You're invited to the Shift Run Stop episode 50 live games night, this Monday.
Bring your favourite portable game or learn to play a new one.

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Monday 18th October 2010, 7-11pm
Downstairs at the Southwark Rooms, 60 Southwark St, London SE1 1UN

Meanwhile, we're still collecting internal fridge noises, and enjoyed this advert featuring the 'fridge eye view', thoughtfully sent in by @hlame. Special thanks are due to Julian Burgess and Leo Vegoda for the videos of the insides of their fridges - we hope to rip the audio and use it in future episodes!

Buy your own tape, make a video of yourself opening the envelope, and tell us about it on Twitter or by email. And you'll hear more about this on forthcoming episodes, but - tapes bought in the next few weeks have a reasonably high chance of being illustrated by our artistic SRS guests!

"I made this"

Buy a Shift Run Stop episode on cassette

The first video we spotted was from Ian Stopher, and uses an iMovie template you might recognise:

The second, the following day, was from Damian Jennings:

Rev Dan Catt, just hours later, posted his own video. Note the excellent use of a pencil to cue the tape:

Most recently, Myk Reeve, who didn't make a video but did take some lovely photos:

Have we missed any? Let us know. Very much looking forward to seeing more of these too.

It's a bit of a kids' "Things to Come", a guidebook to living in 2010 written simply because "It is fun to guess what it may be like". Some of the ideas are eerily prescient, e.g. overpopulation, the prevalence of screen-based interfaces - and he even sort of anticipates the ubiquity of the internet. Elsewhere it's a bit more wack (free public transport? no more pollution?!).

The more I think about this, the more interesting it gets. I realised we're not talking about a predictive power spanning multiple generations here - this chap's still alive, and the future utopias imagined by young people of the 1970s are the very ideas that have shaped the world we live in today, because these people were the architects of the aesthetic that the late 20th Century would develop.

So, almost by definition, the 1970s imagined future is the one that 1970s and 80s were destined to achieve. In other words - maybe there are time limits on our imagined futures; maybe many of our predictions will inevitably be realised within our lifetimes because we can't help but imagine things that seem possible, and if we can both imagine and make, then we will make. In a way it's no wonder that everything has turned out to be either dome shaped or covered in buttons. The social stuff, however, is perhaps trickier to predict, and although we haven't quite fancied the idea of videophones, we certainly do now find ourselves with a mass public databank rather similar to what the author here ambitiously outlines for his homes and libraries of 2010.

But have a flick through yourself - it's remarkably inventive and in a way very thought-provoking, a cartoon wormhole opening up under our feet and linking us to the recent past and it to us. It's also full of charming illustrations of people in jumpsuits talking to each other on their 'vision phones', and the comments on each page are almost as entertaining as the book! It starts here. And if you want to join a campaign to track down the author Geoffrey Hoyle, why, there's one on Facebook.

~Leila

We'll be keeping you company over your Christmas break with some extra long bumper special holiday episodes. Don't forget to join us on the 24th for episode 6 and again on the 31st for episode 7. Great guests and snacks ahoy. Let joy be unconfined.

Don't forget to clear the advert that pops up at the bottom (little 'X', top right corner) so you can see the brilliantly confused commentary.

[ part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 ]

The nuts are hurting your head!

Do you like the song? We're very excited to be previewing our new Shift Run Stop theme tune. It's called "In Computers" and is by Robyn Wilder and her band Bambino Special. Yay.