@arratoon

@BNorbury 'Disappointing' - that's it. Although that said, I enjoyed trying. Five months of watching over the plants like a helicopter parent was more interesting than five minutes running to the corner shop to buy some tomatoes. I shall keep trying! As you say, home-grown tastes good.

Tin of tomatoes for scale

I’ve been giving my tomato plants tender loving care since April. Making sure they get enough sun, enough shade, enough water. Protecting them from the wind. Talking to them. Here are the fruits of my labour. Of their labour. The full five-month harvest. Well, that'll get me through the first 11 minutes of the climapocalypse, I suppose. Once again, my balcony harvest reminds me how important farmers and communal food sources are.

@Pepijn Lovely composition and lovely Alt Text too

#SilentSunday

@Lkdc It would nice if it got a few more signatures before Sunday, right enough. Every signature is a signal.

14,147 people have signed the Danish citizen petition ’Get Rid of Palantir’ so far. The deadline for signatures is this Sunday. To be tabled in Folketinget (parliament), a petition needs 50,000 signatures. The Palantir petition won't reach the threshold. But over 14,000 people isn't nothing either. The petition to reinstate a beloved public holiday abolished in 2024 closes two days later and has 1,628 signatures. So at least the Palantir problem seems to be on the radar.

https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-22854

Clear stretches of path for kilometres, then this one fruit-bombed area under this one tree where a cow is feasting. This cow clearly has a Gary Larson Cow Tool hidden in the bushes that it uses to shake the fruit off the branches when humans aren’t looking.

@nic These stories seem to be coming quick and fast from all over the place. Not rare cases, it seems. In the story about the Kennys case, Tomás Kenny talks about booksellers he knows in Sweden and Germany who are experiencing this too.

@studiolo_rb Ah I see! Yes, there are surely other good, non-mega-corporation Kennys'es in different countries and we should support them all.

@rgarner Hahaha - now I'm imagining Brad twirling his moustache as he destroys books, except that would make him interesting which he is not.

@venetiana That doesn't sound at all absurd - that resonates! You and me and others I've talked with recently are all saying things like this - that the AI mess has made us more aware of non-digital pleasures - of our CDs, our hard-copy books etc. The older ones especially, as you say.

@studiolo_rb I don't need to 'go find' it, I don't need mail order from my local independent bookseller. I just walk in and buy the books myself in the shop while chatting to the nice people who run it.

If by this, you meant to direct me to buy locally, not shop online: I get English-language books that I can't get on the shelf in Denmark from Kennys. I buy Danish-language and other on-the-shelf books from my (equally excellent) independent family-run bookshop around the corner where I live.

@malte Very small, tiny little humans - sounds right to me, that's them. These small tiny tiny-minded mediocrities of humans doing this work as their job.

@j_g_fitzgerald They're great

@fgraver Ah Ennis! Kennys has an art gallery as well as the bookshop - well worth a visit and there are often special events, author talks, art exhibitions etc.

These miserable fuckers who work for these miserable AI companies, doing this miserable work. Miserable human fuckers, clocking into work to plan worldwide book-destroying raids, placing these veiled orders with bookshops, watering their office plant, picking collection points, signing a Happy Birthday! card for Brad, picking up the books, stopping for coffee, posting the books to the US, scanning them, signing up for office bowling night, ripping off the covers, destroying the books. Fuck them.

”Galway bookseller suspects 'scattergun' order is for AI”

"There was everything from History of the Caribbean to Rules of the Road to Internet Explorer for Dummies to books on health & medicine, just no particular genre and very strange."

'They believe they may be getting picked up at collection points in Europe & shipped to the US where so-called "fair use" policies make it legal to slice the spines. The books are scanned using the text to train AI, then destroyed.'

https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2026/0810/1587288-galway-books-ai/

For about 20 years since, any time somebody online asks ’can anyone recommend a bookshop that posts internationally?’, I leap in like an excited child to recommend Kennys. Without fail, other people leap in to add their own recommendations and reader’s love letter to Kennys, both the bookshop and the family and staff who run it.

Anyway.