⤳ On Thursday this week, I played the board game Mysterium with a couple of friends. I was actually given it as a Christmas present last year, but my game-playing opportunities are so slim these days that we’d only just got round to opening it. It’s such a fun and interesting game. It’s kind of like Codenames mixed with Cluedo… on acid (but really, a big part of the game is about interpreting trippy ‘visions’). It’s maybe a touch over-engineered, but that might also be me only playing twice and needing to get used to it. Cannot wait to play it again.
⤳ By far the most interesting things I watched this week was this talk (it’s supposed to be an interview, but the interviewer speaks maybe three or four times - which is probably a good thing) with Daniel Schmachtenberger at Impact/Week in Stockholm. I’m going to write a little about Daniel’s ideas later in the week hopefully, but for now you should find 45 minutes in your week to sit down and watch it from start to finish. It’s pretty incredible.
⤳ This week Nina and I also watched The Equaliser 3. We have had a semi-ironic running joke about these films, ever since we were on holiday in the US and went to see the first one in the cinema, just because it happened to be on when we had some time to kill. Now we have to watch it whenever it comes on TV (which is a lot!) and we had to watch the third one together as soon as we were able. It’s probably the weakest of the three, but it still delivers on all the Equalising and the various tropes it has established for itself and Denzel beats Neeson any day of the week. Here’s to number 4! (Also, a Denzel v Neeson crossover film in the style of Alien V Predator would be amazing - well it would be awful, but you know what I mean.)
⤳ Some interesting things I’ve read this week:
This Vanity Fair piece on the Titan submersible tragedy is extraordinary. I had no idea that Stockton Rush’s OceanGate was so poorly regarded by his peers and that this was basically, an accident waiting to happen.
Erin Kissane’s series on Meta’s role in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar is absolutely essential reading.
The NY Times has an article on How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pushed Toward the Heart of U.K. Health Care which is preety depressing, especially as Palantir’s stock shot up on Wednesday, ago when Palantir “emerged as the top pick for a large contract overhauling the United Kingdom’s National Health Service”
As always, Alan Moore gives good interview.
“*I don’t have a copy of any of those works. I’ll never be looking at them again. And even thinking about them, all I’ve got is memories of having my intellectual property rights stolen and then when I complained about that, being typified as a crazy angry guy; “Alan Moore says ‘get off my lawn.’” And yes, alright, I was quite cross, but I don’t think without reason and also to suggest that I’m angry about everything is an evasion. It’s a means of going, “Oh well, if he’s angry about everything then we don’t have to worry about what he says about the way that people are treated in the comics industry, he’s just angry about everything.”
This, by David Coggins in Esquire, is a fun look at Hemingway’s boat and how he paid for it by writing for Esquire in the very early days of the magazine (as Coggins says, “This was an era when writers were genuinely famous—they travelled with Gary Cooper, and their photos ended up in Life magazine. Writers don’t get boats anymore; we’re happy to get expenses.”)
And this from the New Yorker is a crazy and slightly disturbing article about true crime, amateur sleuths, YouTube and what happens when the detectives become the hunted.
⤳ Listening to:
Here’s a podcast for a change, but it’s a music podcast at least: Transmissions :: Matt Marble on Arthur Russell (Live at PRS)