Back from a week in Wales. Some great mountain biking, Brass:Birmingham playing and walking along refreshingly drizzly beaches. I read a couple of Jarett Kobek books, the commercial flop ‘The Future Won’t Be Long’ and his most recent ‘Only Americans Burn in Hell’ I really enjoyed the former, the latter was good too but a kind of lesser ‘I Hate The Internet’ in some ways. I’m really looking forward to his ODB book.

Kobek really gets consumer computer technology in a way that no other author I’ve read does. You know how some writers can sketch a whole believable character from some telling details about what they’re wearing or the car they drive? Kobek does that with consumer electronics e.g. from ‘ The Future…’

One feature which I paid an especial attention to was Jeremy’s state of the art IBM PC Compatible 486DX-33mhz computer, replete with 1024 X 786 SVGA video and a SoundBlaster 16 Pro 2.

Or from ‘Only Americans…’

HRH powered on the Alienware Area-51 desktop computer

His references are specific rather than generic, he mentions Overwatch not Fortnite and the choice is meaningful.

Compare this to the following sentence from a review of Zed in the guardian a couple of weeks back…

Varley’s expertise is in the “lifechain”, a Beetle program of algorithms, and Mann seems to have broken their futurology.

I had to try 3 or 4 times before I could get past this sentence. (Context; ‘beetle’ is a google like company, ‘lifechain’ is like a fictional hand wavy technology, fine.) But really? A program of algorithms? In the context of this gibberish inventing Beetle and Lifechain just comes off as a way to avoid engaging with or understanding the precise and nameable problems of real world entities and technologies in favour of vague allusions.

Back to Fortnite briefly. The recent story about the kid who won some cash playing has elicited predictable responses. On one side ‘what a crazy waste of time these kids should be whittling sticks and fishing in the creek’ on the other ‘shut up old man games are fine, people used to say the same about novels’. Both sides failing to engage with the specifics of Fortnite the actual game/ commercial enterprise.

(My short take

Pro: fun social environment with an ok game tacked on, not inherently as horrifically sexist/ racist as most games.

Con: casino like psyops and rabid commercialisation of social space aimed squarely at children. The parasitic economy of streamers that exists around the game is a toxic recruiting ground for the far right and rabid misogynists.)

Anyway, the other thing that happened is that I got to use a beer tap at my cousins 50th birthday party. I’ve never worked in a bar (office temping and factory work were my student jobs) so I don’t have the associations with thankless minimum wage grind that others might have formed around the action of pulling a pint, it just felt like being handed the keys to the city. I definitely drank more than I would have had I not been able to pull my own pints.

Bonus: did you know that a senight used to be a word for a week? Seven nights as opposed to the fourteen in a fortnight. Got this fact from reading Mary Barton.