🔗 A Frank Conversation with My Rabbi About The Rise of Skywalker
Judaism has always struck me as the nerdiest of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, so this reading of the also deeply nerdy pseudo-religion of Star Wars through the perspective of a Rabbi was great fun.

🔗 136 Mindblowing & Groundbreaking Internet Videos
I remember when you felt you’d seen all the cool stuff on the internet (yes, I’m aware of All Your Base, thanks) and then suddenly that was impossible. It was around the time video really took off. This is a nice history of the form with some key milestones and a bunch of stuff I’d not seen. Prepare to waste a few hours…

Misty in Birmingham last night.

🔗 The Blundering Brilliance of Prime Minister Boris Johnson
A rather hagiographic explainer of Johnson for American readers by Andrew Sullivan who knew him at Oxford, but it’s worth skimming to the end section:

“He has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership.”

I don’t think I agree, but it’s an interesting strategy - embrace the extremists to silence them. I wonder if it will work… (via)

So it seems LED Xmas lights flash at a high, but not that high, frequency rather than stay on constantly. Waggle them in front of your camera if you don’t believe me.

🔗 Be Gay, Do Crimes. Untitled Goose Game: Is it Good to be Bad?
Grace does a deep dive into the leftist interpretations of the Goose game, one of the few actual computer games I’ve played in the last decade. It was fun, but it was also work, so I’m not sure if it was really fun. See also Don’t Play Untitled Goose Game.

🔗 Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog
A call to get all that great stuff off Twitter and back onto blogs, where it belongs.

🔗 For the many
A more sober than usual piece by Sam Kris on why you should seriously consider voting for the Labour party this election, running through and answering the standard objections. His bit on antisemitism, as someone “absurdly, unnecessarily Jewish”, is particularly vital.

I also like the line “Full disclosure: I am still basically some sort of Marxist (the Still-Basically-Some-Sort-Of-Marxists being an ancient and august political sect, established only a few years after Marxism itself, and named after the slightly whiny noise we all make when asked to actually pin down our political commitments).”

🔗 New Atheism: An Autopsy
A nice overview of whatever happened to the New Atheist movement that was all over the dial a few years back. The answer given here is the progressive atheists became progressives while the nutjobs, sorry, more libertarian athetists realised that the things they hated about religion could also come from secular areas. In other words, it’s about how people organise themselves in society, not what god they believe in. I’ve was brought up with a total absence of religion so I’ve always found atheists an oddly angry bunch, often as weird as the religious folk. This article gives me a nice label, apatheists, those who don’t consider the subject of godly existence relevant. via

🔗 On the Farm
Daisy Hildyard discusses animal sentience with the great anecdote of cows so determined to the reunited with their calves that they overcame all the fences and gates that had held them capture for years, implying they “were able to get out at any time, if only they wanted to badly enough.” And then goes on to cover multitudes more. A great read.

🔗 Cyberpunk is Dead by John Semley
Nice overview of all that was Cyberpunk back in the 80s, from the obvious Neuromancer to reminding me to rewatch Tetsuo: The Iron Man one of these days, in service of demolishing the idea that Cyberpunk today is anything other than nostalgia and cultural recycling.

🔗 Sasha Baron Cohen Says Tech Companies Built the “Greatest Propaganda Machine in History”
Keynote speech for the Anti Defamation League that is well worth 25 minutes of your watching time. Main takeaway is this is not inevitable. This is the result of a business model that is optimised for attention through outrage and that business model can be reigned in through regulation without affecting free speech.

Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart was one of the best movies of this year and for some reason I found myself looking for the poster just now. It turns out there are quite a few variants, including a wacky 80’s-style National Lampoon tribute, but I was particularly taken with this grid montage which is totally up my aesthetic. (No, I’m not writing you a thinkpiece about why a movie about 2010’s teens uses a grid of polaroids - you know the answer to that.)

🔗 John Doran on Sunn O))) and how their brand of doom metal has defined the decade.
Not unexpected, if you’re familiar with Doran’s oeuvre, but nice to see this extensive overview in the Guardian (which still doesn’t have space for the Scott Walker collaboration and the Birmingham’s Home of Metal project, both of which I know he’s very familiar with). I like the idea of Sunn O))) yoga.

Here’s what I’ve been picking up from the people I meet, the audiences I speak to and the stories that come back to me: on a scale not seen before, people are having an encounter with climate change not as a problem that can be solved or managed, made to go away, or reconciled with some existing arc of progress, but as a dark knowledge that calls our path into question, that starts to burn away the stories we were told and the trajectories our lives were meant to follow, the entitlements we were brought up to believe we had, our assumptions about the shape of history, the kind of world we were born into and our place within it.

Dougald Hine: Al Gore Didn’t Want You to Panic

🔗 In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants
This is a wonderfully insightful comparison between the life of “crude medieval peasants entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords” and the contemporary corporate internet user. Full of great links and quotes it shows how the human mind is affected by what it cannot know, the wild interpretations it casts on that ignorance, and how the powerful can use that for control. (via)

Craig Mod, from his newsletter:

Folks mistakenly think only new walks are good walks. But the best walks are rewalks. This is obvious once you’ve completed a few. Having walked a path once, you have seen almost nothing. You have looked too frequently at the map, or worried about direction, campsite location, inn coordinates, et cetera et cetera. You may find cool stuff the first time around, but experience shows you’ll find weird stuff the second.

Eyes full of tears, by Fiona.

🔗 The social ideology of the motorcar
This essay from 1973 about the way cars took over and broke cities is depressingly current. I didn’t notice it was 46 years old at first and would have said it was written yesterday. Notable for the explanation of how motorcars are inherently a luxury good that cannot scale to the mass populace, because once everyone has a car we might as well walk. They only work when the minority have them, or the city is broken to accommodate them. A must read.