I've been thinking a lot about technology in my life and the pull it can exert on my attention and what that's like for my emotional state, and I don't even have a very noisy phone in the grand scheme of things. I have perhaps 4 people in my life whom I regularly communicate with, and they're almost never a negative effect on my mood, but that is largely by design. I've stopped debating on social media, and I'm not one for drama in real life.

I do still find that my phone can annoy me just by existing. It's so useful for so many things, but sometimes those things get noisy and irritating! I like the idea of maining something simple so I can still get a web browser and maps, and then having my iPad to fill in gaps, but I'm pretty fortunate that it isn't something I need just to live something resembling a normal life.

I was skeptical about this, largely because I haven't seen anything half decent on Netflix for what seems like years. At least I know this was somewhat written by humans. At the very least it was conceived by humans.

But I liked it. I mean it's extremely contrived in that way that Guy Ritchie does best, and it has one or two glaring holes in the form of absolute liabilities you just would've sacked or killed, but it was fun. I don't think I'll watch it again when I could watch the film, though.

I know that reading fantasy as a break from science fiction isn't exactly much of a leap but we saw this at The British Library and I wanted to read it. I loved The Dispossessed and I want to read more of her books. Definitely moving onto the next one right away; this was lovely.

Rewatch because I'm hoping to see part two next week and had forgotten the entire plot. Plus we were talking about it earlier and I wanted to watch it anyway.

For a 2.5+ hour film this goes by quickly; it's a strangely-paced film. It's so slow and purposeful, but achieves so much in terms of world and character development. There's so much history communicated through almost every scene; it's remarkable.

Wish I'd read the book first. I know I should have but I have not.

I'm torn between a star and a shrug on this one. I don't love the style it's written in; it reads to me like half journal entry, half recalled anecdote and it just doesn't really do it for me.

The story is fun; engaging characters and vivid scenes, and moves along at a good pace. Lots of things happen, which is always welcome in a book like this. I'm essentially using it as a palate cleanser as I've done a lot of sci-fi lately and it's worked well as that!

If you can read this without picturing the Unbroken Spine as The Society of the Blind Eye, I'm going to have to assume that's because you've never seen Gravity Falls, and that is pretty inexcusable in this house.

For whatever reason, when I played the demo in Next Fest I was being grumpy and  didn't like this game. Pretty much every single gaming site (that I'm still reading every day yes 🤫) has been going on about how great it is (and Nintendo pulling it down for being gambling. So stupid; I really hate Nintendo these days) so I thought I'd give it another chance and I actually love it. If it comes to iOS I would get it again. Perfect for waiting outside charity shops.

I did say these guys were amazing live. It's a live session but close enough.

I've said it before but Bo Burnham is an absolute loss to the music industry. His ability to write a vocal melody is unparalleled even in music, let alone musical comedy. And his live production on Make Happy is completely insane. I can't imagine what it'd have been like to be there for this recording. It's an absolutely huge end to an already incredible show. I wish I could've been there.

Watch Inside. It's the perfect time capsule for COVID, and the songs are incredible. Even the outtakes are better than the next-best musical comedy.

Perfect science fiction. It's pretty tough in places but never at the expense of the story. The whole thing is surprisingly coherent, and I did find myself right at the edge of understanding it at times, but always managed to find my way back to a narrative that at least made sense to me.

If you have even a slight interest in civilisation, technology, space-faring sci-fi then I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this.

I am looking forward to some not-sci-fi though. I loved this but it's a lot and I can do without looking 18bn years into the future for a while.

When Ryan Gosling punches Kevin Bacon in the face is one of the greatest movie moments.

One of the best films I've ever seen in my life. It's perfect. I think about this film multiple times every day.

When it cuts to Taylor Swift standing and singing, that's where you've got me on the verge of tears. This song is beautiful and sad, and having the recognition of everyone in the room including the biggest star in the world right now; it just gets me teary y'know.

I love how Luke's constantly got his eyes on Tracy - he's following her, and making sure not to step on her. His voice is a perfect complement to hers (if a little high in the mix, but I'll allow it).

I hope this gets a proper recording that I can buy.

I love Hippotraktor and they're absolutely amazing live. Belgium, man; I keep telling you. That's where it's going on. Very happy that there's a new record this year.

In the right mood, there's nothing I like more than deathcore and I love ten56.'s take on it. It's so unnecessarily heavy.

I love clipping, and Tipsy was huge when I was going to clubs (don't ask how long ago that was; I shan't answer). I'm still used to the way the radio edit sounds but I'm guessing that's about to change.

Wish I'd learned about this a long time ago. Using the AWS CLI across multiple projects in development is super annoying.

There is just no way that the Willy Wonka in this film, in this universe, becomes the cold sociopath of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. No way.

No part of this is a prequel to that film. This film is what so many are now, and that is a dilute strawman that only exists in the mind of the creator and the shareholders responsible.

The only thing I can say for this trash is that I wanted to hate it; I knew I would hate it, and I was not disappointed.

Letting you know I exist, and letting you continue to exist, are both dangerous to me

What a wonderful sequel to The Three Body Problem. A coherent, plausible, and utterly desperate future imagined through the lens of totally assured destruction of our species.

Probably the best ending to a second-in-a-trilogy that I've ever read. The reader is Luo Ji's Wallbreaker and it's perfect (that's not a spoiler - if you're interested in sci-fi, this trilogy is essential, in my opinion).

I really want to have a go with one of these. I wonder how portable my ability with normal 34-key columnar stagger boards would be for it. Only one way to find out I guess! 😒

I was a huge fan of Kittie in my teens. So glad they're back making music again, and they signed to Sumerian which I love.

This is such a cool time capsule.

I think about this show at least once a day. Absolutely beautiful retro paranoid sci-fi thriller.

I don't usually like playing demos. Not sure why - I think investing any time in something incomplete sometimes just feels wrong to me. Demos are actually perfect for my attention span so I read some lists and tried a bunch of things from Steam's Next Fest. My experience has been largely underwhelming.

Here's a bunch of demos I didn't really like (or really didn't like) and why I didn't really like them.

Pepper Grinder has tonnes of potential. I like quirky platformers like Dandara and Flinthook, but something about Pepper Grinder just feels a little off to me. Maybe it's something I could get used to, but I'll see how much it is when it releases. Definitely one of the better ones on this list.

#DRIVE Rally is a very well-timed low-poly arcade rally game (the aesthetic is similar to art of rally, in some ways), but it seems to have binary braking (i.e. brakes are either off, or slammed on), the steering is super twitchy, and your co-driver is incredibly annoying. There's also some bits where the track forks that he specifically does not help you with, but then yells at you when you go the wrong way. This could be cool but at the moment it's annoying.

Berserk Boy is Mega Man, and it's a good Mega Man, but the combat is pretty one-dimensional and not very satisfying, and the first two bosses are identical except for the colour of their projectiles.

Balatro is a card game. One day I will get it into my head that I don't like card games.

Mullet Mad Jack is like if Hotline Miami was an FPS Japanese gameshow against robots. It reminds me of the movie Guns Akimbo for some reason. It's too difficult to distinguish the enemies from the walls so it's a pass for me.

Echo Point Nova is a bit Neon White-y, but the gameplay trailer makes it look way more fun than it is. There's a lot of mechanics here, and that makes the tutorial long and boring, and after a very short amount of time I was just done with it still being the tutorial.

Breachway is a card game where you play cards by dragging and dropping them onto spaceship animations. It made me miss FTL.

Rack and Slay is a top-down geometry sort of thing where you have to shoot pool and pot the balls except everything is weird. It could be cool as a casual thing, and I preferred it to subpar pool, but that's not really saying much.

Trash of the Titans looks like a cool pixel Final Fantasy Tactics. I say "looks like" because I couldn't actually figure out how to play it.

Raw Metal is a bit like Metal Gear Solid, except when you're spotted the game turns to a third-person brawler thing. I didn't like the stealth, and I didn't like the brawling, then I got shot by something I couldn't see, and uninstalled the demo.

Normal Fishing is a fishing game made by someone who has potentially only ever had fishing described to them. They may or may not have ever played a video game. Games are supposed to be fun.

Gatekeeper wants to be there for you if you like Risk of Rain 2 and Hades. I like both of those games but something about Gatekeeper felt really wooden and slow. It took me about 15 attempts to clear the first area of Risk of Rain 2, and 1 to clear the first area of Gatekeeper.

Artifact Seeker is another vampire survivors clone where all the women are impractically well-endowed. It makes me feel like a creep playing games like this, so I just don't. I seemed to do really well at this without trying, and then I died quickly and didn't understand why.

Never Grave could be quite cool. It has an interesting hat thing going on, which might work. But I don't get why it's ripped off so much of the Hollow Knight feel. And the first boss had an insane amount of health and appeared after about 3 minutes and I couldn't be bothered to deal with it. With a bit of balancing I'd play this again.

Arco is a quirky-looking tactical RPG that seems to have similar movement mechanics to things like Divinity, but it didn't have Steam Deck controller bindings and I couldn't figure out how to do anything so I bailed. Shame as I like Panic and the art style and tactical RPGs (even though I'm terrible at them).

Helskate is a skateboarding game where you play as some sort of demon doing skating and ugh that just doesn't work for me. Plus the controls are super jerky and twitchy and I need smoooooth for games like this. Hope the devs play Rollerdrome because that's the kind of controls I need from a game like this.

This stoked my nostalgia pretty hard. I worked in a phone shop right out of 6th form. I was terrible at it; not a closer, you see. But I have always loved gadgets, and have wanted to have something pretty much exactly like the iPhone since I was 9 years old.

As much as I love the iPhone (I know it's sad but I won't apologise), I do miss when phones were weird. I had so many cool ones:

• Nokia 3210
• Nokia 6600
• Nokia 6800
• Sony Ericsson P900
• Nokia 6310i

I had to get so many contracts to try all the phones I wanted. By the time I stopped selling phones, my credit rating was in absolute tatters.

Casey Neistat has this weird way to make anything a story. I have never been more inspired to make videos than when we were regularly watching his videos a few years back. I got burned out on him for whatever reason, but I love occasionally watching what he's doing now.

He has a particularly unique way of reviewing technology that I've always admired. So many reviewers focus on what tech does, and how that's an improvement, but Casey shows you what you can do with things by just doing it himself. When I saw this video in my list, I knew I was going to watch a video of Casey walking around New York wearing this thing and using it in ways that it's probably not currently intended (it's honestly worth it, if only to watch him trying to land a butterfly on a donut).

This is honestly the perfect complement to all the spec-heavy reviews like Marques' and Nilay's. Just a video of a master storyteller (I don't think that's an exaggeration) using a new tool to do what he does.

I feel like I would still love this guy even if I wasn't that interested in games. His presentation style makes me laugh so much, and his videos all look like they were super fun to make.

Some abrasive vocals for your Friday afternoon. I love this sort of thing.

Aesop Rock is usually as reliable as he is eloquent, but I haven't been as into his releases since The Impossible Kid.

I've been enjoying ITS a lot - it's a solid combination of beats, word-play and entertaining stories, which is what I want from an Aesop Rock record.

I was talking to someone about gaming and it occurred to me that I didn't post a game yet. Might as well start with one of my modern favourites.

I feel like Dead Cells set the template for the modern roguelite in terms of progression and the difficulty curve. There's essentially three parts of this game: the baby area, before you've maxxed out enough of the stats that you're actually going to use; the mid-game which is just training you to complete the "final" boss; then the post-game which is for people who have a far better attention span than I do.

I'm happy, as with most things in gaming (and maybe life?), to be good enough at Dead Cells to enjoy it. I can reliably get to the last area, and kill the Hand a lot of the time, but anything more than that just starts to feel like I'm playing the game just to play it, rather than because I'm enjoying it. I'm glad that stuff exists for the people who want it, but I can live with what I see as the core gameplay loop.

This does have a bit of a steep learning curve but it never feels cheap or unfair, which I think is super important in the early game, so that you can actually get established and not just feel like you're getting beaten up constantly like I do in things like Souls games.

This is a perfect example of why you should revisit music that you didn't enjoy first time. Dan recommended Future Islands to me ages ago and, for some reason, they live with Cursive in the Things That Are Associated department of my brain. Probably because Dan likes Cursive as well but I'm sure they were on the same label at some point or something.

I digress.

Future Islands make such an infectious brand of sad pop music for men my age, with my life experiences. They're like Bleachers or The Smiths, but for me. I like Bleachers and The Smiths, but I've never really identified with them in the way that I now do with Future Islands. Not bad for something that I really did not like five years ago. And, amusingly, Dan doesn't really like them any more either.

FFO: sad introspection, synths, dad caps and weird dancing

Super American, and a mercifully short first season. Stuff like this has a tendency to get dragged out and serialised and I'm glad this doesn't suffer from that (lookin' at you; Mentalist, Numb3rs et al). Decent story with some good twists and turns. Nothing too thinky going on.

There's going to be a couple of obvious and not-recent TV shows here (definitely didn't just write this to get the ball rolling in this category!) but whenever I think about my favourite TV shows, this is always so high on the list.

If you haven't already seen it, I suppose it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to convince you here, but it's the perfect period drama. The characters, costumes, and story are all absolutely wonderful.

The first time I started watching it, something about it made me uncomfortable and tense and I didn't get further than the first few episodes, but I watched it again on my turbo trainer and turned my unease into a calorie burn and ended up absolutely loving this show.

I love this sort of thing. This guy makes a different sandwich every day from (mostly) old cookery books. His videos are a couple of minutes long and he has multiple catchphrases. Top-tier routine-fodder. We watch his videos most days.

Love Audiotree and love Johnny Booth. Hope the latter makes it over to the UK some day.

Super intriguing story throughout, and I'll immediately move onto the next one.

The only criticism I have is that the prose feels very clinical and cold, and I can't tell if it's the translation, the author, or just how books are written in China.

A very, very long and slow burn. So detailed and beautiful and sad and evil. We had to watch it over two nights because I can't do a film like this in a single sitting, but that's just because I was sleepy and not because of any problem with the film itself. It is long but on immediate reflection I don't think you could edit it down in any significant way.

I enjoyed this a lot, but let's not pretend that it's anything more than Parasite for a western audience that doesn't want to read subtitles.

Consider this a freebie from your boy. If you want to enjoy this film again as an adult, watch it with a ten-year-old who's never seen it. I may live to regret showing this to her, but whilst we were watching she was so happy. Imagine being ten and learning that they made films that match your stupid annoying sense of humour. That's real happiness right there.

I don't think I like James Bond

The perfect end that I wish wasn't.

I like it, but it drags on a bit in the last act.

I love this.

No, I give up. I can't stand it any more. Maybe I'll come back later but this was making me actively angry by the time I put it down.

This is a bad movie, dragged out to make a really long bad movie. Normally I would avoid speaking so objectively about a film, and I hope this self-awareness will give weight to my opinion and save someone two hours.

The only redeeming element to this film is the art direction. The story is meandering and unengaging. Performances are hammy. It just doesn't work; and I really wanted it to work. I am so ready for a big budget sci-fi, but I guess I'm waiting for Dune.

Very beautiful, loved the soundtrack. I think there's a lot of metaphor buried in here that I wasn't quite able to excavate. Could do with another couple of watches, which I would have absolutely no problem with.

I liked it. Cheesy as all hell but I feel like that's the point. Solid ending. Probably not going to watch it again.

Hans Zimmer is the laziest composer in history omg. So much of the Pirates of the Caribbean music is in this film.

I love this sort of film.

I enjoyed this film a lot. I like films that are about characters and what they do, rather than some story arc. There obviously is a story here but it's very much a vehicle for the characters.

I read a review that broke it down as a ruling elite class crushing an uprising by pitting the oppressed class against each other to divide and conquer, and how that is an allegory for politics and society today. I like that a lot as a comparison, and I would love it if that was intentional but I doubt it somehow. Amusing how a film about liberation and empowerment lands as a tale of class oppression.

I loved the soundtrack. Been listening to it for a while anyway but it fits so well with the film. Especially Billie Eilish's song.

Cast was all amazing as well. It really comes across how much everyone enjoyed filming it. I thought America Ferrera and Margot Robbie in particular were brilliant, and I love Ryan Gosling as an airhead with too much confidence.

Oddly not as terrible as I expected. The first hour lays it out like The Core or Armageddon or something like that, and the acting is exactly as urgent and hammy as you'd expect. But actually the story is pretty coherent, all things considered. And the special effects are pretty amazing. The last thirty minutes were particularly enjoyable.

I will say, though, if you find deus ex machina annoying, skip this hard.