Parquet and pickering ?
8 Likes
I met a bloke on a train & got chatting ( 1st class Euston - Picadilly as you do!)
He said he bought a 1m of teh supporting girders that were on danceflloor
He said it weighed literally a ton & every time he moved he needed an army of mates to lift & move it
4 Likes
I used to work on the same street. After it closed all the doors were open and workmen were walking in and out with armfuls of stuff and chucking it in skips. I joined in, had a good wander round and found a stool and a few bits of dancefloor which I liberated
11 Likes
A booklover’s dream…
3 Likes
Omg love her
3 Likes
Dragons are more likely than spaceships (no idea how I got here)
5 Likes
On a similar note, this reminds me there’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for years that I remember the name of then totally forget again that suggests we’re alone in the universe…
That ^ is an excellent piece by the way!
1 Like
posted this earlier, but it got lost in the wash. and may yet again.
for our purposes, this is about records.
4 Likes
Yeah, it’s like friends with Spotify playlists that are six years long
1 Like
I enjoyed reading this, then had a mini existential crisis thinking about my poor descendants being obliterated by the sun in a billion years, unable to escape to another solar system! 
2 Likes
I’ve always found the idea that we (who?) needs to move into space if Humanity is gong to survive. Making the planet we actually live on habitable is a mere drop in a vast ocean compared with the absurd idea of Humans ever living on another celestial body. We are of this earth, and will end on it. Even if we made it to Mars (forget interstellar space), we would still be, thankfully, Humans, with all our flaws. Extinction is much preferable to the delusional utopia of people I would not want to spend 5 minutes with.
A complete lack of any historical awareness makes these tech billionaires particularly dangerous. A wild combination of the utopian ideals of the early internet and the unlimited greed and power grabbing of the reality. Death is just a technical issue to be overcome, not the base fact of Human life that gives us meaning.
8 Likes
Agreed. Colonise Mars with no breathable atmosphere and -200C temperatures, or look after earth. Tough choice.
I think fr the billionaires it’s a drive for everlasting legacy. They want their name to be remembered forever.
3 Likes
It goes far deeper imo. If you have wealth beyond most nation states, you have already lost contact with the real world, but there seems to be something going on with a demographic of (mainly) men in Silicon Valley, of a certain vintage. They still have the utopian idealism of the early internet, despite their huge wealth gained in the reality - a belief that they are the vanguard of a fundamental change in Human life (of course, it’s always for the better). The Singularity, AGI, Cryogenics, Terraforming distant planets - all fantasies based on the ahistorical abnormality that was the period of relative stability (for some) following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Elon Musk has gone from talking about Humanity’s colonisation of Space to shilling for Tommy Robinson 
Ray Kurzweil believes that we (who is this We?) will reach LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity) around 2030. He really believes this and is living like a Monk on a rigorous supplement regimen to this end. I highly recommend his book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and The Singularity is Nearer, for a deep dive into this ideology. For the rest of us mere mortals without unlimited time ahead… a combination of AI, biotech and nanotechnology will end death. Unfortunately, we will never have the joy of Eternity with the likes of Ray Kurzweil (and Musk)…
The facts of history, of wars, economic calamities, etc is ignored - all the institutions will still be there with no one turning the power off, to resurrect your frozen corpse/upload your Soul to Tik Tok.
What a time to be alive!
7 Likes
And in addition most of them fail to recognise that the offworld utopian ideals they talk about would need to be driven by ‘deep space philanthropists’ not tech capitalists and they fall very much into the latter camp.
Then again maybe you’ll only be able to go if you can afford the ticket and the survival of humanity on another world will depend on those that don’t actually care about its survival in the first place.
1 Like
And they will all still be very Human. In the down and dark holes of depression I would often have this fantasy of being able to have a holiday from myself somehow - Even a day anywhere but in my own mind. These fantasies of Humans spreading out into interstellar space are just as impossible. Not only that, it would be the same old shite, but on a shit planet populated by absolute wollopers like Peter Thiel & Elon Musk.
I’ll be happily six feet under, in the dear soil of this Earth, with a smile on my cold, dead face. Somewhere on the US West Coast there’s an old abandoned building that was once the premises of a long dead Tech start. promising those needing a lot more lifetime to become real Human boys. Rows of long unplugged cryogenic capsules containing the Earthly remains of the last believers of a long dead Religion.
3 Likes
i believe that therapists call this ‘doing a geographical’ because wherever you go, that’s where you’re at, not some new fantasy version of yourself. Alan Partridge discovered this when he drove to Dundee barefoot during a psychiatric episode. One can well imagine him doing the same to Alpha Centauri.
6 Likes
2 Likes
An essential post imho, and exactly the reason I’m selling my collection (of vinyl not yarn).
To quote Luke Una; ‘We’re all gonna die with a lot of records…’
3 Likes
4 Likes
Looks like councils are pushing back against developers in favour of venues
7 Likes