Good afternoon lovely email friends. How are you? I love what you’ve done with the place. I think this is the week in the year for which it’s hardest to dress. The optimum outfit is exactly between one and two layers, and nobody makes a layer and a half. So it’s a hoodie-on hoodie-off kind of week. On, off, on, off. Anyway, nearly the weekend!
🔪 Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace Is a Pitch-Perfect Horror Parody: Halloween is the perfect time, if you haven’t already, to discover Darkplace. If you know it, it’s time to watch it again. While you can (and should) watch it any time of year, the spooky season is an ideal time for your first viewing. But the show has plenty more targets besides horror. [thanks, MS!].
🎹 Writing “Eleanor Rigby” by Paul McCartney: I thought I should do right by a struggling artist, so here is Mr McCartney on how one of the Beatles’ greatest songs came to be. I don’t know about you, but I find I have to make a conscious effort to listen to Beatles’ songs. Their ubiquity means I never get to missing them, but my memory of their majesty fades. So if nothing else, here’s a good reason to make a point of listening to this one.
🛢 The Largest Oil and Gas Companies in the World: Infographic time. Despite the headwinds facing the oil and gas industry, oil still makes up the largest share of the global energy mix, fuelled by the giant corporations that make up Big Oil. And my my, that one in the middle really is big.
👋 It’s Quitting Season: It’s been a brutal few years. But we’ve gritted through. We’ve spent time languishing. We’ve had one giant national burnout. And now, finally, we’re quitting. This video argues we’re not quitting because we’re weak. We’re quitting because we’re smart.
⏰ How One Guy In California Keeps The World’s Computers Running On The Right Time Zone: A glance into the esoteric world of the tight-knit time zone data maintenance community who quietly keep the world’s computers from avoiding DST-related-meltdowns. See also: The Problem with Time & Timezones.
🥵 The climate coloniser mentality: Musk, Bezos, and Gates believe the natural world can be bent to accommodate humanity’s existing behaviour—and they are obsessed with doing the bending.
🔡 Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish and the allure of lowercase letters: If there’s a consensus explanation for why our playlists and pop charts now look as typographically gonzo as our messiest group texts, it’s generational: today’s stars grew up expressing their multitudes by tweaking the keystrokes in their text messages, social media posts and more. See also: What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation.
🙊 People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much: Breaking up social-media companies is one way to fix them. This article argues that shutting their users up is a better one.
🥩 The future of cultured and plant-based meat: The headline of this article in the LA Times is “Prepare yourself for an avalanche of fake meat”, presumably reminiscent of that infamous meat avalanche of Nineteen Dickety Three. But in spite of the shock-and-awe reporting, the US isn’t far off setting down the regulatory framework for cultured meat, and from there on it’ll appear in restaurants all over.