We got out of our heads. We ran every morning around the canal banks where the tree blossoms have already burst and dropped on the ground to look like cheap confetti. We bought a new video game and took turns smashing things on the screen. On Saturday, we watched The Passion of the Christ, which made me realise how much strange specificity is in the Bible story. The arrested Christ…
*Spoiler warning: I spoil the plot of this 1950s pulp fiction novel early, often, and remorselessly. I picked The Silver Eggheads off a shelf of battered paperback pulp fiction in the Glasgow branch of Oxfam Books. Like all good pulp fiction, the illustration on its cover is absurd and confusing. A flesh-coloured humanoid with simple socket holes for eyes and a mouth, two-pronged grabbers for hands, ball-joints for knees and…
The words aren't coming and usually that's my fault. I wad up my sense holes with dopamine doped fluff and the ooze of it bungs up my brain. I lose the element of surprise so I can't write anything interesting at all. The writing I have done in the last week or so has been the drip drip of mucus out from the congested sinus and onto the page. Scenes…
For a week Berlin's been covered in ice. It's an inch thick on the roads and the bike lanes and the pavements, and it's been there so long it's black and mottled and hard like a mineral deposit. They don't grit or salt here. There's a dispute about who should do the gritting and the salting, between the city and the Ordnungsamt and the street cleaners they contract. Verdicts differ…
This is kind of a brave book. The direct desperation and lack of composure of the narrator combined with the omnipresent situating of events in specific locations in London reminds me of a very particular time in my life. In the way that good writing does it reminds me of the good and also the bad and shameful that I've pushed down as the mistakes of a younger, stupider person.…
We wanted to go see something; it was our first opportunity since we've been back in the city where cinemas are unlimited to us and where we've been like churchgoers there since the first winter we arrived. The pavements have been glazed with ice two, three times over, so we didn'd walk like we usually would. We took the bus and got off at Hermannplatz, walked up the sharpish hill…
I watched this with the in-laws at Christmas as part of a Richard Curtis runthrough. Coming after Notting Hill it was stark how poorly this film has aged in comparison. Perhaps it was never as good in the first place, but Hugh Grant is far more clearly a twat, Kristen Scott Thomas's character is written as a complete moron, and neither of these in the endearing ways that the writer…
Although LyseDoucet's [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She's a…
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…
I like a movie that gets out of hand like this. I'd forgotten until the opening credits that this was Ari Aster. Its marketing doesn't have the trappings of the horror genre because the setting doesn't have those traditional elements either. But this is definitely horrific, and effective. Its ideas are right on its sleeve but it still has interesting enough things to say about them that it works. There's…
Watched as part of a triple-kino weekend in dark, freezing Berlin. This one at Rollberg. Maybe that contributed to our dislike; we always resent walking past Passage and having to climb the hill to the ugly shopping centre. We both hated the ending. It was visually poorly executed and seemed like a reshoot, sound stagey, VFXey mess. It was also not really earned. Why is she tearing pages out of…
This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we're meant to find her ridiculous.
We watched Bugonia. Spoilers to follow. We both suspected that she really was an alien at different points during the movie. When Teddy exploded in the wardrobe, I wondered for a moment whether either he'd detonated the vest on purpose in an attempt to kill the aliens on whatever ship he thought he was being teleported to, or she'd somehow triggered the vest to trick him. The latter theory was…
— The Europeans, [Housing policy, who does it best?][8] — Prof. Steve Keen, [Remedies for ridiculous house prices][1] — Prof. Steve Keen, [Remedies for ridiclous house prices][1] — UCL, [The demand for housing as an investment][4] — UCL, [The demand for housing as an investment][4] — Prof. Steve Keen, [Remedies for ridiculous house prices][1] — UCL, [The demand for housing as an investment][4] — UN, [Special Rapporteur on adequate housing][6]…
— Mind's 2025 Report
This really reminds me of being a certain age and experiencing the culture as remixed in Tumblr posts and usernames. It's kind of a series of poses in tableaux. It was made to be clipped, GIFed and posted to Tumblr with "ugh, this." as the caption. Which is to say, I like this short film and it reminds me of a much simpler time that I thought was complicated when…
At school I luxuriated in not trying very hard and doing alright anyway. Teachers called me "gifted" – a term that was, incredibly, written into education regulations at the time. They also called me lazy, insisting I had untapped potential if I would only apply myself. Now I'm thirty going on thirty-one, almost a decade into a career with which I have a fraught relationship. I want change, and to…
Here are some of the coolest posters I saw in the city this year. Here's the collection from last year.
I read 74 books this year. I'm not reviewing them all; I don't remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons. Did nobody think to tell me about Doris Lessing? The name had a familiar ring, the kind of sound a name gets when it's called great, but only ever in the middle of a list of other great names. I can't really understand…
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We're through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there's sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark…
Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone's camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year.
p8 p9 p10 p17 p32 p34 p38 p46 p50 p80 p90 p146 p172 p191
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I've deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I've tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings.…
It feels like there's a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here's what I've been reading lately about war.
Right now I am in England. It's the first time I've been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes... like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine.…
First here's [Sequel][1], which is one of those apps for tracking the stuff you watch and read and listen to, and the stuff you want to watch and read and listen to. I do a lot of that, and this app looks slick, but I probably won't switch to it because it's iOS only. For you, maybe that's perfect.
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."][1]
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let's be practical, with [another resource][1] to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you've figured that out, why don't you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It's time for a [vibe shift][5]. The…
The church bells in this place, my god. They toll for 10 solid minutes every week night and for God knows how long on a Sunday morning. For a short time today there was a relentless tolling of the bells and a old timey horn honking at once. Chaos. This sort of thing is charming and atmopheric out in the countyside where the sounds have space to drift from afar.…
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…
Despite being a dictionary-reading, computer geek, gap-tooth nerd as a child... and mostly into adulthood, I never did do any PC gaming or building. I think by the time I would have gotten into that I harboured illusions about myself as a creative, artistic person, who probably ought to use a Mac. Thus, I used a MacBook from a relatively early age and never messed around with building the things.…
I think I've given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it's nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised... easy. That's why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything)…
When the sun came out in Berlin, people started climbing into the canals in their inflatable boats. When I rode my bike over Elsenbrücke, I even saw them floating along the Spree in their dinghies, with a bag of beers and a fishing hat. One evening, I saw a lone paddle boarder in the middle of that wide river. It is the done thing, I learned. The Excursion 5 Schlauchboot…
I'd like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts 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…
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day,…
We got a nasty letter from some lawyers. We had some lawyers send a nasty letter. Why are people so up in our business here?
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…
This morning I was sitting at my desk with my eyes half closed. I started to yawn and I stretched my arms out and back. Something in my chest, around my sternum, made a dull pop. I didn't realise I had anything to pop in there. The last couple of weeks have been full of great new things, and I've totally worn me out. We moved into our new, more…
So Popbitch (a very catty UK media gossip newsletter) reports that Fred Again's people have been trying to keep the fact that [he is minor gentry][1] out of his Wikipedia article. Fair enough. I understood his story to go as follows: young South London guy makes poppy dance songs during the pandemic, goes viral, becomes instant stadium-packing act once the restrictions lift, and boy he just can't believe his luck.…
Moving to a new country with a new currency, one of the things we've been thinking about is, "is it cheaper?" It's a very intangible thing. I'm too stupid to do quick currency conversions in my head, I'm earning a different amount of money (is it more, is it less, yes!), and different kinds of costs work out very differently. Recently we had an incident with an outrageously expensive (or…
Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I've been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on [German reunification][1]. In terms of online life, that's the only real giveaway that I've moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I've completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider…
We've been living here together for a couple of weeks. It's a quiet Sunday in our place in the city, the first of its kind. We found our long-term apartment and we'll be there soon. We're engaged; everybody knows. We made sure of that. We're going to get married. Did you hear, we're going to get married. Roots are going down. We have our grocery shops, our first couple of…
I'm leaving London after living here for half a dozen years. I've been too busy with the leaving to feel sentimental about it but I’m making myself reflect. I used to find myself arguing London's case all the time. Now I'm ready to leave it and barely look over my shoulder. I tried very hard to get here. I built a life around keeping hold of my perch here, so…
How long am I here for? Oh who's to say, boy. We've got a cottage on the island, so I suppose it's really up to me how long I'm here for. Where? It's out on the spur, right out where the lane starts bolting back and forth like a silly little rabbit. Near the end. It takes an age to drive out there and it knackers your suspension and in…
Max dropped bread in the toaster without looking. He read the jagged little letter again from the beginning. It arrived at some point last night, shoved through the letterbox with no envelope, a loose sheaf of note paper ripped from a spiral spine. It had been two days since the final blow up. Beginning again at "liar", he wandered into the bedroom and dug his phone of the sheets with…
We are moving to Berlin. I've been making that statement of intent to anybody who will listen for the past few months. I think (hope) we're past the stage where I need to make that statement over and over to make it happen now. It has an inertia of its own. I have a job out there. Sarah has a job out there. I think it's happening. By the end…
First off, here's a [DJ set I liked][1]. Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter ([here's mine][2]). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon ([here's mine][3]) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That's nice. I don't believe it's really going to be that simple, though. On…
First I have a whole collection of maps. There's a map to show [where in the world Wikipedia edits][1] are coming from. There's a map that shows all the different kinds of [planning boundaries][2] that overlap the in Britain. There's an incredibly [detailed weather map][3]. Finally, here's a whole series of maps that examine how much [various governments fudged][4] their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates. There are a couple…
Take these for the pain\ twice daily after eating\ Take these for a headache\ and these for your tired legs\ Take these for a pain in the neck\ in the mornings Take these if you miss your train\ And you can't see the funny side\ Take these if you suffer Take these for loss\ or a twinge in the heart\ Take them in the evening\ Stand by a window you…
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. — Open Mike Eagle, Informations
I'm interviewing for other jobs. It's a very strange process that sometimes feels like having a professional affair. You arrange off-the-calendar meetings with some exciting new thing, because the old one has turned sour. I'll stop myself before I go to deep on the "jobs are like relationships" simile, which I don't really believe in. What I want to say is it's a tiring situation to both have a job…
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…
We've had successive record high temperatures everywhere, but most importantly to me, in London. There was a bit of respite for a week or so but yesterday the humidity starting rising and today the temperature will follow. I don't think I'll find 28° intolerably hot after getting used to almost 40° a couple of weeks ago, but the humidity doesn't make it easy. Hyde Park is parched. The leaves have…
Pieces of aeroplane sprayed across the water in front of them, but only Arlo saw the distinct shapes of people striking the sea's surface. The beach was the thin fringe of a wide bay. At their backs, the drastic slope of the mountains dove into the ground. The town, just four streets deep, was squeezed tight between the mountainside and the sandy beach. The double blades of beach and town…
Sarah asked me the other day, "do you actually find you enjoy writing?" Writing is always something I feel I ought to be doing. I feel bad if I haven't written creatively for a long time. I don't think I'm a great writer, nor do I really hope to become one if I applied myself and commited serious time to it. Nevertheless, I read a lot, and reading gives you…
I was always a bit cocky about languages. I got good marks in them at school and by the end of sixth form I felt I had a pretty good grasp of French. That felt like a lot in the context of semi-rural England where very, very few people learned and spoke a second language fluently.\ French faded because I was an idiot and didn't keep it up after I…
TL;DR I'm switching from Goodreads to Oku. [Sign up here][11] (referral code). I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is [Goodreads][1]. The website and the native…
I left BuzzFeed two weeks ago and started at Kaluza the following Monday. The full implications of that are yet to be seen but for now they include: exciting new problems, lots of new people, nice new office, new cycle to the office through lots of parks, being a bit tired. I’m a really simple creature. When people at the office asked me on Friday how my first week went…
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:…
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…
I think the time I spent on the Community team was interesting. Firstly it was the closest knit team I’ve ever been on, socially speaking. Partly there was a good social chemistry between team members and a sense that we had a fun part of the product to work on and we knew about it more than anybody else in the organisation. The pandemic baked in those personal relationships strongly,…
The new pattern for living seems to go like this. Emerge from a lockdown and shake off the careful life you built inside the restrictions imposed on you. Take a few halting steps out to your friend’s house, to the pub garden, walk the streets more and more carelessly. Soon you can forget the bread baking cycle and the little routines you imposed on yourself so you didn’t bang your…
We were cycling to work together this morning and my girlfriend bumped into an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a few weeks in the bike lane. I cycled a little ahead of them down from Ludgate Circus to Blackfriars Bridge and listened to them make smalltalk and catch up. Being in a busy but flowing bike lane on a morning commute usually makes me feel good in a tribal kind…
I’ve been away from home for just over a week now. I’ve been in France. When I’m not in the UK I feel a lot less claustrophobic; I feel like I have such a wider range of choices to choose for my life. An advantage of this trip has been spending time with people who actually live in not-the-UK. I believe to some extent that people are the same everywhere…
When I cycled to work this morning the air felt like the mountains. Maybe once it gets cold and dry enough the smog drops out of the air or something (unlikely). Either way, the sky was blue, the sun was low and golden and blinding. The roads were full of cyclists breathing steam and I didn’t trust any patches of glittering moisture I saw not to be ice. I got…
I can’t stop watching and listening to things again. I’m back in a cycle of cueing up a continuous stream of video content from dawn until dusk. I walk into the bathroom watching TikTok, I come out casting a podcast to the speakers in the living room, where I work from home. I get on my bike and put my headphones in, queue up another podcast episode while I ride…
I ran out of steam with cooking a little bit this weekend. A lot of that probably has to do with some gargantuan hangovers I inflicted on myself a few days in a row. It also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a victim of my own success in using what’s already in the cupboards. I used up those spices that have been sitting around. I used…
Running’s been difficult lately, but swimming in the ponds is getting better each week. It’s cold enough now that it burns your skin all over when you get in. It’s cold enough that when you feel the cold on your legs as you step down the ladder you think, “not everybody would do this”. Very self-satisfied of me. When the burning fades off, this sudden feeling of wellbeing washes over.…
It’s getting darker and colder, but so far I don’t mind. Like I said before, I’m [cooking a lot][1] of satisfying food. It’s still warm enough to [get into the Hampstead Heath ponds][2] every Saturday morning. The crowd there is thinning out and there’s now a pleasing corps of batty and rich ladies of a certain age who we’re starting to see on a regular basis. I’m doing more in…
I like to cook a lot. Sometimes I cook all afternoon, one meal after another. I end up with a fridge full of boxed up meals that I can pile through in the week or give to loved ones. Dinner guests are relatively rare these days, in the wake of the pandemic year. Some people have been scattered away from the pestilent city centre. Some people are understandably still reluctant…
There's been a gap. There have been some changes. - I left that house alone and I crossed the river - I miss the cat - I cycle everywhere I go if I can - I'm learning a new language for her and also me - I live alone most of the time - I've been off the island and onto another island - I'm fully vaccinated against the virus…
London had its first snow day of the winter. We set out for a run in the mid-morning when the first specks starting to stick to the frosty tops of parked cars. By the time we were circling a park it was coming down thick. The roads were coated with a layer a couple of inches thick and quickly became communal playgrounds for bored families. Sleds emerged. Where do the…
I think the last film I saw in the cinema before they all closed was The Lighthouse. After that weird nautical trip we emerged from The Ritzy in Brixton in the middle of the afternoon, dazed and out of sync with the normal world where people were charging up and down the pavement. The cinema was only a couple of minutes down the road from where I was living at…
I’ve spent a lot of this year living in the worlds other people have made for us. The world of our senses is either too boring (the insides of our homes, dinner arriving in cardboard at the front door) or too awful (bodies in refrigerated trucks, forests burning, and police brutality) to enjoy, so I’ve been turning to media more than ever. It’s been mediating my perception of the world,…
I love cooking but the terminology seems very fluid to me until I hear chefs talking to each other about how they prepare an ingredient in a way that sounds so specific. It turns out these words do have distinct meanings that I struggle to hold in my head. A very awkward Frenglish word. Means frying ingredients in not very much oil but over a relatively high heat. A larger…
I went and saw Jamie in the park. It was freezing cold today but I had panicked and put on a heavy coat. The hills in Dulwich were unrelenting from the beginning and I was dripping in sweat before I reached Clapham. We spoke about things breaking down, about how much we can endure and how many times we can restart things and change our conditions. We were up late…
In East Dulwich there is a Pellatt Road. I still don’t know how to pronounce it; a simple “pellet” seems most statesmanly. I’ve wondered where that name came from. It struck me as a person’s name, probably. I started looking, and found an MP for Southwark who died a little before a plot called Friern Farm near the village of Dulwich in Surrey was bought up and replaced with a…
In this second lockdown it's all suddenly become about long walks and big cooks. Emma's been walking for a dozen miles at a time through a river of wild spaces in South London called the Green Chain Walk. I've been churning through the cookbooks that I've been picking at until now, mostly neglecting. Successes lately have been gyoza, massaman curry, drunken noodles, Tuscan bean soup with homebaked bread. Fridays are…
The latest issue of the All My Stars newsletter got me reading about Crash (1996). It was obviously a very contraversial film, that much I remember. There was some monocle-popping from Francis Ford Coppola on the Cannes jury; he refused to present the award that the film went on to win. What's funny though is that the film won the Special Jury Prize, not just the Jury Prize. What's the…
I was forwarded a PDF that began life as a Google Doc, before it was overwhelmed by demand. Crowd-sourced, guerrilla resources often spring up like this in times of difficulty. Perhaps I should be less surprised at how quickly Londoners have acted to work out where to get a pint without exposing yourself to the virus or the freezing cold. PDFs are notoriusly inconvenient to quickly reference, so I'm mirroring…
I was locked down for two weeks, so when I got out I wanted to make the most of the autumn leaves. Most of the time though, I'm back inside. I saw On The Rocks with Rashina Jones and Bill Murray after I listened to the Big Picture episode about Sofia Coppola.
I've been placed into self-isolation, it's been three days now. A friend of mine who I saw last week got a test after some very low level symptoms and he tested positive. He feels horribly guilty for the cluster of people around him who are now in self-isolation, which goes to show how much of this situation has been laid on the consciences of individual people, wrongly. I've been doing…
I read The History of the Bible this weekend and enjoyed it a lot. I have a little collection of books about theology now, not because of any interest in faith but because I think it's an interesting vein of history and culture. The bible is so often quoted, wittingly or unwittingly, in popular culture and everyday speech. Here are some good excerpts from the book. The first I've included…
I woke up today and I was really, really tired. It's the end of the first week in a new role at work. I lay in bed until an uncharacteristic noon and having just gotten up, everything feels like far too much effort. If I'm tired or unhappy I can usually carry it around with me as I get on with things but I feel very under it today. I…
The numbers are up again (the bad ones, the COVID-19 ones) and the daily cases are actually above where they ever got in the first wave. The response has been slower, patchier; nobody's ready to jump straight into a full national lockdown again. It feels like it could be coming, though. I've mixed feeling about how ready for that I am. We have this new home: spaces to work and…
I rewatched lots of Pixar shorts the other night. So much of Pixar’s storytelling is fixating on parenting, growing up, child development. Also it seems like each Pixar short is some kind of experiment in animation or storytelling. A great example is Piper, the story of a sandpiper on a beach learning to find shells in the sand. The animation of the surf, and the sand with all its different…
We watched Boys State this week. It’s a documentary that follows a cohort of Texan teenage boys going through an intense one-week political bootcamp at the Texas state capitol. They’re divided randomly into two parties\, given lessons in the state constitution, and then they run a compressed set of elections for party chairmen, gubernatorial candidates, and ultimately for state governor. I really enjoyed it, though I felt myself predictably enamoured…
Ideally all the books in the API should stay in the store even if they haven’t been included on any of the named shelves in the last Goodreads scrape. When a new scrape is run it would add any books that don’t appear, shift any books that are in the store but don’t appear in the latest scrape to a no-shelf status (representing books I know about but have no…
We've had a lot of peace. We're spending a lot of evenings in the pool, where only twenty people are allowed at a time and only swimming in a clockwise loop. We've been taking sick days when we feel worn out. I've been reading a little more. Emma has planted the raised bed at the end of the garden with bulbs that are supposed to sleep over the winter and…
We've been on the coast of North Devon. Today the younger ones struck off from a larger group of trundling adults and children to get into the sea (we were standing on the headland and the water looked so calm and blue that Emma couldn't think of anything other than finding somewhere to get into that sea). We found a small rocky beach at the end of a crumbling single-track…
This article was originally published on the BuzzFeed Tech Blog Last month, external accessibility experts certified buzzfeed.com as compliant with the best accessibility practices for the web. That simple statement, ripped straight from the headlines of a boilerplate internal email, does not do justice to the two-year process that brought us to that point. Nor does it embody what the achievement means to our team, especially myself, on a personal…
I’ve grown up with a Pavlovian connection between swimming pools and chocolate bars. When I was a kid I was often taken to the local swimming baths and would stage a successful whinging campaign afterwards to be given 50p for a chocolate bar from the vending machine in the lobby of the baths. Now when I go swimming as an adult, something about climbing out of the chlorinated water in…
I woke up early and lay in bed for a while knowing Emma wanted a big lie in to catch up on sleep from a bad week. Eventually I got up and booked a slot at the gym and cycled there. I’ve been running less and going to the gym more, is that a more vain balance of exercise? Jay Rayner was back at the gym, and this time James…
I might be getting back to work in the office soon. I always used to value the physical and mental separation of work and life. I think I still do and I’m looking forward to having it back for two days a week, which is the plan at first. A lot has changed since I left the office, though. I am much more invested in my home. For one, it’s…
Some days are good for nothing. It's Friday and I've left work early but I haven't been able to concentrate all day anyway. I feel unhappy and all I can think is I should go to the gym or play the piano or practice my Spanish or draw something or... Instead I'm going to flit between things, getting agitated at nothing.
A few weeks ago I went camping in Scotland. Below are some scraps I wrote down while I was on the Isle of Mull. There are significant magnetic anomalies around the islands of St. Kilda. The name St. Kilda is an oddity: there is no such saint. One theory is that it comes from "sunt kelda", Norse for sweet wellwater. Another is that it is a corruption of the local…
It's been a good week. We came back from Scotland and spent a week relaxing at home around my birthday. Then Tom arrived in Heathrow having run the gauntlet of the travel restrictions imposed by the Indian government, UK government, and the various airlines. He's been decompressing here for a week or so, and making us incredible amounts of food and drink in the meantime. It's good to have your…
Yesterday I watched a whole season of Kingdom on Netflix. It's a big budget zombie show set in 16th century Korea. It being a Korean language show, there are English subtitles. However the subtitles not only translate dialogue but describe other sounds. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those subtitles. - Indistinct shouting - Munching - Screaming - Indistinct chatter - Sword rasping - Distant snarling - Men whimpering -…
We’re coming back to the world in floods of normalcy at the moment. One of my best friends was back in town on Thursday, and he came over for dinner and a drink. He was able to see our new home, I was able to cook for him, we were able to sit in our living room together and chat. We kept up chatting until just before midnight. We were…
I've been meeting my manager in the park every week during lockdown. He lived in a neighbourhood nearby and we both missed seeing people from work face-to-face, so it made sense. Plus the weather's been good for the most part so it's been nice to sit and have our catch up in the sun with either a coffee or a beer. Today I cycled there from the new house; it's…
It’s thirty degrees outside and we’re all, including the cat, feeling languid. The internet is down for much of South London, which adds to the general sense of stolid malaise. The past few days have been much more active. I’ve been buzzing around the house trying to make it a home bit by bit. It’s a tightrope doing the practicalities while basking in the glow of our fresh, new space.…
This morning I woke up in my own house to sunlight. I got up and took a shower, the water pressure was great. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the news, and then practiced my Spanish for a while. I hung out some washing to dry. Nobody came along. I had forgotten how it feels to start your day quietly and at your own pace. The weekend…
The Black Lives Matter protests have become the story of the day. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world have been demonstrating for over a week. We joined the end of a march in Brixton first, hearing about it from a friend who saw it pass through Kennington and cycling out to join the fray. It was the first crowd I’d been in in months. It…
We’ve picked a new house. It’s going to be a house! It’ll have a garden and stairs and space for the cat, space for us to work and relax. We’re leaving in three weeks unless some recalcitrant property manager or landlord gets in the way. Outside, COVID-19 measures had begun to relax and things had begun drifting slowly toward normal. Then a few days ago the US exploded with protests…
I've been struggling to keep track of links to the relief funds established for Black Lives Matter activists across the USA who've been arrested, injured, or killed by the police. I'm throwing them up here, with sources linked at the end, to keep track of them for myself and for others who are struggling to pull them out of Twitter. For now, I've donated to the Brooklyn Bail Fund. There's…
We’re getting ready to leave the house. The idea of moving out of this place and into one of our own, already a firm intention before lockdown began, has become a serious one again. Subtly depersonalised pictures of the room we’ve spent so much time in have been taken, and posted online. We are responsible for reviewing applications for our replacements. Young professional, woman, 27, media. Smiley headshot, second photo…
The restrictions on movement were lifted a bit. We’re allowed to sit down in the parks rather than hurry through them on the purpose of exercise. Almost immediately, tiny groups in sunglasses and with beers in hand have appeared. We are also allowed to drive a little way for our recreation. Emma drove us down to the cliffs in Sussex. We packed food and water into a rucksack, and rued…
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of "build minutes" on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the…
In some other countries they’ve been re-opening society, slowly. Here things are fraying; many are talking about making decisions for their own mental wellbeing all government advice besides. On Sunday we said, “We’ll see what the Prime Minister says tomorrow.” “…If we don’t do it by those dates, and if the alert level won’t allow it, we will simply wait and go on until we have got it right.” “We…
Note: There's a follow up to this because I've since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: Develop and run my personal website Cross-post certain types of content from my website to…
We slept unhappily and woke up wary aliens to one another. I shuffled downstairs for breakfast and coffee but there wasn't any milk. I'm known to shower first thing every morning, with stubborn regularity, but today I masochistically let the discomfort and sadness of yesterday fester on my skin and in yesterday's clothes, which I slipped back on to lay on the bed. The cat curled up against me as…
All week we’ve been building up to a big trip to the supermarket — the real, have-to-drive-there megastore. The others wanted the Big Shop experience; Emma wanted to give the car some use, save it from sitting unused and rusting for the duration of the spring. Some of them have also grown tired of the tight loop of stocking the kitchen just-about with grocery box deliveries and trips to the…
I'm reading the epic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, at the moment. At the moment it's the 1920s and Moses is trying to wrestle swathes of land off the robber barons who've built their manor houses on Long Island, so that he can build extensive park systems and a parkway to connect them to the city. It's a mammoth book but I'm really enjoying it. The 1920s is…
Dried pasta, soap, and toilet roll are high value items. There is much hand-wringing and shaming about who goes to the shops when and to buy how much (particularly the old and the medical front line). There is also hand-wringing about lovers trying to reunite before travel restrictions get fiercer. People are guiltily cycling around London and slinking into one another’s kitchens and bedrooms. The NHS are taking volunteers for…
During the eight o’ clock cheer, somebody was blowing bubbles that drifted down the street. I hung out the bedroom window and took more care to try and see the other people in the windows than usual. The girl who sits at her laptop in the bay window opposite was smiling and slapping at her window. Two figures in white stood at a pair of windows on the third floor…
It’s my friend’s birthday today. He’s with his parents in their house on the the side of a hill in the Peak District. He’s quite content up there I imagine: he has his girlfriend, their dog, his vegetable patch (don’t we all). My birthday is at the end of July, and I think I’d sulk a bit if the current restrictions are still in place. I’d like to see some…
It’s Easter Sunday. We ran 10k, to the river and back; it was sunny and the paths up the banks were quiet. The residential streets were even quieter, though every house was full up with its residents. These’s no simple phrase to describe a street that is quiet in the sense of traffic coming and going, but packed with everybody who lives there being at home at once. Yesterday we…
The Prime Minister was moved into intensive care last night. They’re trying to downplay the seriousness of his condition. They’re emphasising that he hasn’t been intubated. Today some artist friends of ours, who we bought lots of art from at a show a few weeks ago, dropped off a parcel on our doorstep. It was a nice package of beautiful objects and warm wishes presented in the chaotic and pleasing…
The bike and the cat have both arrived. They’ve shut the local park, a preemptive action ahead of a hot and sunny weekend. The endless internal and external dialogue about what is okay and not okay to do to stay happy continues. The cat gives some respite. Our minds can be filled with fretful thoughts about her instead of about the virus. The death toll is climbing quickly here, as…
The hospital ship the USNS Comfort docked in New York Harbour a few hours ago. From the news images it looks like something from the Second World War: a long, narrow, white thing covered in lifeboats and bearing the red cross. Presumably it’s painted like that to stop enemy bombers from firing at it in wartime. Everybody keeps comparing this to wartime. I’m filling my time with exercise, reading, and…
Boris has the virus, as has the Secretary of State for Health, and the Chief Medical Officer\. They’ve built a hospital with 4000 beds inside a big conference centre in London. They’ve built another at the NEC in Birmingham. The one in London has been dubbed the NHS Nightingale. I don’t know if the Birmingham one has a name. A hangar at Birmingham Airport is being repurposed a temporary morgue.…
Emma’s gone up to the Midlands to collect the car so that we might have some means of getting away from London without breaking social distancing. I was anxious when she left, I don’t want her to be stuck outside of London if the government suddenly announce stricter travel measures. They’ve already started shutting down the trains bit by bit. Yesterday they shut the pubs and restaurants, and the gyms…
We got back from seeing Tom in India on Monday, and ever since then the world has gotten increasingly strange. Though it isn’t completely enforced, we’re all supposed to stay home and work from home to limit the spread of the virus. All the bars and restaurants are empty, people aren’t going to them and so instead they’re all online chatting away in the evenings. It’s like getting back home…
At my day job at BuzzFeed I’m a software engineer, building stuff for the web. I use my company-issued MacBook Pro “16, 2020 (2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). It's on a Griffin laptop stand, which isn't quite tall enough to bring the screen up to my eye line, so the stand is piled on top of a couple of thick hardbacks that were lying around. I have an Apple Magic…
I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I really enjoyed it without really knowing what to make of it. It’s structured in a stream-of-consciousness way, with distinct sections (which aren’t quite chapters) that sometimes relate to what’s come before with a dream logic. Here are some of my favourite sections, or at least a couple that got me thinking. — “The Tongue Is The Strongest Muscle”, p183 I’ve felt various…
When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed. I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine's content and turned it into a basic static site…
These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2019, compiled from my Goodreads Reading Challenge. - A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimar McBride - Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré - Enigma Variations by André Aciman - The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai - The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee - Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff…
This guy has been collecting all the "Best x of the 2010s" lists that have been appearing in the past few weeks into an impressive collection. Here are some of my highlights: - The Most Important Artworks of the 2010s (ARTnews) - Top 25 Film Scores of the 2010s (CoS) - The 20 Best Video Games Of The Decade, Ranked (BuzzFeed)
This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It's come along just at the right time for me, as I'm generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more. I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch,…
I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It's a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what's happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But…
There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here's something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of…
I was vaguely aware that the French language is basically policed by the Académie Française, but I'd never seen this statistic that really shows how small the base French vocabulary is. Aptly enough I saw it in this article about the French propensity to say... no. — The Culture Map by Erin Meyer via BBC
James Meek (author of Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else) did a great profile of new Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mog. It sums up the argument incredibly well that the stuffy all-English persona he affects in Parliament is at odds with his source of income in a transnational investment firm. Meek goes deep on the problematic network of offshore financial instruments used to shroud Mogg's investment…
I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it's a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the…
For some reason I feel really compelled by accounts of the crash involving the USS Fitzgerald that killed sseven crew members. It's a really interesting case of how the build up of lots of little decisions, shortcuts, putting crew under pressure, can lead to something dreadful. I first heard about it in detail from this amazing This American Life segment by Stephanie Foo. More recently though, ProPublica published this incredibly…
I've been reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson and there's tons of great extracts and references. One that caught me in particular was this excerpt from The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams, which (I think) disputes the rosy typical notions about love but reaffirms it as a wilder, more brutal thing: It's a nice disputation of the oft-quoted 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:
I was watching Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) the other day. It's the height of camp, and I was trying to work out what the elements were and what they reminded me of. Then it came to the introductory Potiphar number and it clicked. The Rich Man's Frug is a dance number that appears in Sweet Charity (1969), a musical comedy directed by the choreographer Bob Fosse. It…
The emcee stood off to the side of the stage in darkness and in a rented tux. Standing in amongst the clutter of the backstage area he swallowed a choke as he tried to clear his throat quietly. Reaching into his jacket pocket he felt the thick stack of note cards there and shut his eyes for a moment, allowing the cool calm of their presence to wash through him.…
If they’d given me a nose I think I’d have smelled the alcohol on your breath yesterday morning. I should give myself some credit; they didn’t give me the best ears but I could still hear that slight slurring in your speech. I could hear you being a little more abrupt with the rest of the crew. I could hear you being a little less clear with the tower in…
Tonight, Kwame would clean the altar. He walked to the front of the chapel. He methodically clicked each in a row of switches and light soaked the altar. Standing next to the altar in the bright lights, Kwame couldn’t make out the first row of pews. His breathing slowed there in the warmth. He stood next to the altar and allowed his arms to hang by his sides. The very…
Hello. My name is Jack… [Group: Hello, Jack] …and I’m a news addict. In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I…
Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly. My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he…
I spend a lot of my time picking apart how things work, and a lot of time sticking things together to see if they work in the way that I hope. That’s tinkering. I’ve been thinking about how I first started working this way. I remember when I was a kid, I spent long days in my dad’s office. His office was actually a garage, a separate building from the…
Rives TED Talk If you take a listen to Rives’ great TED talk from 2006 today, it’s pretty easy to see it as a little time capsule. Here he is talking (eloquently and entertainingly) about Napster and Friendster. What was, at the time, a piece of pop culture criticism and entertainment, is just as easily viewed as artefact of an era in the internet history. The internet moves fast, look…
How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet... Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism…
At its most basic level, music is simply a series of amplitudes and frequencies that make human beings move and vocalise in diverse and strange ways. However, like all other forms of human expression and entertainment, it is now a commodity. This commodity is now packaged to be sold, streamed, licensed and advertised to us. The people who distribute the music define our experience with this basic human commodity. These…