Jared Shurin's Blog, page 2

Lessons of The Kitschies

This year, I’m supplementing weekly newsletters with a monthly ‘long read’. This is the first of the latter. Enjoy.

2024 was, amongst other things, the final year of The Kitschies.

Back when we were bloggers (back when there were blogs), Anne and I really threw ourselves into the ‘talking about awards’ conversation. It is a niche conversation, but a conversation nonetheless. I swear I did like eight panels in two years, yammering on about ‘recommendation engines’ and how ‘“best” is a meaningless...

WWCD (What Would Cato Do?)

The article living rent-free in my brain this week is by Ian Leslie (h/t Matt Muir), about the death of the ‘scenius’:

Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to refer to the collective genius that can emerge when a population of diverse and fertile talents living in geographical proximity form a loose community or ‘scene’. A scene consists of artists (from the same field and adjacent ones) and of collectors, entrepreneurs, curators, critics and theorists (akin to what the sociologist Howard Becker c...

Hot Grill Summer

Huge thank you to Clare for titling both this newsletter and my midlife crisis.

I’ve been slowly leaning, Pisa-like, back into my BBQ roots. BBQ has always been a part of my identity. A grill or smoker has always been our first household purchase, sauces and rubs are smuggled across the Atlantic with every trip; I’ve always spent too long planning the menu of every summer party we’ve ever held.

Covid definitely dialled my BBQing up. We’re fortunate enough to have our own garden and slow-and-low i...

Winners and losers

I’m writing this on the Sunday afternoon before the AFC Championship Game. The Kansas City Chiefs play the Buffalo Bills in about 9 hours; the winner of that match-up will go on to the Superbowl. This is very exciting, especially for fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills.

Sports are fascinating because they are an exercise in competing narratives. Ultimately, this is down to talent and luck and bodies crashing into one another on a field somewhere in the Midwest. But around this singul...

Home in your inbox

Despite the emergence of new speculative financial assets in the past decade and all the hype surrounding them (things like Crypto and NFTs), I suspect the incoming crash will finally see people put whatever little money they have left towards non-speculative things with real intrinsic value, or what old-schoolers like Warren Buffet refer to as Productive Assets.

Ganzeer, The Great Shi(f)t is Upon Us

There’s a lot in the latest newsletter from artist/provocateur Ganzeer, as he strings together ec...

Project V

I’ve been going through all my newsletters for my annual unsubscribathon and inbox cleansing, and that, of course, has me thinking about this little outlet. Raptor Velocity has been a little bit of a letdown for the last year.

There are reasons excuses. My work is sensitive enough that I’m not wildly comfortable talking about communications strategy, even in the abstract. And, post-Cyberpunk, I’ve not had a cohesive bookish topic to focus on. The inconsistency bugs me too: I published 26 newslett...

Snippets

I’m a little behind on sharing some of the interesting (and not so interesting) things I’ve been reading. Let’s get caught up.

what I’m reading

Suburban Warlock by Noah Layton. Just in case you thought I was a classy reader. This is a harem cozy progression fantasy.

Translations:

‘harem’ - one dude with a lot of special lady-friends

‘cozy’ - low-stakes conflict

‘progression fantasy’ - in a context where the characters are self-aware of their own skills and powers, often with textual references to s...

Blade Runner and other famously satisfactory endings

I’m in Bristol this weekend for the Bristol Film Festival! If you’re around, please join for:

Moon

The Matrix

Tron

Blade Runner

Four science fiction classics, on the (very) big screen at the Planetarium! I’ll be doing short introductions to all four. I know absolutely nothing about the fine craft of filmmaking! The screenings start after my bedtime! I have a small child and haven’t been to the cinema since before the pandemic! Everything about this screams ‘success’! Please come along and witness the...

Double Winstead

About two months ago, I wrote a bit about why those lingering on Twitter should finally up sticks and leave. I had spotted the phenomena of good people lingering in a bad place - generally for good reasons, too. They mostly wanted to make sure they weren’t abandoning the other, lingering good people. That phenomenon where no one will eat the last cookie at the office party.

(Yes, I’m using a D&D-style alignment shorthand here, and squashing things into a good/evil binary is deeply problematic. Oh...

Reddit, what is best in life?

The Academy Museum in Los Angeles (THE OSCAR PEOPLE) have announced a major exhibition focusing on cyberpunk film. The first of its type (?), and it looks like, as they say, an absolute banger.

I’m not going to lie: I’ve enjoyed being quoted and/or interviewed as part of the increased attention, and I adore people using The Big Book of Cyberpunk as a ‘survey’ for cyberpunk literature. Good for sales, great for my ego, and - I like to think - a teeny, tiny bit good for the perception of the genre...