November 2022

• *may have instantly become one of my favourite films*

September 2022

July 2022

March 2022

• Thanks to armb for the recommendation!

• As someone said in the chat, best Saturday morning ever.

• The ending (without giving anything away I hope) does not work on the Kindle due to the impossibility of resizing the last portion of text (which I assume is actually a graphic, for reasons). Irritating. Remedied by downloading onto a laptop and using the Kindle Reader instead.

• Loved it for its title!

• “Humans, this novel suggests, are similar: coat them in clothing, dip them in society — with its joys and frictions, its jockeyings-for-power, it erotic and amicable and inimical relationships — and they become themselves. The disguise maketh the man.”

• “His rule of thumb for finding interesting people is to search out those who are comfortable being right on the edge of things, including the edge of polite society. That’s where the intellectual action is.”

• “All the best ideas have an element of utopianism within them. In my dream future UK, there are Clarion Houses dotted all over our regreened, rewilded nation, serving as waystations and watering holes on Slow Ways that join up all our hamlets and villages, towns and cities. That’s my clarion call for today.”

• “Silently I note that he has apologised only for shocking me, not for what he has said.”

• “Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous "2x2 decorated slope" is a LEGO minifigure's interface to the world.”

• “I have seen what virtual worlds can do for people. I have spent my entire adult life reporting on them, and what people do in them and the meaning that they find there. So the fact that I’m now the one standing here saying that we don’t want this, feels significant.”

• “Thinking that endemicity is both mild and inevitable is more than wrong, it is dangerous: it sets humanity up for many more years of disease, including unpredictable waves of outbreaks.”