• Friday, 1 Aug 2025 8:00 pm

  I need jungle I'm afraid

  Here is a story about how I got into jungle music.

  It started in January 2024. University Challenge was back from the Christmas break and Sheffield was up against Aberdeen, who fielded the now-famous question:

  “What name is given to the genre of dance music that developed in the UK in the early 1990s out of the rave scene and reggae soundsystem culture, associated with acts such as A Guy Called Gerald and Goldie?”

  Aberdeen pauses. The captain looks back and forth. She guesses: “Drum & bass?”

  Amol Rajan, without looking up: “I can’t accept drum & bass; we need jungle, I’m afraid.”

  (As a side note slash brag: I did actually get that one at the time.)

  Anyway, the internet went wild with jungle remixes of Rajan saying, “we need jungle, I’m afraid”, e.g:

  These remixes sounded vaguely familiar to me. Other than an experimental stab at Venetian Snares in uni, I’ve never been particularly into drum & bass.

  What was resonating with me?

  The answer emerged only months later, when I found Klang’s Ethnography of Jungle and DnB in 90s/00s Video Games. A subset of very Japanese early-3d video games on the Nintendo 64 (and Playstation, but we didn’t have one of those) soundtracked my childhood. I’ll never forget the fake strings of Super Mario 64’s “Castle Theme”, nor the tinkling beads of Ocarina of Time’s torches, nor, it turns out, the hyperspeed snares of Bomberman Hero’s “redial”.

  The Ethnography sent me down a rabbit hole of old video games we rented from Blockbuster once or twice but whose soundtracks have stuck with me, like Wave Racer 64 or F1 Pole Position or the better parts of Phantom Crash:

  In due time, YouTube noticed that I was listening to a bunch of jungle music all of a sudden and spun up its Charles has a new obsession algorithm and started serving me all sorts of jungle-adjacent Content, including this live drum cover of “redial” from Bomberman Hero:

  And, to bring us full circle, this drum cover of Venjent’s original “we need jungle I’m afraid”:

  So am I into jungle music? I think maybe I’m more into being 9 years old in the final years of the 20th century. But that wouldn’t have been a very good opening line.

  Music

• ---

  Friday, 25 Jul 2025 5:30 pm

  Careless People

  by Sarah Wynn-Williams

  Published 2025 400 pages

  Read this after everyone made a lot of noise about it earlier in the year. I don’t know what I expected; pretty much everything in the book confirms exactly what I thought things were like at Facebook. They’re all weirdos and they’re all so self-absorbed they hardly notice when they enable all sorts of awful things elsewhere in the world. No second-order thinking but it’s okay because they’re all fabulously wealthy.

  I was swept up a little bit during the first third. I want to hustle in the name of my ideals so bad. But maybe that’s just me being a Man In Tech, or maybe just wanting to be back in my twenties and having made different decisions, which who doesn’t want that.

  The last quarter or so felt muddy, almost like Wynn-Williams had to shoehorn in all of the horrible global politics that Facebook did during Wynn-Williams's tenure. And they did a lot of horrible global politics: cooperating on election interference (although: no mention of Cambridge Analytica), building tools for spying in China, the Rohingya genocide (a single chapter called "Myanmar").

  The whole thing makes me glad I’m no longer on Facebook; anyway off to WhatsApp to tell all my family that I’ve posted another book review

• ---

  Tuesday, 22 Jul 2025 6:36 pm

  Skittles

  There’s a YouTube series called “Surrounded” where a person who is somewhat famous for being on one side of an issue is sat down with 20 “regular” people on the other side of the issue, and the 20 people take turns to “debate” the issue with the one person.

  It goes viral every couple of months when one of the “regular” people says something really horrible and people on both sides start sharing clips and commentary on social media. Then half of social media goes, “One guy DESTOYS 20 guys,” and the other half goes “20 guys OBLIETRATS one guy”.

  It's happened again, but I’m not linking to any of this because it’s the equivalent of political Skittles.

  Skittles are little balls of sugar which look like food, and are very tasty like food, and are sometimes sold in places where food is sold, but which are definitely not food. Ik heb een serieus probleem with Skittles. They hijack my biology into eating a whole bag at a time and then 45 minutes later I feel as though I haven’t slept in 3 days and my mouth is bleeding.

  There’s a lot of Skittles on the Internet these days. Not the candy, but: Skittlesish content, ready to be devoured by the Share Size bagful. People put these Skittles on the Internet because if you can jack into my biology via my phone or my computer, you can get me to do pretty much whatever you want.

  E.g. I only watched maybe 15 seconds of the most recent “Surrounded” video and I’ve spent all morning catastrophising about what I would do if someone told me without shame that they were a fascist. They got me!

  And so: there are patently fake conversations on r/AmIOverreacting, and there is scripted ragebait on TikTok, and there are videos like “Surrounded” on YouTube, and there is second- and third-order commentary available in your podcatcher (????) of choice — and all of these are interlaced with advertisements and tracking scripts for cohorting & AI pattern-matching to determine what Skittles & advertisements to serve me next.

  The skill I most need to practice in 2025 is how to avoid engaging. I have to keep the Skittles out of the house.

  Internet Skittles

• ---

  Saturday, 19 Jul 2025 11:33 am

  Poem/1

  I like Matt Webb. I like the way he thinks. I like his framing of AI consciousness not as an empirical measure but as a practical distinction. He makes abstract thinking accessible, which is very helpful for a smoothbrain like me.

  But I'm not a fan of his AI clock.

  

  Every hour it pulls and displays a new ChatGPT-3.5-generated poem, featuring somewhere the current time, from a central server. The poetry format makes it a poor clock: when I want to know the time, I don't want to have to parse a slant-rhyming couplet first.

  That's ok, though. Timepieces do tend to blur the line between information and art. But ChatGPT-3.5 generates undeniably bad art.

  Colors mingle, brush takes flight
  Three fifty-seven, a palette of light.

  This doesn't mean anything; I'd almost rather that it read "3:57 - painting" instead. Matt describes these poems as "profound" and "weirdly motivational". I'd describe them as "a YouTube short titled The Most Inspiring PEople in The world 2025". They have exactly the same semantically-bankrupt energy as Shrimp Jesus.

  If I'm honest, I think that Matt probably knows that the poems aren't very good. But when he first showed it off on Twitter and LinkedIn in 2023 it got a bunch of buzz because it was a quirky, digestible idea in a space that people didn't really understand, and that makes easy fodder to keep Ars Technica or Fast Company chugging along. But coverage isn't validation, and between March '23 and now we've all realised that AI's much worse at generating Good Art than it is at generating Subtle Bugs in Legacy Codebases.

  I'd feel worse about being this negative if this was a clear labour of love. If it uplifted people or promoted connection or kindness between folks. But I just can't find the humanity in this. Why couldn't this have been a funny, if artistically moribund, widget on interconnected.org, instead of something you have to pay £129 for?

  AI Tech

• ---

  Thursday, 17 Jul 2025 9:17 am

  Maurice and Maralyn

  by Sophie Elmhirst

  Published 2024 254 pages

  

  A charming, propulsive read, in spite of one of its protagonists. Maurice and Maralyn is the story of an English couple shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific during a circumnavigation of the globe by sailboat in the 1970s; their 118 days at sea and subsequent rescue was the topic of much contemporary media frenzy. They even published a firsthand account!

  What Elmhirst's Maurice and Maralyn contributes to the narrative is the context surrounding their trip: Maurice is curmudgeonly and kind of mean; Maralyn is engaged and vivacious and humble. It is mostly thanks to Maralyn that they make it out alive. They struggle with fame, and when the attention dies down they retreat to the banal life they were originally trying to escape.

  They’re mostly unchanged by their harrowing experience at sea, which I think is testament to quite how sturdy British folks were in the aftermath of the war. While adrift, Maurice does vow to change his ways — but later, when they build a new boat and return to sea with a crew and an eye to complete the original voyage, he turns out to be such a drag that one of the crew bails before they've reached their destination.

  Maralyn dies in 2002, and Maurice spends the last decade of his life alone and adrift again (do you see what I did there), unable to live without Maralyn but unable to die due to his stout Derbyshire constitution. He writes a memoir, more for himself than for anyone else. He gives a video interview to a shipwreck documentarian: he speaks movingly about the experience, about being alone with the wildlife in the middle of the sea. About the calls of the whales at night. And at one point he admits that if he knew he would be picked up, he’d do it again.

  Maurice died in 2017 and had his ashes scattered with Maralyn's in the New Forest.

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