Courtesy of xkcd: Hallelujah.
Nice to see the classics still getting some respect.1
Thoughts of a sixtysomething geek
Courtesy of xkcd: Hallelujah.
Nice to see the classics still getting some respect.1
Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook:
Happy Valentine’s Day! Just logging in for a quick scroll? Take your time.
You’re not on here as much as you used to be. Still, we’ll never forget you. In fact, we at Facebook love celebrating the moments and people you’ve worked really hard to forget. So now that you’re here, please enjoy this picture of you and your ex-boyfriend from five years ago.
You really loved that wine bar. Look at how happy you were. And is it just us or is your body snatched in this pic? Do you still own that blouse? Oh, right, it doesn’t fit anymore. Just like your ex, it’s gone now. […]
So, which is the most depressing vision of a social life in the 21st century: Facebook as a bitchy friend, or Ericsson’s vision1 of a social life where your domestic appliances are apparently your only company after a dinner date falls through?
[Facebook humour via The Overspill, Ericsson video via Sci-Fi Interfaces]
Given the largely positive reviews that Station Eleven got, regular readers may not be surprised to learn that I ended up shelling out for a STARZPLAY subscription with the plan of watching the ten episodes then deciding whether to let my subscription roll over for another month. There’s other content I’d been meaning to watch1 so we’ll see how long they can keep my interest.
I’m up to episode five so far, and while the show has been a bit uneven so far as they’ve introduced the characters my worries that the show might veer into a more Walking Dead-style take on the apocalypse have abated. I’m mostly enjoying some excellent acting and a cast of characters who are (so far) very much not taking the story in that sort of relentlessly grim direction.
More to say once I catch up with the end of the show, but I do have two negative points about the wider experience of watching the show:
Even if I live to be 100, I will never understand why knowing more about the fate of Boba Fett became such a big deal among fans of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Despite this, there’s no denying that This Place Was Home by ND Stevenson is a really good, heartwarming piece of Boba Fett fan fiction. Got me right in the feels, it did.
[Via MetaFilter]
Tony Blair can only wish he had such good luck…
Domestication is key to the rebranding of Bush as a “good” conservative. His interview on The Today Show was conducted in part by his daughter Jenna, who is one of the hosts of the show. She explained for the viewing audience that although when her father left office, his approval rating was as low as 21 percent, it now sits at 61 percent. They played a clip of Will Ferrell doing his impression of Bush asking, “How do you like me now?” Laughing, the other host remarked that “history has been super kind.” It was the strangest euphemism for the Trump presidency I have heard.
[Via Memex 1.1]
Watching the first episode of This Is Going To Hurt this evening, I was struck by the resemblance to a show called Cardiac Arrest,1 back when Helen Baxendale was a new face and Jed Mercurio was still writing under the pen-name of John MacUre.
Ben Whishaw is very good in the new show and it certainly isn’t trying to make the NHS look good.2 On the evidence of the first episode, the only thing stopping this picking up the crown of “the most realistic medical drama of all time” is that it remains to be seen how open the post-pandemic public will be to the proposition that pushing the NHS to do everything on the cheap while also forcing it to pick up all classes of work is inevitably going to make the NHS look worse than it should.
A lot will depend upon how future episodes depict the role of managers, I suspect. Plus, of course with any BBC show, how far the show catches the eye of the culture warriors in the government and press as they spoil for a fight/headline/soundbite.