Recently updated blogs

Captain L. David Marquet is known for taking the worst ship in the U.S. Navy fleet to the most effective. One of the principles he credits for this change is moving authority to the information. In typical team structures, authority and information are proportionate inverses. People at the top usually have the most amount of authority but the least amount of information as they’re often a few levels removed from …

Geezers and friends spend a sunny day in Deal - 2024 coach trip

The Netherlands has returned numerous looted artifacts and art objects to Indonesia in a major repatriation. This move aims to make partial restitution for historical legacies of Dutch colonialism, imperialism, and slavery in Southeast Asia. The New York Times reports that “the Dutch government returned centuries-old stone Buddhist statues, a bejeweled serpentine armband and other looted artifacts to its former colony Indonesia on Friday, a rare example of cultural objects …

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’re browsing through Kickstarter projects, skip over a whole bunch of projects that look just plain boring or like another fulfilment disaster waiting to happen, and suddenly you stop. You’ve found a game that looks amazing! The visuals speak to you, the production is lavish, and the few sentences the Kickstarter page actually spends on telling you how the game works sound like it …

Things I probably knew but had forgotten: velociraptors are small. It’s only Jurassic Park that made us think otherwise; there’d be much less drama if the most dangerous adversary was only the size of a dog. Even if it was a big dog. We went on a guided walk around the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with a palaeontologist last weekend (the photo is an Iguanodon). We finished at the Irish Elk, …

S.A.M. is back to review SiR’s new album, HEAVY. The post Bitiques: SiR – HEAVY appeared first on Sampleface.

The Sargent Vintage Hand Plane Tote Differences A quick note as to whether we should call it a handle or a tote, the term tote is relatively new in the metallic hand plane world. It’s possible it is a translation of toat, found in early literature. However the earliest example of tote meaning plane handle seems to date to the late 1600s in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises. Moxon uses the …

A bunch of years ago, I threw together Sauntering verse. Based on an individual going on a walk, it uses what3words as a source for collecting words, related to the locations the person moves through, to construct poetry connected to the person’s journey. Then, the often clunky result can be cleaned up by using ChatGPT, constructing a poem that still might not make much sense, but is readable. Because of …

Phew – after a few days of internal debate I’ve decided that I don’t need the new iPhone after all. The only reason I want one is for the better camera system, but I’d still really want an actual new camera with all the image stabilisation, autofocus and low-light performance of the modern models. I’ll put the $1700 the phone would cost and put it toward a better actual camera. …

Over on my Substack, I’ve published a lengthy appreciation and defense of Alain Delon. I hope you’ll join me there! It’s accessible to anyone but please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Supporting me on Substack helps keep Cinebeats and its archives online. Your support also allows me to write more. An excerpt from Remembering the […]

Can you feel it? Autumn has arrived, and with it, early voting for the November election. I’m in an all mail-in voting state and will get my ballot in about 3 weeks, but I want it now! Do you have your plan for voting all figured out? Good News National surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6%. …

Era-defining TV show Lost celebrates its 20th anniversary today. The Lost pilot episode aired on 22 September 2004 on ABC, and was an immediate smash hit. The show chalked up 121 episodes over six seasons, concluding in 2010. Widely sold around the world and shifting tens of millions of DVD boxed sets (becoming, alongside Battlestar Galactica and 24, a prime motivator of the "box set binge" phenomenon), Lost was arguably …

Last week I stumbled across an exhibition of photos of Jeff Buckley by Merri Cyr, including the shots she took for the cover of Grace, his only studio album released 30 years ago in 1994. A beautiful man with a beautiful voice, difficult though to approach his music with a clear perspective through the fog of the misplaced romanticism surrounding an early death - in his case of course a …

It’s difficult to argue with this article’s damning assessment of Britain’s inability to build just about anything, and the economic stagnation that has resulted: “Real wage growth has been flat for 16 years. Average weekly wages are only 0.8 percent higher today than their previous peak in 2008. Annual real wages are 6.9 percent lower for the median full-time worker today than they were in 2008. This essay argues that …

The grand old man of Marxisty critique made it to 90.Here below: a review of Jameson's magnum opus Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that the Observer let me do when I was barely more than a baby.Postmodernism is a thick, dense slab of a book. My favorite Jamesons are the slimmer efforts: A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present and Fables of Aggression: Wyndham …