Pete Hindle

I’ve really slowed down on writing things recently, as a lot of energy has been directed towards getting the state to pay me benefits. Unlike my friends, it seems that governance is totally unimpressed at my near-death experience, and I’ve been forced to spend a lot of time filling out forms, making complaints, and talking [...]

Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”…

Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is [...]

I love these shoes! They’re my favourite ever trainers, and I say this as a thirty-one year old man who has owned one pair of ‘proper shoes’ since leaving school. That is a lot of trainers, running the entire gamut of casual foot-covering styles, from skateboard pretentiousness to faux-classy leatherette things. What makes these shoes [...]

Every day that I’m on “the sick” is  extremely stressful. It’s very rare that I don’t need to call up some government department related to the job centre and correct them. This involves playing phone tag with uncaring, bored people in phone centres.
I just got off the phone with Atos, the private healthcare company that [...]

I originally wrote this for the back page of The Crack Magazine (hi Helen!) sometime last summer, but a series of events caused it to disappear for a while. I just remembered where I had a copy, and decided to put it up. Back when I wrote this, Tesco had just taken over the Chillingham [...]

(SuperAmazingDoesItForYou video link)
After a morning spent tussling with installing, then uninstalling Zotero, I’ve finally had it with those instructional videos that software designers create. I think that nothing beats the written word for communication of information, but I’m consistently finding that complex software is being explained by the use of an instructional video.
And usually, that video sucks. Seriously, [...]

I hate and love the way we browse the web.
I’m almost certainly somebody with a high degree of addiction to the written word. It’s not an internet addiction; I was raised in a family that has an unholy veneration for the written word, and the advent of the internet just allowed me a greater access [...]

There’s no need for Trident, the UK’s nuclear weapon delivery system. It’s an expensive waste of time – but not because of the idiotic stupidity of mass destruction.
If North Korea can make nuclear weapons out of sticky-backed plastic, empty washing up bottles, a spare pack of SCUDs, and a giant rabbit, then isn’t it time [...]

I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking [...]

Genevieve Valentine is a writer and essayist, working in the SF area. She also has an obsession with Catherine Cookson TV movies, where high levels of snark are to be found – although this mainly seems to come out on her Livejournal blog.
Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but [...]