I’m looking forward to this but there aren’t any convenient screenings near me. I may have to wait and hope or go on a bit of a mission.

My main quibbles are that Xtro and Under the Skin should be higher and that some (especially Phase IV and Triangle) are British co-productions and don’t feel very British (at least Triangle has a British director, I suppose).

The starting line-up is likely down to licensing issues - no Atic Atac or Jetpac. However, it does include Ant Attack and The Lords of Midnight (previous post on here links to an article with the full list).

I had some minor involvement with the Oxford Bigfoot DNA study (not enough to make the acknowledgements section) and it is interesting to see people are still investigating this angle as it seems like a good way to evaluate the some of the claims made. The approach applied to British ABCs is definitely making me reevaluate my stance on it but we need a more comprehensive survey, like Oxford one.

And it doesn’t make a punchy headline.

I think he hit hard times after Linda.

I am always self conscious about my long winded replies because sometimes even I wouldn’t wanna read a post that long.

No need to be self-conscious - that’s a concise account of a complicated issue, which is going to go long. Long posts become an issue when they are rambling and unfocused.

Firstly, Tony argues that our accent doesn’t come from where people may think. The accepted wisdom is that Scouse is a combination of the Lancashire and Irish accents, driven by mass immigration to the city from the Emerald Isle during the Irish famine.

That theory was notably promoted by docker, councillor and ECHO columnist Frank Shaw in the first half of the 20th century. However, Tony’s argument is different. He told the ECHO: "Liverpool was an immigrant city in the 19th century. In the 1861 census, half the population were immigrants which was an amazing thing.

“There wasn’t anywhere else like it in Britain - not even London. All of these people mixed together and linguists say that new dialects come from language contract - all of these different people mixing, speaking different languages and different dialects. My argument is that’s where Scouse came from.”

Bit of an odd argument as most of those immigrants were from Ireland, so it’s not wrong to say it’s largely a collision of Irish and Lancashire accents but it is also more nuanced than that, which is what separates Scousers from Mancs (which is also a mix of Lancashire and Irish but with more of a Pennines influence). So there is some influence from Scandinavia (that’s where the dish scouse comes from after all), as well as all the others but Irish is clearly the root of a lot of the distinctive features in Scouse, like the pronunciation of “th”.

I also saw a documentary that suggested dialects based around docks tended to be pitched higher and spoken faster - you can see this by comparing Scouse to Cockney.

So there’s a lot going on but to say Shaw was “wrong” seems odd.

You can see why part of Herefordshire returned a Green MP (ousting a Conservative in North Herefordshire), the pollution of the Wye is the big issue but there seems like a strong green movement pushing for improvements to the environment (see also the recent post on water meadows in Hereford itself).

Once you start accepting, people of the time could move such stones 100miles. (Seems undeniably atm)

Then it really is more about motive then distance. The same techniques work.

Overland. Getting a large stone from the Orkneys to the mainland would have been a considerable undertaking requiring a whole raft of new techniques (pun intended).

I mean, it is now!

Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server)

This is the route I’d recommend as you get superb specs for not much more than you’d be paying through the normal hosting, which, itself, is already very reasonable.

This has been our experience at feddit.uk. Well done to everyone over there. 👍

Worth also noting that:

• We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don’t have to upgrade any time soon).
• Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent “warchest” which should see us through most temporary problems.

One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.

If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).

Also bear in mind that Admins also get reports and can step in to help out - dbzero has half a dozen.

I think that’s an exception. It’ll mostly be beans.

He manages to give the dullest answer. Tell the press you’ve cut a hole in it that you use daily for your own sexual pleasure and, once you’ve finished defiling it, you’ll burn it in the garden of 10 Downing Street exactly as you always imagined torching the old witch when she was alive. Or something like that.

Sounds like they are hinting that the UK government should sweeten the deal.

Technically, they have kept the left tyre so they are complying with signage.

From Beyond and The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk Collection for me.