Ryan Shirlow
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ryanshirlow.bsky.social
Ryan Shirlow
@ryanshirlow.bsky.social
5.4K followers 4.4K following 8.5K posts
Irish 🇮🇪 in Yorkshire 🏵️ Fortean Times writer & PhD student, study folk music 🪕 & folklore 🧚 Also ❤️old 🚙 cars & homebrew 🍺 Dad to 2 wee girls Music on Woodford Halse and Fenny Compton https://ryanshirlow.bandcamp.com/
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The shitter it all gets, the more I’m going to post about mandolins and fairies.

That’s it, that’s the plan.
Reposted by Ryan Shirlow
It's impossible to play the hurdy gurdy without making it your whole personality. No one is a casual hurdy gurdy player.
There was mention on the BBC of a longer route via Turkey, Greece and Serbia.
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this is what happens when everything is in the cloud
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Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage
Lee Wrangler still make some 100% cotton jeans but you have to doublecheck every cut and colour on their website.
Wasted so much money on stretchy jeans - they never soften, they always feel stiff and sweaty. Finally found a 100% cotton pair from Lee Wrangler - miles better.
Twice this last month I’ve returned products that were advertised as 100% cotton online but which were labelled as 95% or less upon arrival.

I wouldn’t care but they look and feel shit - stretchy shapeless and scratchy / sweaty. Infuriating.
A lot of generic cheap clothes on the high street have stayed the same price but the quality has become appalling.

In particular 100% cotton is now very rare to find.

Growing percentage of cheap and scratchy plastic “elastane” in everything. And not always advertised clearly either.
special FX looked so much better when your mate videoed it off TV
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I am doing this again at Bard Books in London on the 28th and Read on Sea in Leigh on Sea on Halloween if you want to catch me
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Fourteen half hour episodes per year. Stop trying to chase the Game of Thrones audience. Make it all rather jolly and scary and lacking in laboured attempts at significance. Ditch the American style showrunner nonsense.

And get Shearsmith and Pemberton in as lead writers.
It needs a team that got into Who with Eccleston/Tennant/Smith - someone under 30 who will appeal to all the fans who aren't middle aged men moaning about it on the apps. Get an experienced showrunner to shepherd them, but let it be a crazy hyperpop explosion or whatever that makes no sense to me.
If you do get the chance I thoroughly recommend hearing Ian read from the book’s notes, as he did at the London Fortean Society on Thursday.

He also covers some of the cases that were too gruesome to make print!
I got my lovely copy of Ian Simmon’s new book from the man himself this week.

Perfectly sized to slip into a jacket pocket, or between two rolls in the downstairs “library.”

@iansimmons1960.bsky.social - where can the good people order one online?

#hauntedlondon
Reposted by Ryan Shirlow
Reposted by Ryan Shirlow
This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted.

It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed.

The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.
I used to really love Easter eggs, looked forward to them every year - then one year they all tuned utterly tasteless, like joyless brown cardboard. I thought it was covid but no the cocoa mass was like 18%
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when was the last time you heard someone mention NFTs?

gotta remember to savor these little things
THIS also with allergens or the dreaded “may contain”
it used to have a really famous goth shop
Oh Spitalfields has really changed in twenty years, not sure for the best. Bit “up market” now.
first episode throws you off the scent - you think it’s gonna be one thing, but it really isn’t - worth sticking with it
I read he was trying to crowdfund a concluding movie, but I guess there was insufficient interest to get it off the ground.