Category: Technology

  • “You go out into the world and see people and they smile, but what is really in their heads?”

    This is horrific. Lyz Lenz writes about a small town and its conversations on Facebook. It’s a nice Iowa town. In a way that many Iowa towns are nice, and they don’t like being called racist. So, when people called them racist, all hell broke loose. …Screenshots of comments sent to me by people in…

  • The wrong kind of body

    This collection of photos is fascinating: it’s the Athlete series by Howard Schatz, and it shows bodies. Big bodies, little bodies, stocky bodies, thin bodies, light-skinned bodies, dark-skinned bodies… the only thing they have in common is that the people pictured are all elite athletes. The collection has been doing the rounds again as a…

  • It’s never “just a joke”

    I wrote about The Last of Us Part 2 the other day, and one of the things I mentioned was its portrayal of LGBT+ characters. One thing I didn’t mention was that their very existence was enough to rouse an army of entitled man-babies to scream about political correctness destroying video games, as they have…

  • The Last of Us Part 2 is a flawed masterpiece

    I finished playing The Last of Us Part 2 yesterday. It made me cry, a lot. I think it’s a masterpiece. I agree with Eurogamer’s Oli Welsh, who wrote: It gets messy and problematic, and neither side comes out unscathed. But, by taking some big gambles, the developers land decisive blows that will send you…

  • “That is phenomenal engagement. What’s not to like?”

    Alex Hern explores the tragic and frightening tale of one man’s descent into psychosis, a descent that was speeded up by online radicalisation. There is no doubt that people have been radicalised by the internet, and by this particularly horrible corner of it. There are just too many cases like Slyman’s, where we can see,…

  • The world smells the same and there are no new flavours

    This is an extraordinary story. One day in December 2016 a 37-year-old British artist named Sam Winston equipped himself with a step-ladder, a pair of scissors, several rolls of black-out cloth and a huge supply of duct tape, and set about a project he had been considering for some time. …No screens. No sun. No…

  • “What’s the deal with all the car selfies?”

    A great piece by Pam Mandel in Longreads about online dating in her 50s: When I can’t sleep, I pet the dog and listlessly scroll through profiles, feeling all the markings of my 55 years, looking for something — someone — to stop that feeling of loss. It’s bad for me, junk food for my…

  • Useful, free apps for music and video

    [The deals listed here are long gone but the recommendations are still good] I get quite annoyed by social media posts urging us all to be productive and/or learn new skills during THE END OF THE BLOODY WORLD but I also get really bored when I’m stuck at home and I find messing around with…

  • How to avoid buying fake headphones

    Step 1: don’t buy headphones on eBay. Step 2: there is no step 2. I did a very un-me thing last week after losing my beloved Sony headphones: I bought a replacement set on eBay instead of paying a little more to get them from somewhere reputable such as John Lewis. Inevitably, they turned out…

  • We should not build certain technologies because the human cost is too great

    Danah Boyd has long been one of the smartest voices in tech, and in her recent awards speech to the Electronic Frontier Foundation she must have made a lot of people uncomfortable. In it she talks about the tech industry’s sheltering of terrible men, and how its technologies can have terrible consequences. Tech prides itself…