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 …
“A fitting gateway to hell, my dear Maeve” “Its like some gothic cathedral” they were awed, each column of the bridge had two elements, so that one could look along the length of the massive brick bridge, where the pillars marched shorter and ever shorter up the side of the …
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 …
A Discussion of Agency Due largely to the influence of Actor Network Theory, a lot has been written in recent years about agency. Much of which I find that I disagree with (Graves-Brown 2013a). At one level, the root of these discussions lies in the neglect of material things in …
“We should be clear that World War I was a war fought in a just cause, that our ancestors thought it would be bad to have a Prussian-dominated Europe, and that is why they fought. ” David Cameron – interview with Mail on Sunday, 18/01/14 Preliminary thoughts on the centenary. …
I just finished reading Stand on Zanzibar (1968) by John Brunner. To save you looking it up, the title comes from the fact that at the time of writing, the World’s population would have fitted, shoulder to shoulder, on the Isle of Wight. By 2010, when the novel is set, …