I suspect that they were trying to reference the ‘bright young things’ of the 1920s. I doubt anyone at M&S even considered that:

(a) that reference wouldn’t be obvious to everyone, or

(b) what it may seem like without the context.

Toads are actually a subspecies of frog, so they’re technically correct - even if by accident.

England - never been a line. The only thing I’ve ever had to wait for is for the bod manning the polling station to find my name on the list and hand me a voting slip. In and out in a couple of minutes.

It comes from bonehead, iirc - a boneheaded mistake.

I had a hunch that the original image would be Nyarlathotep related, aaaand:

I think someone’s been feeding them Call of Cthulhu game module plots. I hope they do Beyond The Mountains of Madness next.

The problem with knowing any amount of history is that any time anything happens you’re just like:

‘Oh. This again’.

It’s somehow both tedious and horrifying.

When your hobby becomes your job!

Parents would find their baby child had been replaced by odd beings who were almost but not quite human.

However strange appearances aside it was their behaviour that marked them out - changelings were said to be either extremely badly behaved - constantly crying and prone to violence, or at the other end of the spectrum strangely docile, often mute and seemingly unable to comprehend anything about the human world they had been left in.

https://www.hypnogoria.com/folklore_changelings.html

Yep, totally a brand new thing that hasn’t appeared throughout human history.

Wake up about 15 minutes before I have to be out the door. Just enough time to go to the loo, brush my teeth and chuck some clothes on.

If I give myself more time than I need, I just get sidetracked by something and end up making myself late.

I saw an early screening of that episode at a post-con event at a Star Trek pub in London.

When that scene came on a ripple of ‘FFS - really‽’ laughter went round the room, just because of how blatant it was.

Clearly they used methane.

Crowds of farm labourers during flood season, all lined up just waiting for their turn to fart into the balloon.

“The mudbloods are stealing our magic!”

That’s Fergus Wilson - frankly, I’d prefer the leech.

You joke, but crop milk is a thing:

Crop milk is a secretion from the lining of the crop of parent birds in some species that is regurgitated to young birds. It is found among all pigeons and doves where it is also referred to as pigeon milk. Crop milk is also secreted from the crop of flamingos and the male emperor penguin, suggesting independent evolution of this trait. Unlike in mammals where only females produce milk, crop milk is produced by both males and females in pigeons and flamingos; and in penguins, only by the male. Lactation in birds is controlled by prolactin, which is the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals.

I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.

(https://piped.video/watch?v=aY9GBl7UmVs)

I had a friend who moved from the US to the UK when she was about 10. We’d sit at her mum’s computer and play ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’, looking up the various clues in the Cyclopaedia on the bookshelf.

I think that was definitely the impetus - I first read about the changes in this article back in April: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/18/reddit_charging_ai_api/

The closing statement is interesting:

The spokesperson we talked to also wanted to make clear the Data API was still freely accessible for appropriate use cases through the Reddit developer platform; hopefully app developers and other small-scale operators won’t have any surprises ahead this summer.

I suspect they ran the numbers and started seeing dollar signs - they don’t care about the third-party apps (which don’t make them any money directly), they’re just trying to cash in on Microsoft etc.

I have a sneaking suspicion they’re going to end up back-pedalling, but it will be too little, too late.