Jared Shurin's Blog

I was back in Kansas City briefly, and although a whirlwind trip, I did manage to sneak in visits to three different BBQ joints: Jack Stack (twice), Q39 and Joe’s Kansas City.

Jack Stack is not my favorite - my sister really likes it, because she swears by the sides. I had a rib-related disappointment there on my last visit, so I don’t trust them for those any more, and stick to the sandwiches. Given that I rate ribs above all other forms of BBQ, that’s the equivalent of the scene in a cop drama...

I am giving a talk at TEDxBristol on 8 November! 

It will, genuinely, actually, for real, be about how BBQ is the solution to some of the world’s trickiest problems…

Bad guy is cooking hot and fast with that sword.

The meme really says it all.

There’s a whole day of talks! I’ve had previews of most of them, being that we’re a pretty chatty cohort, and every one I’ve seen has been excellent. If you just want to pop in for one session (perhaps the third one), I’m sharing the evening slot with Romy Gi...

I received an email last week from Typepad, announcing that they are shutting down their whole platform, effective the end of September. Back up yer assets before they are lost to the seas of time, etc.

I have been a Typepad user since it first began. In 2006, I had outgrown our primitive Blogger- based blog and needed to port it over somewhere. At the time, it was either Typepad or WordPress. The reason I went for the former was largely confidence (or lack thereof). I had, at the time, my domain...

Some literary contributions, a belated event mention, a few things I had nothing to do with, and - of course - a BBQ update.

Make-Believe and Artifice

Make-Believe and Artifice, by Rose Biggin, publishing September 9th from NewCon Press

Rose’s long-overdue inaugural collection. Fifteen absolutely brilliant stories from an immensely talented writer. I don’t really have the words to describe Rose’s work (awkward, what with contributing the book’s foreword), because she is - in the absolute best of wa...

Well, my last newsletter, umpteen weeks ago, was a moan about declining readership. Then I went silent for ages. I’m aware probably looks like I was off on a massive sulk. Far from it!

First, everyone was LOVELY. The number of kind emails I received were really touching. I really wasn’t feeling sorry for myself - honest! I’m aware that newsletters, like podcasts, are notoriously non-transparent. Given the state of the internet (RIP), I think owned channels are all the more important, especially ...

Cast your mind back to January, my decision to enact Project V and trial the ‘dot-dot-dash’ format: weekly rambles and a monthly deep dive. Ten weeks later, the results are in, and they aren’t great.

summons back all the planners who had been totally excluded from the process since writing the creative brief

Let’s start with the data, and, oh.

The Boob of Doom

Well, that’s probably not good.

I don’t conduct exit interviews. However, I think it is safe to guess that:

Some readers that...

This year, I’m supplementing weekly newsletters with a monthly ‘long read’. This month’s comes courtesy of Dr Paul Graham Raven, who is oft-quoted in this newsletter. I was very pleased when he offered his thoughts on ‘fandom intensity’. Comments and questions? Let me know, and I’ll include them next week. Now, over to Paul…

I have a hypothesis which explains the difference in intensity that Jared recently noted between fandoms attached to science fiction and/or fantasy franchises and fandoms att...

What’s the most controversial TV episode ever, and why? 

Genuinely fascinating, and, at 1,500+ responses, I’m not the only one that thinks so. (As an aside, this is the sort of open-ended question that used to do really well on Twitter back when Twitter was Twitter. That platform’s UI changes have now made it useless: broken threading, no searchability, no ‘save-ability’. Also, y’know, Nazis.)

The two things that struck me are:

a) wow, there’s a lot of ‘classic’ television that I’ve not seen

b) al...

In The Matrix, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains to Neo that the world is crappy because humans wanted it that way. The AI overlords initially created a different, kinder version of the Matrix. (The all-subsuming virtual reality that keeps humans engaged while they serve as batteries for their AI overlords.) (Uh, spoilers?)

That first edition, according to Smith, was a perfect world:

But humans didn’t believe it.

We couldn’t live in peace and harmony because, Smith posits, we’re inherently des...

Given we had our first ‘dash’ last week, I’m making this a shorter one.

From Chelsea:

Via Matt:

(Matt and I exchange emails routinely, and this might be the only printable one.)

Elsewhere, another tick on the old bucket list. Video Games Industry Memo did a dive into ‘why politics is obsessed with Civilization’ and as someone on the outskirts of the former and deep into the latter, I got to give a quote or six.

Also obligated to point out that my editorial partner-in-crime, Mahvesh Murad, does a ver...