Simon Lees

Lawyer, dad. Expect politics, music, 49ers, NFL, sight-hound, whisky and cycling content. RTs are not endorsement etc...

[Simon Lees @simon_lees]

@miltonmarkets00 Him watching the girlfriend’s dad do the lawn from under an umbrella is perfect. Makes him seem a lot more likeable

[Simon Lees @simon_lees]

If I had a grand-fathered negatively geared property I would definitely try to make it positively geared as soon as possible 🙄

[Matt Barrie @matt_barrie]

spoke to a mate this morning who is a real estate agent and he felt the same thing:
1. rents will immediately go up
2. investors will hang on to their properties

[Hon. PolProf of Agile Ceremonies @CeilNoyle]

Still his most memorable speech 💼🌹📈🤓🥹

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

My reaction to Keir Starmer's last ditch press conference - an unsurprising reaction but possibly a helpful one (at least to those who, like me, consider him an abysmal PM).

Like many, I approached Keir Starmer's prime ministership with deep-seated pessimism, my expectations already set at rock bottom. Yet, I confess: I failed to foresee the clinical precision with which he and his inner cabal would sabotage their own administration and scar Britain.

The crux of their debacle lay, first, in a distinctly dictatorial, authoritarian reflex. And second—crucially—in a seething contempt for those who lent them their votes, while simultaneously performing a grotesque pantomime of flattery toward those who never would, and never will, support them.

Having exorcised from the Labour Party its most authentic voices—people of unimpeachable integrity, such as Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, a purge that eluded even Tony Blair’s repertoire—Starmer embarked on a rampage:

He slashed disability benefits; armed and fed intelligence to the Israeli government as it executed genocide in Gaza; channeled his own inner Farage, perhaps his inner Enoch Powell, to vilify migrants and treat refugees as vermin; gutted international aid to masquerade as a defender of defence spending; bulldozed wildlife and their habitats; unveiled a new lexicon of draconian anti-protest laws; left trans people suspended in legal limbo; clung with religious fervour to absurd, socially ruinous fiscal rules; allowed Rachel Reeves to squander £100 billion covering the Bank of England’s outrageous and wholly unnecessary Quantitative Tightening losses—a gift that keeps giving to the City’s banks—while imposing yet another round of austerity on government departments and public services.

Once the great hope of the downtrodden, Starmer’s Labour has become the villain - the genuinely nasty party.

Once a human rights lawyer, he has single-handedly plunged Britain into a shoddy, incompetent authoritarianism.

https://t.co/wIjnc9NfmJ

[Simon Lees @simon_lees]

@CarlosMoralesG_ I love them, good quality, thick fabric. They size on the small side

[Aleksandar Brezar @brezaleksandar]

The best story you'll watch all week: apparently the Italian town of Punta Marina in Ravenna has been suffering from a peacock "invasion" and residents are not amused.

The editing alone is Primetime Emmy-worthy.

Sound on. You can thank me later. 😎

[Simon Lees @simon_lees]

@JBMason I’ve got the Informale Moleskin workshirt, it’s amazing, I can’t stop wearing it. Their jungle jackets are a bit too formal/ structured for me. UK brand Paynter do some great limited run jackets in all different types. I’ve got a great corduroy chore coat from them

[Simon Lees @simon_lees]

@TimurNegru And Greece please

[David Paxton @DavidDPaxton]

Excellent.

[The Baffler @thebafflermag]

It’s hard to make a living as a writer: fellowship money dries up, freelance rates keep dropping, and book advances aren’t what they used to be. Our new issue features a forum on the side hustles that journalists, novelists, and poets take on to survive.
https://t.co/mbEBUHbk3B

[₿en Wehrman @benwehrman]

How boomers will "hand over the reins" to younger generations

[DJ RENA @djrena_jp]

TOTO - Africa (Turntable remix)

[Rambo Van Halen @RamboVanHalen]

I put in 25 years. It would be 26 but I haven't worked yet this year and I'm not sure I'll ever work in entertainment again.

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. But it's a sad thing--especially since the collapse of Hollywood is (mostly) self inflicted.

Outsiders like to blame the unions and burdensome regulations. That's not exactly wrong, but the big reason is that Hollywood stopped making a product that people wanted to consume.

Film is a funny thing. On one hand it's art. But on the other it's a mass consumer product--like a car, or a soft drink.

But unlike a typical consumer product, it was something we consumed together. We went to a special place, and sat with strangers, and watched stories.

And those stories infected us.

They entered our minds and our souls and they implanted things.

Deep things. Ancient things. Timeless things.

Things like heroism and beauty and love and fear and sex and death and adventure and tragedy and pain and injustice and all the things that make up our dreams.

There's a thing we call "cinematic language". It's how we tell a story with images. (And BTW if you want to learn more about the language of visual media, read Scott McCloud's excellent book Understanding Comics.)

An odd thing about cinematic language is that it's the same language as dreams. There's a scene in Christopher Nolan's Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio is explains to (the tragic) Ellen Page how dreams work.

But what he's really describing is cinematic language. Inception is really a movie about movies BTW.

While it's far from my favorite film, I think it's the perfect film. Because the suspension of disbelief is perfect. You believe the plot about dreams because you're familiar with how movies work--maybe not consciously--but you know.

Everyone knows. Maybe not everyone has seen a movie, but everyone has dreams.

Another odd thing about film: you don't "watch" a movie, you look into it. And you put yourself inside it. Now you're in the dream.

And you're hypnotized.

Because movies do that too.

The motion--the moving images--they hack your brain. We're programed to pay attention to moving things.

Even when the things aren't real.

Even when they're just light reflected off a screen.

So we'd go to these special places--these movie theaters--these temples--and we'd sit, and we'd "watch" and we'd enter the dream.

And we did it together.

And after the movie was over--and the lights came on, and we'd file out over the sound of popcorn crunching under our feet--we were different.

We had become transformed.

Sometimes we were changed in minor ways. But sometimes not. Sometimes we were changed in profound ways.

And we did it together.

Before the movie we were a room full of strangers.

But after--on the way out the door--we all had something in common.

Because we shared an experience. We'd shared the dream. And we'd all become transformed.

And then tech got involved...

Streaming turned movies from a communal experience to a personal experience. And that's an issue, but they did something else too.

They started developing movies as if they were tech products.

But you can't apply a KPI to a dream. At least, not successfully anyway. Because dreams don't work like that--nor does any sort of art.

And that's a funny thing about making movies. You try to make the best film you can, but at the end of the day you have no idea if it's good or if it's going to be successful. You just have to hope the audience likes it.

Now, you can design a movie that will appeal to a preexisting audience. Marvel movies are like this. There's a large group of fanboy nerds that will see every single one.

You can count on them every time.

Just like you can count on the Gay Oscar Bait crowd (for example).

But those movies are slop. But Hollywood became specialists in slop. Because slop is safe. Because you could apply KPI style metrics to slop.

As a result they lost the audience. And the audience is probably never coming back.

I wrote a book in 2024 (that was published in 2025). While writing, I thought of it as my farewell to the industry.

But looking back, what I was actually writing was a eulogy for Hollywood--the place where dreams were made.

And so it goes...

[A S Hamrah @hamrahrama]

On this year’s Oscar movies, and Melania, for @nplusonemag: https://t.co/UZbSH7vxW3

[Alexander August 🌞🌴 @NovemXI]

Keep in mind, these guys were not skimming through a library of mp3s - they were pulling these samples from a vast collection of vinyl records in their basement. This is art.

[Epic Clip Vault @EpicClipVault]

This greatest moment in legal history 💀

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

This article is so good https://t.co/eq2nQeJdwg

[HJB News @HJB_News__]

This has to be the best one 😂

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Not where I would have expected an adversarial touchpoint to get saturated first, and extremely not the last such story.