“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”(1) The foolishness of these words might seem obvious, but there is a case to be made that it is indeed possible to predict the future. In his address to the Royal Institution (24/01/1902) entitled The Discovery of the Future, H.G. …
The death of hegemony with the rise of the media. My PhD supervisor Alan Costall always warned me about what we might call presentism in researching the literature. As he rightly said, it’s all too easy to only look at recent texts and those that recur again and again in …
An Exploration of Post-Factuality In 1992 I organised an exhibition at Littlehampton Museum on the history of a local company, Duke and Ockenden, also known as Dando. The company had been drilling wells and making drilling and pumping equipment since the late 1860s. Even in later years, the company had …
Introduction Stalker is by no means the only game which recreates “historic” places (see Kapell and Elliott 2013). The most notable parallels are the various iterations of Assassin’s Creed which represent the 12th century Levant (Damascus, Acre, Jerusalem), Rennaissance Italy (Florence and Rome) and 18th century America (Boston and New …
Given my deja vu experience at Robert Maxwell’s talk (CHAT 2012), I thought it would be worthwhile to return to Stalker’s Pripyat to do an archaeological survey. If only as an inspiration for tourism, the game might be seen as an element of dark heritage, albeit as a vicarious experience. …
I haven’t posted on this blog for some time, partly because I have been travelling. Specifically, I have been in north east Ukraine, fighting my way towards the abandoned town of Pripyat. Along the way I have killed and maimed a lot of people, mostly bandits, together with a number …
…it’s just been misremembered The internet is filling up with crap. My personal pet hate is misquotations, or the meme-ing of quotations without citation. Is this because I am a pedantic academic twat, or is it that by this process, crap gets spread around and actually finding genuine information gets …
Travelling Hopefully Towards a New Society?i Preface 2014 On thursday 16th October an exhibition about William Morris, Anarchy and Beauty, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This reminded me of the following piece which I wrote, based on a paper given at the Morris centenary conference in …
Last year I reported on excavating a trench for power cables to supply a new garage in our back garden. I have now finally got round to preparing the site for the garage, and accordingly could not resist digging a test pit on the site to see what information I …
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations …