I finished reading this book on a plane to Amsterdam and in the end, it felt right to be reading it in aviation-land. It’s an airport read. I got what I wanted from it in that it gave a little bit of insight into the Russian media and political landscape of the 00s. I learned some new names and had my memory of others reinforced. That said, there’s a bit of self-aggrandising in here and there’s not a little bit of misogyny. Maybe that’s authentically what a slightly mercenary TV producer in Russia sounds like, though.
While I claim that the reason I haven’t emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don’t have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: “I am more interested in his insurance affairs.”
I was a real life, buck-toothed nerd when I was a child. I liked video games, didn’t play outside enough. I spent a lot of time playing around on a computer. But I never built one.
As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services over the years. Those are becoming less and less of a good deal, and the geeky voice at the back of mind is saying louder and louder: why not do it yourself?
I’d like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have sharedmythoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they’ve finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did.
I have a lot of fun and messed up memories from my time at the Fun Internet Company. Those times are well and truly over, both at the personal level and the macro economic level. The backbiting merry-go-round I’m still vestigially connected to is replete with think pieces about what that era was all about and what’s next for media and society now it’s looking really rather done. The main piece I care about though, is this fantastic oral history, featuring many of the people I knew there and some wild incidents I was around for any many that I wasn’t there for but were part of the lore.
We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and the parts required for breathing, crying, and perhaps laughing. Limit then, itching, fidgeting, coughing, sneezing, farting, and throat clearing. I, of course, might start scrolling through my phone if I get bored.
First I have a whole collection of maps. There’s a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There’s a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There’s an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here’s a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates.
POSTING. Why must you post? Why must the thoughts you have be assessed in public for their value? Be boring or interesting to yourself. For the sake of thinking unthinkingly don’t show your thoughts to others. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to think without an audience.
First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It’s astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond “pretty funny clip”. It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works. It answers the question of how in on the joke various parties are. Finally, it’s a tribute to how much Tim Curry threw himself into the ridiculous brief.
When, from the outside, a collection of people or an institution is doing things I strongly disagree with, it often turns out that from the inside I can see all the mechanisms and incentives that make perfectly normal people works towards bad outcomes. Take online advertising. In my last year at BuzzFeed I finally bit the bullet and started working in the part of the team that makes the money: the ad tech team.
When I was growing up I sometimes thought I wanted to be a writer, but I quickly realised that doing it for a job wasn’t going to be fun or rewarding. My position is that I took the coward’s way out in choosing to go into software engineering, for a more financially stable existence, but I went into the world with a respect for the writing staff and a general dread at their constant mistreatment.