The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy – enjoyable and informative memoir by an Australian GP, from the time of his diagnosis with multiple myeloma (bone marrow cancer) through treatment to full remission. He's a writer as well as a GP - of fiction, drama and poetry, not only medical reminiscences - so this is a pleasure to read: full of imagery and perception. There's a wry sense of humour throughout, which he seems to be blessed to share with his wife and constant companion, and which introduces an ironic detachment into what might otherwise have been either bleak or merely clinical.
Everything Everywhere All At Once – Oscar-winning fantasy film. I liked it in the end (heartwarming and sentimental in the final act, and I’m a sucker for that), but found it very confusing to begin with because of the constant switching of genres. (American immigrant drama? high concept science fiction? techno-thriller? kung fu movie? knockabout comedy?) Of course that’s part of the point; the clue's in the title. And Michelle Yeoh is great, of course, continually switching between different versions of her character.
Elizabeth is Missing – BBC drama, and a very sympathetic and empathetic portrayal of dementia with the late Glenda Jackson in one of her last roles, troubled and disturbed by the apparent disappearance of her friend Elizabeth, which – as we gradually realise – has triggered recollections of the mysterious disappearance of her sister many years ago, when they were both young. The early scenes are especially good, putting you firmly on her side when other people are ignoring her concerns and treating her like an idiot, but so equally are the later scenes as we become aware of the all-too-real failings in her memory and cognitive powers. The payoff finds her both vindicated and culpable: a sweet-sour ending, which seems fitting.
Howl’s Moving Castle – 2004 Studio Ghibli film, based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones. The combination of Japanese animation (from Hayao Miyazaki) and Welsh story produces something quite different from the usual American studio output: an old woman as main character (actually, she's a young woman under an enchantment, but she behaves like an old woman), a young and good-looking wizard, and a powerful anti-war sentiment, with vivid sequences of planes raining down bombs on defenceless cities below – recollections from Miyazaki's own childhood. Perhaps not his greatest film (common opinion accords that honour to My Neighbour Totoro), but it intrigued and touched me, which I suspect is just what Miyazaki intended.
Vera – the final season for everyone's favourite Newcastle detective, and a wonderful send-off too with a pair of quality episodes. Very satisfying it was to see Vera, now retired (instead of taking a promotion into desk-bound seniority) walking her dog along the causeway to Holy Island, and in the follow-up documentary to see Brenda Blethyn as herself: to be reminded of just how different she is from Vera in real life and therefore what a good actor she is.
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool – moving portrayal of the real-life romance between the Oscar-winning actor Gloria Grahame and a much younger lad from Liverpool. The story's tensions arise around their age difference, Grahame's scandalous past, and her reluctance to confide to her lover that her cancer has returned and that she is dying. Great performances by Annette Benning and Jamie Bell are what give this film its power.
Lost Echo – interesting but (for me) finally unsatisfying adventure game (despite a good review), in which a scientist-inventor hunts for his girlfriend who has mysteriously gone missing – at least, as he remembers it, because no one else has any recollection of her having existed at all. The usual conspiracy tropes are deployed, though here mixed in with elements of time travel and manufactured memory. It all adds up to a world in which reality is shifting and nothing is secure – which is fair enough, but it does mean the end doesn't provide any kind of closure or conclusion, and I do like stories with an ending: a reason to finish at that point rather than somewhere else.
Resonance – another interesting but (for me) unsatisfying adventure game (again, despite a good review), my difficulties with this being mainly due to the complex control system. There are four controllable characters, and the inventory of each contains memories (both short-term and long-term) as well as objects, which provides just too many different ways one might try to achieve a desired result, even if you know what you're supposed to do. Eventually I gave up and followed a walkthrough, and I wasn't impressed by the story (something about a newly-discovered source of energy which could also be used as a weapon); I didn't really care about the characters or what happened to their world, and when one of them was revealed to be evil and to have been lying all along (how can this happen in a player character, with whom you're supposed to be building up empathy?) I lost patience. There are better games out there.
Operencia – turn-based role-playing game, essentially an old school dungeon crawler but with gorgeous graphics, good voice acting, and a decent story with a middle-European feel (the characters have names like Jóska, pronounced Yoshka) rather than the usual Dungeons and Dragons vibe (basically Americanised Tolkien). I enjoyed this very much, though I did need to go back a couple of chapters at one point (I'd chosen the wrong skills for my characters so they were too weak to overcome the increasingly lethal monsters). What made me abandon it in the end was a particularly nasty trap – a field of moving spikes – which I just didn't have the speed of hand-eye coordination to pass. A pity; I liked the character I created (an oriental hunter called Bao Zhai), and I did want to follow the story through to its conclusion.
Astrid: Murder in Paris – I listed this excellent French TV detective show in a post last year, but I found the latest season (the fourth) a bit disappointing; perhaps the show has passed its peak. We've already learned about the things which terrify Astrid and how she copes with them, and we know about Raphaëlle's chaotic personal life and how she tries to keep Astrid safe so that she can do her crime-solving autistic savant thing, so there's not the same pleasure of discovery. So I went back to Season 1 to enjoy the show from the start.
The Conversation – 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film, with Gene Hackman as a top-ranking surveillance engineer, tasked with covertly recording the conversation between a woman and a man in a city square. I'd been vaguely aware of this film, especially from the point of view of sound design, and I was delighted to discover how well it still works as a slow-burning thriller. The classic features of 1970s cinema – a sense of alienation and a snail-like pace – fit perfectly with the story and with Hackman's isolated, work-focused character. The soundscape, on which his professional intensity encourages you to concentrate, is truly haunting, particularly the conversation itself, which you hear repeatedly until you know it almost as well as Hackman's character does, and still there is something in it which you hear shockingly for the first time towards the end of the film. A true classic.
The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré – audio book read by Michael Jayston, who played Peter Guillam in the BBC TV dramas, and who does a creditable impression of Alec Guiness when speaking as George Smiley, which is what one wants and expects. The story flicks between London, where Smiley is struggling to revive the reputation of the Circus after its betrayal by double-agent Bill Haydon (the Mole), and the Far East (Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia), where dissolute aristocractic journalist Jerry Westerby (the Hourable Schoolboy of the title) is despatched as part of Smiley's plan to ensnare a mole within Red China. Sad and unhappy, like most of Le Carré's novels, but also powerful and vivid in an unpleasant way, dripping with tawdry 1970s atmosphere and a sense of the British Empire in its final decline.
Friday, 9 May 2025
Tuesday, 6 May 2025
Old Skies: review
Wadjet Eye have done it again: proved that it's possible to create a really great 2D point-and-click adventure game, if you have a cracking story, characterful dialogue writing and voice acting that is nothing short of stellar.
I've been waiting to play this game for several years, ever since I saw a video of creator Dave Gilbert talking at AdventureX 2019 about an experimental game he'd produced for a jam. He showed a clip of it, in which a time traveller named Fia - some kind of agent in pursuit of a fugitive - lands in a city street and contacts her remote handler, Nozzo. "What's your status?" he asks. "I've got a splitting headache," she replies. "Didn't the Brass say this was a painless procedure?" She then discovers that her kit bag is missing. "Oh. Um. That's bad," he says. "Yes, Nozzo. That's bad," Fia replies with feeling. "How d'you expect me to find Monty without the tracker?" That was the extent of the clip, just 40 seconds long (from 13:55 to 14:35), but it sold it to me. I liked Fia's resolute but slightly stroppy attitude and her collegially affectionate relationship with Nozzo, and I wanted to see more of her and her adventures. So here she is at last in a full-length game, once again voiced by Sally Beaumont who brought her so vividly to life from a short sketchy script for the game jam.
Fia works for an organisation called ChronoZen, which sends rich clients on short trips into the past as a sort of temporal tourism. Playing as Fia, your job - with Nozzo's support - is to give them the experience they want (things they want to see, people they want to meet, even - within strict limits - things they want to change), while making sure that no harm comes to them or to the timeline. Of course, this being an adventure game, the missions are never as simple as they sound. In one, the client runs off by himself and Fia has to track him down and find out what he is trying to do, because he clearly has an agenda other than the one he declared to ChronoZen. In another, the person the client has longed to meet, because he was a role model for her, turns out to be a protection-money collector for one of New York’s gangs, so that Fia has her work cut out to prevent them both from being killed.
It's when Fia gets killed for the first time that you find out about the Emergency Rewind Protocol: if she dies, Nozzo can rewind time by a few seconds, or a few minutes, to give her another chance. This is no pain-free re-spawning, though, as in many an RPG; each time she's revived, Fia winces with agony, and she retains full memory of how she died. Here's where the game really shows its quality: it would have been so easy to reuse the same dialogue each time, but instead Fia's rising irritation with the repeating events and her failure to escape the death loop is reflected in her dialogue options. She starts to anticipate what her antagonist will say, or comes out with something like "Let's skip ahead to the part where you hit me." Not only does this cushion the player against getting bored or irritated, her use of irony to defuse and cope with adversity is expressive of Fia's character. It doesn't prevent her from being killed again, though. ("You know, I'm really fed up with getting shot in the head.")
The puzzles which advance the story are mostly solved through dialogue choices or through use of information gathered from other characters, the environment, or the biographical database to which Fia has access. No implausibly large inventories here; once again, the dependence on conversation, setting and history works to build a rich sense of the characters and the worlds they inhabit. Even when you get stuck on a puzzle, you can have Fia ask Nozzo for advice; he effectively acts as a built-in hint system, but one that deepens immersion in the game rather than breaking it, because giving helpful advice is what his character does, and it never feels like cheating to ask him for help.
As with Wadget Eye’s previous hit Unavowed, the game is divided into chapters, each of which represents a discrete mission with its own story arc. But again as with Unavowed, there is a larger story arc, which emerges gradually over the individual chapters. There are hints about this larger story right from the beginning. Fia, like all ChronoZen agents, is insulated from chrono-shifts, changes to the timeline; when historical reality is changed, through accident or design, she remains unchanged, with memory of the previous reality, and all previous realities. This means that she avoids becoming attached to things which may suddenly disappear. She doesn't have a favourite restaurant or favourite place; they change too much. For the same reason, as we learn during the course of her missions, she doesn't follow sport and knows nothing about art. In an early scene, she tries to pick up a man at a bar, and just as the conversation is starting to go well, there;s a chrono-shift and his disappears from existence. And what does she do, with an unexpectedly free evening? She goes into work, to see if there are any late clients requiring escorting. No matter how good at her job she is, no matter how dedicated, this is shaping up to be a life of personal isolation and non-commitment.
Without being heavy or overly serious - and there are some very funny moments in this game - Old Skies packs an emotional punch, prompting thoughts about meaning and purpose and the nature of a life well-lived. The questions confronting Fia are an amplification of the questions which confront every one of us, once we become aware of the inescapable change and impermanence of things. How can one leave one's mark on the world if everything is prone to erasure from existence? What. if anything, is it worth caring about, if it can be taken away from one in an instant? Does what we do really matter?
Having played the game through to its thrilling conclusion, I'm not sure whether Fia's story has a happy ending or a sad ending. Perhaps that doesn't matter. I'm very glad to have known her and gone through it all with her. And now it's over, I'm feeling bereft and lost. So sorry, Dave, but for me the countdown starts now. I'm waiting for your next hit game!
Sunday, 4 May 2025
Cuttings: April 2025
Social media is awash with ‘heteropessimism’. Do young women really think so poorly of men? – article by Rachel Connolly in The Guardian. "As a millennial woman with a phone, I have felt bombarded by social media content expressing [heteropessimist] sentiment for a while, and it seems to be reaching a crescendo. In a recent thoughtful piece for the New York Times, Marie Solis analysed the growing popularity of heteropessimist declarations from relatively young women since 2019, when the term was coined, through to a fresh spike coinciding with Trump’s second election win. 'In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps,' she wrote, along with female celebrities declaring vows of celibacy or identifying as 'self-partnered' (the state of being happy and fulfilled alone)... I have found the strident 'boysober' and 'self-partnered' iterations of this trend cheering. The shrugging passivity of heteropessimism always struck me as mystifying. What do women, in the 2020s, need relationships with men for?... In the absence of a mass movement of women actually doing this, though, I’m not convinced that heterosexual relationships really are so irredeemably unsatisfying. Online communication is inherently performative. It is not a metric of how people truly feel, but more what they think they will be rewarded for saying. Heteropessimism mirrors other forms of progressive discourse over the past decade, which have placed a high premium on declaring self-awareness about participating in oppressive systems – capitalism, say – and describing their problematic elements without necessarily doing anything about them."
My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois? – article by Daniel Lavelle in The Guardian. "I have been obsessed with and confused by social class all my life. Both of my grandparents grew up in Liverpool in the 1930s in traditionally working-class households. They were clever and conscientious and managed to earn scholarships to university, eventually becoming teachers. My parents have university degrees and own property; one of them is now a judge. To most people, all these things place me squarely and categorically in the middle class. But I was in special educational schools from the age of nine, spent part of my childhood in care, left education altogether at 14 and collected the dole until getting my first job in a cotton mill. All these things make me a dyed-in-the-wool prole. And yet I have two degrees, I have written two books and I freelance for the Guardian – you can’t get more insufferably bourgeois than that. At the same time, I am pushing 40 and living with my mum because I can’t afford to rent anything larger than a broom cupboard, so I feel as though I am in class limbo – fitting in with everyone and no one at the same time.... In 2011, the BBC ... teamed up with the sociologist Prof Mike Savage and a group of his colleagues at the London School of Economics to try to bring the idea of class into the 21st century [proposing] seven classes: the elite, the established middle class, the technical middle class, new affluent workers, the traditional working class, emergent service workers and the precariat. I fed the BBC’s online survey my details, including salary, housing situation and interests. My result: precariat. The lowest on the totem pole. Then I did the test again. This time, I fessed up to going to the gym, listening to classical music and enjoying the theatre, as well as playing video games and watching football. I experienced rapid social mobility, ending up as an emergent service worker – and even more confused. Looking back, my confusion and sense of being in limbo arose from ignorance and misunderstanding. My view of a working-class person was someone who wore overalls and worked with their hands; I saw the middle classes as home‑owning office workers in business attire. Academia confuses the issue even more with its obsession with stratification. But [film maker Ken Loach] has helped me clear some of the fog in my mind. Our society is like a commuter train. There are a few very well-off people in the front, with their own seats, tables and ample legroom; everyone else is stuffed into the carriages behind them. Some passengers are lucky enough to get a seat, but most are on their feet and cramped together, attempting to disappear from the agony via headphones and screens, trying to remember why they put themselves through this every day. Every year, the standard carriages get more and more crammed. Meanwhile, first class has fewer passengers and is roomier than ever. At what point do the rest of us get fed up with playing sardines and take up the rest of the train? I don’t know, but noticing your fellow passengers would be a good start. Then we may realise that we are all in this together."
Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded. This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well.... Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean."
My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois? – article by Daniel Lavelle in The Guardian. "I have been obsessed with and confused by social class all my life. Both of my grandparents grew up in Liverpool in the 1930s in traditionally working-class households. They were clever and conscientious and managed to earn scholarships to university, eventually becoming teachers. My parents have university degrees and own property; one of them is now a judge. To most people, all these things place me squarely and categorically in the middle class. But I was in special educational schools from the age of nine, spent part of my childhood in care, left education altogether at 14 and collected the dole until getting my first job in a cotton mill. All these things make me a dyed-in-the-wool prole. And yet I have two degrees, I have written two books and I freelance for the Guardian – you can’t get more insufferably bourgeois than that. At the same time, I am pushing 40 and living with my mum because I can’t afford to rent anything larger than a broom cupboard, so I feel as though I am in class limbo – fitting in with everyone and no one at the same time.... In 2011, the BBC ... teamed up with the sociologist Prof Mike Savage and a group of his colleagues at the London School of Economics to try to bring the idea of class into the 21st century [proposing] seven classes: the elite, the established middle class, the technical middle class, new affluent workers, the traditional working class, emergent service workers and the precariat. I fed the BBC’s online survey my details, including salary, housing situation and interests. My result: precariat. The lowest on the totem pole. Then I did the test again. This time, I fessed up to going to the gym, listening to classical music and enjoying the theatre, as well as playing video games and watching football. I experienced rapid social mobility, ending up as an emergent service worker – and even more confused. Looking back, my confusion and sense of being in limbo arose from ignorance and misunderstanding. My view of a working-class person was someone who wore overalls and worked with their hands; I saw the middle classes as home‑owning office workers in business attire. Academia confuses the issue even more with its obsession with stratification. But [film maker Ken Loach] has helped me clear some of the fog in my mind. Our society is like a commuter train. There are a few very well-off people in the front, with their own seats, tables and ample legroom; everyone else is stuffed into the carriages behind them. Some passengers are lucky enough to get a seat, but most are on their feet and cramped together, attempting to disappear from the agony via headphones and screens, trying to remember why they put themselves through this every day. Every year, the standard carriages get more and more crammed. Meanwhile, first class has fewer passengers and is roomier than ever. At what point do the rest of us get fed up with playing sardines and take up the rest of the train? I don’t know, but noticing your fellow passengers would be a good start. Then we may realise that we are all in this together."
Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded. This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well.... Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean."
The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? – article by Sam Freedman in The Guardian. "One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk. The Scottish author was an outspoken socialist who could never understand why rightwing fans liked novels that were so obviously an attack on their worldview. But that hasn’t stopped Musk... The barges used by SpaceX to land their booster rockets are all named after spaceships from the Culture books. Musk’s entire career stems from trying to replicate sci-fi novels. His desire to colonise Mars was sparked by the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov (another staunch leftwinger).... Musk isn’t alone in his enthusiasms. Mark Zuckerberg has renamed his company and sunk $100bn in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a word that first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash... If sci-fi’s influence was simply on product design, it wouldn’t be a problem.... The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics. The dominant genre of sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, when today’s Silicon Valley overlords were growing up, was Cyberpunk... As historian Richard Hofstadter noted in his famous 1964 essay, the 'paranoid style' has been a feature of rightwing American politics for a long time – but The Matrix has given it a new vocabulary and imagery. The red pill Neo takes, choosing to escape his simulation and see reality, was repurposed by the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, an associate of JD Vance, as the guiding metaphor for the 'alt-right'. That the transgender Wachowski sisters, who directed the film, had in mind a metaphor for their own oppression is bitterly ironic.... Thiel often names companies he backs after Lord of the Rings artefacts.... Palantir, is a global data analytics and software company, a major supplier to the NHS and a defence contractor for numerous governments. It’s named after the powerful seeing stone used by both Saruman and Sauron in their attempts to control the world. Thiel is clearly a Lord of the Rings obsessive – the problem is, it’s not entirely clear which side he wanted to win."
‘Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!’: how video game adaptations became prestige TV – article by Duncan Barrett in The Guardian. "The Last of Us, [now starting its second season, is] a show that generally takes its storytelling deadly seriously. While the [recent] wildly lucrative Minecraft movie strip-mines its IP for laughs, this celebrated HBO series, adapted from the PlayStation titles of the same name, is as focused on taut character drama as the thrills and spills of the zombie genre. According to executive producer Carolyn Strauss, .... showrunner Craig Mazin pitched it to her as a story about love: 'He said to me: "This is a show about the good and the bad of what love compels you to do.'... For Mazin, the bold narrative choices of the original games were a large part of their appeal thanks largely to the instincts of creative director Neil Druckmann, with whom he shares a credit on the series.... 'We had lunch and I talked about how much I loved the game and what I thought it was really about, underneath the hood of zombies and fungus and fighting,' he says. 'He’s very protective of it, as well he should be. And at that time, video game adaptations didn’t have a good track record.' That’s putting it mildly. In the past, efforts to drag game characters kicking and screaming into the real world have resulted in some serious stinkers.... But it turns out even the ropiest adaptations have their defenders. 'Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!' laughs Gabriel Luna, who plays Joel’s brother Tommy in the series. 'It’s a good movie!'... [However,] the wacky adventures of Bob Hoskins’ New York plumber are a world away from The Last of Us. Season one received near universal praise, scooping up dozens of awards. The source material certainly helps. Take, for example, The Last of Us Part II which the latest season of the HBO adaptation is based on. For me, one of the most powerful moments playing it came when I, as Ellie, was exploring Joel’s house and I found a photograph of his dead daughter, Sarah, on a chest of drawers. The level of 'interaction' is limited to picking up the photo and taking a closer look, just as it might be in real life, and it has no real bearing on the action of the game. But a tiny moment like that can be unbearably powerful. 'You’re going through a series of sequences that the game designers have very carefully crafted to give you a particular experience,' says [Peter Howell, lecturer in computer games design at the University of Portsmouth]. 'Exactly as a director would do in a TV series.'"
It’s not too late to stop Trump and the tech broligarchy from controlling our lives, but we must act now – article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world’s leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving 'broligarchy' – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics.... What happened to me is now coming for so many other people. Not just weaponised lawsuits against other journalists and online campaigns of harassment and abuse – though that is coming – but the everyday surveillance and data harvesting to which we are all subjected. In the new political landscapes, that carries new risks. I’ve been on the sharp end of that. I know how it feels. Terrifying. But it’s also the business model of Silicon Valley, and it’s why, as individuals, we must take steps to protect ourselves. What I can’t stress enough is how much worse the situation is now, six years on.... We are not powerless. There are things we can do collectively. I learned that when 30,000 Observer readers rose up to support me in my legal case. Last week’s talk is dedicated to them, because without them I don’t know where I’d be now. But together, we were able to hold power to account. And in the darkness that’s falling, I believe that rebuilding our information system – together – is the first step to getting out of this mess."
‘Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!’: how video game adaptations became prestige TV – article by Duncan Barrett in The Guardian. "The Last of Us, [now starting its second season, is] a show that generally takes its storytelling deadly seriously. While the [recent] wildly lucrative Minecraft movie strip-mines its IP for laughs, this celebrated HBO series, adapted from the PlayStation titles of the same name, is as focused on taut character drama as the thrills and spills of the zombie genre. According to executive producer Carolyn Strauss, .... showrunner Craig Mazin pitched it to her as a story about love: 'He said to me: "This is a show about the good and the bad of what love compels you to do.'... For Mazin, the bold narrative choices of the original games were a large part of their appeal thanks largely to the instincts of creative director Neil Druckmann, with whom he shares a credit on the series.... 'We had lunch and I talked about how much I loved the game and what I thought it was really about, underneath the hood of zombies and fungus and fighting,' he says. 'He’s very protective of it, as well he should be. And at that time, video game adaptations didn’t have a good track record.' That’s putting it mildly. In the past, efforts to drag game characters kicking and screaming into the real world have resulted in some serious stinkers.... But it turns out even the ropiest adaptations have their defenders. 'Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!' laughs Gabriel Luna, who plays Joel’s brother Tommy in the series. 'It’s a good movie!'... [However,] the wacky adventures of Bob Hoskins’ New York plumber are a world away from The Last of Us. Season one received near universal praise, scooping up dozens of awards. The source material certainly helps. Take, for example, The Last of Us Part II which the latest season of the HBO adaptation is based on. For me, one of the most powerful moments playing it came when I, as Ellie, was exploring Joel’s house and I found a photograph of his dead daughter, Sarah, on a chest of drawers. The level of 'interaction' is limited to picking up the photo and taking a closer look, just as it might be in real life, and it has no real bearing on the action of the game. But a tiny moment like that can be unbearably powerful. 'You’re going through a series of sequences that the game designers have very carefully crafted to give you a particular experience,' says [Peter Howell, lecturer in computer games design at the University of Portsmouth]. 'Exactly as a director would do in a TV series.'"
It’s not too late to stop Trump and the tech broligarchy from controlling our lives, but we must act now – article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world’s leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving 'broligarchy' – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics.... What happened to me is now coming for so many other people. Not just weaponised lawsuits against other journalists and online campaigns of harassment and abuse – though that is coming – but the everyday surveillance and data harvesting to which we are all subjected. In the new political landscapes, that carries new risks. I’ve been on the sharp end of that. I know how it feels. Terrifying. But it’s also the business model of Silicon Valley, and it’s why, as individuals, we must take steps to protect ourselves. What I can’t stress enough is how much worse the situation is now, six years on.... We are not powerless. There are things we can do collectively. I learned that when 30,000 Observer readers rose up to support me in my legal case. Last week’s talk is dedicated to them, because without them I don’t know where I’d be now. But together, we were able to hold power to account. And in the darkness that’s falling, I believe that rebuilding our information system – together – is the first step to getting out of this mess."
Enough Is Enuf by Gabe Henry: the battle to reform English spelling – review by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian. "The idea of the ghoti [pronounced 'fish'] is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries.... In his amusing and enlightening new book, Gabe Henry traces the history of these efforts, beginning with a 12th-century monk named Orrmin, continuing through the beginnings of American English and the movement’s 19th-century heyday, finally arriving at textspeak. English is a mess, Henry explains, thanks to its complicated parentage, which involves the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. William Caxton, England’s first printer, also deserves some of the blame: his standardisation of spellings in 1476 meant he 'froze our orthography during a time of linguistic flux. Our spellings today are therefore anchored to a pronunciation spoken sometime between Chaucer and Shakespeare, back when we voiced the S in aisle, the G in gnarl, and the K in knife.' Spelling reformers had their work cut out for them, then.... Not everyone failed: Noah Webster’s American dictionary successfully excised letters he thought were extraneous, such as the 'u's in 'colour' and 'honour'... Texting has, of course, made simplifications such as U for 'you' and 'thru' for 'through' more common. Some complain about this as further evidence of the 'deterioration' of language; I have at times been one of them. But Henry’s book gave me a new perspective, cheering for the simplification crowd."
No, you’re not fine just the way you are: time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world – article by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian, extracted from his book Moral Ambition. "Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options. Category I jobs: Not that ambitious, not that idealistic. Some jobs simply don’t add much value. These are people writing reports nobody reads or managing colleagues who don’t need managing.... There’s also a class of not-so-useful jobs. A class of influencers and marketeers, lobbyists and managers, consultants and corporate lawyers – all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine... For some in this not-all-that-ambitious, not-all-that-idealistic category, there’s an escape hatch: becoming financially independent. Countless self-help books lay out how to get rich with minimal effort, so you can get out as soon as possible, then kick back and relax.... Category II jobs: Ambitious, but not all that idealistic. ... These people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, a fat salary, a corner office or other perks.... Take consultants. These talented people are at best helping others be a little more productive. They don’t start new organisations, don’t come up with new innovations and generally don’t concern themselves with the most pressing challenges facing us today. If you’re among the top in your field, you can afford to go skiing regularly or buy that beach house you always dreamed of. But is that really all you want out of life?... Category III jobs: Idealistic, but not all that ambitious.... You see it in young people’s take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they’re passionate about – and preferably part-time. Sometimes it seems 'ambition' has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle. Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has. As long as it feels good.... In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is defined by what you don’t do. Don’t fly. Don’t eat meat. Don’t have kids. And don’t even think about using a plastic straw.... The trouble with idealists who lack ambition is they tend to prize awareness more than action. But here’s the thing: awareness alone won’t help a soul. It’s at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal. Category IV jobs: Idealistic and ambitious. ... Let me introduce one of my personal heroes, the British author and activist Thomas Clarkson.... In 1787, Clarkson became one of the 12 founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Ten of the others were entrepreneurs. Go through their archives today and you’ll find to-do lists, action plans. While the French abolitionist movement was led by writers and intellectuals (and didn’t get much done), the British movement was run by merchants and businessmen.... I’ve spent years researching the Clarksons of our time: activists and entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, engineers and innovators, all bursting with moral ambition. What they have in common is a refusal to see their own deeds as drops in the ocean. They believe they can make a difference and are prepared to take risks to get there. They don’t just think, 'Someone should do something about that' but take action themselves.... So ask yourself the question: what’s the 'great honour and glory' of your life? What do you hope one day to look back on? 'A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,' writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'but about being worthy of respect.' Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good."
A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right – article by Harry Shukman in The Guardian, adapted from his Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. "Hope Not Hate focuses on monitoring, researching and campaigning against the far right. I contacted their research team in late 2022 to discuss working together. ... I was already spending time undercover in extremist circles. This was a chance to do it more safely, with more guidance.... Going undercover is an extreme strategy, and people may wonder if it was justified.... Leaders in the far right conceal their true nature to present a more acceptable version to potential voters, donors and sometimes their own members. One prominent eugenicist who works in Westminster admitted this tactic after I’d befriended him. 'Everyone puts on the mask,' he said. Only by spending prolonged periods of time with them, winning their trust and being deemed safe is it possible to see those moments when that mask slips and the truth peeks out from underneath. If the far right are using subterfuge to gain ground in politics, then it makes sense to turn their tactics back on them. All this matters right now. The far right is edging towards the mainstream....The Scandza Forum is one of the biggest intellectual far-right gatherings in Europe. [Its conference in Tallinn, Estonia] began with a lecture by a racist Danish academic called Helmuth Nyborg, [according to whom] immigrants of low intelligence are coming to Europe and having lots of babies, threatening intelligent, low-fertility Europeans.... By the end of the Tallinn conference, I realised that ...the race science movement is not composed of fringe weirdos. It is well funded, sophisticated and influential. The penny began to drop while the conference guests were drunkenly milling around after dinner. I heard an English accent and ... introduced myself [to] Matthew Frost, a former private school teacher. Frost described the operation he was running. It’s called Aporia, he said, an online magazine that publishes stories about 'HBD'. HBD stands for human biodiversity, the concept that races, sexes and socioeconomic classes can be ranked by traits like intelligence. Advocates of HBD believe that differences between these groups are principally caused by genetic factors rather than environmental ones. HBD, another term for race science, underpins eugenics, the idea that desirable traits can and should be bred.... Incredibly, Frost said he had received a large amount of money from an American investor, someone who made his fortune in the tech world. He wouldn’t tell me who. It would take months to find out."
Where to start with Terry Pratchett – article by Marc Burrows in The Guardian. The entry point. "Most of Pratchett’s books work as entry points. He always wrote with new readers in mind, offering a gentle handhold into his world. But a good choice would be Feet of Clay – a proper police procedural with a great mystery and thoughtful reflections on prejudice, class and the very nature of personhood. And it’s funny, but that’s a given when it comes to Pratchett." The one that will cheer you up. "Witches Abroad, a 1991 Discworld novel about three witches on an epic quest to make sure a poor servant girl doesn’t marry a prince. On the way there are parodies of The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula and Hans Christian Andersen stories. Pratchett writes older women beautifully: Nanny Ogg might be one of the finest comic sidekicks in literature." The masterpiece. "Pratchett’s 2002 book Night Watch was recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, and rightly so. It’s his angriest and most profound novel – a kind of mashup of Les Misérables and The Terminator via the Peterloo massacre and the battle of Cable Street. It’s about justice, trauma, and how doing the right thing is exhausting, relentless work." The one you'll learn from. "In the author’s 1998 novel, Carpe Jugulum, a family of vampires invade the tiny mountain kingdom of Lancre, allowing Pratchett to have endless fun with the tropes of gothic fiction. There’s a much darker core to this one, though. It’s a story about who we are and about right and wrong." The one that will make you laugh out loud. "A slightly obscure pick, but I loved the 1999 spin-off Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. The recipes themselves are largely irrelevant. The real gold is Nanny’s etiquette advice; this is some of the best comic character writing Pratchett ever did." The one that deserves more attention. "The Johnny Maxwell trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind; Johnny and the Dead; and Johnny and the Bomb.... Often overshadowed by Discworld, these young adult books are smart, warm, and full of big ideas handled lightly." The one that will make you cry. "The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry’s final novel, published just months after his death in 2015. It’s his farewell to Discworld and its characters. There’s a death scene I still struggle to read. It’s graceful, brave and completely unshowy."
Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future – article by Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian. "One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a 'low-IQ individual' is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being 'high-IQ' is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right.... It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright. One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy .... From the early 2000s to the present, he has been a consistent advocate for the importance of IQ as a measure of human worth. In the late 2000s, as an exponent of what came to be called the Dark Enlightenment, or 'neo-reaction', he suggested IQ tests could be used to disqualify voters in post-apartheid South Africa.... IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor ... who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were 'lower IQ' compared with those in the Democratic party.... All of this would have remained a quirky symptom of San Francisco Bay Area chatboards were it not for the recent alliance between the world of the tech right and the governing party in Washington DC. The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called 'living with inequality'. Yet here’s the rub. That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence. To date, generative AI is primarily a means of automating away many of the very white-collar jobs that had previously been the heart of the knowledge economy. ... The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education. If those jobs are whittled down to a nub, then on its own terms, the point of caring about IQ vanishes as well."
Old Skies – review by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu on Adventure Game Hotspot. "100%. Old Skies takes the well-worn concept of time travel and shoots it back through history to make it fresh again. It’s a beautiful, wonderfully written and acted tale both epic and personal, with enough time-bending conundrums to keep even the most jaded adventure gamer guessing. Pros. Epic centuries-spanning story that feels both grandiose and deeply personal. Superb cast of characters brought to life with phenomenal voice acting. Stunning art direction and attention to detail in every era visited. Ingenious puzzle design revolving around your death(s) and collecting information rather than relying on typical item-based brain teasers. Beautiful musical score masterfully captures the feel of each historical period. Cons. No way to rewind your own reality (yet) to play it again for the first time."
No, you’re not fine just the way you are: time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world – article by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian, extracted from his book Moral Ambition. "Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options. Category I jobs: Not that ambitious, not that idealistic. Some jobs simply don’t add much value. These are people writing reports nobody reads or managing colleagues who don’t need managing.... There’s also a class of not-so-useful jobs. A class of influencers and marketeers, lobbyists and managers, consultants and corporate lawyers – all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine... For some in this not-all-that-ambitious, not-all-that-idealistic category, there’s an escape hatch: becoming financially independent. Countless self-help books lay out how to get rich with minimal effort, so you can get out as soon as possible, then kick back and relax.... Category II jobs: Ambitious, but not all that idealistic. ... These people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, a fat salary, a corner office or other perks.... Take consultants. These talented people are at best helping others be a little more productive. They don’t start new organisations, don’t come up with new innovations and generally don’t concern themselves with the most pressing challenges facing us today. If you’re among the top in your field, you can afford to go skiing regularly or buy that beach house you always dreamed of. But is that really all you want out of life?... Category III jobs: Idealistic, but not all that ambitious.... You see it in young people’s take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they’re passionate about – and preferably part-time. Sometimes it seems 'ambition' has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle. Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has. As long as it feels good.... In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is defined by what you don’t do. Don’t fly. Don’t eat meat. Don’t have kids. And don’t even think about using a plastic straw.... The trouble with idealists who lack ambition is they tend to prize awareness more than action. But here’s the thing: awareness alone won’t help a soul. It’s at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal. Category IV jobs: Idealistic and ambitious. ... Let me introduce one of my personal heroes, the British author and activist Thomas Clarkson.... In 1787, Clarkson became one of the 12 founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Ten of the others were entrepreneurs. Go through their archives today and you’ll find to-do lists, action plans. While the French abolitionist movement was led by writers and intellectuals (and didn’t get much done), the British movement was run by merchants and businessmen.... I’ve spent years researching the Clarksons of our time: activists and entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, engineers and innovators, all bursting with moral ambition. What they have in common is a refusal to see their own deeds as drops in the ocean. They believe they can make a difference and are prepared to take risks to get there. They don’t just think, 'Someone should do something about that' but take action themselves.... So ask yourself the question: what’s the 'great honour and glory' of your life? What do you hope one day to look back on? 'A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,' writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'but about being worthy of respect.' Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good."
A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right – article by Harry Shukman in The Guardian, adapted from his Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. "Hope Not Hate focuses on monitoring, researching and campaigning against the far right. I contacted their research team in late 2022 to discuss working together. ... I was already spending time undercover in extremist circles. This was a chance to do it more safely, with more guidance.... Going undercover is an extreme strategy, and people may wonder if it was justified.... Leaders in the far right conceal their true nature to present a more acceptable version to potential voters, donors and sometimes their own members. One prominent eugenicist who works in Westminster admitted this tactic after I’d befriended him. 'Everyone puts on the mask,' he said. Only by spending prolonged periods of time with them, winning their trust and being deemed safe is it possible to see those moments when that mask slips and the truth peeks out from underneath. If the far right are using subterfuge to gain ground in politics, then it makes sense to turn their tactics back on them. All this matters right now. The far right is edging towards the mainstream....The Scandza Forum is one of the biggest intellectual far-right gatherings in Europe. [Its conference in Tallinn, Estonia] began with a lecture by a racist Danish academic called Helmuth Nyborg, [according to whom] immigrants of low intelligence are coming to Europe and having lots of babies, threatening intelligent, low-fertility Europeans.... By the end of the Tallinn conference, I realised that ...the race science movement is not composed of fringe weirdos. It is well funded, sophisticated and influential. The penny began to drop while the conference guests were drunkenly milling around after dinner. I heard an English accent and ... introduced myself [to] Matthew Frost, a former private school teacher. Frost described the operation he was running. It’s called Aporia, he said, an online magazine that publishes stories about 'HBD'. HBD stands for human biodiversity, the concept that races, sexes and socioeconomic classes can be ranked by traits like intelligence. Advocates of HBD believe that differences between these groups are principally caused by genetic factors rather than environmental ones. HBD, another term for race science, underpins eugenics, the idea that desirable traits can and should be bred.... Incredibly, Frost said he had received a large amount of money from an American investor, someone who made his fortune in the tech world. He wouldn’t tell me who. It would take months to find out."
Where to start with Terry Pratchett – article by Marc Burrows in The Guardian. The entry point. "Most of Pratchett’s books work as entry points. He always wrote with new readers in mind, offering a gentle handhold into his world. But a good choice would be Feet of Clay – a proper police procedural with a great mystery and thoughtful reflections on prejudice, class and the very nature of personhood. And it’s funny, but that’s a given when it comes to Pratchett." The one that will cheer you up. "Witches Abroad, a 1991 Discworld novel about three witches on an epic quest to make sure a poor servant girl doesn’t marry a prince. On the way there are parodies of The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula and Hans Christian Andersen stories. Pratchett writes older women beautifully: Nanny Ogg might be one of the finest comic sidekicks in literature." The masterpiece. "Pratchett’s 2002 book Night Watch was recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, and rightly so. It’s his angriest and most profound novel – a kind of mashup of Les Misérables and The Terminator via the Peterloo massacre and the battle of Cable Street. It’s about justice, trauma, and how doing the right thing is exhausting, relentless work." The one you'll learn from. "In the author’s 1998 novel, Carpe Jugulum, a family of vampires invade the tiny mountain kingdom of Lancre, allowing Pratchett to have endless fun with the tropes of gothic fiction. There’s a much darker core to this one, though. It’s a story about who we are and about right and wrong." The one that will make you laugh out loud. "A slightly obscure pick, but I loved the 1999 spin-off Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. The recipes themselves are largely irrelevant. The real gold is Nanny’s etiquette advice; this is some of the best comic character writing Pratchett ever did." The one that deserves more attention. "The Johnny Maxwell trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind; Johnny and the Dead; and Johnny and the Bomb.... Often overshadowed by Discworld, these young adult books are smart, warm, and full of big ideas handled lightly." The one that will make you cry. "The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry’s final novel, published just months after his death in 2015. It’s his farewell to Discworld and its characters. There’s a death scene I still struggle to read. It’s graceful, brave and completely unshowy."
Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future – article by Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian. "One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a 'low-IQ individual' is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being 'high-IQ' is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right.... It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright. One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy .... From the early 2000s to the present, he has been a consistent advocate for the importance of IQ as a measure of human worth. In the late 2000s, as an exponent of what came to be called the Dark Enlightenment, or 'neo-reaction', he suggested IQ tests could be used to disqualify voters in post-apartheid South Africa.... IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor ... who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were 'lower IQ' compared with those in the Democratic party.... All of this would have remained a quirky symptom of San Francisco Bay Area chatboards were it not for the recent alliance between the world of the tech right and the governing party in Washington DC. The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called 'living with inequality'. Yet here’s the rub. That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence. To date, generative AI is primarily a means of automating away many of the very white-collar jobs that had previously been the heart of the knowledge economy. ... The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education. If those jobs are whittled down to a nub, then on its own terms, the point of caring about IQ vanishes as well."
Old Skies – review by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu on Adventure Game Hotspot. "100%. Old Skies takes the well-worn concept of time travel and shoots it back through history to make it fresh again. It’s a beautiful, wonderfully written and acted tale both epic and personal, with enough time-bending conundrums to keep even the most jaded adventure gamer guessing. Pros. Epic centuries-spanning story that feels both grandiose and deeply personal. Superb cast of characters brought to life with phenomenal voice acting. Stunning art direction and attention to detail in every era visited. Ingenious puzzle design revolving around your death(s) and collecting information rather than relying on typical item-based brain teasers. Beautiful musical score masterfully captures the feel of each historical period. Cons. No way to rewind your own reality (yet) to play it again for the first time."
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