PicoBlog

Over the weekend, I watched Scoop, Netflix’s take on the car-crash of a TV interview given by Prince Andrew about the allegations concerning himself, Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Giuffre. The movie was entertaining enough, but, for my money, it misfired on two subjects. First, Prince Andrew himself. As played excellently by Rufus Sewell, the movie aptly captures the Prince’s vanity, frustrations and the bubble-wrap of privilege around him, giving rise to that disastrous interview.

As someone who stuck it out through seasons 8, 9, and 10, there is no doubt in my mind that Season 9 truly was the worst season of the series. And yes, it is worse than Season 2. I came to that conclusion, not because of Lucas and Elizabeth's relationship. In fact, their scenes and storyline were the only ones that some fans got enjoyment out of. For me, the reason why Season 9 is at the bottom of my ranking is because EVERY character apart from Henry, Lucas, and Elizabeth was given meaningless, boring storylines that went nowhere or were completely out of character.

A few months ago, I got deep into beauty Tiktok. It started after my daughter was born; I spent many hours holding her with one hand, and the easiest thing to do with the other hand was scroll through Tiktok on my phone. Thus, a Tiktok addiction was born. While I was already a skincare enthusiast, I was never previously a big makeup person. After watching what probably amounted to hundreds of hours of beauty videos on Tiktok and successfully getting influenced, I decided it was time to buy myself new makeup.

In 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia was published. Since then, the name of his imaginary island society has rooted itself firmly in our cultural conscience. Utopia is, by definition, a fiction. Combining the Greek οὐ (not) and τόπος (place), utopia’s literal translation is ‘no place’. Since More’s day, however, we’ve been mixing utopia and eutopia (good place), so utopia today means not only a fictional place, but a good fictional place.

Trigger, Action, Reaction. Problem, solution, moving on to the next one. We live in a time of quick feedback loops. At work, the speed of that loop increases every day - faster business results, faster project delivery, and more rapid career progression - we are always encouraged to be problem-solvers.  A sign of how pervasive that is, problem-solver became a cliché. Designers, Engineers, and Consultants added to their job titles "

As a thirteen-year-old insurgent confined within the monotonous conformity of suburban landscapes, the rhythmic rebellion of Maynard G. Krebs' bongos pulsated against the silence, while Lenny Bruce's incisive satire sliced through the still air, challenging the complacency with a sense of urgent vitality. These were the first cats who taught me to see, really see, not just look the ways others wanted. At the tail end of the '50s, when TV was still a black-and-white novelty and not everyone's perpetual third wheel at dinner, CBS rolled the dice on "

“Tonight we will see the good and evil in everyone.” — “The First Purge.” For (soon-to-be) six movies, “The Purge” franchise has raised the idea that the scariest thing isn’t a bunch of masked murderers gathering at your front door. It’s the idea that there might be murderer inside of all of us.  It’s an idea raised in several horror/thriller films, my most favorite being Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” While “The Purge” movies don’t necessarily make their point very well, (every protagonist in the movies ends up killing out of survival or self defense and not wiping out innocent people) the central idea is that every person has a murderous rage inside of them that would come out if there were no laws or police to prevent that.

When we interact with the physical world, the rules are predictable. Gravity, mass, elasticity, velocity—we build an intuitive sense for how these things work as small children, and that knowledge serves us for a lifetime. When we interact with people, the rules are much stranger. We’re confronted with a vague and shifting landscape of informal norms. Many of the rules are implicit, change depending on the context. The dynamics of social norms are wildly complicated, so let’s narrow the discussion by looking at it through a particular lens: the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit.

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapse readers! One of the many things I’m doing with this here Substack thang is to rescue favorite articles and blog posts of mine from obscurity — pieces that, for one reason or another, are no longer available on the internet in their original form (if at all), or are languishing unread on one old blog or another. Earlier this week, while my girlfriend and I were enjoying an evening cookout, Gary Puckett & The Union Gap’s brass-tastic “Lady Willpower” popped up on a playlist of 1968 hits that I’d put together.