Jo & Kush (both from Liverpool UK) Winners of the 2026 BBC's Race Across the World and the £20,000 Prize. in which five teams of two race each other to reach various checkpoints in the shortest possible time over a 50 day journey...
Jo Diop and Kush Burman both aged 19, the pair were the youngest competitors in the 12,000km BBC TV adventure from Italy to Mongolia - taken without mobiles phones and on a strict budget and using only public transport (No Flights)
The friends have said they will use their shared £20,000 prize to invest in getting on the property ladder after both their mums had been renting.
Mr Ratcliffe, the headmaster of the school they attended in Liverpool, described the former students as "magnificent, young gentlemen", adding that "for both boys behind the scenes there's a mum who has sweated blood and given tears to make sure that they get everything they and other children in their families need".
"I think those mums deserve an enormous amount of credit and there's a lot for us all to learn from that kind of family unit."
The pair were praised by viewers for their mutual support during the two-month trip, which showed Kush's struggles after his much-loved stepdad Matt took his own life during the coronavirus lockdown.
Before the journey, Kush said he could get "very anxious" and viewers saw Jo provide space for him to decompress and - on at least one occasion - stay awake the night to let his friend get things off his chest.
Their support for each other throughout the journey was an example to us all...
The pair have been widely praised for their openness, including by politicians promoting healthy masculinity, with a former government minster saying: "There are nasty influencers we need to worry about, but men and boys need to see this....
"Being kind and looking after each other - that's real masculinity."
Sewing "a little bit" is one of the most useful skills you can possibly have proportional to how cheap and easy it is to learn.
So many of the items in our daily lives are sew-able. A simple needle and thread changes the way you think. When an item breaks, you no longer think, "I guess I must buy a new one..." Instead, you think, "I guess I must fix it..."
How many of these everyday items rest for eternity in a landfill, because of a simple break that a needle and thread could have fixed? How many excess items were manufactured to make up for the forgetting of the humble needle and thread...?
it’s so special to me that so much of fan culture is textual analysis for the love of the game. like thank god there are people in my phone who are also thinking about this thing i love so much that they are writing transformative fiction as character studies and setting clips of the show to music with theme-relevant lyrics and writing long text posts analyzing every line of dialogue like!! yay!!!
Kathryn Janeway done as That Picture of Katharine Hepburn. Maybe this is some more Killing Game stuff where Katrine is a dashing pilot during the interwar period idk
My favourite catchphrase from any fictional character ever is from Gregor Vorbarra (and his badass foster mum): "Let's see what happens."
which is a pretty mundane sentence. but it's a lot less mundane when it's coming from the emperor of three planets who once drunkenly "fell" out a window and ran away to accidentally work in construction, and is one of two people who can consistently outscheme Miles Vorkosigan. He has the kind of pent up rage that can only be amassed by a lifetime of sitting through meetings with the dullest people alive. He is a quiet, mild mannered man who itches to watch the world burn.
"Let's see what happens" is a signal that Emperor Gregor has switched into chaos gremlin mode. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
barbara wright was the perfect companion, you can’t change my mind
she’s smart, she’s compassionate, she tells the doctor to fuck off when he’s treating her badly, one time she drives a truck through a line of daleks, what more can you want?
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
What I love about T’Pol is that she is insane. But, instead of making her the black sheep of her family, they also take pains to establish that her mother T’Les is also just insane. This was not a one-off psychological quirk, she just comes from a family line of Vulcan girlfailiures.
The 2026 WIP Big Bang & WIP Reverse Bang Is Open For Sign-Ups!
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I'm tired of hearing about Young Kirk and Young Spock. I want a (good) show about young shithead Science Lieutenant Janeway falling in BFF love with Tuvok while on adventures together and there's ZERO ROMANCE. I MEAN IT. NO ENTERPRISE LOVE BOAT ALLOWED.
I'm talking ZERO love interests for Janeway as far as the eye can see. People of all genders keep flinging themselves at her but she refuses to let herself do anything more than have a pathetic wank because of her angst about Tau Ceti Prime. She channels everything into raw chaos bisexual energy with Tuvok just enabling her at all times.
T'Pel asking with pure Vulcan sarcasm if they had fun and in the middle of Tuvok replying that Vulcans only do their duty not have Fun, Janeway (still slightly hungover and wearing sunglasses) slings an arm around his shoulders and says, "SO MUCH fun. You should've been there, T'Pel. You should've seen the way your man risked it all to save my sorry ass from a sentient liquid people. We almost died again."
there's a 2-part season finale with time travel hijinks and fanservice cameos by both Kate Mulgrew and Tim Russ alongside their younger counterparts, showing that even 40+ years in the future these two are still BFFs and getting into Some Bullshit together
