They say everyone has a book in them. Unfortunately, the best bits are being previewed in emails and tweets.
I had originally planned not to do a ‘this is what I did this year’ then last night I thought I might and then I thought again that no, I don’t want to read that so I’m not going to write it. People do ask me for recommendations of things, so I’m going to recommend some things I really enjoyed this year:
I adored Control and all the expansions, it’s the only game I played to full completion with all the achievements. I sunk a few hundred hours into Planet Zoo (the animals are cute and it has a high degree of customisability). I started getting into Rimworld on Wes’ recommendation before realising that it was a black hole of time and managed to pull myself out before it consumed me. I also replayed a few hundred hours of No Man’s Sky but hit that plateau point where you realise that there’s just a lot of doing the same thing over and over again to go and stopped.
I watched a lot of YouTube: The graphics geekery of Corridor Crew and Digital Foundry; Blender from Blender Guru and Ian Hubert, the ongoing mechanical travails of B is for Build and Colin Furze. Girlfriend Reviews for weekly amusement and game criticism. Let’s plays from RKG, Mike Sheets, Let’s Game it Out (never fails to make me lol) and Two Dollars Twenty. Terry Barentsen, Francis Cade, Phil Gaimon and others for bike stuff. Maths from Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown amongst other. Some cultural criticism from Critical Nobody and What’s So Great About That?. Film from Every Frame a Painting and Now You See It. I also got into watching people paint and play miniatures through Play on Tabletop, eBay Miniature Rescue and Goobertown (he is just the nicest, coolest guy). I’m grateful and in awe of the people who put this material together all the time for free and make super interesting ideas open, accessible and digestible to wide audiences.
Voracious podcast consumption included mostly chart-topping stuff; Adam Buxton (49th in the charts, don’t you know) was, and always is a clear favourite and inspiration. The Crooked Media empire for US and world politics: Pod Save America, Pod Save the World and Lovett or Leave it. Talking Politics for a more European and UK perspective. Reply All for all things Internet and the new spinoff How To Save A Planet. Then history from Mike Duncan’s Revolutions, History of English and History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Dan Carlin also snuck out two more episodes of Hardcore History over the year, each one was a five-hour treat.
Somewhere I properly read like maybe three books and they had such a significant impact that I can’t remember any of them. I’m still working on The Idiot. I read hundreds of papers, chapters and essays which I update you on here pretty regularly anyway. One day I’ll assemble a library of stuff, I’m still migrating Evernote to Keep It so once I’ve done that it might be easier.
Short Stuff
- I rebuilt the Haunted Machines site. Check it out. We’re working on some stuff so it needed updating.
- This blog also needs a redesign. It’s settling in now from the big overhaul but, for example, the tags need to be somewhere else. I’ve started to refer back to things and there’s not an easy way to search at the moment.
- Games Workshop has increased in value 1600% in the last five years and is also apparently worth three times the British fishing industry.
- Some people got stroppy when I was exasperated about the use of fishing as a hostage in Brexit negotiations. I’m not going to concede; yes – it will effect some people’s lives but it is marginal compared to the utter havoc and destruction the nationalists have unleashed on far more significant sectors of UK economy and culture.
- An engrossing bit of visualisation; the Timeline of Failure of UK’s response to the Covid pandemic. It’s produced by tireless satirists Led by Donkeys and paints a picture of a group of people who won’t take serious stuff seriously.
- The first alt-universe Covid movies have been cropping up. I wondered a few weeks back about the diegetics of Covid and how it would effect the reliance of films on certain social cues and tropes. Imagine it as something like a world war – there are films specifically about war where the war is essentially a character. And then there are films where war is a big, unavoidable bit of context. In the second case this is usually covered with a bit of exposition and then everyone goes about their normal business but how will you create films where everyone has to keep a distance and the social rules are different? It necessitates new tropes: Zoom calls, the end of quiet, conspiratorial hallway conversations, people standing 2m apart. Well anyway, luckily for us these first films are are just terrible.
- Apple have decided to say they are going to be making a car. Do they need to make a car? No. Does the world need another car? No. Will it positively impact their perception in the eyes of the tech bois? Yes. This is just profoundly sad. Remember when Apple actually invented stuff rather than just attempting to carve out territory and invent competition? Imagine if Apple said ‘We’re going to compete with all the companies designing cars by designing-out cars. We’re going to use our decades of understanding user behaviour and needs [to better or worse extents] to redesign urban infrastructure and services such that we can significantly reduce road deaths.’ I’m too jaded to wallow in disappointment at this stage in my life.
I’m reminded of an idea I read years ago that Concorde was killed off by Skype. Yes, the safety problems were what did it in, but the fact that no-one invested in developing iterations or alternatives is because the primary use-case – fast travel across the Atlantic for business people and celebrities – was made cheaper and easier by Skype. - What was the last thing you remember being invented?
- Homelessness is a maligned and ignored problem in London and many other cities and it can be easy to forget how it is getting worse all the time, exacerbated even more by Covid especially when we’re not out and about being confronted with it so much. If you’ve got some change rattling around at the end of this month, consider giving some to Crisis if you’re in the UK. It’s going down to freezing this week and some change could help keep someone warm.
That wasn’t very short. the keyboard feels really heavy, like it’s an effort to type. I guess I’ve bene out of practice the last few days. I’ve got to get on the bike, there’s still 195km to ride in the next three days. Remember that I love you, see you next year.