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> LINK · 'You You You' by Arab Strap on YouTube Holy moly. This starts with a so-so story - "I'm old and tired but I've got you" before Malc's allowed to start playing a massive guitar around the two minute mark and it becomes a brooding angry screed and they're wearing balaclavas and it's just incredible. What a song.
If you're fortunate enough to be able to book a cruise with Virgin Voyages 1 , you might have seen the "bid to level up" option hidden away on your booking confirmation. The bid-to-upgrade system is weird . It's not well explained. Sometimes it is counterintuitive. Timings are vague. It's a lottery-of-sorts, and like any lottery it becomes a little easier to win if you can figure out how it works.…
> LINK · 'WILD GUNMAN: Resurrecting Nintendo's First Coin-Op on its 50th Anniversary'
> LINK · 'This is not the computer for you' by Sam Henri Gold A really nice blog about technology reviewers. Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks…
After two frustrating hours including an unnecessarily optimistic reinstallation of a 90GB game, I finally figured out how to wipe your Forza Horizon 4 progress on the Steam Deck. Here's my super simple guide: Click on Forza Horizon 4. Go to the little cog on the right, click on 'Properties...', the on the 'General' screen that appears make sure that the 'Keep game's saves in the Steam Cloud for…
> LINK · Anemoia: the psychology behind feeling nostalgic for a time you’ve never known This came up recently in Jonathan Coe's novel The Proof Of My Innocence , noting how twentysomethings obsessively watch 'Friends' for some pre-smartphone, low-risk nostalgia for a time they never experienced. From the definition on the link: Traditionally, psychologists thought of nostalgia as being based on a…
> LINK · Gradient Horse A fun little toy where you, erm, draw a horse and then see it run along a lovingly-rendered CSS plain along with the horses drawn by other users. Delightful.
> LINK · 'MOPy fish' on Wikipedia Something suddenly remembered: this screensaver released by HP in 1997. All my friends installed this on their preferred computer in the PC room at school and it made the sole ICT teacher frantic. To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a…
From Craig Mod 's excellent walking travelogue Things Become Other Things : So I walked. I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and feel the air of our town leave my cells and be replaced by the air and ideas of a different time and place. The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I…
I now pronounce... ...an album of the year post clumsily written around the theme of marriage. There hasn't been a single favourite album this year. I'm at a stage in my life where music means an awful lot but the battle against nostalgia is increasingly tough. I crave the comfort of the known, the stuff I liked as a carefree teenager, the pop hits of yesteryear. Since moving last year all my…