You can only pick one... THE CLASH - THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN or THE DAMNED - THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD Pt.1 What's it going to be?

Paul Hanley talks Futures and Pasts Festival amongst a plethora of Fall activity. silentradio.co.uk/05/31/inte…

Happy Oak Apple Day! May all the grisly and heretical Puritan interludes of your life end with the happy Restoration of days of cavalier merriment, risqué stage frolics, and High Church rectitude!

We are not in a union, voluntary or otherwise. The U.K. is a unitary sovereign nation state. In common with most other nation states there is no right of secession and no obligation upon the government to facilitate secession. Either you understand this and you are unprincipled enough to stir up false grievances in those who cannot, or you don’t understand it, in which case you’re a moron.

Introduce yourself with 10 bands you’ve seen live - but forgot to list until Twitter reminded you. 🙄@johnbarrett2468 1. Echo and the Bunnymen 2. Suede 3. Wet Leg 4. Ride 5. Adam Ant 6. Spiritualized 7. Billy Bragg (it was a while back) 8. Chapel Club 9. Dubstar 10. Kraftwerk

Introduce yourself with 10 bands you’ve seen perform live. 1. The Fall 2. The Cure 3. Morrissey (and band!) 4. Jesus And Mary Chain 5. The Pastels 6. Radiohead 7. New York Dolls (no, not the full original line up) 8. Stereolab 9. My Bloody Valentine 10. Pulp

I’m taking Pornography. Still sounds unsettling, massive, and emotionally raw in a way most “dark” records never achieve. You can hear entire generations of alternative music trying to chase the atmosphere The Cure created on that album. #TheCure

That'll be the adverts on the Eurovision Song Contest which is shown on THE BBC, famous for not having adverts, will it, brainiac? (Yes, I know there's adverts on RTÉ, but it's not showing it because they're a bunch of pathetic fucking shamrock Nazis)

Just watched Interior Design Masters, they sent Jonni home! Disgraceful - Kier’s Britain.

They actually see politics in 2026 like this.

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

You can only pick one... THE SMITHS - THE QUEEN IS DEAD (The album track not whole LP) or JOY DIVISION - DISORDER What's it going to be?

So disgusted by this… Worked with Maureen in 2015 on a play, in Birmingham & London, & there were concerns for her safety even then. This abysmally foul & downright dangerous attempt to demonise & cancel her should outrage & sicken us all. Arts: SPEAK UP & OUT! RT 🙏

Friday..still in pub..new music discussion..what do u prefer out of these 2? Vote repost if yr not bust. The Unforgettable Fire Sparkle in the Rain

Totally Wired v This Charming Man. Do it now.

It was 51-49.

If I’m being honest, I’m feeling pretty down about my small business. I’m working so hard but it’s been very quiet. It’s bloody difficult at the moment. Please have a look at what I do and repost to spread the word. gailmyerscough.co.uk

Is 1985 the greatest year in album history? If you could keep only ONE of these albums and lose the rest forever — which survives? No ties. No hedging. One pick 👇 #NowSpinning #VinylCommunity #RecordCollector #80sMusic #PostPunk #NewWave #TheSmiths #KateBush #TheCure #TearsForFears #NewOrder #TomWaits #DireStraits #TheReplacements #JesusAndMaryChain

Today (24 March) is the anniv. of the Union of the Scottish & English Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland also became King James I of England (France and Ireland) Never forget: Scotland wasn't colonised by England (as the SNP claim) It was a Scottish king who united the Crowns in 1603 and it was Scotland that first called for a union with England (1690s), resulting in the Act of Union in 1707, which created Great Britain and a single parliament. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Who's music do you listen to the most out of these ....? Vote and repost if u can.