While I’m talking about good things to watch on Netflix, here’s another.

I’m late to the party on this, I realize, but Black Mirror is really, really good. I was initially put off watching it because of the title and the branding: I’d assumed it was some sort of horror series involving slashing and mirrors. But then Oliver revealed he’d been watching it, and watching a horror series is the last thing on earth he would do, so I dipped in.

Hard to do justice in words to what it is, but suffice to say: each episode is a completely self-contained story; each story concerns some aspect of the not-too-distance future and how technology might change how we live and work; the production values, especially the depictions of screens and devices, are very high.

The good thing about being late to the party is that there are three seasons waiting for me to stream.

The late nite TV shows of Europe have created a federation of Trump mockery.

Making my way through both Trapped and Lava Field, Icelandic crime dramas streaming on Netflix, I’ve so far experienced five times more fictional Icelandic murders than the single real murder in Iceland last year.

Both series are compelling, especially Trapped, which I loved for its cast, landscape and plot twists.

Four years ago I was an early adopter of the effort to build a mobile operating system on top of Firefox; as part of this effort, I purchased a Firefox OS-powered Geeksphone Peak in May of 2013 and, the next year, upgraded to a Geeksphone Revolution.

There seemed to be such promise in a non-iOS, non-Android mobile OS, and Mozilla made great progress toward this.

But it didn’t work out: in 2015 Mozilla abandoned the effort, and Geeksphone has faded out of existence. The Peak and the Revolution are sitting in my museum of dead phones.

After seeking solace in the arms of a Moto G for a couple of years–a generally happy and productive time–I opted to back another dark horse and purchased a Nextbit Robin, a crowdsourced Android-based phone with an intriguing design and a promise of a unique “we’ll dump overflow into the cloud so you don’t need to manage” storage promise.

I’ve been using the Robin for the past seven months. It’s proved itself a serviceable, mostly-snappy Android phone. The cloud features haven’t proved useful for me at all: their web-based photo management site is primitive and, in the end, I seldom bump up against the 32 GB internal memory anyway. The promise of better community engagement that the Kickstarter origins suggested never really materialized: there are discussion forums, which is something, but seldom is there much useful information there. Perhaps most frustratingly on a day-to-day basis, the camera and gallery apps Nextbit includes have always been pale imitations of what’s available elsewhere.

And then, this week, the announcement that, like Geeksphone before it, Nextbit is shutting down.

Perhaps the promise of the artisanal mobile phone maker is one that simply cannot be realized in a sustainable way; perhaps these devices are simply too complex to expect a small team to be able to design, build, sell, distribute, manage firmware for, and so on. In any case, I’m not likely to buy a phone from Novterinity or Cellphotophia any time soon, and, when my Robin begins to degrade, will likely need to invest some time in understanding the world of commodity iOS or Android phones to find a replacement.

Either that, or just go back to my Nokia N70.

I’ve been thinking of developing a side business card-printing service that would be highly constrained: one typeface, one ink colour, one name, one paper. My working assumption is that, in a world of business cards jam-packed with logos and telephone numbers and Instagram handles, there’s a market for something that goes in the opposite direction.

By way of prototyping the idea, I printed up some Clark Kent cards in 30 point Futura Bold (purchased two years ago from Letterpress Things). in black ink, on two different types of paper, both of which I inherited from Campbell’s Printing when I bought their Golding Jobber № 8.

The first run was on a glossy card stock; the type bites slightly into the paper and there’s a pleasant shimmer to the ink:

The second run was on textured card stock; the effect is more muted, but it’s pleasant to hold in the hand and feels like it will live up to more wear and tear than the glossy stock:

I could use some more prototyping work on this project, so if you’d like me to give a go at your name, please let me know and, as capacity and time allows, I’ll see what I can do, no charge.

Oliver is getting ready for bed.

Me: Oliver, is Pokemon Go a meme?

Oliver: No, but Pokemon Go Vote is a meme.

My favourite feature of Ta-ke Sushi is that they bring a flagon of water to your table as soon as you sit down. All restaurants should do this.

I have long been fascinated by DNA Lounge in San Francisco, mostly because its genesis and operation are so well-documented online. It likely ranks as the place I know the most about but am least likely to ever visit (for reasons of both geography and demographic).

The place has been going through an existential crisis of late, trying to establish itself on a financial footing that doesn’t require its generous patron-founder. And so they have been casting about for new ideas to bring people in the door:

We’ve also been brainstorming about what other similar pop culture parade we could get in front of. I think the sweet spot might be “I was into it when I was 12, and it’s still popular today, so the ‘sexy costume’ version of it makes me feel all funny inside.”

Nostalgia seems to be the rule of the day. Stranger Things. Fuller House. Gilmore Girls. World-ending grief outpourings as music and film stars of the 1970s and 1980s die. Pinball. Vinyl. Four-colour pens.

Lord knows that I can wallow in it myself, pining for the good old days of Live from the Formosa Tea House and CA*Net.

My wise old friend—nostalgia, yes—Ken Hone once said that as soon as something had a history it was time to jettison it and move on to something new. He was talking about progressive movements, but I think the idea has broader application.

As Oliver will attest, not a day goes by when I don’t make passing reference to “back in the 70s,” either seriously or in jest. Perhaps this should be the year that I stop doing that, stop wearing the sexy costume version of my younger days and looking forward into the abyss.

Ethan the Dog has not been getting enough exercise this week because our back yard is one giant ice rink. So I thought I would take him out to the dog park behind the PEI Humane Society for a good run this afternoon.

Except that the dog park was also one giant ice rink, and so was closed. Which we only found out once we’d driven out there.

To save the afternoon, we decided to go to the movies instead, to see A Dog’s Purpose, the latest Lasse Hallström film.

So instead of a good run in the winter sun, Ethan got to lie on the floor of theatre four, confused by an hour and forty minutes of dogs he could hear but not smell.

To boot, the main human character in the movie was named Ethan, so for much of that hour and forty minutes he was also hearing his name called out from the screen.

We owe you one, boy.