Christopher Phin

I worried for years that being nice, being helpful, being generous, being useful came from a broken place inside me — A place where my value could only be articulated & assured if I was useful — I don’t think that any more. Generosity of spirit; joy; compersion — give I instruct you (me, and you): love wildly and love widely And if it were ever true that that love wells up and pours forth through a crack in your soul that deserves care & repair, accept that repair when it is tenderly offered but never again question its value

They used to have cut-out on that bottom edge iirc, which was very nice. Guess the trade-off is more protection on that edge, but I hear ya.

(And thank you! xxx)

YouTube video by Christopher Phin The problem with Apple’s Silicone Cases (which I’m ignoring this time…)

Why I bought the Apple Silicone Case for my new iPhone eyes-open – despite assuming it has the same fatal flaw of previous Silicone Cases.

🧡

(I really like the Silicone cases, but stopped buying them because they degrade fast. This is a treat, therefore. I like how grippy they make the phone to stop it sliding on a chair arm/bed, I like I can put my phone face-down, AND they stop the damned rocking…)

An orange iPhone 17 in the orange case, next to a still-packaged blue iPhone 6S case. The hole for the camera in the latter is TINY compared to the ‘plateau’ aperture for the 17.

Survived caseless for a week! 😅 I’m sure I used to have an orange Apple Silicone case before so went looking for it for a photo. Couldn’t find it, but did find this 6S case, and the difference in camera aperture over 10 years amused me!

Attending a memorial this morning for a friend who decided to leave the party far too early, at least as far as the rest of us are concerned.

Go tell someone you love how much they mean to you. Go make some art. Ensure the world is more beautiful because of you, and the community you raise up.

🤍

That would make sense! I did make sure I was, but maybe not being reported back. Surprised the accelerometer data isn’t enough!

Has anyone successfully thrown video to a car using the new AirPlay functionality in iOS 26’s CarPlay? I’m aware it needs to be added by devs for third-party apps, but I assumed it would work with video from Photos or Safari’s default media player, but I couldn’t get it to work. Am I dumb?

YouTube video by Christopher Phin A World of Your Own: the modern queer anthem we didn’t know we needed

My friend Stuart and I have often talked about the rich #queer resonances in the song ‘A World Of Your Own’ from the 2023 movie Wonka, and recently, finally, we did so with a camera rolling so you can join in on the discussion. youtu.be/Wt1ArezeaiQ

I’m proud of this. I hope you share this joy! 🏳️‍🌈

A group of five people sitting around a living room, laughing as they play Mario Kart.

Technically, I lost comprehensively 😅 but being able to successfully coordinate five adult schedules to get some of the most important people in my life round for a night of Mario Kart, means that’s really, I’m winning the biggest prize of all 🥰

YouTube video by Christopher Phin How to paint your nails (especially if you’re nervous about it)

Looks like my very long but I hope very useful guide to painting your nails is closing in on a thousand views, so giving it a little reboost! 💅

Call for submissions of pitches for Transactional Intercourse. £250/£340 per 1000 words.

PAID WRITING OPPORTUNITY for trans and/or intersex sex workers! Looking for pitches of essays and personal narratives about your experience in sex work to be included in Transactional Intercourse, a trans and intersex sex worker anthology.

Send in your pitches here: forms.gle/UV8TLD8xKGxZ...

"open season on these cunts"

I don’t need to be reminded that the world is beautiful. I know. I need to be gifted the opportunity to sink into its beauty.

A pretty young Caucasian woman with long hair sitting on a mat on a beach, smiling Mona Lisa-style at the camera. She wears a deep pink silk dress adorned with smatterings of opalescent sequins (actually the dress she got married in) and a dark denim jacket.

Today is my 20th anniversary. I shot this on my first. Can highly recommend finding someone incredible to go through life with hand in hand. More please, @jennyphin.bsky.social; you’re a fucking phenomenon. 😘

PS You have no idea how much I want to make memes beautifully using all my design skills, like, matching the font and drop shadow perfectly etc, but that is antithetical to meme culture…

The scene from The Thick Of It where Peter Mannion MP says ‘I’m bored of this, I’m going for a Twix’, but the last word is patched with ‘twink’

Sometimes things occur to me and I have to exorcise them from my brain

YouTube video by Christopher Phin Power Mac G4 Cube – sci-fi eject

Reminded of this very silly video I made back when I wrote a column about vintage Apple tech. Ejecting the internals of a G4 Cube always felt like pulling out a nuclear core, so I went all-in, scripting something, having friends record dialogue, slathering vfx and sfx… youtu.be/69PE6XSqE0g

The world is divided into two types of people: people who, on hearing you have availability from, say, 2–5pm, would book at half hour meeting at the latest at 4:30 or at 5pm.

And the latter group needs to be respectfully euthanised. For their own good.

Screenshot: No room for wokeness! @Wokenessisevil Notice how no one, not a single soul, has ever complained about the female gaze in entertainment. [photos show Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) and Alan Ritchson (Reacher) with ripped muscles]

This isn’t the female gaze. This is the male gaze. It’s men who are obsessed with the physicality of other men. Women, in the main, would much rather see a man who looks like he’d make himself a stack of buttered toast and let you steal a slice

Grazie! (You’re namechecked on Mastodon as one of the people who got me to this spot :)

A small thing: I’m adding ‘Kit’ to the list of names I respond to chrisphin.com/blog/kit/

Thanks to all the amazing people who’ve contributed to that thinking :)

They want you to think ‘protest’ only looks like marches and Molotov cocktails because that’s merely thousands of people in one place at one time whom they can crush with force. They love that. They can’t crush a protest that’s a billion people over a dozen generations feeding friends and neighbours, creating truthful and unapologetic art, being the safe person someone knows they can unmask with, ‘letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves’, having joyously affirming sex, or making yourself quietly kinder and softer year after year. They hate that. Both protests have value. But one is ours.

A laptop open in a car with a small screen in the dash showing the standard Mac System Settings. Outside we see the mouth of the River Tay, and Broughty Ferry castle, a squarish, boxy building.

Too silly. Sick of my desk so took my laptop out in the car to work this evening, which not only has a standard wall socket to charge the laptop, but an HDMI port. Turns out (of course) that I can use one of its screens as an extended display 🤪 and of course audio plays through the car speakers 😄

Two enamel pins stuck to the lapel of a berry coloured corduroy jacket. One reads ‘TERFs suck’ and the other ‘queer joy’ with a smiling cartoon character underneath spreading its arms, with joyous squidgy ribbons of colour emanating from it.

New pins 🥰

White text on a blue sky with bubbles floating across it which reads “If you feel defeated, we've already lost. Instead, feel joy. Pride 2025”

Honestly why I’m happiest on Mastodon. (Not a pissing competition about which is the more niche or woke social media platform, just a point about why I like my little gang of queerdoes on Masto.)

Bring me back by Christopher Phin on Apple Music Playlist · 9 Songs

Apple Music: music.apple.com/gb/playlist/...

Spotify: open.spotify.com/playlist/456...

A friend asked me to list what 10 songs he could play me to snap me out of a coma 😅 and while I could easily spend the rest of my life obsessing over the list, that seems suboptimal, so I tried to give it a strong-opinions-lightly-held pass, trying not to worry about it too much… ▸