A bad day for going too hard on myself. Big bowl of porridge and a glass of Johnnie Walker black for dinner.

TIL Chris Goss made a whole album in the early 90s which is pretty much just him and legendary nutter Ginger Baker on drums - v Kyuss/early QOTSA adjacent open.spotify.com/track/6inU4P...

● I'm in this photo and I don't like it

This kind of nostalgia is fascinating but can mostly be reduced to a craving for unmitigated social contact. but my free time is so limited now that any time for medium deliberation is itself a luxury! Have your own kids and you'll no longer be wondering about how you'd like to spend your mornings!!

I finally finished watching Small Prophets. Really great final episode, & somehow I wasn't expecting to be emotionally sideswiped by a Modest Mouse song on a BBC show.

Say Hello to the Angels

Insanely satisfying to finish my run today to the last minute or so of this, ending just as I turned the key in my front door open.spotify.com/track/1I3XuG...

Spent an anxious hour replacing my first drifting Switch joycon stick. But I did it! It works! I'm still going to have nightmares about that tiny bastard spring hidden under the R1 button.

Seems a good day to remember that, in his book An Intelligent Person's Guide To Modern Culture, Hungary's favourite right-wing thinker Roger Scruton implied that the Pet Shop Boys made a 'minimal contribution' to their own records. They successfully sued him for libel. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta...

We watched Decision to Leave. Smooth, opulent, technically dazzling filmmaking; some of the most ridiculous transition shots I think I've ever seen. A mystery in a hall of digital mirrors. Longing now to be an eyeless dreaming jellyfish.

I think about this adorable touch on the Switch parental controls app all the time. (Also when you remove all time limits it says: "Your child can play as much as they like today.")

This is the line of division / Terminus Est

Severian and Thecla from The Book of the New Sun

An untidy heap of junk with a basket of assorted DVDs: a couple of Band of Brothers box set, a very faded Ashes cricket collection, a FIFA thing, Prisoner of Azkaban, and (very prominently) like six copies of "HITLER'S HENCHMEN"

Extremely normal selection of DVDs left to take outside someone's house today

It's probably true

They could make them in the blue and yellow.

Stumbling around awake too early this morning, my only thought: Lidl should sell own-brand Joycons. Now I'm irritated that this isn't a thing.

yeah I'd be a bit peeved if I was named in this, also. hope all involved can see the funny side (e.g. the bit with the haircut)

first I've seen of this, good grief. Could they not have spent a bit of that on hiring her a PA, I wonder.

Mario Galaxy movie review: a bunch of stuff happens, more or less at random; somehow there's a part which is weirdly reminiscent of the bit from Doom: The Dark Ages I did last night. Also it sounds like Benny Safdie had a lot of fun with lines like "Boarding school? More like BORING school!".

"He knew it was impossible to forbid Vronsky to toy with painting; he knew that he and all the dilettantes had every right to paint whatever they liked, but he found it unpleasant. It was impossible to forbid a man to make a big wax doll and kiss it. But if this man with the doll came and sat in front of a man in love and began to caress his doll the way the man in love caressed his beloved, the man in love would find it unpleasant."

A few lines from Anna Karenina to recall the next time someone starts describing their relationship with an AI chatbot.

You go about in pity for yourself, etc

Singularly depressed at sibling photos of sunny holiday destinations in my family groupchat today; I am at soft play for what seems like the 800th day this year, skipping buying lunch for myself because I'm worried about the cost.

finished Made in America again last night; forgot that one of AJ's last scenes is him wanting to join the military so he can go work for Trump as a helicopter pilot. Oh dear.

Eden

And miles to go before I sleep open.spotify.com/track/5jFiIi...

Dr. Elliot, from the Sopranos, drinking from a giant, netted water bottle.

Me, reading your takes

also it's so good that the "I hate this fucking shit!!" reaction image is still used everywhere and yet the original context remains the funniest: he's just throwing a tantrum about how much he hates going to therapy! as we all do!

The show as a whole is fairly damning about talking therapy but this is the cherry on top because this C-grade insight is *as good as it ever gets for them* - taken seriously by both - & obviously it changes absolutely nothing. A very bleak version of that good old tweet about "winning at therapy".

That bit in the 3rd to last Sopranos where Tony - after years of sessions, & having reached the zenith of his awfulness - finally offers his therapist a tortured metaphor like a trophy: how mothers are like buses, they're only dropping you off somewhere but you feel you need to chase them forever...

counterspell: computational theater you participate in is the actual innovation of videogames, anything that requires another person is something better replaced by an activity done outside on a field

Picturing this in a kind of Russian doll frame narrative where the narrator is fantasising about their unrequited love's new life while also catfishing the reader with an imaginary Very Successful life for themselves within a deeply banal and unsuccessful reality

The bit where you have to climb a really really long ladder in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater while an instrumental version of the greatest song in the world plays in the background.

The bit with the really really long stairs in The Beginner's Guide where everything slows down the further you go.

The deeply unpleasant bit with the really really long stairs under the Historical Society in Silent Hill 2.

The bit in the fish cannery from Edith Finch, which is really too much to even start describing.

I'm a big believer that games should occasionally have you do something incomprehensibly tedious and (apparently) out of character to make you think about what is happening.