In Haringey, the council is changing the way it charges for car parking. Dialogue between the council and the scheme’s opponents is progressing via a medium that is unconventional but actually rather apt: the parking meters themselves.

Is this all the work of one person? It looks like the same sort of pen, and the handwriting is similar. The wording in that second matches that of the original yellow stickers. Perhaps this is just a one-man crusade. A lone wolf. Or perhaps these interventions are radicalising a whole new generation of militants. Only time will tell.

See full post on James Ward’s blog.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but isn’t the German foreign minister throwing some serious shade on to the UK here? The idea that post-Brexit Britain will be on a par with Turkey and Ukraine in terms of its relationship with the EU certainly seems like a bit of dis…

Brexit: German minister sees model for Turkey and Ukraine (BBC News)

I’m a huge fan of Mario Kart and have been since its first incarnation on the SNES back in 1992. In fact it’s fair to say that Mario Kart was a major obsession throughout much of the 1990s.

I wasn’t ready to move on to the N64’s expanded vision of the Mario Kart universe — to me, it was like trying to breathe life into the game of chess by introducing an array of gimmicky new pieces or growing the board to a 12×12 square — but by the time Mario Kart DS came out I was back on board.

Despite being such a big Mario Kart fan, though, I found myself cringing when I learnt that foreign tourists cruise the streets of Tokyo attempting to have a “real life Mario Kart” experience:

It’s one of Japan’s hottest attractions amid a tourism boom—to the frustration of some locals… Indeed, it’s all fun and games until a tourist drives her go-kart onto the sidewalk and crashes into a police station. Or until another one manages to hit a parked car. The Times reported in May that in the span of two months, Tokyo police have recorded a dozen such incidents, 10 of which involved foreign tourists and none of which involved any fatalities.

I can only imagine how annoying it must be to be trying to get around Tokyo and then come across a mob of tourists bumbling and bumping along the road in bootleg “MariCart” go-karts, dressed as Nintendo characters. Probably even more annoying than the shrieking pedal buses that crawl around here in London sometimes: at least there’s only one pedal bus to deal with instead of ten of them veering all over the place, and I’ve yet to see anybody on one of those things throwing banana skins on to the road.

And besides, I can’t help thinking that these tourists, as well as being annoying, are missing the point of Mario Kart altogether. If you believe that trundling along in a glorified golf buggy is in any way a replication of the Mario Kart experience, then I’m sorry to say that you don’t understand Mario Kart, and don’t know what it feels like to play it properly. Sorry if that sounds harsh but there you go.

Thankfully, Nintendo has sued MariCart for copyright infringement and is in the process of building its own real-life Mario Kart experience in its forthcoming Super Nintendo World theme park. That’s something I wouldn’t mind having a go on.

The following passage from Slate’s “The Year In Push Alerts” touched a nerve with me:

As a computer programmer, White said, he gets frequent 30-second breaks while the software he’s working on is loading, rendering, and searching—and during those tiny intervals he feels helplessly drawn to the news. “[I’ll see a] tweet about some bizarre behavior… Look at the article. Click through to another article. Post that on Twitter. Get a like. Look at that person’s feed. See another take on how awful Trump is. Click on it. Feel guilty. Try to focus on work. Someone walks into my office and says, ‘Can you believe that Gorsuch says …’ And so on.” During the first few months of the administration, White said, he was losing approximately half of his work time falling down these miserable holes.

For me, this pattern started to take hold during the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote and I’ve had to work hard to break out of it. It’s part of the reason why I stopped being a smartphone person and took a step back from Twitter.

Oh yes, mentioning Twitter reminds me of this thing I saw about Twitter, on Twitter. It’s depressingly accurate and makes me even more keen to run screaming from the noisy blue bird:

“How a day on British Twitter works”, by @TechnicallyRon. Click for full version

David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” is a mammoth of a novel. I started reading it in August and only just finished it last night.

Spoilers now follow!

Its conclusion felt abrupt, unexpected, like an ambush. This was mainly caused by the way Infinite Jest is constructed, with a lot of events subsequent to the conclusion having been hinted at in earlier chapters, leaving the actual endpoint serving as more of a midpoint. But the ambush effect was exacerbated by the Kindle: when you aren’t holding the physical substance of the remaining novel between your fingers, it can be hard to know just how close you are to its end.

Infinite Jest sets itself up as a satirical novel. Many aspects of its characters, and of the world it’s set in, are introduced with an air of comedic ridiculousness, from the names of the years in “Subsidised Time” to the physical deformity of Mario Incandenza. But the book very often moves in on these characters or situations and gives prescription drug rehab for christians near me, slower, honest and human, moving beyond its surface tone of satirical irreverence and adopting one that is often painful or even heartbreaking to read. Many of the passages that deal with drug and alcohol addiction, in particular, have a hyperreal aspect to them.

I did find myself becoming more and more irritated by James Incandenza’s work as a respected avant-garde filmmaker. I didn’t know if we were meant to be cringing at the pretentiousness of his films or not, or to be more precise, if we were meant to cringe at the idea of a world in which films like his are seen as high art. I found myself cringing at a lot of the described films anyway, regardless of DFW’s intent. They sounded like attempts to make rather basic statements but giving them a spurious profundity by wrapping them up in a few layers of artistic obfuscation. Towards the end of the book those were the passages (descriptions of academics building their careers on interpretations of Incandenza’s films, etc) I felt most tempted to skip through.

The complex and involuted nature of Infinite Jest invites a second reading but its sheer size makes it unlikely that I’ll do that any time soon. So I’ve been reading a few discussions and analyses online. One thing I found is this website, Infinite Summer, which divides the book up into sections that should be readable in a week  and then provides articles and comment threads for each of those sections. It’s a bit like an asynchronous book club, and I wish I’d been aware of it when I started out.

I’m a big fan of websites like Infinite Summer. It’s both anachronistic and refreshing to see online discussions taking place away from the Borg cube of Twitter/Facebook, conversations you can discover via a search engine and just read through without having to be logged into anything.

There was a time when most of the posts on this blog were about Twitter.

It started more than ten years ago with me writing about how I didn’t get Twitter before later posts revealed my growing enthusiasm for the whole thing. I savoured the endearing banality of strangers on buses, smirked at “brands” who were botching their forays on to the platform (as if I knew any better), and eventually I was posting semi-technical instructions about how to extract data from Twitter (Twitter eventually stopped that working) or share your loved tracks from Last.fm (I don’t know if Last.fm still exists). I even designed the service that put a British rail company on Twitter for the first time.

You might remember that back in the late 2000s and early 2010s many people blithely dismissed Twitter as a tool for nothing more than knowing what Stephen Fry had for breakfast. The harrumphing Twitter sceptics were everywhere with their gruff dismissals of what they saw as lightweight ephemera. I made a point of taking them on and trying to convince them of the platform’s value. If you had told me back then that, within the next decade, the White House would play host to a president who used Twitter as his or her primary mode of communication — that “the first Twitter President” was going to be a thing — I’d have been genuinely excited. “Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!”, I would have said to those sceptics.

In the end the sceptics lost the debate and they lost it hard. Worse, most of them ended up on Twitter themselves, in time to take part in the eventual death spiral that is now well underway. Because Twitter has become a dumpster fire: a raging, unstoppable inferno, casting toxic fumes and molten plastic blobs in all directions.

If this was the mid-2000s still, it wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just move on. If a forum’s admin turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser, or stood by while Nazis polluted all the threads with swastikas and frog cartoons, people would just leave. I’ve been involved in online communities for long enough to have seen numerous such mass migrations, where a critical mass of contributors moved off a mailing list or message board, leading to the whole community embarking on an exodus to the new, unblemished territory. Renewal and rejuvenation of the community usually followed.

Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine this happening today, now that Twitter and Facebook have formed what is essentially a duopoly in online community. Users of Twitter look to its owners to sort out the problems it has, and there’s a lot of anger at the business for its inability or unwillingness to do so. But what is yet to dawn on us, as a group, is that the onus is not on Jack Dorsey to change Twitter; the onus is on us to do what we would have done in the mid-2000s and just leave.

This is easier said than done though, because leaving Twitter at the moment feels like leaving the internet itself. It’s like you’ve made yourself invisible. And besides, Twitter remains the best place to go to complain or joke about how bad Twitter has become.

So I’ve resolved to start avoiding Twitter as much as I can, just for my own personal reasons. I could do without the feelings of anxiety, rage, frustration and depression that come from scrolling through the timeline that has become the moronic inferno made real.

But can I find a way to step back from Twitter without stepping back from the internet? If I find enough other people who are trying to do the same thing, then perhaps I will.