You Don't Live Like I Do

Scene Film Festival Day

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:01:33 GMT

As I mentioned while talking about Levy Pride, I was happy to take part in some of the events outside the "main area" of the Klondyke Club. Going to the Lesbian Cheese Party was great fun, watching the arm wrestling and taking part in the cheese throwing, while still being back at the Klondyke for the dog show, which is the best part of this and any other pride.

This weekend is Manchester Village Pride, with lots of activities in the Village itself. There are also two official fringe events for the Pride - one is the family fun activities at the Great Northern this weekend, and the other is the Scene Film Festival which runs in the week before Pride.

Last Saturday after gym I went to Cultplex in Cheetham Hill to watch a couple of films as part of the Trans Image, Trans Experience (TITE) takeover of Cultplex. First up was "October Crow", written and directed by Jack Haven who I recently saw starring as Maddy in "I Saw The TV Glow". This clearly a labour of love, featuring a lot of Haven's real live friends, and written as a tribute to actor Peter Nolan Smith (Haven's upstairs neighbour). But it didn't really click for me - it was the kind of arty where every shot lingered about 25-50% longer than it needed to, the motivations of the characters weren't particularly clear or interesting, and shooting on iPhone meant that tracking shots going through light and dark areas suffered from the camera over-correcting the brightness in sometimes painful ways.

Fuelled by an excellent kebab, I watched the next film, "Puppygirl". The description of "a semi-delusional trans woman" in a "gonzo documentary" gave me the ick, but I decided to give the TITE and SCENE organisers the benefit of the doubt and I'm glad I did. Basically it's the story of Milo, a trans woman in Chicago, and part of a queer community there. Puppygirl play is really big among transfemmes, and people she's dating assume she's into it, when she's not. Then she gets invited to appear in a porn film as a puppygirl and decides to try and see what the fuss is about. The documentary follows the theme of a voyage of discovery, but is really a slice of life about Milo and her friends (including the film's director).

After that I headed over towards HOME for the free outdoor screening of "Clueless" with cosmolinguist. I thought I'd not seen it before, but within about 30 seconds of it starting I realised I had. So we just sat in the sunshine in deckchairs, drinking beer and enjoying the movie.

We missed the last few minutes of "Clueless" because it clashed with Greg Araki's "I Want Your Sex". This was a generation clash movie, with a famous Millennial artist who seduces her Gen Z intern into kinky sex. And like other Greg Araki films, it descends into nihilistic farce. If you like seeing horrible people doing horrible things and other people get sucked into their orbit and it all ending terribly, this is a fun film. In the video intro beforehand, Araki said it was an attempt to get the sexless Gen Z to fuck, and I don't think it works on that level - the main Gen Z character is clearly horny, and his life is ruined as a result. Still, it has a lot of Olivia Wilde in latex, so I could appreciate it on that aesthetic level. Also I was amused by my Gen Z friends' reaction to the film; they hated the fact that a powerful woman did terrible things and didn't really get any come-uppance. Perhaps that's the reaction Araki was trying to provoke?

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Busy Day

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 23:15:59 GMT

Today was set aside for doing some chores. Didn't quite get as much done as I'd hoped, but...

Helped mother_bones buzz their hair
Started sorting through shed stuff that's been on the dining room table for a while with cosmolinguist
- Binned one old air mattress as unsalvageable
- Started testing another for slow puncture - if it's good, we'll donate it, otherwise we'll bin it
- The posh one with the self-inflator is broken, so I took the motor unit out to see if it can be repaired
- Bungee cords are now in the car boot, and some car leads are in the car leads bag
Sorted out what's happening with this Tuesday's Queer Club
Did the artwork and social media posts for Queer Club

Not bad for a day that started with a lie-in after a hectic Saturday - which I hope to write about later too.

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Levy Pride

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:53:45 GMT

Last weekend was Levenshulme Pride, and it was great fun. I won't do a blow-by-blow account of what happened. But it was good for me as a feeling of community and friendship at various levels, including:

Two of my partners were out with me. Sadly P was laid up with a cold. But it's rare that V makes it out to stuff like this and it was lovely to have them there
Close friend A came along with us on Saturday after trans gym (having showered and changed at our house), joined in the Levenshulme Pride Parade, hung out with us at the Klondyke afterwards, met some of our friends, and seemed to have a good time. We chat online a lot but don't spent a lot of time with him outside of trans gym, and it was great to share a bit of our lives with him.
P's partner J came along on Sunday and joined us at the Lesbian Cheese Party in Cringle Park to watch arm wrestling and throw a Babybel at a Grownupbel; they mooched up to the Klondyke with us afterwards to watch the dog show. Again, it's rare that we hang out with them in this combination of people and they're really lovely.
The Lesbian Cheese Party was co-ordinated by one of the Queer Club founders and it was great to chat with him a bit there
Some of my former coworkers from my terrible last tech job came along to the dog show and I got to hang out with them and a friend of theirs, catch up and admire good dogs
We were marching in the Levenshulme Pride Parade with Queer Club, which I now help organise. It was great having friends from that on the march, and great to hang out socially with two fellow Qumittee members; we went to their wedding but obviously they were kind of busy at the time, so this was lovely
One of aforementioned good dogs was Xena who has holidayed at the Wonder House before, and we got to chat to her human as well - we met them through Queer Club
Generally there were a bunch of queers I'm on friendly "wave and say hi" terms with around
Even the ones who are associated with Bad Shit didn't try to start anything

I feel a lonely and disconnected a lot of the time, so a weekend with so many connections and conversations was really lovely. I'd rather try and remember that feeling than the chronological details. Also, going to the Lesbian Cheese Party was great; in previous years we've just hung around the Klondyke by default, but I'm going to keep an eye out for more things like that in future.

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Goths on a Field 6, 10-12th July 2026

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:02:52 GMT

Goths on a Field isn't a commercial music festival. It's more of a camping weekend for about 100 friends, most of whom know each other from coach journeys from the North of England to Leipzig for Wave Gotik Treffen festival. I've never been on those coaches or to the festival, but I'm a couple of degrees of separation away and I like camping, so I've ended up tagging along for a few years now.

This year I was travelling solo - one year of camping in a heatwave was enough for cosmolinguist. But I was keen to air the tent out ahead of EMF, and this time I even remembered the tentpoles and had a new, not very flashy but sturdy air mattress. It wasn't quite as hot this year as last, but it had been dryer for longer, and the farm was taking precautions - absolutely no fires, even camping stoves; tents had to be 3 metres away from each other, and cars had to be parked in a separate field. The last of these worked out nicely - having the cars distant made the campsite feel more like a campsite. And there was more of a breeze this year, especially in the barn.

( The Bands )

Outside of the music appearances in the barn, there were some great DJ sets, including from Doof hosts Lee and Tes. There was an auction for Mind, and I bid for a poster of the event signed by all the performers, which was great. I also won a bag of stick-on moustaches and a portable fan in the raffle. Socially, I felt a bit out of place this time round. Perhaps it's because I was knackered to start with, perhaps it's because I didn't stay up late chatting after the bands had finished. I did enjoy seeing friends though.

On the Sunday, I packed up my tent and headed home for a long-overdue shower!

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Busy Day

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:28:40 GMT

It was a busy day but a good one. P decided to go to Trans Gym this morning with me and cosmolinguist so we set off slightly earlier than usual to pick her up on the way. The area around the gym is a bit of a building site at the moment and after class our friend A was not sure how to reach his bus home, so I offered him a lift. A bit out of our way but a good chance to catch up after EMF.

I dropped P home, then picked up my meds from the pharmacy, and came home for breakfast and shower. Around 2pm, all of us (me, V and E) headed round to P's to see her and her partner J, their garden (which has had a lot of V input on plants), and a friend who was visiting them. After lunch, me and P went to the charity shop to drop off donations from both our houses, and to pick up some compost.

We got two 40L bags of compost from Home Bargains, and P picked them both up off the till and carried them to the car, because she can and she likes lifting things. There was a lady behind us in the queue who gave me a real death stare, presumably for my lack of chivalry in "letting" my girlfriend carry the heavy stuff, which pretty much everybody found funny when I told them.

After more chatting and socialising, the people with energy-limiting conditions were getting tired and we headed home. But I picked up a bag of garden waste to take to the tip, and combined it with a bunch of stuff from our house, so me and E went and got rid of all that stuff. Since we got back from the tip the evening has been pretty quiet - the hearty lunch meant that we weren't bothered about a big dinner.

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Here Comes The Sun

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:15:39 GMT

After about 2.5 years, this week we finally had solar panels and a storage battery installed. The system was turned on at lunchtime on Wednesday and basically since then we've not drawn any energy from the grid. Instead we've dumped 22kWh out, about 30% of what we've generated in total.

I'm trying not to turn into one of my many middle-aged friends who gets weirdly obsessed with solar power, but this is really fucking cool. We paid a bit more for a system that can go off-grid, i.e. it works as a full-house battery during power cuts. This also satisfies the prepper in me a little. Plus they had to install an earth spike down one side of the house - literally a large metal rod going down into the earth - for off-grid operation.

I've been watching the graphs on the mobile app periodically. I can tell when cosmolinguist boils the kettle in the morning because there's a brief spike above our ambient load of ~500W from lights, fridges, always-on computers etc.

The one thing I really need to do is to change our electricity tariff. I want to move to a time-based tariff where electricity is cheaper overnight and more expensive at peak times (mostly mid-morning and early evening). As the days get shorter, we won't be able to generate enough solar power to meet all our needs, so I'll be charging the battery at cheap times and "spending" it at expensive times, so we should end up paying less overall. And when we do manage to export power to the grid, we're not currently getting paid for it, so we should do something about that!

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Catchup List

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:56:57 GMT

Hi all, long time no blog. I pointed a few people from EMF Camp to my Dreamwidth so I guess I'd better post something.

I've been away on Adventures, and Stuff has been happening. Just over a week ago (really?) was Goths On A Field, where I saw many good bands, had a nice time camping in a heatwave, and experimented with mylar sheeting. I've just got back from a week at Electromagnetic Field 2026, which was both great and frustrating in different ways. I hope to say more about both those things.

Back at the house, we're in the middle of having solar panels and a storage battery fitted. I've found myself trapped in my office today because the loft hatch is immediately outside, and people have been working on ladders. Still, it's very exciting.

But now my attention needs to turn to the things that are happening in the immediate future, so I'm making a brief list here to try and avoid missing anything.

Queer Stuff

Levy Queer Club next week - do Fediverse socials, discuss what needs to be done ahead of Manchester Village Pride
Buy Manchester Village Pride tickets
Plans for Stockport Pride, Manchester Trans Pride

House Stuff

Figure out how to use new solar + battery setup
Switch electric tariff to one that makes sense with new setup
Remortgage by mid-August

Health Stuff

~~Reorder meds~~
Catch up on group therapy notes from last week (missed due to EMF) and practice
Look at private ADHD diagnosis

Other

Car MOT
Car aircon recharge
Check why Codeberg payments haven't gone through

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Ball Games

Wed, 27 May 2026 22:22:04 GMT

I had a nice time this evening going to the park with cosmolinguist and P. We got ice creams and tossed a rugby ball around, and hung out with P's partner J and a friend they were there skating with. I'm still not great at either throwing or catching a rugby ball, but probably better than I was 35 years ago when I last played rugby. We didn't get there until 8pm, so it was starting to cool down after another sweltering day, and it was great to just hang out, mess around and chat nonsense.

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Conversational White-Water Rafting

Sun, 17 May 2026 23:37:01 GMT

The last Bank Holiday Monday was fun. cosmolinguist's Canadian friend Bill was in the UK, and we haven't seen him for over a decade. Incompatibilities with Bill's idiosyncratic approach to communication technologies meant that I had to be the go-between and secretary, and for a while we weren't sure whether he had received any messages from us. But he got back to us on Monday morning and we made plans, meeting him in the city centre at lunchtime.

I did my tour guide bit, showing him the still-bescaffolded Town Hall, Lincoln Square, the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. Apparently he'd been to the latter before, but didn't know it was one of the first places in Manchester to have air filters installed during the Industrial Revolution, to stop soot and sulphur in the air from contaminating the library books. We doubled back along Peter Street and the former Free Trade Hall, and ended up at Society, down by the Bridgewater Hall, where Bill and I enjoyed pizza and E had veggie quesadillas. After that we took in the lovely tiled Peveril of the Peak, the punky former-toilet Temple of Convenience where we chatted international politics with a lefty Polish bartender, and headed up to the Village to the Molly House.

Talking to Bill is a bit like white water rafting - he says what's on his mind at any given time, and he's massively knowledgeable and fearsomely intelligent, so the conversation flows fast from topic to topic and really all you can do is cling on for dear life and hope to occasionally nudge things.

It was great fun. So much so that we managed to do it again the following Friday - this time we hit the Northern Quarter, starting in Bar Fringe talking about creativity and art. Later in Terrace we got talking to some students who bummed cigarettes off Bill, which ended up in some bizarrely deep and meaningful conversations. Eventually E and I staggered off for the last train and Bill walked with us, then went to check out the Piccadilly Tap.

He'll be back next year. I'm looking forward to it already.

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First Time Back

Sat, 16 May 2026 10:37:22 GMT

First time back at trans gym weight class since my hernia surgery two months ago. It was a quiet class, which means I got a lot of attention from the trainer, but they were happy that I knew what I was doing and didn't push myself. I mostly went bar weight for lifts, and when a snatch-and-jerk exercise made my tummy grumble I just stopped doing it and rested.

Also it was really nice to catch up with people, have some silly natters to the young people about cosmolinguist's and my opinions about Olivia Rodrigo, and do my best to support them through some of the tough times they're going through both at the gym and outside.

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Busy Weekend

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:14:19 GMT

Last weekend was rather busy. After work on Friday, me and cosmolinguist cycled to Station South for a pint. It's the first time I've been on a bike since my hernia operation six weeks ago, but it didn't seem to cause any problems. Of course, I took it gently. And it was lovely to sit outside in the sun and drink and chat.

On Saturday morning, we met up with some Internet friends to walk around Sale Water Park with some doggos. It was nice being sociable, and the slow sniffy labrador meant we didn't go very fast. We chatted to a lot of people, and ended up having a nice pub lunch, again sat outdoors in the shade. We headed home briefly, to recharge my phone (and myself), before heading into the city centre for a friend's birthday, drinking in the sunshine at North Beer. It was fun to meet some new people, and have some good conversations about Manchester's history, culture and attitude. We ended up in the beer garden at The Salisbury, my old haunt from the 90s which is now much closer to its old rock pub self than its weird mid-noughties wine bar incarnation, but it was too noisy and smoke-filled so me and E headed home after a token pint of Old Perculier.

On Sunday, we went to visit Bud Garden Centre for their birthday party! We pottered round and looked at plants, but this was the point where my abdomen had had enough and started twingeing, so I went to sit in the car while E and V did the shopping, and took part in the raffle and other fun things. When we got home I had a nap, and in the evening we watched an MR James livecast.

My standard metric for a good weekend is "does last week feel like a long time ago", and with all these things it definitely does! I'm glad that I could do the exercise I did, and that I rested as soon as my tummy started hurting so it didn't get any worse. And it was great to get so much sunshine.

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Solar Feelings

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:53:29 GMT

I'm in the process of sorting out solar panels and domestic battery for my house. This is a very popular thing in the UK currently due to Trump fucking around in Iran, which means that gas, petrol and other prices have skyrocketed.

The logistics are reasonably simple - I've approached three major providers (Wickes, EDF Energy, Octopus Energy) for quotes, plus a local installer who hasn't gotten back to me. I have quotes ranging between £8-12k, all for slightly different setups, with different capacities and brands of panel / inverter / battery (I'm obviously not touching Tesla). I need to figure out what I want and put the order in. I also have two other local installers I've been recommended, who I may approach for further quotes.

There have been rumours about the Government issuing interest-free loans for this work, which would be lovely, but if it's going to go ahead it won't be until after the local elections in a month due to purdah. And the install will require a G99 certificate, which can take up to 3 months to be issued due to the sudden high demand which isn't going to slow down. Between those, we'll miss a lot of the summer, so I'm tempted to just go ahead. And I'm immensely fortunate that between the household, we can afford that.

( Feelings, whining from a position of privilege )

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Eid

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:11:44 GMT

We live on a street where about a quarter of the houses have Muslim families. This morning I watched our neighbours opposite, who moved in fairly recently and we don't know well, pose for photos outside their house all dressed up in smart clothes. Later on our next door neighbour, who we know well enough to have sent an Eid card, was outside with his toddler and wife, chatting with another neighbour, who is white and not religious AFAIK.

The weather is nice enough that I had the windows open - not enough to overhear any conversations but enough to know that there is chatter and happiness around me. It's nice.

ETA: Our next door neighbour just brought round some food and and a really cute little teapot for us!

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The Friday Five: Dreamwidth / LiveJournal

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:24:00 GMT

The Friday Five for 20 March 2026

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?

In 2000, a lot of the UK Goth scene ended up on LiveJournal. I tried my hand at blogging by hand-writing HTML on a shell account on a nerd friend's Solaris box in the States, but quickly realised that the comments and community were an important part. Partly I moved so I could post sickeningly cute comments on my then-gf's LJ. That... didn't end well. But I started my LJ in 2001.

I was a fairly late mover to Dreamwidth after LiveJournal started its long slide downwards; I didn't hit the migrate button until 2017, and I didn't delete my LJ account until 2018 when a then-coworker linked to it on work IRC. There were a lot of very cringe public entries from decades before I didn't particularly want to be associated with.

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?

Other than thefridayfive, not many! DW never seemed to get the right critical mass for communities. I welcome suggestions!

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?

See above!

4. How did you pick your user name?

About the time I needed an LJ username, I was listening to a lot of The Velvet Underground, and the line "Different colours, made of tears" from Venus In Furs was stuck in my head. Unfortunately, that was one character too long for LJ usernames, so I had to elide a vowel. I'd never heard of the TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" before.

5. If you could change your user name, would you?

I don't think so. I have many usernames in many places, but I like this one here!

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I Ate'nt Dead

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:59:58 GMT

Today has been a bit of a weird day. Me and cosmolinguist got up at 6am, were out of the house for 6:45am and at the hospital by 7am. The Elective Surgery Unit wasn't "properly" open, so we got let into the reception area and just wandered around until we found some people who told us where to go sit down. By 8am I was on the ward, I'd been briefed on what was happening, and E knew when to come back and collect me. He went and caught the bus home and had a nap, having done the most important job of getting me to the hospital on time. I was visited by the anaesthetist and the surgeon, both of whom were confident in the procedure.

The apprehension of mortality which had ruined my Friday Yoga had pretty much dissolved by this point and I was determined to just get through it. I was second in the queue of six patients, so I got changed straight away into incredibly snug paper pants, and two surgical gowns - one worn with the flap at the back like usual, and a second opening at the front like a dressing gown over the top to protect my modesty as I walked to the operating theatre, literally at the end of the ward. With 6 patients in a ward designed for 24, CO2 levels were low so I didn't have to mask. I dozed for about an hour and a half, using my rucksack and hoodie as a makeshift pillow. By this point, around 9:30am, I was feeling OK, just exhausted. I think I was too tired to be worried.

I had to sit around outside the theatre for a bit, and get fitted with a cannula by an anaesthetist who was rather brusque. Fortunately such things bother me less than others, and he might have been kinder if I'd made more of a fuss beforehand. The nurse weighed me and said I don't look as heavy as I am, and I bit my tongue rather than go on a rant about the BMI bullshit which has denied me this surgery for years. I got asked what I did so I started talking about apprenticeships and how they're useful for people for whom academic paths don't work out - and how many people with dyslexia or other support needs we find once they've been pushed out of traditional schools, because testing for functional skills is mandatory in an apprenticeship. Turns out I'm still pretty passionate about that, even though it's far removed from what my job actually entails.

I went into the theatre, got settled on the table, started breathing in gas while they injected the general anaesthetic... and woke up in recovery, at about 11:30. ( Vague medical details below )

One of the ward nurses brought me tea and toast which was gratefully received and scoffed. I dozed for a bit, but the guy in the bed next to me, who'd had his inguinal hernia surgery (a complication from a hip replacement) before me, was waiting for his wife and bored and chatty. So I talked with him quite a lot, he's in his late 70s / early 80s, retired from doing computer stuff back in the 1970s. We talked about the changing face of technology over the decades, such as how a modern $1 embedded system can emulate an original Mac Classic. He had military tech experience so I talked about some of my programming jobs in the 90s on classified projects, and also about ISO26262 and MISRA, both standards in functional safety which came about from real-world errors such as the fighter plane which flips upside down if it crosses the equator on autopilot. We talked about dogs and horses (he keeps some where he lives in Altrincham). Lovely conversation but utterly knackering when I was a couple of hours behind him on the recovery from anaesthetic.

Just after his wife arrived to collect him, E arrived to collect me. He helped me get changed out of my tiny paper pants and gown, into the clothes I'd arrived in. By that time I'd had my last set of obs and the water had worked its way through my system so I had a successful wee. So the nurse brought over discharge paperwork, went through some of the details with me: no shower or bath today, no baths for a couple of weeks, no driving for at least 48 hours and until I can safely do an emergency stop without pain; no lifting more than 5-8kg for 4-6 weeks. Then we headed out and grabbed a taxi, getting home around 3:30pm, about 9 hours out of the house.

I've spent the afternoon chilling out on the sofa, drinking 2 litres of apple squash and just starting to feel rehydrated. I was too tired to play games or watch much of anything, until I had a little nap while E was out walking the neighbour's dog. E let me sit at his end of the sofa so I could stretch my legs out, and V lent me their weighted capybara plushy which was comforting. This evening we watched Team GB vs USA in the World Baseball Classic, which was an interesting game for the first 4 innings until the Americans woke up and walked all over the Brits. I'm still feeling tired and woozy - clearly too tired to write a concise DW entry, so well done if you've persevered this far. I'm glad the surgery is over; I hope the recovery is mild because I've got a lot of work to get done by the end of next week! I'm not looking forward to going weeks without any gym though...

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Gyms, Garden Centre and Hospital

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:06:16 GMT

( Talk of health and exercise, mention of death )

This afternoon, me, E & V went to the garden centre in Cheadle for lunch and shopping. I'm not great at gardening and I made a few suggestions which turned out to be unhelpful, which was a bit of a downer. Still, I found a nice white clematis to climb up the plastic skeleton in the garden, and ham, egg and chips for lunch helped perk me up a bit. We ended up getting a buttload of plants to populate the garden - a mixture of flowers, herbs and ferns. And V & E swung by B&M on the way home to get some dirt and decorations to go with it, while I waited in the car.

After getting home, me and E took Teddy for a nice long walk, then I ordered fancy burgers for dinner - if I'm going nil-by-mouth I might as well have a big meal beforehand. Now it's time to pack, and get ready for a very early start - I'm due in hospital at 7:15am!

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Slow Day

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:19:27 GMT

Today I missed going to the gym because I had a morning hospital appointment. Next Sunday, I'm having surgery on my umbilical hernia, so today I was having bloods taken, being swabbed for MRSA, and having a pre-operative interview to discuss the procedure. This has taken literal years since I was diagnosed with the hernia in 2022 and dismissed for being fat in 2023 so I'm happy it's finally going ahead.

Other than that we didn't have many plans for the day. I finished playing through Control again, in time for the sequel to come out soon. Then I went upstairs and spent a couple of hours blitzing ADHD paperwork. I got so caught up in this that I forgot to come down for dinner and was exhausted by the time I did. We tuned into a Nunkie MR James stream, but I promptly fell asleep!

After that I made myself a snack and watched this week's Starfleet Academy, which was lovely. It has made me simultaneously curious about and terrified of reading / seeing Our Town.

Also, I noticed that iPlayer has the Derek Jacobi teleplay of Breaking the Code, the biographical play about Alan Turing. It's a much better portrayal of Turing (at least according to the biographies I've read) than the terrible "The Imitation Game". Me and cosmolinguist saw it on stage last October, which was a competent enough production.

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Gorton and Denton By-Election

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:47:13 GMT

For the last couple of weeks I've been telling every canvasser that's come to my door the same thing - that I'd like to vote Green, but I'm going to vote to keep Reform out, and that there wasn't any clear evidence of the best way to do that. Labour have been relying on an opinion poll of 150 people taken weeks ago before the close of nominations, which shows them in second place to Reform. The Greens have been relying on betting shop odds (very easy to manipulate) and internal polling (very unreliable). Both have been telling me that their "internal data" points to them being the best option.

Yesterday, a new poll from Omnisis was published. The sample size is still small (450) but much larger than we've seen before, and the polling was carried out after the candidates were finalised and after the campaign started. I am pleased to say that it puts Greens in front of Reform in the constituency, within margin of error. Labour are trailing Reform, also within margin of error, but the Green-Labour lead is outside that margin. It also says that the Green supporters are more likely to actually turn out and vote than Labour ones, which suggests that the Green lead will be bigger on Thursday than this poll suggests.

I can nitpick some things about the poll such as the sample size, but this is the best indicator I'm likely to get before going to the polls on Thursday. And I'm glad that I have some reasonably solid evidence that convinces my head that I can vote with my heart, rather than just looking for something that reinforces what I want to be true. I know from previous experience that the Labour vote in Gorton is soft as anything, and it's nice to have evidence that the Green squeeze is actually working.

There are some interesting nuggets in the data which show how people either don't understand questions or give nonsense answers, like the Labour supporter who would vote Reform if they "knew" this was a Labour-Reform battle. There are a small minority of both Green and Labour supporters who would vote Reform to stop the other from winning. The Reform vote is largely unsqueezable - even if they think Reform can't win, most supporters would either vote for them, or not vote at all, than vote for either Greens or Labour. More would break Green though, which suggests the "vote to get Kier Starmer out" message is working.

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Parting Company

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:04:11 GMT

I've just applied to Companies House to have my Limited Company, of which I am sole director, struck off and dissolved. I founded it years ago as a potential holding organisation for providing IT services to political organisations. But it never really worked out like that - I spent many years providing those services such as mailing lists, chatrooms, wikis, CRM systems, but never got on the "approved suppliers" list. Then 2019 happened and... yeah, I stopped doing that. Part of people fucking me over in politics was making false allegations about me violating data protection laws, and that shit could have damaged my real job, so it was another reason to back away.

I'm feeling bittersweet about it all, but I still have my head held high. I did a better job than many of the people who actually got paid for doing this sort of thing. In retrospect I'm glad I never did manage to get anywhere with it; losing my social life and activism was bad enough, but at least I didn't lose my livelihood at the same time. Still, it's an interesting trouser-leg of time to contemplate.

I guess this is why I do things like read my employer's social impact reports. It's nice to know that the work I'm doing is helping other people make a difference in the world, even if it doesn't feel like I'm doing it myself.

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Vaguely Romantic

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:26:32 GMT

It's been a busy weekend, full of chores and errands, but for a while on Saturday night I was spending time with all three of my partners, chatting and sharing food. It wasn't an intentional Valentine's Day thing, but it was sweet nonetheless. And it's always good to be reminded of what awesome people I share love with.

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Losing Community?

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:05:48 GMT

I haven't posted on Facebook for about a year, since they announced that they were no longer even pretending to moderate queerphobia. But I've checked in there about once a week to catch up on close friends, and it's been a useful source of events. Since they've now insisted that users pay or get even more stalked / used to feed the LLM / GenAI machine, I've decided to just download my data (including photos etc.) and delete my account. I'm aware that I'm cutting myself off from some people this way, but most of them I've got other ways to talk to - mostly via Signal or WhatsApp.

This is happening about the same time as Discord are announcing various changes. I'm already using a SOCKS proxy based in Germany to circumvent their age restriction requirements, but that may stop being effective soon, or they may again be feeding everything into the GenAI behemoth. There's a good chance I'm going to have to disengage with Discord in the next few weeks.

I'm worried that this is going to cut me off from some other communities. The Manchester-based Discord has been a bit dead since a big argument a few months ago caused a schism, and neither it nor its supposed replacement managed critical mass. So that's not much of a concern. And I quit the UTAW Discord when I resigned.

But the Doof uses Discord for its Thursday evening stream chat, and I'll really miss that. I've been suggesting to communities that they move to Zulip, who provide a free tier much like Discord, but which is also Free Software, self hostable, and supports migrating between installs. I even set one up for the Doof. But nobody's even interested in trying it out so far. Discord is also a place where some queer and Covid-cautious activism happens and I'll be sad to miss that too.

Still, concentrating on the positives, I have friends from real-life things like Queer Club and the gym, who I talk to over Signal or WhatsApp, and I've just prompted a meetup of local gym buds for brunch in a few weeks. I'm playing a D&D campaign with P and friends every couple of weeks. I chat with people on the Fediverse. Even if I do lose out on communities currently based on Discord, I'm not going to be totally cut off.

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:32:02 GMT

I have just finished re-watching the 1979 "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" series with Alec Guinness. Such a wonderful piece of television, so beautifully filmed and constructed around a brilliant story. The acting is so wonderfully subtle.

Next up, "Smiley's People" from 1982 - I've not seen that before, so it'll be a complete surprise.

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CareADHD Referral

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:04:31 GMT

(backstory: I asked the GP about an ADHD diagnosis in Spring 2023, got given some forms to fill in, sat on them for about a year, filled them in in March 2024, returned them in April, got rejected by the Adult ADHD service for not talking about my childhood symptoms enough; got given a different survey to fill out, returned that in April 2025, got accepted by the Adult ADHD service in September 2025 and put on a 7+ year waiting list)

Last October, cosmolinguist looked into getting a private ADHD diagnosis and compiled some notes for me. In January I managed to force myself to look through them and do some other research. I asked my GP to refer me to CareADHD for an assessment under NHS Right to Choose. The assessment will cost me about £400, which is a lot cheaper than some of the other providers. About a week ago I heard back from the GP saying that they'd done that. I haven't yet heard from CareADHD and obviously now it's not my turn to do something I'm really impatient about it! But I'll give it a little while longer before getting in touch to establish a timeline - it'll probably be another couple of months before I get the diagnosis appointment.

I'm having a lot of feelings about this. I know that getting ADHD meds has been a literal life saver for friends, and I'm hoping it'll help me with my current situation, where lack of concentration is making me suck at my day job and many other things in life. I'm hoping it'll help complement the therapy work I'm doing, where we've been talking about emotional dysregulation and my anhedonia - if I can't enjoy things, I'm significantly less motivated to do them and seek shiny dopamine diversions.

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. This won't be a magic bullet that'll solve everything overnight. It might not even help much at all, or it might be a painstaking process of adjusting medications and dosages (and dealing with ongoing meds shortages in the UK, particularly post-Brexit). In the short term it may even make things worse. But the possibility of breaking the decades-long cycle of overcommitment and burnout is so tantalising...

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One of Those Guys

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:40:24 GMT

Last night, after a very pleasurable theatre trip with cosmolinguist, I ended up messing around a bit with the smart plugs I bought ages ago.

I have actually been using these plugs somewhat. They're on the house WiFi and that lets me remote-control them through a browser and set timers for them. They also have a mechanical button if you want to interact with them in a more traditional manner - that's basically a hard requirement for any home automation stuff I do, after the time I visited a friend and had to poop in the darkness because the bathroom lights couldn't be switched on until he reinstalled a Raspberry Pi.

But having resurrected Home Assistant on my fileserver I figured it was time to actually get these things talking to each other. I still find HA overly complicated, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is between an "app" and an "integration". I hit a few dead ends following this guide but eventually got to the point where I could use the Home Assistant web UI to control the plugs rather than the built-in web UI.

That doesn't sound like much of an improvement but it's actually quite exciting, because now anything I can do with Home Assistant, I can do with the plugs. I installed up simple speech-to-text and text-to-speech integrations in HA, and now I can talk to the HA app on my phone, tell it to turn the plugs on or off, and it does so! And tells me it's done it in a northern voice called Alan!

It's another small step on the HA journey and I'm still not thinking about temperature monitoring around the house, but it gave me a nice little dopamine hit.

(by this time it was 2am and E prodded me to come to bed, so I excitedly demonstrated this to him and then went to sleep)

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OggCamp

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:45:35 GMT

OggCamp is a long-standing Manchester-based geek "unconference". This basically means that you don't know who's going to talk about what until the start of the day, which is why I've never bothered going before. However, given my dead ends trying to get geek spaces to be serious about Covid safety at FOSDEM and EMF, I wondered if it would be worth a go trying to get OggCamp on board with basic ventilation. I have sent them the following email:

I'm interested in attending OggCamp and also volunteering to help. I'd like to help make OggCamp a safer place with the ongoing pandemic. Geeks are knowledge workers and the impact of Long Covid on memory and "brain fog" are truly horrifying.

I am pleased that the website mentions the pandemic at https://www.oggcamp.org/code-of-conduct/#health--safety but the advice there seems a little out of date - particularly around "rules and guidelines" which haven't been imposed since the UK government decided to "let it rip" through the population.

I'd like to volunteer to help with the listed Covid mitigations - handing out FFP2 masks and lateral flow tests. I'd also like to try and work with the venue in the run-up around the ventilation point. Ideally I'd like to see if Pendulum can achieve 5 or 6 "air changes per hour" (ACPH) in each room through their existing ventilation system, which is the standard recommended by WHO and CDC. If not, I'd like to look at air filtration mechanisms such as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes which could make up the difference. I'm happy to work with other volunteers on this, and to try and bring in other volunteers from organisations like Breathe Easy to help with this and other aspects of OggCamp.

Can I suggest that OggCamp considers offering refunds to people who can't attend due to Covid or other contagious illness? I expect most people wouldn't claim the refund, but it might make the difference to a contagious person staying home.

It might not get anywhere but it's worth continuing trying to chip away improving at pandemic safety in geek spaces. One victory would be a huge difference from the indifference or hostility I've encountered so far.

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