Charlie Brooker

"Hey, wouldn't it be great if we had a supercomputer that could predict the future? By "we", incidentally, I mean "we" as in "the human race", not "we" as in "myself and you – you specifically". You might be Josef Fritzl for all I know. I don't want to find myself sharing a supercomputer desktop with Fritzl. Every time I went to open a window, he'd nail it shut."

From here.

Future events such as these will affect you in the future

Getting to the pictures is such a massive pain in the dick from here. At a minimum it takes an hour unless you drive there in the car. These are the provinces, and town centre cinemas simply don't exist here.

Multiplexes are terrible, mechanical, sparse warehouses where no love of film is exhibited along with the features and that possess all the character but none of the staffing levels of the shop demonstration floor of a branch of Currys megastore. This is a true thing. Nevertheless construction is nearly finished on one such monument to fast food, production-line-apathy on the route of my walk to work, and when it is my cinema attendance will increase dramatically. Even in such substandard conditions as those offered by modern, cattle-car digital multiplexes I still find the viewing of films at the cinema a hundred times or more satisfying, memorable and definitive than anywhere else. I'd say it was the tailor made conditions, but that's not fitting for Cineworld; really it's the off-the-peg baseline competency and big dark room.

Ten thousand days in the fire is long enough

I just had the immense misfortune of seeing the first few scenes of (500) Days of Summer, and am glad that I did. I was originally going to write that I wished I hadn't but that would be willingly bypassing the pleasure of knowing that there are still films which can provoke in me deep and deepening reactions. It's the most tonally loathsome, hateful, dippy Indie claptrap I've ever seen, and one film which, had it suddenly become Michael Haneke's Funny Games I'd have been cheered to watch the torturers go about their work. The problem is everything. It's the plonky pianos and shrill Indie siren soundtrack, the arch Author's note "this film is a work of fiction" etc, no resemblance intended especially to ex-girlfriend and so on, which ends with the word "bitch." Slimy fucking ... I can't go on writing this because I keep dissolving in shouts of "fucking arseholes!"

Meanwhile, 18 months ago...

This. I went for a similar walk today but with the dog I didn't have then. I did not see a horse.

Considerably more worthy of remembrance is this post of mine from July 2005.