A lot of a individual creator newsletters are basically a week’s worth of old-style blogging (lots of links with context, a bit of analysis, a hot take or two, with some personal life stuff mixed in), stuck in an email and sent.
Not a good or a bad thing, just an observation.
This is a lovely wee story of how a camera was lost in the Highlands, but found and reconnected with its owners 12 years on.
Castlehill, Edinburgh, Spring 1994.
About time: Discord working on macOS app that runs natively on M1
Proof-of-work crypto comes with a substantial climate cost: Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators
I’m busy scanning some negatives from nearly 30 years ago. Now, it’s not uncommon to find things in old photos or negatives that you don’t really remember. But this batch of scanning is particularly bad for that because this is from a time of my life I spent a while trying to forget.
It’s not that it wasn’t a fun period — it’s just that it ended badly, and that tainted it for me for years. Yes, inevitably, it marked my first big relationship breakup, my first real heartbreak. And yes, I left that rather late: most people get that unpleasant experience over with before their early 20s. But it also was marred with fractured, difficult politics in the Student Union I was working with that made my last few months there stressful and unhappy.
I got my first job, moved away, and threw myself into a new life, severing ties with that period for a couple of years.
Oh, and I buried the photos and negs from those years completely away from the rest. I wanted to forget. I preferred not to throw away those images. But I wanted to avoid seeing them.
But now, 30 years on, it’s all good. And when I found them hidden in a box of old hardbacks, I was positively excited to see them again. This rather silly photo of me was one result.
But then these photos started emerging:
A… chest of drawers?
That’s the sort of photo I might start a film with, or end it. But in the middle? Odd.
And then, a rather generic flower pic:
This is not the sort of thing I cared about photographing back then. And I don’t seem to have any prints of these images. It wasn’t like me to chuck photos away.
And a view of the garden of the villa we were staying in?
What the hell was I thinking? Not something I’d shoot — but not something I’d chuck away, either. And this is nearly half a film’s worth of inexplicable images.
I was a student back then: buying and developing film was expensive. None of this made any sense.
And then, right in the middle of these inexplicable images, I find this:
A photo of me.
And then the penny drops. These photos weren’t taken by me.
I had clearly lent my camera to my girlfriend of the time, who was taking photos of the state of the villa and its grounds to send to her parents. It was their property we were staying in, after all.
That’s what I don’t have any prints — I clearly gave them to her.
A small mystery solved, a small piece of my past reclaimed.
This is probably a symptom of getting old, but I find getting Black Friday emails (a) in the UK and (b) on a Monday slightly confusing.
This series feels like the format Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who should always have been. It’s the mutant offspring of classic Who with its weekly cliffhangers, modern Who’s story-per-episode format and Chibnall’s own Broadchurch.
It’s the first series to really blow apart the formula established in RTD’s reboot series, and is all the better for it. After 15 years, some experimentation with the format is desperately needed again.
Chibnall could still mess up the landing — but I’m enjoying Who weekly in a way I haven’t done since Matt Smith regenerated.
I’m — personally — convinced that RTD and Bad Wolf aren’t back to pick up where they left off, they’re back to built out the Doctor Who television universe. RTD made comments to suggest he thinks that was a missed opportunity, before news of his return broke.
He actually had one, towards the end of his run, with Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures running concurrently in the same universe. And, occasionally, they crossed over. This was the model the Arrowverse has gone on to make central to how it operates.
I suspect that, long-term, Russell T Davies is back to become the Kevin Feige of Doctor Who, while other people become the show runners of individual shows — including the parent title.
As long as I get a Paternoster Gang spin-off out of this, I’m happy.
Last night’s episode was a vivid example of how Who is at its best when it’s a thin scientific veneer on top of magical horror. The Weeping Angels are clearly magical monsters, but the “quantum locked” science hand-waving allows you to explore radical and out there ideas, with a little hand-woven science to explain them.
Patient Zero: The TARDIS herself.
Dramatic light over the sea today.
Chilly beach walk with the girls.
A newsletter that is half about NFTs and crypto and half about decarbonisation is an uneasy mix, given the huge energy costs of the former.
We’ve got a goshawk lunching in our back garden.
Not sure I could rock this look, 29 years later…
I now know what a lakh is.
Spending an enjoyable evening looking at journalist-created newsletters from India and surrounding countries.
I know how to live it up on a Friday night.
I love writing.
I hate getting started on writing.
Night in the Quay.
Always sound advice.
Blimey. I think Substack is down.
Do I have the mental bandwidth left to update a theme on one of my Ghost blogs? Hmmm.
Cory Doctorow is not pulling his punches on NFTs.
Are you an outdoor or wild swimmer? Then fill in the 2021 Trends in Outdoor Swimming Survey to help gather information about the potential and problems with the activity globally.
One of those headlines that takes on a whole new level of “ick” if you’re a Brit:
Today, I turn 50.
Please respect the privacy of my family and I at this difficult time.
Thank you.
UK has “no intention” to deliver COP26 pledges says Cambridge scientist:
“The UK’s net-zero strategy is as unrealistic as “magic beans fertilised by unicorn’s blood” and will fail to deliver the emissions reductions promised by 2030”