Recently updated blogs

I love a good book, for the learning and the enjoyment. I like to read widely and frequently. I virtually always have access to good reading, regardless of whether I am sitting at home (with its curated piles of yet-to-read books) or I am out traveling and perusing the Internet for electronic books, then experiencing them on my e-reader. This post is not about any specific type of book. Rather, …

Occasionally, I feel compelled to justify the discipline of information architecture. Most recently, it was due to the release of Duly Noted. A few reviews have included a variant of the phrase, “the author [i.e., me], an ‘information architect,’ says that…” Note the quotation marks. The reviewer likely thinks, “I’ve never seen the phrase ‘information architect’ before, so this author must have made it up.” Of course, I didn’t. IA …

The North sea oil boom was a huge thing in the 1970s. In theory it was supposed to make the UK self-sufficient in oil supplies instead of relying on the Arab countries who dominated the market. It was controversial in many ways. There were suggestions that Scotland, off whose coast the oil fields sat, did not receive enough of the profits while others argued that the environmental cost was not …

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 …