Tag Archives: technology

The camera hole

Ten huge oafs lumbering about a squeaky school gym, bouncing and hurling a reinforced beachball at each other. They have to put the ball in a net, and that’s made nice and easy by the huge board they can deflect it off, like that motorbike racing where they lean right over, but with stablilisers. To win, you need to be less shit than the other team just once in 48 minutes, which is why every game seems to finish about 190-188.

No, basketball is not for me, but I accept it’s for some people. And two legends of the game were recently linked across time by monumental sporting moments. Michael Jordan won the 1998 NBA Finals with the last shot of the game, as the astonishment of a Salt Lake City Crowd was immortalised in the background of a famous photograph. 

And last year, LeBron James broke the all-time NBA scoring record, and the background again shows a wide-eyed crowd basking in the joy of history in the making. Not that they saw any of it. The second of these two now-classic pictures shows almost every fan beside the court holding a smartphone in front of their face so that they can one day hear a young child say “But Grandad, why didn’t you just watch the fucking game?”

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The Luddite

Last year I disappointed someone in bed.

Not a unique occurrence in my life; the soft hand on the shoulder, the distracted sympathy. But this was a whole new breed of failure. This time, I’d shared a password. Bed’s not the place it used to be.

This simple act had outed me as The Luddite. The old geezer who stares in bewilderment at the new-fangled. Who pines for the wistful days when this was all fields. Who had chosen, in 2023, to commit the most horrific crime: not keeping his online security tighter than a camel’s arse in a sandstorm.

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Aye aye, AI

Fucking Elon Musk. Haunting the sidelines of every argument like a sullen overgrown teenager who recently lost his battle with leukemia, Musk’s interventions are about as welcome as an invite to the Christmas staff party at Yasser Arafat International Airport.

So when he laid out his shambolic, beach-postcard level opinions on artificial intelligence in a discomfiting interview with fanboy Rishi Sunak the other week, imagine my glee when his views matched mine. AI needs to be carefully regulated, and the world should agree to proceed with a sensible degree of collaboration, because none of us wants to be chased up a tree by a robot maid who’s decided your pants need washing, right now, whether you take them off or not.

I’m happy to say that normality has now resumed. Perhaps in part because of the discombobulation of finding myself on the same side of an argument as a man so creepy he makes Charlie Sheen look like Charlie Brown, I’ve had a revelation and completely changed my views on AI.

Fuck it, let’s go all in.

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Aeroplane mode

My uncle bought me a computer for my 7th birthday: an Acorn Electron, a remarkable piece of kit. If not state of the art then certainly the most incredible machine seen in Somerset since old Bill Townsend brought that new fangled sheep dipper back from the Bath & West Show and promptly got drowned for witchcraft.

Having my first computer doomed any thoughts of playing outside for the rest of the year, so I have some sympathy with parents who bemoan their offspring glued to screens day and night. We all love our electronics. And they allow us to stay interconnected, always in touch, always online – even when we don’t want to be, because if you think in future you’ll be allowed to unplug and get off the grid, you’d bloody well better think again.

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The Cheshire Cheese and the Boot

Some things ignite rage in the soul. The sight of that fucking oaf Johnson at a podium outside number 10. Secretly filmed footage of care home staff abusing residents. Easy Listening covers of proper rock tunes. Farage.

But the world’s not all Jose Mourinho; there’s joy aplenty if you’re willing to peek from behind the sofa. The sight of someone you don’t know doubled over laughing – how bizarrely infectious is that? A good film in a quiet cinema while the world outside goes all to bloody hell. Dogs. Snow. Dogs in snow.

And some things can be a bit of each, like Ben Stokes briefly papering over not so much cracks as canyons in England’s batting order. It’s 2019 though. Everything must be one or the other, good or bad, no grey areas. Ambiguity has been killed by the internet and if you’re on the fence about something you’re Neville Chamberlain reincarnated. You there: decide.

So what the fuck am I supposed to do about table service at Wetherspoons?

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Death by Playmobil

I passed my driving test 23 years ago. I started driving so long ago, Arsene Wenger was in charge of a Japanese team with a name like an Austrian mountain troll and Henri Paul was still alive. I miss Henri. We all do.

I’m neither good at driving nor bad at it; I’ve never won a race and I’ve never knocked two people off a tandem. Generally speaking I can sit behind the wheel of a car and know, with a reasonable degree of confidence, how to make it move forwards, backwards and side to side. But I do have one question.

What the fuck is the handbrake doing down there?

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Maximum AI

Well that’s it then. It’s all over.

Plato. Lincoln. Einstein. Parks. Tendulkar. Churchill and Pryor. Schindler. Tubman. Wilberforce, Hendrix and Peel. Johnson and Jonson. Fleming. Pankhurst. Dec.

These names and so many more light up the sky like Sana’a at dusk. The history of humanity is a tale of triumph against the odds. But every good thing must come to an end, and that end is upon us.

Someone has actually built a T-800.

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Here’s looking at me, kid

Sometime in the late 70s I remember watching Alien at a West End cinema. A space crew receives a distress call, and as they sit down to eat their no doubt well-earned grub they’re unexpectedly joined by a testy little monster bursting out of John Hurt’s chest.

The shit really rains down when the Facehuggers show up. Prising them off someone’s face just delays the inevitable and the only sensible solution, as Ripley so eloquently put it, was to the nuke the shit out of planet LV-426, just to be sure, and by Alien version 2, 4 or 81 they did. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s ‘perfect creation’ was lost.

Only it wasn’t, at least not to Earth. Facehuggers are everywhere. Digital Facehuggers.

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A hole to China

It was a rather hot summer’s morning at about 10am. I’d been up since 6am because I work for myself and my boss is a total prick.

My friend came to see me, said he had the day off. Now, you know that friend you have that, when they say they have the day off, you know you’re about to spend all day down the pub? Well, this is my friend like that. Before I could even argue he threw me my coat, and as this was a summer’s day, this confirmed my suspicions that we would be in the pub all day and most of the night.

It was one of those days where work didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, really.

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