Seasons’ greetings, paperinos, and a very merry boxing day to you all!

I hope you’ve been able to enjoy some combination of food, drink, family, friends, rest and nonsense in the last few days. I’ve been having a lovely time in Aotearoa, and am about to head back home to spend a few days at my mum and dad’s place. (I’ll be back in Aotearoa before too long — there’s a tour in the works for April/May, watch this space!)

As promised, the 2024 Wordplay Quiz is now live here! You can get the answers by supporting me on Patreon here, buying the compendium here, or visiting my facebook, instagram or bluesky on 30 December.

That’s about the size of it! I don’t have much else to tell you, save that I hope you have a lovely end of the year and I look forward to seeing you in 2025!

Mwah,

jim xoxo

PS. This is the first Fishwick Papers sent through beehiiv. Did I do it right? Does anything look weird? Let me know!

End-of-the-year Lists

• Paul Fairie’s headline of the year nominees

• The British Film Institute’s best video essays of the year

• The Bulwer-Lytton award for worst hypothetical opening line to a novel

Playing together

• Brendon Bennetts on developing Dungeons and Comedians

• The player-comedians of Untitled Goose Game

• Resolutions to conflict in improv teams

• Party in a shared Google Doc

The Business of Art

• The Disney channel has a youtube problem

• The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s mysterious artists

• Sing Sing director Greg Kwadar’s plans for pay equity

• Report: artists are subsidising audiences’ access to the arts

Online/Offline

• The Pentium as a Navajo weaving

• Facebook auto-generates extremist militia groups

• Random survey responses of most important life events

• Which influencer influenced which? A fascinating lawsuit

Many Noises Of The Week

• The BBC has open-sourced their library of sound effects

Way To Help Of The Week

• Help people trapped at the US-Mexico border

Know someone who would like The Fishwick Papers? Send them to sign up here!

Have a link you think would go well with The Fishwick Papers? Reply to send it to me!

Want to support The Fishwick Papers? Sign up on Patreon!

I live and work on the lands of the Gadigal people. I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and through them to all First Nations people around the country currently called Australia. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Good morning!

How on earth are you? How’ve you been? How’s that project you’ve been working on? Oh yeah, me too, the end of the year has been bananas. Got any plans for the end-of-year break? I hope you get some more time to take it easy at the start of next year, to get stuck back into that project!

Since my last Fishwick Paper (hey, shout out to those of you who were here when this was *weekly*) I’ve:

• been to Aotearoa to co-direct the New Zealand Improv Festival

• had a blast teaching a lot at Improv Theatre Sydney

• tested my new show Grifted and Talented (more of which next year!)

• and finished this year’s Wordplay Quiz, which will be themed around episodes of Bluey. It’s available today over on Patreon, or will be released next Monday in other places, including here.

If you’re in Sydney, I’m doing a big run of shows this week at the beautiful Old Fitz Theatre. My dear friend Maddie Parker and I are two-thirds of The Joy Riders and we’ve a series of special guests to present Joy (Riders) to the World: A Christmas Comedy Caper. It’s going to be a heap of fun, so please do come along (especially tomorrow and Wednesday)

Finally, I know I’ve been on Substack for relatively few issues, but it turns out the management have a fondness for allowing fascists on Substack, so I shall once again be moving the Fishwick Papers to a new home (Beehiiv). If you want to continue receiving the Fishwick Papers, congratulations! You need to do nothing! If you’re a Substack-or-bust kinda person, then unsubscribe by the end of the week and your information shall be lost in the wind and you’ll never hear from me again.

Okay. On with the links.

Images of images

• What is real in the AI photo era?

• IMG_0001: beautiful slices of youtube

• The Pointer Pointer

Stories of stories

• I’m what the culture feeling: a video essay about Drake and Kendrick

• Navel Gazing: a fantastic podcast series from John Dickerson

• The prominent accessibility advocate who never actually existed

• The lie that cost an Irish politician the presidency

The celebrity of celebrities

• Marc Almond of Soft Cell making mince pies

• St Vincent performs for rescue puppies

• Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown

• Chappell Roan confronts the sickness of modern fandom

Iconic movie scene inappropriately rescored of the week

• Breakmaster Cylinder rescores the chase scene from Mad Max Fury Road

Weekly Way To Help

• Fund a kitchen in Gaza

Hey paperinos!

I’m recently back from a month-long trip in Europe, which was part holidaying (which was much needed), part attending my cousin’s wedding (which was gorgeous), and part teaching and performing (which was a blast).

And I’ve come back ready to dive into many more things! Here’s a quick run down!

• This Saturday at Improv Theatre Sydney I’ll be trialling my new show Grifted and Talented (trailer here), inspired by things like Taskmaster, Game Changer and Would I Lie To You?

• I’m also hosting trivia at The Bearded Tit on July 16 and teaching a two-day deep dive into narrative improv on July 20–21!

• Then I’ll be in Brisbane for a week to teach and perform at the Brisbane Improv Festival, before going to Adelaide for a week to teach some workshops and present The Saboteur!

Elsewhere in my life, we’re working hard on this year’s New Zealand Improv Festival (4–12 October in Wellington, watch this space), I’ve been reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and I really enjoyed cycling around Amsterdam so I’m looking to get one of the cool bike locks they had there.

Finally, since it’s been so long between drinks, I realised that I completely forgot to share last year’s Wordplay Quiz all about Terry Pratchett novels. You can find it, along with all the previous year’s quizzes, here.

On with the links!

Terms

• Is corecore radical art or gibberish shitposts?

• A study of preferred terms for body parts in lewd writing

• A guide to international naming practices (very useful resource for writers!)

Films

• Every Best Picture winner ranked by how good a Muppets version would be

• Hollywood forfeits $30 billion a year through racial inequality

• A thorough analysis of title drops in films

Patterns

• The red letter mystery at the Tweed Heads museum

• People don’t book tickets for shows until three days out

• I ate three eggs every single morning for a week. Here’s what happened.

Delayed Virality

• In case you haven’t seen Jenny Nicholson’s Star Wars Hotel video

• A great dance set to Somebody That I Used To Know

• The Louvre ‘imitates’ the Museum Workout

Addictive Browser-based Videogame of the Week

• Infinite Craft

Evening you veritable angels!

I am starting to wind things down for the end of the year, and am very much relishing being in a position to be able to do that. I’ll have one more Fishwick Papers in late December to properly reflect on the year (and share the 2023 Wordplay Quiz), so instead I want to tell you about the few things happening right now!

I’m doing a one-off performance of my award-nominated solo show All The Hallmarks of a Christmas Movie this Friday at Improv Theatre Sydney. It's an improvised festive romantic comedy in the style of (but definitely not breaching the intellectual property of) a major production company who also makes greetings cards. Last time I did it was in late August, so please come along for a more seasonally-appropriate version!

I have a few other shows happening here and there around Sydney this week, details here.

Ooh, and I was chuffed to recently be invited on the Improv Chronicle podcast and absolutely nerd out on improv theory. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into please take a listen!

Finally, my friends at The Barden Party are bringing their new production of Romeo & Juliet to Sydney and Melbourne late this year and early next year. They perform in parks and open-air venues, but their bread and butter is performing in people’s back gardens. If you’d like to book a private show of some raucous and irreverent Shakespeare, I can’t recommend them highly enough!

Now, on with the links

Scene With/Without

• The truth about ‘lesbian erasure’

• A Brooklyn neighbourhood polices itself for five days

• A new tool lets artists poison the data of generative AI

• We made an entire movie without revealing our main character's gender

Time Jump

• How Sydney’s most toxic river is fighting back

• The mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge

• New York invented modern nightlife

• Naming dinosaurs in Te Reo Māori

Status Transition

• The new media goliaths

• Why the internet isn’t fun anymore

• Not feeling lucky: The enshittification of Google

• Starfield is the death of videogames as we know it

Word at a Time

• Explaining Elon Musk’s latest lawsuit in plain English

• A free(!) textbook on the essentials of linguistics

• How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

Supercut Of Things That Contain A Specific Feature Of The Week

• Songs that stop on the word “Stop”

Well hello there!

It’s been a busy few months, believe you me. Between shows, directing, teaching, travel, and a LOT of emails, I’ve been proper out of it. But now I’m BACK! Here are some things I’d like to tell you about! 

We debuted Butterfly Smokescreen, the immersive/interactive play performed on a luxury yacht in Auckland! It went really well (check out what audiences thought of it here). So well, in fact, that we’re bringing it back for another season in late September. If you know somebody in or near Auckland, send them our way!

I can’t remember if I said here, but I’m the Artistic CoDirector of the New Zealand Improv Festival! More excitingly, the programme for the 2023 Festival has been released. It’s a mammoth 30+ workshops and 25+ shows over 9 days in October. Earlybird registrations for workshops are open for a few more days (and look very likely to sell out), so if you’re interested in coming to Pōneke (Wellington) for a week of joy, get in quick!

However, the festival was unsuccessful in the grant funding that we applied for. This means that to deliver the festival to the standard we hold ourselves to, we need some extra help. We’re running a crowdfunding campaign to cover the difference, and thanks to an anonymous donor, every dollar donated will be doubled, up to $10,000. Our amazing supporters have already got us 78% of the way to what we need — if you’re in a position to be able to donate and get us closer to that finishing line, we would really appreciate it!

Finally, I’m doing a show this week as part of the Sydney Fringe! It’s called All The Hallmarks Of A Christmas Movie — each night I’ll be improvising a brand new holiday rom com… by myself. I’m a little daunted, but the rehearsals have been an absolute blast. If you’re in Sydney, I’d love to see you there!

Right. Links time. Let’s do this.

Arty/Facts

• Who’s Afraid of Lorne Michaels?

• The troublesome acting classes of Michèle Lonsdale-Smith

• Orange Is the New Black Signalled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy

Screen/Test

• Mattel, Malibu Stacy, and the Dialectics of the Barbie Polemic

• Women Are Being Pushed Out Of The Tech Industry

• The Puzzle of Putting Videogames in a Museum

• The end of Social Media on the web

In/Out

• The Forgotten Secret Language of Gay Men

• Worth The Risk? Institutions and Queer Erotica

• An interactive dating chart of players in the Women’s World Cup

Wordplay/Horseplay

• A Progressive’s Style Guide

• HORSE POLO TONGUE SWALLOW by Freya Daly Sadgrove

• The Password Game

The most bonkers story about a fast food manager I have ever read Of The Week

• Domenic Broccoli and the Revolutionary War

Goooood morning!I’m writing this from a cafe in Parnell, Auckland. I’m here for a few weeks working on of the most exciting, nerve-wracking and enjoyable projects of my career.

A few years ago I started developing an interactive, immersive theatre show with my friend Laura Irish, later joined by my partner Kirsty. It’s a 1920s Hollywood murder mystery, set and performed on a luxury yacht, based on the real death of hotshot producer Thomas Ince.

We were given funding from a private donor to finish developing the show (and rehearsing and producing it…) on the condition that we opened a two-month season in the first week of June. So, I quit my day job, and two weeks later arrived to start working!

It’s been an absolute dream to work alongside some of my favourite actors and writers to make this een happen. It’s so rare to be working full-time (and let’s be honest, more than full-time) just doing writing and directing and rehearsing and thinking about character and story and how to give the audience an absolutely wild time. Let along to be doing it all on a luxury yacht like the Sea Breeze III.

If you want to find out more about the show, you can listen to my co-director Laura talking to RNZ about it here. If you or somebody you know lives near Auckland, you can find a link to book tickets here.

Alright, I need to get back to wrangling the sprawling script of the show (did I mention the characters are moving between all four levels of the boat?), so in the meantime, allow me to satiate your desire for ol’fashioned links.

The Writers’ Strike

• Why are TV writers so miserable?

• The looming threat of AI to Hollywood, and why it should matter to you

• I highly recommend Going Rogue, whose latest season is on the 2007 writers’ strike

Pop Culture

• The next big weapon in the fight against AI could be wolf cock

• How Uri Geller won a pointless legal fight against Pokémon

• We aren’t ready for Fortnite’s new game engine

Big Numbers

• Explaining the new round of Australian tax cuts

• This video is nine minutes long, not sixty

• An original musical about ZIP CODES

Endings

• Stan Grant explains his departure from the media world

• The Titanic of the Pacific: The sinking of the Valencia

• Dear Araucaria: writing to a crossword compiler

Interview about improv of the week

• The Unscripted Dave Morris

Hello!

It’s a cold rainy day here in Sydney, in the middle of a cold rainy week, and I’m curled up in bed, with a cat at my feet, a song in my heart, and some links to share with you all.

Before I do, some quick updates! First is that I’ve been appointed as the Artistic Co-Director of the New Zealand Improv Festival, which is such a joy. I love this festival and I’m stoked to be taking the helm alongside my dear friend Matt. We’ve just announced the festival dates — 7–14 October this year, in Wellington — so put them in ya diary!

Second, if you’re in Sydney/Eora, I’m putting on two shows in the Sydney Comedy Festival this year. One is the return of The Saboteur on 26 & 28 April at The Factory Theatre. We had the rehearsal for this today, and let me tell you this is one of the more raucous and competitive casts I think we’ve had.

The other show is Crash Test Dummies on 3 & 5 May at The Factory Theatre. It’s a show with two of my favourite collaborators Maddie Parker and Emilia Higgs. The goal that we’ve developed for the show is “I want to make little magical worlds for my two wonderful friends to play in.”

A couple of things have come up recently that make it looks like, for the next few months at least, I’m going to be able to do a lot of very exciting theatre things, and I can’t wait to tell you about them.

But in the meantime, sum lynx:

Building Immersion

• The Rise and Rise of Immersive Art

• How to write an article about the Metaverse

• The Door Problem: explaining the roles of game designers

• The Future Is A Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse

Funding Art

• Australia sees videogames as valuable, but is it just because of money?

• Theatre never recovered from COVID, and it might be too late

• The day United Bank gave Theatresports a million dollars

Gone wrong

• I was a museum’s Black Lives Matter hire

• The school board, the principal, the statue of David

• Disastermind: people who did quite badly on Mastermind

Impropaganda

• Everything you know about Italian food is wrong

• Jon Stewart interviewing Ian Hislop

• The era of military-funded e-girls

Eurovision Dance Party of the Week

• Zoe London on the BBC

There we are! Thank you for reading, stay warm, and I’ll see you next time.

MWAH,

jim xoxo

Good evening paperponis!

It’s a hot ol’ day here in Sydney/Eora. I’m very grateful to be able to work from home and shut all the blinds and hide away from the world.

A quick update for those of you in Melbourne/Naarm: I’m bringing my improv show The Saboteur to The Butterfly Club later this month! It features a stellar cast of fantastic people, all prepared to accuse each other of subterfuge. If you’re very quick (read: book before midnight tonight), you might still be able to get Early Bird tickets, otherwise you can easily get Regular Bird tickets. I’d love to see you (and ten of your friends) there!

In the meantime, on with the Paper Proper:

Feeling yourself

• The quest for a dumber phone

• Quit the books and shows you’re not into

• Whatever happened to Honeysuckle Divine?

Animals

• The important and extensive history of Frod

• How human is the name of your dog?

• This Is Fine turned 10 years old

• How to draw a horse

Fixing things

• Strangely retroactively edited Things

• Designing safe public spaces for teenage girls

• Ryuichi Sakamoto was annoyed by Restaurant Playlists

Constraints and the Breaking Thereof

• Smoke and Mirrors: revealing the magic tricks of virtual worlds

• The Tate Modern ruling that could impact cities’ privacy

• How the bottle episode has changed over time

Adaptation of Interview Clips into a Style Parody of an Unrelated Artist of the Week

• Eminem as a Talking Heads song

And there you have it! Some rinky-dink links. As ever, your thoughts on this week’s paper, or suggestions for interesting reads for future papers, are gratefully welcomed! And don’t forget to tell a friend that they should sign up for The Fishwick Papers, especially if you think they’re the sort of person who would like it. That would be swell, thank you!

MWAH,

jim xoxo

Good afternoon!

It’s a bold new age for The Fishwick Papers. We enter 2023 having moved our operations over to Substack. This really changes very little about what will be in the papers, but should make the distribution side of things much more straightforward. A round of applause please for TinyLetter, for lasting longer than any of us thought.

I’m currently relishing the week between Christmas to New Year where time loses all meaning. We’re staying at my mum and dad’s in the outer suburbs of Sydney, watching the cricket, eating Summer Pudding, and getting through books at a rate of knots.

A few quick things to update you on! First, my annual wordplay quiz came out last Friday, this year themed around Board Games. You can find this year’s quiz here, and you can download a collection of all the quizzes for pay-what-you-want here (including charming new design and layout by Ellie Featherston).

Second, there’s a Chrismas special of my podcast I Get That A Lot with Father Chris Bedding. I think it’s quite a special interview, looking at jokes about ‘Bedding’, the haunting of printers in churches, and the way people view faith workers. You can find the episode here or in your favourite pod places.

Anyhow, to some good ol’-fashioned links!

Prose

• Who let out Shakespeare’s dogs of war?

• 'I missed my chance to tell Buster Keaton he was a genius

• Writing My Community’s History Helps Me Chart Our Better, Brighter Future

Shows

• This New Noise: A Sonic History of the BBC by Public Service Broadcasting

• A play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. No, not that one.

• Theatre I.N.C. — A Wero For Stage Productions

Flows

• The Continuity of Splines

• Four Tet on his 155-hour Spotify playlist

• Does time really flow? New clues from an old approach to maths.

Gross

• Thanks to AI it’s probably time to take your photos off the internet

• Using reaction gifs is over (davidtennantrain.gif)

• Swimming in it: Art and (Im)morality

Scottish Pop Culture Poetry Of The Week

• Batman’s Aff His Nut by Robert Florence

Well. There we are. New links, new year, new us. Have a splendid week and I’ll be back with more for you soon.

MWAH,

jim xoxo

Good afternoon!I'm in Brisbane. I've just had a delightful few days performing The Saboteur with my friends at Big Fork Theatre, and teaching some workshops with my friends at Impro Mafia. But I've also been enjoying a little bit of a holiday, after a busy few weeks, and have spent a lot of time catching up on the European Athletics Championships. That's an important thing to tell you: I've gotten really into watching athletics in the last year or so, and nobody is more surprised by this than me, believe you me.Also I want to tell you: The Sydney Fringe is coming up! I'm involved in a few shows, but I'll stick to two of them for now. First is Crash Test Dummies, an improv show where me, Maddie Parker and Emilia Higgs stress-test comedy for your safety. It's on this Wednesday and Friday at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville, and I'm very, very much looking forward to it.And then second is that The Museum of This Morning is getting its Australian debut! I interview audience members about the things they did on the day of the show, and weave them into an onstage exhibition. It's on September 27 and 28, in a rather-bigger-than-expected venue, so please tell your friends about it.OH and if you're in the UK, Only Connect is back on your television screens this week. We're in the right half of the year again.Anyway, for now, some lynx:

Working

• Universities are the next Uber

• The man responsible for Batman's nipples in Batman and Robin

• A health-first approach for rehearsing & performing in Aotearoa New Zealand

Doing Improv

• Groupmind, or lack thereof: can improv be inclusive?

• Working for the Weekend at UCB Theater

• The Schnozzle isn't what it used to be

Playing

• Pokemon cards through the ages

• The amazing advances in competitive Tetris

• Click Whir Ping: the lost sounds of loading videogames

Posting

• How we broke the old internet

• How blogs broke the web

• Nobody shares anymore

Subscription Box Of The Week

• The Awesome Black Box

Tada! Some things to read! If you enjoy The Fishwick Papers, please consider joining my Patreon to support the making of it, or simply spread the word and send a friend to sign up. Thoughts and submissions are always welcome — reply to this email and they'll come straight to me.Have a lovely week,MWAH,jim x 

Evening, pretzels!I hope you're warmer than I am on this brisk Sydney evening. Since last we spoke, Kirsty and I have moved into our new apartment here in Sydney/Eora. It's exquisite to have a definite place together, by ourselves — in the past two and a half years I've lived in something like nine different places, only one of which has been just the two of us. So it's nice to have a spot that we can settle into for a while.When I moved to Aotearoa in 2020, almost all our stuff from our flat in Melbourne/Naarm went into storage. But when we moved down there in late 2017, we had put some other things into storage to save space. Same deal when we moved house in 2016. So now we've gotten everything out of storage, and we're trying to figure out how to piece together the echoes of who we were two, five and six years ago, alongside who we are now.And on top of all that, just the other week I got covit. Hurray! Fortunately, my symptoms were very mild and I'm feeling right as rain again. And coincidentally, it's been raining quite a lot since I recovered, so I haven't even really been able to enjoy going outside again.Anyway. Enough of that. Time for some links.

Small Details

• Absurd Trolley Problems

• Can't Unsee: A Game of Design Decisions

• The 7.17 gigapixel photo of Rembrandt's Night Watch

Creativity

• How to appear very good at improv when you are in fact average at best

• Just how much squelching is in Stranger Things Season 4?

• AI writing has entered a new dimension

Investigations

• The field of firearms forensics is flawed

• The Mainstream Media Lost the Depp-Heard Trial

• The Mysterious Affair of the Harrowgate Literary Society

Delightful Linguistics Paper of the Week

• The Perception of Rhythm in Language — Anne Cutler

As a quick interlude: if you're a citizen or resident of the UK, I would encourage you to give feedback on the government's proposal to reintroduce imperial measurements to shops. It takes five minutes or so, and you can do it here.

And what do you know, that's another Fishwick Paper in the books! Ruminations on this paper's inclusions and recommendations of inclusions for future papers are always gladly received. If you know someone who would like this, please send them this link where they can sign up.Until next time, be good, or sinful, or somewhere in between, just do it the most.MWAHjim x

Good evening!Here in Sydney things have suddenly taken a very chilly turn. Winter is back with us!I've been keeping busy, tootling along with a number of creative projects. If you happen to be in Sydney, this Friday (tomorrow) I'm performing a new show Stories Untold of London Unseen in Redfern, then Saturday and Sunday see the Sydney debut of my intrigue-filled improv format The Saboteur in Marrickville. Please come along and/or tell a friend!Also, a quick recommendation: I recently read First You Write A Sentence by Joe Moran, and it's just about the finest book about writing I've ever read. If you write words in any capacity, I found it absolutely captivating and infatuating.Anyway. To the links!

Dis-data

• The death of the computer file

• The oxymoron of 'Data-driven innovation'

• How the AI industry profits from catastrophe

• 'Algospeak' is changing our language in real time

Dis-arts-ter

• Want to make art? You better be rich.

• The campaign to destroy the arts

• Arts education in crisis

Misc-aster

• Are comedians more prone to mental health issues?

• How Games Marketing invented Toxic Gamer Culture

• The (warning: gruesome) story behind Macdonaldtown Station

And then some nice retro things to balance it all out

• Introducing the Stevie-Nicks-inspired whimsigothic trend

• It's fun to remix modern songs like old songs

• A playable history of electronic music

Unusual Linguistics Study of The Week

• Labov's 1966 study involving a rabbit in a coat

And there! Another Fishwick Paper! If you enjoy The Fishwick Papers, please consider joining my Patreon to support the making of it, or simply spread the word and send a friend to sign up. Your submissions of nifty-ish things that you've found, not to mention your thoughts on any of the links contained in this missive, are also more than welcome: simply reply to this email.Go be brilliant,MWAHjim x

HULLO!As I so boldly foretold in my last Fishwick Paper, I have moved to Sydney/Eora! I made it! I'm now settling in, looking for a place to live, sniffing out some job and show opportunities and generally having a very pleasant time of it all. Because of the move, I don't have a tremendous amount of other things to tell you about (as of yet. stand by for the NEXT email which will be CHOCKERS) so I'm going to dive right into the fourteen links that I want to tell you about.

Truths and Lies

• Robert Pattinson is a liar

• The deepfakes are taking over LinkedIn

• The ugly truth of how movie scores are made

Generations

• time absorbs the feelings it produces: a chaotic, generative ficto-essay

• Automated dystopia and the worst tourist attraction of all time

• Bridgerton and the great myth about corsets

Antagonists

• Disney’s queer characters won’t hide its funding of real villains

• The Fine Line Between Illness and Madness in Gotham

• Trapped In A Cabin With Lord Byron, the RPG

• All Of My Facebook Ads Are Horrifying

The people who make things and the way they are made and the people who receive the things that are made by the people who make things

• Array Collective, The Turner Prize, and critics

• At SXSW, a pathetic future struggles to be born

• Joan Didion and the opposite of magical thinking

Addictive little game of the week

• Wikitriva

Aaaand that will do us for now. If you enjoy The Fishwick Papers, please consider joining my Patreon to support the making of it, or send a friend to sign up. Please feel free to send interesting things to include, or to share your thoughts on this edition by replying to this email.Otherwise, have a splendid ol' time, and I'll see you in my next email!MWAH,jim x

Hello!Welcome to an email. Put your feet up. Or down. Wherever's going to be most comfortable for you. I have here in my hot little hands a collection of things that I have read or watched and been interested by in the last little bit. Before we get into that, though, a few updates!First: I'm moving to Sydney/Eora! If you live there and would like to catch up, or have a project you think I'd be a good fit for, please do let me know!Second: there are some new episodes out of my podcast I Get That A Lot with award-winning playwright Benny Marama and The Hacker Known As "Alex". I also have a few appearances in the new audio series Radio EUGH! Episode 1 and Episode 2 are available now!Third: times are tough out there. Okay, that's not really an update, but it's a link into me suggesting that, if you have the means, please consider donating to people in Ukraine, Palestine, Texas, or somewhere else where things are hard.ANYWAY. Please enjoy a selection of linkaroonies right here!

Big Crimes

• The mystery of Jimmy The Pig

• Line Goes Up - the problem with NFTs

• What is happening to women's figure skating?

Hustling

• You're Beyoncé's assistant for the day. DON'T GET FIRED!

• The new breed of creative commons superpredators

• Fringe World is one big hustle

The Online People

• West Elm Caleb and the feminist panopticon

• The 'metaverse' is a new name for an old idea

• Talking Bretbug in the strategic political classroom

Words

• How America developed worries about 'no worries'

• Matcha: a game about the Korean alphabet

• Can a Swedish pronoun cure sexism?

Musical Diagram of the Week

• Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Ta-da! A baker's dozen of little nifty bits. I hope you enjoyed them. If you did, please consider joining my Patreon, or send a friend to sign up! I'd also love to hear your thoughts, the links you liked, or any interesting links you find in your travels.Thank you for reading, have a lovely week,I LOVE YOUjim x

Good Friday to you!I'm writing to you in between a day of writing and working away at my projects, and a night where I'll be hosting a trivia night, which I'm looking forward to. I'm starting to get a sense for what the next few months will be like and it's all looking quite exciting! More on that soon.In the meantime, there's a new episode of I Get That A Lot with all-round joy Bridie Connell!And in the meantime before that, here are some links to interesting things!

Colourful little blobs

• Wordle is a love story

• The most frequently used emoji of 2021

• Circus and philosophy: teaching Aristotle through juggling

Seeing yourself

• Glance Back: capturing the time between you and your computer

• Why do we call our celebrities our sons?

• The black vanguard in white utopias

Living in old buildings

• Introducing royalcore, the aesthetic taking over TikTok

• The managed destruction of Australia's oldest Faculty of Arts

• From museums' statements of solidarity to transformative action

List of the best video essays of 2021 of the week

• The BFI's list of the best video essays of 2021

And now it is time to end the newsletter. If you enjoy The Fishwick Papers, please consider joining my Patreon to support the making of it, or send a friend to sign up. Please feel free to send interesting things to include, or to share your thoughts on this edition by replying to this email.Until next week,MWAH,jimPS. here's a lovely little bit of writing about cooking 

Good afternoon and Happy New Year!I hope Things are treating you kindly, given their unparallelled ability to Thing all over the Thing. I'm starting the year with a few weeks of finishing off projects, and having a bit of a creative retreat time before everything starts back up at full steam in a few months. Maybe.Before we get to the paper proper, I have some quick things I would like to tell you about that have come out in the last month!Firstly, my podcast I Get That A Lot has started its second season! Each episode someone tells us about the annoying jokes other people make about their name. The first two episodes this season feature James Colley and Mimosa Shah, and can be found in all your favourite pod places.Secondly, I've been a fan of the reporting over at polygon dot com for many years, and I'm very excited to have my first article there, about how Hobbiton has impacted the nearby town of Matamata.Finally, in case you missed it, at the each year I put out a wordplay quiz, of punny and reasonably nerdy clues, which this year all point to Agatha Christie novels. It's a bit of fun to be solved on the couch with your friends and family. You can get just this year's here, or you can get all of them (pay what you want) here. 

Interpersonal Relationships

• The Art of the Boyfriend 'Soft Launch'

• A missing work that could have changed videogames entirely

• My friend's life was ruined (for a while) by a kitchen makeover show

International Relationships

• Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther

• Shein beats Amazon at their own game

• Manifest: tracking supply chains

Intertextual Relationships

• Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith

• Have we forgotten how to read critically?

• Pokemon and the first wave of digital nostalgia

Industrial Relationships

• The battle for Bungie's soul: a studio searching for a better culture

• The legislation that failed to stop sex trafficking

• The cult of the middleman

Darcy of the week

• 65 years of Mr Darcy proposing

There we are, that'll do for now. I'll send you another missive in a few weeks, but in the meantime, if you enjoy The Fishwick Papers, please consider joining my Patreon to support the making of it, or simply spread the word and send a friend to sign up.Stay safe, keep at it, tell someone you love them,I love you!jim x 

Godo evening!I was going to change the godo to good, but then something about it spoke to me. It's pretty.Over here we've been out of lockdown now for a few weeks, and that happened to coincide with me picking up quite a lot of freelance work, which was both very pleasing, but also suddenly quite overwhelming – I wasn't used to having one thing due in a week, let alone many!They're mostly over, now, and I've been able to work on a few more of my own projects. As such! You can expect to see the second season of my podcast I Get That A Lot in a week and a bit, and also my annual Wordplay Quiz (see previous years' quizzes compendiated here).BUT I also have a healthy reservoir of things I want to share with you, and without further delay, here they ARE:

Scams

• Billionaires are using sports teams as a tax dodge

• Figuring out the 'post a pet, plant a tree' scheme on Instagram

• How the creator of 'Inspector Gadget' ended up at the hart of crypto-finance

Career Changes

• Meet David Correos: the Taskmaster contestant Who Snapped

• How come so many museum director jobs are empty?

• The Detective Agency - Jonny and The Baptists

Histories

• Twitter thread of the most popular song of each decade

• The true cost of The Lord of the Rings: 1 billion dollars and counting

• A personal essay about a misguided junior high production of Company

The New Thing Is The Old Thing Is The New Thing

• The connection between Marvel's Loki series and Tarkovsky's Stalker

• An essay from 2014 predicting the next decade of culture wars

• Gen Z are acting like boomers when it comes to chain mail

Cake Video Analysis of the Week

• Horrific Storytime Cake Decorating videos are being aimed at kids

So there we are, fifteen new things for you to go have a looky-loo at. I've got to go cook dinner now, but please do tell me which of these are your favourites and please get in touch if you have any suggestions for things I should include next time!As always, this newsletter is supported by my delightful Patreon backers, please consider joining them! Or if that's not your thing, then maybe go tell a friend to sign up.Have a grand ol' week,jim xoxoxo 

Good Evening!Here I stand, in front of you, ready to send you eight links to things of various halloween relevancy. In between now and then, though, I would like to provide you with an update of everything that's changed in my life in the weeks of lockdown between now and my previous email:Well, now that's out of the way, here are the links!

Someone's There

• Seance: an immersive audio experience for one

• Neighbourhoods Watched: The rise of surveillance in New Orleans

Haunted Housing

• Demi Adejuyigbe delivers a new song from Ray Parker Jr

• The great divide of the New Zealand housing market

Same Same But Different

• How and why Netflix customises its thumbnails: a twitter thread

• The explosion of exhibitions about Vincent Van Gogh

Poetry

• 'What is a poem?' by Mark Grist

• 'Ash' by Tracy K. Smith

Ta-da! There we go. I'll go back to tinkering with my projects, but I hope you have a lovely week and I look forward to sending you more things soon. If you enjoy The Fishwick Papers, please consider joining my Patreon to support the making of it, or simply spread the word and send a friend to sign up.In the meantime, stay safe,Yours sincerely,jim x