First thing, no apologies needed friend… You really didn’t speak over me, and replies take as long as they take.

Second thing… I wish I had read more of his work when I met him. Instead we just chatted about the world. He has such a broad intelligence and he was very kind with it.

If you were ever setting up a pub quiz team, I’d highly recommend. * *

He’s a fellow northerner, and there’s something about his work that really speaks of that. There’s such a strange creative history up here that gets attention, but also seems to get subsumed. We chatted about that.

And for me, Alice in Sunderland is the one I give to other people, but Luther Arkwright is the one I’ll happily return to.

The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.

I wish this wasn’t as true as it is.

I don’t think this is a gaming problem.

It is a discourse problem.

People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.

And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.

And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.

You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.

People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.

And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.

Audience error.

That’s fair enough.

I recently started editing video in Resolve, but decades of using Premiere means my muscle memory is heavily biased.

I suspect that might be the same for you.

In what ways do you find it more convenient?

Yep. Cool. There’s a place for them, certainly.

Still don’t think that’s reading though.

I say unpopular because those that do think audiobook are “books” tend to be very, very vocal about how wrong I am when I express that opinion… As if I’m somehow undermining their enjoyment or the legitimacy of their consumption.

The 52% on my side are just sat quietly reading books and minding their own business.

I think you make some interesting points… Content is important.

Although I think there’s such a desperation to get people into the reading habit that anything is considered good enough.

Remember the Harry Potter book when they first came out. I seem to remember a lot of chat about how those books were low effort, but that they encouraged a lot of life-long readers.

I know that here, in the UK, our education system tends to make people resent reading. Furthermore it instills some awful habits… Like feeling you have to finish a book even if you aren’t enjoying it (which usually means you stop reading altogether).

Anyway. That’s a long way of saying I think you are right.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but listening to audio books isn’t reading.

It is a different sensory experience. It uses different parts of the brain and imagination too.

It is far closer to listening to a radio play.

I’m not saying it is any worse or better, just different.

I’m not sure that conflating the two is useful, particularly when talking about reading habits.

Prompt to hallucinating?

Do you mean “Prone”?

That is the sort of mistake an Llm would make.

And this is the same logic that big companies are using when they rip off small scale creators to feed their AI algorithms.

The argument is more nuanced than “it isn’t stealing because it is just copying”.

With the AI stuff, they are not just copying the work, they are stealing small creators livelihoods as well as the efforts of their labour.

I know, it’s cool to say the catch phrase, “of buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing”, but ultimately this benefits the massive mega corporation’s more than the little guys.

Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.

Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.

A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.

Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.

And this isn’t to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.

I met Talbot at a comic festival in Lancaster some time back. Spent an awfully long time chatting to him. Fascinating and kind human.

Children born between next Wednesday and Friday will be designated “generation cd-dvd” closely followed by those born the following week who will be called “generation noombers”.

The media will focus tightly on how these two groups, born mere hours apart can be entirely characterised in general terms that don’t consider geographic, social, economic, or race discrepancies and will set them against each other in a bitter feud that includes housing availability and which slang is the best slang.