Iz 🌟

An unpopular government dealing with a rebellion that tried to stop you implementing an unpopular policy by suspending people involved in the rebellion - that's going to go well, surely. Trouble with having such a big majority and a lot of MPs who are likely to be 1-termers, no consequences for them disagreeing with the government and actually it'll probably help their case as a local voice. One of those suspended MPs has a majority of 18 votes! I'd get rid of Morgan McSweeney - his hatred of the Labour left seems far more deeply rooted than Starmer's and he is probably more responsible for the government's poor communication strategy and its dogged attempts at doing un-Labour, unpopular policies. He's not even a particularly gifted strategist.

Funny thing about that FindOutNow poll, not only is it majorly an outlier from other polls that have included a hypothetical Corbyn party, the page on their website that links to it is now deleted - and the only people promoting it on Twitter have been Zia Yusuf, Aaron Bastani and Stats For Lefties. As ever, the shadiest polling company in Britain. To be honest, I just don't believe a party based around Corbyn would be that popular when it hasn't even launched yet, doesn't pass the smell test. MoreInCommon also released one yesterday which is not nearly as dramatic. YouGov also reported this which... er... Good going!

Pains me to say but I feel it is just hard in a diversified media environment for a new big band to really break out into the mainstream, at least in the sense of making pop music. Much harder than solo artists. I mean, bands will continue selling out stadiums here and there but it might be that newer bands don't in the end. For those that care for that type of music, there will be bands that everyone within that space knows, still. Bring Me The Horizon are headlining Leeds/Reading. Sleep Token I constantly hear about. But then with diversified media, that can still be really huge in the sense of being known by a large number of people despite making no impact on charts. Also will vary by country, if Linkin Park's tour dates are anything to go by - another band that recently had a fairly successful era - they had 5 tour dates in Germany but 1 in the UK this year, so I went to Germany to see them - for whatever reason Germany was considered to have much more demand for them. Could well be that our media landscape just isn't pushing bands as much right now.

Yes, the English version got released a couple of weeks ago! Given the Japanese version has been out for years (with many more characters and support cards than the English version currently has) and the anime gained a fairly small but loyal following it's pretty long-awaited. Would not have expected it to blow up so much either, I think a few popular streamers have started playing it, but the game's quality (for a gacha game), the general amusing nature of certain horses for meminess and the wholesomeness of the series probably helped for anyone open to anime things.

That's it though, it's great to see people taking to horses that weren't in the anime much like Urara and Bakushin (and now I want to rewatch it), but the reason they can do that is because they've built the characters around notable racehorses and have ways to make them unique and fun characters. I'm 3 playthroughs in and each career is different and very challenging to finish, Id love to complete them all but it'll take many failures before I do (love a game having roguelike elements). It really is that one gacha game that also has a good gameplay loop. To my surprise. Plus my Twitter timeline is full of compliments about the real horse Gold Ship who is just as much a fave as his anime girl version, proper independent free spirited animal.

oof, did feel that an alt pop song might be out of its depth here but thank you for the compliments from those it was aimed at, and Rob for the 8 points! ❤️ Girl Group seem like a very promising set of newcomers (bjfest is a hard comp to target)

Zarah Sultana is probably one of the best MPs in Parliament right now, young, energetic and on the right side of pretty much everything, so I definitely want to see her have a long career in politics that isn't dependent on the flaws in the Labour Party. I think it's probably a good thing to get this going, there is of course a danger that they can't take any of the territory in political space between the Greens and Labour, and so the initial reaction is 'oh no this will split the left' (and I see a lot of mocking online, encouraged by the Spectator's journalists chortling from their summer retreats). A party the left are energetic for and not just lethargic about like Starmer's Labour is needed. Really the Green Party isn't a sufficient home for the left long-term and Labour's direction is not encouraging for popular transformative politics. If the political theory of 'let's keep trying new things' advocated by Reform is correct, after their failure, this, with a few more popular left figures attached to it, could have potential. Reform's criticism is that neoliberalism keeps failing when they are just a more extreme and stupid version of neoliberalism and trickle-down, this (and the Greens) are the only really new thing out there. also electorally I think there are few seats where this party will at the moment gain enough votes to cause a seat that Labour would have held otherwise to lose to Reform or the Tories so I think that's overstated right now.

voted early as I'm away the rest of the voting period (will try to check out the other semis at a more leisurely pace while away), nice bunch of songs, pop for sure but a few fun different ways of doing that.

The markets thinking her job was in danger yesterday caused the pound to drop. Confirmations that she will stay in her job this morning and that 'she will be Chancellor for a very long time' caused government bonds to rally this morning. Yes she'll survive, this isn't the normal 'full confidence', there's a deliberate effort this morning to enforce that she is staying; and the markets are liking her as a stable force if nothing else. Whether she'll do any good long-term I don't know because of the total lack of ambition to force the change necessary but for financial stability and representation of the government she and Starmer are in lockstep.

Once again, I regret to inform you that I love my horse girls This game has a surprising amount of depth and stats for something that was designed as a mobile game - it's like a sports manager + simulation + cute visual novel in one i.e. perfectly catered to me

Good game from Fognini, I often avoid the opening games of favourites like Alcaraz as I don't like walkovers but that was good to see him put up a spirited defence and good last match at Wimbledon. Decent effort from the young Mimi Xu against Radacanu, but experience won out - Radacanu vs Vondroušová is an interesting upcoming second round match now, two former Grand Slam winners who are now unseeded (and in neither case due to being in the twilight of their career either)

Criminal investigation launched into both Bob Vylan and Kneecap, fun times ahead. :/

You cannot incite against a foreign military force not present in the country, and said foreign military forces are committing atrocities daily. Agreed, conflating the IDF with all Jews (as the BBC are essentially doing with describing it as antisemitic) is very worrying. But most of all it sickens me how much column space is taken up finger-wagging at this music duo for somewhat uncouth language while Palestinians continue to be killed by those that our institutions are defending.

Yeah I like YouGov's version of the MRP slightly more: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52437-first-yougov-mrp-since-2024-election-shows-a-hung-parliament-with-reform-uk-as-largest-party Electoral Calculus seems to blindspot some seats that plainly obviously don't go with the prevailing tide of the country no matter what that is, the biggest difference between the two MRPs is that YouGov has Labour keeping some of the inner cities that they're never losing in a 'them vs the right-wing' scenario, but then YouGov STILL has Labour hold seats like Hexham, Stroud, York Outer and Truro that as you say are not the sort of seats that Labour is supposed to keep in a wipeout scenario. I think FPTP gets hard to predict with 4 major parties (plus nationalists and Greens in select seats) and this could be a limitation of MRP and predictive outcomes more generally. On numbers of seats YouGov looks within the realm of reality, EC's a bit bullish on Reform but not out of the question, it's just what those seats are.

Imagine musicians and festival goers, a very progressive constituency, being pro-Palestine. It does make the media look really out of touch, they're just words, and arguably are part of what makes the festival so culturally relevant. (which is why in my archivist mood I'm very much annoyed to see that the BBC are now censoring the on-demand version of that set, it's likely to be the most historically relevant part of this festival!)