Within Earshot

Rock The Casbah / I Will Disappear Into the Street Parade

2012-02-04T22:45:00.032Z

PART THREE OF A SERIES. PART ONE. PART TWO.

President John F. Kennedy, The COM Library, 2009

Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793, but regicides of earlier times and their followers were  interested in  attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They  wanted another  king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that  the throne could  remain empty for ever.
- Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951

2011 was by all accounts the most unpredictable year since 1989. A revolutionary wave began sweeping away the Western puppets, just as the Eastern Europeans sent the Soviet puppets to the ash-heap of history. Stability for stability's sake was once the mantra that subjugated the Middle East until the suicide of one man seemingly instigated what neither international free trade nor exiles or internal opposition could persuade. I originally intended to examine the preconditions of these revolutions, but that continues to be a work in progress if not a mystery for future historians. What I have noted, however, is that this wave that has rippled through the Middle East, and other regions to varying degrees, has for the most part been leaderless. When I last wrote a political post in November 2010, the eve of events in Tunisia, I specifically rejected cadres as essential or desirable to revolution. The absence of commanding individuals in Tahrir Square or elsewhere appears to have shown spontaneous and leaderless movements are possible - though the effectiveness of these versus the militarised rebellion in Libya or Syria is yet to be settled.
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Don't Believe a Word

2012-01-19T18:48:00.016Z

mirrors_2, ze1, 2003

I've always taken exception to the idea that you should do something you enjoy professionally. If I was to work as a freelance writer, for instance, I would have starved to death long ago even if I set my own deadlines. I could invoke that old Douglas Adams' quote again, but I wouldn't want to look like I'm trying to boost the word count - even though I just have without quoting it. I specifically put a 'Scheduled Posts' gadget on the blog to try and hold myself to my own weak promises and perhaps, I hoped, the Russian web crawlers that read this blog so often might demand that the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post I've been putting off and on for four years now actually turn up in January 2012 like I said on the 31st of last month. Surely that's why they keep viewing that post fifteen times a day, to communicate in the only way they can? I can't imagine it's because they like what I wrote - it's a bloody list of songs I liked last year.
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Music For Your Tape Recorder

2011-12-31T23:59:00.061Z

This year started with a rich mixture of contemporary releases and older hidden gems thanks to "legal downloads", until May or halfway through the list when I was recommended Trademark Ribbons of Gold. I almost didn't listen to anything else for four months until the pace picked up again when I finally purchased GTAIV and Rockstar did once again provide some well playlisted radio stations. Come the end of November I remembered to check for new releases which led to a cascade of new material for consumption. The below playlist is no longer by month as it would be pointless listing one track for each between May and September.
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Running Blind Through Killing Fields, Bred To Kill Them All

2011-12-25T01:33:00.005Z

First Person Shooter, rimblas, 2009

As revealed at the end of my long-simmering rant against Sony, I unexpectedly recently received a PlayStation 3 as a birthday present. The bundled game was Resistance 3. I'm not one for First Person Shooters. I never experienced the revelation of Wolfenstein 3D because it would never work on my old computer; and I never actually bothered to play the second coming of the FPS, Half Life, despite having purchased it. The last shooter to grace my shelf was Rising Sun eight years ago - the poor quality of which (save for a few interesting moments) pretty much killed any enthusiasm I had off the back of the success of Frontline. Only a particular subgenre of the FPS has ever really appealed to me - the tactical shooter.
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Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart

2011-12-24T23:59:00.259Z

Playstation 2 Collection, PseudoGil, 2007

When the PlayStation 2 was launched I had to wait a year before my parents could afford one for my birthday, and even then I had to go without a Christmas present that year because it was that expensive (around £250). Flash forward seven years and the old console had succumbed to drive failure. My parents bought me a replacement slim PS2 which cost only £80. With the release of the PS3 in 2006 I was hoping to follow a few series into the next generation: Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5, et al. As always, the launch price was ridiculously expensive and none of the launch titles interested me, so I waited and saved - every year I put my Christmas tips into my 'PS3 fund' and every year there's a new reason not to buy one.

By last Christmas I made enough to afford one, not due to lack of tips over three seasons, but because the price has barely moved. At the time of writing it appears the cheapest model has finally dropped under £200. I imagine that won't last as Sony will employ the same trick they've been using for five years - halt production, swap out the hard drives for larger ones, restart production and slap the old price tag on them. Given how bloody long it has taken for the price point to decrease, adjusted for half a decade's inflation it probably hasn't at all.
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It's in the Trees, It's Coming!

2011-11-22T18:30:00.001Z

missingno, bencanfield, 2010

Back in the summer I was engaged for several weeks with a role playing game. Though you don't play as any defined character, Gran Turismo has many of the elements of an RPG - just look at the grinding I had to do to afford an Audi R8. This month, however, I've got back into a proper RPG, one of the most popular of all time - Pokémon. Fittingly, I fell ill by the due date for this post as the last time I played Red/Blue was on a sick day which I spent bringing my Pikachu up to Level 100 in Cerulean Cave, which must have been at least twelve years ago. So aside from illness, why have I spent thirteen hours playing a child's old Gameboy adventure this month while on the cusp of turning twenty-five? And why am I also watching the anime?
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You Could Feel The Sky

2011-10-31T18:30:00.000Z

Twentieth Century Fox (suck it, Murdoch)

The past few weeks I've been starting work whilst it's still dark and stood at my window waiting for my lift. The first day I was staring out toward the hills in the distance and a light appeared on the limb and grew brighter and brighter moving right until quickly fading. Whilst I wandered what I had seen, the same phenomenon repeated itself and then I realised I was watching the headlights of cars on the road along the hillside. Similarly, the first time I saw an Iridium satellite in the sky I wanted to believe it was something supernatural, but by actually being educated in my observation I knew it was only a communications dish catching the sun over the horizon. As someone who would like to see evidence of extraterrestrial life or of the paranormal, is it not odd that I've never seen an aerial phenomenon that I was unable to identify? I've got Mulder's I Want To Believe poster on my wall for more than just X-Files fandom. Most UFO reports really are of Venus refracted through swamp gas, because most people can't identify the brightest planet in the sky.
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Just the Two of Us

2011-10-29T19:34:00.063+01:00

Crushed By The Wheels of Industry (Music Video), Heaven 17, 1982

Last December I hardly wrote anything because the crushing Christmas post meant that I was going to bed early to get up for work early to work till late. It's October and that's already the state of affairs. Only resourceful use of scheduled posts has kept me from being completely silent this month. How is it that one of the better months of the year is resulting in massive overtime payouts, uncompleted walks and undelivered packets? It's not Christmas, it's not snowing... it's "modernisation"!
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Some Might Say

2011-10-25T00:01:00.006+01:00

Flag of the Getae

Some might say that I have no idea what I want from a conlang. Although this one is in no way genetically related or even similar to previous samples, I still think of them as incarnations of my conlang. That said, I have figured what I want to try out with this one. Last year I said I was trying to out-weird Albanian, so I've gone ahead and made a sister language to Albanian - which, as far as I know, no-one has tried. Most likely because Albanian is poorly and lately attested compared to well documented languages like Latin which has spawned countless Romlangs as a result. On the basis that Albanian is a descendant of Dacian (and that Romanian has a Dacian substrate), I've scraped together what little (free*) information is out there and applied them to yield plausible cognates with Albanian.

*A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language is currently £154 on Amazon and only partially viewable for free on Google Books.
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Seen Enough?

2011-09-30T23:59:00.013+01:00

Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me and we understood
-The Caves of Altamira, Steely Dan (1977)

Triplets 14th Street, heather, 2007

No-one is ever paid royalties for Robin Hood and the Monk - the oldest attested ballad of the titular archer. Look at the diverse productions derived from the folk tale of Robin Hood. Where would the modern entertainment industry be without the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm? Such public domain works preceded the shift from cultural to economic capital. The wealth of the developed nations is today largely composed of intangible assets, mainly concepts and ideas and their resultant products, which once known are easily reproducible. This is a problem as our wealth then lies in a naturally infinite source. In this context it's plain to see why copyright terms are continually extended; and if the industry lobbies are correct in their assertions of economic clout, then I can confidently predict that in twenty years a defrosted Cliff Richard and a waxwork Mick Jagger will once again be campaigning for the prolonging of terms for another generation. When these terms exceed the average lifetime they will in effect be infinite. The only ones around to observe the passing of a century-scale 'time limited monopoly' will be perpetual corporations.
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Lose Control

2011-09-12T18:42:00.023+01:00

Star Wars Collection, Brian Hathcock, 2007

When I was a child in the early 90s, Star Wars seemed to have faded from view. It was actually Muppet Babies that introduced me to it, though I had no idea at the time what it was they were parodying. It wasn't until one of my uncles who grew up with Star Wars got hold of a widescreen VHS of A New Hope that my brother and I were properly presented with the phenomenon. A year or two later the Special Editions were in cinemas and I recall a children's programme looking at the digital insertion of Jabba the Hutt into Episode IV. At the time I thought this was a good thing, bringing it closer to what was intended but couldn't be technologically achieved in 1976. If what we got was a compromised realisation of Lucas' vision then how could we not welcome improvement? But the changes kept coming, and not just the little visual and audio retouches that go unnoticed. Fans of a certain calibre are acutely aware of all the alterations that Lucas has made over the years, and they will certainly be aware of the incongruous modification to Return of the Jedi that will be imposed with the forthcoming Blu-Ray® release.
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Great Times in Commotion

2011-09-11T00:01:00.004+01:00

9/11 Flipbook, scott_bl8ke, 2011

When I was in Primary 7 we had to spend Wednesday afternoon doing drama. At one point this neatly crossed over with our study of the Second World War - in groups of three we had pretend it was 1939 and we had just heard Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war against Germany. I simply couldn't act as if I was shocked by the start of the war. It meant nothing to me and there was nothing in my own living memory at the age of 11 that came anywhere near that event that I could draw upon. To me, the war was documentaries looking back half a century and old Sunday afternoon films about heroic adventures (it hadn't yet been fully abused and commercialised by first person shooters) which was not the context the people of the real 1939 were living in. That drama class is over half my lifetime ago, so I can't remember what response I acted if any.
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Cinnabar / Phthalo Blue

2011-08-31T21:03:00.000+01:00

Litmus, magnuscanis, 2009

Just across the river stands the Rosneath transmitter and on clear days the Black Hill transmitter between Glasgow and Edinburgh can be also be discerned. I remember when I first moved into my current house looking out over the river and imagined seeing rolling longwave signals being relayed across the land. That's of course a misconception of how vision works (perpendicular light does not intersect an observer's eye), but it did make me wonder what the world looks like beyond our three-colour perception.
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All Important Rubbish Made to Publish Made to Last

2011-08-12T00:01:00.010+01:00

It's that time of year again I allow myself to write the ~~worst~~ easiest kind of blog post.
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London's Burning With Boredom Now / This is England

2011-08-10T16:09:00.009+01:00

London riots, Sean MacEntee, August 2011

London's Burning is an exaggeration, of course, but it seems everyone's invoking The Clash these days. So what's happening on the streets down South? Very likely the same thing that happened in France six years ago. It would be easier just to list the problems that exist: mutual hostility between police and youth, economic disparity, high unemployment, political neglect, racism. In return, at provocation the local adolescents take to the streets, burning everything in sight. Sounds a lot like the death of the social contract, but that's really been the case since the 1970s and the destruction of the post-war compromise.
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Phonemes Solo

2011-07-24T20:15:00.006+01:00

The Railway Crossing, Fernand Léger, 1919

The Car Analogy works with almost anything. Language is a car that gets your idea from A > B. A great ride makes the journey tolerable (as great prose is effortless to read). Abusing the car will break it, as in deprecating words. Recently the reporting of News of the World's phone hacking has relied on repeating the same key words and phrases constantly. We're told that advertisers and individuals distanced themselves from 'toxic' association with the paper - I heard it so many times I felt agitated as if the word itself was so. We were also told the 'vast majority' of journalists did not employ illegal methods in gathering information. The vast majority of times I've HERD or RED 'vast majority' I've unconsciously deleted the word 'vast'.
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A is to B as B is to C

2011-07-12T18:09:00.007+01:00

Turquoise Hexagon Monolith, Prij, October 2010

A while back I was accosted by some Jehovah's Witnesses whilst taking a break out on delivery. Once I started talking about causality they dove straight into their bibles for a relevant passage that can be summarised as the old Watchmaker argument. I conceded that the houses around us were indeed built by people, on the grounds that it's quite obvious they were designed and built. We've all seen houses under construction.
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Everything Must Go

2011-07-10T18:31:00.009+01:00

Testing my CLK-GTR around La Sarthe, Gran Turismo 4

One of the less realistic elements of racing games, particularly ones that brand themselves as simulators, is the short length of races. Two or three laps are common, whilst five or more is a rarity - imagine how long it would take to complete a real F1 season and how quickly the publisher would get sued after someone sits in front of a screen for hours until they have a seizure. These things are necessary limitations, balancing realism, accessible difficulty, and convenience. It's why you can set the length of play in Football games and the reason few racers feature a clutch.
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Into The Nineties and Beyond

2011-06-19T00:29:00.024+01:00

Around this time eight years ago I was sitting my Higher English exam (first of two tries). For the writing segment you're given a booklet with roughly a dozen topic sentences to pick from. I can't remember what topic led me to write an embarrassing China Syndrome knock-off - in fact I'd like to forget it entirely. I disliked it enough that I put an apology at the end. However, in the preliminary exam a few months before, I wrote an A+ story I really wish I had gotten photocopied - it was probably one of the best things I had then written. The topic I chose in that exam was "Write about a time you went to hospital". When I saw it I immediately thought of the time I broke my arm in primary school, but I realised that the topic did not necessarily mean 'write about a time you were admitted to hospital' allowing me some room for genuine on-the-spot creative writing. Soon after I intended to rewrite it from memory (it was a single page at most) for my old website, but I never got round to it and the following is therefore an extremely loose reconstruction. I also can't remember how it ends.
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My Favourite Game

2011-05-30T20:51:00.013+01:00

My Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR 98, Gran Turismo 4

What's that old Douglas Adams quote?

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

At least Adams' were set by his publisher - mine are all my own making and I was much better at meeting them last year. I was hoping to complete a lot of draft posts this month but I dropped everything to play Gran Turismo 4 for three weeks. I know I'm an instalment behind, but it got neglected in favour of Metal Gear Solid 3 at the time.
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There'll Be No Doubt In Your Mind, You'll Believe Everything I'm Saying

2011-05-26T00:50:00.006+01:00

X-Files Title Card (Season 1 DVD)

Contemporary events sometimes create a cinematic zeitgeist. After Hale-Bopp passed, Hollywood simultaneously gave us Armageddon and Deep Impact - both films about large objects from space on collision courses with Earth (but only one was any good, which I'll get to at some point). Looking back at the 70s we see a slew of thrillers about political intrigue, paranoia, and conspiracies all borne from the fallout of the Kennedy assassination, Watergate and the involvement of the military-industrial complex in the Vietnam War. Since the 70s, doubting the official line has never been more popular. The X-Files, inspired by those thrillers, prominently tapped into notions of government cover-up concerning UFOs and the existence of alien life. Today doubt knows no bounds, having mostly transformed into full conspiracy theorism. From 9/11 truthers to the birthers who continue to contest the validity of President Obama's nationality, these doubts form more of a dis-belief system than healthy scepticism. And yet in these incredulous times the incredible is accepted so long as it's from an alternative voice.
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Play To Win

2011-05-03T19:48:00.026+01:00

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1947

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When You Walk Through Me

2011-04-20T22:02:00.002+01:00

I wanted to see Source Code last week in the cinema but I was ill and I was becoming desperate to avoid spoilers so I viewed it by other means (you know the means I mean). Make note that I will of course pre-order the DVD because I liked the film and wish to ensure more like it get made.

'Inception meets Groundhog Day'. I hate these descriptions that paint everything as a mashup of two existing works. That's not to say that there aren't similarities to other works, which I'll address in the spoiler section, but these comparisons used to market films to preconfigured audiences make little sense under any kind of scrutiny.
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Ready Let's Go

2011-04-12T23:41:00.009+01:00

Beyond The Infinite, Prij, 2005

Every year I forget to write something on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, and judging by the lack of material here this year was no different!

I remember when I was around nine, and hardly anyone in my class could name the first man on the moon, my dad had told me about the first man to go into space. He and the others that followed him were mortal men and women, but they have and will find themselves amongst the heroes in the sky. I'd rather kids want to be like Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong than one of Simon Cowell's puppets because it's exactly what needs to happen in order to regain the future that should have been already.

One of the earliest releases from the original Human League was a tribute to Gagarin, but also a tribute to the people of the Soviet Union that made it possible. The Dignity of Labour chronicles the miners digging coal to make steel with which engineers construct the launch pad and craft that propel Vostok 1 and its occupant upward into the void.

[188]

Don't Steal Our Sun / The Past Inside The Present

2011-03-27T15:32:00.005+01:00

under this clock..., paloetic, 2010

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
-Mark Twain

For a few years in school I refused to set my watch according to Daylight Savings. The very idea of gaining and losing an hour each year was absurd. Noon is noon - the point of day when the Sun is directly overhead. Of course this is never actually the case in most places even within a perfect time zone system, never mind the absolute mess that passes for a system in practice, but it's accurate enough for common use. If DST irritates me (and it is as I write this at ~~1am~~ 2am) then you can imagine what I think of the Daylight Savings Bil 2010.
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The Times They Are...

2011-03-07T03:42:00.022Z

The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular, 1995

...a-becoming quite different. One of the advantages of a long running television series is having the time to fully explore and develop the characters. One of the disadvantages of a popular long running television series is that it always passes its peak. Actually, that's a subjective call on my part and that of vocal fans. Objectively, a long running show changes.

The generally agreed point at which The Simpsons faltered lies between Seasons 9 and 10 (roughly 1998). By that measure the show, now in its twenty-second season, has been poorly-written for over half its existence. The common argument against criticism of the latter seasons is that viewers have become overly-familiar with the early episodes through heavy syndication/repeats. As the "bad" now outnumber the golden age ones, that can no longer be true. They can still put out what are good episodes, but they're thin on the ground. The decline must be borne from a change within the writing staff as it is the tone of the episodes that together define the series. In particular, certain writers may not have been familiar with the tone or the show at all.
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Music is Math

2011-02-28T03:21:00.004Z

Broken Record, Auntie P, 2005

Like a broken record [industry], people are constantly portending the death of the album. In an age when every released track is a potential chart entry the album is an obsolete collection of songs.

Originally the album was a collection of physical media containing a lengthy coherent piece. The limited length of a single record necessitated that something like Beethoven's Ninth be split across many records bound together like photographs in a photo album. With increasing storage and a commercial and cultural shift in the post-war era toward self-contained songs, the album came to be a compilation of a group's output.
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Ask (GA-Slag FAQ)

2011-02-01T00:00:00.011Z

Two years ago in the GA-Slag Retrospective I wrote about the genesis and development of said site. In this second background feature I've collected some questions about the GA-Slag, addressed some issues, and provided a little background to events depicted in prominent editions.
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Walk Out To Winter

2011-01-29T23:48:00.008Z

Ecosse C285, Dave Hamster, 2009

See Christmas? Christmas is a bastard.
-Still Game, Cold Turkey (2005 Christmas Special)

It goes without saying that Christmas is an exceptional time of year at Royal Mail. It's fittingly the antipode of summer. Whereas the sunny season is so light that overtime claims are banned, December is a cash bonanza for those willing to take on as much work as possible - morning prep, doing parts of other walks, IVO, RLB, driving lorries, working your day off. If you need the money, so be it. I'm not interested in working myself to death so I only opt in for the early starts, mainly to deal with gone-aways and do the detective work required of the mal-addressed items that people continue to post every year.
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There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

2011-01-15T23:37:00.007Z

Public Domain (NASA), September 2010

Looping hypnic orbit looking down. In the twilight I've looked up. Unfathomable distances separating the beacons. Laser light decoheres and planets resolve as less than a smudge. The universe is an explosion in which we exist. Soon we'll be blasted apart beyond horizons. The stelliferous era will be a faint memory as the stars extinguish and galaxies degenerate. DNA strands huddle round an ocean vent for warmth. Somehow the connection is made. We'll leave the cradle, disappearing into eternity. We'll slide through forever. Slide away.

Listen Carefully While I Sing My Comeback Song

2011-01-15T21:29:00.016Z

Mirrors, Olly Wright, 2006

When all else fails resort to a post about blogging...

When last January rolled around this blog was stagnating. For whatever reason I couldn't write - whether that be writer's block or the limitations of the interface - and resolved to at least post once a month. From all the drafts and notes I decided to work on one of several delayed (seven years) editions for my old website from school. Having spontaneously returned to form, I quickly found myself facing a self-imposed minimum of four posts a month. By June I had completely exhausted the long-standing pool of draft posts and was either resurrecting abandoned posts, republishing old essays, or simply hoping something would come along and inspire me.
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Music For Your Tape Recorder

2010-12-31T21:30:00.004Z

This year was by far the most contemporary year I've had since I stopped listening to Radio 1 - only two songs from this year's selection pre-date my living memory. This is probably because I stumbled into the "chillwave" genre and am currently consuming all the in-print material available. The lack of releases from the eighties or earlier is also because I haven't obtained any offbeat and out of print albums. Or rather, I'm not willing to shell out £30+ for an out of print album (again) and can't get it by 'alternative means'. As such, there is no now-out-of-print-good-band-your-parents-shunned award this year. Since this is the year of chillwave, I will instead present the Roygbiv-eargasm award to Imprint After by Toro Y Moi. Not since said BoC track has a song withstood incessant listening and accelerated toward the top of my most played Top 50.
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Waking Up And Getting Up Has Never Been Easy

2010-12-19T19:35:00.011Z

Postmen in the Snow, Rupert Brun, 2010

Throughout this productive year I've maintained the post-a-week pace of writing by planning out the following month in advance. Usually there's around ten drafts in varying levels of completion If I'm struggling to bring a scheduled draft up to standard I'll postpone it a month and bring forward a more complete one. December was to be no different, only accommodating a two week gap between the first week and the Christmas week for obvious employment reasons. Unfortunately I fell ill in the first week which scratched the first post and the past two weeks has seen the Royal Mail network buckling under the strain of the seasonal post and periodic blizzards. I've been waking up early, on the streets till late and going to bed early - rinse and repeat. As such, I've neither had the time nor energy to write.
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You Won't Have to Follow Me, Only You Can Set You Free

2010-11-30T23:59:01.091Z

Nelson Mandela, Frames-of-Mind, 2007

The Marxism essay for politics class was a by-the-numbers 'name the core aspects of theory-x' test like most class assignments. There were a few reasons I bothered to finish and hand in that particular essay - setting it apart from all the others due at the same time. I really enjoyed the politics class - the lecturer, the free flow of the classes (compare the rigidly planned psychology class, which I hated) and the subject matter.

The essay was also an opportunity to coherently express my knowledge and ideas on the subject and perhaps gain a greater understanding through arranging it on paper. Though discussing Leninism and identifying the Russian Revolution as a keystone event of the movement were explicit requirements of the essay, I can't recall whether determining an initial cause for the eventual failure of the Soviet Union was part or something I threw in to show off. Based on the conclusion I reached, that the implementation and continuation of War Communism undermined the revolution's own internal support and led to increased centralisation of power, I wonder whether the latter was true. Having stated that Imperial Russia was still a largely feudal state, only to then dismiss the idea that this was why the Soviet Union could not make the transition to socialism by leap-frogging the capitalist epoch, I perhaps wrote myself into a corner and then wrote back out of it in order to increase the word count. The essay also got a straight A!
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Q: Are We Not Men?

2010-11-24T18:59:00.005Z

In the past this information has been suppressed, but now it can be told. Every man, woman, and mutant on this planet shall know the truth about de-evolution

Collage (top to bottom, left to right):
[1] (Unknown)
[2] Peacock @ Delhi Zoo, Hi Pandian [CC:BY-NC]
[3] Pulled Pork Sandwich in progress, Marshal Astor Food Pornographer [CC:BY-SA]
[4] African Lion Feeding on Horse, Luke Robinson [CC:BY-NC-SA]
[5] hypnotic, procsilas [CC:BY]
[6] gato televito, Walala Pancho [CC:BY-NC-SA]

Imprint After

2010-11-22T21:14:00.003Z

unidentified compact disc, Janesdead, 2005

I hate being subjected to Radio 1. Either my tastes have evolved considerably, or pop music's standards have dropped considerably. Yes I know, I'm twenty-three so that probably puts even me far outside its tweeny demographic; but I swear we've witnessed the idea of the musical composition known as a 'song' eaten from the inside out by the refrain. The refrain - often called the chorus - has always been the catchy part of a song, often where the hook resides. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before the chorus came to form an entire song whereupon the hook ceases to be a means to catch the listener's ear and instead acts more like the little slots on a cheese grater. Coupled with a gratuitous looped sample being shouted over, the whole concoction shreds my eardrum over the course of three minutes.
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Hexadecimal Genome

2010-11-14T00:50:00.006Z

Eye-Bee-M, Paul Rand, 1981

I mentioned in October that my first computer was an IBM PS/1. In fact, I also had a used Commodore 64 for a few years, though I can't remember which came first; plus, I never really thought of the C64 as a computer. Like a console it plugged into the tv and it had a tape deck which to my young mind was equivalent to a game cartridge but with excruciatingly long loading times.

The interface of the 64 made it difficult for me to accidentally break it - the command for loading a game was written down on a piece of paper, and that was as much as I knew. By comparison, a technician had to be called out at least three times to reinstall Windows 3.1 on the PC. This was the same OS that came with a tutorial for using a mouse, so it was simply a case of double clicking the wrong thing. I used to explore the System and Windows folders looking for interesting hidden stuff (ooh, regedit.exe), but I only remember one particular time now in which I went into the Control Panel and decided to change the theme settings to something more Christmas-y. Unfortunately when it was next booted, Windows failed to load because my Christmas theme exceeded the video card's colour limit. You live, you learn.
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The Artist Pretending It's Art, The Question is: Where Do You Pay?

2010-11-09T16:58:00.025Z

Penny Black Printing Press, takomabibelot, 2009

What separates entertainment from art? If "all art is quite useless" then the last blockbuster you saw in the cinema is probably more so. But it makes a hell of a lot of money for those who control the media, hence these quite useless products are copyrighted for nigh a century. Our culture is far from ours in possession. How can it be called culture if can't share it? Last month I asked Who will be the first to give it all away, and Who will be the first to take it all for nothing?

The web was the first gift, it's architecture free from commercial claims. The second question has already been answered by the millions running torrents over the global network, and the unlucky few who have been subject to legal action (that often never goes to trial). The latter is a direct result of the disruptive innovation of the former. The buying and selling of music is a very recent development in the history of music (which is entangled with language and similarly as old) made possible by the invention of recording media in the late 19th century - only then forming a concrete object with value.
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The Masses Against The Classes

2010-11-01T21:17:00.003Z

The following was written for the Marxism module of Politics A class in the HNC Social Sciences course. I was up until 6AM writing this five years ago. In fact, this was the only paper I bothered to hand-in before failing/dropping out of the course by early 2006.
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The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

2010-10-29T17:26:00.008+01:00

The Void (149), Prij

One of my favourite programmes in the mid 90s was Strange But True? - one of the very few programmes I ever watched on ITV. As a child just old enough to have grown up with Ghostbusters 2, I was fascinated by the paranormal in the same way the more exotic scientific phenomena, like blackholes, captured my imagination. Because it was broadcast on a Friday night, I was allowed to stay up to watch it. I clearly remember one particular evening, The Enfield Poltergeist episode (broadcast 20/10/95) kept me awake a lot longer. I was nine years old at the time so that's understandable. I was too young to have seen Ghostwatch, but I obtained a copy last year and at the age of twenty two I was disturbed enough to sleep with the light on.

Back in July I was lying awake one night with the window open. I go to bed early on a Friday because I have to get up early on Saturday morning for work. I had already been in bed around two hours without managing to fall asleep. By now it was midnight and I was on the verge sleep when I was startled by a noise outside. What at first I thought was water running down a pipe resolved into a loud growl. I live one floor up so either it was on my windowsill or in the garden and very loud. So loud in fact that my brother who didn't have his window open went out to see what it was (as the cat had gone outside). Neither of us could see anything in the dark, though the cat appeared and was watching the far wall that separates downstairs' garden from next door. Foxes occasionally wander this far down from the golf course and cemetery, but it would have had to have vaulted two fairly high fences to get into our garden, and jump the wall to get out the other side and I've heard foxes before but never that sound. Nevertheless, the most reasonable answer is that it was a fox but reason pales to emotion in forming impressions, and that is from which the mind jumps to conclusions.
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D'You Know What I Mean?

2010-10-25T16:37:00.029+01:00

I have an admission. I... am a conlanger. I have been for seven years, but no-one knows. Tolkein called conlanging "a secret vice", though as an historical linguist he should have had no reason to hide it. It's perceived that people who make up languages are either strange twins or just strange. Tolkein went on to write one of the most popular literary series in history which gave his hobby some respect, even though hardly anyone knows the books were written as a cultural backdrop for the languages.
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The Information Chase

2010-10-19T19:04:00.030+01:00

Banksy Leake Street London, The_Magician, 2008

The Leaning Tower of Pisa. An object which would long ago have toppled to the ground, if it were not for all those counterbalanced lead weights and years of continual stabilisation work. When the Italian government requested help in saving the structure, it was seen to be more important to preserve the tilt for tourism than make it a naturally stable building as it was intended and like any other. The earth shifting beneath it put it on the cusp of collapse centuries ago. The tower is as much a symbol of man defying physics as it can be a metaphor for the copyright industries.
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Reformat The Planet

2010-10-10T00:01:00.014+01:00

8-Bit Art, ConvenienceStoreGourmet, 2010

I remember some of the first games I played when I got my first computer (an IBM PS/1) sixteen years ago. Thanks to shareware, and also rampant piracy in the local IBM factory, I had The Duel: Test Drive II, Crystal Caves, Keen Dreams, and Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis (all seven floppies of it). Of course, looking back the graphics were pretty awful, Test Drive's level scenery was highly repetitive, Keen Dreams' audio wouldn't work for some reason, and the dialogue in FoA lacked voice acting. I also had Wolfenstein 3D and Prince of Persia, but they don't count because the former would never load and the latter was lacking the manual, so I had no idea how to draw the sword and therefore get past the first level. Yet somehow I managed to get a number of years enjoyment out of those few games. You can tell I'm a gamer because I never say 'video games'.
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I'll Wonder Why We Didn't Try To Do or Die

2010-10-02T00:17:00.006+01:00

Porsche Carrera Che Guevara, f650biker, 2008

As Royal Mail heads toward becoming another target of the new depression, I recall where I was when it became apparent we wouldn't be able to afford the future. Funnily enough, I was out on delivery with my pocket radio listening to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2. The big news of the week was the ongoing collapse of Northern Rock and the bank runs on their highstreet branches - something out of the past and decidedly out of the ordinary.

However, plenty saw it coming. It was just a matter of time before another big crash. What market goes up must come down. The good times do not continue forever, yet something like the fact that infinite economic growth is impossible is met with Wealth of Nations being thrown at you - as if Adam Smith was a proponent of magic. There are only so many resources on this planet and only so much of them.
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That Was Then But This Is Now

2010-09-20T21:48:00.030+01:00

A Complex Fractal Image, Public Domain

When I was in school I used to watch the BBC's Horizon, back when entertainment hadn't yet cross-bred with factual programming. Cosmology really interested me and I proceeded to loan A Brief History of Time from the school library. One thing that really irritated me was the way Hawking seemed to go out of his way to leave space for a god. Now, with his new book, he has closed the door on that - "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going".
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Over The Horizon Radar

2010-09-14T21:25:00.007+01:00

I FAIL (Cropped), Prij, 2006

One of the reasons I've always advocated media studies, despite not having taken it myself, is to promote critical thinking - especially with regards to advertising and journalism. It's important to doubt what you're presented with, be it a brand of aftershave or a superbeing in the sky. Without free thought we become consumers, like farm animals fattening up to be led round the back and given a second mortgage. As a free thinker I hate to see lies and deceptions being mindlessly accepted by people. More so when it's me. In my pursuit of lucid dreaming there's nothing more annoying than not dreaming, than later remembering you did. Across three nights at the start of this month I missed three opportunities to become lucid.

In the first dream I had a false awakening and was presented with something I knew was not true and I successfully recognised that. However, I reasoned that I was being tricked into believing I was dreaming (a reverse Inception?) and proceeded to perform the finger-through-hand reality check in order to prove I was awake. It correctly proved (in narrative) that I was awake. To practise that reality check and see it fail was extremely frustrating. The following night I dreamt I was on what alternated between being a train and a plane. With obviously fictional characters present amongst the passengers, I had a conversation about lucid dreaming with the two women in the row behind. I even talked about reality checks but didn't perform one, perhaps because of the previous night's failure.
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Pretending To See The Future

2010-09-12T14:17:00.011+01:00

so happy there is INTERNET COVERAGE, irina slutsky, 2008

In a mobile multimedia multichannel world it's difficult to imagine just how centralised information and communications were in years gone by. I'm not quite old enough to have grown up with the web (online just short of a decade) but I do know from having limited access when abroad that disconnection from the hive mind is like suffocation. It's hard to understand the shared experience of millions of people listening to the radio as Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939.

I remember looking at the audience figures in What's On TV? in the 90s and the major soap operas would bring in a maximum of 9 million viewers. Only something like a Christmas Day special of Only Fools and Horses would break that and be able to claim the nation itself was focused on that channel in that hour. But to think of something with the same gravity as a declaration of war, that could only be 'September 11th'. The first global event of the modern era. I first heard it over the radio when I got in from school, then I went online to see it on every news site, and I turned the tv on to see every channel carrying US news feeds. There were probably instant messages and e-mails and phone calls all communicating the same thing to others.
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In One Ear

2010-09-01T00:01:00.013+01:00

Don't stop....no pares....., spanishgirl_in_oxford, 2006

The Spelling Bee is a curious Anglophone phenomenon. The idea of spelling out words as an academic competition is unheard of in countries that lack byzantine orthographies. I'm a long time proponent of spelling reform in English and also a long time hater of people who cannot or will not spell correctly. If I have to go back to the start and reread your sentence because you're not bothered about spelling, then I'm not going to read whatever you had to say no matter how interesting or profound it was since you obviously don't care enough to effectively communicate it. Perhaps a reform will come if we embrace the yoof's demotic - a silent letter cull at the expense of some 'sk8r boi' monstrosities and grammatical malformations.
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Introductory Nomenclature

2010-08-31T00:01:00.006+01:00

Today is World Blog Day. Unbelievably it's been four years since I last did this. Since I realised I no longer read any of the blogs I cited four years ago, and also Para deleted her blog a while back, I decided to link to the ones I read regularly.
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The Shape of Things To Come

2010-08-28T18:14:00.027+01:00

The Raven, richardault, 2008

I've never been to a funeral before and I wish I could say I'd never have to go to another.

The day began by meeting the rest of the family over at my grandmother's house before the funeral cortège arrived to take us to the cemetery. As we waited I took a seat by the window when my eyes were drawn to her chair. So jarringly unoccupied it brought to mind the shot of Tiny Tim's empty seat in The Muppet Christmas Carol - the muppets did it best. If the chair was peculiarly vacant, the room and the house were even more so. The short drive to the crematorium was quietly sombre. As a grandson I was first with the rest of the family to enter. My mind was concentrated on trying to remain composed amid the audible grief of my mother, aunt and uncle. This was not the first time for them - my grandfather died five years before I was born. Whilst the hall filled my thoughts were drifting toward understanding the situation. When the coffin itself was carried in, trying to remain detached became infinitely harder - eyes drawn front and centre, staring at it. I didn't look at the service booklet because of the picture on the back page - photographs have become too disconcerting.
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The Reverse Will

2010-08-20T15:25:00.092+01:00

Skrik, Edvard Munch, 1893

About twelve years ago my brother and I got pet goldfish. They died a number of times, probably due to our negligence; but we were unaware as our parents had replaced them, overestimating our attachment to the point of driving up the motorway to the pet shop in Renfrew one morning. To say that we were upset about this would be an outright lie, truth be told I pretty much forgot we had them - the cat was the centre of attention. Pet fish are really an entry level pet, the sort that a child can make a fatal error without having any serious mental scars. Ashes to ashes, flush to flush. Later on my cat disappeared. He was older than me by a few years so it was all but confirmed he went to find a place to die. Still, the ambiguity makes denial easier, and I wasn't as upset as I would in a more clear cut situation - as when my second cat was run over. That was much different because I had her from kittenhood. Animals do have personalities. Despite not witnessing it, her death is quite clear in my mind. That led to an excruciating post in 2005 that I'm not going to link back to.
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Heaven's Night

2010-08-15T16:37:00.001+01:00

Silver Falls 19, emperley 3, 2010

Early Friday after midnight I was reminded of the Perseid meteor shower. I spent nearly an hour standing still looking straight up into clear skies. The first I saw flashed across half the sky. I saw perhaps half a dozen. One of the brightest left an afterglow in either the atmosphere or my eye. Stood in the garden without sign of another, I could have been the only one watching.

After a while I couldn't crouch out of the streetlights anymore and lay down on the stairs, like an uncomfortable recliner. I lay there staring through space. I stared through it and at it. I started to move through it. As the stars rolled over I had to call it a night before I fell asleep. The night sky was probably the view our ancestors woke to on first watch. Unobstructed by skyglow, they would have seen the milky way and the enshrined heroes pivot on the celestial sphere.

You could feel the sky.

Heard From Telegraph Lines

2010-08-12T12:00:00.004+01:00

Back at the end of last year I gave the blog a new layout when I realised I had been using an ancient template the whole time. The labels gadget prompted me to get the post tags in order whereupon I noticed there was a gap in the more academic topics between mid-2006 and the end of 2008. Interestingly enough, that was the period this blog lapsed into diary mode. I managed to get back on track in October 2008 when I laboured to produce five whole posts, but it wasn't until this year that I regained motivation by inverse resistance to the rise of microblogging. Since I've mastered Goggle Docs' spreadsheets, here's some illustrations:
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(Dream A Dream A Trance As You Dream) In Trance As Mission

2010-08-10T16:07:00.002+01:00

The Listening Room, René Magritte, 1952

More than a decade ago in a hot and stifling home economics class each pixel in my eye went out one by one until my vision faded, my inner ear lost track of balance, and the last thing I could feel was my head painlessly colliding with the floor tiles. I woke up in bed, got up for breakfast and went about the morning routine for school. Then I woke up again in the recovery position on the classroom floor. As I woke I said to the teacher 'I was dreaming' - What I meant was, I thought collapsing was the dream, and the dream was reality. She figured I had dreamt Scotland won the World Cup. I always found dreams interesting like my own personal bizarre little narrative-defying films, which is why I used to keep a dream journal off and on between 2004 and 2008. A few years ago I read about lucid dreaming but largely forgot about it until seeing Inception. Since the start of this month I've been trying, though to no avail as of writing.
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Overdose Delusion

2010-08-01T16:18:00.047+01:00

Screenshot from Inception, 2010

I said I'd write up an analysis of Inception after another viewing and I've now seen it thrice - twice on the big screen, and once on the small screen *cough*. I've already pre-ordered it. Here I've tried to reign in my branching interpretations...
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Dreams Never End

2010-07-20T22:35:00.033+01:00

I really hate it when films are described as a cross between two renowned films. The cover of R-Point features a quote from 'Front Magazine': "Blair Witch meets Full Metal Jacket" - not even close. Inception has been summarised as The Matrix meets Ocean's Eleven.
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All Together Now

2010-07-13T23:20:00.016+01:00

Alex Song: Cameroon 2010, tsevis, 2009

Before the South Africa finals, I hadn't watched any football since the 2006 World Cup. Somehow I managed to completely miss Euro 2008. As Scotland failed to qualify as usual, I wasn't hindered by great expectations, dreams of glory or any other kind of emotional high. Unlike England. Despite thirty-two teams competing in the 2010 tournament; the one we have to hear about again and again is of course, that team that won it once a very long time ago. Any time England qualifies for the World Cup the national media (being mostly based South of the border) will drop 1966 into every possible topic or story. Only the Welsh and maybe Northern Ireland could also understand how irritating that is. Though only one thing could be more annoying that having to hear about a missed penalty for a week - England winning.
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Extrinsic 5: Cities, Buildings Falling Down, Ideal Homes Falling Down

2010-07-06T13:47:00.014+01:00

My photostream "Cyprus"

One of the day tours on offer in Cyprus is a trip into the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC)- the highlight of which is the 'abandoned city' of Famagusta where we were told you could 'see' the long out-dated clothes on display in the shops. Or at least that's how it was sold. As I was in the last divided country in Europe; the chance of crossing through an armistice line into a place with its own zone of interdiction, like a tame North Korea, appealed to me.

I went on this trip on July 14th 2007 and intended to write a post the following day. For whatever reason, I didn't. I dug out the old notepad I had on holiday at the time and the entry for this consisted of the date, title, and a blank page. Here's what I would have written had I not scrapped the post two years ago...

As always these bloody trips require getting up at 0700 when the only thing on offer in the restaurant is fucking sandwiches. Our hotel was in Paphos which is conveniently on the wrong side of Cyprus. After a mind-numbing eternity on the motorway, during which we picked up our Greek Cypriot Guide, the bus eventually reached the Green Line which we followed to the Eastern Sovereign Base for the crossing into the North. The Green Line seemed to mostly consist of open field, warning notices and lookout posts. Our Southern guide mostly spent this time covertly denouncing the Ataturk, only to do a complete about-face on that topic when the Northern guide boarded at the checkpoint. As tourists in the South, you could be forgiven for slipping into the perception of the Turkish side as a muslim East Germany. Both guides had stories about how the invasion and division of the island had affected them and their families. Both hoped Cyprus could be reunited.
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United States of Whatever

2010-07-04T00:50:00.038+01:00

Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator! [Cropped], br7tt, 2007

What came first: idiots or misanthropy? I never fail to be amazed/depressed at the sheer ignorance people are capable of. The general public seems mentally in the pre-Galilean age
in which the stars are fixed, a burning ball of coal revolves around Earth and the Moon only comes out at night as everyone knows, whilst smugly proclaiming that simpletons in the middle ages thought the world was flat. Safe in their own delusions they watch reality television where they indulge in more delusions about their superiority over the trash who appear on screen. There is something seriously wrong in a world that turned Orwell's warning of totalitarianism into a yearly wet t-shirt contest.

It used to be you could laugh at those silly colonials on the other side of the Atlantic, with their god and guns and poor understanding of world geography. But then I noticed stupidity was a universal not tied to a specific state. I can lambaste an American for calling me English or confusing Slovakia and Slovenia, only because I know the difference between Washington state and Washington DC. I have done the research - I have the high ground. I've bothered to read about the latest models of quantum mechanics even though the mathematics is beyond me and I failed Higher Physics. Therefore I took exception when people were talking about the Large Hadron Collider going on-line and possibly creating a blackhole that could destroy us all, because they read it in a column in The Sun written by some celebrity who probably still thinks atoms are indivisible. Indeed, mass ignorance of the LHC's purpose was rammed home earlier this week when I realised I hadn't seen Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe in a while.
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I'm a DJ and I've Got Believers

2010-06-26T16:25:00.026+01:00

cue, danmachold, 2005

A few weeks back I was in the barber's and I was watching BBC News in the mirror - I think this was the same day Gordon Brown stood down as PM. One of the employees then changed channel to the Radio 1 feed. I stopped listening to R1 at the end of 2003. As the Radio 1 Festival was around the corner, the presenter decided to play an "oldie" from years gone by. It was Avril Lavigne's 'Sk8er Boi'.
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Alone Again with the Dawn Coming Up

2010-06-25T01:38:00.005+01:00

2AM Eternal, Prij, 2008

In the heat there is a light in the North that defies sunset. Airlanes are pink against the blue airglow. That light is the relief from the winter dark that hangs so low overhead for so long. Sure enough it will return again.

Summer gives way to winter, gives way to summer. Our existence disappears in the cycle. Waves breaking on the shore die for more still behind them. The gears of the orrery crush stone. Imagine what it will do to you.

But for now in the blithe dawn chorus, all possibilities remain ahead. If your soul could explode in ecstasy, it would form the ethereal light on my horizon. She is still rising, stealing the stars from the sky.

Fleeting rhodon touch.

(Deeper Underground) I Get Nervous in the New York City Streets

2010-06-19T16:09:00.004+01:00

9/11, marc_buehler/NBC, 2001

Yeah, again. After publishing my analysis of Cloverfield last month, I continued thinking about the film's relation to September 11th. What I have written below is really pushing the limits of the narrative as I highly doubt the producers, being American, are communicating the message that I think could be extracted from it.

»Spoilers Throughout«

In my previous analysis I argued Clover (the titular monster) was a personification of 9/11 and as such, the instigator of the character drama. The origins, motivations, and purpose of Clover are ultimately unknown. The only clue is the brief shot of an object strike the ocean in the final scene before the credits (the promotional material offers a scant back-story). Despite Rob's camcorder perfectly capturing that brief glimpse, Rob and Liz are entirely unaware of it. When Clover starts wrecking New York, no-one understands what is going-on nor why it is happening.
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Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions of Pounds, Billions of Pounds (Corruption, Corruption)

2010-06-15T15:17:00.007+01:00

jump-you-fuckers, matthewnstoller, 2008

It's World Cup time, not that I've seen much so far. It seems whenever I go to BBC iPlayer to watch a game it's audio only because fucking ITV have the broadcast rights to that particular fixture. So I had the misfortune of enduring commercial television for the first time in quite a while. I already knew the rampant commercialism of sport is sickeningly omnipresent, but it's still aggravating to see product after over-priced Chinese slave-laboured product so-tenuously linked to the World Cup being hawked as if there's no tomorrow.
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Lineman for the County

2010-06-09T22:11:00.013+01:00

Endorsing the Returns, Prij, 20/03/10

This week marks my third year working for Royal Mail and, coincidentally, another operational change has taken place. Even in this short time there have been noticeable changes, all of which are driven by the mantra 'mail-volumes-are-down-and-people-are-emailing-and-texting'. Roy Mayall has tackled these claims several times, so I needn't repeat his rebuttals.

When I started, weekday working hours were 0800 to 1300 with deliveries starting at 0930. In October 2007, despite union resistance, this shifted an hour back. The next initiative was 'summer lapsing' in June 2008. This involves dividing a duty amongst surrounding walks during the easy summer period. With the exception of Christmas, 'summer lapsing' now occurs Monday to Thursday using the 'starburst' delivery method. That knocked me off the walk I was on at the time (Hallmark Fount) exactly a year after starting. I didn't appreciate that present.
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Window Washer's Dream

2010-06-04T17:46:00.011+01:00

NYEastRiver_From_WTC, Fanghong, 1992

At the end of the 90s I was getting a bit old for Lego. There's an old camcorder tape somewhere from the early 90s of me giving a tour of my attic-based sprawling Lego city. When I moved out of my old house in July 2000 the Lego was packed away and it's still in boxes in the basement because this house is substantially smaller. A few months prior to moving, a friend had given me an old copy of SimCity 2000. Along with Pokémon Red/Blue, it was the cause of my first exile from television - even from then-still-good The Simpsons. By my first exams in May 2002 I had a copy of SimCity 3000. I would get up early and play it all day, which in hindsight could have been used for studying but I coasted that year's exams anyway.
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(Deeper Underground) But I Got To Go Much Deeper

2010-05-28T21:06:00.010+01:00

»Spoilers From The Outset«

B0000609, ghackettny, 2001

Looking for something to watch on Sunday night, I put on Cloverfield again. Last year I wrote a short review after first seeing it, in which I thought it was underrated. As I was munching through a packet of crisps the Brooklyn Bridge collapses killing Jason and many unknown others. People are screaming names and fleeing in abject terror, and I suddenly felt uncomfortable. Indeed, some reviews criticised it as September 11th pornography - making entertainment out of tragedy as the horror genre does with fear. In my mini review I saw it as a contemporary framing of the monster/disaster movie genre but lacking depth or social commentary. That unease prompted me to question whether it really was without merit, leading me to watch it yet again on Thursday.

Prior to 2001, the most destructive act of terrorism in the US was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 - as referenced in the opening scenes of The X-Files Movie (1998). That incident is well known but largely restricted to that city in terms of impact. September 11th, on the other hand, was a game-changer, broadcast live as it unfolded - its effects on American culture are profound and long-lasting. Before it, the American public was only familiar with terrorism on the evening news. It had never struck home on such a large scale. With the thousands of people who died on that day, how could Hollywood ever make a disaster movie again? To make a popcorn disaster movie with a massive body count would be grossly insensitive.
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Persuading You That Monochrome is Dayglo

2010-05-20T22:23:00.013+01:00

NOPE, Tom Edwards, 2010

There is now a new government in Westminster, not that I can tell. I still find myself thinking Blair is Prime Minister and Bush is President. The climactic shift that these brief windows of participatory indirect democracy (elections) are supposed to produce never arise. Round we go, like a zoetrope: Labour in power, Conservatives in power; Democrats in power, Republicans in power. The illusion of movement. It's hypnotic.

I hate to be the cynic, but I guarantee the 'new politics' will come to remind you of the old politics. How many months was it before fresh-faced Tony was caught accepting money from F1 autocrat Bernie Ecclestone? I was ten at the time and I can remember hearing how the Labour landslide was the rebuke of Tory sleaze. Remember the icons of the mid nineties meeting Blair at No. 10? How many of them were in sight of Downing Street ten years later? Politicians have been heralding change more times than the boy who cried wolf, and yet even I was swept along by Obamamania.
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Somebody Up There Likes You

2010-05-08T17:49:00.018+01:00

Frakk em all!, Don Solo, 2009

As someone raised on Star Trek I've been reluctant to leave the comfort of the Roddenberry universe. Perhaps because Trek is the oldest standard for serious (by 60s standards) sci-fi television, all other shows come across as re-costumed copies. I was too young to see The Next Generation during its original run, but BBC2's tea-time repeats in the 90s made me a fan. When Deep Space Nine was imported I was probably too young to appreciate its breaking of the Trek mould - war, questionable ethics, the Federation losing for once. I preferred Voyager at this point but as it went on I became convinced Star Trek was losing steam. Voyager in particular was either repeating itself or TNG or pulling a deus ex machina every time they walked into the Borg. Despite that, the Doctor was and still is a great character, but his story arcs with Seven of Nine (and her own character development) would have been so much better if Seven wasn't visually the epitome of fan service.
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In The Waiting Line

2010-05-01T05:12:00.005+01:00

Still Life with a Skull (Vanitas), Philippe de Champaigne, 16xx

I have a very good long term memory. If I say I don't remember it, it's probably because I want to forget it. Despite this, I always feel highly disconnected from the past. My room is littered with little mementos of various places and times because I tend never to return after leaving: I have a safety box-cutter from my ten days working at Amazon, a phonetic alphabet chart for pinning to a monitor from the telephony course I was on in 2007, and I have the old frame labels of my old delivery. Each of those is a concrete object that proves the past happened. I have a much harder time with the future.
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I'll Bet You Five You're Not Alive If You Don't Know His Name (GA-Slag -1)

2010-05-01T00:00:00.007+01:00

Seven and a half years ago I had written a satire of the school's Remembrance Day service and constructed a website for it on my NTL webspace. In the retrospective I quoted the original creators (Martin and Stephen) who were originally going to write The GA-Slag about individuals they wanted to have a go at. They abandoned the idea out of fear before I picked it up in November 2002. I can't remember how I got hold of the concept, but I do remember talking to Stephen about covering the service as a piece for his site. We were pissed off about having to attend, so why not entertain ourselves? The original idea was obviously a legal minefield best avoided, or navigated with pseudonyms at least. As I said in the retrospective, slagging people off would have just segregated things even more in fifth and sixth year. By that point most of the really irritating types (the neds) had already left during fourth year.

It occurred to me that there was one character ripe and deserving of abuse I had neglected to write about. One person we could all agree on...
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Architecture and Morality

2010-04-26T04:33:00.013+01:00

BM093 New York Skyscrapers, listentoreason, 2005

Back when I was studying social sciences at college one of the classes would assign reports on an issue of our choice relevant to the course. Possibly overreaching into doctorate territory, I repeatedly tried to investigate religion and morality, or more correctly disprove the correlation between them. In fact, one of my lecturers told me it was a good idea but way beyond my means and the scope of the course. I later threw in some swear words and just published my opinion on this blog.

The claim of ownership on morality by religion in general is without substance. The Archbishop of Cantebury, Rowan Williams, in particular irritates me. Softly spoken, every time he pops-up it's to say things would be nicer if we'd just listen more to that swell fellow upstairs (but don't expect him to lift a finger). The Abrahamic religions have spent centuries now claiming that armed with their unique truth and moral compass, the ills of the increasingly secular world can be cured (secularism being equated with materialism). Problem is, this moral compass has been spinning around for millennia. What may have been permissible then is not now, and vice-versa.
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Something to Sing About (The Spell We Cast With Buffy)

2010-04-21T19:38:00.024+01:00

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards
-Kierkegaard

Willow Rosenberg promo photo, Trekkie Gal

Whenever I watch a film trilogy or a tv series boxset, I reach the end and want to start over again. A good test of the quality of the material would be whether it could stand up to an immediate repeat viewing. I've never done that - when I've finished watching Back to the Future, for example, I always leave at least a few weeks before watching it again. It is possible to ruin a good thing and I hate to spoil BTTF like Jurassic Park. Considering most films have a runtime of roughly 100 minutes, you'd need to set aside close to five hours to revisit a trilogy on DVD, easy enough. Now consider revisiting a long-running tv show on disc: nearly forty-five minutes for American network productions with twenty or so episodes a season comes to fifteen hours. Now you need to justify watching all the way through an old series.
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Words Can Put You On The Run

2010-04-13T18:04:00.034+01:00

Russians were here, quinn.anya, 2007

I've been making my way through the Battlestar Galactica series boxsets recently, and coincidentally there's a moral panic over the film Kick-Ass. What the two have in common is bad language, if there is such a thing.

The quote the BBFC's
rating of Kick-Ass (link may contain spoilers):

The film contains multiple uses of strong language. [...] KICK-ASS contains one use of very strong language. The word is spoken by a young girl who, like Kick-Ass, has become a makeshift superhero. Although some people might be offended by a child using this type of language, the predominant effect is comic. [...] The remark is delivered in a throwaway fashion rather than aggressively directed and the unexpectedness and incongruity of the use provides a comic justification for its inclusion.

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Then Your Children Will Be Next

2010-04-10T20:28:00.022+01:00

There are 58,789,194 people in the UK at the last census in 2001. Along with 92.1% of that number I have classified myself as white. Specifically, White British, and only because I'm not White Irish or White Other. I'm obviously white and since I live on this island called Great Britain I suppose British is a suitable enough adjective, so what is it I have in common with all those other white people? Some sort of racial heritage? Some sort of national identity?
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The Bitterest Pill

2010-03-20T16:20:00.034Z

Royal Mail Success - This Letter Reached the Right Person, Neil Boyd, 2009

I've been working at Royal Mail for nearly three years now, but I've never really written about the job. I could swear like a sailor about management and the way RM is being intentionally driven into the ground, but I really like the job and wouldn't want to risk it over a bunch of rants - hard to believe this is from the man who wrote this at school and deliberately got suspended twice.

Actually, when I say I like the job what I mean is my walk, and the reason I'm writing this is because I've been moved off that delivery after 21 months and today was my last day on it. If I sound bitter it's not only because of my reputed early finishes (during the summer! Was I the only one who had a lull during the summer?), but because I had actually got to know a lot of people in the area. I greet the same faces each morning, residents say hi to me in the streets, one lady gives me an apple and a mars bar every Saturday, I see Mrs ABC nearly everyday for her sign-for packets, and so on. In fact, so long was I on that walk that I became less focused on finishing as early as possible and began to chat with Granny Smith.
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Where Do I Start, Where Do I Begin?

2010-03-20T00:01:00.011Z

The Flag of The Polity of Star City

Since I last wrote about NationStates four years ago, I've noticed that the governments of many regions ceased to function and slid into informal gerontocracy as the numbers of residents declined. Well, as I write this on January 30th, my nation Star City is just over seven years old. When this is published my home region The Proletariat Coalition will also be seven years old - though the exact date in March is long-forgotten, it was contemporary with the invasion of Iraq; as such I tend to set the anniversary on the 20th. To mark this, I'm republishing my memoirs from five years ago. You can read the currently outdated history of TPC at NSwiki.

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Magic Window

2010-03-18T18:28:00.155Z

Parabola tree, am4ndas, 2009

Having suffered through a three year long mild writing-block, I've suddenly found myself back on a roll. Maybe it was my brief experiment with Twitter that did it: that whilst you can throw any old combination of 140 characters together on Twitter, there's a satisfaction that comes from turning your thoughts and ideas into actual sentences and paragraphs that communicate those concepts. Also I'm a contrarian.

Rejuvenated, I've got through a number of long standing drafts that were featured in a filler-piece from two years ago. So here's another filler telling you what ended up where:
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Computerwelt

2010-03-15T17:47:00.021Z

Lego Technic 2/2, MiikaS, 2008

The "mainstream-media" is always producing these pieces about internet addiction and challenging people to live without the internet for X amount of time. At no point have I seen the media challenge people to live without writing or the wheel - the preceding most important technical revolutions in history.

The greatest danger is viewing an innovation as a toy. The Classical Greeks had steam turbines, but elected to power spinning-tops instead of factories, or at least viewed it as a curiosity. The wheel was absent from the pre-Columbian Americas except for stone proto-wheels on children's toys. Despite how the internet/web has demonstrably revolutionised the dissemination of information, old media treats it like an amusing sideshow. Which is why they continue to flounder in the post-scarcity digital world, railing against progress and demanding someone stop the children.

[The web] is a full-duplex, two-way medium, more like the telephone than the television. Entertainment is experienced as doing, not just watching. Old Media types might think that the Web is filled with empty eyes and empty heads [...] There is no audience anymore: the Web's eyes are active and in search of actuality
-Steve Baldwin

[200]

Cries and Whispers

2010-03-14T23:39:00.085Z

Fire Under Centralia (2 of 4), Cartographer, 2006

Eight years ago on Friday I bought Metal Gear Solid 2 which came with a bonus DVD that also included trailers of other forthcoming Konami releases. Amongst them was the E3 2001 trailer for Silent Hill 2, which was a work of art in itself.

Regrettably, I put off buying it for a long time because survival horror is not my thing (though, speaking of which, I did play halfway through the The Thing game), and it took three years since putting it on my Amazon wishlist for me to summon the courage to play it.
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Alone in the Town

2010-03-10T02:29:00.003Z

(Untitled), Prij, 25/12/05

It's happened again. Whenever I've got time off work I quickly slip into nocturnal mode. A while back I slept through three consecutive days of daylight, which is probably why I can't remember how long ago it was. It must have been during Winter, my curtains were never opened.

There's nothing like the solitude of the night. An extended run of quiet hours, you and the words, the music, or the film uninterrupted - a closeness that cannot be achieved in the light and air of the day, but after a while you must come up to breathe. The intimacy of the night can also smother you. The only colour in the dark is the infernal monochrome of the street lamp, like dead stars too weak to shine. It's often during these nights I sit and think, sometimes deliberate.

There is nothing to avoid in the night but sleep, for in my dreams I have fought backwards and see the old faces but speak new words. Accept the past or spend every sleeping moment trying to change it. It was once her face, then another's, and yet more from memory. Did I even know any of them? All I really want is someone else to catch this drift. Otherwise, I might have to consider I'm the only extant.

[224]

Turn On, Turn On, Turn On The News

2010-03-04T15:39:00.014Z

Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997

For the past few months Rupert Murdoch has been tilting at Google accusing them of stealing his 'content' - that is, linking to it. One gets the impression he hasn't a clue about the interwebs, which has become increasingly apparent since buying MySpace in 2006.

If you look to the Financial Times, it's true that readers will pay for real quality content. Murdoch's best-selling "newspaper", on the other hand, relies on jingoism (Gotcha!), xenophobia (Swan Bake), outright lies (Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster) and tits. If the dead-tree version is worth only 10p to the masses, who are you going to find willing to cross a paywall to access this moronic bullshit online?
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Film For The Future

2010-02-24T20:03:00.009Z

Victor Vasarely outdoor work, Váradi Zsolt, 2005

Despite the hype, I refuse to see Avatar. I can see through it. People keep talking about how amazing it looks, they even admit that the story is hackneyed. I can't quite understand why Avatar is up against The Hurt Locker for awards. No, that's no true. It's pretty obvious Avatar is the big 3D revolution tentpole release - what better way to cement that, than by showering it with psuedo-critical praise. The phrase you are looking for is 'circle jerk'.

Most won't know this by name - L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. It's the short film with the train coming towards the camera. Cinema goers in 1896 may not have scrambled out of their seats to get out of the way, but they were impressed by the lifelike images on the screen. That's really what Avatar is - a glorified IMAX demo. The Hurt Locker on the other hand concerns its main character and his motivations. Long after the special effects of Pandora are superseded, The Hurt Locker will offer its narrative for continued contemplation.
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If You Tolerate This

2010-02-21T18:10:00.005Z

For about a decade I've politically identified myself as a Marxist. That happens to coincide with my existential crisis at the age of 14, so naturally I'd find revolutionary upheaval appealing in a world of shit. I read 1984 at roughly the same time, which I understood as a very obvious criticism of Stalinism, which makes me a Trotskyist, though my own thoughts about the failure of the Soviet Union (which I'll be posting later in the year) align me closer to Council Communism than any Leninist strand.
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Brothers, Sisters, We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang

2010-02-20T20:29:00.005Z

Public Domain, 1945

The final episode of the European Civil War is a safe harbour for many films and games. The Third Reich was probably the most unambiguously amoral belligerent in history, and because of this no-one objects to massacring entire Wehrmacht divisions in Medal of Honor ('the acceptable face of war'). It's probably the war that least needed a series of films entitled Why We Fight.

Nearly everyone has played soldier against the Nazis in some MoH clone, as shooters tend to outnumber games on the other forms of combat - naval and air power. One of my favourite games is B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th. I find the gameplay very appealing - training as a navigator and trying to figure out if we're on target by which of the Frisian Islands we're passing over, or being the bombardier and desperately trying to spot a steel works in Essen through nine tenths cloud cover, lest we have to restart the bombing-run and go back through the flak - I love that kind of technical roleplay.
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A Suicide/The Kiss

2010-02-14T00:00:00.001Z

I've always been interested in space and astronomy. Unfortunately, the sense of proportion that comes with that is a form of torture. I had what can only be described as an existential crisis at the age of 14, bad enough that the school contacted my parents.

Whilst I may not be as acutely mind-fucked a decade on, I've never actually exited the crisis, just attempted to ignore it. It popped up again in 2006, as a large bulk of posts will testify, and now and then since but the lack of posts mostly hide it. I was thinking a lot, however, and I happened to be reading this article:

A particular way of breaking through the sense of isolation is through touch.

when it struck me like a diamond bullet through the forehead, that I already knew this. Nothing could more be described as transcendent than the random hug the girl in my chemistry class once gave me. It sounds so petty and laughable a saudade, but it just could keep me going. Somewhere out there is a connection to be made.

Art: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Extract), Georges Seurat, 1884
[185]

Quadrant 3

2010-02-02T21:05:00.005Z

F-35 JSF Developmental Pilot Helmet, Image Editor, 2007

One of the more overdone tropes of Western cinema is the notion of the machine revolt. Most people are familiar with The Matrix and Terminator, but I highly recommend Colossus: The Forbin Project from 1970 as an early example of the genre. The final scene of Colossus is as poignant as John Connor's radio broadcast at the end of Terminator 3 (which was in all other respects a bad remake of T2).

In all these films the machine revolt is preceded by a common act - a computer is empowered by man to do what we are either unable or unwilling to do or think.
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Golden Brown (GA-Slag 0)

2010-01-24T01:30:00.009Z

It's nearly ten years ago that GA received a very special visitor. Chris Eubank came to the school for all of 15 minutes. To this day I wonder if I was daydreaming in English. It was totally surreal. You think he's eccentric on the tv? Try seeing him on stage.

We were all called into the assembly for a special talk about drugs, m'kay? Chris was promoting a hip new website called Dare to be Different or D2BD as per all the promotional material. The excitement builds as he arrives with his entourage and runs up on stage. Imagine if Dali had been recruited to write a public service announcement.
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Music For Your Tape Recorder

2009-12-31T23:30:00.021Z

This time last year I was quite excited about La Roux. Here was a band I thought was going to finish what Yazoo started. But the voice and the bleeping began to grate. Music in the early eighties sounded like that because of hardware limitations. Consider these words from All Music Guide on Simple Minds' second album: "It's where [they] ventured beyond the ability to mimic their influences and began to manipulate them." I hope their next effort will endear itself more, but I'll probably forget to check up - which is why it took me till May to find Fujiya & Miyagi's Lightbulbs disappointing. Unfortunately life is too short to spend it listening to stuff again in the hope you might appreciate it second time round.

Only with a band as good as Boards of Canada would I do that. Having devoured Twoism, Music Has The Right to Children and Geogaddi last year, I started searching for In A Beautiful Place..., The Campfire Headphase, and Trans Canada Highway, which were not included in the set I procured (Bought them all since). When I came across Macquarie Ridge, I swore I had heard it before. I listened to it endlessly, trying to remember when I thought I had heard it, before realising it had actually overwritten a memory of hearing Kelly Watch the Stars on a school trip in 1998. That is the genius of BoC.

Last year Dalek i was my now-out-of-print-good-band-your-parents-shunned of 2008. This year it's The Passions. Bet they could only remember through Ashes to Ashes.
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Communication Let Me Down

2009-12-31T23:17:00.008Z

Beginning, Kenneth Noland, 1958

Though I wouldn't consider this blog to be in the same league as Doctorvee's, it seems many bloggers are facing the same issues.

The post rate here and elsewhere is down. In the early days it's probably true the deluge of posts each consisted of 500 words or less. Occasionally I would post some grand interpretation or theory, until gradually great 2000 word essays felt expected. Writing multiple 100 word entries, even if it is a legitimate non-twitter-esque post, feels like cheating . I've tried Twitter and found 140 characters only suited to celebrities talking about a cloud they saw an hour ago, or more interestingly (links to) breaking news.
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Saturday's Kids

2009-11-09T00:44:00.007Z

Preparing the Night Mail, scardy, 2002

I always wonder who's up at 6am watching cartoons and then I remember I used to get up every Saturday morning in the mid 90s to watch Live & Kicking. L&K was on from 9am to noon but I was always afraid I'd sleep in and miss it - the tagline being "Miss it, miss out".

I'd wake up in the dark and drag my duvet into the living room. I was often up far too early, sometimes BBC1 would still be off-air and there'd be static. At some point the test card would kick in with a piercing tone before transiting to Pages From Ceefax. The music played over PFC is often described as terrible, but I love it. As a preteen exposed to manufactured pop, this poor man's jazz/funk/easy-listening was amazing. PFC was probably also my exposure to the wider world: I remember reading about an IRA bomb one morning as the news pages scrolled.
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Book of Brilliant Things

2009-08-12T15:00:00.002+01:00

Ten years ago, before I had an internet connection or Amazon started turning a profit, I remember being at my Nan's and the TV was on. During the programme break there was an advert for Amazon.co.uk. As a 75 year-old she dismissed the internet as a fad. A strange attitude to have for someone born 18 months before the first demonstration of the very thing she's sitting in front of. I do love the smugness that comes from looking back on that.
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Sunshine of Your Love

2009-07-07T00:18:00.050+01:00

I fell with her every rise
Dawn watched over me
I'd love to set eyes on blinding beauty
I'll die long before her

1] PAST.fall(ATELIC).PERFECTIVE.ATELIC-SUBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR rise.PRESENT-ACTIVE-PARTICIPLE.GENITIVE.COMITATIVE 3p-NEUTER-SINGULAR-OBLIQUE.GENITIVE
2] Dawn.NEUTER-AGENT watch(TELIC).TELIC-OBJECTIVE-3p-NEUTER-SINGULAR 1p-SINGULAR-OBLIQUE.LATIVE.SUPERLATIVE
3] eye(TELIC).VERBIFY.OPTATIVE.OBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR beauty.CONCRETE.PATIENT DUPLICATION.blind.SUBJECTIVE-3p-NEUTER-SINGULAR
4] die(TELIC).SUBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR.FUTURE DUPLICATION.long.CONCRETE.SUBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR 3p-NEUTER-LOCATIVE.PRECEDE

he.darew.[a]qi.kar rejas.[a]dán.en'ad ha.ne
hág.aṭa wirah.e ma'aw
xokå.je.jih.[a]me ṭiw.en.am ba.bál.a
diwax.[a]ke.z ta.ṭaláw.[a]ke hej'per

Hedarewaqikar rejasadánen'ad hene
Hágaṭa wirahe me'aw
Xokåjejihame ṭiwenam babála
Diwaxaket taṭaláwake hej'per

[Sample now out of date, IPA removed]

William's Last Words

2009-06-06T22:20:00.005+01:00

Journal for Plague Lovers cover art

In the age before my disposable income, a visit to the local record shop involved lengthy deliberation on which CD I really wanted to justify handing over a massive £10 of pocket money. The problem here was that the price of a CD limited how much you could purchase from decades of musical output. This is why it took so long for me to acquire The Holy Bible (henceforth THB). As a recent newcomer to the Manic Street Preachers, I set out with the money from my 13th birthday to buy their then previous album, Everything Must Go (hf. EMG), only to encounter THB in every shop. At the time I was uninterested and largely unaware of its legendary status - my first encounter with it was actually the title chiselled into a table in the school's music department. Naturally when I tried to find THB, all I could find was EMG - which I eventually got for my 16th.
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Deeper Underground

2009-05-19T21:27:00.004+01:00

When South Park parodied Cloverfield last October, I put it on my very long list of films to see. So seven months and a hundred films later...
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We've Shared This Thought For Some Considerable Time

2009-05-17T02:04:00.002+01:00

Corner Reflector, 2007

For a while now I've been toying with the idea of renaming the blog. A good candidate came to me this afternoon. The current name lacks the effect I thought it had nearly 4 years ago - it's far too vague and doesn't communicate anything in particular. Rebrandings can alienate your audience. I got rid of the visitor counter on the site a good while ago, so I'm unaware if I have one. The last thing I would want to do is have everyone update their bookmarks. This is your chance to speak up if you're there.

That said, this blog is split between essays (the humanities, science) and diary excerpts (girls, vignettes, other girls). One seeks an audience and the other is merely on public display. I'm just uploading my mind bits at a time. As for the character of Herr Niemand, to begin with he's not what you'd call human. I'm still developing him and his story, but I may coerce him into making some more appearances. I'll continue to chip away at the half-dozen drafts that remain, and since I've made my way through several dozen films in the past months I may share my opinions on a select few.

[214]

Seen and Not Seen

2009-05-05T18:00:00.003+01:00

Home Sewing is Killing Fashion, Bo Peterson, 2006

I've become completely sick of Hollywood. Perhaps the odd classic blinded us to the fact that everything else was always shit? It seems 90% of films since around 1980 have been remakes, or "reimaginings". I'm alright with that if it improves upon the original - case in point, The Thing. But what seems ever more apparent is a churn of films from the past quarter-century being refilmed. Refilmed with the intention of milking everyone again. Name a Japanese or Korean horror film, a Hong Kong action film, any successful foreign film; and you'll find either part or all of it has been ground into a recent Hollywood production. Let The Right One In has a Hollywood remake in production before it even has a full release. Why?
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I Wanted to Rub the Human Face in its Own Vomit

2009-05-03T17:27:00.012+01:00

Fall of the Damned into Hell

The de rigueur moral outrage is predictable and contemptible. I ask, why is it we send people to prison? People out there consciously debase justice to revenge. Driven by tabloids with their head-on-pike photoshopped front page graphics. Vanguard of morality, continued on page 3 with tits. The eternal shreiking victims are never able to accept that anyone can reform. Did he paint a picture of the rape scene? They will never accept anything less than the death penalty because they cannot reform themselves. An eye for an eye, and still they'll be calling for a second hanging for a one-man murder.

In Scotland this hysteria typically results in yet another outcry against the 'not proven' verdict. Their motivation for its removal has nothing to do with fixing the legal system, but everything to do with gaining closure - regardless of who it's exacted on. Abandon your pretensions of morality. You're really not much better than they are. In the end, there will only be the guilty verdict.

[172]

He'll Build A Glass Asylum

2009-03-23T20:42:00.005Z

Back in January I was originally going to write about Tommy Sheridan hitting rock bottom and appearing on prolefeed-contest "Celebrity" Big Brother. Instead the bilge-circus centred around a non-entity has enraged me. I'll refrain from mentioning who this non-entity is, though it should be obvious given the saturation of the non-story.
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I Close My Eyes (...)

2009-02-22T03:06:00.007Z

Walk down the street at this time in the summer gloaming, you might see me through the window.
Sitting up in bed, maybe listening to More Than a Feeling, trying not to dream what-was and youth-elation.
If I fall asleep, how can I live when the past has burrowed inside the present?
Someone keep me awake.

Only I and the sender of a card for my 18th birthday know why it's never been thrown out.

I Saw Drones

2009-02-21T20:17:00.004Z

The vacuum grew in the hypnotic flames. Eyes peered out and into the maelstrom man.

The nightmare exited the hole in his head, while his soul leaked through his ribs. His iris released the pin that held the chimneys and trains in place.

Now spiritless and immune, John stepped through the furnace. His benefactors presented an offer of employment.

With a handshake, he guaranteed his return.

[edited Feb 2010]