Recently updated blogs

Black Goddess with Clouds for HairI think this is a cool idea! You’ve got regular Black characters (women?) too, so even better. Not that there seems to be any poor implications with having the Black goddess; magical Black girls for the win! She may not need a “counter” exactly, but it’s always good to have multiple modes of representation, particularly as she’s not human. This immediately made me think of …

This blog is ten years old today - happy birthday, dear I Buy a New Washer! Birthdays, I've found, are a time for looking backwards (what was I thinking?) and forwards (help!) and then for celebrating (woohoo!).On 18th Feb 2014 I published this: 'I Buy A New Washer - Day One'. Long-serving readers know that I intended it to be the title of that first post, not the whole blog. …

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, probably at an in-law's, I pulled a copy of The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss from the shelves. I looked into it, evidently at Chapter 2, and put it back on the shelf. The scene of a callow teacher failing to dominate a class of boys simply did not interest me. I wonder now whether the form of the book, a small Modern Library …

I had an email from IFTT this week that warned me that the webhook service that my Mastodon bot is using will be shut down by the 22nd February unless I switched to a paid plan. I switched, but not to the IFTT paid plan. My bot now uses mastofeed.org to send the latest item in an RSS feed to Mastodon. The setup took minutes and there was no need …

If you’ve been surfing the tech sphere lately, you may have come across the term e/acc or effective accelerationism as if it was something new. But like most of these tech elite driven ideologies, it’s largely a mutation of more naive and sometimes sinister trends.For this episode I spoke to Adam Jones, host of Acid Horizon and Zer0 Books and Repeater Media and author of Anti-Oculus. Anti-Oculus is a psychedelic …

I'm afraid that medication for back spasms does not make for timely posting of the sausages, so some of these have perhaps been in the smokehouse a bit longer than optimal. That, however, may make some of their other ingredients slightly less noticeable. As I remarked during the first iteration of this meme (a few weeks ago), it's really too bad that nobody noticed that reading is sexy during

Some unexpected news at work about our client running out of money to pay us put a slight dampener on the week. Hoping it will be a temporary situation, but I'm yet to find out what I might be working on in the next month or so. We went to Manchester last weekend to visit some friends for their kids' birthday party. Ahead of the party we spent some time …

Some beautiful weather this week: clear, sunny, crisp, blue. It’s no longer dark when I wake up! I bought a bunch of daffodils. Project Get Out More achieved medium success: I met Denis for coffee, and I also went to LRUG. I’d intended to be more sociable than that, but I walked around too much and had to dial it back later in the week to let the pain subside. …

One of the biggest areas for English teachers is the ‘why’ aspect of analysis. Why does the writer do this? Over the years, we have seen paragraph structures to address this and we even seen lists of verbs to address this issue. The problem is that whatever way we approach things we are using a pneumatic drill to open a flower. Things are usually more subtle, nuanced and complex than …

And with that project finished, another £54 gets put into the hobby fund. A couple more projects to go before there’s enough in the kitty for the big summer releases

Sea Fever (Neasa Hardiman, 2019) As far as niche sub-genres go, sea-bound eco/survival horror is generally a good bet, and this modest, primarily Irish indie production takes a pretty convincing shot at it. It’s a rather less exciting prospect to try to write about, truth be told, but I feel like telling you about it nonetheless, so buckle up, and we’ll get through this whole ‘review’ thing together. So, synopsis …

I believe tonight is the formal drop for the sixth and last episode of Monsieur Spade, which reminds me I have further ongoing commentary on hand by Terry Zobeck to nudge out onto The Mean Streets. I don’t believe there’s any cause for cliffhanger excitement. If Terry squeaks more in so it is “live,” or if shows up a few days after the fact, all good enough. For the third …

Yesterday we both went on a one day “Hobby Chainsaw” course at a local college. We’ve inherited a chainsaw, and often have some chunky wood to dispose of, but didn’t have the courage to use the thing. Wielding a chainsaw not entirely naturally It was a fun day and really helped. It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d take chainsaws apart but that helped with demystifying them a great deal. …

“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.” “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E. Cummings told students from the hard-earned platform of his middle age, not long after Virginia …

Copyright David Kushner Growing up in the 90s, id Software was synonymous with groundbreaking games – and parental concern (how did I get away with playing DOOM?!). David Kushner’s “Masters of Doom” (ISBN 9780749924898) dives into the origin story of this iconic studio, focusing on its founding duo: John Carmack, the programming prodigy, and John Romero, the rockstar designer. While I devoured the id Software classics like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein …