A tale of two tweets. The first, a news story tweeted by Glasgow Live:

A Glasgow bridge has been decked in brightly coloured post-it notes with messages which aim to help bring people back from the brink of suicide.

The notes, which appeared this morning (Monday), have been posted on the Squinty Bridge and on railings alongside the River Clyde between Glasgow Central.

Handwritten messages read: “You matter”, “Just coz you’re struggling, doesn’t mean you’re failing”, “You are strong” and “Do not give up. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

The second, a tweet by US trans support group CATS:

I recently started learning to play the piano. If it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, that means my neighbours will stop hating me in the year 2210, or 2114 if I practice a lot more often.

Getting good isn’t really the point, though. As TS Eliot rightly put it, it’s the journey that matters.

I like learning the piano. It’s fun, my tutor and I have a good laugh and week by week I get a little bit less shit at playing the piano. I’ll never be any good at it, but each time I make progress I get good enough to do a little bit more.

Right now, I’m doing a terrible version of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games and a terrible, basic chord version of John Grant’s Caramel. These are not difficult songs, I know, but until recently I was convinced they were impossible. Now, they’re achievable. I can’t do it now, but I know that eventually I’ll be able to play and sing Video Games without messing it up and do Caramel perfectly while honking into a kazoo for the synth solo.

Not only that, but it’s given me the confidence to write on piano too. We’re not talking piano symphonies here, but having moved from painstakingly programming keyboards one note at a time it’s enormously liberating to be able to actually play things.

I will never be good at this. But the list of things I’m good enough to play will keep getting longer.

In A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut suggested that “we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” Getting slowly better at something you previously found impossible is one of the most glorious forms of farting around I’ve ever experienced.

Neo-nazi poster boy Milo has posted a big rant to Facebook about how his career has hit the skids. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to read it without laughing.

There’s more to this than well-deserved schadenfreude, though. It’s yet more evidence that refusing to give vicious rabble-rousers a platform kills their careers. Of course it does. They built their careers using those platforms to abuse free speech and other people’s tolerance of extremist views.

We’re told that de-platforming white supremacists and other bigots makes them stronger and louder. But the evidence shows that it doesn’t. Milo’s the one mewling now; not so long ago it was the neo-nazi Richard Spencer. Infowars’ Alex Jones will be next.

It’s time once again for the famous XKCD cartoon about free speech:

There’s funny, and then there’s the kind of funny where you end up a crying. honking mess. Cris Shapan’s fake posters and book covers leave me helpless with laughter. His Facebook page is a joy.

What I love about Shapan’s work isn’t just the jokes, although the fake pulp novel Maelstrom Of Pee made me laugh so hard something important popped inside me. It’s the attention to detail. Shapan’s work is just extraordinary.

The fake advert above is on urban myth debunking site Snopes: it’s so convincing that many people have shared it online thinking it’s a real advert from the fifties. A similar thing happened with another of Shapan’s fakes, a foodstuff called Rolled Pig.

There’s so much joy and silliness in this stuff. It’s glorious.

What would it be like if some of the world’s greatest horror writers got together to pitch each other stories? Mike Rosen of Guttersnipe Comics thinks he knows.

I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes by quoting them here. The whole thing made me laugh like a drain (language NSFW).

I’ve been locked out of my Twitter account for a terrible, terrible crime.

No, not being a big old Nazi. Messing with the year of birth in my profile page. This, apparently, is a really bad thing and I can’t currently read anything on Twitter or see other people’s messages to me.

It’s been brilliant.

Being unable to access Twitter has made it clear that my relationship with social media is completely out of whack. I’m following too many people and indulging too many more, and the result is a firehose of fury with precious little of the funny cat pictures and dad jokes I signed up for. It’s become a massive time thief and a drain on my mental health.

I’m not quite ready to bin Twitter altogether, although I’m close, but assuming Twitter decides to let me back in again I’m going to massively reduce the number of people I follow – not because they’re bad people, because I don’t follow bad people, but because I’ve let myself fall into a situation where there are just too many people talking at once. I can’t hear myself think above the din.

I’ve been meaning to share this for aaaaaaages.

Harrison Bergeron, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

I read Harrison Bergeron when I was a mere slip of a lad, about 20 years after it was first published. It’s short and funny and beautiful and terribly sad, and I can’t think about the ending without crying.

It’s stayed with me ever since I first read it. It was the gateway drug that gave me a lifetime love of Vonnegut’s work (and his writing style, which I’ve shamelessly nicked), and like much of Vonnegut it’s eerily prescient: the things happening to the characters (I don’t want to spoil any of it) are like today’s social media distractions.

The story was published in one of those sci-fi anthologies, and it must have been a particular good one: it also featured the utterly terrifying Descending by Thomas M Disch, which I think about every time I descend into the Subway.

The Department of Work and Pensions is solving the problem of people being referred to food banks by, er, banning use of the word “referral” and ensuring Jobcentre staff don’t offer anybody food bank vouchers. Instead, they’re to be “signposted” and given “signposting slips” that can be, er, traded for food at food banks. The numbers are not recorded.

This means that if you file a FOI request asking how many people are being referred to food banks, the DWP can accurately say “none”.

What a wonderful world.