Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.

Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it’s been- and that’s with 20gbs data, which I’ve barely used.

My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.

Well, shit. I just looked up the definition and never knew it was actually slang to refer to the lower class. My (low class) dad always used it as “idiot” and I never questioned it before. The more you know.

Don’t get me wrong, if it was the situation where I had to pick between Labour or Tory then obviously I would be forced to vote Labour. But fortunately I’m not in that predicament.

I had heard the opposite from local counting volunteers. I was told that the MPs are told how many spoiled ballots there were as that is key analytics to knowing how many undecided voters they failed to win over.

Maybe that’s not the case anymore and a spoiled ballot doesn’t have the same message.

I appreciate you taking the time to write all this up, though I am aware of all of it. I will vote SNP in a futile attempt to remove the Tories from my constituency, but Labour in Scotland are not the same as the rest of the Labour party. Their only identity here is “anti-SNP at all costs.” Hell, a bunch of their councillors were suspended for creating a coalition council with the the Tories as well.

They will always be the same party in Scotland, until they change their tact and start supporting progressive policies as opposed to “SNP are the devil and nothing else matters.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disillusioned to the fact that the SNP have many faults within their party. But they gave me free education, free prescriptions, and mitigate a lot of damage the Tories in Westminster try to force on the public. (Bedroom tax, as an example).

Labour are just tory lite. And 2019 may seem like a long time ago, but bare in mind this was still 3 years post-brexit referendum. There was still a lot of anger, and openly trying to convince your own constituents to support the Tories (the party they are supposed to be the main opposition to) in that time is still a massive breach of trust, in my opinion.

Hopefully a Labour Westminster government will happen, and will make positive changes, but considering Scotland only returned 6 of 59 seats as Tories in 2019, its not up here that needs convincing.

I didn’t expect much if I am honest, I wasn’t that politically engaged during that election. I took the time to read and appreciate the manifesto, went off to vote, then realised afterwards what you had outlined there. Again, fortunately it didn’t matter because my constituency didn’t return a Lib dem MP, but I was still pissed.

Witnessing Labour campaigning for the Tories sealed that decision for me for life. 100% fuck them, Red tory cunts.

Lesser of 2 evils when it comes to Westminster. But I won’t vote for them, and fortunately I’m in a constituency where Labour have never won, and have absolutely zero presence regardless. Their local branch building is essentially a shed.

Does it fuck. I am Scottish, not some Russian bot.

The Russians already won when they convinced the plebs to vote for Brexit to separate the UK the EU as they planned.

Indicating I would consider spoiling my ballot, then outlining detailed reasons as to why based on my local choices, should really tell you everything you need to know.

Peddled by disaster capitalists and Russian money/propaganda.

And now the Tories want to pull us from the ECHR, to tear away workers rights and further privatise everything to funnel money into their own bank accounts.

It’s damn sad there will never be a “we fucking told you so” moment, because the useful idiots that were used as fodder in this whole mess are too fucking thick to ever understand the gravity of it all.

I didn’t vote Lib Dem to end up with the fucking tories, which is exactly what happened. I’m not surprised their support plummeted after that.

I was a student at the time, but fortunately, I’m Scottish, so the student loans fiasco didn’t apply.

It’s definitely between Green and SNP for me I think. I’ll wait and see what the manifestos put forward but likely SNP will be the only option for getting the tories out anyway, once again.

I’m just tired and frustrated of doing this in every single election and having the rest of the UK shit the bed and vote Tory anyway. I’ve put a £100 bet on with a friend that the Tories will win again even though they’re polling real low. I just have no faith in the electorate to do anything but vote against their own interests.

My stance has been Tories out since the Cameron and Clegg love affair, I have voted on that basis ever since. I’ll likely vote SNP to get rid of them.

Not to mention SNP are the loudest advocates for PR in the UK, even though they stand to lose the most from it (by far).

Every spoiled ballot has to be counted and reviewed, a spoiled ballot is a “this is a person that took the time to turn up to vote and we didn’t manage to win them over.”

There is a massive difference between spoiling a ballot and just not voting.

Yep, SNP it is then.

Why are they so obsessed with this clearly unpopular policy? Just give up and move on. Come up with ethical alternatives? Or even a stricter border policy like other western countries have…

But of course, if they did that, then they wouldn’t be able to use immigration and foreigners as a scare tactic on their elderly demographic anymore.

Back when Boris resigned and the headlines said that the Tories would return single digit seats in a full wipeout, I made a £100 bet with a friend who was excited by the news that the Tories would win the next election regardless. I am that confident in the UK population’s obsession with shooting themselves in both feet. Hell I might even go and raise the bet.

Sure, those are good examples of negatives, but that is just the way of it. This happens all the time when new technology emerges. Just think about the audio industry, all of a sudden people could produce music from their spare bedrooms- jobs weren’t needed anymore. But the music industry is now far more saturated than ever as a result, as it is so much more accessible to people, without the need for specialist equipment and stacks of cash.

Not OP, But, Stephen Hawking could have kept his voice, as an example.There are probably lots of beneficial uses of this technology. Automatic TTS voice messages would be another 🤷‍♂️

A very long time ago, a large group of us had a night of drinking around 3 miles from our small town. With a drunken adolescent sense of mob mentality, a sprinkle of rebellion, and a bucket load of mindless teenage stupidity, we descended upon the town to cause some trouble. We wanted to put our stealth skills to the test, and devised a plot to separate into multiple teams of 4. The name of the game was Gnome Hunt, and the aim was a heist that would make Danny Ocean shit his pants.

We agreed on a time limit of 2 hours where we would rendezvous back at the threshold of the town, count up scores, and fade back into the rural night from whence we emerged.

Quickly, the game evolved from simple gnomes, as drunken brains decided larger scores would net more points, so why settle?

After the 2 hours had passed we all met up again with our prizes. We had no scoring mechanic, of course, so we just all decided “good game”, shook hands, and sauntered back into the dark countryside.

Left behind, on a wall at the entrance to a housing estate, was a glorious display of all sorts of garden ornaments, arranged in a way that would make B&Qs seasonal team take pause.

The following weeks were a blaze of entertainment. The local paper had a photo of the full display, and a piece written as to the mystery of it all. Locals played along, with “wanted” and “have you seen this gnome?” Posters put up around town. All in all, the town seemed to enjoy a good laugh at the whole thing. None the wiser that it was simply reckless abandon from stupid, yet polite, drunken teens.