-an OD of Toughts-

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 ...

 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...

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...

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...

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...

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed sounds less like a television series and more like something scribbled on the side of a van that has definitely been parked behind a nightclub since 2008. Yet somehow, against all odds and common sense, it turns out to be a cracking little thriller — all blackmail, murder, moral panic, and the sort of suburban chaos that makes you think every school gate conversation should come with a warning label. At its heart, the show is about a newly divorced mother who stumbles into a nightmare involving a cam boy, a suspiciously large amount of bad decisions, and youth soccer, which is apparently now one of the world’s most dangerous criminal ecosystems. I don’t know who came up with that premise, but they deserve either a medal or a very long sit down with a therapist. It’s the sort of plot that starts as “just one tiny mistake” and rapidly becomes “oh no, the entire police force, a couple of corpses, and everyone’s dignity are involved now.” Tatiana Maslany is terr...

Obsession is the sort of indie horror film that sneaks up on you, taps you on the shoulder, and then proceeds to rearrange your thoughts for the next hour. I’m not even a horror fan, which is rather like saying I’m not keen on being chased by a swarm of angry hornets, but this film had me hooked from the opening stretch and never once gave me the luxury of switching off. It does not merely aim to unsettle you. It lingers, it nags, and it leaves a rather nasty little splinter in your brain. What makes it so effective is that it does not behave like a cheap scare machine. It is not interested in shouting “boo” every five minutes like some theatrical brat demanding attention. Instead, it builds something slower, stranger, and much more intriguing. It takes a premise that sounds almost familiar, then twists it until it feels deeply wrong in a way you cannot quite explain. And that, frankly, is where the film becomes dangerous in the best possible sense. There is a point in Obsession where ...

There are moments in history that expose what power really looks like. Not when it's smiling for cameras. Not when it's shaking hands or making speeches. But when it is frightened.   Because frightened power doesn't argue. It silences. On a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, one woman became something the most powerful men in the country could not control. Her name was Daphne Caruana Galizia. She wasn't backed by an empire of newspapers. She didn't command an army of reporters. She sat at a desk, opened a laptop, and wrote. That was enough. Enough to make ministers lose sleep. Enough to shake governments. Enough to terrify men who believed themselves untouchable. Malta is small. Everyone knows everyone. Secrets don't stay hidden for long. Unless the people keeping them have money, influence, and power. Daphne made it her life's work to drag those secrets into the light. Every day, she published investigations that named politicians, businessmen...