Recently updated blogs

I seem to have experienced a run of bad luck recently when it comes to household systems and technology, and just when I thought my troubles were over, up crops a new issue. Since June there’s been a problem with the central heating system - necessitating the replacement of a motorised valve, a toilet cistern that wouldn’t refill after flushing, and Matthew’s shower scaled up and non-operational. There has also …

Is game design hard? That depends. Is understanding other people and seeing the world through their eyes hard? Because that’s game design. You’re putting yourself in the shoes of the players, imagining what experience they would be having at each part of the game compared to what experience you want them to be having, and then sculpting and crafting a text that encourages them to do that. And on top …

. What do you expect of a book? A book on culture and critical theory would generally assume a certain readership, but an author-writes for what they can see – an imagined reader, not any really existing person who has actually bought the thing, if any. What do you expect a book to say? Assuming books can talk, what might this one say about an obsessive critical theory rethink of …

Pro wrestling, at its essence, is a kind of carnival theater improv based heavily on audience reactions. Every emotion must be over the top to reach the person sitting in the last row. Every aspect of the story should be told in the ring itself, through the choreographed violence. There's a reason why so many former theater kids become wrestlers these days; the line between burlesque, drag, musical theater, and …

Hello everyone! I am still diligently working on the historical fiction novel that I started writing back in February of this year and announced that I was writing in June. Writing the novel has been my main preoccupation for the past few months and I have been spending at least ten hours most days working on it, which is a major part of the reason why I haven’t made many …

Cyclamen hederifolium in one of the courtyards at the music school. An invaluable coda for the shade garden by virtue of flowering in early autumn rather than spring. Tolerant of deep shade and drought. Hailing from the southern Mediterranean it will naturalise when it likes the conditions as is the case here. Known as the Ivy-Leaved Cyclamen the leaves do indeed resemble Ivy albeit smaller and variegated. When C. hederifolium …

I am writing this on Friday afternoon. This time last week I was upstairs in a building behind the Royal Academy, in a gallery called General Assembly. I was looking at Ellie Cotton’s paintings, her show A Study of Saint Francis. The story goes: Ellie Cotton is a painter who went to see an exhibition at the National Gallery, one full of paintings of Saint Francis of Assisi, from the …

Hi Darling Ones, Last night I had a conversation with my friend, Em, about writing, writing habits, and routine. It was a great talk and we vowed in the new year to establish a routine and hold each other accountable. I’m excited, because I want to work on my writing and my penmanship. I’ve been woefully lax on the physical practice of writing. I’m easily frustrated with the tremor and …

The vast bulk of the publishing/marketing/fake literary agency/impersonation scams on which I’ve expended so many words are based in the Philippines (though they do their best to make themselves look local to their preferred American and Canadian victims by maintaining fake business addresses and phone numbers). Many operate in their home country as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, innocuously claiming to be third-party vendors that provide business-related services (such as …

I’m very picky with lip products and I have a reason to be. I have eczema-prone lips so I need something that’s moisturizing, hydrating and mild. Only a few lip care products have made my cut. There are some that feel average to me and some that triggered an eczema flare. I try to stick […]

Dear Captain Awkward, Several months ago, I (he/him) fell into an affair with Ethan, a much younger coworker who seemed like a breath of fresh air in my life. From the moment we began talking, I was captivated by his intelligence, energy and charm. He was adventurous, spontaneous, and made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. I believed we shared a deep, soulful connection—a bond …

I have Google Takeout setup to periodically export to GDrive as a series of 10Gb .zip files. I’ve been meaning to get these over to S3 for a bit in part for backup purposes, and in part because I wanted to futz with the photos. I’m quite confident I’m not the first person to want to do something like this. But we’ve reached an awkward and unfortunate moment in the …

It’s time for my annual update on crime statistics, following the September release of 2023 numbers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). We also have preliminary numbers on homicides in 2023 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Data sources are listed at the end of this post along with my comments on data quality; see …

While today we are inundated with color images of the Earth, our earliest views from space were confined to monochromatic or black and white images (see “First Pictures: The View of Earth from Space – October 24, 1946”). During the post war years when we began to explore the frontier of space, color photographic film was not sensitive enough, compared to black and white film of the era, requiring longer …

John McTiernan's Predator, with Jess Dunne and Joe Griffin. At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database. Show notes, including links: https://them0vieblog.com/2022/06/04/287-top-gun-maverick-this-just-in-50/ Follow us on twitter at @thetwofifty.