Tom Ewing

Looking at Spotify charts it’s interesting which the completely Tay-proof markets are - Nigeria, Egypt, India, Belarus, Japan…

(South America in general doesn’t give much of a shit)

You encounter it early on and while loveable it won’t have the legs to be part of your final team - is that enough to go on?

As with Pokémon, I think this is squeaky wheel stuff, there were vocal fans who disliked the last one too. It’s the equivalent of the angry football fan burning his season ticket on Sky Sports News

The Life Of A Showgirl can’t even offer Lechonk the pig in its defence

There’s been a certain amount of wishcasting about this being a flop. It reminds me of the last Pokémon games, where they were janky as hell and people went “it’s over” and they sold more than anything since the very first two. There is an “ah, well, nevertheless” zone for media sadly

I know, I know, I let a dumb misreading get under my skin

And stories specifically about the rights of robots have defaulted to individual rights because that’s the idea of rights we’re most familiar with, so yes, most stories about robot rights will have an underlying (sometimes barely underlying, hi Pat Mills!) metaphorical framework about people

There’s a basic problem that it’s just very hard for humans to write characters that aren’t in fact human

…which we are experiencing as an individual thing we chat to but which are mostly personalised instances of a vast generative model

Nor am I saying conversations about machine sentience are pointless, or that just because something exists in fiction it can’t happen in real life. I’m saying that the fictionalised versions of robots as individual beings have been poor cultural preparation for the ‘AI’ we actually have…

I should probably have qualified this but I thought it was obvious - no, I was not saying that every story about robots is about this. Terminator is not a human rights metaphor.

ELP’s Love Beach killed him :(

tbh lots of minimal can win my love but not against Neneh sorry

No minimal can win my love, it's sweetness that I'm thinking of

Apologies to Sandra Sa for the typo here!

If you scroll back on their playlist to 4.35am this morning they played Big Mama Thornton, I take it all back

“Taylor will be forgotten soon” requires marginally less wishcasting than “Harry Potter is going to go away” but only marginally

I like that they’ve named the station after a track that would make 95% of their listeners take a hammer to their radios

You can’t be telling me that people who chose to listen to a British classic rock station in 2019 know fuck all about the blues, surely? I simply refuse to believe such a thing

Me reading about Lori Vambe

Also very cool that it has one of the corniest / best intros in the world - “You mean a heart attack?? No! A RAP ATTACK”

It’s very cool that only 3 years after Rapper’s Delight there’s a rap defense/explainer hit, like The Showmen’s “It Will Stand” was for rock&roll - 82 is the year it’s really obvious hip-hop on record isn’t a fad, bits of it getting into other songs and the first big style shift into electro

More polls! Some extremely tricky choices at the top of the card and the Anthony Braxton v Eddie Murphy face off you didn’t know you wanted -

Is it a bit like the X-Men which have drifted more and more pro-Magneto over the decades?

I have now ordered second-hand intervention & the milieu trilogy from World Of Books so we shall see!! (Saga I am pretty sure I can get from any charity shop if I wish to revisit, alongside CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR et al)

Oh yeah there are certain aspects of writing novels that Adams is really undeniably bad at

Right and it’s steering clear of actual cultural things (again aside from Blobby) but I do think you could fit Pratchett novels in there without missing much of a beat - tho maybe because he is genuinely normie not focus group normie

My most unfriendly spin on this is that there are lots of people who hate it when a bad person likes the Jam or RATM or Pratchett or whoever because on some level they feel liking those things is part of the evidence they’re a good person

Silly Sausage feels kind of cockwomble adjacent on some quadrant I have not identified the axes of

Early Adams is “what if a high concept/Big Object 70s SF writer but played for laughs” and I like that cos the concept/object scaffolding is solid underneath. Once the concept is stuff like “cricket as the organising principle of galactic conquest” I’m out