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Started playing Forza Horizon 5 this weekend. Amongst the free cars I got on starting was a Mitshibushi Lancer with seems to make offroad almost trivially easy as it’s so ridiculously fast. Or maybe I haven’t got my difficulty set correctly yet…
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Mighty Goose is the Metal Gear clone I didn’t know I needed. Conceptually nuts, often simply too manic on-screen and very statisfyingly playable.
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Brexit and economic migration
An interesting article about some of the rhetoric around UK shortages. The quote that stands out for me: “I don’t accept that the UK’s reliance on unskilled, cheap labour is an unalloyed good”.
Brexit hasn’t provoked the basic discussions about the nature of the country’s economy in the way it should have.
The rhetoric around training and paying better has truth to it but there are a number of jobs that simply don’t require a lot training and really the question is about whether the true costs of labour can be passed back into the wider economy. Part of the Brexit dream was forcing the capital investment into automation required to remove the need for labour but its going to take longer than six months to come up with caravans of self-driving lorries.
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I’ve been watching the Marvel “What If…?” series. The animation approach is really interesting as a lot of things work a lot better in animation than the CGI live action.
The stories are also interesting as the Dr. Strange ends in failure and the Zombies one ends abruptly.
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Goshawk Summer
I have been reading Goshawk Summer which manages to blend the nature diary with some of the queasy uncertainty of the initial outbreak of the COVID pandemic in the UK. The bulk of the book covers a spring and summer spent filming a goshawk nest in the New Forest.
Nature takes the foreground with divergences into the management of land and the balance of demands on the natural environments. The author grew up in the New Forest so occasionally there are snippets of nostalgia, autobiography and memory. The basic beat of the nature diary, the succession of seasons and inevitable drumbeat of live moving through it phases underpins this book in the way it does for the entire genre.
Later with the lockdown lifting the thoughts become darker as the forest fills with people, litter and anger. The respite of lockdown proves fleeting and as with carbon emissions the world rushes back at speed.
A passing mention of the inability to meet with family sets up a darker still epilogue that reveals personal tragedy and combines it with the impact of the forest visitors on the ground nesting birds.
The other diversions are to provide insight into the behaviour of animals and the ecology of the forest and biological systems in general. The balance of information is generally right here. Enough to inform, not so much as to derail from the central narrative.
Natural life exists within the turning of the seasons; but lurking at the back of everything in our current time is a clock ticking that cannot be turned back and which may advance without us and many of the other animals that cling precariously to their space within a human world.
Simply and directly written, the book moves swiftly and satisifies as the summer unfolds. The joy of the nature memoir is to share in the moments of sublime observation without the often difficult waiting that accompanies the wait. The successful writer brings us the beauty and allows us to elide the difficulties in experiencing it for ourselves. We live vicariously for better and worse through our observer. The elegant trick here is also to tap into the emotions of a recent shared experience and set it against ancient rhythms.
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I’m rewatching the Witcher Season One. I’d forgotten how high the production values are the strigia is amazing and the costumes and sets look as good as the Lord of the Rings
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Most of the commentary around why Britain isn’t trying to form some kind of coalition to intervene in Afghanistan seems insane. We were already defeated militarily there ten years ago and it feels like country has been trying to ignore it ever since.
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Loki Season 1 finale
The new Loki series has been engagingly all over the shop. The retro-future look of the TVA was great and then I wholeheartedly agree that it felt like the writers and actors all created their version of Doctor Who. The penultimate episode seemed to strike a balance between the epic, the comic and the mythological.
The final episode though? Mostly I agree with this Polygon article. The logical villain would have been another Loki variant that reflected and contrasted the protagonists. After five episodes it was just hard to care about some character we’d only just met expositing for half an hour.
I met the reveal of Season 2 with a bit of a sigh, given the complete misfire in this episode is there any guarantee that it is going to be the same thing for the next Season, a bold opening to a unsatisfactory bucking of narrative demands.
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I saw this poem near the start of the pandemic and loved it’s challenge to survivor bias and the idea that other people’s suffering is a cost worth paying. readwildness.com/19/smith-…
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I really felt the argument of this article Nothing matter to careless people. The worst thing about tactical short-termism is the failure to appreciate the corrosive effect that convenience has on foundational elements of society.
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Card-game design crossovers
It’s interesting to see the crossover in card games between computer implementations and physical games. I started to read through the Dark Souls card game rules and I felt that I’d like to actually play a digital version of it and avoid the hassle of having to setup the cards, boards and tokens.
The encounter and treasure draws felt like the loot tables in Slay the Spire, which has done so much to popularise card metaphors for computer games and I wondered whether it is easier to prototype games as physical or digital versions of themselves.
All of this made me wonder why I actually bought the game in the first place and I think it came from a different time in a way. When something that could be played with multiple real players and solo sounded great whereas now if you think you are mostly going to be doing things solo then there is a real question as to why you wouldn’t just take the digital version of it.
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It doesn’t take long in Ape Out before you’re brutally murdering people and revelling in their deaths and fear as righteous revenge for their abuse
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Book review: Ex Libris
Ex Libris is a collection of reviews, recommendations and appreciations of books and authors. It covers a huge range of interests, fiction, history, biography as well as speeches and poetry. Themes recur in the selection including the writing by children of immigrants to America and most often Trump and the tumult that he brought to American life. Democracy is covered from de Tocqueville to Orwell and Arendt.
It has a number of beautiful full page illustrations with imagined covers for some of the titles in an art deco style. The book generally is beautifully presented from the text font to the structure of the pull quotes. It is something that is meant to be consumed as a physical book.
Sometimes the selections lead from one to another or circulate a theme but it is just as easy to select a title at random and navigate the book by chance.
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I get angry about the amount of effort that goes into holding Nicole Sturgeon to account for Alex Salmond’s actions.
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There’s something really distasteful in the way that Nicole Sturgeon is being made accountable for Alex Salmond’s actions. It feels to me that he gets a pass on his conspiracy theories when it’s clear that he was abusive to women who worked with him.
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I suffer from the occasion bout of existentialist dread and I found this thread on Twitter presenting the thoughts of Pliny the Elder to be of tremendous comfort. The logic is entirely reasonable and the amount of effort that one has to go to to create an eternal identity and it’s subsequent reward or punishment seems like the one that requires a tremendous amount of construction.
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Vaccinating teachers
The discussion going round about whether teachers should be vaccinated ahead of their age schedule yet again reflects the confusion between providing education and childcare. The provision of education could be delayed over a longer time, after all learning should really be lifelong.
The need for childcare though is immediate and one of the blockers is the need for teachers to isolate. On that basis it is probably more valuable in terms of net impact to be able to run schools on different rules.
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