Patrick W. Reed

Pubs in Jersey helping me decide where not to bother spending my money this weekend with this AI bollocks. Don't think I fancy a pint of Wemwood Hobgoblin tbh.

Bloke in front of me at security with an absolutely unprecedented amount of Stuff In Pockets.

Wrote up the by-election, the Green victory and the conferences for Labour at the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

They should invent an airport for people who have existed in society before.

Six years since I spent time in the company of the great "Exotic" Adrian Street, at the Resistance Gallery. Both man and venue are sadly no longer with us, but what an evening it was.

Hiding in-jokes, references, and insane details in the background environment is surely the most fun part of creating a video game, even before you get into the way that the environment can inform and flesh out the story. Be wary of anyone wanting to take that stuff away.

Pretty uncomfortable w the implication in some of the chat today that British Muslims’ concerns are somehow less electorally valid than those of people from other backgrounds. Quite a lot of reductive implications that gaining the support of Muslim voters is somehow dishonest or gaming the system.

Tomorrow night we have the debut of a play called 'Old Monsters: Bela and Boris' all about the relationship between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

It is a script reading by regulars well-known to the bookshop.

almost a decade late, I have to say I have become absolutely hooked on Hollow Knight. What a game.

If nothing else, revisiting it has at least demonstrated that my tastes have evolved since I was a teenager!

Yeah, it's a perfectly good "Superman as inadvertent villain" story, but it does so little with the most interest parts of the premise, and the understanding of Soviet politics are non-existent. It's sometimes closer to a post-9/11 US surveillance culture parable, but paper thin as that too.

...the infant Superman's ship crash land in Ukraine, it creates a time loop, which I don't think is the best way to end this story. If it had instead landed in Kansas, thus "correcting" the timeline, that would have felt more narratively satisfying to me.

SPOILERS incoming for a book published 23 years ago:

The twist at the end about Luthor's descendants, the red Sun, and Jor-El, and Superman's origins being that he wasn't sent from Krypton but from Earth's far future, is lovely. But I wish that final panel had been slightly different. By having...

The ending is very good, but by that point the central premise has been completely abandoned anyway, and it's a fairly bog-standard Elseworld Superman vs. Lex Luthor story, that's about how joined at the hip those characters are in any universe. That works in any setting, including this one.

...Superman reconciles their abilities with a belief in collective action, but abandons this thread at the slightest provocation, and only ever explored it through the clumsiest interpretations of Marxist doctrine anyway.

It's a fine Superman story, but a very poor Cold War story.

...it does nothing meaningful with the Soviet or Cold War setting. About a third of the way through, it pivots to a fairly generic evil Superman dystopia, and may as well be an Injustice story with the bare minimum of Soviet window dressing. It pays lip service, early on, to how a character like...

Last night I re-read Superman: Red Son for the first time in about 22 years, and while it has its moments, I'm not nearly as high on it as I used to be.

The strongest point is the artwork. Using the character of Superman to mimic Soviet propaganda artwork is a masterstroke. The weakness is that...

You'll note that the 'You need to vote Labour to stop Reform!' guys aren't elated that Reform got trounced. They seem a little gutted, actually?

The wilful obscurantism of the political class & decades of demonising anything with the faintest whiff of Marxism, means too many poor white Brits will feel a false sense of class solidarity with millionaire landlords with the "right" accent over workers facing the same struggles as the rest of us.

I have long said that you need to be wary of politicians talking about the "working class", because they almost invariably include a silent "white". They're not talking about Bangladeshi waiters, Pakistani cleaners, or Somali couriers, are they?

tweet by the late Dawn Foster from Sep 4th 2020 "Matt Goodwin once emailed me to accuse him of being racist when I called him a “racist whisperer” and I had to explain to him that horse whisperers aren’t horses."

RIP to a real one

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A still from an episode of The Simpsons, in which Mr Burns is explaining to Waylon Smithers that one puppy standing up in a group reminds him of an actor - the caption reads, "the person who's always standing and walking"

We are watching Hell Comes To Frogtown, and just noticed for the first time that Rory Calhoun is in this movie.

I had completely memory holed that, fair enough!

that was the best version of Stomp To The Future that I've seen the Young Bucks pull off.

...Royal Rumbles, because nobody attempts eliminations or does anything but lie around waiting while someone else gets their shit in. Matches like this main event are the opposite and so much better for it, just wild chaos everywhere you turn.

Something AEW consistently does better than anyone is these big mad feelgood matches, where there's always *something* happening. So much of modern wrestling follows WWE's lead that if something isn't on camera, it doesn't exist, and that only one thing should be happening at a time - it's ruined...

Brody vs Swerve should be fun, though I'd like to see Brody slotted above "guy for the heel to beat" status, & the set-up being "Kenny randomly called Brody the most dangerous man i AEW a couple of weeks ago" isn't ideal. It feels like they had no meaningful direction to capitalise on Swerve's turn.

Brody King vs. Mark Davis is a pleasingly meaty match. Wrestling can encompass all kinds of athletes, all kind of body types, all kinds of styles and personalities, but sometimes it just needs to be two big bruisers clobbering each other.

And Statlander is feuding with the Triangle of Madness! You can get two meaningful matches out of a Stat/Willow/Harley trio!