Recently updated blogs

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Miller Oberman’s poetry collection Impossible Things is a mesmerizing elegy for a young child and thoughtful examination of the author’s own childhood. The …

During this past week we've been flung into a very cold, wintry spell and although it's been a bit of a shock to the system, it's been really very beautiful out there in my immediate vicinity. On Monday we woke to freezing fog and sub zero temperatures, the sort of weather which adds teeny droplets of ice to foliage and spiders webs and makes it look like they've been decorated …

Why is A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn out of print at Amazon? There is no Kindle or Audible edition either. This 1954 novel won the International Fantasy Award back in 1955. Being out-of-print is especially puzzling when you consider the other winners of that short-lived award: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1951), Fancies and Goodnight by John Collier (1952), City by Clifford Simak (1953), More Than Human …

I can’t believe another sci-fi stop-motion feature exists with the same plot as Mad God – Phil Tippett must’ve been so steamed when he saw this. Both movies’ worlds are packed with lore and backstory, which they mostly don’t bother us with, as we follow a little guy who descends into lovingly-detailed hellish depths on some doomed mission. This guy’s human body has been mangled so he’s been robocopped into …

The looming shadow Quote of the Day “The best photographers know what not to photograph.” Bill Jay Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Eric Clapton | Wonderful Tonight Link Long Read of the Day What If Echo Chambers Work? This is a really striking essay because it addresses a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Years ago (2012 onwards, to be precise), the political theorist …

Amelia is a young woman who finds a rooftop garden filled with broken pots, so she decides to fix them and plant things in them to restore the garden. Help her do so by solving simple jigsaw puzzles and playing a planting mini-game on Nintendo Switch. Amelia’s Garden is actually a sequel/spinoff to a game […]

Last week I went to see Robert, because I'm a gracious person and sometimes you have to bring joy to the little people. We were heading into town from Aigburth station and I spotted something on the line diagram on the platform:Do you see it? Computer, zoom and enhance.The map has been printed with Liverpool Baltic station already on it. According to Robert the sticker covering it keeps being ripped …

It may be #GermanLitMonth, but Japan is rarely far from my (literary) mind, and when planning my choices for this month’s event, I was reminded of a book that had been on my shelves for a year or so, one that bridges the gap between east and west. It’s a tad wet and humid in Melbourne today, but that doesn’t matter if you’re wanting to do a little vicarious gardening, …

I’ve been using my denim pen wrap a bunch lately and thought I’d share some pictures. I made this wrap back in 2008 and it has had a lot of use in the past 16 years. I used to make a lot of denim objects like this when I was a tailor at Self Edge. My denim wallets still get a lot of use too. The post Denim Pen Wrap, …

Just busy, mostly. The house has just about recovered from various illnesses. Obviously with R’s birthday on the horizon we’re expecting a delicious cocktail of coughs and colds for the start of the festive season. Got a game of the new edition of Underworlds in. Much smoother, a teeny bit less character to each warband, still lovely opponents. Did a turn at the Public Digital networking event. It’s been ages …

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. Notepad++ development began, in September 2003, by Don Ho, a former Paris Diderot University computer science student. Notepad++ was built as a Microsoft Windows application; the author …

(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning) From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to …

One of the big current admin tasks is informing organisations that my Dad has passed away. I started on the utilities this week, calling BT to let them know, and to have the name on the account changed to my Mum’s name. (They do have an online form but it’s ambiguous in places.) That seemed to go OK. But then it was apparent the broadband at the house had stopped …

Harry Mulisch, one of the most significant figures in Dutch literature, recently came to my attention through Michael Orthofer’s Complete Review. Described there as “unquestionably among the leading authors of the second half of the twentieth century,” his work was entirely new to me. His personal history—a Jewish mother and an Austrian father with ties to the Nazi regime—infuses The Discovery of Heaven with a profound engagement with post-war history …