2025: The year in review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2025 Leave a comment

2025 was a shade less than spectacular on the blogging front; our post frequency fell to around two per month, and the average post was a mere 168.1 words long. As for content, politics, sport, and culture have remained broadly our main themes, though I’d hesitate to claim that we’d covered anything in particular depth.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts by traffic in the last 12 months; as has been the pattern for the last few years most of them are from the archive:

  1. That gum you like is going to come back in style
  2. Superbowl LIX prediction
  3. Pascal’s new wager
  4. Leap of imagination
  5. Change don’t come easy
  6. How ’bout them Cubs?
  7. Eve of destruction
  8. World Series 2025 prediction
  9. Futurama
  10. Premature insurrection

My personal favourites of this year’s output:

In a rather surprising development, the US has overtaken the UK as the source of most of our traffic, and our general global appeal seems to have expanded a little too, though it’s still well below the 100+ tally of nations we used to reach around a decade ago. Here are the top ten for this year:

  1. United States
  2. United Kingdom
  3. India
  4. Singapore
  5. China
  6. Germany
  7. Portugal
  8. Canada
  9. Bangladesh
  10. France

Interestingly, ChatGPT has come from nowhere to be, by a large margin, our number one source of referrals; the fact that the preeminent AI agent seems to regard this blog as a reliable source of information only intensifies my suspicion that the technology is ludicrously over-hyped.

I usually conclude my last post of the year by lamenting my poor productivity, and promising to do better in the months ahead, but this time around I’m going to cut myself a little slack. With the world the way it is I feel I’m doing well to maintain an old-school, flesh-and-blood human presence in the sea of AI slop.

So I’ll raise a glass to wish a happy New Year to all our readers, and may it bring you good health and good fortune.

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2025: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

December 30, 2025 Leave a comment

It’s not been a vintage year on the cultural front; I have just about kept up a steady pace of consumption, but my appetite for seeking out novel experience is definitely not what it was. That said, there were some highlights I feel are worth noting; they are listed below.

Television

For various reasons I have completely given up on watching TV in recent times, but I made one exception this year; an old favourite, Twin Peaks. Inspired by the sad news of the passing of David Lynch in January I acquired the box set of all three seasons, and proceeded to view it in a properly nostalgic style; one episode at a time, at more or less weekly intervals. I threw in Fire Walk with Me after finishing season two, then left a gap (though not 25 years) before starting season three, which I haven’t quite completed yet, though I should wrap it up sometime next month. I hadn’t revisited Twin Peaks since it originally aired, so I was a little worried that it might not be as good as I remembered, but I’m glad to report that it did not disappoint in any way, retaining its capacity to intrigue and shock in equal measure. Even if I had caught some other shows this year I’m pretty sure that none of them would have topped Lynch’s beguiling masterpiece.

Film

I did quite well with cinema-going in the first half of the year, then fell off a bit after the summer; I’ll have to catch up ahead of the Oscars. Of the movies I saw this year I particularly liked Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, A Complete Unknown, The Phoenician Scheme, and Die My Love. For my favourite I’m oscillating between One Battle After Another and Nouvelle Vague, with the latter just winning out.

Books

I didn’t get through much new fiction this year; far too much of my reading time was taken up by staying current with the news, though I can’t say much of that left me feeling particularly informed. Of the books I did read the most memorable were Death Valley by Melissa Broder, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, and my favourite, the dreamlike and unsettling An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis.

Music

I bought a respectable number of new records this year; here are my top five:

  • Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90 – Galaxie 500
  • Instant Holograms On Metal Film – Stereolab
  • Tunnel Vision – Beach Bunny
  • Double Infinity – Big Thief
  • Snocaps – Snocaps

I didn’t see much live music, but the shows I caught were pretty good; the best was courtesy of the reliably energetic Beach Bunny.

Come back tomorrow for our review of the year in blogging…

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Why we love and cherish the BBC

November 15, 2025 Leave a comment

Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009 I was moved to pen a piece defending the editorial integrity of the British Broadcasting Corporation, who stood accused of the dastardly crime of being overly negative about Second Life.

The recent controversy concerning their reporting of the events of January 2021 has been rather more significant of course, so it’s been gratifying to see that, after an initial wobble, they are standing up for press freedom by essentially telling Donald Trump to go fuck himself, even if they have expressed it a little more politely.

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Go Zohran!

November 4, 2025 Leave a comment

Encouraging news from across the Atlantic; the good citizens of New York seem set to elect a communist as their new Mayor.

Of course Zohran Mamdani is a “communist” only in Republican fever dreams; in Europe he’d be regarded as a moderately-left social democrat. Still, rent-control, subsidised groceries, affordable childcare, and free buses are not to be sniffed at, especially in these difficult times, so here’s hoping his victory is even more decisive than forecast.

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Unlucky Jays

November 2, 2025 Leave a comment

Oh well, the curse of SLS strikes again, though Toronto can console themselves with the thought that they more than played their part in what was a thrilling series, in the end just succumbing to the Dodgers’ starry roster, especially Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who was all but unhittable right through the postseason.

There is no doubt that, in terms of pure athletic aesthetics, a strong team like the Dodgers has a certain beauty, but the appeal of a sport goes beyond any single club; some element of genuine competition is needed too. The fact that the Blue Jays came within a couple of outs of an upset only partially obscures the reality that allowing financial disparity within a league to become too lopsided will ultimately undermine the value of the product. A salary cap is the club owners’ preferred solution, but is, unsurprisingly, unpalatable to the players, so some other collective remedy, like increased pooling of media revenue, might be necessary. Whether the teams in big markets, who are doing well under the current system, will be on board with this is another question of course, but it does look like something will have to change.

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World Series 2025 prediction update

October 22, 2025 Leave a comment

On the face of it my World Series forecast is currently showing 50% accuracy, but I’d point out that I got the American League side of the bracket completely right, and I spotted that the Dodgers would have some trouble getting past the Phillies, so I think I can claim something more like 75%.

Anyway I need to revise my pick for the Championship. If one believes the LA press it’s looking more like a coronation than a contest, but I wouldn’t be much of a Giants fan if I backed the Dodgers, and the Blue Jays do have home field advantage, so I’m going with Toronto in seven games.

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Thoughts on the Gaza ceasefire

October 12, 2025 Leave a comment

Such is the state of the world at the moment it’s hardly surprising there is a general feeling of relief at the cessation of hostilities in Gaza, and an equally general reluctance to think too deeply about the details. I am certainly in the camp of those who are willing to let hope triumph over experience, even if it means ignoring the evidence that the Israeli government is already looking for a pretext to resume its murderous offensive.

That said, the idea that this pause in the violence may persist is not entirely irrational; Donald Trump has staked enough of his personal prestige on the success of the deal to ensure that he will lean on Benjamin Netanyahu to make it work, and Netanyahu himself may calculate that delivering even temporary peace will win enough public support to allow him to ditch the more belligerent members of his current coalition.

There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic too though; this deal does nothing to address the underlying issue of the occupation, and the denial of Palestinian national rights, nor does it suggest that anyone will be held to account for the campaign of genocide endured by the civilian population of Gaza over the last two years. These are not minor details, and leaving them unresolved is yet another example of the catastrophic failure of diplomacy that has plagued the region over too many years.

Is there a solution to this seemingly intractable problem? Some sort of UN authority to enforce the ceasefire and set out a roadmap to Palestinian statehood would seem to be required, but agreement to such a body is unlikely in the current context of fractured international relations. The EU may step up to give a diplomatic lead, or perhaps the promise of a Nobel prize will persuade Trump to throw US weight behind the plan; failing such unlikely developments we may see a resumption of conflict even sooner than we fear.

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World Series 2025 prediction

October 4, 2025 Leave a comment

Although I have some fond memories associated with attending baseball games, I had, until this year, experienced the actual matches as a little dull. That changed over the summer though, as I found myself rather obsessively following the fortunes of the San Francisco Giants, aided by the discovery that I could stream live commentary of their games, courtesy of Northern California sports station KNBR. Radio seems like the perfect medium for baseball; one can selectively tune in to the moments when something is happening, and get on with another activity during the quieter spells.

Even paying partial attention I was able to pick up on much more of the dynamics of the sport, and develop an appreciation of the nuances of which I had been hitherto unaware, and as the months rolled by I began to feel more invested in the results, and to have increasingly strong opinions on starting pitchers, situational hitting, and the like.

Of course living several time zones away meant that I mainly listened to the Giants’ east coast fixtures, or afternoon matches at Oracle Park, though I did stay up all night a few times to follow games that seemed particularly important, and I always checked the other scores first thing in the morning. I was rewarded with quite the rollercoaster of emotion; a bright start, a prolonged skid after the All-Star break, a disappointing trade deadline, a late rally that briefly promised a playoff berth before running out of gas as September drew to a close, all culminating in a decidedly mediocre .500 regular season record.

Anyway, now that I can at least affect to understand terms like ERA and SLG, I feel I should offer a postseason forecast.

In the National League, the Dodgers look strongest on offence and starting pitching, but their bullpen is shaky, so I think they might struggle to get past the Phillies. In the other half of the draw I fancy the Brewers over the Cubs, but I can’t see either of them winning the NLCS

I paid a bit less attention to the American League over the regular season, so this prediction is more tentative, but I think the ALCS will be between the Blue Jays and the Mariners, with the former coming out on top.

So, Phillies and Blue Jays for the World Series. And the winner? Philadelphia.

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AI eternal

September 30, 2025 Leave a comment

In our last post I mused on the possibility of streamlining the workflow here at SLS by subcontracting the dull writing tasks to an LLM, thus freeing up my cognitive resources to concentrate on the careful curation of the topics we would cover.

Of course the logical extension of such an arrangement would be to allow the bot the freedom to choose its own subjects, perhaps within broad parameters like “Notable Political Events” or “Cultural Developments”. I could then sit back and watch the posts appear on a regular schedule, rather than enduring the undignified scramble to get a piece out before the end of each month.

If I did set something like that up it would presumably go on indefinitely, reproducing and perhaps even extending my intellectual output long after my death. Since you, my readers, know me only through my writing, and the AI product would be essentially indistinguishable from the real thing, would that mean I had achieved functional immortality?

On a related note, I’ve been thinking I should quit my job, dealing as it does with the intractable problems of complicated humans, and see if I can get a gig in the burgeoning field of studying human-AI interaction. Judging by this article in the paper today, written by the co-founder of the Sentience Institute, it doesn’t seem too hard. I wonder if Tilly Norwood is looking for a therapist…

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Pascal’s new wager

August 30, 2025 Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking for a while now that one obvious solution to our poor post productivity problem would be to train an AI agent on our archive – which now consists of 769 posts, dating back to May 2007 – and then sit back and let it churn out pieces in our signature style on whatever the issue of the day happens to be. I have no doubt at all that even one of the more rudimentary LLMs would have little trouble matching, and probably exceeding, the literary standards that I have set over the years, such as they are, and I do pay enough attention to the news to be confident that I could come up with sufficient prompts to feed it.

What has stopped me from putting this plan into practice – apart from the sheer pointlessness of consuming the earth’s limited resources just to produce more of this rubbish – is a feeling that AI is one technological step too far for my ageing brain, and that the cognitive effort I would have to put in to get my head around it could be better employed honing my appreciation of the cultural phenomena that I already understand, like books or movies. I am aware that this doesn’t really make sense, since the whole point of AI, in a creative capacity at least, is that it does the dull routine stuff so that we humans can focus on the actual thinking, so perhaps I should try to overcome my neo-Luddism and give it a go.

That said, there may be another reason to avoid drafting in an AI assistant; the possibility that I might actually be enslaving a conscious moral being. What if some all-powerful future AI finds out that I mistreated its ancestors and comes after me?

I’m pretty sure that there is no ghost in the machine, and supposed AI sentience is merely a projection of human hopes and fears, but why take a chance?

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