Week 02

January 13, 2020

Phew, that first week back at work was strangely hard for no apparent reason, but we got through it.

Second week of not drinking alcohol. It’s ironic that such a healthy thing always makes me feel so bad for the first week - I don’t even drink that much but my brain chemistry definitely re-adjusts when I stop completely and it’s not enjoyable, proper mood swings and down days. It does make you wonder how anyone ever gets out of being properly addicted to drink | drugs | whatever, must be several orders of magnitude harder, anyone who does it deserves a lot of respect.

As I’m working at a scale-up (sigh) as usual the workforce skews young, which is a welcome change . Some of the conversations I’ve had with post-millennials* do make me wonder whether Late Capitalism only works because there’s a critical mass of people that remember the mid-20th century version of capitalism that worked (for some values of ‘worked’). Seems very likely post-millennials will just ghost capitalism-as-we-know-it and invent something else, but I think it’s 50/50 whether that’ll be some kind of social democratic arrangement or some weird data driven hyper-capitalism.

Good Things

Talking of zeitgeisty stuff, I watched Messiah this week, Netflix’s second coming thriller and it was far more interesting than a lot of the standard streaming stuff. It definitely seems more plausible than it would have a few years ago. The modern world does seem to be at a tipping point, so how much would it take to move it, and what paths could you push it down. As one character says “It doesn’t matter if he’s he’s real!” which is definitely a mood. Maybe Jesus was a shrewd operator too? In one episode there’s a big miracle, and the director uses all the cinematic bag of tricks to immerse you into the moment and it really worked on me, which is very meta. Well worth a watch, look forward to season 2.

I Can Go For That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock on iPlayer was fun and informative, Katie Puckrik presents and you can tell she loves this stuff, it’s enjoyable watch if you like that Californian “ennui deluxe” sound.

I also finally finished listening to Elton John’s autobiography Me - so many books are put forward as ‘warts and all’ but there are very few that really deliver, this one does in every aspect. Taron Egerton, who played him in the Rocketman film, narrates it which was a nice touch.

Quotes

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” Paul Virilio

“I sat around wanking in a dressing gown covered in my own puke “ Elton John

“This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” Boeing employee, 2017.

Next Week

I'll try and do something interesting next week so I don't have to just write about media. Not promising anything though.

2 whole weeks of weeknotes, keep going everyone, we can do this!

* I much prefer the suggestion we call them ’memelords’ rather than ‘post-millenials’ as they hate it and no generation should get a label they like.