The Future

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?


from comsicomsa on Vimeo.

[Facebook humour via The Overspill, Ericsson video via Sci-Fi Interfaces]


  1. From just over a decade ago. Back when having a robot vacuum cleaner was a sign we were living in the future. 

Station Eleven

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:

  1. Whilst the official podcast has all the access to the cast and crew one could wish for, the content is so self-congratulatory about just how brilliant everyone was that it can be hard to take. This is why for other shows I mostly steer clear of their official podcasts, but I haven’t had time to locate a suitable non-official alternative for this show yet.
  2. The STARZPLAY app for iPadOS breaks so many of John Siracusa’s (unsolicited) rules for streaming apps it’s ridiculous and is also just horribly unreliable when it comes to just playing streaming video, full stop. Silent crashes, the app reacting to a wrong touch by returning me to the start of my episode multiple times per episode, it’s infuriating. They’re lucky the content is worth the perseverance required.

  1. I definitely need to see Counterpart from scratch, and it’d be good to finish off Fringe after I made it to the end of season 2 in an earlier watch on NowTV earlier in the pandemic. 

Fett Fanfic

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]

Luck

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]

This Is Going To Hurt

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.


  1. Yes, that was a while ago. What can I say, I’m old. 
  2. Beyond depicting the staff as basically people trying to do the right thing despite the pressures of the system they have to work under.