Freelance writer. Electronic music obsessive. Displaced leftist. Amateur political commentator.
Hamburg, Germany
Joined August 2010
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One of my favourite pieces for @screenrant last year. A chance to dig into what fascinates me about horror soundtracks; how they "embody the provocative themes of their respective films, abrasive & experimental... similar to horror itself—a misfit genre forever on the fringes."
This is the Screen Rant tribute to horror cinema’s most memorable soundtracks: bit.ly/48LjySV
🎵 Psycho
🎵 Halloween
🎵 A Nightmare On Elm Street
🎵 Tenebrae
🎵 The Thing
🎵 The Shining
🎵 Alien
🎵 Rosemary’s Baby
🎵 Candyman
🎵 Hellraiser
Angus Paterson retweeted
Karl Marx once — very perceptively — wrote:
“Wherever there are political parties each party will attribute every defect of society to the fact that its rival is at the helm of the state instead of itself. Even the radical and revolutionary politicians look for the causes of evil not in the nature of the state but in a specific form of the state which they would like to replace with another form of the state.”
One might add today:
“The revolutionaries now mainly live off the vicarious thrill of the radicals running the existing state.”
Well actually, I think this trend is bad and disturbing. It means that music culture is stagnating and dying! 😭
wsj.com/arts-culture/music/t…
Maybe these kids don't want to get drafted for the fucking military? Particularly considering Germany's relatively recent military misadventures. If I was still in Germany, I would protest. – at Toodyay, Western Australia
Angus Paterson retweeted
The politicos try to claim they’re just protecting people from “harmful material” by regulating social media but the real harm they’re worried about is to their political standing.
The irony is they’ve misdiagnosed the causes of their crisis of authority.
The funniest part about this video is the "microaggressions" she mentions are wholeheartedly, without doubt, just examples of German people doing extemely German things. – at Toodyay, Western Australia
Angus Paterson retweeted
The Firewall certainly highlighted the sense of the old parties treating a plurality of voters’ wishes as unacceptable.
A related mistake was to paint the AfD as an existential threat to democracy. Voters twigged that it was mostly a threat to the old parties’ grip on power.
Both of these things can be true at the same time for the gaming industry. Sweeney speaks in plain language and he's willing to call it what it is. Bromberg argues that in spite of this there are reasons to be optimistic about gaming's endurance over the long-term. – at Australia
Some of these criticisms are made in good faith (rather than straight-up grifting), but they're still ultimately redundant IMO. Are we really saying there's no room for a fresh, subjective take on classic myths? Is this really the sort of lifeless adaptation we wanted from Nolan? – at Gold Coast, Queensland
"The Odyssey" translator Emily Wilson doubles down on criticizing Christopher Nolan's movie, this time calling it "emotionally empty."
“Nolan’s 'Odyssey' is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the ‘apparent magic’ of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.”
“What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.”
(via The Atlantic)
variety.com/2026/film/news/t…
Angus Paterson retweeted
Just keep reminding yourself that it’s the populists who are the petty authoritarians.
🤔
Angus Paterson retweeted
Whether it was the 2015- refugee intake, shutting down nuclear power, enacting the toughest possible climate action, or overturning foreign relations in response to Trump’s rise or the invasion of Ukraine, so many of the German political class’s apparently “progressive” actions in the last 20 years have been the concomitant — and not the contradiction — of its brutal enforcement of harsh austerity measures on poorer European nations after 2008.
With their social bases hollowed out, Germany’s main parties came to rely on being the leaders — economic, political & moral — of an EU project into which they’d escaped as their key source of authority.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost, the once-“miracle” economy in a mess & the old parties dissolving into irrelevance as the AfD surges despite widespread popular suspicion of it.
It's always bizarre when big organisations try to manage their relationship with the media like this, I've experienced it many times. Insisting you tow the line on narratives, and treating you like PR instead of journalists with an obligation to report on something like layoffs.
Earlier today, Insider Gaming received emails from several Ubisoft employees that two of its studios were shutting down and hundreds of employees would be affected. Subsequently, after corroborating said information, we ran with those stories.
This is normal journalism. It's a normal practice - you get news from sources, you corroborate, you try to get a comment from the company, and you publish.
After some of these stories went live, Ubisoft contacted us to say that the information was under an embargo (which IG never received), which, frankly, is weird but understandable, since employees should be told first by their employer. However, before each story went live, the affected teams were informed of the impacts, and that's how we found out; it just wasn't a company-wide announcement yet. Sure, there were probably a few people who were affected and didn't know about the layoffs/changes, but it has NEVER been the media's job to protect a company.
Developers find out about layoffs all the time via the media, and I even know of instances of journalists pursuing a story, texting/emailing developers BEFORE their dreaded all-hands meeting to say they would be laid off in a matter of hours. The fact is, it is shit to report on layoffs, but ultimately, it's a part of our job.
Am I glad we published articles on layoffs today? Hell no. But I am glad that we did what we were supposed to do.
Personally, I think as an industry, we're running into quite dangerous ground when we start abiding by embargoes about layoffs, but even more so when we publish the info like we learned info from sources rather than the company itself... But maybe that's just me.
Angus Paterson retweeted
Met a guy who was fidgeting around the main door, desperation clear in his eyes. I asked him what's up and he's 4 months into his flat search and he just gave me a look of helplessness and said "sometimes people HAVE to move you know?"
Yes, this was me & my former partner in Berlin. We were forced to (peacefully) cohabit for roughly 18 months, after which I bounced around several nightmare sublets before fleeing to Hamburg, while my ex was stuck in an apartment costing 80% of her wage. Absolutely diabolical.
There's a mobile port available of "Alien Isolation", so I've taken the time to start a fresh replay.
It's stunning, and one of the best things I've ever played (and among the best things to emerge from the franchise).
Art design + world building + environmental design = 🔥🔥🔥
The internet actually used to be great, people forget. Online communities, forums, online media with a functioning ad model, popular sites existing that actually aren't Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok, etc...
This is oft discussed, but honestly I never noticed the "German Stare" the entire time I lived in Germany. I think I was just an easier match for the German temperament. – at Western Australia, Australia
Publishers were bending over to accommodate the shitty SEO world that Google created. This utterly corrupted journalism and online content, a weird evolution in service of the tech gods. And then when it suited, Google pulled the rug. – at Western Australia, Australia
