Twitter’s Getting Musky, So Why Can’t We All Just Leave? by Tom Beasley

As someone who spends an awful lot of time on the internet, I’ve been forced to care far more than I would like to about the life and work of Elon Musk recently. The billionaire CEO of the Tesla electric car company is the wealthiest man in the world and an infuriating blowhard prone to shooting his mouth off about crypto-currencies, politics and all manner of other things. He’s usually easy enough to ignore, but Musk has recently agreed a deal worth more than £30bn to buy the social media website Twitter. […]

DiCaprio Meets Cannibalism As 2022 Begins… by Tom Beasley

One of the first movies I watched this year was set in 2022. In fact, a lot of you will be familiar with it and might have seen it many years ago. The film is the 1973 sci-fi thriller Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston. It has been sat on my DVD shelf for a few years now and, having seen some chatter on Twitter about its 2022 setting, I decided to pop it in and have a watch. […]

I’m Not Sure I’m Ready For Normal Yet by Tom Beasley

Normality is a funny sort of idea at the moment, right? We all want to get back there, and none of us is particularly sure how close to it we’re supposed to be right now. For some people, the government’s incredibly successful vaccine programme and the removal of the remaining social contact rules was enough. When I leave the house at the moment, many people seem to have simply called time on the whole thing, happily rubbing shoulders on public transport and in supermarkets, having consigned their face coverings to the nearest wheelie bin. It seems that for a lot of us the daily figures around new cases, hospitalisations and deaths have begun to lose all meaning. […]

Was The Line Of Duty Finale Really That Disappointing? by Tom Beasley

One of the biggest trends of the last decade or so in popular culture has been the diffusion of TV audiences. Once upon a time, millions of people would tune in to the same channel at the same time to watch Dennis Taylor pot the crucial climactic black ball of a snooker final. Even more strikingly, half of the entire population would watch an EastEnders character hand over divorce papers on Christmas Day. But, with hundreds of channels and dozens of streaming services available at the click of a button, that communal experience is now mostly gone. […]

We Might Be Locked Down, But We’ll Soon Get Back Up Again by Tom Beasley

So that was Christmas. Weird, wasn’t it? I live in the heart of what was Tier 4 and so spent the Saturday before the big day foraging in the aisles of a supermarket for whatever scrap of turkey was left on the shelves, having had my plans for a return to Coventry scuppered at the last moment. The day itself was, thankfully, a lot of fun – albeit more subdued than normal – and New Year similarly passed in an enjoyable flurry of booze, Zoom quizzes and internet-facilitated Mario Kart races. When the clock ticked over into 2021, social media filled swiftly with optimism, as if the horrors of the last 12 months would disappear the moment we hung our new calendars on the wall. […]