Mark Brown

Same with anything, really. What you see in something often depends on what you've seen before. Things aren't groundbreaking if you've never seen the ground before. Things can't be unprecedented without the precedent. It's so hard to imagine looking at a book and thinking 'I have no context here'

I always feel a bit like it's really hard as someone who reads a lot and reads widely to imagine what it would be like to not have the benefit of the dense web of allusions and language you've built up over a lifetime, where every new thing knits into everything before and adds itself to your self

Local reporter ‘shocked’ over picture of his face on punchbag at UK town hall Joe McCann of the Melksham News was tipped off by a contact about the image and raised issue at council meeting A local newspaper journalist has said he was left “shocked” after a picture of his face was printed out and attached to punchbag at a town hall. Joe McCann, who has worked for the Melksham News for 10 years, was tipped off by a contact that a print-out of his face had been attached to a freestanding punchbag inside the building. Continue reading...

Local reporter ‘shocked’ over picture of his face on punchbag at UK town hall

I also love radio and agree that podcasts and radio aren't the same thing at all. I think newspapers because I work in newspapers. I think, in part, the physical nature of them is part of their benefit.

I do two things in my day job mostly. Selling print adverts in our monthly newspapers and thinking about strategy for our papers. My feeling is there's a number of people who aren't used to the existence of local newspapers (or scrutiny they bring) and don't have an ingrained sense of what they are

I ask these questions because I spend every working day working in local newspapers (we have four monthlies as a company). I'm. Not amazingly time rich, so would love to natter with folks looking at this particular issue rather than just accepting established wisdom or hand wringing about it

If you think yourself into someone in their early twenties now, the problems that a newspaper can solve in your life are actually pretty clear, and very much different from the ones removed by news going digital when you were a baby.

I don't think newspapers and ghost or substack newsletters are same thing. Nor podcasts or other permutations of news feeds. I feel like too many assume 'it's all computers these days with the young' uns' without examining how you'd actually make a strong value proposition to them for print papers

Has anyone UK based done any research into how you build the next generation of local newspaper readers, rather than just going 'oh, it's all on the screen so newspapers should be vertical video'? It occurs to me there is a strong offer you could make to a generation who have never bought a paper

The disgraced former Prince was having a lot of meetings across the world in semi official and official national business roles for years, then wasn't, then started the same thing but with his own thing with start ups. I wonder to what extent current allegations infect all of that period of activity

I feel like there is probably a lot of fishy history during the silicon roundabout / start up mania period 2014-2021.

Serious question re former Prince Andrew: has any journo done any digging into Pitch at the Palace, his Dragon's Den style thing for supporting start up businesses?

Because that touched a lot of start ups and crossed over with Andrew's roving international business stuff.

I got into the police station and I saw a zombie and I killed and then I saw a zombie and I killed it too. There was a locked door with a club sign on it. I found a club key and opened it. I picked up 20 bullets. I killed another zombie. Found another locked door. It has a diamond symbol. Some dogs attacked me, I killed them with my shotgun...

I've always wondered what Resident Evil characters actually write on those typewriters when you're saving your game.

Endless wanging on about men are this and women are that and the natural order of things. So much damage done to people just so that reductive cultural and political beliefs can be propped up. So much sucking up to people who just want to trap the world in rigid binaries based on convention only

I don't think the lives of trans people should be chucked in the bonfire to appease the egos of gender essentialists who think the most important thing in the world is that boys go through one door and girls the another and society will fall apart without that illusory comfort

We have a propensity to hold onto not very interesting pre-1920 buildings while dustbinning of history extremely interesting ones that come later. A world you read with your eyes and feet tells the story of a place far better than many people realise.

I have often thought that discomfort with the Post war and pre war modern in the UK is going to leave only the worst of it, not the best of it standing. I'm the kind of pillock who'll go half an hour out of my way just to walk through something that might not be here forever.

Something feudal about RAM and technology parts being only available to the tech-barons for their AI systems. The retreat from the personal computer age

Like, for a generation growing up in the fifties, a meaningful statement could be 'I was brought up on Westerns' as a way of explaining a moral code or a set of politics. But what does it mean to say 'I was brought up on games'? (I know it depends on what games)

These are super interesting, thank you! What I've been thinking about is how story logic shapes real world logic and what, if any, difference it makes if someone primarily consumes story through games rather than other narrative arts. There's the 'doing' of games and the 'meaning' of games, maybe

Thanks! I'll check that out.

But I know that so many people are and spend more time with those stories than they do with any other. It feels like a 21stc art form that politics and criticism hasn't yet got a handle on as story, but that story sense shapes more of the world than other narrative arts

Like games are fictions. I love plays and books and films and comics and telly. They all tell stories in different ways with different rules. But games tell stories by different rules again. I'm fascinated by the politics and sense making of games, but I'm not that into that medium for stories

*and consume, rather than consumer.

*book publishing in the post above, obviously.

I mean both stories games tell and how they tell them and the meta story of taking part in games. If people spend more hours in those stories than any other, surely this must mean that what these stories are becomes increasingly important, because the stories we ingest shape the stories we tell

Hello. Computer games is a bigger industry than boom publishing and film. I don't really play games that much. I assume people consumer more 'story' through games than they do through other media. Can someone point me towards some good writing on narrative in games and its real world implications?

I can't help but feel so much of the malaise of the current government comes from not expecting to win the last election and being geared up intellectually to fight a campaign to win the next one. Ready to outflank a government, but not to be one. Except they are.

I adore Ian Gibson on the Robot Rebellion. The frames where they are in the robot factory changing the settings particularly. I think nearly everything up to about prog 500 is just an incredible vivid mess of two blokes, Wagner and Grant, egging each other on, pissing themselves laughing

I think, because I am old and boring, that we could revitalise lots of struggling organisations and spaces by giving them funds to run activities and opportunities for young people. Not as interventions but just 'this is a cool thing that you can do'. No moral crusade, just fun stuff to explore