Recently updated blogs

18th November 2024 The new Republican presidency-congress in the United States as well as developments in other countries mean that in addition to the illiberalism we have had so far, there is more – perhaps worse – to come. So how should liberals respond? Here are three suggestions, humbly put forward. 1. Do not respond, if you can, to catastrophism. You are going to think how bad things can be, …

I’m not technical when it comes to singing and use lots of visual imagery in my teaching. But does it help or can it be confusing? I came across a great satirical article the other day: Singing Teacher Uses Another, Even Better Analogy. It was pointing out that some of the analogies used by singing teachers can, on the face of it, seem ridiculous. “The sound doesn’t come out of …

Hep As Was and Maybe Still IsFrom Mark Vieira’s book, Into the Dark: The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941-1950, here is thought expressed by critic John T. McManus for PM magazine, circa October 12, 1944: “That ultra-aware modernism, “hep,” is a very handy word to have around for a picture like To Have and Have Not.” So what was it to be hep? Simplest definition suggests awareness of what …

The Almeida Theatre’s Angry and Young season has been one of the highlights of the year with a repertory and rather revelatory run of Look Back in Anger and Roots. To that, the venue now adds a selection of rehearsed readings that pick up on some of the themes and concepts prevalent in the main […]

I haven't posted a video here for a while, but within the research being carried out for a future project, this popped up. Simple enough fare, but oozing with atmosphere and just a bundle of modelling inspiration and detail.

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

I have been wanting to read Joe Hill’s N0S4R2 (or N0S4A2 in the US) for so long! I got this second hand in a library sale…maybe last year. Definitely not this year as I’m 11 months into a book buying ban. Possibly 2022! I put this book off for a couple of reasons; 1. I… Continue reading Trying to Find a Scary Book

Having read Jason's entire output, I've found that his most interesting comics are those that follow his current cultural influences into ridiculous flights of fancy. The Left Bank Gang (imagining the Lost Generation writers as cartoonists) and Goodnight, Hem (imagining Ernest Hemingway as a sort of real-life action hero) are two of his best, but I've also enjoyed the way he's managed to insert the immortal Musketeer Athos into a …

Marine Beaufils is a French embroidery artist whose meticulous work draws on the analogy between pixels and needlepoints, as she translates scenes from her favorite video games, movies, or scientific imagery from screen to embroidery canvas. This process freezes a fragment of a larger narrative, converting backlit scenes into a familiar medium that evokes a homey feeling and a vintage aura. The embroidered scenes thus bear an ambiguous quality as …

Yet more exciting news from the LEGO® Pick a Brick online development team! The ability to upload a wish list, which premiered in North America recently, has now been rolled out to the UK and Germany... with even more new features included than before.Continue reading »

Version numbering is hard, and there are lots of popular schemes out there for how to do it. Today I want to talk about a system I’ve settled on for my own Django-related packages, and which I’m calling “DjangoVer”, because it ties the version number of a Django-related package to the latest Django version that package supports. But one quick note to start with: this is not really “introducing” the …

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! One of the greatest weapons modern social platforms have against us is something called FOMO - the Fear of Missing Out. We are inherently social creatures and we want to belong to a group, and to do so we feel like we need to be aware of everything that is going on. We fear we’ll miss out on something important and will …

Suppose you want to migrate to another star, taking your entire civilization with you. Not an easy task given our technology today, but let’s remember that in the 13 billion year-plus history of the Milky Way, countless stars and their planets have emerged that are far older than our 4.6-billion year old Sun. If we imagine an intelligence that survives for a billion years or more, we can hardly put …

(1999) Written and directed by James Marsh; Based on the book, Wisconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy; Starring: Ian Holm, Jeffrey Golden and Jo Vukelich; Available on DVD Rating: **** “…I was looking for stories that cut across 100 years and resonated with contemporary anxieties about guns, or religion, or drug-taking. I thought that was an important way of making the film more contemporary in its concerns.” – James Marsh …

After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out. Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode …