Maybe I Need To Accept That I Simply Hate The Archers

Last week instead of links I shared thirteen small life changes/improvements I made in 2025 and will be sticking with in 2026.

1. Peter Watkins's strange and wonderful 1964 film Culloden is currently available to watch on BBC iPlayer. If you have access to it, I highly recommend watching it, as well as the making of documentary from 2006. It's a thought-provoking piece that presents a re-enactment of the 1746 battle between the British Army and the Jacobite rebels as a contemporary war documentary (Watkins was very inspired by 1960s Vietnam reportage). I've visited the battlefield monuments and site before, but from this I gained a deeper understanding of both the extent and horror of the British forces' crimes and how badly the Jacobite leaders handled the battle.
2. A handy printable year-at-a-glance calendar.
3. Lena Dunham's thoughts about her mum's style are very sweet.
4. A game where you guess which country a TV channel is from based on a random snippet of live broadcast. Prepare to have all your national stereotypes shattered!
5. An interesting essay that I think got a bit buried by December list season: The Strange Career of Joan Didion, Cop Hater.
6. Apparently we used to hate hedgehogs because they seemed... witchy.
7. Eve O. Schaub is growing a dress (she's spinning the flax now).
8. Thoughts on resting just to rest, rather than to be ready to over-function again.
9. Being really into keyboards (the kind you use for a computer) seems like a nice hobby.
10. Is performative offline the new performative online? I think it has been for years; I used to hate that because of my job I couldn't be one of those people who quit the internet entirely.
11. This is a fun interactive infographic that shows you the relative sizes of things, from a strand of DNA to a forest-sized organism that hangs out in Utah.
12. Katherine Angel explains why she likes The Archers. I've always blamed not my having English parents for my inability to listen to more than 30 seconds of it, but she grew up in Belgium and loves it, so maybe I need to accept that I simply hate it on its own merits.
13. How medieval people from different cultures understood the moon.