I was reminded this week that feedback is a gift and, friends, the best thing about a gift is that once the giver has left your house you can yeet that hideous gift into the trash where it belongs. Is it a symbol of that fact that they don’t understand you? Bin! A book that’s far too complex and you’ll never read? Bin! A mirror that shows you your truest self? You better believe that’s going straight in the trash.

Only God can judge you, and she once yeeted an angel out of heaven for giving feedback on the whole ‘human’ project. So she’d understand.

This week I’ve had another cultural session. More of the writing group, where I performed a smidgeon of my stand-up and got some very helpful feedback. I gave feedback, whose value only time will tell. And I saw Barbie.

Barbie was interesting. Barbie was a lot of things. It certainly felt like a love letter to cinema. The obvious homage is to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the dream-like dance sequences reminded me of Singin’ in the Rain:

The feminist theory is a little lukewarm for me. It asserts that there are problems with patriarchy but doesn’t really propose much in the way of solutions; it seems that there are countless ways to be a Barbie but all of them require being conventionally attractive. By the way, there is no greater proof that attractiveness is a social construct and also a player in the system of capitalism than the history of Barbie – which, as the movie notes, has made it harder to be a woman. Now it’s not enough to be attractive; you must be attractive and a rocket scientist.

Barbie, and indeed the role of capitalism in extending patriarchy and capitalism, is…not really touched on. Which is fine. It’s a movie made by Mattel. The last movie adapted from posable dolls was G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and the only thing that movie had to say about feminism was ‘it’s when girls kick good too’.

The performances are an absolute pleasure, and it is an immensely fun movie. I had quite a few laugh out loud moments, and Margot Robbie’s performance is really fun to watch. America Ferrera is an absolute delight. There is a man to whom she is married and he has three lines, which I imagine is the thing making Ben Shapiro very angry this week.

I also watched a game of football this weekend or, as we Brits insist on expressing it: I watched the football. You might imagine this is simply a group of entertainment-deprived Englishmen sitting in a circle watching a football, waiting for it to move. This is not the case. We love this game, and it gets as a consequence the honorific of the definite article. The Godfather. The Gaffer. The football.

I watched England’s women become the second best football team in the world and it was an absolute pleasure. A little gang of us watching a huge screen, offering unsolicited advice, prayers to at least three deities, and making any number of noises as the teams clashed. It was an absolute joy.

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There’s been some interesting work news, more on which anon. My list of potential thesis topics keeps getting longer, which I’m told means I’m not doing shortlisting properly. I’m going to keep trying to get down every idea people throw at me. My latest idea is to try to prevent this sort of thing by equipping publishing houses with public key cryptography and convincing Amazon to make changes to its internal processes. Which, now I’ve written it out longhand, is easily the most laughable idea I’ve ever considered.

The current module, cybercrime, continues. We have thankfully moved away from child sexual abuse material, which is a topic absolutely riven with heartbreak, and into the slightly jollier question of why people commit crimes at all – and specifically, why they commit them on the Internet.¹ It is a genuinely fascinating question, and although the why doesn’t particularly interest me, it helps me get to what does interest me: trying to reduce those harms.

It’s good. It’s tiring, it’s all tiring, but I’ve a holiday booked soon and I can’t wait.

1. I have indeed become the kind of person who capitalises Internet, and moreover the kind of person who will bore you with why that is. ↩︎