I hate this sort of thing, you hate this sort of thing, let’s get it out of the way. In addition to
capturing old web pages, the Internet Archive is also home to untold thousands of old videos, games,
and books — each of the latter of which correspond to a real, physical book in their collections.
They lend them out like a library, for only one person at a time… until the pandemic, when they made
the perhaps ill-advised decision to lift the borrowing limits for that limited time. Publishing
companies, who weren’t too happy with that, pushed the nuclear button, sued them over the entire
idea of digital lending, and
now a federal court’s decided against them. They’re planning to take the fight as high as they can go —
and they could use your donation.
As i said, i hate to do this — you don’t need me to tell you about all the ways the world is fucked
up — but i’m willing to make an allowance when it affects me in particular. So many pieces of
internet history, even on this site, now only exist as digital ghosts in their machines (hell, i
even had to replace one of the links here with an Archive.org link after the author was suspended
from Twitter). And i can’t count the number of musty out-of-print books that i would have never been
able to access here from my comfy chair in England if it weren’t for the IA preserving them for a
new generation.
The uncanny-valley tendencies of AI should be used to innovate and
create new, terrifying non-binary genitalia, neither male nor female but a horrifying third thing
the likes of which homines sapientes have never before seen
Director: “Cameron Crowe” (possibly Tom Cruise in a latex mask)
Plot: Rich prick gets in a car accident, has some nasty dreams, and then Mr
Exposition shows up in the great glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in
the last 10 minutes to explain everything
Director’s taste in music: Same as mine; you can tell because this film has like
fifteen pointless needle dropsa
Does it contain a Tom Cruise Triathlon™?b No, although he
does do a Tom Cruise Run™ at least once
Does it at least have good ideas? It has the germs of things that might be called
ideas, but none that haven’t been done better before
When i was eleven, my dad told me to come downstairs. (I was on holiday at the time, you see, on my
semiannual Divorce Custody Trip® back to the fatherland, where i could gorge myself on as many
sweets and spit out as many cuss words as i wanted.) He had something to show me on his home cinema
setup.
Normally it would be some documentary about watchmaking or nuclear waste storage or any number of
things that took his fleeting fancy. Neither of us were much for fiction, and my young self
especially wasn’t much of a cinephile. I don’t think my taste in movies had updated much since i
watched Finding Nemo on a loop at age three.
Two and a half hours later, there i was, on his lily-white fake-leather sofa, my jaw agape, needing
a lie down to take it all in. That was the day i met my first favourite film: Interstellar.
Christopher Nolan has a reputation for mind-bending bombast, but his directing is actually quite
plain when you get down to it. His palette of colours would be more at home in a hardware store than
an art department.a He has little time for the fancy camera trickery so
beloved by his fellow mass-market auteurs like Spielberg and Zemeckis. He shoots his pictures as
they are, not as a painter might like them to be.
It works to his detriment as often as in his favour. The Dark Knight trilogy’s dedication
to surgically removing every ounce of colour and whimsy from its inherently campy source sucks it
dry of life and fun. (Whenever Heath Ledger isn’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “where’s the
Joker?”) But in the intervening years, it seems that Mr Nolan figured out how to use his un-style to his
advantage.
On Earth, he shoots everything like, well, a Christopher Nolan film — a look that perfectly suits
such a drab, dying world of omnipresent dust storms and weltering crops. When the plot shoots past
the stratosphere and into the stars, he anchors his fantastic alien worlds and black holes of
tantalising beauty against that same pedestrian style; devoid of his peers’ tricks and flourishes,
you get the sense that if his gargantuan star-eaters and tome-tiled tesseracts were real,
this is exactly what they would look like.
Much has been made of Interstellar’s Achilles’ heel: lurve. I'd like to offer a
lukewarm defence. Many take Anne Hathaway’s speech about love as a force “transcending dimensions of
time and space” as exposition, seeing her character, Amelia Brand, as a simple mouthpiece for the
Messrs Nolan’s hamfisted platitudes. I would call this a severely mistaken interpretation.
Dr Brand’s lines come at the lowest point in her life. She has spent years — decades, from Earth’s
view — floating alone in space; now, the crew have to decide how to use their one remaining shot to
save all mankind. She isn’t making any profound statements or logical arguments. She is desperately
trying to explain to the two men beside her why she thinks, right or wrong, that they should take
the risk and visit her former lover’s last known location rather than the closer world the other two
prefer. It’s clunky and melodramatic, but that’s the point: she’s grasping at straws, willing to do
anything to see her love again. Her speech gives balance against her comrades’ assumption that cold,
hard logic is all that matters, throwing gut feeling and emotion out the airlock.
When Cooper falls into that black hole and finds himself wall to wall with a myriad versions of his
daughter, it isn’t some literal fundamental force of “love” that brings him there. It is his
acceptance of Dr Brand’s romanticism over Mann’s enlightenment. Cold calculations have brought him
nought but ruin, forcing him to watch his daughter grow up in front of his eyes and nearly killing
both him and the whole human race; so, he lays down his mask, dives into what science tells him is
certain doom, and lets the man who wept at those 20 years of messages take control.
I’m not sure that it all comes together in the end. Matthew McConaughey is a fine performer, but the
role of Cooper deserves someone who can give it the gravitas (heh) and sensitivity his trauma
deserves — not just screaming “Murph!!!” over and over. Mr Nolan’s script is utilitarian as ever;
misunderstood as it may be, Dr Brand’s tangent fits into the rest of the film about as well as a cat
fits into a baseball glove.
That slack-jawed night on the sofa would begin a new tradition. Every time i shuttle back and forth
between England and Holland, i queue up Hans Zimmer’s score on my earbuds, and try to time it
juuuuust right, such that the second the jet takes off, “Mountains” comes to its peak or
“No Time for Caution”’s organs begin to blare. There’s a lot of flicks i like better these days —
Interstellar would probably barely scrape the top ten — but there’ll always be a warm place
in my heart for my first love.
(Guy who writes headlines for newspapers) I love Ben, Jerry's
It has now been over three months since i visited the city of Manchester. What once was a vivid
memory has been obscured by the fog of ever-ticking time. But there is unfinished business to be
dealt with — so let me sing to you, dear reader, of Affleck’s Palace.
Cottonopolis’ pop- and counter-culture mecca found its place in a bourgeois defunct department
store; its hollowed husk has been stuffed beyond recognition with dozens of stores over four floors,
from fashion to cassettes to Hatsune Miku–themed fizzy pop.
It’s an absolutely disorienting place to get your head around. The meme up in Newcastle is that the
Grainger Market
is an Escherian nightmare where nothing is ever where it was last time, but Affleck’s is a whole
other level (three of them, in fact). Stairs lead to more stairs which lead to corridors which
somehow lead back to the same stairs. It took me five goes to find the cassette tape store, and when
i did, it was closed for a fag break. It’s the sort of place where a non-specifically foreign woman
who you never see again sells you a cursed trinket that brings ruin to your family.
I can only tolerate hippie shit in small doses, and, thankfully, this little bath-bomb dispensary
was the perfect small dose. Incense sticks? Tie-dye decorations? Sure, why not.
This shop claims to be Europe’s largest LGBT specialty store, which i’m
sure is true, if only because half of Europe has the same attitude towards gay and trans people as a
moderate Westboro Baptist.
Bad and naughty intellectual properties go to Funko Pop Jail, where they belong.
And if counter-culture isn’t your thing, there’s enough stalls hawking Disney merchandise to keep
you occupied. (I clapped when i saw the thing i know!!!)
I hardly even remember getting in or out of the building, which leaves me at a loss for how to end
this post. Maybe it’s more of a feeling than a real place — you just wake up one day, teleported
inside, and have to complete a vision quest to buy a cone of rose-flavoured ice cream to find out
how to leave.
The Stem Projector is the kind of
ridiculous gadget i’d think up when i was seven, with no regard for any practical value or
market — haptic channel surfing! Instagram filters for movies! Automatically-generated mood
boards! Just complete nonsense and i want it now.
“The Stink A”,
or, why Kiwis have trouble typesetting Māori
In the spirit of every Youtube video since 2016, i would first like to say that this
segment is brought to you by Sponsorblock.
Begone with those crummy razors and earbuds!
Viewers are kindly forewarned that this video contains flashing lights.
I had a religious experience yesterday.
It’s a common metaphor. A playful exaggeration of what happens when something goes beyond a mere
dopamine hit and passes into
complete shamanic bliss.
If most of the people in the crowd there with me had said that, they wouldn’t have meant it
literally. They’re atheists. Christians. Muslims. “Spiritual, but not religious”. Either they see no
point in all this God-bothering, or their spiritual needs are well accounted for.
As for your correspondent? Well, loud, boisterious ecstasy is
exactly the type of old-time religion i’m after. Hundreds of sweating, screaming, beautiful humans,
swimming in the sea of each other, without a care in the world, freed, just for a moment, from the
stresses of their mundane daily life1 — and all led by a charismatic
preacher front man. What else could you call such a thing?
When you’re a shy bairn who follows a dead religion, you take what you can get.
Also… about halfway through the show, the band put up a big caption on the side screens
saying “guest starring Harry Styles”2 (greeted with rapturous applause).
They then proceeded to bring out Lewis “iwageddicannaustibeisumwunyuluuuuuuh” Capaldi
instead (greeted with considerably less rapturous applause), and have him sing the absolute holy
grail of 1975 concerts: “Antichrist”, a song from
their very first EP which the band have steadfastly refused to ever play
live. Masterful trolling.
Welcome, one and all, to the 2798th annual Horny Awards! Every year since humans figured
out how to count them, the Satyrs’ Forest has presented hand-made, custom trophies to the best works
of the year that was. It’s an astoundingly long-lasting tradition, and definitely not something i
made up just now.
2022 was one of the years ever. Things, i’m told, occurred. People were born; people were taxed;
people died. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released several albums. It will go down in the
history books as “the year between 2021 and 2023”. On with our show.
Film
The Laurel Wreath Award for Annual Achievement in Film
Our first category marks all the wonderful movies that were made in this past year — which is quite
a lot, so my apologies to all those films who i either didn’t mention or didn’t have time to see!
There can only be one winner, but i’ll start off with a lightning round of honourable mentions. Baz
Luhrmann’s
Elvis
was like being locked inside a room with an insane person for two and a half hours, and i loved
every ridiculous, extravagant, kinetic minute of it. Tom George’s
See How They Run
and Rian Johnson’s
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
were brilliant and funny throwback mysteries which really needed more time and appreciation in the
cinema. And i dearly hope David Letich’s
Bullet Train
becomes the new Fast and Furious — 2Bullet2Train!
Bullet Train 3: This Time it’s a Plane! Bullet ISS! The possibilities are endless.
An especially honourable mention goes to Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, a tender horror romance which almost made it to the main list before i realised that i hadn’t
actually all that much to say on it. It’s a metaphor for something, i tell ya hwat…
It could have done with less of the hot-dog fingers, but anyone who would leave our first “official”
runner-up off of their year-end list is a heartless bastard. On paper,
Everything Everywhere All at Once
is a recipe for everything everywhere to go totally wrong: a riff on The Matrix with a
tenth of the budget, directors whose last work was a movie where Daniel Radcliffe farts a lot, and a
sense of humour firmly dated to Reddit circa 2012. Yet it pulls it off.
This is a movie where people beat each other up with dildos, where a hallway of people literally
explodes into colour and light, and where the equivalent of the Death Star is an everything bagel.
It is also one of the only movies to have made me bawl like a baby in the cinema.
Everything Everywhere is an anti-cynical, anti-nihilistic manifesto for our time. Yes,
nothing matters! and yes, you might not write the next great American novel or paint a masterpiece!
but the world has so much joy and beauty, so many minuscule details that you pass by every day, so
for goodness’ sake, even if you’re
just doing laundry and taxes, take your
time to enjoy the little things in life.
I need to go hug my mum.
Blockbusters aren’t what they used to be, are they? Ever since Endgame, Marvel have been
running on autopilot, releasing a steady stream of snarky CGI sludge
made more out of obligation than passion. They don’t even work as escapism anymore — the fantastical
isn’t fantastic when every billion-dollar release is set in a world of superheroes and sci-fi.
Like Everything Everywhere, our other runner-up is a prime example of a movie that just
shouldn’t work. It’s a sequel to a 40-year-old film so mediocre i turned it off halfway through,
made as a cynical cash-grab recruitment ad for the navy, with a topic and plot designed to appeal
exclusively to Your Dad.1 Yet, through sheer dumb luck, Paramount hit the
jackpot on
Top Gun: Maverick.
Obviously, Tom Cruise is an absolute charisma magnet and the best part of every movie he’s ever been
in. But that seductive Scientologist smile only goes so far
(just look at The Mummy), and that’s where
our director comes in. Joseph Kosinski doesn’t have a particularly long track record; it would be
easy to mistake him for a typical director-for-hire. His dialogue scenes don’t stand out from the
pack, and he’s not particularly creative with the camera, but that doesn’t matter. What he excels at
is spectacle.
2010’s Tron: Legacy is a profoundly middling film in terms of its plot and characters, but
it gained a cult following thanks to the delicious combination of Daft Punk’s killer score with Mr
Kosinski’s brilliant visuals and action. He took that computerised world of bits and bytes and gave
it stakes, weight, and a sense of scale, where a Marvel hack would have told the
VFX guy to just press render and go with whatever comes out.
So you take a director whose most known work is a spectacular
CG effects-fest and a lead actor famous for his insistence on doing all
of his own stunts, and what do you get? The best blockbuster film of the decade, that’s what. The
original Top Gun’s plane scenes drag and drag with no real purpose; in Maverick,
every flight has something at stake, with non-stop action — but the film still knows when to pull
back and take a breather to give its characters heart. My icy, cynical heart knew that i
was being manipulated every step of the way, knew that every pull of the strings was
planned out in advance, knew that this film was made for money and nothing else… but i’ll
be damned if i didn’t start crying at that Val Kilmer cameo.
Go and see Top Gun: Maverick on the biggest screen you can, whether that’s a 1080p computer
monitor or an Imax cinema. You won’t regret it.
Our two runners-up were films that i would recommend to anyone, anywhere, of any age, and at any
time. They have something for everyone. First place, on the other hand…
If you believe the lame-stream media, our winning film was the result of arthouse horror hero Robert
Eggers being given a blank check by Universal to make a big period action movie. This is false. It
was created by scientists in a lab in Durham to appeal to me and me specifically. (You can tell
because i was the only person who actually went out and watched it.)
Based on the Norse legend behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
The Northman is an epic following Large Scandinavian Man as the viking
Amleth, son of a deposed king, on his journey to avenge his father with the power of
Odin and testosterone2 on his side.
When i call Amleth a viking, i do not mean that all-too-common sanitised Hollywood depiction of a
20th-century Christian in pagan clothing. No; his society and its ways are portrayed as they were,
warts and all, regardless of what the audience might feel about it. The vikings of this film keep
slaves, burn down houses, consult witches (memorably played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and
Björk, in decreasing order of screentime), mock Jesus, and pray to Gods as a fact of life. (The film
never particularly demeans them for the latter three, which i found a welcome reprieve from
paganism’s usual relegation to the villains of horror schlock.) The only concession to modern mores
is
the absence of polygamy, because splashing people with period blood and cutting off heads is okay but good heavens a
second wife?????
Mr Eggers and his crew schlepped all the way to Iceland for filming and made good bloody use of it.
Whether its long shots are focused on nature’s rolling fields and bursting volcanoes or humanity’s
flame-lit funerals and grimy oarsmen, the result is consistently one of the most beautiful things of
the year.
It’s not for everyone. It’s long, and those just there for the action will find themselves asking
when they’re going to get to the fireworks factory. It’s gory. It’s grim. But it’s definitely for
me.
The Zoetrope Award for Classic Cinema
Hey, did you like the Matrix sequels? Do you want to watch a three-hour-long film where
every character is played by the same six actors? No? Well, too bad, because the best film i watched
in 2022 that wasn’t released that year was the Wachowski sisters’3Cloud Atlas.4
There was a point, about 60% of the way through this three-hour-long movie, where i started to
wonder if it was all worth it. I’d seen Tom Hanks attempting a Cockney accent, Hugo Weaving in
unconvincing Asian prosthetics, and a lot of people saying “tru-tru” a lot of times. Surely it was
impossible to tie this all together into a satisfying conclusion.
I started having flashbacks to The Matrix Resurrections, an endlessly creative film plagued
by its own self-obsessions and Lana Wachowski’s inability to not put the first thing that
came into her head into the script. Was this going to be the same? Are the sisters trapped in an
endless cycle of almost-but-not-quite?
And then there was a point, about 90% of the way through, where i started crying. They’d squared the
circle, tied all six stories up into a neat bow; an epic told on the scale of centuries, where
actors cross boundaries of time, nationality, race, and gender; a film that would be their
magnum opus were it not for the long shadow of The Matrix. I don’t know how they
did it, but they did — and thus nudged their record of hits against misses slightly to the positive
side.
The Pebbledash Dildo Award for Cinematic Disappointment
2022 was a good year for bad movies. Moonfall was the peak of so-bad-it’s-good Emmerichian
excess. Morbius morbed all across the internet. And the usual Marvel schlock was even
shlockier than usual. But nobody thought those films would be any good anyway — it’s hard to be
disappointed when you don’t have any expectations in the first place.
So, by God, was i disappointed in Nope. From Jordan Peele, critics’ favourite rising star, this sci-fi Hollywood horror brims with so
many creative ideas and metaphors that they all boil over and don’t go anywhere. I can only imagine
that a quarter of the script got sucked up into a UFO and they decided
to just keep shooting. There are so many great ideas in this film, and it’s a darned shame they
wound up such an anticlimax.
The Comfy Sofa Award for Peak Television
I don’t actually watch much television; i’ve always found it hard to get invested for the “long
haul”. Ben Stiller’s Severance, made for Apple’s floundering streaming service, is a slow
burner, the sort of thing i despise — but its slowness is methodical, carefully drip-feeding you
bits of information whilst never wasting its time on fluff and filler.
It’s strange. It’s puzzling. It’s brilliant. And the final episode is some of the best
TV i’ve ever seen. If i could, i’d sever myself — just to watch it all
over again.
Music
The Golden Lyre Award for Excellence in New Music
It’s The 1975.
Well, no point in dragging that out. They may not be the best band in the world, but they are my
favourite band in the world; their eclectic pop-rock sensibilities are what got me into
music, and i’ll always appreciate them for that.
This isn’t just a sentimental pick.
Being Funny in a Foreign Language
sees the band trim away the fat and bloat of their previous works and hold back on the eclectic
experimentation of the Music for Cars era, settling on a distilled, refined version of the
sound that defined their first record. There are no bloated instrumentals, no experimental
noodlings; just, as their international tour proudly suggests, The 1975 At Their Very Best.
No album came close to blowing them out of the water — because i’m a soppish fanboy — but to whet
your appetite, here are some more of my favourite songs of 2022. (In no particular order.)
The Hurdy-Gurdy Award for Enduring Musical Resonance
It was with some trepidation that i typed the word “Pagan” into RateYourMusic’s charts function,
knowing the reputation that explicitly religious music has. The words “Christian rock” have always
been accented with a sneer, and the most well-known Pagan musician of the modern age is an
unrepentant church-burning neo-nazi.
Right at the top, after i’d filtered out all of the metal (apologies, metalheads; it just isn’t my
bag), sat XTC’s
Apple Venus Volume One. You won’t find it on streaming — frontman Andy Partridge has few kind words for the likes of
Spotify — but i made do with a pirate Youtube playlist until i tracked down a physical copy at the
shops.
Apple Venus is the group’s penultimate album, and even knowing nothing about them, I could
tell. It drips with aching sincerity, the kind that dips into corny pastiche, in that particular way
that only happens when a band who have spent their whole career dripping with snark and cynicism
realise that they’re getting too old for this shit.
And that’s all i wrote.
Some other favourite old songs i discovered this year:
The Sad Trombone Award for Most Disappointing Music
I’ve been getting into post-rock recently, and there are a few albums which seem to be near and dear
to fans’ hearts. Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun, a surprisingly accessible masterclass.
Godspeed You Blank Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists, the best soundtrack for a movie that
never existed. Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, a bit too jazzy for my tastes. A few more that
i’ve yet to listen to.
Then there’s The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.
Explosions in the Sky’s third album is widely beloved. It tops lists with the big guns. It often
shows up on genre “starter pack” lists. There is a teensy, tiny problem with this: it’s shite.
Well, alright, i thought, two tracks in. Maybe it picks up by the end? Everyone is raving about that
closing track, “Your Hand in Mine” — and then that was shite too!
This is music for a car commercial. It is
the Imagine Dragons of post-rock. It’s the sort of music a TV network
might play as inspirational backing for their Paralympic coverage. It is sappy, insipid, and
uninspired dross of the purest and vilest sort, and it boggles the mind to think how it ever got the
reputation it now has. See me after class.
The electronic arts
The King’s Dice Award for Interactive Entertainment
Just one game found its home amongst my digital shelves this years, and i have yet to find the
opportunity to complete it. Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn wins by acclimation — so
far it’s stylish, intriguing, and fun to solve, but again, i’ve not finished it! We’ll see if it
sticks the landing.
The Broken Link Award for Best Use of Hypertext
Homestuck isn’t very good. It has an undeniably appealing cast of characters and charmingly
naïve art — you don’t get millions of fans without doing something right — that are sadly
weighed down by its author’s baffling decision, faced with all the sprawling multi-media
possibilities of the web, to tell its story entirely in walls of unreadable monospaced text.
Wired Sound for Wired People isn’t my thing. It
has undeniably mastered a medium: its flickering pink pixels and eerie soundscapes build an
unmistakable mix of intrigue and unease, beckoning you to follow it down the rabbit hole. But it
lacks a message to go with it — there’s no story to speak of, just a collage of strange and trippy
scenes.
So what if someone were to combine the best bits of both, and undo their shortcomings?
Idiosyncratic, eerie audiovisuals, with relatable dramatis personæ, and a
compelling story which uses the power of hypertext to its fullest?
Enter
Corru.observer. Linked to me by someone whose homepage i’d complimented — with no other comment than that it was
a friend’s “personal site” — Corru puts you in the seat of an archæologist(?) some
decades(?) in the future(?), trying to piece together the memories of an alie… i’ll let you find out
the rest. There’s only an “episode” and a half out right now, and i can’t wait to see where it goes.
The Fred Figglehorn Memorial Award for Online Video
But in the age of Tiktok and Vine, it pays to be succinct. Our winner by no means reaches the
six-second nirvana of those two platforms, but at 25 minutes, it would fit comfortably into a
half-hour broadcast slot on telly — not bad on a site increasingly dominated by 7-hour videos about
people watching sitcoms for children.
That winner is Michael Stevens’s video on
the origin of selfies. In it brief
runtime, it answers every question i never knew i had about the selfie, while spinning in a number
of fascinating tangents and eyebrow-raising questions (in the typical Vsauce house style). It even
got me to renovate the gallery just to add that photo by Anastasia. Cheese!
The real world
The Spruce Panflute Award for Outdoor Splendour
I perused many places during my walks out and about this year, but none so consistently provided me
with so many new sights as the Ouseburn, a small but mighty stream which winds its
way in the east of Newcastle from suburbs to leafy woods to industry to hipster vegan cafés. Every
time i thought i’d seen it all, the Ouseburn revealed a new cranny, some quirky establishment or
warp in the city’s fabric, something different to explore.
This is what we in the industry refer to as “the money shot”.
The Crackling Heath Award for Indoor Wonder
Affleck’s Palace is the beating heart of Mancunian counterculture; a labyrinthine
maze of shops which across their three floors sell everything from rose ice cream to bath bombs to
incense to Hatsune Miku–themed fizzy drinks… and i can’t tell you any more than that, because i
haven’t finished my post about it yet!
Really, though — Affleck’s has it all and more, and i’ll be sure to stop by next time i go down
south.
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award for Good News, Everyone!
Day in, day out, we are flooded with the latest news of disasters and terrors from around the globe.
It gets the views, it gets the hits, and it gets the clicks; it’s no wonder journos love to
accentuate the negative.
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award is an antidote to doom and gloom, honouring the best thing
that happened in 2022. It was a late entry, but it could hardly be anything other than…
…The National Ignition Facility, the U.S. government lab who reported that, for the
first time,
they’d gotten more energy out than they put in via fusion power. There are hiccups, of course; the facility’s magnets guzzled dozens of times more power than the
reactor itself. But every stepping stone has its imperfections, and this is the first great step to
a truly prosperous future — where energy is too cheap to meter, where power is so abundant that
there will be hardly a grain of economic sense in the idea of tapping any more of
Gæa’s precious little black gold.
Happy belated new year, everyone. And as always — may it be better than the last!
I found out that Mark Toney’s1, in Newcastle, serves Dutch-style apple pie,
and it immediately gave me flashbacks to my childhood like the critic in Ratatouille. I
honestly started crying. Delicious stuff. …Sorry, what’s that?
Apologies for the interruption; my legal team have informed me that i have to actually put links in
my link roundups. Who knew‽
“My afternoons with the singing bowl lady”
— A rare sympathetic portrayal of new-agers, one that neither revels in tired atheistic snark
nor makes me want to tear my hair out with vapid bollocks
I’ve been hammering away at a big ol’ 2022 recap post, trying to get it ready before it’s
irrelevant. It seemed cruel to leave you all with nowt over the new year, though, so i thought i
might send you some photos from a recent evening walk.
Ashington1 is a poor erstwhile mining town at the very tip-top of the local
conurbation, Newcastle’s last gasp before coal and collieries give way to princes and pastures. It
takes pride in two things: one, its mining history, and two, the fact that two Ashingtonians
delivered England the world cup in a final remembered by ever fewer people.
This is the Queen Elizabeth II Country Park — not to be confused with the
Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park
down in that London — a marvellous regeneration project which has turned a spoil heap into a lovely
lake complete with a Premier Inn. That purple light off in the distance is the
Woodhorn Colliery Museum, a
whistle-stop tour of Northumberland’s mining history which apparently fancies itself the Blackpool
of the North.2
And that’s all i wrote. Tune in next time for either another bashed-together filler postcard (by
Gods, am i going to have to make Blyth sound appealing next?), or the first annual Horny Awards™.
We’ll see how far the Procrastination Monster lets me progress. :-)
![Meme captioned "Holy shit!! Is that a motherfucking [Newcastle upon Tyne] reference???" surrounded by various things which almost look like things from Newcastle](/garden/media/holyshitreference.jpg)
