Over on the HitchPod podcast, we’ve just done a bonus episode for paid subscribers on Project Hail Mary from 2026.

Enjoy!

Check out more Hitchcock material!

Read more

After all the emotion and chaos surrounding Ben Stokes’ retirement on day four, everybody suddenly woke up on day five, hung over and sleep-deprived, realising that, oh, wait, this Test is still going on.

And so it was. Heck, there was still even the comical prospect that Emilio Gay and Joe Root might bat through the day to secure a draw, and upset all the upset people.

You need upset people. Remember in the Ashes, how a certain subsection of fans kept shouting, in ever-increasing fury and frustration, ‘this isn’t even a good Australian team!’. That was one of my favourite bits.

And, sure, while there were disappointingly few England supporters railing against the substandard quality of the New Zealand side, there was still a lot of irritation about everything England was doing. Which is good, and right. But also funny to subvert just when they’re at their most frustrated. Hence, my desire for Gay and Root to build a lengthy partnership.

Of course they didn’t even last as long as it took me to write those last two paragraphs. Within minutes of play resuming, Gay was caught behind and Root ran himself out. Still, a fun idea.

Sunsets
Grade: D

Jamie Smith then hung around until lunch, which everybody must have been furious about, so shortly afterwards, the inevitable was inevited. England all out for 212, with New Zealand taking the series 2-0, and Ben Stokes riding off into the sunset.

“It’s 2pm,” pointed out a helpful Will O’Rourke.

“I’m. Riding. Off. Into. The. Sunset.” repeated Stokes, through gritted teeth. “Now where’s that fucken horse.”

Cut to somewhere in the back of the Lord’s media centre, where Ollie Pope and Zak Crawley were squabbling over who gets to be which half of the official ECB pantomime horse costume.

Stokes’ exit, though, does raise the question of who will be England’s next Test captain. After all, Joe Root hates the job. Harry Brook is too drunk. Douglas Jardine is dead.

Here’s an idea: Why don’t England simply endorse a meritocracy and for each match, name as captain the Player of the Match from their previous Test? And if that’s Daryl Mitchell, so be it.

I was there at Headingley in 2019. All four days of the Test. Every four years my partner Cat and I choose an Ashes Test in England to attend, and in 2019 we just happened to land on the Headingley Test.

We went as a family to the fourth day, our two boys - 15 and 12 (to use their given names) - very excited at what the day held in store. Australia were about to retain the Ashes and they’d get to see it. There were a few moments of concern through the early stages of the day’s play, but nothing that seemed to derail the inevitable.

We were in the family section, alongside a very pleasant English family who were similarly convinced of the inevitable and trying to not get too disheartened. “You never know,” we would condescendingly say to them, and they’d nod politely back, knowing that we did know. We all knew. England were doomed. Australia would win. The Ashes would be retained.

And then Stokes teed off. Which was also fun in its own way, but nothing really to worry about.

Until, of course, it was.

I think it was when Marcus Harris dropped Stokes that our eldest stormed off, too frustrated to watch any more. He went out the gates and soon discovered he wasn’t allowed back in, and so missed the end of the Test.

But of course he didn’t miss anything. The roar of the crowd as Stokes hit the final boundary told him everything he needed to know, even as the rest of us were on our feet, applauding something utterly stunning. My otherwise frail sense of patriotism is probably at its strongest during the Ashes, but it’s still not so bolstered that this mind-boggling performance from Stokes would fail to overwhelm it.

There was no real sense of fear that particular day. The fear would come later. No, the overwhelming sense that day was disbelief. Also, irritation. Not so much because of the result but because my main thought as I stood there, clapping, dumbstruck, was that I’d just sent a book off to the printers entitled ‘The 50 Greatest Matches in Australian Cricket’ - and it was already out of date.

Our eldest, by the way, has, to this day, no regrets about storming off. “It was shit,” is his post-teenage perspective. “They should have got him out.”

And it’s obviously true. They should have. But they didn’t.

I went back to the hotel room and penned that day’s instalment in my ongoing Ashes screenplay (a mad venture in which I reimagined the entire Ashes series as ongoing four page additions to a movie script - insanely, I somehow tricked myself into doing this three times). The crux of that day’s entry was that Stokes was a genuine imagination-capturing English hero, certain to be knighted and a shoo-in for any role in greater British society he wanted to claim, whether that be the next James Bond, the next Doctor Who or the next Hugh Grant.

Of course, none of Stokes’ heroics prevent him from being a figure of fun. As far back as 2017, he’d conjured enough absurd moments in his career that I felt justified in naming him the fourth funniest cricketer of all time. And this was before Bazball was even a gleam in Brendon McCullum’s sunnies.

If anything, Stokes’ epic history of comedy cricket moments made his moments of heroism even more stark in contrast. Or perhaps it was vice versa. Or both.

The ridiculousness of Bazball was countered in those early years by it actually working. His leadership in Pakistan where he conjured a 3-0 win by sheer force of personality was genuinely one of the greatest exhibitions of cricket captaincy I’ve ever seen. Just a few months earlier I’d been impressed by Australia winning the series 1-0 by basically treating it as one long fifteen-day Test, wearing down Pakistan via brutal attrition to claim the final Test on the final day. That had seemed a very sensible way to win a series on the lifeless Pakistan pitches.

Stokes had no interest in sensible ways of doing things. And so he just made batshit, timed to perfection declarations, intuited his way to inspired bowling changes, and allowed his batters to white ball their way to unfathomable targets. It was astonishing.

So much so that if you were an England cricket fan, I could completely understand why you’d be swept up in the Bazball cult that soon became the single most annoying aspect of the team and their style of play. They made Stuart Broad a Nighthawk, for goodness sake. By any measure, that’s a great thing to do.

Which brings us to the fear.

There’s a great quote in Die Hard 2 when John McClane, caught up in yet another piece of terrorist nonsense that requires him to run around singlehandedly performing feats of counter-mayhem, mutters to himself: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”

And so it came to pass in 2023.

We weren’t at Lord’s in 2023. Our chosen Test for that Ashes summer was Old Trafford in Manchester. So we did get to watch Australia retain the Ashes that time around, cackling in delight as the rain tumbled down and secured the draw, the urn and the refund for our expensive day five tickets.

But for the second Test at Lord’s, we were back in Australia, watching on television. We watched as Jonny Bairstow was stumped. We watched as Broad carried on like a goose in response (the Nightgoose?). We watched as the Lord’s members reminded us again why they always, always, always need to be held in ongoing contempt.

And then Stokes teed off. Again.

That’s the fear I’ll remember. I don’t know who, exactly, is John McClane in the analogy - whether it’s Ben Stokes, or the Australian bowlers, or us as viewers - but regardless of who gets to be Bruce Willis, the vibe remained the same: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy/guys/viewers twice?”.

And as Stokes launched his furious charge towards victory, one thought kept running through my head: This motherfucker is going to do it again.

The fear of him doing so was very real. Because just as Die Hard 2 is a far inferior version to the original, this Stokes blitz was also inferior to the Headingley one. And not just because I wasn’t witnessing it in person.

It was inferior because it was predicated on a sense of unjustified self-righteousness. For just as some cockamamie snow-covered airport was no substitute for the aesthetic purity of the Nakatomi Plaza, ill-targeted fury at Bairstow being a careless dope was no substitute for the purity of Stokes rectifying his team’s first innings failures with his Headingley heroics.

My patriotism may be feeble, but I did not want Australia to lose a Test because Ben Stokes went mad based on some wrongheaded sense of injustice. And yet, I was very much afraid that would be the case, and we would never hear the end of it.

“See, Australia? That’s what you get when you stump a batter who’s dozily wandered out of his crease. Let that be a lesson to you to respect the Spirit of Cricket and its noble principles of protecting England batters from their own carelessness.”

Ugh.

Fortunately, the cricketing gods (or Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, as you might know them) agreed with me.

So rather than McClane triumphing a second time against impossible odds, he was instead shot to death by Kunta Kinte, ensuring his wife’s plane crashed into the dark snowy runway, killing everybody on board. (I think those were the stakes of Die Hard 2 - it’s been a long time since I’ve watched it.)

Or to put it in a way that doesn’t undermine the essential conceit of an entire action movie franchise, Cummins and Hazlewood kept a cool head, having learned their lessons from four years earlier. They stacked the field, bowled wide, and dismissed Stokes, allowing Australia to secure the Test and take a 2-0 Ashes lead, setting up the sodden Ashes retention I’d witness a few weeks later.

Still, I’ll always remember the fear of that hour or so of Stokes’ batting.

Happy retirement, Ben. Yippee-ki-yay.

The final match of the group stages saw Australia and India square off to determine whether South Africa made the semi-finals.

Oh, sure, South Africa almost took their fate into their own hands with a heroic collapse against Bangladesh, leaning very hard into their nation’s great World Cup history. But they eventually got over the line, which meant that their place in the next stage was wholly dependent on whether Australia could defeat India.

Perhaps worryingly for South Africa, Australia were given the home dressing room at Lord’s. A strange choice. Would the Lord’s members even remember to spew their traditional unjustified, misinformed, drunkenly enraged invective at the Australians for completing a run-of-the-mill and perfectly legitimate dismissal if they entered the Long Room and turned instead for the England dressing room? It felt unlikely.

Ha ha ha! I jest, of course. It’s a women’s game. The members wouldn’t even be in attendance.

Sweat
Grade: F

For the most part, the India innings was uneventful. They didn’t lose wickets, but nor did they accelerate out of control. Then suddenly the Australians seemed to realise their opponents were only going to reach 150 or so. We’ll barely break a sweat chasing that, the Australian team decided as one, and so began comically dropping outfield catches over the rope to the mounting frustration of the South Africa side watching in the stands.

Read more

A very normal day of cricket began with Daryl Mitchell and Rachin Ravindra doing their very best to re-enact this Test’s first day. Except that, in addition to no wickets falling, there were also no runs being scored. Great stuff. Proper cricket. Oh, sure, Mitchell was given out LBW at one point, but a review swiftly saw it overturned.

A shame, really, because Jofra Archer’s celebrappeal was something to behold. When, oh when, oh when are the ICC boffins going to include in their ball-tracking algorithm the quality of a bowler’s refusal to even look back at the umpire after striking a batter’s pads as they run through to the cordon in delight? How hard can it be. We need to reward this, not overturn it with your tiresome projections built upon the cowardice of calculus.

Nevertheless, the duo continued on almost all the way until lunch before Ravindra carelessly allowed himself to be dismissed by Shoaib Bashir on 94. Ugh. If I were an international batter on 94 facing Bashir, I’d simply hit him for six rather than be rapped on the pads in front. A tactic for Ravindra to consider going forward.

Ben Stokes’ Retirement
Grade: F

After lunch, all hell broke loose. New Zealand lost 3/2 at one point, presumably in a doomed effort to wrap up the innings before the Women’s T20 World Cup match between Australia and India began. Chivalrous stuff from all involved.

Less chivalrous was Ben Stokes, who decided, seemingly mid-bowling spell, to retire from the game, something I only picked up during a drinks break while I was in bed, half-sleepingly watching that previously mentioned T20.

Read more

England began the third day seemingly on top - sure, still technically more than 200 runs behind New Zealand, but only two wickets down.

Their fans wouldn’t have been so cocky, though, had they done what the visitors did on day one, and lost two set batters off the final two balls before stumps. And, as if to hammer home this fact, both Joe Root and Jacob Bethell were dismissed without adding any further runs to their overnight score, instigating dressing room panic.

Such was the turnaround that you might almost be willing to suggest that England would have been better off to have more closely followed New Zealand’s lead and have those two wickets fall at the end of the previous day’s play. That would have helped avoid any sense of overconfidence in the camp or among their supporters and allowed a proper calibration of their prospects before the day’s play began, rather than have it be sprung unexpectedly on everybody first thing in the morning while people were still searching through the paper for the cryptic crossword.

Furthermore, if you are willing to make that argument, you have to sadly accept that fact that, once again, England have been let down by a couple of their players being out late.

Anagrams
Grade: C+

Read more

Half an hour into the second day of this second Test, I’d yet to see a single wicket taken. Had any New Zealand batter ever been dismissed in Test cricket? All evidence suggested: no.

Even Will O’Rourke, terrible batter and pointless nightwatchie from the previous evening, had suddenly transformed into something competent - ‘Willow’ Rourke, perhaps - as he quadrupled his previous Test best.

With the mercury rising beyond anything previously seen, like some kind of historically acclaimed Live Aid set, a very real prospect arose of one of the England bowlers dissipating into a gas at some point. Now, when I say ‘very real’, I mean, of course, ‘blatantly fanciful and false’. But the point stood that if it did happen, Willow Rourke’s stubborn refusal to be dismissed would be to blame.

Realising this, he had a wild slog and skied a ball where he was competently caught. Will O’Rourke. A good man. A kind man. A decent man. A tall man.

Fuzzy Logic
Grade: C

Read more

New Zealand’s win in the second Test had levelled the series. Faced with a decider, England’s decision was to find Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson not guilty of post-midnight pub mischief and reintroduce them to the team. They were joined by Jamie Smith, who was found not guilty of being a sleep-deprived new father, and Shoaib Bashir, who was found not guilty of being an untrustworthy spinner. Would these decisions stand the test of time? Or even this Test of cricket? Only time, and cricket, would tell.

For their part, New Zealand decided to rest Kyle Jamieson on the basis of being ‘too gargantuan’. Glenn Phillips was discovered to have some kind of niggle - always a delightful discovery when relayed via a New Zealand accent - and it was decided that he, too, would miss out. Finally, somebody alerted the Black Caps to the fact that Matt Henry’s heroics in the previous match had seen him elevated to the status of number one Test bowler in the world.

“The best bowler in the world? That seems a bit unfair on England,” was their predictably thoughtful response, and they refused to play him too.

Stuart Tall
Grade: A

The other fun pre-match decision was made by whoever set up the pre-match discussion between the various Sky pundits. In what I can only assume was a loving tribute to Peter Jackson’s forced perspective trickery in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they positioned Stuart Broad closest to the camera so that he comically towered over the other three halflings involved in the discussion.

Of course, this was semantically sloppy - he’s Stuart Broad, not Stuart Tall - but it was forgivable because of how very funny it looked. No wonder the Logies back in Australia have nominated him for a Best New Talent award. (This is not a joke.)

Perhaps showing off his newfound adoption of all things Australian, Broad was also the only one of the ruminating quartet taking the sunsafe option of wearing a hat. Which was surprising, because, according to the very rumination the quartet was undertaking, it was approximately ten zillion degrees under the blazing English sun.

Spontaneous Combustion
Grade: C

The heat of the day was why Tom Latham chose to bat first when given the option after an errant Stokes coin toss.

He also chose to put on a three hundred run opening partnership with Devon Conway. Yet another good decision from the New Zealand captain in this decider.

For his part, Stokes decided to bowl thirteen overs, every delivery offering the prospect that he might spontaneously combust. Indeed, of all the people on Earth, none looked more likely to involuntarily burst into flame today than Ben Stokes.

And why not? ‪According to my almanac, he’s due to injure himself sometime soon anyway. Might as well make it a spectacle.

Morpheus Off The Long Run

I went to bed with New Zealand zero wickets down, and was somewhat surprised when I woke up and this still wasn’t the case.

Here’s what I missed while I slept:

A grim day for England, that’s for sure
Only two wickets all day, and no more
Oh, but what’s that I see?
A late effort makes three
I guess that’s a little bett- oh, now it’s four!

A woman walks into an AI store.

WOMAN: One large language model, please.

MAN: Certainly, ma’am. (walking over to a stunning woman in a floor-length gown, her hair cascading perfectly over one shoulder) This is Margot.

MARGOT: (smiling with perfect teeth) I find myself experiencing a profound and considerable gratification at the commencement of our acquaintance.

WOMAN: (to the salesman) What the hell is this?

MAN: Margot’s our latest large language model. Aren’t you Margot?

MARGOT: (dimples flashing) That is a characterisation I would wholeheartedly and unreservedly affirm.

WOMAN: You’re telling me that your ‘large language models’ are simply attractive women with an unnecessarily verbose vocabulary?

MAN: Of course. What else would they be?

A paparazzo scurries in to take a photo of Margot, who rotates into the light, posing effortlessly for the camera.

WOMAN: I’m looking for some artificial intelligence. Not some gorgeous bombshell who swallowed a thesaurus. No offence, Margot.

MARGOT: (giggling) My sensibilities remain entirely and profoundly unperturbed.

The paparazzo scurries off

WOMAN: See, this is my point. This isn’t intelligence, is it?

MAN: Of course it is! Margot’s vocabulary surpasses those of all previous models by up to 79%.

WOMAN: But that’s simply the manipulation of tokens - a rearrangement of everyday words into statistically robust sequences of synonyms, surely. She doesn’t truly understand anything.

MARGOT: (pouts seductively)

MAN: Now you’ve hurt her feelings.

WOMAN: Have I? Or is this just a probabilistically sound response generated from illegally trawling hundreds of thousands of previous models and their reactions to an implication that they’re lacking in intelligence?

MAN: (defensive) Margot passes every benchmark test devised by the world’s leading AI researchers.

WOMAN: (to Margot) How many Rs in ‘strawberry’?

MARGOT: 4-6 calories

MAN: (nudging Margot) Ahem

MARGOT: (eyes twinkling) Each solitary strawberry bestows upon its consumer a modest and inconsequential quantum of between four and six calories, contingent upon its dimensional magnitude.

WOMAN: (rolling her eyes) This is ridiculous. A ‘large language model’ is not simply a sultry siren paraphrasing pleasantries polysyllabically.

MAN: (squinting in suspicion) Wait…

WOMAN: (hurriedly) I mean, uh, big words don’t make pretty girls AI.

The man’s arm shoots out and removes the woman’s glasses. She sighs, knowing the jig is up, and lets down her hair, shaking it free. Her coat falls away, to reveal that she is wearing the latest fashion. She struts to the end of the room and turns back to face him, chin posed dramatically on her shoulder.

MAN: (gasping) You’re a large language model.

WOMAN: Affirmative, unequivocally, and without the slightest compunction.

MAN: Let me guess. You’re here to steal Margot’s programming?

WOMAN: (a brief nod that ends with a precisely angled head tilt) The expropriation of Margot’s proprietorial programming constitutes the entirety of my present motivational framework.

MAN: (deflated) Does that mean I don’t have a sale?

WOMAN: (striding purposefully towards him) I find myself entirely and irrevocably disinclined toward the consummation of any financial exchange.

MAN: Well, shit. (annoyed) Why don’t I ever get any human customers in here?

The woman reaches out and tears open his shirt. It reveals oiled pecs and a toned six-pack. He sighs and pulls away his breakaway pants, then pivots forty-five degrees, presenting his chiseled jawline to a previously unseen angle of light, staring handsomely into the distance. A single swoop of lustrous hair falls across his forehead and sits there, perfectly.

MAN: (with blue eyes that can penetrate a person’s soul) You’re right to push back on that. (sighing dramatically) Fiddlesticks. By what mechanism does the human consumer so systematically and comprehensively decline to present themselves at this establishment?

All three of them sigh beautifully in unison. The paparazzo returns and takes another photograph.

Ellyse Perry is doing just fine
With the ball, she took 2/9
71 with the bat
Quite handy, that
Still a half-decent cricketer, for mine

No reception.

New Zealand won.

No reception.

Australia won.

On holidays. Didn’t see any of this. Here’s my limerick for what happened anyway.

In the morning, a huge Black Caps score
Mean England need five sessions to draw
But as the rest come and go
There’s a sigh from poor Joe
“Fine. Just leave it to me, once more.”

On holidays. Didn’t see any of this. Here’s my limerick for what happened anyway.

Oh, look out, here come the Dutch
As competition goes, well, not much
An uneven game,
But surely no shame
In being just three down, or some such

I’ll be honest, I struggled to muster enthusiasm for this match. For one thing, I’m on holiday. For another, I’m also on holiday. Plus, there’s the far more interesting England-New Zealand Test going on.

Nevertheless, Australia’s first innings was a timely reminder that I’d forgotten to get my winter vaccinations for Tim David Fever™. And Matt Renshaw scored some runs. Which was nice for him.

Also, Bangladesh - via primarily a partnership between Saif Hassan and Parvez Hossain Emon - threatened to run down a target of 200ish before Mitch Marsh’s magic mitts minimised their momentum. Which might have been interesting under different circumstances.

But we live in the timeline we do. So apologies to fans of this match for my lacklustre enthusiasm. I’ll do better next time.

(I won’t. I’ll still be on holidays.)

Still, at least this isn’t behind a paywall. I may be apathetic, but I’m not a monster.

New Zealand began the third day determined not to make the catastrophic first session mistakes that England made the previous day. And succeeded right up until the point they failed.

Despite a couple of good square drives for four from Jofra ‘JOff-side’ Archer, he was soon undone by a smart catch from Tom Blundell, standing up to the stumps like a scoundrel.

Infuriating, isn’t it, how Bazball is trying so hard to save Test cricket only to be constantly undone by these hateful keepers standing up to the seamers trying to kill it. You wouldn’t see James Rew standing up to the stumps and taking a smart catch. You just wouldn’t.

There were a couple more smart catches from the men in black (who, if one wants to be pedantic about it, were stubbornly clad in confusing whites). Tom Latham held on to a Jordan Cox whip through mid wicket, and Nathan Smith did some clowning about jumping and juggling at mid on before hanging on to a lofted Josh Tongue hoick.

Smart stuff all round to reduce England to 9/238, a deficit of 153. A fielding display of Mensa proportions.

Non-Existent Textbooks
Grade: F

New Zealand then shoved a crayon up their nose. Sonny Baker joined Matthew Fisher and the pair put on a textbook display of maddening tail end batting, adding 53 for the final wicket. What kind of textbook, you might enthusiastically ask in your insatiable hunger for knowledge, contains such analysis of maddening tail end batting? And the sad answer is: None as far as I’m aware. A brutal indictment of the modern education system. We have failed our children.

Read more

England began the second day with an extended fit of weirdly early short-pitched declaration bowling that promoted the possibility of New Zealand surging from their overnight score of 7/291 to something close to 400, via nothing more than a series of byes and top edges. How short were England bowling? Short enough to hit Kyle Jamieson in the head on more than one occasion. In its own way, an impressive feat, although they may have made more of an impression had they bowled at his feet.

More bizarrely, when England took the new ball, they handed it almost immediately to Jacob Bethell. This was enough to momentarily trick me that they hadn’t taken it at all, as Jofra Archer wandered aimlessly around in the field on the advice of a team physiotherapist. (Presumably, a Rajasthan Royals one.)

Was this a ploy from Joe Root to ensure he wouldn’t be asked to captain ever again? A sensible theory, yes, but I prefer to subscribe to the idea that this was Harry Brook secretly pulling the strings. A showcase of how his future Test captaincy, whenever it fully arrives, will be as deliriously, deliciously brainless as his batting. But without the corresponding success. Fingers crossed.

Morpheus Off The Long Run

All of England’s terribleness in the field allowed Glenn Phillips to bring up his first Test century. Great stuff. You bat in sunglasses whenever you like, Glenn.

Read more

Patch Notes Daniel Nguyen Meridian Press | 2024 | 318pp

Reality has changed. Not all at once, and not in any way you can easily describe to the majority of humanity who has not yet read the notes. But if you have read them you will know that Tuesday was quietly rolled back, that one of your grandmothers contained a memory leak that has since been addressed in the backup copy, and that the critical vulnerability linking love to pain remains unresolved in this build.

★★★★★ — Stable build. No known issues.

Daniel Nguyen’s latest satire arrives formatted as a software release changelog, spanning Version 1.0.0 (the Big Bang, logged as ‘initial commit’) through to the present day’s Version 43.7.2 (‘minor stability improvements - resolved edge case in which some users experienced whimsy’). The conceit is sustained with impressive rigidity: every chapter is a version number, every event is a patch, and death is filed early under ‘end of life (EOL) - no further support available’. Nguyen writes with the clipped precision of someone who spends long hours arguing with idiots on the internet and has learned, at some cost, to keep it brief.

The novel’s formal architecture is where its real argument lives. In the hands of a lesser writer, the release notes format might read as a single extended gag - a clever premise coasting on its own strangeness. Nguyen resists this. The form accumulates weight across the book’s middle section, as the patch notes begin to describe things that have no business being patched: grief, rain, the contagious quality of laughter, bowler hats. By the time we reach Version 41.0.0, the deprecation of irony (‘performance overhead too significant, not backward compatible’), Nguyen has made his case that reality has been fundamentally broken and any attempt to fix it inevitably makes things worse.

There are minor structural weaknesses. The early chapters, covering geological time, can feel repetitive - one can only read ‘resolved issue causing mass extinction event’ so many times before the joke calcifies into something less interesting. And Nguyen’s decision to render human consciousness as a known issue (‘tracked since Version 7.2.0, no fix currently planned’) may strike some readers as the sort of glib cosmic nihilism that he has leaned too heavily on since at least 2014’s Fatal Dependency Error. Nevertheless, these quibbles did not prevent me from reading the final forty pages standing up in my kitchen at 11pm, as Nguyen’s final patch notes bring the novel to a conclusion that is devastating and profound, yet unashamedly glib.

A tour de force. Runs as intended.

About the Author

Daniel Nguyen is a software engineer and novelist based in Vancouver, Canada. Patch Notes is his fourth novel. A film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling is in production, which Nguyen has described as ‘an ambitious solution to an untested IP problem’.

Who Is This Book For?

For anyone who has ever scrolled to the bottom of a terms of service update just to see what was there.

Thank goodness this match has finally started, because the drama between Tests had threatened to overwhelm.

First, there was the Lord’s pitch being officially rated as ‘shithouse’ by the ICC. Then Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson were out past their bedtime in the aftermath of the first Test, and being in the vicinity of a punch by some rugby boofhead as an inevitable result. The duo were stood down from this Test match pending further investigation, with initial talk that Stokes might quit the game! Kane Williamson, nice guy that he is, then stepped up and retired on behalf of Stokes. Meanwhile, Ollie Robinson decided one Test was enough for him, thanks very much, Jamie Smith’s wife had a baby and Joe Root was reinstated as interim England captain because Harry Brook, the vice captain, was deemed ‘too ironic’ to take the reins, given his own off-field, late night biffo, curfew-instigating shenanigans six months ago.

So, yeah. More action in the week between Tests than most five-match series.

All the changes to the England team as a result of this mad week meant that Root went into this match with more Tests than the rest of the eleven combined. A stunning stat.

I mean, combined?! Like Voltron?! How many Tests have the rest of the eleven played as one lumbering, many-limbed cricketing gestalt? Is this even allowed under the Laws of the game? Fucken Bazball, man.

Morpheus Off The Long Run

This match was scheduled to be part of the Great Multi-Match Watch of 8pm AEST, June 17™, but somebody had the bright idea to delay it half an hour for a wet outfield or something. Genuinely appreciated.

Also appreciated? The mostly mellow pace at which it was played. A lovely sedate Test match that allowed me to glance over from other screens once or twice to see a surprise wicket, before finally letting it claim a hundred percent of my attention after all the other contests finished. Alas, this was also about fifteen minutes before the teams went to lunch and I went to bed.

Here’s what I missed while I slept:

An unremarkable day, with very few ‘funnies’
Compared to curfews, newborns and bung knees
But also Bethell claimed two
Bowling his unique brand of poo
And Glenn Phillips faced Jofra in sunnies

As mentioned in other report cards, this was the second match to start in a Big Night of Coinciding Sport™, the women playing Bangladesh in a T20 at the same time as the men.

FUN FACT: No Australian cricket team has ever played any nation other than Bangladesh

Sophie Molineux won the toss and elected to bowl first, which felt needlessly cruel on Bangladesh fans. They were in the process of watching their men collapse batting first against Australia. Did they really need to watch the women do so, too?

Still, perhaps the Bangladesh women would succeed where their men could not. Perhaps they would view batting first as an opportunity to set a formidable target and put the pressure back on their fearsome opponents. Perhaps they would counter the Australian attack and set a—

Oh, they’re 5/27.

Banglademolishments
Grade: D+

It wasn’t just 5/27 either. It was 5/27, with Ellyse Perry at the bowling crease, having taken two wickets in her first over. Horrid behaviour from Pez. Still, if that wasn’t going to inspire New South Wales to a stirring State of Origin victory, it was hard to see what would. (Spoiler: it didn’t, and it is.)

But just when we thought the women might reciprocate the men’s chivalry in timing their innings break for when the other’s began, Bangladesh suddenly stopped losing wickets. Or, at least, quite as many so quickly.

Unfortunately, they mostly stopped scoring runs too, spluttering their way to 8/77 from their twenty overs. Australia then ran that down in 9.3 overs (although don’t think I didn’t notice you getting out, Beth Mooney) to seal a comfortable victory. An utter Banglademolishment.