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mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Mike Ashmore
@mp-ashmore.bsky.social
230 followers 1K following 82 posts
How do you do?
Please don't hold this nonsense against anyone else.
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mp-ashmore.bsky.social
It _really_ wants to sell me that single legged doll. But also, some Wrestlemania figurines and...I think... an endoscope? Christ.
Facebook Marketplace preview again, this time: four Wrestlemania action figures in a miniature ring, a purple-cased smartphone on a matching purple background, the single tan leg of a baby doll, and what look like an endoscope but is hopefully just an 'illuminated inspection lamp' or something.
November 7, 2025 at 7:52 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
For the record: never bought a thing off Marketplace. Does not stop it trying to pimp me stuff according a set of defaults that must be, at best, 'boring middle-aged weirdo'
Facebook Marketplace preview again, the four squares showing: very inexpensive guttering, a rain swept stretch of decking, an uncannily realistic baby doll's face and the front door of a house, but not attached to a building.
November 7, 2025 at 7:39 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Phone clear-out time, and the uncomfortable question 'WTF have I done to my Facebook marketplace algorithm?' just loiters there awkwardly, unable to make eye contact.
Facebook Marketplace, showing the old four-image preview. This time the pictures are: the bloke from Wheetus, a baby chair, some metal pails of fried chicken and the single, tan leg of a baby doll. I think.
November 7, 2025 at 7:30 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Three hours later, the Anti camp has grown a bit. Kudos to whoever got the Royal Standard off Temu, you win the flags. The other side from this, past the dozen coppers, there's a fair sized Pro crowd with a Palestine flag, a Miners Banner and a rival PA system.
The back end of a small crowd of Anti migrant protestors with British and English flags and some other more obscure ones. There's a royal flag, but it's only printed on one side so there's a real chance it's a sheet or something.
September 6, 2025 at 12:50 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Cool, the *frantically consults Wikipedia* Knights Templar have turned up. In case there are pilgrims? Needing an escort to the Holy Land? I am not familiar with this particular cosplay.
Two St George and one Templar flag outside the old Laying in Hospital in Newcastle city centre
September 6, 2025 at 8:52 AM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
It's the Weekend on Bridge Street which means it's Newcastle's anti-refugee protest time. There's a 'hotel'* down the street so this is going to get busier later, but TBH It's all looking a little quiet. One determined Anti already out with flags set up but nary another soul about.
Bridge Street,Newcastle, looking quiet. One long protest has strung up some England flags on one side of the square.
September 6, 2025 at 8:19 AM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
I half-heartedly dusted, oiled and re-ribboned this key-jamming cantankerous bastard of a typewriter and now the kids are looking at me like I'm a time-traveller. Which, to be fair, being very old, I sort of am.
A typewriter, half heartedly polished up and put on a shelf. For typewriter nerds: It's an Imperial Good Companion Model T.
June 30, 2025 at 8:24 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
This was a pay-day guilty purchase, so I'm happy to report that Simon Roy's 'Habitat' is really, really good and *everso slightly* lunatic.

#booksky
The front page of Simon Roy's 'Habitat' comic, with a loinclothed tribesman fleeing across on the leg of a giant robot, backed by space-ships, astronaut-suited characters and a threatening looking exoskeleton.
June 2, 2025 at 4:49 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
These beauties are from Sunderland University's Glass and Ceramics Department's 'Dry Run exhibition', the 21st and final, courtesy of the fallout from the slow collapse of the Glass Centre.
Anyhow, all good stuff, all free at the Shipley in Gateshead.

#DryRun
#ShipleyArtGallery
'Swim' by John Dean. A large ceramic vase shaped like a shoal of fish swimming in tight formation. 'Greenhouse Plants' by Yanjie Gao. Strange but beautiful frosted glassware pieces, shaped like a cross between a bon-bon jar and a deep-sea jellyfish.
May 31, 2025 at 4:58 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
A friend persuaded me to play this by calling it 'the Sims, if the Sims were survivalists who had to fight off giant scorpions'. Now that I've wasted a few hours on it, yeah...fair description.
The title page of the game 'stranded: alien dawn', with a group of space faring survivor types sit around a camp fire by the wreck of a rocket ship while space scorpions sneak up on them.
May 31, 2025 at 8:32 AM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
In among all the beautiful, poignant stories in this superb Cat Island documentary is a portrait of a vet who gets mauled by every ungrateful feral cat he touches. By cat number 20, I was gone. Five stars.
The movie poster for Cat Heaven Island, about a small semi abandoned island in Japan, with a picture of the feral cats who rule the place.
May 10, 2025 at 8:44 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Note to self: colouring-book rabbits should not watch 'Watership Down'.
A picture, cut out of a colouring book, of a rabbit with a thousand yard stare. Like it's *seen things*, man.
May 10, 2025 at 9:41 AM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Ladybird! A 7-spotter too. The true reward of never doing any real gardening is I can pretend it's all about the bug-life. Anyway, yadda yadda: ladybird.
April 16, 2025 at 7:02 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
The 6 year old's giant teddy bear has my exact energy right now.
Outside teddy bear lolloped on a chair, looking like a tired, drunk, middle aged man.
January 11, 2025 at 9:43 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Warkworth! Most Castle-y of all the Northumbrian castles. Right by the beach too, but it's November and I'm already cold enough, thanks.
The Keep and Bailey of Warkworth Castle, Northumberland, against a grey, cloudy Northumberland sky.
November 17, 2024 at 5:19 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Repost with a pic you have saved that you haven't found a use for.
A chicken with speckled black and white feathers, perched on a fence in a snowy coop somewhere. Someone has added small, pink, plastic dinosaur arms to the chicken, which now looks like a tiny veloceraptor.
November 14, 2024 at 12:32 AM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Halloween Question: Does adding googly eyes improve everything?

Halloween Answer: Yes. Yes it does.
A load of digestives biscuits - proper ones mind you, no knock offs- covered in what turns out to be white chocolate so they look sort of like mummies. A small kid is adding googly candy eyes to them, proving the point that googly eyes make everything better without any possible doubt or exception.
November 1, 2024 at 12:30 AM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
BIG good news update: we only went and bloody did it! DFMO in the UK on a compassionate access program, no American trek, £65k+ in the treatment fund (so far) for anything she needs. I'd say 'i don't have the words' but I *do*, they're just not *enough*.

#DFMO
#solvingkidscanceruk
#GNCH
Small girl holding two boxes of medicine in front of a rainbow-and-giraffes mural at the Great North Children's Hospital, Newcastle.
October 25, 2024 at 9:45 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
If you see this post, quote-post a bridge
October 23, 2024 at 4:31 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky
💙📚
#Books

#BookChallenge

Day 20
Joe Sacco's "Safe Area Gorazde". The cover is hand illustrated and yellow tinted. A convoy of trucks and armoured vehicles winds up a mountain road. They pass the shattered ruins of a village where the buildings are empty shells and the trees bare.
October 18, 2024 at 6:57 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky
💙📚
#Books

#BookChallenge

Day 19
'Q' by Luther Blissett. On the cover, a woodcut figure of Death, playing a fiddle, steps out from the centre of a typeset letter Q.
October 17, 2024 at 7:37 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky
💙📚
#Books

#BookChallenge

Day 18
'Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable', Originally by E C Brewer, 20th Edition, edited by Susie Dent. A plain white background, with the title picked out in a strange idiosyncratic font compiled from a dozen different image a of miscellaneous things- from crowns, skeletons, lighthouses etc. It's deeply odd and also genius, you should take a look.
October 16, 2024 at 8:04 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky
💙📚
#Books

#BookChallenge

Day 17
Douglas Adams' 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'. The cover shows a brass plaque, engraved with the book's title, shining against a deep blue sky full of dark clouds.
October 15, 2024 at 6:15 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky
💙📚
#Books

#BookChallenge

Day 16
'The King's Revenge: Charles II and the greatest Manhunt in British History'' by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. A plain cover decorated with a bloodied axe.
October 14, 2024 at 6:11 PM
mp-ashmore.bsky.social
Context:
A *lot* of swans menacing a party of kids for their birdseed.
October 14, 2024 at 6:44 AM