The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

Introducing @towns.satyrs.eu

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Hello! If any of my (beautiful and sexy) readers are on Bluesky, i thought they might like to know that i’ve made a bot on there. It’s called @towns.satyrs.eu, and it posts a random British/Irish town (or village, or hamlet, or city) on the hour, every hour, give or take a few minutes. Like so:

Screenshot of a Bluesky post showing a town name (with Welsh translation), its coördinates, and a four-picture grid showing a satellite image and three more boring photos

It’s inspired by the inimitable (okay, highly imitable) @townsusa.bsky.social, which does the same thing but for American towns. Here’s how i made it, in bullet-point form:

  • Place data
    • From the moment i had the idea, i knew i wanted to use historic counties as the basis, rather than local government areas or the post-1974 bastardisations. I thought this would be a big hurdle — but, thankfully, the most comprehensive permissively licensed database on British place names out there, the Gazetteer of British Place Names, is maintained by none other than… the Association of British Counties! So that was easier than i expected.
    • The Irish government maintains its own official dataset of population centres, including both Irish and English names. It’s a bit thinner than its British counterpart, but it serves nicely enough for our purposes. (I had wanted to use Logainm.ie, the even more comprehensive dataset of Irish-language place names, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of download button anywhere… alas!)
    • For crown dependencies and overseas territories, i scraped data from OpenStreetMap using the Overpass Turbo API. It comes with its own bespoke arcane query language, but thankfully it’s 2026 and you can just get your friendly local server farm to write your queries for you instead of learning it yourself for questionable future gain.
    • OpenStreetMap also sourced most of the Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and Irish place names for the UK, where the ABC’s gazetteer was frustratingly thin on the ground.
  • Pretty pictures
    • The satellite images are sourced from Mapbox, whose API has a very generous free tier if you can stomach giving them your card information.
    • Wikimedia Commons, incredibly, lets you search images by geographical location. The bot asks for the fifty nearest photos in a one-kilometre radius, then picks three from that list at random. (This avoids naïvely picking the three nearest and thus ending up with three pictures of exactly the same thing.)
    • Descriptive alt text is generated for the above by Google’s Gemini 3 Flash. At about a fifth of a pence per post — £17.50 per year, otherwise put — i’m hoping it won’t burn too much of a hole in my pocket.
  • Posting
    • Posting goes through Bluesky’s native ATProto API, whose documentation even starts with a helpful tutorial for setting up your first bot. That’s nice of them.

Anyway, that’s all. Enjoy, and do give the bot a follow if you wish!

eutechnia (noun)

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Nasa poster depicting a couple reclining on a green, verdant futuristic Earth: “Your Oasis in Space — where the air is free and breathing is easy”

The Amish are not a people known for their love of the newfangled. They are deeply wed to their traditions, keeping to themselves, keeping the old ways alive, and shunning any sort of Engliſche imposition on their material culture. But there is one technological innovation which even the most stringently conservative have accepted:

A chart showing the uptake of technology by various Amish subgroups. 6% permit tractors. 40% permit mechanical refrigerators. *97%* permit motorised washing machines.
Via Wikipedia

The washing machine may be the most revolutionary invention in human history. (At the very least, it is the most revolutionary in women’s history, and 50% ain’t bad.) We do not often think particularly much of it today; when we do, it is usually because it is making too much noise, broken, or otherwise inconveniencing us. And yet! Think of all the hours saved — the gruelling days of hauling heaving buckets of water, scrubbing down with fat, keeping watch over boiling tubs… To quote the statistician Hans Rosling, on his mother’s first time using the machine:

My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, ‘Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.’

This is the fundamental beauty of a technology applied correctly. It is deskilling as liberation. The liberation of one’s time, the liberation of one’s energy, the liberation of one’s mind to think about things other than merely staying alive.

Over the years, so many of these improvements, big and small, have shaved the drudgery, toil, and pain from our lives. As i write this paragraph, i am taking a sip of water that i can be reasonably sure is pathogen-free, with ice cubes which came from my electric freezer rather than the Arctic. A recording of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” is playing through my headphones, on demand.

Rarely do we truly appreciate these facts. Once a technology has embedded itself thoroughly enough into society, it becomes just another part of the scenery. “Hasn’t that always been there?” But sometimes, i’ll be out on a walk, and i’ll see a power pylon, and i’ll think — god! What a beautiful world we live in! What a great, bounteous planetary network of which we are all a part! For a moment, the spirit of Boris Yeltsin at a Texan grocery store possesses me, and my head begins to spin.

There is no name for this hyper-specific emotion. In the spirit of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, i thought i might coin one.

This is eutechnia: the dizzying awe at all the technological progress of all of human civilisation that has brought you here, an appreciation for just how much better the average life is today than the past, and a deep reverence of all the interconnected systems that keep it afloat. In an age of pessimism and malaise, we could all do with a little eutechnia in our lives.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume LXIX

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“Song from the perspective of a ransomware virus” has to be up there with “Song from the perspective of a child’s bedroom nightlight” in terms of the great musical points of view, right?

Chærete again. I’ve been reading Snow Crash for the first time recently, and it’s absolutely rewired my brain. I suspect i shall have more to say on it when i finish it — in which event you’ll be able to find it on the brand new “Stuff i’ve {watched, listened to, read, played} recently” page, if you were wondering where those posts had gone!

Anyway. Some links for you all, for the sixty-ninth time.

Worried we’re going to run out of good, reliable Future Years. 2000 was a big blow, and we just lost 2019, 2020, and 2025 in rapid succession. 2050 and 2070 are in reach in our lifetimes. I don’t think anything starting with a 21- has anywhere near the same amount of aura

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume LXVIII

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Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume LXVII

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Welcome back! I’ve had a stress-filled month, and i just saw Disclosure Day and thought it was naff, but let’s ignore that and focus on the beautiful things of the world for a moment. Like these links i found you. Please enjoy each one equally. :-)

It is time to nuke Whitehall from orbit and start again

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It is the position of His Majesty’s Government that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are old enough to vote, old enough to join the military, old enough to drink, old enough to have sex, and old enough to pay income tax, but not old enough to go on the computer after the watershed.

They want to protect the children by boxing at shadows, but all they’re doing is trapping the sons and daughters of abusive parents tighter between the walls of their cruel homes. They are condemning the transgender child of a fundamentalist drunk to suicide instead of allowing them any outlet to discover themself, all on the back of flimsy evidence and moral panic.

And yes, the internet is shit sometimes. There are bullies and hate-mobs and vicious cycles and predators. But the approach that this country has taken has overwhelmingly been one that targets users, not companies, and only places them at further risk. Children, teenagers, and adults are made to submit sensitive biometric data to sketchy startups all so that it can get leaked out onto the open internet. Independent websites shut down under the burden of compliance, leaving only the faceless conglomerates able to operate.

They go to Australia to “fact-find”, only to find that teenagers are less aware of the world around them and get around the age checks with ease. They decide instead to “go further than Australia’s”, seeing that the problem must be that they have not placed enough restrictions on their country’s young citizens, and enact an infantilising curfew on seventeen-year-olds — the very demographic they are trying to court to vote for them! — whose extent would make China blush. And the media laps it all up, because they’re thinking of the children, and nobody who thinks of the children could ever be too restrictive of civil liberties.

All the while, the world’s first trillionaire stokes pogroms from his chair on his personal echo chamber, Facebook does away with any pretence of fact-checking, and the Americans cut off AI access to anyone who’s too forrin. But doing anything about that would require effort, thought, investment, and a functioning set of vertebræ.

I hope, dearly, that the NSPCC, and everyone who agitated for a censorship régime to “protect the children” that will do anything but, can never look themselves in the face in the mirror again. Peter Thiel is laughing at us from hell.