fakeman_pretendname

As said above - you're going to want to take it apart anyway and see what it's made of. You may be able to clean the fabric - but you'd need to know if it's glued or stretched onto a backing board of some kind first anyway.

I'd be inclined to replace it or take it to a framers for the amount of effort it may take. It wouldn't be an expensive job.

If you're interested in home repair options, if the fabric is stretched and pinned/stapled etc (i.e. not glued onto a backing board), you can try unpinning, then cleaning with any general water/mineral stain removal instructions for clothes etc - dabbing, soaking, saliva, detergent, vinegar, chuck it in the washing machine etc, then re-pinning it.

If it's glued onto a backing board, some of the cleaning might still work, but might be pretty impractical, and you'd perhaps have an easier time painting it.

You'd need a stain-blocking primer/undercoat otherwise the mark will just seep back through - then you might want a few very thin coats of gesso or other quick undercoat on it, then several very thin coats of waterbased whatever-you-like matt paint on top (no real difference in using household emulsion wall paint or the finest of artists acrylics). Multiple very thin coats will keep the fabric texture more visible.

I'd be inclined to say replacing it would be a whole lot less hassle :)

Very nice. Visually and technically brilliant.

Yeah, it's Federated with loads of cool places that are real, but you don't know them, they go to a different school.

Our silver cat is a huge fan of tummy tickles.

He specifically requests them, and he's certainly gone over ten minutes without any hint of wanting to stop, he just "supermans" his arms out one at a time, and sometimes drools a bit.

Cat tax picture:

Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).

Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.

At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don't remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of "the printer isn't working" "Linux has broken my USB pen" etc, and the fix being "remove the snap version and install the deb version". It caused a lot of problems.

If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn't use plug-ins, couldn't use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn't respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.

Snaps were fine for "aisleriot solitaire" or "calculator" (assuming you didn't mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn't need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.

Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn't ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.

I think it meant to say "Scrounger Guy Hands realises legislation loophole, which allowed him to steal billions of pounds of unearned money off the British Government and the British people, will be closed, leaving his company with a tiny fraction less of immoral profit, whilst still making billions in profit"

I totally agree, but it might be a pretty hard-to-argue Arts Council bid.

Also, if you're into the empty feeling of nuclear sadness, check out When the Wind Blows (1986) - it's from Raymond Briggs's graphic novel - who did "The Snowman" and that Santa Claus one amongst other family favourites. Surely a lovely, fun cartoon to watch with the kids!

WARNING: DO NOT ACTUALLY WATCH WHEN THE WIND BLOWS WITH YOUR KIDS (unless your kids are adults)

The tone and scale is quite different, but the overall themes or message certainly have a lot in common. Both worth seeing.

I can't remember The Day After as clearly as I can Threads, but I remember it was definitely worth seeing, though I feel like it had a little more of a film/plot/narrative/entertainment element to it, whereas Threads was just quietly bleak and undignified - a gritty soap-opera story in Sheffield, then everyone gets nuked and you see all your favourite characters as they piss themselves and their hair and teeth fall out from the radiation and then they slowly die from illness and starvation, then you watch a documentary style presentation of the tiny remainder of population, scrabbling in dirt, trying to find a still living plant.

Absolutely watch both - all humans should watch both at some point in their lives - but maybe not on a day where you want to have any fun or talk to anyone, or do much except stare into the distance in silence.

Yes please! Most of the streets near me have been dug up three or four times now, over the last few years, for new companies to put identical cables next to the other company's cables, because they don't want to pay the rental or whatever it is.

I'm sure the extra telegraph poles are even more annoying.

"The Darkness Out There" by Penelope Lively.

In short, a "nice old lady" tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.

I think it was there for the "the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy".