Enjoyed this album. I wasn’t really aware of St Vincent before seeing her perform Los Ageless on a couple of TV shows, but I was keen to hear the full album. I don’t think it was as outstanding as I thought it would be, but certainly enjoyable from start to finish. The two singles stand out, and I really like Slow Disco although think it’s been slightly ruined by the Fast Slow Disco version.

So there are two things I should admit before continuing. Firstly, I was keen to watch this mostly because I have a soft spot for the Zefron. Secondly, I’ve always been a bit sceptical of what DJs do. Put together a track, sure, but that whole reading the room thing… hmm.

We sort of stumbled across this as a bonus - it’s not available on iTunes but Mr C was very excited to see it pop up on Netflix because it was a bit of a trailblazer in terms of CGI. So we embarked on a viewing, and oof, it was good.

I’ll admit, my podcast listening habits these days are like a rollercoaster. Some weeks I listen to barely anything, other weeks I am re-subscribing to shows and listening non-stop. It’s an adventure. One show that has been with me for a while, though, is NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. I’m a little way behind on it, but actually that works in my favour, because I’m also quite far behind on the culture they are covering.

I really loved this. It’s a superbly strong but simple, gentle but deep coming-of-age story that has so many layers you could probably tell a hundred different stories from it. The story it does tell though is lovely, and told in a fabulously fast-paced manner. You skip from scene to scene and there’s barely a moment to take stock.

Mulder and Scully popped up on a radio stream I was listening to and I thought it would be fun to listen to a full album, but actually it turns out I was only really bothered by the two main singles. I had that weird feeling, too, when you know someone’s super distinctive voice for just one or two songs, then you hear them singing other stuff, it sounds really odd!

This is a really good, strong pop album, some nice songs from Bebe, but I have to be honest, it wasn’t all that memorable. I’ve forgotten pretty much all of it only a day or two after the last time I listened to it. Also, it feels like she popped Meant to Be on the end begrudgingly, whereas it actually would have fit earlier in the track listing quite nicely.

I remembered seeing this before and enjoying it quite a lot but when we came to watch it, I couldn’t really remember the intricacies of what it was all about. I was glad for that, as the joy of everything unfolding is part of the fun - how the people all intertwine with each other and the mess-ups, mix-ups and machinations of mobs continue to add layers of complexity to a good story.

This was exactly what I thought it would be, and perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon when you want something simple to enjoy. It’s not as good as the highs of Chicken Run or the wonder of Wallace and Gromit, but it’s a nice story with some fun dialogue and occasional moments of comedy bronze!

I really enjoyed this collection of writings from the wonderful Nora Ephron, as they cover a variety of topics from aging and death, to the wonders of living in New York City. The pieces vary in length and subject matter but all have that warm, open and frank feeling that you are being told home truths in a very direct but also somehow comforting fashion.

I’ve read this book at least a couple of times before, and although I remembered it quite fondly, I couldn’t totally remember how the events unfolded. This readthrough was a little different to those that have gone before - I found the set-up a little convenient and some of the dialogue a little clunky, particularly anything involving Steve’s parents.

I vaguely remember being disappointed by the last R.E.M. album I listened to - good songs, obviously, but not a cohesive work that I liked. This time, I really dug it. The singles stand out, as always happens with such classic songs, but the rest of the tracks fill in really well to make it a good listen from start to finish.

I quite liked the last album I listened to by deadmau5, it wasn’t my usual kind of thing but I really got on with the dance beats. This one was a bit of a departure from that and it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. Good songs, but they’re all the same thing and with the guest vocalists it wasn’t so much dance music as just one actual song done six different ways. Good, but not great.

I loved this! Oddly, I wasn’t really hugely looking forward to it one way or the other, but I was invested almost instantly and loved every second of it. I think it probably works a lot better if you have played at least one but preferably both of the rebooted games, because there was so much in there that comes from the games, it was a joy to be reminded every step of the way.

I’ll own up and admit I only watched the OJ trial mini-series because it had David Schwimmer in it, but by the end of the series I was totally gripped and astounded at how events played out. I’ve previously read OJ’s slightly bizarre quasi-confessional book, and thought reading the other side of the story would be interesting too.

I’ve long been intrigued by the UK’s National Trails. They are long distance footpaths scattered around the UK that follow historical or geographical patterns, like Hadrian’s Wall, the Thames, or the best of the lot, the South West Coast. The South West Coast Path is the best of the lot because, as it says in the title, it follows the coast – and the sea is the best geographical feature there is. It also tracks through some of the most beautiful areas, with the gorgeous Cornish beaches, Devon cliffs, and the lovely Jurassic coast.

Yay for the third album along my journey through the history of Johnny Cash. Whilst this is very similar to the previous two albums, I felt like I preferred it to the second record but not quite as much as the first. Good songs, great guitar work, and nice rhythms that keep you entertained. What’s not to like?

Really loved Sanctify when it was released, so was keen on hearing the rest of the album, and it lived up to my expectations. A really solid pop work, with many of the feelings from Sanctify spread across the rest of the songs. I think it didn’t quite get into my soul as much as it should have on only two listens, so I may have to listen a few more times, but otherwise a winner.

Really interesting film, this one, and yet another movie that gives me plenty of lessons in history to shore up my woeful store of knowledge. You can’t go wrong with Hanks and Streep, they were both excellent in their roles that showed very different sides to the newspaper industry and how they converged to fight the good fight for the free press.

Ah, what a lovely little film. It took a little while to settle into the back and forth nature of the storytelling, from the happy days plunging into the dark moments as quick as snapping your fingers. But once you’re in the story, you need to know what happens next so it doesn’t matter which bit of the narrative comes next.

I’ve long been of the mind that AR is a far greater useful tool to humanity than VR will ever be - particularly since I had a go on the PlayStation VR equipment for just a couple of minutes and subsequently had to lie down for half an hour. That being the case, I’m trying to keep an eye out for awesome developments in AR apps, and PeakFinder is one of those.

In my adventures with Swift programming, I mentioned the R2-D2 toy/gadget that you can bring home and programme yourself. When I wrote about it, it was a delicious want rather than a need, but somehow over the course of a sunny few days off, I ended up with the very same Artoo bluetoothing himself to my iPad. I’ve only been playing for a little while but first impressions are: This is the cutest thing ever! It bleeps and bloops, the tripod wheel comes in and out and it whizzes around making that scream noise that R2-D2 is so famous for. You can control it via a Sphero app, which makes it more of a remote control style toy, or you can actually sit down and programme it.

I have, during the course of writing on this blog, mentioned many times the ways and means I am enjoying Wimbledon - whether that is indulging in endless TV and radio streams, analysing what options are available on various app stores, or even being lucky enough to attend the tournament itself. This year, I am firmly back in my armchair, and have even indulged in a couple of days off work to ensure I capture as much of the opening matches as I possibly can.

I really enjoyed this film, laughed almost constantly from start to finish. It’s kind of your standard comedy, but what I liked about it was that it was a unique idea, it felt fresh and original rather than the derivative comedies we have come to know more recently. I also liked that, whilst not all the jokes were high quality, they didn’t have to sink to the level of constant (and boring) d**k jokes.

George’s second album very quickly became one of my all-time favourites, so I wanted to see what the debut effort was like. I really enjoyed this too, although I think I prefer the second one as a complete piece of work. Loving Ezra’s relaxed summer-time feel though, it just fits the mood at the moment perfectly.

I’ve not always been a Florence fan, but the latest single Hunger had really turned me around so I wanted to check out the rest of the album. I’m not sure it lived up to the lead single, really, it was a mellow listen but didn’t really capture my attention as I’d hoped it might. Also, a couple of the tunes were so reminiscent of the music on Westworld that it was quite distracting. Hunger is still a winner though.

So, I mentioned Swift Playgrounds recently and thought I would share more of my experience with the app. I tweeted a summary that basically covered my history with trying to learn Swift.

Very intriguing film, this one. I had seen an early trailer which suggested both Matt and Kristen take the path to the small life, so the fact that she bailed early came as quite a surprise. It also meant the film took a completely different path to the one I was expecting - and the claims in the intro that it is a big comedy don’t sit well with me. It was fun, but I don’t know that it was particularly funny.

I’m writing this post in the Ulysses writing app which, I just learned, can connect to Wordpress and publish posts directly without having to interface with the awful Wordpress app. This is potentially the final stage in the “using the iPad for pretty much everything you need to do”, for which I have written a post previously and intend to write an update on very soon. And just to fully test, here’s a recent picture from the beach.

I was expecting this to be quite like the Molly Bloom film, based as it is on a real life Winter Olympics athlete going slightly rogue. But actually, it wasn’t like that at all - it was packed full of dark humour, characters speaking to camera, disagreements about whether things actually happened or not, and a generally slightly lighter tone.

I like this album because it’s familiar to me, I know most of the songs, and listened to it quite a lot when I was younger. It’s not good though. This is the pinnacle of manufactured pop, and that shines through from start to finish. I think Hear’Say came too late in the pop cycle to really have any major success - they were more of a nineties band but hit in the early 2000s. Earlier, they might have done better, but as it is, we’ll have to put up with Monday Monday being the best they can do.

A good, solid album this one, but perhaps a little bit on the depressing side - whilst I quite like the defiance of Don’t Give In (a really good song), there’s also a track called ‘What If This Is All The Love You Ever Get?’ which really was as downbeat a listen as you might imagine. Good album though, you just have to be in exactly the right mood for it.

We watched the Westworld edition of Carpool Karaoke yesterday, and thought “Yea, I know there’s a Paul McCartney one out but it can’t be as good as this.” Evan and James had great chemistry, great fun and got up to some fab antics with bonus Westworld memes thrown in there for good measure. So, we turned to the Paul McCartney and James Corden episode and… well, we couldn’t have been more wrong, could we?

I’m currently working my way through the various options for learning how to code via Swift Playgrounds, and branched out recently to the standalone session that lets you adapt a version of the well known game Rock Paper Scissors. The demo first lets you play the game so you can see how it works, then it asks you to personalise the game with a variety of options. I think it wants you to pick the colours that each player uses and perhaps adjust the hue of the background, but I went for a slightly more ambitious personalisation scheme.

Tricky little film this one. They did a good job airbrushing one actor for another, and the seams were barely visible, but it does feel like they were focusing so much on that aspect that somewhere along the way the rest of it got lost.

In stark contrast to the low-key Lily Allen I listened to the same week, Madness are just a barrel of fun. A lot of it sounds the same, it all has the same reggae beat underneath and you just go along for the ride - great fun.

I’ve only recently realised how much I like Lily’s work so far, and this album is another great addition to her body of work. It’s slightly different to what has gone before, though, and has a much more mellow quality than the rest. It’s also quite depressing, if you listen to it all in one go, very much instilling the loneliness and restlessness that Lily must have been feeling at the time throughout the tracks.

I wasn’t too bothered about the TV series of this, but saw that before I read the book. Finishing the book it didn’t add or take away a lot from what I had seen on screen - the two matched each other quite closely, although I can see areas where the drama was ratcheted up for the TV show, like the hot tub situation.

I didn’t know anything about this story before seeing the film, so it was something of a revelation! It was a fascinating tale and definitely one worth knowing about. It was good to be able to get through the whole film without being disappointed in our knowledge of poker - we have none but everything was explained that needed to be explained.

This was SO GOOD. Great story, fabulous actors, a new spin on the superhero tales we’ve seen so many times now. It does, unfortunately, suffer from being part of the Marvel universe in that we just can’t remember anything anymore and all the nuances are lost. But that aside, as a standalone film, it’s incredible.

I was all ready to write a glowing post about how much I love the Apple Design Awards that take place during WWDC week, but it turns out I have already done this, two years ago! Back then, I was looking for more from the Apple crew in terms of discoverability of the best apps out there and their update to the app store to include a great Today tab has done just that. Featuring stories, lists, behind the scenes videos and more, it’s a nice way to find new content, or learn more about apps you already use.

Been a little while since we watched a film so wanted to ease ourselves back in with something kinda mindless - you know, Neeson flexing his specialist skills as always.

Really loved this, obviously, some of the great songs from the great man all packaged up in one neat album. I actually knew a few more of the songs than I thought I did which made it even better. But really, marching along the streets on a sunny lunchtime walk, with Bad blaring in your ears is basically as good as it gets.

I was really looking forward to this debut release from Jorja, as the huge coverage she’s had on Beats 1 has hyped me up as intended. I was really impressed with the album, it’s very mellow, chilled out and easy to listen to. I thought it went a little bit warbly in places, but for the most part a really great album from Jorja.

I’m kind of in two minds about this one. On the one hand, I started reading thinking this was an absolutely absurd situation to have ended up in. But on the other hand, you sort of can see how it would happen - particularly as our characters appeared to have feelings for each other right at the start of the relationship - complicated though they may have been.

In direct contrast to my post this week about struggling to care for the Westworldian robots, now I’m all over-excited at the thought of this Transformer’s spin-off featuring the one and only Bumblebee. Of course, part of that is because Haiz is in it, but equally, it’s hard not to love that big yellow beast, isn’t it? I wonder why I care more about the machine with headlights for shoulders than the one that looks and feels and is acted by a human being.

I started watching West World after a recommendation from a colleague. The last time this happened, Mr C and I became totally and thoroughly obsessed with The Big Bang Theory and this time looked set to be no different. We both sat down to watch it and loved it. The intriguing concept, glossy visuals, great cast, musical puzzles, twisting narrative and never-ending feeling of wondering where it was all going, these all added up to a great viewing experience. Even the occasional overly violent scene was an acceptable compromise for the greatness of everything else.

We suddenly realised that most of the Les Mills tracklists are propped up by Fall Out By and Panic! at the Disco so it was about time I listened to one of them. Opted for the debut album by P at the D, and whilst I enjoyed the songs, I sort of couldn’t get over the titles having absolutely nothing to do with the content within. Good fun rock, but not something I can get on board with!

I was dubious about this one, really, and probably wouldn’t have listened except I really liked Stop Me From Falling. Unfortunately, the rest of the album was kinda what I was expecting. It’s listenable but it suffers from not being one thing or the other - not really proper country and not really pop either. It didn’t quite stack up for me but I admire Kylie for constantly trying new things.

Simon Amstell has always struck me as a hugely quirky but pretty funny stand up, with more to tell than he is probably comfortable sharing. This book proved that the first part of my sentence is true, the latter not so much - as this book is an incredibly open look at his life.