales. It was rumoured that Bangor was chosen as the lyric due to it having an extra syllable that flowed better with the song. There were rumours of an outcry among local councillors and businesses in Rhyl about the missed opportunity for tourism which would have been generated. Cook stated that the song was specifically written about Bangor.[3]

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Trip_to_Bangor_(Didn%27t_We_Have_a_Lovely_Time)

Aerial view of the Blue Hole of Belize, an atol on shallow water surrounds a very deep cavern with very dark blue water

Estate agent photo of a large room with fake oak beam ceilings, wood stove, large table with ornate chairs and many many fake medieval features, but very well lit with modern spot lamps

Jar of Branston Original Pickle '
Ingredients

Vegetables in Variable Proportions (52%) (Carrot, Rutabaga, Onion, Cauliflower), Sugar, Barley Malt Vinegar, Water, Spirit Vinegar, Tomato Purée, Date Paste (Dates, Rice Flour), Salt, Apple Pulp, Modified Maize Starch, Colour (Sulphite Ammonia Caramel), Onion Powder, Concentrated Lemon Juice, Spices, Colouring Food (Roasted Barley Malt Extract), Herb and Spice Extracts.'

Wiki screenshot text: "Numerous articles have been written about this whole dance being filmed in one take and unrehearsed. As unbelievable as that sounds (there are multiple cuts in the scene, requiring two or more cameras), the Nicholas Brothers confirmed it in an interview shortly before their recognition at the 14th Annual Kennedy Center Honors. The choreographer, Nick Castle, said, "Just do it. Don`t rehearse it, just do it." And so it was done, unrehearsed and in one take, which relieved Harold Nicholas because he did not want to do the rigorous routine over and over all night.[15][3][16]

In another signature move, they would rise from a split without using their hands.[3] Gregory Hines declared that if their biography were ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer-generated because no one now could emulate them.[3] Ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov once called them the most amazing dancers he had ever seen in his life.[17] " — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Brothers

Prince Humperdink and Count Rugen walk thru woodland past a particularly knobbly tree (screencap: The Princess Bride from https://movie-screencaps.com/the-princess-bride-1987-4k/page/54 )