James Alistair Henry

@adamjschwarz.bsky.social

19 Mar

I wrote a book called Pagans! It was Waterstones SFF Book of the Month this February! It's not available in the US (sorry) and the sequel is planned to come out early next year (2027). www.waterstones.com/book/pagans/...

James Alistair Henry reposted

Adam Schwarz

Lula: "We had to overcome foreign interference through digital platforms, which we will have to regulate. A crime in the digital world must be treated the same as a crime in the real world. We cannot have monstrous companies earning millions... not paying taxes... wanting to steer elections."

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva having a 10m whatsapp channel to counter RW propaganda in real time is a *brilliant* move.

This post is unavailable.

@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com

A whole generation of tech execs are going to die out because they got stuck in bathrooms or just walked into the sea and no-one, tragically including their kids, is going to miss them.

Rebecca Watson@skepchick.org

me: mom, what was I like as a little girl? my mom (completely fucking braindead): hey alexa describe a human kid or something

James Alistair Henry reposted

Marie Le Conte

I wrote this! TL;DR the rest of the world spent so long anxiously watching Orban destroying everything; the least we can do now, for Hungary and for our own sakes, is to watch as Magyar proves that things can actually get better

mcewanmorton.bsky.social@mcewanmorton.bsky.social

Hungary’s lesson to the world: Populism isn’t permanent www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

thenewworld.co.ukHungary’s lesson to the world: Populism isn’t permanentUnder Orbán, Hungary seemed lost to the far right. But a new PM has shown how to pull a nation back from authoritarianism – and it’s working

'A WORK OF GENIUS.' Not my words, Carol, the words of Anna Jones in the Radio Times.

Thursday 29th Oct, 2.15, Radio 4 and on BBC Sounds thereafter.

bbc.co.ukBBC Radio 4 - Drama on 4, The Call of CthudoFive detectives. One impossible mansion. Can they solve a murder before it solves them?

The proper link: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

To add to the lecturers dating students discourse, a friend of mine dated her English lecturer at university and he actually marked her down so no one would suspect, which was a whole extra level of indignity for all concerned.

That's all I'm saying about the incident because a) I respect the privacy of the people concerned too much, and b) obviously, I want to turn it into a six part drama series at some point.

Of course, I will have to wait until everyone involved is dead, possibly including me.

Has anyone got today's Guardian? Apparently there's a little mention of Call of Cthudo in the radio bit, but it's not online yet...

On a similar note, I saw this n the charity shop my mum works in this morning and could not resist.

juliaraeside.substack.comThese f*cking guysComedy, rape culture and the resurgence of openly hating women for lols.

And now a very cool illustration in the Radio Times, by the excellent www.shanecluskey.com

James Alistair Henry reposted

Julia Raeside

@jnraeside.bsky.social

I'm very tired and very angry. Free to read.

Has anyone got today's Guardian? Apparently there's a little mention of Call of Cthudo in the radio bit, but it's not online yet...

Aww, many thanks @wanderinggaia.bsky.social!

bbc.co.ukBBC Radio 4 - Drama on 4, The Call of CthudoFive detectives. One impossible mansion. Can they solve a murder before it solves them?

Out next Thursday, 2.15pm www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Once again I am INFURIATED by that bit in Animal Collective's My Girls where he sings 'I don't mean to seem like I care about material things, Like my social status,' when social status is clearly NOT a material thing. Then he goes on about wanting adobe slabs, which ARE a material thing.

I don't think it's a deliberate contradiction either, I think he's just confused.

In case anyone from Animal Collective has a bluesky search going: it's a brilliant, brilliant song, I just get a bit thrown by those lyrics.

This has turned out to be a terrible weekend to have planned to travel from Cornwall (just had a storm that's messed up travel) to Belfast (just about to have a storm that'll mess up travel). :(

Very sadly, this means I am missing the wedding of the incomparable @emmajwaring.bsky.social, my editor on Pagans, and someone who has become an actual proper friend, she's amazing. Bit gutted.

Fair bit of weather here in Cornwall at the moment. *cruise ship blows past window*

@transactualuk.bsky.social

It's bin day here, council begging people not to put their rubbish out until the last possible second, and even then, weigh it down with an anchor or a large child or something.

James Alistair Henry reposted

TransActual

We believe that the public has the right to know the consequences of this policy change. So if NHS England won’t publish the full assessment, we will. transactual.org.uk/blog/2026/10...

James Alistair Henry reposted

Al Jazeera Investigates

@ajiunit.com

"They can start cutting people's faces up. They can stab someone. They can shoot someone." EXCLUSIVE: Our hidden cameras capture the leader of Turning Point UK organising a fake rally for a foreign government and helping arrange a murder-for-hire with loyalist paramilitaries.

James Alistair Henry reposted

KJ Charles

@kjcharleswriter.com

Replying to @kjcharleswriter.com

And I want it to be clear this should be a matter of consent. I should have a right to veto use of GenAI to alter the text of my book, to forbid my book being fed into any LLM including proprietary, and to veto its use in associated areas--cover, design, translation, audio, and marketing copy.

James Alistair Henry reposted

Mahmud El Sayed

@mahmudelsayed.bsky.social

The Society of Authors is surveying members about their so-called AI charter: 1) Rip it up and start again 2) Include explicit red lines where AI use is UNETHICAL with examples. i.e. No use in generating ideas or plot. No AI-written text. I don't care if you use it for spellcheck or voice-typing.

James Alistair Henry reposted

Rachel Coldicutt

@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social

Replying to @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social

I haven't, honestly, been thinking about Amol Rajan all day, but I just went and had a little look at what's going down at the Amol Rajan Connection and ...

I'd give it five minutes love, I was just working out my membership tier price systems.

An archive episode of In Our Time just dropped, about 16th C philosopher/theologian Desiderius Erasmus and my first thought was ooh, I have a friend who had a good old chat with his summoned spirit at one of Lady Paddina Cole's seances, bet they won't mention THAT.

It sounded awesome though. At one point Erasmus' features were sort of superimposed over Lady Coles, and my friend, who works in telly and knows SFX inside out, thought 'oh wow, where's the projector then?' and looked around but there wasn't one, at which point he started rethinking things.

That's what happens when you say to completely normal friends you've known for years: hey, I'm working on a script on near death experiences, ever had anything weird/paranormal happen to you? Me, ten minutes later: ...

And then I realised yeah, that was maybe a bit unreasonable.

I reckon 20% of any time I spend in London is taken up with carrying very small Japanese ladies' absurdly heavy luggage up or down stairs. Obviously, I wouldn't have it any other way, but it's becoming so frequent and the bags are *so* heavy I'm starting to think it's become a thing.

I asked, very carefully, if she'd like a hand, hoping I wasn't being patronising, and then we discussed for a while if I *was* being patronising, and she concluded that I wasn't, but she'd got herself into this mess and wanted to get out of it by herself, so we agreed I could leave her to it...

... both our honours satisfied. And I didn't have to sprain anything, which was a bonus.

Enjoy Sound of Instant Regret.

Last time I was here a quite stocky/butch lady short hair and loads of tattoos was standing at the top of some stairs at Paddington with a bag that might have had an actual bank vault in it, sort of sighing.

@flyingrodent.bsky.social

Japanese tourists now putting weights in their luggage to increase chances of meeting Helpful Man As Tall As a Tree.

James Alistair Henry reposted

flyingrodent

It’s Libby Purves babbling about “thousands of men of fighting age” here, by the way. They just drop that kind of chat like it’s nothing, now. It’s hard to explain just how drastically your average panel zombie has radicalised in the last decade, particularly in the last five years.

flyingrodent@flyingrodent.bsky.social

This week, the lads ask whether Britain might see riots like the ones in France. Hosts and guests talk at length about the terrors of immigration, and it doesn’t occur to any of them that Britain has in fact seen years of sustained rioting, arson and fighting with police by the far right.

*insert 'bold move Cotton' gif*

Daniel McElroy@danielmcelroy0.bsky.social

Amol Rajan’s membership tiers…that is scandalous.

One thing I like doing in the V&A (besides having a coffee with/via @jamesspackman73.bsky.social is pretending everything there is an early version of Warhammer. This griffin has loads of attacks until his pot gets knocked off at which point he drops to zero wounds.

... and no attacks, because he's trying to balance the pot on his head again. But when he does, look out!

Daughter and I in London for traditional (but sadly final) half-term trip. We saw @burngold.bsky.social on the train on the way up, turns out he exists in real life, who knew!?

@notupmytrousersyoudont.com

We're going to see Phantom of the Opera on Tuesday, which is not really my thing, but I'm sure I'll end up a convert like when the dad in Bob's Burgers went to that Pat A Cake live stage show and ended up having a quasi-religious experience (Bob's Burgers is incredible).

James Alistair Henry reposted

AdrianAtterbury

Reading an account of someone visiting the commandant of an RAF training school in 1939 who "Judging by the chestful of medals had seen an awful lot of trouble in the last war". He's exactly the sort that Reform types fetishise, yet he seems to have a very different view of immigration to them.