I'm writing this slightly later than normal after we got back from a trip down to the Bristol to see our lovely friends. There's a bunch of pictures on both Instagram and Hipstamatic (which is totally great and has encouraged me to start taking more pictures).
Other than that, this has been a fairly quiet week, with only a Society of Authors local meetup of note. It was good fun to catch up with some other local writers.
This week is going to be a bit busier. I'm in Brighton tomorrow, then it's another SOA meeting on Tuesday over in Whitstable, then next Saturday in London for something at the Barbican. And I probably should look for some work at some point…
The three things which most caught my attention
- Everybody's Everywhere, the documentary about Lil Peep, is available on YouTube. I wish he had lived longer: the kid had a way with words, and it would have been interesting to see him apply them to the concerns that come with a longer life.
- I'm poking something about Technocracy with a small sharpened stick, and I'm interested in Michelism and John B Michel. If you have a weird mind, you might want to take a look too.
- Michael Tsai, whose blog you should have in your RSS reader (like it's 1999), wrote a post noting discomfort about the smartphone as single point of failure in our connected lives. He's right: it is, frankly, scary.
Things I have been writing
I resurrected Technovia, and wrote something about the "climbdown" of the UK government over access to end to end encrypted messages was nothing of the sort. Then of course there was Elon Musk sabotaging a Ukrainian attack because he is a naive, gullible idiot. And of course there was the news that Brexit is basically going to give you a worse version of Windows in the UK. Well done, Brexiteers!
I also started working on my next short, more on that next week.
Things I have been reading
I've finished four books in the last week. The first was China Mieville's A Spectre, Haunting, which I have been reading for a while and finally got around to completing. China sometimes sounds like someone who did a PPE degree crossed with a Socialist Worker seller, but it's still a good book and I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in Marx.
Next came Russell Davies' Do interesting. A short book full of sound advice on how to get your mind moving, with little activities. Another recommend.
I finished Tansy Hoskins' The Anti-Capitalist book of fashion, which is yet another recommend. Even if you're not that interested in fashion, it's a good deconstruction of how a lot of modern Capitalism works, from the exploitation of workers in the developing world through the creation of alienation of various kinds in the developed world through media.
And finally -- four books! -- it didn't take me long to read Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con. If you are in any way interested in tech you need to read this book.
