Downtime

Recent Posts

  • Live from the Lord Moon of the Mall (Pt. II)

    Ryan Priest 16 Jul 2020
  • “You’ve got to wear a face nappy if you want to come in here,” chunters a half-cut Tim Martin as Matt Hancock enters the Lord Moon of the Mall. “Only joking,” he slurs. “Who am I to tell the health ...

  • Live from the Lord Moon of the Mall

    Ryan Priest 10 Jul 2020
  • Matt Hancock’s latest app assignment has proven more of a head-scratcher than that one he released about himself, and as he dithers and delays at his desk over the release of anything serviceable ...

  • Doubling down with Nick Clegg

    Ryan Priest 01 Jul 2020
  • As the Stop Hate for Profit campaign inspires over 150 major companies and counting to pull their advertising from Facebook, its appeaser-in-chief has slid open his webcam cover and got back to ...

  • Eau de you think you are?

    Ryan Priest 24 Jun 2020
  • A bunch of olfactory obsessives have blasted through their Kickstarter campaign target to start making bottles of fragrance purported to smell like space. Just as Robin Williams once lorded it over ...

  • Artificial ignorance

    Ryan Priest 11 Jun 2020
  • Microsoft’s move to replace MSN.com’s human editors with artificial intelligence has resulted in the software misidentifying one woman of colour for another – before regurgitating other outlets’ ...

  • The robot league

    Ryan Priest 03 Jun 2020
  • Restaurants in the Netherlands have been easing themselves back into business with the help of robotic waiting staff, going some way to repair the profession’s reputation after China’s automated ...

  • A sitemap for sore eyes

    Ryan Priest 27 May 2020
  • When Dominic Cummings wasn’t using his press conference to brag about how many trees his dad has, you can bet he was going on about being into viruses before anyone else. The thing is, deep down, ...

  • Gov. U OK?

    Ryan Priest 20 May 2020
  • These times of ours, you might have heard, are being described as both “strange” and “unprecedented”. There’s also been some talk of a “new normal”, although while for some that means extra-long ...

  • Spot the difference

    Ryan Priest 13 May 2020
  • Remember before the pandemic, when news of robotics firms and their increasingly capable creations filled us with dread? Well, to paraphrase Tim from The Office, we never thought we’d say this, but ...

  • Dawn of the spawn of Musk

    Alex Scroxton - Security Editor 06 May 2020
  • Jeff Bezos may get brickbats over Amazon's treatment of its warehouse workers and Bill Gates may find himself at the centre of a coronavirus conspiracy theory, but for surefire billionaire Bond ...

  • A nite to remember

    Ryan Priest 26 Apr 2020
  • You sometimes hear people say we might all be part of an elaborate simulation, a highly sophisticated video game created somewhere else in the universe for a bit of entertainment. If that’s the ...

  • The hybrid sessions

    Ryan Priest 23 Apr 2020
  • There’s been some excitement around the inaugural virtual House of Commons sessions, which essentially comprise some MPs social distancing in the chamber while others can be viewed on several ...

  • I’m a celebrity...Let me monger fear!

    Ryan Priest 09 Apr 2020
  • We’ve all been in Amanda Holden’s shoes. One minute, someone’s sending you a petition explicitly linking 5G to Covid-19; the next, you’re accidentally sharing it with 1.9 million Twitter followers. ...

  • The Disney resort

    Ryan Priest 26 Mar 2020
  • “There’s nothing more unpleasant than watching grown-ups joining in with TikTok.” The words of Downtime less than two months ago. But as the government furthers its restrictions on UK life, the ...

  • Moog from home

    Ryan Priest 18 Mar 2020
  • Social distancing is a bit of a busman’s holiday for Downtime, but just to be safe, we’ve alienated everyone we know. We haven’t really known what to do with ourselves since being advised to stay ...