Tales of cyber-neurosis
February 10, 2025 Leave a comment
I finally managed to come up with an accurate sports prediction, though I have to admit that backing the Eagles to beat the Chiefs wasn’t too much of a stretch, if one looked at the actual numbers rather than buying in to the “invincible Mahomes” narrative.
February 9, 2025 Leave a comment
I must admit that I rather lost interest in the NFL last month, as my adopted team stumbled towards the end of a disappointing season, but I have paid enough attention to have an opinion on who will win the final game tonight; Philadelphia.
February 8, 2025 Leave a comment
One of my favourite quotes is Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s 1972 comment “It’s too early to say”, uttered in reply to a question from Richard Nixon on the significance of the French Revolution. It has subsequently been reported that, due to a translation error, Zhou was under the impression that Nixon was referring to events in Paris in 1968 rather than 1789, so he wasn’t taking quite such a long-term view as had been thought, but still, I think that the general principle that one should hold off on making judgements until sufficient time has passed is essentially sound.
I’ve been thinking of this as I’ve watched the flurry of activity that has unfolded in Washington since Donald Trump’s second inauguration last month, every day bringing news of some fresh lunacy. Is it all part of a cunning strategy, a smokescreen to distract us from the real villainy? Or is the performative cruelty and transparent grifting actually as much of a plan as Trump and his acolytes have?
I guess time will tell, though, if I ignore my own advice against giving instant opinions, I would lean towards the view that they don’t have much of a blueprint beyond pushing the boundaries until someone makes them stop, or, failing that, until reality intrudes upon their fantasies.
I suspect it may be several years before we can really make sense of it all though – perhaps whoever is running China in 2225 will feel they have enough perspective to offer a verdict.
January 16, 2025 Leave a comment
Sad news today of the passing of film director David Lynch, undoubtedly one of the finest auteurs of his generation.
My first exposure to Lynch’s genius was seeing Eraserhead when I was still at school, and I’ve followed his work ever since. As I’ve noted previously, Twin Peaks was a major influence on my cultural outlook during my student days. On my initial visit to Los Angeles in the early 90s practically the first thing I did was to track down a copy of the LA Reader, so that I could cut out The Angriest Dog in the World; that comic strip, now yellowed with age, is still a prized possession. Mulholland Drive became my favourite movie the first time I saw it back in 2001, and has remained so ever since, its phantasmagorical beauty beguiling me anew with each viewing. Of all Lynch’s creations I am perhaps fondest of Rabbits, which is incomparable in its unsettling incomprehensibity.
I could go on all night with examples – Dennis Hopper as Frank in Blue Velvet, the costume design in Dune, Lynch’s masterful use of music – but for some reason I feel a sudden need for some coffee and cherry pie…
January 11, 2025 Leave a comment
Even though I’m thousands of miles away I’ve been feeling very disturbed by the news from Southern California; principally, of course, due to the appalling loss of life, property, and peace of mind being endured by the residents of LA County, but also because, even to my supposedly rational mind, it seems like a terrifying omen. A bastion of progressive values literally burning to the ground is the sort of unsubtle metaphor for the times we find ourselves living in that would normally be dismissed as ridiculously blunt in a work of fiction, yet, the way things are going at the moment, it feels, if anything, like an understatement.
January 1, 2025 Leave a comment
Despite my generally curmudgeonly nature I’m not entirely immune to the cultural currents that identify this time of year, a few days after midwinter, with a new spring just about imaginable, as an opportunity for reinvention, both personal and societal, and a reason to believe that the world, and my life within it, can only get better.
I’m sure that this feeling won’t last the week, but I’ll enjoy it while I can…
December 31, 2024 Leave a comment
Our very first post of 2024 set out a number of predictions for the year ahead; I tried to keep them vague enough to encompass a range of possible outcomes, but even with that precaution I still mostly ended up being well wide of the mark. My hopes that the conflicts in Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan might wind down proved to be naively optimistic, with the genocide in Gaza in particular expanding to a horrific scale. I did foresee the demise of the Conservative government in the UK, but perhaps overestimated how much would change under Labour. I thought Joe Biden would be reelected, and backed the 49ers for the Superbowl.
Given that unpromising start, it was perhaps inevitable that my blogging output over the following twelve months would be less than stellar. I did manage more than twice as many posts as in 2023, and our traffic was up a bit too, but the quality could charitably be described as uneven. This is reflected in the statistics; our top ten most read are an essentially random selection from the archive:
My favourite posts of the year mostly came in a rare burst of energy in the spring, with another flurry around the November election; some are upbeat, though a slightly disturbing number of them concern the death of well-known figures:
One trend that has definitely accelerated over the past three or four years is a reduction in our geographical reach; there was a time when we had readers in over 100 nations, but now just about all our traffic comes from the UK, with even the US and other anglophone countries dropping off sharply this year. We still have a few visitors from foreign lands though; here are the top ten:
There are many topics I should have written more about; the aforementioned wars, political and economic developments in Europe and the US, the rising influence of AI and other technological novelties, to name but a few. Even if I give myself a pass for avoiding such gloomy fare, I could still have posted a bit more frequently on cultural issues.
A particularly glaring omission is the complete lack of commentary on Second Life, despite it ostensibly being the prime subject of this whole project. The new owners of the platform finally got around to releasing a mobile viewer earlier in the year, and, since I still pay nearly $100 annually to maintain my premium membership, I was actually given advance access, and thus had the opportunity to be among the first to review it. I did get as far as logging in, and wandered around the grid for a while, but I wasn’t really inspired to write anything. I found the interface as hard to master as I had when I first tried the PC version back in 2007, and once I did get the hang of it there was still the same old SL problem; nobody is there, and there’s nothing to do. To be fair, I was using an old iPhone with a tiny screen, so I probably didn’t get the best visual results; I might give it another look if I upgrade my phone next year.
Thinking about the twelve months ahead it’s hard to know what to expect. If there’s one thing I’m sure of after the last few years it’s that I’m inching ever closer to Socratic Wisdom; perhaps 2025 will be the year when I can finally proclaim that all I know is that I know nothing. That said, I will resolve to try a little harder on the blogging front, if for no other reason than to give me something to look back on next December.
On that hopeful note I’ll wish all our readers a happy New Year, and may it find you healthy and prosperous.
December 30, 2024 Leave a comment
Looking at my Tumblr I’m reassured to see that I did consume at least a little culture during the last twelve months; I’ll try to distill each category down to a top three.
Television
Despite subscribing to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime I almost never have time for TV shows. Only Murders in the Building: Season 4 was the sole series I watched all the way through, so I guess it takes gold by default, though it was pretty funny, so it would probably have won even with competition.
Film
My favourite movie by a mile this year was ultra-violent live-action Looney Tune Hundreds of Beavers, with Perfect Days and I Saw the TV Glow also making the podium, and Werner Herzog biopic Radical Dreamer just missing out. The 50th anniversary reissue of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was essential; his latest work Megalopolis rather less so, though it certainly had its moments.
Books
Paul Auster’s passing in April prompted me to catch up with his New York Trilogy, which turned out to be the highlight of a year when I mostly avoided more recent fiction; Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel was the exception and takes the silver. Bronze goes to non-fiction; Zeke Faux’s exposé of the crypto industry Number Go Up.
Music
I’ve listened to a lot of radio this year, mainly US college stations, which inspired me to compile a long list of new albums to get hold of, very few of which I actually got around to purchasing. Of those I did buy my top three are probably Fairweather Friend by The Umbrellas, News of the Universe by La Luz, and Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman, though on another day I might include Sierra Ferrell’s Trail Of Flowers, Rooting for Love by Laetitia Sadier, or This Is How Tomorrow Moves by beabadoobee. The best live shows I saw featured the aforementioned Umbrellas, Belle and Sebastian, and Jane Weaver. I even had a favourite opera – Marx in London!
That’s a brief run through the culture of 2024 as seen through my very limited lens; come back tomorrow for a look at the year in blogging.
December 23, 2024 Leave a comment
I have to admit that, around this point eight years ago, I was relatively relaxed about the prospect of Donald Trump ascending to the office of President of the United States. The fact that I was an old white guy living an ocean away helped of course, but I was also calmed by a residual faith in the essential immutability of government institutions; short of burning everything to the ground it is actually very difficult to effect significant change to the political landscape of an advanced society like the US or UK. This is usually immensely frustrating for those of us of a more progressive nature, but it is sometimes reassuring to know that not everything is lost just because the crazy people have temporarily taken charge.
Did my lack of concern turn out to be justified? I guess that I personally didn’t do too badly, but Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, hundreds of thousands of excess Covid deaths, and families separated at the border, were only a few of the reasons that those less privileged than I might beg to differ.
That said, the US government remained robust enough to see off the laughably incompetent coup attempt, and had Joe Biden directed his DoJ to be a bit more forceful in going after Trump for the many crimes he committed during his time in office then we might have seen the back of him. Alas, with typical liberal timidity, Joe let Donald off the hook, and now we are where we are.
I am thus somewhat less sanguine about how the next four years will work out, especially since the people Trump is recruiting suggests that his second administration will be a veritable carnival of reaction.
Are there any reasons to be hopeful? The fact that the congressional GOP couldn’t quite stomach Trump’s demand to shut down the government just before the holidays may be a sign that they won’t go along with all his insanity, though whether he will actually need their cooperation may well be a moot point. Putting obviously unqualified people in charge of big departments will make it easier for the career bureaucrats who know how everything works to maintain business as usual. And perhaps Trump himself will recall that being President is a pretty sweet gig, even with the checks and balances, and that wrecking the joint may be considerably more trouble than it is worth.
Or am I just whistling in the dark? Is this really the time that we go to hell in a handcart? I’m not quite ready to succumb to despair just yet; I’m still enough of a dialectical materialist to believe that human progress is a historical inevitability, and that any current difficulties are merely a bump in the road towards fully realised communism. I’ll stay as involved as I can in resisting the spread of Trumpism on these shores, and I’m sure it won’t be too long before my American comrades see it off as well.
November 9, 2024 Leave a comment
This time four years ago we were contemplating the question of whether the Trump administration would be viewed by posterity as a minor bump on the road of progress, or if his defeat in 2020 would prove to be only a temporary setback to the onward march of American fascism.
Well, now we know the answer, and it wasn’t even close, Trump comfortably winning the popular vote as well as the Electoral College, and the GOP coming out on top in the Senate, and perhaps also the House.
I must admit that, in the aftermath of January 2021, I thought it was all over for Trump personally, and that the movement he had sucessfully marshalled, for a while at least, would split, with relatively moderate elements returning to mainstream conservative politics, and the conspiracy-addled fringe fading into online insignificance. Instead the lunatics have only strengthened their control of the asylum, with the acquiescence and/or connivance of the GOP hierarchy.
And, it must be said, the result tells us something about the nature of society in the US. The electorate know all about Trump, and a majority of them like what they see; the virulent racism and toxic misogyny are a feature, not a bug.
Is this surprising, when one considers the whole span of the history of the USA, a nation founded on genocide and slavery, where legally-sanctioned racial discrimination was the norm within living memory? Was the advance of civil liberties in the latter half of the 20th century merely a blip, destined to be erased as the country reverts to type?
Perhaps I’m delusional, but I’m staying positive. Many obstacles can be put in Trump’s way, both personal and institutional, to frustrate the implementation of his reactionary agenda. The fight will be hard, but it’s not unwinnable.
Second Life Shrink 
