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What drives Malta’s youth to drugs? They can’t afford a bloody beer

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Drug-driving is becoming a bigger problem. But perhaps the answer isn’t another police press conference. There is some worrying news coming from Malta’s roads. And when I say worrying , I don't mean the usual Maltese sort of worrying, where someone has parked his BMW diagonally across a pavement, and everyone spends twenty minutes discussing it on Facebook. This is rather more serious. Drug use among young people is becoming an increasingly worrying problem, and there is growing concern about people getting behind the wheel after taking drugs. Naturally, the first response is predictable. More police. More roadside checks. More testing. More penalties. More powers. And, presumably, another government press conference in which six people stand behind a table while one of them explains that "the authorities are taking this matter very seriously". Which is reassuring. Although I'm not entirely sure what the person who has just taken cocaine at 2am in Paceville is going t...
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The Reverse Midlife Crisis Nobody Talks About

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I Think I'm Having a Reverse Midlife Crisis People joke about the midlife crisis. Apparently, at some point you're supposed to wake up, buy a bright red sports car you can't get out of without making noises like an old Labrador, start wearing clothes designed for someone half your age, and convince yourself that "finding yourself" involves spending €18 on artisan coffee while posting inspirational quotes on Instagram. I went in the opposite direction. I think I'm having a reverse midlife crisis. And strangely enough... I'm happier than I've ever been. Time Has a Funny Way of Humbling You When you're twenty, time feels like a warehouse full of spare tyres. You burn through it without thinking because there's always another one. Then one day you realise you've somehow become the bloke who says things like, "Twenty years ago..." and it wasn't referring to the 1980s. That hits differently. It's not vanity that gets you. It...
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Hi-Fi in 2076: AI Can Build the Perfect System... But It'll Never Replace the Joy of Owning One.

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Hi-Fi in 2076: AI Will Pick Your Music... and Probably Judge Your Taste Too For the last 50 years, the hi-fi industry has been obsessed with one thing: making music sound more real. Bigger amplifiers. Better DACs. Gold-plated cables that cost more than a second-hand Ford Fiesta. Speakers so large they require planning permission. Now, according to a panel of audio engineers, the next 50 years will be very different. Apparently, by 2076, artificial intelligence will know exactly how you like your music. It'll understand your room, your hearing, your mood, your age, your heart rate and, quite possibly, whether you've had an argument with your spouse. Your hi-fi won't simply play Pink Floyd. It'll decide which Pink Floyd you need. Comfortably Numb because you've had a bad day. Money because your electricity bill just arrived. Or Another Brick in the Wall because the neighbour has started drilling again. It's clever. It's futuristic. And it's also slightly ...
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How to Destroy Paradise... One Apartment at a Time

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 It is getting worse. Spend five minutes in any large Facebook group, and you'll witness what can only be described as a national therapy session, except nobody's getting therapy. Somewhere along the way, we collectively sold our souls. Not for eternal glory. Not even for a Ferrari. For another rental apartment and the hope of squeezing one more tenant into what used to be someone's spare bedroom. The new national dream isn't to build a life. It's to knock down your grandparents' house, replace it with twelve identical grey boxes, and call it "investment." PL didn't invent greed, but he certainly turned it into Malta's favourite spectator sport. Everyone suddenly became a property developer. If you owned a patch of land bigger than a bath towel, congratulations—you were now a tycoon. For a while, it looked brilliant. Money was flowing, cranes were multiplying faster than rabbits, and GDP graphs pointed heroically upwards. But here's the pro...
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The Worst Day of My Life Became the Best

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My name is Michele. I'm 39 years old. It was a rainy Tuesday in November, six years ago. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I was called into the owner's office. I worked as a sales representative for a hotel supplies company. They didn't even offer me a coffee. My boss gave me the usual slimy speech, full of corporate buzzwords like "downsizing", "necessary cuts", and "difficult decision". In plain English, it meant, "You're fired, effective immediately. You have half an hour to clear your desk." By exactly 4:00 p.m., I was standing on the pavement in the pouring rain, holding a cardboard box that was slowly falling apart. Inside it were my Star Wars mug, two diaries, and a stapler. I was 33 years old, had just taken out a mortgage, and had no idea what I was going to do next. I couldn't bring myself to go home. I felt like a complete failure. So I walked into the first open place, a small neighbourhood bar. One of those depressing pl...
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The Cooking Crisis: Why Only TCNs Are Left Taking the Kitchen Grind

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Every time a headline pops up claiming that "young people just don't want to work in kitchens anymore", a very specific memory comes flooding back. Imagine being 19 years old, fresh out of culinary school with a massive hunger to learn. You land a job at a high-volume restaurant, working a blur of 16-hour days, 7 days a week. At the end of your first month, you take home €1,400. Thirty years ago, if a 19-year-old took home the equivalent of €1,400 a month, they were laughing. It was genuinely great money for a teenager starting out. Back then, the brutal hours felt like a fair trade for financial independence and a solid foot on the ladder. You could buy a house, live comfortably, and actually build a future. But three decades later, the wages have stagnated while the cost of living has skyrocketed. Today, offering that same kind of compensation for back-breaking labour isn't a tough rite of passage anymore—it is simply corporate greed and modern-day slavery. This sh...
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Ready Player One Review- Spielberg's Love Letter to Every Geek Who Ever Lived

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There are films you watch. Then some films grab you by the collar, throw you into a DeLorean at 88 mph, hand you a lightsaber, a Rubik's Cube, and an Atari joystick, and say, "Good luck keeping up."  Ready Player One isn't just a film. It's a full-throttle assault on your childhood. Steven Spielberg somehow managed to make a movie that feels like spending Saturday morning in the 1980s while simultaneously living in the year 2045. Every frame is a treasure hunt. Blink, and you've missed something. Pause it, and you'll probably find five more things. Watch it a second time, and you'll discover that the thing you thought was an Easter egg was actually hiding another Easter egg behind it. The opening race alone is enough to make any self-respecting geek spill his drink. The DeLorean from Back to the Future . The Batmobile. Akira's motorcycle. King Kong trying to flatten everyone. The T. rex from Jurassic Park reminds us that dinosaurs still haven...
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