Recently updated blogs

Just a heads-up that the listing for my forthcoming book Beyond Hope: Collective Power and Mutual care in the Long Emergency has just gone live on Amazon here in the UK, and that you’d be doing me a real solid by pre-ordering it via the link. (I’ll update this with links to alternative/non-Amazon sources as they become available.)

Hi everyone! You may have noticed that we’ve slowed down a bit on posting, approving comments, and, well, pretty much our whole end of the deal. We’d like to say we’re just too busy and important, but…we’re not. Behind the scenes, we’ve been actively downsizing and “sunsetting” this little dog and pony show we call Awful Library Books. We started this blog in 2009, and after 14 years we’ve realized …

Further to the earlier post, Cock-Horses, I came across this video of a recent cock-horse competition. Credit: Mario Broekhuis. Orson Cart.

A new home for the Landslide Blog I started this blog on 16 December 2007 – that feels like a long time ago now – as a site on Blogger. In 2010, the American Geophysical Union established the AGU Blogosphere, and I moved the blog to this site at that time. For almost 13 years it has been a great home for this blog. However, you may have been aware …

High up on the hillside behind my cottage there is a badger set. It's near to a small group of very old beech trees that stand very tall among some old whitebeam and hawthorns. The colours in the autumn are amazing. I've set this print early on a blustery autumn day. Trying to get the feeling of the badger being buffeted and ruffled by the cold wind. The greys of …

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible. bell hooks https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/hooks_Love_As_The_Practice_Of_Freedom.pdf I thought Barbie was a solid film. Powerful tonal shifts, a mostly banging soundtrack and emotional heft in the right places (my gf was in bits after five mins). There’s the whole franchise/sequel dark age critique that has been done to death, although Blindboy found an …

Equipment: Sony UBP-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. Angel Face (Warner Archive Blu-ray) Of all the amour fou film noirs out there, this one is absolutely the fou-est. Only Alain Corneau’s Serie Noire comes close, and that needed almost thirty years and being actually French to top this 1952 Otto Preminger lulu. If you’ve seen it you know what I’m talking about. If you ain’t …

Mastodon remains problematic, can we fix it? A designer thinks out loudAll this is super opinionated.However, it is informed by the great user research Erin Kissane has done with mastodon users who were on bluesky. 500 responses is solid.Start here https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt(We make decisions in my day job on prototype features that have been in front of a couple of rounds of 6 or 7 people. So yeah, this is solid …

The good thing about just popping posts on the front page every year or so is that in doing so I can still make the claim that Popjustice is one… The post The 2023 Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize: Shortlist appeared first on Popjustice.

Talon zips and velvet chandeliers: The Real McCoy’s headquarters in Kobe, Japan Wednesday, July 26th 2023 Share Share this post Subscribe 12 Comments ||- Begin Content -|| The Real McCoy's headquarters in Kobe, Japan is extraordinary. I had been warned it would be, but it really didn't prepare me for the scale of the operation or for the mix of craft and eccentricity. The company owns four warehouses in the …

Barry Hughart (his surname is pronounced hew-gert) died in 2019 at the age of 85. His career as a writer of fantasy was short-lived, but his work was acclaimed. His first novel, Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was (1984), was the co-winner of the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (along with Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock), and it won the 1986

The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at length on this, and why I have come to think that the issue of Kyoto is actually …

The Old Setup To properly appreciate the upcoming network shenanigans I’ll have to give you a bit of context on my current setup first. You see, there is a server VLAN at home where everything is hosted, using normal, local IPv4 addresses. Traffic comes in via a Hetzner VPS which runs a reverse proxy (Caddy), that reverse proxy talks to the local network via a WireGuard VPN between VPS and …

I wrote about AI already, but that was about how we’re all going to die. Since then, the conversation has become more nuanced. Now I’m encountering more subtle ideas I think are totally wrong. So because I know better, here’s why. “AI is already here.” ChatBots are good at figuring out what comes next when you start a sentence with, “The capitol of Antigua is…” That’s pretty cool. We didn’t …