Skummy

I have often said that "again" can be the funniest word in the English language.

Oh for sure, the entire idea is unworkable. But I'm starting from the other guy's starting point of "in five years, it will be better", and assuming that many of those problems are ironed out, and it would still be shit.

I was talking to a mate in the pub a couple of weeks ago about AI, and someone at the table next to us butted it with the usual, "yeah, but you're talking about AI now, not what AI will be capable of in five years time", and about how by then all the limitations will be ironed out, and you'll be able to just tell it to make whatever movie you wanted. The example I pointed to then, and will probably continue to make whenever that argument comes up, is that an AI would never have made Jaws. Because everything that made that movie is great is born of having to adapt to the problems of making it, and of how it evolved through that process. That's true of every film, and pretty much any creative act, that it's shaped through the work and through the accidents and coincidences and everything else that takes place during that work, but never really as glaringly so as in Jaws.

I love Alarmo.

I love Dylan's singing voice from around the '90s onwards, once it has some more bass behind it, and it's less nasally. Something like "Love Sick" really leans into that voice, and I prefer it to any cover version. I also have a soft spot for the couple of covers albums he did in the 2010s, to get this back on topic, doing "great American songbook" and Tin Pan Alley stuff, and a lot of that is on the strength of how his voice has matured.

I completely get Stephen King's objections to The Shining - that it was a deeply personal book for him, that it was about how addiction can destroy families, and about how circumstance can drive an ordinary man to madness, while, as King himself pointed out, Jack Nicholson's performance in the movie is clearly stark-raving mad from the beginning. I'm not a huge King guy, but I quite like the book, and adore the film, so I'm thoroughly team Kubrick on that one.

Tetris

Casablanca

I did the Taskmaster Live Experience yesterday. It was interesting. It starts with a "Museum", with props from the show, including some of the artwork contestants have painted framed on the walls, and some replicas of bits of the set, with a couple of easter eggs and "find X number of things" tasks to complete, as well as some of the simpler to replicate tasks; my girlfriend got a potato in the hole without touching the red green on her first attempt, I was absolutely dreadful at it. The actual Taskmaster side of it was reasonably well done; there's recordings of Greg and Alex, and then an "Assistant's Assistant" in the room with you live. There were only four people in my group, whereas other groups had 20+, so it would have worked very differently - if there's more than five of you, only the top five scorers progress to the final task, with everyone else getting a secondary task to complete at that time, and all scores are reset for the final, so basically whoever wins that wins the whole thing. There was one task in the Lab that should have been a team task, but because there were so few of us we were given the option of pairing up or playing it as individuals, and went for individuals. There's two options, of an easier or harder route, and we did the easier one, and I was terrible at it. I came second in one task, but got zero points in one, and came last in one, so really not a good run.

I've only sampled the first 9 or 10 games and I absolutely love it already. So many designers just do pixel art and decide that's enough to be "retro", but this feels so convincingly like a collection of lost '80s games.

The Witch's Road song might be the most annoying piece of music I've heard used as a centrepiece for a piece of fiction in years. Fucking terrible stuff. There's some good horror effects, but mostly so far I've thought the Agatha show is awful, and I don't really understand what (or who) it's for. There's definitely no sense of "if you liked Wandavision, you might like..." to it, but nor does it seem to fit anywhere else in the MCU, or have nearly enough going for it to stand alone.

Reading reviews of UFO 50, it sounds incredible. Definitely tempted, though I will lose all of my free time to it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147860/UFO_50/

If you'll excuse the gratuitous self-plug, I have a new podcast, Bunkum & Ballyhoo. The tagline is "A Podcast About Bullshit", and it's all about con artists, showmen, hoaxers and liars in general throughout history - the first few episodes have a wartime theme, with the first episode looking at a South African masked wrestler who became a martyr for the far-right and the apartheid movement, and the second about an English wrestler who fought for the Nazis. The third will be about Jasper Maskelyne, a magician who supposedly helped turn the tide of World War 2 with his conjuring tricks. It's just me talking about these things, so I keep it short and sweet - there's two episodes and one in the can, all coming in at under twenty minutes. It's been well received so far. As for other stuff I've been listening to... 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back is a book club podcast by Mike Nelson of MST3K and Rifftrax, and Connor Lestowka of Rifftrax. They read bad books together and talk about them. I went right back to the start, when they covered Ready Player One, and have dipped in and out of other books they've covered since then. I can find Connor irritating at times, and some of the more improv-y stuff they do is skippable, but when it's just Mike Nelson being exasperated by the writing of someone like Ernest Cline it's fantastic. It probably helps that I've watched so much MST3K and Rifftrax over the years, so I find Mike's voice very relaxing. Discworld Order - another book podcast, and a bit cheeky, as I've guested on this one. The host, Mark, who has read more fantasy books than anyone else I know, and a guest discuss Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, one at a time, in order. It's very flee-flowing, and always interesting hearing how people feel about books that usually mean a lot to them, but that we often hadn't read in years - what we got from them first time around, and what we get from them now. I was on to discuss Mort, and I really enjoyed it. Weird Little Guys - A Cool Zone Media thing, Molly Conger looking at Neo-Nazis and far-right extremists in America, and how many of them are just sad weird freaks. Dogg Zzone 9000 - again, a bit cheeky because I was on it. A spin-off podcast of 1900-Hot-Dog, the comedy website run by Robert Brockway and Seanbaby, formerly of Cracked, and basically internet comedy royalty in my book. Looking at weird old media, with no real set theme beyond that, but always funny and bizarre. I was on to discuss Rambo y sus Titanes, the Argentinian wrestling show based on the action figures based on the cartoon series based on the Rambo movies (based on the book First Blood). Bigfeets - genuinely maybe my second-favourite podcast right now after Three Bean Salad. It's Brockway and Seanbaby again, joined by Jason Pargin. It's an episode-by-episode rewatch of the low budget Bigfoot-hunting reality show Mountain Monsters. I have never watched an episode of Mountain Monsters, and likely never will. But them discussing it is some of the funniest stuff I've ever listened to.