The original Star Wars movies were so loved because: -Spaceships and laser swords are cool. -It's WW2 in space mixed with a Western in space. All-American tropes like gunslinger and fighter pilot, but in a space opera. -It has a religion that is real. Yes its kind of cringey 1970's California Buddhism but it's still in there. Plus the religion assists with laser sword fights. -The setting has a delightful archaeo-futurist tone. It's after the fall of a cleaner, better civilisation ("an elegant weapon....from a more civilised time...") and it has a mix of hard sci-fi tech and scrappy junkyard tech plus all kinds of aliens that just exist as a kind of backdrop. -The acting is fine, the pacing is excellent, the dialogue has just enough exposition to let you figure out what's going on but not too much to ruin the mystery. -Nothing like it had ever been made. It felt genuinely new. And the scale of the story was so large, it felt impossibly epic. For the 70's it really did blow people's minds.

The Good Vibes Tour might appear to be over, but the good vibes will continue with intimate shows in the fall, plus an awesome merch sale happening now! Tickets: Shop:

For the first time since about 2010 I was sad to not be at Computex this week. I’m genuinely excited about Nvidia's RTX Spark. The idea of having AI agents running locally on a laptop or desktop—not always in the cloud—is one of the most interesting shifts in computing. But—and this is a big BUT!—I’ve also covered tech long enough to remember a lot of promises about the future of the PC. Meanwhile, Apple’s M series have completely reshaped our expectations of performance and battery life. The hardware doesn’t arrive until the fall. I’ll be first in line to test whether this is truly a new era for PCs or just another keynote!

Before the coronavirus pandemic, China was already the centre of the global baby bust — but the fall in birth rates has accelerated in the two years since the virus first struck