My research for the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story has led me to try and figure out where the Metropolitan Police Service in London stores its firearms. It turns out this is information that the Metropolitan Police Service would really rather prefer I not have.
(I understand why this is the case. It’s just annoying.)
In the course of my research, though, I came across this video about the Met’s Specialist Training Centre, which provides firearms training to multiple police organizations within the UK. The video features, among other things, a member of the facility’s staff pointing to a barrel attachment on a revolver and calling it a suppressor.
My inner Ivan Chesnokov immediately started screaming. For those unaware: you generally can’t put a suppressor on a revolver and expect it to actually, you know, suppress anything. So either the barrel attachment isn’t a suppressor (gunfuckers in the YouTube comments are widely of the opinion that it’s actually a compensator), or what we are being shown in this video is a bullshit gun that doesn’t work.
I know the gunfucker is a rare breed in the UK, but I feel like the staffer in that video is the one guy in the whole country who should know what he’s talking about.
Complete: “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree”
A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.
The final chapter of “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” has been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.
Recommendation: The Wire
“All the pieces matter.”
So hey, you know that series which is widely considered the best television show of all time? Yeah, turns out it’s actually good.
I didn’t watch The Wire when it was first airing, largely due to the fact that I was 11 years old when it started. I finally got around to it this year, and it has immediately become one of my all-time favorites.
There’s a lot to like about The Wire. It knows when to shut up and let the filmmaking speak for itself. It respects the intelligence of its characters, but is attentive to the limited vocabulary they have to describe their circumstances. It’s confident in its ability to hold your attention without prolonged exposition, flashy gimmicks, or cheap shock.
Maybe what I love most about it is this: everyone involved took their jobs seriously and showed up with something to say. At the very beginning of its first episode, The Wire shows you a Black kid lying dead in the street and says, “This is America.” And then it spends the next five seasons proving itself right.
This Week’s Links
Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point
Author and LGBTQ Reads creator Dahlia Adler notes that publishers are stepping back from queer books because of the risk of bans. She’s been tracking queer book deal announcements in Publishers Weekly for many years, and they’ve been declining. Even when queer books are acquired, the language used in the announcements is often coded, obscuring the queer representation.
Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.
The Filipino virtual assistants behind LinkedIn’s “thought leadership” content mill
“It’s all AI comments by fake people answered with fake replies by other fake people,” Alex said. “It’s so dead internet, like none of this is real.”
It’s reassuring to me that David Simon is as angry and vindictive a writer as I am.
-K
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