Every ethical issue surrounding parents vlogging their kids’ childhoods for money is raised in Joscha Bongard’s debut, but it releases the dysfunctional tension too easily

When teenager Luca (Maja Bons) wants to watch the film of her birth, she finds it on YouTube. Same with the sweet, thoughtful chat her mum gave her about periods when she was nine or 10; it was filmed in the family’s podcast studio. None of life’s special moments go unmonetised in this satire from Germany, a horror story of family dysfunction. It’s a look at the dark side of the family influencer industry, raising just about every possible ethical question about parents vlogging their kids’ childhoods, and it’s impressively disturbing, up to a point.

Sixteen-year-old Luca is the only child of Stella (Bea Brocks) and Chris (Liliom Lewald), social media stars who make viral videos of their perfect-looking family life for their 4 million followers. They live in a beautiful, sterile minimalist home in the countryside, and we often watch them through CCTV cameras fitted in every room. Shrewdly, first time film-maker Joscha Bongard doesn’t portray Stella and Chris as monsters; they love their daughter Luca, who they affectionately call Nunki. But fundamentally they do their best parenting in front of the camera, all bright smiles and proud affectionate glances.

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This recklessly ambitious doorstopper follows the 16 days of England’s medieval uprising from a vast array of viewpoints, and in startlingly rich prose

AK Blakemore’s third novel tells the story of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when commoners of all classes – not only peasants, but merchants, servants, smugglers, and some local lords and officials – rebelled at the imposition of a poll tax and rampaged through southern England, burning records of debts, killing their oppressors and laying waste to their homes. The book closely follows the events of the rebellion’s 16 days, employing a vast array of points of view, including the young king Richard II, several of his courtiers, dozens of elements of the rebellious Commons, a porpoise and a runaway horse. The title suggests the novel’s portrayal of these events as an inevitable reckoning; a “doom painting” was a picture of the Last Judgment on the wall of a medieval church.

As a book of this scope must be, it’s a doorstopper. As any novel by Blakemore will be, it’s dazzlingly rich in lexical glamour, and this is likely to be any reader’s lasting impression of the book. Sometimes it feels as if the author is out to use every word in the English language in a startling, aestheticised, puckish way that expands both the word and the world. The result can be joyously silly. Who else would give us slugs that “blurb their elementary forms from out of the undergrowth to begin a dank and toothless festa”, or “lunar-brilliantined mud”? But there is also gravity and passion here, especially when she intimately imagines the lives of the commoners: “they rise, to fry eggs in butter and pork fat; they rise, to whet knives on scarred stone; they rise, to braid the manes of their draught horses; they rise, to count arrows; they rise, setting aside their glitchy dreams of hairy stars and blue-skinned devils; they rise, fearful and powerful, into the bright day.” The cheekily anachronistic appearance of “glitchy” in this medieval scene is typical of Blakemore’s method. All forms of language, high and low, archaic and modern, are here. Her use of detail to convey a historical scene is also extraordinary: the barber’s chair where “a crowd has gathered beneath the ribboned pole to watch the draining of a cyst”; the brewer with “a grotty beard, chlorotic with hops, [that] hangs down almost to his belt”; or “the horseflies waltzing over the liquefying flesh of severed heads”.

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I took him to university this weekend, and it reminded me of the exhilaration of suddenly having your own space, absolutely separate from your mother

When kids are small, and their expectations of an event diverge from yours in some important way, you feel terrible about it. You might be taking them to a play, and they thought that meant they’d be allowed to play, but actually it meant they had to sit still while strangers shouted things. You experience their disappointment as much as your own physical pain.

Then when they’re “adults”, your expectations diverge again. They thought you’d drop them at university and immediately leave, while you thought you’d unpack, and meet their flatmates, explore the city, and spin round a supermarket, then have a Nando’s, and maybe read a bedtime story, get chatting to the other parents and maybe all do karaoke? Well, then it’s time to manage your own disappointment, and the only thing to be said for that is that it’s way less bad than managing theirs.

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A long-distance walking route in the south of France devised by the celebrated land artist offers intrepid hikers an opportunity to immerse themselves in nature and art

At 69, I had never hiked with a backpack and I had no idea what land art was. Nonetheless, when my friend Jackie, a nature documentary film-maker, invited me to join her and her friends Wendy and Sasha on a hiking trip to Refuges d’Art in the mountainous countryside of Haute-Provence, I said a resounding “yes”. We would be sleeping alongside sculptures by the renowned land artist Andy Goldsworthy.

First, I watch Rivers and Tides, a documentary on Goldsworthy’s work, and discover he has built exquisite ice sculptures and stone cairns in my own country, Canada. His work seems to speak to an older part of the soul. Then, I start walking up hills, gradually adding weights to my backpack until I can comfortably carry 9kg (20lb).

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At first the mice were just a distant pitter-patter. But soon they had an unblinking confidence that they owned the entire house and all the food in it

Living in a nine-person house in Vancouver, Canada, far from my UK home, came with plenty of benefits. Cleanliness was not one of them. A dish left behind quickly multiplied and bins overflowed in little more than a day. I’m not saying the endless strew of disposable coffee cups was the cause of our year-long mice infestation, but it no doubt helped.

In the winter of 2023, one of my housemates began to hear the sound of creatures rattling around in the ceiling of her basement room. The pitter-patters grew louder and louder; others began to report sightings from across the house. It wasn’t long before I was waking to the sound of my bedroom bin rustling. I had to accept it: we had mice.

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Director Pepa Lubojacki’s heartbreaking film chronicles the lives of her brother as he struggles with drink and homelessness – and her own shame in the face of societal prejudice

Czech film-maker Pepa Lubojacki originally set out to make a film about pigeons. What fascinated the 39-year-old director was that the grey birds are clearly beautiful and highly intelligent creatures, yet human cruelty towards them is socially acceptable in the way it isn’t towards, say, crows or magpies. “You can spot kids kicking and chasing pigeons while their parents cheerfully look on,” she says.

The moral blind spot reminded her of the way that people looked at homeless people like her older brother and her cousins. “The public has learned to avert their eyes,” she says. “My cousin was declined care seven times with open wounds in the hospital, and finally, they had to amputate both of his legs.”

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William Meyers spent 25 years photographing New York – and noticed how small, everyday acts of civic engagement helped sustain the nation. He talks us through his favourite images

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President has been posting on Washington arch, AI and his ‘25 top achievements’ – the chances of an uplifting speech appear slim

The annual gathering of the United Nations general assembly has historically been a platform for US presidents to display their most serious face and a positive vision to the world.

From Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to John F Kennedy and Barack Obama, over eight decades US leaders have used the setting to expound on grand themes before a global audience at pivotal moments in international affairs.

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Exclusive: Collection’s 300,000 pages record lives of enslaved people in countries including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa and Trinidad

Nearly 4m records documenting the lives of enslaved people across 20 former British colonies have been made searchable online for the first time.

The records have been digitised and indexed by the genealogy company Ancestry, which has partnered with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.

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The issue cannot be avoided any longer. Andy Burnham and his chancellor must face the fear of a pensioner backlash, and find a fair solution

There is always something oddly unreal about party conference season. In theory, everyone is getting away from Westminster to better reflect on the state of the nation. In practice, the whole circus just briefly relocates to the coast, to live off warm white wine and gossip for three days, before coming back with a streaming cold. But this year, reality seems more elusive than usual.

Everyone knows hard choices loom, but everyone is frightened to make them. Every serious party needs billions of pounds to fund their promises, and everyone knows there’s an obvious place to find the money, but nobody wants to be the first to say so. And so a deferential silence shrouds the pension triple lock, whose future will be vigorously debated on the fringes and in private conversation this autumn, but less so on the stage.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Miffy_ has added a photo to the pool:

Miffy_ has added a photo to the pool:

Shot from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

niggyl :) has added a photo to the pool:

On the tide line, Binalong Bay, Bay of Fires, Tasmania.

Still going through the older files looking for frames that might have something to offer.

This with my first DSLR in 2012.

Nikon D7000, Nikkor DX 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6, 1/320th sec at f/9, ISO 100

Cranamanor13 has added a photo to the pool:

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has outlined an ambition to expand its datacenter fleet to 20GW of capacity, and chip that will help it get there. CEO Eddie Wu announced those ambitions today at Alibaba’s Apsara conference, where he delivered a speech that likened current AI applications to light bulbs, because electric light was an early application of electricity but the really important stuff came along decades later. He also compared AI to steam engines. “Steam and combustion engines were designed merely to do what horses and laborers were already doing: pumping water, weaving, and hauling,” he said. Over time, the CEO said, engines proliferated to the point at which “machine power already drives 99.9% of the world’s physical work.” The CEO thinks AI – which he prefers to call “Machine Thinking” – will one day do 99.9% of all cognition, and usher in various utopian outcomes. “In the future, every niche domain will have millions of AI scientists and domain experts constantly driving breakthroughs and tackling challenges,” he said, before asking his audience to imagine an AI charged with building a starship capable of reaching Mars. “For such an ultra-complex, long-horizon task, AI will break it down into tens of millions of subtasks, executed by millions of agents working non-stop until completion,” he said. “A human only needs to define the intent and the goal to mobilize massive intellectual resources.” Going large Alibaba Cloud , he said, has decided to play its part by mobilizing resources to scale its global datacenter fleet to 20GW. By way of comparison, commercial real estate outfit Cushman and Wakefield last week said it can see 37.7GW of datacenters currently under construction in the USA alone. Some of that will go to the Stargate project, which has promised to bring 10GW online by 2029. OpenAI is a member of Stargate and has promised to implement 10GW of Broadcom accelerators by 2029. Meta has announced plans to build a 5GW datacenter campus for its own use. In late 2025, Amazon said it added 3.8GW of capacity in the previous twelve months. We could go on but you probably get the idea: Alibaba Cloud is going to build a lot of infrastructure, but perhaps more slowly than its rivals – and may still end up with a relatively modest datacenter fleet. The company will, however, apparently fill its bit barns with China’s most advanced AI chip – the Zhenwu V900 Wu announced the processor in his keynote and described it as “the most powerful AI chip in China today, delivering three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890.” Apparently, Alibaba can build a single cluster packing up to half a million V900s, and the resulting machine will “power frontier model training and inference.” The chip comes from Alibaba’s T-Head semiconductor business, which has published basic specs describing the processor as possessing 216GB of memory and 1200 GB/s inter-chip interconnect bandwidth. Machine translation of the spec sheet explains the chip possesses the following qualities: Native support for FP32 through FP4, and optimized for cutting-edge AI models and AI application workloads; An improved Tensor Core arithmetic unit that significantly improves instruction precision in FP8/FP4 formats; Richer scaling factor formats and Block Size configurations under MXFP8 and MXFP4, which apparently make for more stable performance when running training and inferencing workloads. Wu said he expects “significant growth in the annual AI chip shipment volumes,” but didn’t say when the chip will go into production, or when Alibaba will make enough to power one of its giant clusters. The CEO also used his speech to announce that Alibaba has started training its next-generation model, Qwen 4, and has two successors on its roadmap that it expects will scale to five and ten trillion parameters respectively. Alibaba may develop those models using Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) – the technology that sees models design new models. “Currently, Alibaba’s Qwen team is exploring RSI and has made meaningful progress,” Wu said, before mentioning that the team plans to train models with the same number of parameters as the planned Qwen successors. One matter Wu didn’t touch on is where Alibaba plans to build its new datacenters. The company is China’s top cloud and has a colossal domestic market to address. Alibaba Cloud has also targeted growth in Southeast Asia and has presences in Europe and North America. New datacenter builds face considerable community opposition in all those locations, and Chinese tech firms are often viewed with even more suspicion than their US counterparts. China, meanwhile, is promoting construction of giant datacenters in the country’s west where renewable energy is plentiful and cheap. The Register would not be surprised if that’s where Alibaba does most of its building. ®

Weer voor Rotterdam ☁️ - 22-09-2026 07:15 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 16.3°C · Bewolkt ☁️ | Min 15.7°C / Max 21.1°C | Kans op neerslag 1%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 15.7°C, Max 21.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1029.1 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 10.8 km/u (3.0 m/s), richting: → 266°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 08:00: 16.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1029.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.9 km/u (2.2 m/s), richting: ↗ 227°
• 09:00: 16.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1029.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.6 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: ↗ 232°
• 10:00: 17.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1030.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.0 km/u (2.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 230°
• 11:00: 17.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1030.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: ↗ 230°
• 12:00: 17.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1030.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.0 km/u (2.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 229°
• 13:00: 18.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1030.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.7 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: ↗ 247°
• 14:00: 19.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1029.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.8 km/u (3.0 m/s), richting: → 256°
• 15:00: 20.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1029.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.4 km/u (2.6 m/s), richting: → 261°
• 16:00: 21.1°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1029.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: → 279°
• 17:00: 21.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 4%, 🧭 1028.8 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.2 km/u (2.0 m/s), richting: ↘ 331°
• 18:00: 20.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1028.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.8 km/u (1.9 m/s), richting: ↓ 356°
• 19:00: 20.5°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1028.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.9 km/u (2.2 m/s), richting: ↓ 6°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• woensdag 23 september: Min 15.9°C, Max 21.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 8%, 🧭 1024.3 hPa ↘️ -4.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 21.6 km/u (6.0 m/s), richting: ↗ 241°
• donderdag 24 september: Min 12.2°C, Max 18.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1023.8 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 11.9 km/u (3.3 m/s), richting: ↓ 341°
• vrijdag 25 september: Min 10.6°C, Max 20.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1020.3 hPa ↘️ -3.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 8.3 km/u (2.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 187°
• zaterdag 26 september: Min 13.7°C, Max 19.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 9%, 🧭 1019.4 hPa ↘️ -0.9 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: ↙ 63°
• zondag 27 september: Min 15.4°C, Max 22.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 5%, 🧭 1012.7 hPa ↘️ -6.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 13.0 km/u (3.6 m/s), richting: ↑ 175°
• maandag 28 september: Min 12.6°C, Max 16.6°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 6.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 26%, 🧭 1015.8 hPa ↗️ +3.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 7.7 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: ↗ 212°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 07:15): 16.3°C (Bewolkt)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 15.9°C (-0.4°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 8.3 km/u (2.3 m/s), richting: ↗ 223°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 15.1 km/h (4.2 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 72%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1029.6 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 18.8 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 07:27 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 19:40

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 31 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 11.9 μg/m³
• PM10: 18.8 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

De horecavakbeurs Rotterdam Gastvrij is voor veel bedrijven dé plek om nieuwe smaken en producten te laten zien. Ook AI speelt daarin steeds vaker een rol, zo blijkt uit een rondgang door Ahoy. Een voorbeeld is de AI-zelfscankassa, die naast tijdwinst ook een bijdrage kan leveren aan het personeelstekort in de horeca.