John Bull
LightNews LightNews
banner
garius.bsky.social
John Bull
@garius.bsky.social
28K followers 1.1K following 23K posts
He/Him. Author. Historian (inc of obscure Military Holy Orders). Strategy streamer. Tech/Transport Strategist. Editor of @lonrec. Orient fan. Business/Writing: [email protected]. Agent: @pastpreservers.bsky.social
Posts Replies Media Videos
garius.bsky.social
Right. My bedtime. Will leave y'all with this nugget:

Slædepatruljen Sirius (The Sirius Dog Sled Patrol) is an elite Danish naval recon unit, operating solely in the Arctic and Greenland. They fought the Nazis there in WW2.

It's seen one of the psychologically toughest units to serve in, globally.
Unit badge showing an angry husky, over an anchor, encircled by a red belt. A Danish crown sits atop it with the word SIRIUS below.
January 14, 2026 at 11:22 PM
garius.bsky.social
Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart trying, but failing to look unassuming in his eye patch and ww2 uniform.
January 14, 2026 at 10:42 PM
garius.bsky.social
Okay as the original publisher is long since gone, here is a version of the (award winning at the time!) thing I wrote on the Pristina Airport incident back in the day.

Note Putin's role. Also worth it for this bit of sassiness by the Romanian Foreign Minister.

authory.com/JohnBull/Pri...
In frustration, the Russians decided to push their luck. They informed Romania that a transport plane would shortly be entering their airspace, permission or not. “You could do that.” The Romanian Defence Minister, Victor Babuic told Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov over the phone. “Of course we would be obliged to send up an aircraft to intercept your aircraft.” Babuic pointed out that in such tense situations, accidents often happen. He couldn’t guarantee that the pilot wouldn’t mistakenly shoot the Russians down. “Of course this is a crime.” Babuic said, apologetically. “He would be prosecuted under our law, and he would be sent to jail for seven years.” He paused for effect. “But he would also be a national hero.” He added, thoughtfully. The warning worked. No further attempts to reinforce the Russian contingent at the airport were made.
January 14, 2026 at 7:25 PM
garius.bsky.social
Get a Tortie, they said. Perfectly normal cats, they said.
Tortie sat on my shoulder
January 14, 2026 at 12:09 AM
garius.bsky.social
Artists/Mini painters: Reply with the worst brush you still regularly use.
Very crappy, bunged up old medium citadel brush.
January 13, 2026 at 7:31 PM
garius.bsky.social
🌷REMINDER TO MY DUTCH FOLLOWERS 🌷

You need to update the rota and say which day you can be assistant manager at Manchester United this month. This only works if everyone does their fair share.
image of bbc article with headline "Man Utd reach agreement to appoint Carrick as interim manager with Holland as assistant"
January 13, 2026 at 10:53 AM
garius.bsky.social
Got him his favourite food for dinner to celebrate four years since he came inside.

Hard to make out, but what you're seeing here is a black kitty sprawled out on a duvet against my arm. Belly up, legs out and snoring happily in a lamb kebab induced coma.
Grainy dark photo of kitty in a state of absolute bliss.
January 12, 2026 at 11:12 PM
garius.bsky.social
STREAM TIME.

The world is terrible. The weather is awful. Let's forget about it all for a bit and train some race-winning anime horse girls.

Join me for #umamusume and general natter! Also probably cats. twitch.tv/gariusthebrit #gaming
screenshot of umamusume showing anime horse girls running a race together.
January 12, 2026 at 4:36 PM
garius.bsky.social
4yrs ago today, we helped @catsprotection.bsky.social trap this tiny, hungry, limping feral kitty. He wasn't happy about staying in our spare room for a month after a vet visit.

But then he discovered duvets. And after we released him, i went for a nap. Woke up to discover he'd decided to move in.
emaciated black kitty on our drive, hoping for food. black kitty, now much healthier, stretched out with wide eyes as he discovers duvets for the first time. black kitty lying on duvet, snuggle up against my side, paws resting on my arm.
January 12, 2026 at 12:44 PM
garius.bsky.social
When you got beaten to the fluffy fort.
Black kitty looking outraged, beneath a surface where a tortie occupies a big fluffy donut
January 11, 2026 at 4:43 PM
garius.bsky.social
Important content
Black kitty curled up on bed
January 11, 2026 at 3:55 PM
garius.bsky.social
Druuuug cushhhhhion
Cat rolling around on the floor with a catnip infused cushion
January 11, 2026 at 12:20 PM
garius.bsky.social
"Okay. So i can explain..."
Tortie perched on shelf unit where she has clearly been trying to knock stuff off
January 11, 2026 at 12:12 PM
garius.bsky.social
"Guys i'm bored. Is anyone around?"

Random Saturday drinking is the best.
Three guys older than they'd like to admit jist enjoying beer and a shot
January 10, 2026 at 5:24 PM
garius.bsky.social
Haven't hit y'all with this in a while sooo... WHIRLING CANDY!
January 10, 2026 at 9:57 AM
garius.bsky.social
Good morning from him.
Black kitty curled up on bed
January 10, 2026 at 9:29 AM
garius.bsky.social
Meanwhile elsewhere in a whole different Scrivener file...
They were lurking near the perihelion when the convoy and its escort skeined into the system. It was the only thing that saved them. “Silent running!” Collingwood shouted. Inwardly, she was pleased with how quickly her crew reacted. They’d been drilling in the system for over a week, but many of them were fresh out of the academy. Nemesis was an old boat, rarely deployed forward. Perfect for blooding new officers in Her Majesty’s Star Navy. “This is no different from the drills.” She said calmly, moving along the narrow command deck. She noted which stations were under the control of recent graduates, trying not to be too obvious about it. One of them was Camo control. “How are we doing lieutenant?” Collingwood said, pausing behind the station. The young man sitting at it didn’t answer. He was fully focused on the screens in front of him. “Lieutenant?” She said again, slightly more forcefully. “Sorry ma’am!” The junior officer said, glancing up suddenly, wide-eyed. “I was just-” She cut him off. “Lieutenant. Focus please. Report.” “Silent running confirmed. They can’t see us, ma’am.” Collingwood smiled, wryly. “I guessed that lieutenant, on the basis that there aren’t a number of destroyers already powering towards us from the edge of the system. What I need to know is at what point that situation is likely to change.” The reality was that Collingwood already knew the answer to the question. She’d seen the screens in front of him and already parsed them. But she needed to know that he understood what they were saying, if she was to rely on his judgment in the critical minutes or hours ahead. HMS Nemesis was a ‘stalker’. In starship terms, a spiritual heir to the submarines that had prowled earth’s oceans a century ago, back before humanity had discovered Skein drives and interstellar travel. She was designed to strike silently and lethally, but that came at a cost. She was too small to carry heavy armour, and the spaces in her hull that would, in other ships, have been taken up with plasma field generators were instead the home of her giant heat-sinks. It was those heat-sinks, that were critical both to her lethality and her survival. The easiest way to detect a ship moving in the vastness of space was by the heat that it put out. Everything - from life-support systems and engines to sublight drives - generated heat, making most starships glow like stars in the vacuum. As a result, your average ship - civilian or military - was visible from vast distances away. Stalkers were different. When they were running silently, they took all that heat and stored it up in their heat-sinks instead. Right now Nemesis was as thermally invisible as it was possible for a ship to be and would remain so for as long as she retained the capacity to store up her heat. That left her free to attack other shipping with little, or even no, warning. Or to hide from bigger and better armed ships. You can’t shoot at something you can’t see. “Oh… right. Yes ma’am.” The young lieutenant replied, turning back to glance at his screens again. “Well, we’re thermally cloaked, and close enough to the sun that I don’t think they could have spotted us when they skeined in. Worst case we’d have just looked like a burst of sunspot activity against that backdrop.” Collingwood nodded. “Occultation?” She asked. Occultation was the second major threat to a stalker. One of the first things drilled into trainees at the academy was that space isn’t black. It is a network of stars and interstellar features that can be used both to navigate and to spot things that shouldn’t be there. A ship moving across the face of an interstellar object, even a distant star, would cast a shadow or block the view of it temporarily. So the easiest way to detect a ship that was masking its heat was to use astronomical sensors to spot errors in the star-field - so-called ‘occultation’. “Low risk, Commander. The star-field density here is pretty low.” “And yet I see from the boards that you’ve already fired up the camo. Explain.” The Nemesis was equipped with an active camouflage system to try and compensate for occultation. A vast network of holographic emitters built into her hull that would try to project an accurate view of the galactic plain behind her, from any direction, when active. In theory, this rendered her almost immune to occultation but the system wasn’t flawless. If the celestial backdrop was complex then it could struggle to keep up with all the changes, particularly if they tried to move at any speed. It was also energy-intensive. Energy that generated heat that then needed to be sinked. Standard procedure was therefore not to activate it as part of silent running unless the enemy were close, the ship was manoeuvring or a specific order had been given. “Ma’am! I…” The young lieutenant stammered, then seemed to catch himself and started again, more confidently this time. “The sun may have masked our thermal signature ma’am but all it would take is a flare or surface distortion and we’d stand out. Like, really stand out. So when you shouted ‘silent running’ I… I made a judgment call.” “And it was the right one.” She said, patting him on the shoulder. “Good call. Well done, lieutenant.”
January 9, 2026 at 6:08 PM
garius.bsky.social
We continue.
“Right. So that giant escalator at Angel says ‘fuck off. I’m done with this.’?” Jas asked. “What do you do? Set it free so it can spend its days roaming the vast plains of Argentina?” When Florrie didn’t answer straight away, Jas’ eyes went wide. “No. Seriously. Fuck off. Now you are fucking with me.” She giggled. Florrie laughed. “It’s not quite like that.” She protested. “There’s a facility out in Kiruna in Sweden. We share it with Storstockholms Lokaltrafik. It’s quite cool actually. There’s mood rooms, lots of space for roaming and… and I’m getting distracted. Forget about that for now. Cutty Sark. You wanted to know about Cutty Sark.” “Oh I am absolutely not forgetting about the retirement home for old escalators and we are so not done with that topic.” Jas interrupted. “But please do continue.” “The issue at Cutty Sark is that, like Holborn, the station sits at a point where reality is particularly weak and minds overwhelming. It’s an issue in Greenwich in general. Too much history round there. Take a guess: how long do you think it is before an escalator at Cutty Sark becomes sentient, post-installation? As a clue, the network average is about nine years.” “Hmmm...” Jaz mused. “Six years?” “Try six months.” “Bloody hell!” “I know.” Florrie sighed. “So at Cutty Sark, the Enigmatic Engineering department had to get creative. If you can’t stop the escalators becoming sentient, you might as well just hire sentient escalators to begin with. So that’s what they did. They went out to Kiruna and asked if any of the retirees were bored and wanted to do something useful. A few agreed.” “And that,” Florrie said, lifting her pint glass, “is why the escalators at Cutty Sark are always fucked. Because there’s only three of them and they’re all volunteers. Anyone who’s worked with volunteers knows that they’re generally lovely people, but can be a pain in the arse to manage. So it is at Cutty Sark. Every morning the station staff arrive to find that the escalators have rearranged themselves again, or have decided they’ll only go up, not down, that day. Or that they’re all taking the day off. Nothing the staff can do about it. They just have to put the signs out and the relevant barriers up quickly, before the pax arrive.” Florrie drained her pint of lager, raised her eyebrows and waggled her glass at Jas expectantly. “Oh shit, definitely. Stay there.” Jas said when she’d finished laughing. “We are so not done with this night yet.” She manoeuvred herself out from behind the table. “For a start, you need to tell me more about the Swedish retirement home for grumpy escalators.”
January 9, 2026 at 5:57 PM
garius.bsky.social
So I've discovered is my solution to writing is I actually need to be working on three different fiction projects concurrently to make progress with any of them. Which is...

I mean don't ask me what that means about my brain but hey. Expect random extracts from all three this year.
“Okay. The escalators at Cutty Sark DLR. Definitely some mystical shit going on there.” They were sitting in a basement bar on Hanway Street, tucked into a sofa-lined alcove under the stairs. Florrie had promised Jas that she’d answer any questions she had about the work of Unforeseen Issues, but only if the sergeant agreed to buy all the beer. “Oh God.” Florrie sighed. “Yeah. Escalators.” She took a sip of her pint and leaned back on the sofa. “So, the human mind is a powerful thing. More powerful than we understand. The way we think about things affects those things, particularly when they’re inanimate and there isn’t another mind pushing back.” “I know all this already.” Jas said. “Yes, but you really have to understand just how major those effects can be when a lot of people think the same thing.” Jas laughed and pulled up her shirt, revealing her heavily-bandaged side. “What? You mean like a sudden influx of Nazi dinosaurs with automatic weapons? Trust me. I get it.” “No! Well yes, kinda, but also no.” Florrie replied. “That’s a weakening of the barriers between dimensions. This is different.” “Different how?” Jas asked, as she lifted her own glass to her mouth. “Escalators are alive.” Florrie waited for Jas to finish coughing beer out of her nose. “Fuck offffff.” The soldier replied when she regained her ability to speak. “You’re taking the piss.” “I’m not!” Florrie protested. “Okay, let me explain. Escalators are complex pieces of machinery and the ones we install on the Underground are designed to last a long time. We’re talking decades. “The problem is that pretty much everyone who regularly uses a station ends up anthropomorphizing the escalators. It always starts with something small. Maybe the down escalator from the concourse has a squeak that sounds like it’s moaning. Maybe the same escalator always seems to cause trouble and be out of service.” “Oh no.” Jas laughed. “I can see where this is going…” “Now imagine that going on for about ten years.” Florrie continued. “Every day. With thousands of people thinking pretty much the same thing. Eventually, that becomes reality. The Escalator becomes sentient and…” “I bet they’re always grumpy, aren’t they?!” Jas interrupted. “Not always.” Florrie admitted. “But mostly, yes. Because that’s how people imagine them to be.” Jas nodded, then leaned back on the sofa seemingly lost in thought. Florrie noticed the barman was trying to catch her eye. She turned to look and he waggled two shot glasses at her. She gave him a thumbs up. “Okay,” Jas said eventually, “so at the risk of getting all philosophical…” “Are squaddies allowed to do that?” Florrie interrupted with fake innocence, pushing a newly-arrived shot glass full of Jägermeister in Jas’ direction. She picked up the other one herself. “Fuck you. I have hidden depths.” Jas sniggered. They tapped the shot glasses together then downed them. “What I was going to say was: if an escalator becomes sentient, then how do you make it work?” “You can’t.” Florrie replied. She was impressed. It wasn’t often people grasped the implications of sentient escalators quite so quickly. “We’re not in the slavery business. Sentience is sentience. Personhood is personhood. Whether you’re squishy like us, or composed of gears. If you’re alive, you have rights. One of those is the right to refuse labour. End of discussion
January 9, 2026 at 5:53 PM
garius.bsky.social
You'll never be this comfy
Kitty in a fluffy donut
January 8, 2026 at 8:15 PM
garius.bsky.social
So apparently a certain guest from next door snuck in and went upstairs at some point today. There he hid under the folds of the spare room duvet.

Which is very cheeky on his part.
Nect doors cat half out from under the duvet, snoozing.
January 8, 2026 at 6:01 PM
garius.bsky.social
This is what we call "Facebook weather" because it's too scared to go to London, for zero logical reason.
bbc graphic showing heavy weather hitting a good chunk of England and Wales, except London for some reason.
January 8, 2026 at 5:52 PM
garius.bsky.social
Christmas tree put out for recycling.

Tortie now trying to work out what's different since she woke up from her nap.
Confused tortie looking at the space where a christmas tree was.
January 7, 2026 at 6:33 PM
garius.bsky.social
Porriiiiidge
Tortie eating leftover porridge from a bowl
January 7, 2026 at 9:50 AM
garius.bsky.social
Druuug cuuuushion
Tortie blitzed out with catnip toy
January 7, 2026 at 9:36 AM