I’ve been obsessed with the “school wars” meme, what it says about London, the very real fears of parents, algorithmic school rumours… and why almost no other news outlets have just sent people to stand and see what happened. Here’s where we’ve ended up. www.londoncentric.media/p/school-war...
A good read; as someone who grew up playing games in the 90s it's often struck me how "good AI" (in the sense of a compelling NPC/adversary presence) was once something games bragged about, but which has since fallen off the map entirely.
(A favourite brand at the moment is the delightfully named Oh Ricey! which have actual fine rice noodles in a Pho-style stock. they are really good!)
Daft minor purchase that has significantly improved my life: one of these silly ramen bowls with a tightfitting lid. You just throw everything in the bowl, pour on boiling water, and take it wherever. I expect young people were doing this ten years ago but it has hugely boosted my ramen consumption.
One of those moments where it goes beyond toeing the party line to a point where the politican seems to be actively living in a dream world, a different parallel reality, to what the rest of us are seeing.
Deeply weird interview with Yvette Cooper on R4 this morning wherein supporting an American war of regime change was recast as a purely defensive action to protect British citizens across the middle east (?) even extending that to strikes on missile sites. No questions at all as to how this began.
I cannot contest this but I just wanted to record my surprise at seeing a street name appear on my timeline which is about two mins walk from a house I lived in about twenty years ago.
Rose Byrne is excellent in it, but it's kind of a disservice to her performance that almost everyone else in the film just has to be an insufferable two-dimensional asshole by comparison.
I saw If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: quite good in parts, though i didn't find it half as upsetting or as convincing as some. It falls back on sitcom-level cringe black comedy too often; felt like it was missing a certain something that I can't quite name.
Clueless about what to read afterwards. What could follow this. Might pick up Heat 2.
In an effort to finish more books this year I dug out my old Kindle a few days ago; having never read Tolstoy, I put on a recent translation of Anna Karenina. Suddenly reading it is all I want to do. Such effortlessly perfect characterisation.
Heard the new Labi Sifre song on the radio the other day, and it completely stopped me in my tracks for a few minutes open.spotify.com/track/0r66U3...
Screenshot from Thank Goodness You're Here: a queue of four unpleasantly bloated people waiting in a greasy little chip shop; I like the sign on the wall that says "Kids deal: have some of your mum's" and the plastic carrier bag with the old Tesco logo on that just says WANK.
Screenshot from Thank Goodness You're Here: a horrid gaping meaty maw made of sausages with face on and burgers and bits of other miscellaneous butchery.
Screenshot from Thank Goodness You're Here of a woman mourning the destruction of her Lady Di commemorative plate, plus me getting a trophy notification called "The People's Princess" (too soon?).
Screenshot from Thank Goodness You're Here: a man reads a paper in an orderly living room, of the kind you might recognise if you were born in the 80s or 90s; big painting of a WW2 bomber over the carriageclock fireplace; model spitfire and packet of rolling tobacco; commemorative medals on the wall; book cheekily named "Trainspotting for Tosspots" etc
Played a bit of Thank Goodness You're Here: I'm enjoying the aggressive Viz mag surreal-silliness, but it's also an endearing picture of a certain British decrepitude that set in around the Thatcher era & which has never really left. Everything is falling apart and the only constant is indifference.
I like how you can see this and think: surely there must be more context, surely they must have cut out something crucial between those parentheses? But then you watch the actual clip and no, that's actually it
such a lovely cool little documentary on the sound design in Bluey
Screenshot from Sword of the Sea: a sweeping view of desert like landscape with a towering mountain in the background.
Screenshot from Sword of the Sea: a curve of green jellyfish forms an upward spiral that leads up and out of a kind of massive enclosed courtyard.
Screenshot from Sword of the Sea: two figures battling a massive serpent creature.
I finished Sword of the Sea, the first game to ask: what if you could bust some sick kickflips across the backdrop of a Fumito Ueda game? It's very pretty, with another gorgeous score by Austin Wintory, though it also feels derivative & gets carried away by its own spectacle. Neat but hard to love.
Most people experienced the fall of the Roman Empire as: “One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it.”
Screenshot from Silent Hill 2: James looking sorrowful in the reflection of a big old TV monitor.
Screenshot from Silent Hill 2: Maria lying stretched out on her side, bathed in pinky purple light, on a sort of raised stage, the word "Dream" written on the world behind her as graffiti. (Yes I got the Maria ending, I'll leave you to your own conclusions about that.)
Finally finished the Silent Hill 2 remake last night. It's immaculately presented but overlong, harrowing, oppressive to the point that I'm glad it's over. (you could argue that's the point.) Most of all I'm curious about the original series and it's a pain that most of those are hard to play now.
Replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and was struck by a small sidequest in which Johnny Silverhand delivers the Gen X lament and wonders why history didn't end.
stuckness.ghost.io/johnny-silve...
Back then it was probably the most unbearably 80s ones like A View to a Kill and macca, today...probably the same tbh. maybe with added John Barry OHMSS for the pretense of seriousness.
Just remembered I had this on cassette when i was about that age, absolute banger
A little surprised that I've only just discovered this since I have two small boys obsessed with steam trains - it's absolutely stunning: youtu.be/l8mScKWj3kQ?...
Quite enjoying WH40k Rogue Trader. Even for a CRPG it's arcane - a lot of reading and fiddly combat systems - but for me there's something cosy about that. More importantly it has an unprecedented amount of options for being a total Blackadder-esque bastard in charge of a mile-long spaceship.
Big fan of the art for this semi-related Famicom game, about building a water pipeline from the USSR to Tokyo en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorby_n...
Rediscovered this on my emulator handheld, having not thought about it since I had it on Game Gear as a littlun. An endearing little puzzler with a socialist twist: the protagonist (named after Gorbachev??) is busting into factories, stealing food and handing it out to starving grannies.
What a strange and beautiful story.
If you ever wondered what happened to the massive quantum computer prop from Devs (the Alex Garland tv series) apparently it is now hanging over Dr Hannah Fry's dinner table (but how would you dust such a thing?) youtu.be/7_fQIHu8wsY?...
Went for a run on a new route today and only discovered after getting home that if I'd gone a bit further I would have reached a Costco and been able to get the bus home...potentially dangerous information...
I once went to a screening of 2001 which had not only an intermission but an overture, as it would originally have been screened: that Ligeti score slowly building as the lights went down before the curtain opened. It was absolutely phenomenal.
I've got a lot of cinema opinions but my other big one right now is: given that most screenings are half empty, why don't cinemas hand out 2 for 1 tickets like candy to members & at off peak times? surely the bump in extra drink/snack sales would be worth trading for seats that'd be empty anyway?
