Minutes to Midnight

I just came back from an extended stay in Italy. My dad was in hospital, but while I initially underestimated the problem, this time it turned serious. As his health was quickly deteriorating, I got on the first flight and rushed to see him. For the last four decades, I have been convinced he would go with a heart attack, because that is our weakness: it runs in the family line. Fate had it differently. While everybody scrambled to hear a different explanation every day from doctors, I remained…

A few weeks ago I wrote about RSS, talking about Terry Godier’s posts and arguing about the need for a different experience with reading feeds. My initial thought was that his new RSS client, Current, was incapable of doing what Fraidycat does — show the original website instead of a sanitised read mode that strips out any creativity. I was wrong. I purchased Current last week, and it’s been a great journey so far. Not entirely bug-free, but incredibly refreshing and s...

As a quintessential Cold War child, still fixated on it, I periodically revisit films and documentaries about its most prickly moments. For years, I’ve observed, and occasionally joined, debates surrounding the two key films that managed to capture the 1980s collective paranoia: nuclear annihilation. The first, in 1983, was the American The Day After. A year later, the British Threads emerged. The debate has historically crystallised on a rigid duality in interpreting t...

Noticing how less meaningful I've been finding my RSS reading habit, I went on the lookout for possible reasons. First, I really dislike the idea of reducing a sizeable part of my internet usage to a standardised homogenous experience. Imagine going to a bookshop and see all the books printed with the same style, size, type of paper, colours, typeface. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Well, why are we accepting it with websites and blogs via RSS? I don’t mind reducing n...