Do you have any examples that would support that? I can’t say that I have seen any tendency myself. If anything, dark comedy tends to come from marginalised groups, I’d say.

UK - local authorities are busy un-declaring climate emergency, nationally they are blaming the wildfires on re-wilding done by lefties and anyway, they say, it is no worse than the summer of '76.

Brought up in the UK being expected to go to Sunday school etc - but Christianity seemed utter nonsense to me, and I was at a loss to understand why so many adults appeared to take it seriously.

Early 20s (still pre-internet)- I met someone who was involved with an evangelical church and I determined to give Christianity another proper ‘go’ and try to understand what people were finding in it. That eventually resulted in me crying in a heap in the corner of my room as I first felt that I could not even find ‘the door’ let alone open it and let Jesus in (as that church was keen on expressing it) and then realising that it had once and for all confirmed that there was no ‘door’ at all.

Shortly after that, I met a group of pagans and started reading some books about neopaganism, wicca and druidry. There was a lot of dross, of course (as there is in Christianity) but the underlaying ideas clicked immediately. I have been though several phases of how I express that and it is pretty low-key these days - but I have considered myself a pagan ever since. I changed career a couple of years after that and became a wildlife ranger for the next 20+ years and was a visiting pagan chaplain for some local prisons for several years as well.

I think only two now:

• The Hobbit - one large, illustrated edition but also my original paperback version, which I am loath to let go
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - both my wife and I are very fond of our individual copies.

I do have two versions of Plato’s Symposium, but one is in a volume along with the Karma Sutra, and another is with a couple of other Socratic dialogues, so not really the same book as such.

Non-existant. However, my older brother did have Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Portnoy’s Complaint & The Doors of Perception on his shelf - and we also had encyclopedias.

It seems completely alien to me.

Then Wells has done his job!

This is SF fulfilling it’s role as satire. Wells is commenting on the Victorian heroic, imperial ideal that was sold as the ideal for manhood at the time.

He is holding it up to question by an outsider: the Selenites.

He us saying much the same here as Wilfred Owen did in his Dulce et Decorum est.

Favourites include Lord of the Rings, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey & Maturin series, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.

Currently reading Bleak House.

Ahh - didn’t realise that this was a subscription site. I have the bypass-paywalls addin. That is one of the downsides.

From the article:

Closer to home, whilst the Isle of Man does have a small number of feral ponies located in the north east, it’s the wallaby and feral goat populations that cause debate between conservationists, ecologists, animal welfare campaigners and landowners.

They differ from the Dartmoor ponies in that they are classed as non-indigenous, but calls for a cull of both species are constant and can be undertaken entirely legally by anyone with a licensed shot-gun.

It seems that public opinion will be what saves the Dartmoor pony – let’s hope it does the same for wallabies and feral goats, and that they are afforded suitable legal protection.

It’s a bit tenuous, I agree, but it is an opinion piece, and people from the Isle of Man are allowed to have opinions on things elsewhere.

Regardless of the actual metabolite responsible, this does raise the question of whether, if any other species consume them and are susceptible, they see tiny versions of their own species?

Yes, studies have been done on exactly that.

Is this a cooling behavior, perhaps similar to when dogs pant?

Yes, that is exactly what it is.

There was no movie.

The TV show was great, and I am definitely a fan, but this is not really ‘ClassicFilms’ material, I’d say.

And just a day or after a similar outcome with a Palestine activists’ trial:

https://leminal.space/post/36704056

After a bit of gap, I read a couple when on holiday for a couple of weeks and am now that I am back, am starting another:

• Domination by Alice Roberts - looking at the rise of the Christian church over the first few centuries as an extension of the Roman empire - just doing empire stuff by other means. Solidly written and well evidenced.
• Smuggling Under Sail In The Red Sea by Henry de Montfreid - A fascinating account of the author’s hash smuggling expedition in the 1920s. I would put it broadly under travel writing, since he clearly loves being away from the ‘civilised’ world and writes best in those sections. All the casual racism that you would expect from the era, though.
• Bleak House by Dickens - some recent editorial about falling literacy and comprehension quoted the opening passage of the book and prompted me to pull it from the shelf. As with so many, I had Dickens forced upon me at school and my contrarian streak dominated my opinion of his writing for a long while after, but I did eventually realise that, had I been allowed to find his work myself, I would have enjoyed it. A good few decades have passed since then and I can appreciate it free of baggage now.

Here’s a guide to IDing Aspen.

Made in Dagenham (2010) is a comedy/drama based on this strike.

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey & Maturin series is the first that comes to mind for this feeling.

Smuggling Under Sail in the Red Sea by Henri De Monfreid at the moment. I didn’t know what to expect of it, but it is really fascinating and atmospheric - as well as being as casually racist as you would expect of the 1920s.

I did today. I’m on holiday and it was very hot.

• Got up really early and did a coast walk before it got too bad - and before too many people were around
• Full English at a cafe
• A bit of gaming
• Posted some stuff to Lemmy
• Read a few chapters
• Watched a film