"It’s not very hard for me to find fiction that’s ‘relatable’, that mirrors my own assumptions and experience of the world, because people like me write books and publish them. I find that fiction and I read it, often with pleasure and sometimes with admiration, but I look for books of all kinds that are not ‘relatable’ to me, books that are windows more than mirrors. If fiction has a moral purpose – it doesn’t have to have a moral purpose – it’s in letting us see our shared world from places other than our own and through eyes other than our own, giving us versions of human experience and history and geography that are not at all ‘relatable.’"

Great, technical article about building music hardware. Empress really aren't messing around: Blackfin chips, smart board design and circuit architecture, and TDD for embedded code all in the mix. It's great that ZOIA is such a success for them.

"If you look carefully at that montage in The Parallax View — the “screen test” where they show Warren Beatty a montage of images with titles like MOTHER, LOVE, ENEMY, GOD, HOME to see if he’s got what it takes to be an all-star psychopath assassin — you’re going to find an image of me, cuddling naked with an up-and-coming-soon-to-be-B-list TV star named Ben Murphy."

And so begins a heck of a flow of prose, in HILOWBROW's excellent round-up of 70s thrillers. The whole piece just keeps accelerating to its inevitable conclusion. "It only looks like a conspiracy if you're a detective".

Excellent. Also contains excellent 'Hereditary' burn.

"We’re more willing to grant intelligence to things that we’ve built ourselves than to non-human species, even though it’s increasingly obvious that primates, cephalopods and trees have forms of intelligence that we should maybe be listening to. So how do we take this sudden decentring of the human with regard to AI? It’s like a Copernican moment when suddenly we have to acknowledge there are other forms of intelligence present. And then suddenly go, “Oh shit, there have been incredible amounts of intelligence here all along, and we’ve completely ignored them." This is very good.

Craig Mod on his long walk; his descriptions of the nature of all-encompassing boredom remind me of hiking the Pembrokeshire coastal path, alone, and how your thoughts change as you slip into walking as your primary focus.

Marvellous work from Yann Seznec: impractical, deeply personal musical instruments, beautifully explained.