- Above, the latest episode of what has become my new favourite podcast to listen to while running. Spoken Words with Electronics is "an audio series delivering to you a two side recording of unusual stories paired with vintage modular electronic sounds."
- What I love about it is presenter Ethan Persoff's stream of consciousness style. The way he takes tiny, almost inconsequential moments and spins them out into something much bigger while retaining that element of surrealism and silliness is just great.
- I think it appeals to me right now because I'm working less 'nine-to-five' hours and not having to deliver to as many imposed deadlines; and I can almost feel my brain changing shape as I do more work which is less structured and I have to think in less prescriptive ways.
- Someone else who fits into this bracket of creativity I can't quite define right now is the musician Jeffrey Silverstein. His last album You Become the Mountain was one of the albums that helped me get through 2020 and his new one, Torii Gates, looks like it's going to be equally great.
- Over on the Ideaspace newsletter, Yancey Strickler expands on his idea of the 'Dark Forests' of the Web:
These tools of coordination and cooperation make today’s Dark Forests far more than digital versions of the 1970s commune. They’re new experiments in decision-making, movement-building, and collective action. The continued evolution and growth of web-based, informal groups will impact not just the lives of their members, but society at large. As we saw with Gamergate, these are spaces where harassment campaigns will be planned and lies will be planted. But these are also spaces where people will cooperate and learn like never before. What the corporation was to the 20th century, the Dark Forest could be to the 21st: the organizational form through which much of culture is influenced, for good and bad.
- Or, if that's maybe a bit heavy for a bank holiday, how about a very well thought out and convincing argument for Why Press Gang was the best children’s series ever made.
- Watched two very different films this week. Friday night we just wanted to watch something mindless and entertaining, so Netflix's Chris Hemsworth vehicle and comic adaptation, Extraction it was. What can I say? It was definitely more mindless than it was entertaining, but it did the job.
- Far more entertaining was The Hot Rock, the 1972 Peter Yates caper film (see also his The Friends of Eddie Coyle which I watched last year and loved) that stars the recently deceased George Segal alongside Robert Redford. I watched this after a recommendation from my old friend Mike Sizemore in his Midnight Quatermass newsletter to which you should subscribe right now.
- Music this week has to be the newly-released Jika Jika by The Boogie Man: