I can tie my tie all by myself (Week Notes, 6-8, 2025)

Last weekend (edit: 3 weekends ago), we went to a family party with a dress code that was as exacting as it was eclectic. My response involved a velvet tuxedo jacket and a bow tie. I first wore a tuxedo, and a bow tie, in 1996 but I've only ever owned a clip on. The one time I was required to wear a real bow tie was as a groomsman at a wedding. Not one of us could tie the fucking thing, but luckily the very awesome wedding photographer Lee Allen put down his camera and sorted us out.

I decided to take the leap and get a real bow tie, but I didn't have a grown up in the room to help me. YouTube, obviously, came to the rescue but I had several false starts. This was the video that finally made sense, and now I feel like a real adult at last:

Cluedo

Let's make a quick fly past on something from 2009: @cluedo. This was a game we played for a few weeks on Twitter. It involved trusting a totally open community, not really caring about that trust being broken, and being a bit wide eyed and giddy about all of that.

If you were chronically online at the time you'll immediately recognise and feel a nostalgia for when this sort of thing happened, if you weren't, ask your parents about when social media was fun and take a look at this:

How to play @cluedo

@cluedo is a twitter based guessing game. The idea is simple: test your powers of deduction and your knowledge of twitter-folks by working out who is running the @cluedo account. To pla…

theplanJon Hickman

Slow Horses

"Now a Major TV Show" as they say, the Slow Horses novels (or more accurately, I believe, The Slough House novels) by Mick Herron are great fun, and I've just finished reading them all.

I've seen all four series on Apple TV, and am a TV-first-Book-second fan. The transition went really smoothly. There are changes from book to TV, there always are, but there aren't any changes that make me mad—they're done well and for the right reasons, and I have complete trust in each incarnation to continue to be complimentary and a lot of fun. I also expect both will continue to deliver an occasional gut punch (one twist toward the end of the current cycle of books made me gasp out loud in a coffee shop, and I realised I had my hand over my mouth).

I started reading the books while I was on holiday at the end of October, having grabbed a mint copy of book one (Slow Horses) from the charity shop. Sat in my holiday apartment, I had to get book two (Dead Lions) as an ebook. When I got home completed the run in a few months thanks to the magic of the library service, for which I am particularly indebted to Birmingham's inter-library loan system. Support your local library, folks.

If you decide to read the books, be sure to pick up the novellas too. These sit between main books (and TV series) and introduce various people who come into the main arc later on (J.K. Coe, who debuted in the most recent TV series, makes his debut in the short story The List). The first few novellas are actually a continuing story. The way the novellas are all published is a little confusing as they are sometimes shipped together (I found Standing by the Wall tucked in the back of a copy of Bad Actors, and the volume marketed as The Drop includes the story of the same name, as well as its precursor The List, but not its conclusion, The Catch!).

I needed to use several fan pages to piece together a reading order and so forth: this is probably as good a source as any. The new novel, Clown Town is expected this year, with a Q3 2025 release date.

Bins

Birmingham has a waste collection strike on at the moment. I've seen a bit of this sort of thing on social media: posts from councillors asking residents to do their bit by taking things to the tip.

"that will help" we're told? Help who? It will help the council as an employer by diminishing the impact of the strike on the services they're supposed to deliver. It will help the councillors because they look strong and because they don't like you moaning at them. It won't help you as a resident, and it won't help the striking bin workers. It's not scabbing as such but it's pretty adjacent.

• the strike is only affecting recycling, not the stinkier part of your waste
• the strike is mostly about worker safety
• if you're literally at capacity with your recycling, I would think a better option is to put some recycling in the general waste that is still being collected—unionised workers will collect it, and any extra demand for service caused by larger loads is something they can manage through other parts of their action, like work to rule

It is important to have solidarity with striking workers, always. Here's a song about bin strikes.

Homelessness in Birmingham

An emergency protocol has been in place recently to help get people off the streets during the recent cold snap:

We can house everyone when it's cold or when there's a pandemic. That means we can house everyone all the time. "The city has no money blah blah" ... "the money for this comes from central government whah whah". No. Choices are being made. I think they're the wrong ones. All I can really do about that is encourage you to donate to Shelter.

A history of "Gorton" font(s)

This is a lovely long read history about a family of fonts, how their letters came about through the machines that made them, and how they spread. Unfortunately it's somewhat unbalanced by a weird thread of NYC-exceptionalism—Fonts! Visual culture! The urban environment! Only in New York, Baby!—that starts with the headline, and continues through the whole piece, but if you can background that part it's a wonderfully rich tale that's actually more about Britain than America.

The hardest working font in Manhattan

A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.

Marcin Wichary

Signup spam protection on Ghost

At the start of the month, we added a domain blocklist to Ghost, which allows site owners to block new subscribers at the domain level.

Signup spam protection

Recently, many publishers have noticed an increase in bulk signup-spam from SMS services such as txt.att.net – leading to large numbers of fake member accounts being registered on their websites. On Ghost(Pro) we proactively monitor and block spam signups like this automatically as a part of our managed

ChangelogTeam Ghost

Some platforms deliberately allow fake signups through because they make growth charts go up and to the right 📈 but at Ghost, we believe in quality over quantity. Subscriber growth isn't worth much if the subscribers aren't real!