Hello, I’m on holiday now. Heading to Edinburgh Fringe for 5 days – cannot wait! Expect a round-up next time on the acts and shows we’re seeing. (Expect hits & misses!)
Backdrop
A heatwave in London • Reeves sending for Hunt and scrapping stuff • Right wing riots tenuously following fatal stabbings at a kid’s dance party • Trump questioning Harris’s racial identity • worrying Middle East escalations • Snoop at the Olympics dressage. What a world.
Last weekend
After posting last week’s note, I had a family bbq for my mum’s birthday, coincidentally accompanied by this hot air balloon floating over Tivvy – how nice! Got back Sunday (earlier than planned and for free, thanks to a full refund after my booked train was cancelled).
Monday
Had Monday off and spent most of it piecing together info for HMRC’s irksome investigation of my 2019/20 tax situation, when I merged my civil service pension into my local government pension and it caused a world of pain. Never do this!
🕹️ I played some of Twelve Minutes, a great locked room time-loop point-and-click mystery (with Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy). Love it!
🎬 Then Dylan and I went to Eraserhead in BFI’s NFT3. I hadn’t seen it for years, and never on a big screen. Dylan’s first watch and he loved it.
🎧 On the way back we listened to that Amon Tobin tune that samples Eraserhead’s man-made chickens scene.
Tuesday to Friday
Four days of work, mostly from home, hiding from the heatwave.
It featured a jam-packed regular Exec Board and a bonus two-hour planning sesh; plus my directorate’s six-weekly all-hands Show & Tell (a really good one!)
We’re shipping some big visible stuff in the coming weeks including a new shoutout feature on the intranet (it’s the wonderwall component of GovIntranet, which we’re renaming Credits Roll to make it filmy), plus a price change and sexy new web homepage for BFI Player.
I joined a field trip to Target 3D to get more familiar with how tech is transforming the screen industries. The buzzword is “convergent” (not just emergent) technology – referring to how game engines (mostly Unreal), LED volume walls, gen-AI, VR and AR, motion capture and camera tracking are being used in combination to change how screen content is created and make new forms possible. It was fascinating to see, but HOT AS HELL cos of all that compute power amid the heatwave.
Main takeaways:
- we increasingly inhabit an experience economy (at the centre of the Venn diagram of physical spaces + live events + screen content)
- convergent tech collapses the production timeline so that visual effects work previously confined to post, can now happen in pre-production, meaning faster feedback (“fix it in pre”) – and so more experimenting and happy accidents.
- there’s also something a bit soulless about it all, though, to be wary of. Useful tools to augment human storytelling, not replace it.
📺 At home Joy and I watched Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy which was fun and informative. One former Confessions actress sounded familiar – turns out she voiced The Flumps!
🎬 We caught the end of Hammer House of Mystery: Child’s Play up in the high channels, and it was excellent.
🔗 Excited to see the brilliant brain of Emily Middleton is being engaged by DSIT on the design of the new digital centre of government – we’re going to have a chat.
🔗 Emma Keith at the NT started weeknoting – nice.
🔗 London Museum launched a spiffing new website with AI help to find connections across the collections.
🎧 Randeep sent me this v good podcast episode about movie recommendation algorithms.
South Facing Festival
🎵 On Thursday Dylan and I went to see The Roots (supported by The Pharcyde and De La Soul) at South Facing Festival in Crystal Palace Park.
This was Dylan’s first gig, I was just tagging along. I’m generally not that keen on live music, preferring studio production and being somewhat chorophobic, but I HAD SUCH A GREAT TIME in spite of myself. The Roots are incredible, tight musicians. The venue was perfect too.
⛈️ The whole thing came to a standstill when the heatwave gave way to thunder and lightning, closing the stage for safety. We endured an hour of heavy rain in our soaked summer clothes to wait for the headliners, but we were so glad we did.
Saturday and Sunday
🏋️♂️A personal trainer session at the gym. I’m not managing to do any exercise between weekly PT appointments at the mo, frustratingly.
🎬 Skywalkers: A Love Story. Vertiginous doc on Netflix. I really liked this.
🎬 FrightFest: Beneath the Dark Heart of Cinema. A decade-old doc about London’s iconic horror film festival where my wife’s film 7 Keys premieres in two weeks (book here!)
🔗 Chris Michaels writes well about the far right riots
🔗 Love this nostalgia about old audio gadgets from Mark Hurrell
🕹️ More Twelve Minutes. I’ve downloaded Thank Goodness You’re Here to play on holiday (on the Switch).
All week
📺 We’re rewatching Veep from S1 to show the kids after I read somewhere how much it’s predicted (and been out-satirised by) real events in US politics.
📺 Rewatched a couple of Over the Garden Wall episodes – PERFECT.
📺 We’re now on S4 of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Don’t snooze on this, it’s so fun. I will mention it twice more to remind you, when we start the final season and when we finish it.
🎧 I listened to The Tavistock: inside the gender clinic on Tortoise. I didn’t know much about it, and now I know more, but I still don’t know quite what to think or feel. While things might be better now for trans and non-binary people than at any point in history, there’s a long way to go and it’s such a turbulent moment – not least this raging debate on who decides, how and when, that a child is sure enough about their identity to start irreversible changes; and to weigh the damage of denying or delaying that choice. So… a thought-provoking and hard listen, and I hope the mere mention of it here hasn’t been triggering for anyone reading.
🎧 New JPEGMAFIA album is very good.
Infinite scroll
Aka the best of Neil’s #fyp (and occasional other stuff):
- Wide shot, perpendicular to the road, of a person getting hit by a bus [TikTok]
- This shit is pomegranates [TikTok]
- One million screenshots
- The way my Gen X brain works [TikTok but also pasted below]
Thanks for stopping by. See you next week!
