I finally watched El Camino last night, and seeing how Breaking Bad was one of my all time favourite TV series, I had high hopes for the movie. You can probably guess from my intro that it fell short of what I was expecting. Instead of a movie, we got an extended last episode to the series, one that we could arguably have done without.

I don’t want to get too much into the spoiler game, but basically, we catch up with the story at the end of the last episode of Season 5 with Jesse Pinkman speeding off into night in psycho Todd’s El Camino. The 2 hours that follow drift along at a slow pace as Jesse encounters some of his old crew, both in real time and flashbacks.  He does have a problem to solve before he can ride off into the sunset like the High Plains Drifter. I guess the movie brings closure to the show, if you need such things, but I think we would have been better off leaving Jesse’s endgame to our individual imaginations.

Switching gears…

Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus came yesterday. I was a little reluctant to pay £25 quid for a book sight unseen (there was no preview available on Amazon). I had to go on the strength of the reviews alone. I’m glad I went for it though because so far it has not disappointed me. And in fact, I cranked out my first tiny poem using one of the techniques from the book. Real quick, Jeff Noon is a really big language dude (he’s famous for writing in the cyberpunk genre with hits like Vurt, Pollen, and Automated Alice). He’s also into his music. He wanted to do what DJ’s do with music to literature, i.e. taking source texts and running it through a series of noise gates and filters to produce something totally different from the original text.

I used a couple of random tweets, exploded them

and then mixed it with this tweet:

Got the whole team drinking it! @BeroccaUK
???????????? #nodaytootough #advertising #agencylife #InfluencerMarketing pic.twitter.com/NU1uX7HOZ3

— Lucie Kerley (@luciekerley) October 16, 2019

to finally arrive at:

satan got the whole team reading dark material like your heart.

I did that over lunch. I’m looking forward to using the different filters and gates on some longer source texts.

So blogging turned 25 this week:

Last Monday was a significant anniversary in the evolution of the web. It was 25 years to the day since the first serious blog appeared. It was called Scripting News and the url was (and remains) at scripting.com. Its author is a software wizard named Dave Winer, who’s updated it every day since 1994. And despite its wide readership, it has never run ads.

I’m amazed that Dave Winer has managed to blog every single day since 1994! That’s lot of blogging. I like the writer’s suggestion that blogging is still important despite the infilitration of social media:

He’s also a reminder of the importance of blogging, a phenomenon that has been overshadowed as social media exploded and sucked much of the oxygen out of our information environment. When Winer started, blogging was an elite activity: you had to know how to set up a website and publish to it. But when Blogger and LiveJournal launched in 1999 followed by WordPress and TypePad in 2003, the barrier to entry became vanishingly low; in effect, if you could type and had an internet connection you could become a blogger. And so for a time blogging became the predominant form of user-generated content on the web.

And finally, I agree:

The blogosphere continues to be one of our greatest information resources. So why not log off social media, get yourself an RSS reader and wise up?

And here’s my RSS Feed so you can add me to your RSS reader.

Musical Interlude

I’ve been digging Cake this week. Particularly this version of I Will Survive: