Friday Reading S11E20

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from the Guardian’s Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things. It is now in its eleventh season. Sign up here.

“Panenka himself, meanwhile, saw it differently. ‘I saw myself as an entertainer and I saw this penalty as a reflection of my personality’, he said. ‘I wanted to give the fans something new to see, to create something that would get them talking.'”

Some fascinating stats and the history of the “Panenka” penalty in this piece which is about a lot more than Agüero: “Was Agüero’s Panenka a mistake? Analysing the art and science of penalties” – Sean Ingle

I came for the slight general interest in how skeuomorphism (which has at times annoyed me a lot on the web/apps/internet etc) was now making a mess of electric vehicle charging, but then got distracted by the tale of the the guy who genuinely appears to have made an early “horseless carriage” that actually had a fake horse head and body sticking out the front. The past is a foreign country etc etc.

“How skeuomorphism is holding back the future of EV charging” – Juan Btesh, on The Next Web (but I think it is sponsored content from somewhere else republished)

I 100% guarantee you if you find anyone on Twitter in favour of insisting on photo ID to participate in elections in the UK their argument literally always boils down to “But I’ve got photo ID and can afford to renew it, so what’s the issue?”

“She’d never stopped wondering about the boy that her passenger train had struck. ‘I always think back to: Was that young boy showing signs? Could somebody have seen those signs?’ Sometimes she would visit the town he had grown up in. She’d see young men who would have been around his age and now had families of their own. It brought home to her again the terrible meaning of a young life lost.”

Fascinating long read about Heather Waugh, Scotland’s only woman freight train driver.

Sometimes I feel like remain the only middle-aged white man on the internet not to have their own podcast, but if you like making that sort of thing, then Novel have a couple of jobs going – a senior one as Head of Content Ops (would suit an experienced TV PM/Production Exec) & a more junior one as a Production Coordinator.

DO MY QUIZ!!! – The weekly Guardian quiz, No 3

An enjoyable primer on Delia Derbyshire and her work Beyond Doctor Who by Mark Brend

Also with Radiophonic Workshop links…

“To say that something is like something else is sometimes missing the point, especially when it comes to creative audio, where a single person can produce the audio in the same way that a single artist can paint. When you’re into that territory, your personal preferences are going to be involved and the thing takes off on its own. You can’t necessarily say I am doing a piece like something else. It just takes off.”

“Peter Howell talks ‘Radiophonic Times’” – James R Turner, We Are Cult

I’m a big fan of over-thinking things and then making lists about it, so how couldn’t I love this absolutely unreasonable definitive guide to how you should watch all of Doctor Who’s regenerations. I can, for example, totally get on board with the fact that World Enough & Time / The Doctor Falls / Twice Upon A Time / The Woman Who Fell To Earth / Ghost Monument works as a five-parter because of the interlinked cliff-hanger/quest endings.

COMPLETE AND UTTER SILLINESS: HOW TO WATCH THE DOCTOR’S REGENERATIONS “PROPERLY”! by Pretentious Doctor Who Essays

[Bonus points here for the blog introducing itself as “A place for hardcore Doctor Who Fans to read my essays and be told they’re wrong if they disagree with what I say”]

I mentioned it earlier in the week, but my new album came out today. 13 tracks of melancholy 80s sounding electronica featuring archive voices talking about the paranormal, you can get “The Grim Circus” from Bandcamp for £4.