• Monday, 2 Jun 2025 5:45 pm

  Dia browser

  The Browser Company of New York is back at it. Here is a link to a post titled "Letter to Arc members 2025" with an update on the abandoned Arc browser and and update on the work they've been doing on the new "Dia browser", which just appears to be Chrome but where you’ve set your homepage to chatgpt.com.

  (What the hell is an “Arc member” by the way? It’s a browser.)

  And here is a link to the Dia browser website, with a (very masturbatory) intro video which makes it seem like it’s just Apple Intelligence, except for instead of the interface being Siri, the interface is the browser search bar.

  

  I cannot understate how little faith I have in this project.

  Further reading: Here is a link to Tom MacWright with the exact same take, and here is a link to my previous opinions about Arc & why I didn't use it back then, which maybe means that I'm just a Hater.

  Browser Web

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  Monday, 2 Jun 2025 1:35 pm

  Some art I like

  The internet introduced me to a couple of new artists last week, whose snapshots of regular life resonate with me.

  Hasui Kawase (via Jason Kottke) was a woodblock engraver who produced hundreds of prints through the Taisho and Showa eras depicting landscapes in vivid colour and detail. Apparently he was a big influence on Miyazaki, which I guess endears him automatically to me as a white guy approaching middle age.

  

  

  

  Elin Danielson-Gambogi was a Finnish artist of about the same period, actually, who produced realist portraits of life and work in Finland and Italy. Her paintings are expressive without being dramatic, which is exactly how I like my art.

  

  

  Art

• ---

  Friday, 30 May 2025 11:34 pm

  Slam of the North

  Out at Slam in the North (I think that’s what it was called) tonight in Durham at the Assembly Rooms. This was I think my first time going to a... poetry slam? Spoken word competition?

  Fifteen people or so got up and read a poem of theirs, and then there was an interlude and they came back and read a second poem each, but in reverse order. Then a panel of three judges came up with scores and two of the universities won: Durham and Sheffield.

  During the interval the three judges did some poetry. Two of the judges were so-so, and the third judge, who was from Newcastle, was much better. Is it okay to say that some poetry is so-so and that some is much better? The only way I know to talk about poetry criticism is to say that one's own is rubbish.

  I felt a little bit out of place when we first arrived — most of the competitors were young women and I’m just some middle class white guy — but the space was welcoming and there was a sort of excited tension amongst the readers that drew me in. I even snapped my fingers at one point.

  I’m glad that I went, and I want to go to another. Two hours of folks trying to translate their Personal Experience into language with as little filter as possible is something that I get vanishingly little of these days — but which I think is fundamental to appreciating life among people.

  Shows

• ---

  Thursday, 22 May 2025 5:33 pm

  Andor, season 2 (2025)

  

  Verdict: good television. Comforts the afflicted etc. But I don’t have a lot more to say about season 2 that hasn’t been said better elsewhere. I agree with Schaffrillas Productions that the season feels like 4 seasons of television smushed into one; luckily, given the production schedule, they avoided making things feel too rushed.

  I couldn’t decide whether I felt that the season was a bit too much of a commentary on current events, especially in the United States: draconian immigration policies, the undermining of democratic systems, political infighting among the “good guys”, permission of massacre for the purposes of mining “raw earth” I mean foliated kalkite.

  But fascism is fascism, whether it’s in 2025 or 1939, or presumably in 2060 or a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Yes it’s a commentary on today, but it retains enough of the essential qualities of fascism (and resistance thereto) that it’ll still be a worthwhile watch in better times.

  When I was finished, I went back and watched Rogue One (2016) again (like pretty much everyone else), and found it… middling. Chronologically it’s obviously a sequel to the TV programme, but thematically it feels like a prequel: the message of resistance and hope is present but undeveloped. Then I re-watched the beginning of A New Hope (1977), which by comparison feels nearly totally flippant. It was a different time.

  In my review of season 1 I called out the production design as something I particularly liked. Well guess what that’s because it’s the work of Luke Hull, who also did production design on Chernobyl (2019), where I also called out the fantastic production design. I think that I am a big fan of the work of Luke Hull.

  Andor, season 2 |

  TV

• ---

  Monday, 12 May 2025 9:22 pm

  Postwar

  by Tony Judt

  Published 2005 878 pages

  

  You know, for a nearly 900-page book covering the history of Europe from 1945 to the new millennium (or thereabouts), Postwar is a remarkably easy read. A long read, for sure — but an eminently manageable one. If anything, its straightforward telling-of-events narrative very nearly spoils it; Judt leaves it a little bit too much up to the reader to connect the dots.

  Maybe I'm just a idiot. Maybe the average reader of a 900-page history of a continent should be up to the task of finding the common thread that weaves that history together.

  Luckily Judt puts it right at the end of the book:

  All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe's competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans' collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed. Europe's barbarous recent history, the dark 'other' against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans. Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives.

  If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europea out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past.

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