Recently updated blogs

I watched another episode of The Sea of Faith last night – number four (not yet on the BBC iPlayer but available, with blurry visuals, on YouTube). This one focused on two very different thinkers – Marx and Kierkegaard: 'compare and contrast' indeed. As with Freud, I wondered if Marx would be quite so prominent if the series were made today: back in 1984 I guess it was still possible …

Two nights ago I went with my two brothers to hear a reading of Louis MacNeice’s great poem Autumn Journal. It was read beautifully by the Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who had clearly memorised many of the 3000 lines. The poem was written between August and December 1938, a fraught time in Britain when people despised the government but passionately supported the appeasement of Hitler—because they remembered well the slaughter …

I hope the first thing you say is not, "Look how sharp that heron is! You nailed focus right on that heron's eye!" (click to enlarge)It is my sense that if you watch a lot of photography related videos and listen carefully to what photographers say ‘first’ about their own images as well as what they most often say ‘first’ about other photographers’ images, you might be surprised. When I …

It’s been an unusual autumn so far. A very notable lack of sun from the end of October into November was followed by an early cold snap before Storm Bert brought flooding chaos to parts of south Wales, the West Country and elsewhere. Just before the beginning of every winter I have a crack at predicting what winter will be like; the results often being very mixed. However, on looking …

Thanksgiving Drawing from a Scrapbook circa 1940 Collection Jim Linderman

By: Luke StrangeFor those that have followed us for a while, you may have seen our Council Homepage Website Emissions tracker. Every few weeks, we update the data on the site to see how council websites are performing. We measure the size of the web page in bytes, and we use Website Carbon Calculator to estimate the amount of CO2 that loading each page produces. We get in touch with …

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Photo by FlyD on Unsplash “At the 83rd UN General Assembly, UN Special Envoy on Future Generations Celebrates Four Years of Global Transformation.” This paper was developed in October 2024 by the School of International Futures, to lay out a vision for a successful implementation of the Declaration on Future Generations up to the next review. The paper is set in 2028, as a Keynote Speech from the 1st Special …

As one who has felt strongly about this for many years this was welly before I was diagnosed with my Terminal liver disease added to my respiratory problems after living with it for several months. My health changes day to day most mornings I feel sick, my back aches most of the day despite pain killers I get dizzy spells, I hardly sleep at the most 2 hours plus the …

This post is an adapted extract from my book Boost Your Django DX, available now with a 50% discount for Black Friday 2024. Python’s breakpoint() function opens its debugger, pdb, which pauses the program and allows you to inspect and modify things. Let’s look at an example of using it within a Django view, from a sample project included in Boost Your Django DX. Here’s what the project looks like: …

In central Brixton, near the library and facing the Town Hall, there is a huge ghostsign advertising Bovril*, a beef extract product that is still available today. Bovril was created by John Lawston Johnson in 1897 – its popularity and success enabled him move into and adapt a house that can be found a few stops along the railway line from Brixton, at Kingswood House, Sydenham Hill. Indeed the house …

Believe it or not, I’ve only read one Georgette Heyer before – I listened to April Lady and really enjoyed it. In the three years since, I’ve bought quite a few Heyer novels but haven’t actually got around to reading any of them. A little while ago, I thought I’d see if any of the Heyer titles on my shelves matched gaps on A Century of Books – and landed …

David Smith joins Tim Worthington for a chat about Eddie Brock failing to maintain a consistent pair of shoes in Venom: The Last Dance.

A view from my studio window over Hastings’ West Hill. Photograph by the author. This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird. From Joe Crawford at ArtLung - Dune and Colonialism: I notice that Al has …

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)’s father had been a Universal­ist preacher. With their emphasis on a loving God, Universalists were early advocates of endling slavery and the first church to ordain women. In 1886 Univ­ers­alist Aug­usta Chapin bec­ame minister of the Oak Park Unity Church Chicago, attr­acting new members to the assembly including Lloyd Wright’s mother Anna. Frank’s maternal family were Welsh Unitarians; his uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones was a noted …