I attended Glasgow’s #BlackLivesMatter protest yesterday with the family. Adding to its numbers was literally the least I could do: as a white man, I do practically nothing to counter the engrained bigotry that comes with 43 years of privilege. This morning I read a blistering account by Elyse Cizek of her own internalised racism […]
I’m a satisfied customer of The Guardian, but I’ve long grown a bit tired of its opinion pieces. They could all be called You Know Me: I Don’t Like This Sort of Thing. Their real value to me now is as better informed and expressed versions of my own opinion. For example, Owen Jones was […]
Do I want ad content to be more appropriate to me? Christ, no. My whole existence depends on adds not being targeted. There are millions of products out there that I simply must have. I only avoid financial ruin because I don’t know they exist. All it would take is for some clever algorithm to […]
Despite Life is Strange 2 ultimately leaving a sour taste in the mouth, I’m indebted to Feminist Frequency Radio for introducing me to the series. I thought I’d collect links to their episodes on the subject here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ffr-63-life-is-strange-2-episode-2/id1307153574?i=1000429304606 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/83-life-is-strange-2-episode-3-wastelands-tevis-thompson/id1307153574?i=1000442821385 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ffr-94-life-is-strange-2-episode-4-faith/id1307153574?i=1000449374892 Edit 2020-04-27_1126: changed the first sentence to reflect my ultimate disappointment with Life is Strange […]
It’s about time to pick up my daughter from nursery, but I’m not going to. In my defence, she’s on an outing, so she’s not there to pick up, but try telling my gut that. I have that dreadful sinking feeling that I’m neglecting something really important. My every fibre knows it’s time to pick […]
God be praised, as of Feb 1st, we in the UK can stream the whole of the Studio Ghibli catalogue (apart from Grave of the Fireflies, for some reason) via Netflix. It’s a welcome excuse for many an article extolling its magnificence, but I particularly liked this Guardian one, ranking them: the top two places […]
I have my hands on the first media for The Women Who Built Glasgow City today: a documentary for BBC Alba. Producer-director, Margot McCuaig dropped off a drive with the interviews. First thing to do: copy them onto my RAID. Easy start.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci is wonderful. It’s long, but it needs to be. It’s given me an appreciation of the master’s life, work and political context (you think ours is turbulent), but also takes care to present alternate theories regarding the more mysterious aspects of Leonardo’s life and work. Above all, it […]
I just finished Jaron Lanier’s book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, and I found it so convincing, that I deleted my Twitter accounts immediately. Everyone knows they sell your data, but Lanier goes further and explains how, purely in the name of ‘engagement’ with advertising, the algorithms engage in massive-scale […]
I don’t know what in the hell is really happening in Mulholland Drive. Maybe nothing is. Screenwriting manuals would lead us to believe that what it does is invalid, that it could never hold an audience’s attention, let alone its empathy. The fact that it is often voted best film of any given period (the […]