How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cat Videos

This is the second part of The Petri Dish trilogy. The first part was on the inexplicable anger of complete strangers.

Imagine you are the editor of a television newsroom. Your viewers don’t have time to digest every news story because the world is a big place. It’s your job to prioritise and package this information, just give them the important facts. Your desk is cluttered with stories, some of which are still developing and the truth is unclear. Your gaze skims across them.

Boko Haram continuing to wreak mayhem in Nigeria. Death toll from fighting in Libya continues to rise. Fears that Russian troops are operating within Ukraine. IS continues to make gains in Iraq, forcing Obama to send the troops in, again. Unrest in Ferguson over the police shooting of Michael Brown. Bill Cosby is in the news, but not for good reasons. Greek government workers take down most of the country’s infrastructure in a protest against austerity. Women are dying in India after a mass-sterilization exercise goes badly wrong. European space probe lands on a comet – but will it stay there? Bird flu virus has been discovered in the Netherlands. The World Chess Championship is taking place. 18 people are killed by a fire in carrot packaging plant in Shandong.

I lied. You’re not an editor of a newsroom but a social media addict.

Every day you live the flood, your smartphone saturated with raw news, often lacking context, often buried in strong personal bias. No one is going to pay you to figure out the truth or decide what events are more important than others.

How do you deal with this?

Read More »

As Good As It Gets

This is the first part of The Petri Dish trilogy.

I wasn’t sure if it was my kind of thing, but when IndieGameStand sent me an indie first-person shooter as their latest offering, I picked it up without too much thought. I didn’t realise it was an alpha until after I’d installed it. It was starting to bother me that I kept buying alpha games off IndieGameStand without realising it, somehow they never seemed to make that fact prominent enough, that the “sale” was actually an early access funding drive.

The game was a total twitchfest and I’m not very good at this sort of thing any more, my thumbs don't snap into place like they used to, but I made a good fist of it. My son was entertained for awhile watching me, but I always tended to flounder and die after a few levels.

Still, I like to follow videogame people on Twitter at random, just to inject a little unknown into my feed. If I find them offensive or frustrating, I’ll mute or unfollow and be done with it.

I followed the developer of the game... and he tested my patience.

Read More »

The Family That Plays Together

Since becoming parents, my wife and I have been terrible at carving out special time to spend together. The last two films we watched together in the cinema were: Inception and Guardians of the Galaxy. If you check out IMDB you'll discover these films define a gap of four years.

Although we always talk over the serious events of today and the serious plans of tomorrow during the post-dinner cleanup, we inevitably end up doing things separately to maximise productivity and are rarely free at the same time. And as we exist in a perpetual state of near-exhaustion, if we do attempt to snuggle up in front of the TV in the evening, the warm comfort of another body means at least one of us ends up watching a dream instead of a film.

We just don’t seem to do things together any more. That is until Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) came along.

Read More »