Longform on Tales from the Bitface

📚 Books 2026, 11: Bright LIghts Big City, by Jay McInerney

Mon, 11 May 2026 07:31:42 +0100

I feel that title should have a comma.

I heard Jay McInerney interview on The Booking Club podcast , and it intrigued me enough to make me want to read this. Then, as I suggested a couple of days ago, I wondered why I hadn’t read it years ago..

The second-person, present-tense viewpoint quickly becomes transparent, and is never annoying.

It’s a cocaine-fuelled fever dream. Over a few days and 150 or so pages our unnamed (I think) protagonist loses his job through general fucked-up-ness, tells us the story of how his wife left his wife left him, and of the death of his mother. Which seems to be main trigger for his fall. This is a telling quote:

You kept waiting for the onset of grief.You are beginning to suspect it arrive nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda’s departure.

All of which makes it sound dark and tragic. But it’s not. It’s really funny most of the time, and a compelling narrative beautifully written all the time. Overall I enjoyed being in the narrator’s head — or him being in mine, or however you’d put it.

Crucial Track for 03 May 2026: (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:22:18 +0100

"(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash

Listen on Apple Music

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The prompt:

Share a song you love that has parentheses (in the title).

It's been a while since I wrote a Crucial Tracks entry, but when I saw John Philpin's post with this bracket-based prompt, how could I not write about one of my favourite Clash songs?

The strange thing about the title is, given the parenthetical structure, we should call it 'In Hammersmith Palais' for short — you can always drop the parenthetical, right? — but in fact everyone always calls it 'White Man' for short.

It famously tells the story of Joe Strummer going to a reggae show at the titular venue, and realising he was the only white person there. And about punks and other groups and how they did or might behave. The near-closing couplet seems worryingly relevant again at the moment:

If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They'd send a limousine anyway

Also I don't know how this will appear either on Crucial Tracks itself or on my blog, but what the hell is the image that's appearing alongside the track where I've selected it? Very strange. I've screengrabbed it and added it to the post, but I've no idea where it'll appear.

Anyway, one of my all time favourite songs, with or with the brackets/parentheses.

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

Listen to my Apple Music playlist

📚 Books 2026, 8: The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño, Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:36:13 +0100

On the cover of this there is a quote from The New York Times describing it as ‘A gem-choked puzzle of a book.’ Which is a very fair point. I ended this book and said, ‘I didn’t understand that.’ Which has nothing to do with its being in Spanish, as I was reading a very good translation.

I didn’t really get what it was trying to say, what the point of its existing was. Which sounds horribly dismissive, and I don’t mean it that way. I enjoyed it while I was reading, which didn’t take long, as it’s only 196 pages. But the ending…

Well, let’s start at the beginning. It’s a novel by a Chilean author who is very well thought of, at least posthumously. It’s about two twenty-something would-be poets from Chile, recently arrived in Mexico City. It has three strands. One is a fairly straightforward telling of their life, from the point of view of one of them, Remo. Trying to find writing workshops, learning about the literary magazines of their adopted city, partying.

In another strand, someone is interviewing someone else. The interviewee appears to be Jan, the less active of the two poets. In that first strand, it’s clear he hardly leaves their room. But in this one he has just won a major award. The interviewer may be Remo, but it’s never stated, and there are suggestions it’s someone else.

And in the third strand, Jan writes letters to real-life science fiction authors. Alice Sheldon, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Jose Farmer, and others. They are partly fan letters, partly weird philosophical discussions.

And that’s more or less it. They both get girlfriends, Remo gets a motorcycle. The book ends with a section entitled ‘Mexican Manifesto’, which describes Remo and Laura’s experiences in the bathhouses of the city. And then it just… stops.

Honestly, I feel as if there’s a whole chunk missing at the end. Especially since there are no pages after the last one, either with information or even blank, which is quite unusual.

Another review comment, from the Paris Review, says this book ‘functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions’. So maybe I need to read more of his books, and I’ll understand them collectively?

A couple of reviews linked from the Wikipedia entry suggest strongly that this — an early draft, not published in Bolaño’s lifetime — was indeed the wrong place to start.

If You Hail Mary, Will She Stop to Pick You Up?

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:29:29 +0100

In my piece on Project Hail Mary, I mentioned having some thoughts on the title. I was talking about the use of ‘Hail Mary’ to mean a last-ditch attempt. All else has failed, we have no other hope left, this is our ‘Hail Mary’. I believe the use of it in that form comes from American sports. Most likely American football. I’ve seen the term ‘a Hail Mary play’.

It baffles me how the expression came to be used that way. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. The ‘Hail Mary’ is a prayer to ‘Our Lady’, Mary the mother of Jesus. It is very much a Catholic prayer. Presbyterians, such as members of the Church of Scotland, wouldn’t be heard dead reciting such a prayer. Nor, I imagine, would Baptists, Evangelicals, or other non-Catholic Christians. I’m not sure about the Church of England, they can go either way.

So it surprises me the term would originate in the United States, a country drenched in Christianity, but not so much in Catholicism. True, there have been a couple of Catholic Presidents, including the last vaguely sane one, so it is a mainstream sect there. But it doesn’t seem exactly a major player.

Maybe people have some sort of sense that Catholics have better access? That Catholic prayers have more power? Or is it something like, ‘Even God won’t answer my prayers, maybe his mom will’?

I don’t know, but the thing is, it’s the wrong prayer to choose. The ‘Hail Mary’ isn’t a last-chance prayer, something you save for desperation. It’s not just an everyday prayer for Catholics, it’s one that’s used with mantra-like repetition. It’s mostly said as part of the rosary, where groups of one ‘Our Father’ and ten ‘Hail Marys’ are tracked on a set of beads. The rosary is recited in churches at least weekly at regular services (not the mass), and no doubt daily by real believers.

If you’re looking for a Catholic prayer that’s appropriate for all hope being gone, try the Last Rites (or in Latin, extreme unction), the prayers said for a dying person. Though the intent there is not to prevent the death, but to help to ease the soul on its way.

You’re not really supposed to pray for help on the football field. Saving the world, maybe. But what if those astrophages were ‘God’s will’? Maybe He chose to destroy the world not by the expected fire, but by ice?

What do I know, though, I’ve been an atheist a lot longer than I was a Catholic.

Full of Grace

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:19:00 +0100

So, what did I think of Project Hail Mary 🎥, after my scientific concerns?

I enjoyed it immensely. I had a great time. I was in a electrically-reclinable chair that vibrated during the loud parts (though that’s about the Leicester Square Odeon, not the film, of course).

I have things to say about the title, the expression used in it, but I’ll keep that for a separate post. The main flaws in the film — which, to be fair, is a blockbuster big-screen bonanza, and beautifully made — are scientific.

Starting with physics. It’s a long time since I knew enough special relativity to work out the time-dilation involved in a six light-year trip, and to be fair we’re not told how long it lasted for the induced-coma-experiencing Grace; but we do know it would be a lot longer on Earth, assuming the ship actually reached a significant percentage of lightspeed.

That point is perhaps implied at the end, but it should have been mentioned in the film — not least since they specifically say the Eridans don’t know about relativity.

Turning to the biology. Look, it’s just annoying that it’s so stupid, when there’s at least a couple of ways they could have told the same story, without requiring biological life to exist in an environment where, not only is it impossible for atoms to join together into molecules, even atoms don’t stay together. Stars are plasma, which means a big soup where the energy is so high electrons are stripped off the nuclei of atoms. You don’t get biology. You don’t even get chemistry.

Just make the ‘astrophages’ exist at some distance from the star, occluding it. Or have them be dark matter, instead of algae. It doesn’t matter. The story would be just as good, just as compelling, without being annoying.

Because it’s not about the science. It’s a love story. Love between human and — let’s not say ‘alien’, because everyone is alien out there. Between Earthling and Eridan.

Or friendship, if you don’t think it reaches love. I don’t mind.

It’s also about the limits of humanity and what we might be able to do even if we refuse, if we’re forced into an impossible situation. And language and communication and all sorts of stuff.

It’s really good. You should see it.

Against the Far Right but not Against Antisemitism?

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:45:21 +0000

There’s a big march planned in London tomorrow, called Together Against the Far Right. It’s organised by the ‘Together Alliance’, which seems to be a big conglomeration of trades unions and other groups. All well and good.

The odd thing about it is, at a time when antisemitic attacks are at a high, there are no Jewish groups involved. Or nearly none. Indeed, this article from The Times (archive link) is headlined ‘Celebrities back anti far-right march “freezing out Jewish groups”’:

Jewish leaders said they believed they had been frozen out by the organisers despite the event’s far-right focus, while groups they perceive as being linked to “extremist rhetoric and outright antisemitism” were listed as supporters.

I don’t know what the organisers are playing at,¹ but I don’t see how you can stand against Nazis if you’re not standing with Jewish people.

I sort of do know, or strongly suspect, and it’s both sickening and stupid. ↩︎

Why Can't We Find Out What the Green Party is Proposing?

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:00:39 +0000

I’ve been hearing about the Green Party’s conference motion against ‘Zionism’, and how it seemingly is deeply antisemitic, and will effectively have them supporting Hamas. I didn’t want to write about it without reading the actual motion. But that appears not to be possible unless you’re a party member. It’s behind a login requirement. I can’t find anywhere that actually quotes the motion.

The Guardian and the BBC don’t seem to have reported on it at all. The Daily Mail has something behind a paywall, but its headline claims the motion ‘would make it party policy to back Hamas terror attacks’. The Canary’s article on it¹ speaks warmly about it, saying it ‘could be a game changer for UK politics.’

Well, yes, and not in a good sense.

It’s one thing to be against some actions of the current Israeli government. Quite another to support — even tacitly — an organisation dedicated to the eradication of the entire nation and people of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are Nazis, and all people of the left should oppose them and their aims just as much as we opposed the National Front and the British National Party.

But without being able to read the motion, it’s hard to know how extreme it is. You might argue it’s a private matter for the party, unless and until it becomes their policy. Up to a point, that seems fair. But I think political parties have a duty of transparency. They want people to join them and vote for them. Therefore they should let the public know the kind of things they’re talking about.

And the mainstream press should be reporting on it.

And hey, who knew The Canary still existed? ↩︎

The First Band I Ever Saw, 46 Years Later

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:26:59 +0000

As I teased, Saturday saw me and my friend John buggerdefanoblog.wordpress.com heading for Camden once again to see Stiff Little Fingers. It is far from the first time I’ve seen them. They were the first band I ever saw, back in 1980, at the Glasgow Apollo, and they might be the band I’ve seen most often. I’m not sure, but they’re certainly up there with The Pogues, The Fall, and James.

But before they got going the other night, there was a support band. The Meffs are that slightly unusual format, a two-piece. And in a mirror image of perhaps the most famous band of that format, they have a female singer/guitarist and a male drummer (and singer).

They were pretty damn good. Noisy, shouty, melodic at times, and well worth a listen. Plus the guitarist, using the incredible power of a pitchshifter (the effects pedal, not the band), we must suppose, created an incredible bass sound along with her lead/rhythm work. Remarkable.

And then on to SLF. They tour in March most years, and to be honest there were no surprises — one new song, which was pretty good. But I enjoyed it a lot more than the last time, and that was partly about atmosphere. I don’t really care for the Roundhouse as a venue. It’s a great building, but I feel like, for a rock venue, the ceiling is too high. Not to the detriment of the sound, it just feels too open above your head.

Which doesn’t make much sense, given the atmosphere can be great at an open-air gig. But there you go, it’s a feeling. However, that’s what I was feeling before I went. This time it was much better, and I think that’s at least partly due to getting there early, seeing the whole of the support act, and generally getting into it. They don’t call it a warm-up slot for nothing.

They love a backdrop, so SLF, as you can see there.

Next year it’ll be 50 since they started out, so we should expect something big. Or not, but I hope they’ll be back, and us too.

📚 Books 2026, 5: Red Menace, by Joe Thomas

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:17:31 +0000

Red Menace is the sequel to White Riot. As the first book starts with the 1978 anti-Nazi festival in Victoria Park, this one starts at Live Aid. We have similar backstage access, with Suzi Scialfa, photographer and writer, and her partner Keith, sound man to The Style Council.

Thomas does a very clever thing in this book: he makes us be sympathetic to, on the side of, one of the main characters, Parker, who is a spycop, with all that implies. He’s in a relationship with a woman who doesn’t know he’s an undercover police officer. He’s gathering information on left-wing and community protest movements.

He seems to be doing it for good reasons — one of the main crimes he’s trying to father information on is police corruption. This is a time when Stoke Newington Police station was the source of much of the illegal drug traffic in Hackney, a hotbed of police corruption. Parker and his handler are working agains that. At least partly.

In the last one Parker was infiltrating the National Front, which makes me wonder why nobody in the left-wing organisations he’s involved with in this one are aware of that. I suppose you didn’t really do background checks if you were a community organisation on the Broadwater Farm estate, or union organisers in the Wapping dispute. Those being two of the real-world political struggles the novel covers.

It’s told from multiple viewpoints again, most of them characters from the previous novel, and mostly in third person. There are a couple of the younger characters who get first-person sections. And one mysterious gang-boss character whose italicised chapters are in the second person. We’re told ‘you’ are behind various criminal activities around corrupting land deals in the London Docklands redevelopment, corruption involving ‘Right to Buy’, and so on.

I’m not sure why exactly Thomas chooses to do things in this way — particularly the different grammatical persons. Perhaps to help with keeping the different voices distinct; perhaps just as an exercise for himself (or to show off, you might say). It could be confusing, but it never is.

As before, the story is not finished, with a third volume planned. But most things that concern us in this book are wound up, for better or worse, and stories in the real world don’t really have endings, do they?

The striking thing about these books is how he weaves his fictional characters into real-world events that he — and most of his readers, I’d imagine — lived through. Or at least lived through the time in which they happened. And how he has real people interacting with his fictional ones. He gets away with it, I imagine, because he doesn’t have real people say anything they didn’t actually say, and he cites his sources. Political pamphlets, interviews with The Style Council, and so on.

It’s tense at times, and I recommend it.

Identity Is The Crisis, Can't You See?

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:58:30 +0000

I recently read Alembic Offerings, by hippieish writer Erik Davies. It included this line, which intrigued me:

I cut my teeth in the post-structuralist 1980s, more interested in difference than identity.

It reminded me of how I had long been confused by identity politics. That is, for years — possibly decades — when I heard the term ‘identity politics’, I had supposed it to be about individual identity, about how each of us is different.

Which means I must have actually been confused by some of the things I read that used the term, since it means almost exactly the opposite.

My misunderstanding came from the idea of proving one’s identity, of identifying yourself, showing identity documents. Identifying a suspect, even. They all mean demonstrating that a person is a specific, unique individual.

Whereas identity politics is about memberships of groups.

It feels like a linguistic shift. I am a member of several groups, but none of them uniquely identifies me. Even the intersection of all of them doesn’t do that. So why does the politics of group membership get tagged with the term ‘identity’?

Well it turns out the Latin root of the word relates to similarity:

mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.

to quote the Mac OS dictionary. But different fields use it differently. From Wikipedia’s Identity (social science) :

Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group.

Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one’s characteristics. The etymology of the term “identity” from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual’s “sameness with others”. Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender, educational, generational, and political identities, among others.

But in its Identity (philosophy) we find:

In metaphysics, identity (from Latin: identitas, “sameness") is the relation each thing bears only to itself. The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if x and y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?), and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person x at one time and a person y at a later time to be one and the same person?).

So the politics version appears to come from the social science use of the word, unsurprisingly.

Funny old word, identity. I think, like Erik Davies, I’m more interested in difference than identity, in the group-membership sense.

Claim Chowdering Gruber's Claim Chowder

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:13:58 +0000

John Gruber makes a ridiculous assertion, or so it seems to me. In criticising Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic’s claim that ‘AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in [their] software in a year’, Gruber takes things the other way:

It may well be true that 90 percent of the lines of programming code that are written today, Friday 13 March 2026, will have been generated by AI. If anything, it’s probably a higher percentage.

This seems like nonsense to me. Certainly AI-generated code is being created, and some of it released. But I work in software development, in a real company making real software that moves people’s money around. There’s some experimentation going on, people will use it to try things out, or better understand things, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. But there are millions of lines of code out there being written and managed every day by real humans.

And when you’re working in a highly-regulated industry like the payment card one as I am, or medical systems, say, it seems unlikely to me that we will ever let significant applications into the world if they were not written by humans.

Maybe I’m being naive, at least by saying ‘ever’: if there’s one certainty it’s that things will change. But the idea that we’re already above the 90% AI-generated mark? Sure, Anthropic are likely to be at that level. They build these tools. Eating your own dogfood and all that. But for normal, day-to-day development? It just doesn’t ring true to me.

Plus, of course, software development is about a lot more than writing code. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Purity Poetry

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:30:44 +0000

A great post from Ian Betteridge, called Zen fascists will control you…. Dead Kennedys fans will recognise the title as a quote from ‘California Über Alles’, their single and album track from 1979. Ian builds on it to write a history of the various movements, ideas, cults, that have believed or supposed that humans can be improved or perfected, by diet, exercise, drugs, physical enhancement…

Or by following the word of an ‘enlightened’ leader, for example.

He sees the overarching theme as purity:

This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn’t require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It’s how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you’ve made a wrong turn.

He traces the idea through Joni Mitchell singing ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ to the Human Potential Movement and the Whole Earth Catalog, to est, and from there to the modern biohacking idea¹, and billionaires trying to extend their lives using the blood of young people.

You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass.

And connects it to the Nazis:

The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.

It’s an excellent piece, and the guy’s a great writer. So it slightly surprises me that, after he writes:

somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.

he doesn’t extend his argument to the state of the modern ‘woke’ idea. Detached from its origins in Black US culture, its adherents demand such a strong acceptance of all parts of the ‘omnicause’, that any disagreement about one tenet of the belief system can lead to ostracism. Purity politics at its purest.

Or so it seems, at least. And indeed, Ian appears to insulate or distance himself from such an attack in his first footnote:

I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now.

Those attackers on Bluesky sound like exactly the type of hyper-woke folks I’m thinking of.

OK, he’s mainly talking about the danger of these beliefs from today’s super-rich; but they need foot soldiers. Mobs can be as dangerous as rich individuals.

Which I see doesn’t have a proper Wikipedia article, but there are various related links at that page, and if the proper article is ever written it should go there and this footnote will be obsolete. ↩︎

The Olympic Park, the V&A, and Bowie

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:42:59 +0000

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is in Kensington in West London. At least, its original and main site is. It has others. The newest (I believe) is in the Olympic Park, over in East London, quite near me. They call it the V&A East Storehouse, and it’s in a building that I think was the broadcast centre in 2012, and afterwards was a shared-use office-for-hire sort of place, I believe.

I guess that business must have dried up, because the museum takes up the entirety of the building now, from what I can tell. And it’s a really intriguing way of presenting parts of their vast collection. It’s a bit like an Ikea warehouse. On tall shelves, over three floors, items are arranged in seemingly random order and mostly without grouping, and minimal information. There’s a web site and QR codes so you can look things up, at least as to a title, description, and date.

I like this way of seeing a museum’s collection. The randomness leads to interesting juxtapositions: you might get a 14th century mahogany chest next to a 1960s electric guitar; a Piaggio scooter, decorated by a modern artist, sits with ancient pottery, and so on.

There’s a good article about it at Visit London, with photos that give a flavour of it.

Our main reason for going there was the permanent collection of David Bowie’s archive. Only a tiny fraction of his huge collection is on display, but it’s worth a look. Mostly photographs and letters and such, and some costumes and the odd guitar or synthesiser.

My favourite thing was a rejection letter Bowie received in 1968, saying he wasn’t quite right for the label. Which was Apple Records! Can you imagine what it would have been like if Bowie had joined the Beatles' label?

Class Distinction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:29:50 +0000

Over on BlueSky, Andrew Hickey of the excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast shares a post about the modern British class system, by someone who goes by ‘John Bull’. I think I used to follow him on Twitter. The post says:

Class in the UK is pretty easy to understand.

Top 1% of wealth = upper class
Bottom 1% = working class

Everyone else self-defines as “upper-working class” regardless of actual income.

They will think one of the other groups are “scroungers”. But never both.

Which is at least partly intended as humorous, I think, and so exaggerates for effect. But it may not be far from the truth. Except… I don’t recall ever having heard the term ‘upper working class’ before.

The class that does traditionally get split is middle: upper middle class, lower, middle class, these are (or were) common enough terms. And sociologists use (or used to use) the letter system, which had ABC1, C2, C3. Possibly others, but I don’t recall. I assume A–C map to the traditional upper–working range, which means they split the working class up, but not the middle? I don’t know.

Anyway, I tweeted¹ at Andrew saying I’d never heard the term, and he replied he had, a lot. Someone else in the comments also said they hadn’t heard it.

All to say nothing in particular, except I’m thinking that traditionally it wasn’t just about either wealth or income, but titles. You couldn’t be upper class without a title. But now I’m wondering if the so-called nobility sit (or sat) above even the upper class.

If there’s a special verb for posting on BlueSky I haven’t heard it, so I’ll stick with the old workhorse. ↩︎

Automatic Introspection

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 19:31:56 +0000

One of my concerns about LLM-based ‘AI’ systems and their ability to generate code has always been the idea of people creating software they don’t understand. It doesn’t matter too much for an individual’s personal projects, for little utilities, and so on. But in a professional context, such as my work, it borders on the terrifying.

It can be hard enough, even as an experienced programmer, to understand the intent of an unfamiliar codebase — hell, sometimes it’s hard to understand code you wrote yourself a few months or years ago. How much more will that be the case when the code was generated by an automated process that was prompted in turn by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing?

That concern remains, even as I read stories of people getting Claude to write code, and getting it to fix it when it doesn’t work at first. In the long term — maybe the medium term — even bug fixing might be done by prompting.

But from a couple of recent experiences, one of my concerns has moved to something perhaps more familiar to non-programmers. People crafting English text that the reader doesn’t really understand.

And maybe that they, the ostensible writer, don’t fully understand. We’ve lived through decades of business jargon filling our textual brain space, read endless corporate bulletins where we wondered whether the writers understood what they were trying to say. And now the power of automated obfuscation is available to everyone.

Ablative Irony

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:54:36 +0100

Also via Kottke comes this article by Claudio Nastruzzi at The Register, where he talks of ‘semantic ablation’ in text generated by ‘AI’:

When an author uses AI for “polishing” a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and “blood” reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks “clean” to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its “ciccia” – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

It’s about how LLMs — probability-based machines, after all — tend to push text in a generic direction, away from a writer’s unique voice, towards a common mean.

So let’s all not do that.

The irony is, I was trying to look up an unfamiliar word in that quote — ‘ciccia’. The dictionaries installed on my Mac had nothing useful, and nor did Wikipedia. DuckDuckGo’s search only came up with uses of the word as a family or brand name. I used the ‘!g’ syntax to send the query to Google.

It must be the first time I’ve had to do that in quite a while. I’ve heard people mention — complain about — the ‘AI Overview’ the Big G provides, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it before now. But it was what had the answer:

informal Italian term for meat or, idiomatically, body fat (flab).

Clearly Nastruzzi is using it as we might say ‘the meat of an argument’, or similar.

Google’s AI thing does not cite its source, though, and none of the next few search results give a reference for that use in English, though one is to the meaning of the Italian word.

Anyway, my recommendation to all fellow writers, would-be writers, and people who want to or have to communicate by writing: express yourself. Don’t let American machines do it for you (and use as many em-dashes as you need, as I have done here).

Good Programming Test

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:09:26 +0100

There have been a couple of interesting pieces in the ‘AI’ space over the last few days.

In a long Twitter post Matt Shumer writes breathlessly about how AI is changing software development, and how it’s going to change everything else. It feels simultaneously celebratory and sort of panicky.

It’s had a lot of pushback, including this piece from Om Malik, which has the advantage of linking to several other pieces that comment on Shumer’s. Shumer doesn’t have the luxury — or rather, the standard, decades-old convention — of linking to the things he refers to, because he’s writing on Twitter. Which has added the capability of publishing long posts, at least for blue-tick-verified users, which is good; but has not seen fit to include standard web feature like links, which is bad.

For me, he shoots himself in the foot with this exhortation:

If you’ve always wanted to write a book but couldn’t find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done.

Ahahaha. No. That’s not what writing a book is. Writing a book — the clue is in the term — requires writing, which takes time, and craft, and practice… Getting your friendly neighbourhood AI to do it for you is very much what I referred to as cheating.

Anyway, both are worth a read, and the others Om links to, too. For me, they have contributed to a surprising change I’ve been noticing in myself. You’ll recall I wrote about feeling revulsion towards the modern AI situation. I find that feeling is fading, replaced with a sceptical interest.

Of course, I can no more explain why that change is happening, than I could the revulsion in the first place. Perhaps it’s just the ongoing piling on of the conversation. If anything, I’m getting bored of hearing people talk about AI on tech podcasts.

However, there is a change I’d like to make to some code at work that I think might work well as a test for possible uses I might have for the technology. It’s not a change to how something functions, just to how that functionality is implemented. It’s not essential, but it will make some things easier in the future.

And since we’ve got this GitHub Copilot thing, and it has access to various models, I think I’m going to give it a try next week. I’ll report back here.

Asbestos Intrusions

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:04:15 +0000

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok.

Cory Doctorow’s latest piece is the script of a talk he gave on ‘AI’, or more specifically, ‘how to be a good AI critic.’ He’s writing a book on the same subject.

I found it weirdly comforting in one specific area. That of the supposed copyright-infringement of the training of LLMs. Cory explains why it did not, in fact, infringe copyright:

First, you scrape a bunch of web-pages. This is unambiguously legal under present copyright law. You do not need a license to make a transient copy of a copyrighted work in order to analyze it, otherwise search engines would be illegal. Ban scraping and Google will be the last search engine we ever get, the Internet Archive will go out of business

And he goes on from there, explaining why the subsequent steps in training also do not infringe. Some would disagree, of course, and many would say they put their work on the web with a ‘Not for commercial use’ type of licence, such as a Creative Commons one.¹

Which is fair enough too. I don’t think many would disagree with the idea that using the web to train these things was unethical; even more so with using pirated books. But it wasn’t strictly in violation of copyright (at least the current state of US copyright).

Why do I find that comforting? What I mean is, it removes or slightly reduces one of the reasons to be opposed to, or appalled by, these prediction machines, which I alluded to in one of my earlier thoughts about the matter. And in doing so maybe helps me in my quest to understand my own feelings, by at least reducing the number of things I have to consider.

Something like that, anyway. Read the whole of Cory’s piece, it’s very good.

I have done so myself in the past, though my site doesn’t currently show any licence. ↩︎

Essentials Playlist, Allegedly

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:26:22 +0000

This was an Apple-Music-generated playlist. It considers the following to be my ‘essentials’, as of yesterday.

The Fall — Kicker Conspiracy
The Velvet Underground — White Light/White Heat
James — What For
John Cale — Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend
The Beatles — I Am the Walrus
Joe Strummer — Gangsterville
Warren Zevon — Something Bad Happened to a Clown
New Order — Your Silent Face
David Bowie — The Motel
Kenickie — Spies
Big Country — Harvest Home
The Stranglers — Dagenham Dave (1996 Remastered Version)
10,000 Maniacs — My Mother the War
Cocteau Twins — From the Flagstones
Wet Leg — Convincing
Radiohead — Anyone Can Play Guitar
Sonic Youth — What We Know
The Long Blondes — Separated By Motorways
Arctic Monkeys — A Certain Romance
Ramones — Baby, I Love You
The View — Same Jeans
Stiff Little Fingers — Go For It (Remastered)
Grizzly Bear — While You Wait for the Others (BBC Maida Vale Session)
The Big Pink — Dominos
Thea Gilmore — Heart String Blues

I can see where it’s coming from, to a degree. The Fall, of course, and I’ve been playing them a lot recently for reasons I’ll go into later. Joe is there (though not The Clash), The Velvets, John Cale on his own (though not Lou). James, SLF of course (but the strange choice of their only instrumental).

All fine. Odd choice of Bowie track, but then, I did play through all his later albums recently, for reasons that I also might go into later.

10,000 Maniacs, though? I hardly know the track (though I like it), and I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an album by them. I don’t much like Arctic Monkeys, though that song is fine. But the Grizzly Bear one? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by them, including that one.

Oh yeah, and a very odd choice of Warren Zevon track.

It closes well, though: I love that Thea Gilmore track.

But you’ve got to wonder what goes into the algorithm that generates this kind of thing.

Less Like Manufacturing

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:18:03 +0000

Mitchell Hashimoto writes, in My AI Adoption Journey, of his process of adopting ‘AI’ agents in software development.

He describes himself as having been ‘a heavy AI skeptic’. My question, then, is, why did he force himself to try it?

He perhaps answers that when he says:

Adopting a tool feels like work, and I do not want to put in the effort, but I usually do in an effort to be a well-rounded person of my craft.

OK, I guess. But at the end he writes:

I’m a software craftsman that just wants to build stuff for the love of the game.

This feels relevant to what I was saying yesterday about tools like this feeling like cheating. If you’re only doing it for fun, as a hobby, then nobody’s judging you but yourself. But the craftsmanship, the writing it yourself: isn’t that the point?

If you did woodwork as a hobby, say, you could doubtless make a chair faster with an automated factory of some kind. But wouldn’t you lose the fact of being a craftsman, then? The very reason you took it up in the first place?

Generalised Philosophy Talk

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:26:42 +0000

Much of what we see written or hear podcasted about LLMs is how useful they are for programming. Coding, as they say, which may or may not be a distinction without a difference. I’ll come back to that, perhaps.

At work, as I mentioned briefly in a footnote last time, there is some pressure — or not as strong as that, let’s say wishing — from some elements of management, for us to make more use of ‘AI’. It’s a payment-card company. A regulated industry. It seems vastly unlikely that there would be a place to connect our customers' data, for example, to a US-owned (or Chinese!) probability machine.

But in the process of our work, internally; in software development, for example…

I resisted — or just ignored — the suggestion that we activate GitHub Copilot in our code editor, for a long time. And then when I decided to do so, to try it, I found I didn’t have the permissions. So I left it. Eventually, though, the permissions got sorted out, and I gave it a try.

There was a piece of code I didn’t fully understand, so I asked the chatbot built into IntelliJ to explain it. And, with a bit of back and forth, it did. It was nothing I couldn’t have found out by searching, but it was quite effective.

So I activated the auto-completion feature in my editor and let it go for a while.

Reader, yesterday I deactivated it.

It had become so annoying, so intrusive, I couldn’t stand it any more. Whenever I tried to type anything it would pop up a suggestion. Often it suggested exactly what I had been going to type anyway. Which is not the worst. We’ve had autocomplete in editors for decades, probably, where the editor will suggest the name of a class, method, etc, and it saves a lot of mistyping.

This new thing, though; this was suggesting whole blocks of code, practically whole methods. And worse, it was suggesting text. You go to type a comment, and it proposes something very close to what you were going to write. Or something quite different, but either way, it is not what I want.

They say having Claude Code or something to help you is like having a keen junior developer at your side. Fine, but if a junior developer kept trying to type what I was typing, I’d tell them to sod off and get on with their own work. Stop trying to do mine for me.

All of which leads me to another of the things about ‘AI’ that has bothered me since I first heard of people using them to help with work in this kind of way.

Maybe this is a silly concern, but: it feels like cheating. Getting someone/thing else to do your work for you? That’s not right.

Aging Inquiries

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:23:17 +0000

When I first started hearing about the modern suite¹ of ‘AI’ systems, I had a reaction. Now, I’m a computer programmer, and a science-fiction fan, so you might imagine my reaction being one of interest, intrigue, fascination; a desire to explore these new tools, toys, entities, whatever they may be.

No. Not so much.

My reaction was something I’ve been trying to understand and explain to myself ever since. It was an emotional reaction, not a rational one. I’m not talking about concerns over environmental issues, power and water consumption, or even the copyright violations of training the things. Those came later. My initial reaction was a visceral rejection. The closest I can come to a one word expression of it:

Revulsion.

Why would I feel that way? Why such a strong reaction, why such disgust? I don’t know. I’ve been struggling with it all this time, which is why I haven’t written about the subject.

I mentioned this at work² one time, and one of my colleagues said maybe my reaction was to some extent provoked by SF’s history of AIs gone evil. It was an interesting thought, but didn’t feel quite right. After all, my favourite SF novels, Iain Banks’s Culture books, have machine intelligences that are thoroughly good. Or devious, cunning, scheming, and all sorts of other things humans can also be. Chat GPT is not Skaffen-Amtiskaw. But what is?

I sometimes wonder if it’s just age. Maybe if I were twenty years younger I’d be diving headfirst into the afore foot linked pileup. But I don’t know. Which is going to remain a common theme of these pieces.

Tranche? Cluster? Pile? What is the collective noun for LLM systems? ↩︎
As you might imagine, there’s a certain amount of pro-AI talk at my work, though from what I’ve seen, mainly from management. I’ll have more to say about that as I write more of these pieces, I should think. ↩︎

📚 Books 2026, 3: How to Seal Your Own Fate, by Kristen Perrin

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:14:51 +0000

As I said a couple of days ago, the second Castle Knoll Files book isn’t quite as good as the first. It’s a fun enough read, but it feels slight as a work of detective fiction, compared to, say, Christie or Rowling, the main crime writers I’ve read recently.

And there are some incongruities. The writer is American, though she has lived in the UK for years, and it shows. Especially in the parts that are written as being a diary from 1967 (the main narrative is present day). Modern terms are used in ways that they wouldn’t have been back then. No examples come to mind right now, but I might update this if they do.

And there are occasions of dialogue that reads more like exposition. People just don’t talk like that.

Apart from those relatively minor points, I enjoyed it a lot, and will doubtless get the third book, which is due out in April. I wonder both for how long Perrin will be able to keep coming up with titles that match the style; and for how long our intrepid investigator, Annie Adams, will be able to find cold cases in great-aunt’s notes.

Watched: ¡Nae Pasaran! 🎥

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:47:46 +0000

¡Nae Pasaran! is a great wee documentary about some workers at a Rolls Royce plant in East Kilbride (near Glasgow), who refused to repair the jet engines for Hawker Hunter aircraft belonging to the Chilean air force, because of Pinochet’s coup and atrocities.

The filmmaker, Felipe Bustos Sierra, is the son of Chilean exiles, and he manages to track down various people in Chile who were connected to the events. Former air force officers who refused to support the coup and who were arrested and tortured thereby. An air force general who did serve in Pinochet’s murderous regime, but wasn’t flying the day they bombed the parliament building, honest guv!

There were eight engines in East Kilbride for maintenance when one of the workers realised they were Chilean. As a union shop steward he ‘blacked’ them: marked them as disputed and not to be worked on.

Eventually they were moved outside. After six months in the Scottish weather, we learn, even crated up, they would be useless.

Well worth a watch if you can track it down (It was available to buy on Vimeo). A celebration of international workers' solidarity, and reminder of a time when unions were strong in this country.

Little Lost Machine

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:43:23 +0000

A little while ago, which turns out to have been June 2024, I microposted saying I ought to write about my thoughts on the current state of what people like to call AI. LLM-based prediction machines, some might say. Then about a year later I briefly wrote again about my negative reaction to the whole idea.

But I didn’t go into detail. And I’m still not going to; at least not today. I have several thousand words of attempted essays, if that’s not a tautology¹, wherein I try to understand my own thoughts and feelings.

And time passes. And the development of the things is lightning fast. It’s a moving target that annoys me.

Still, I do have thoughts. And feelings. And the best way to understand them is to write about them. And the best way to write about them is publicly. Maybe. So I’m going to try writing about them here. A series of short posts around that theme. This is the first.

Maybe I’ll give them their own category, though I have too many categories as it is. I discovered it’s hard to search my blog for ‘AI’. Micro.blog’s search is good, but that’s just such a common set of letters. Weirdly, it brought up all my Crucial Tracks entries, as if it was also finding the ‘IA’ in ‘crucial’.

What with ‘essay’ originally meaning ‘attempt’. ↩︎

📚 Books 2026, 2: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:09:19 +0000

My god, but this is good! As I said the other day, Emily Tesh seems like she’s just dropped out of a clear blue sky in the last few years and taken the science fiction and fantasy worlds by storm with her previous novel and now this one.

We’re in a magic school. It’s a boarding school in the Home Counties of England. A public school, in the English¹ sense, with all that implies about class and wealth, privilege and entitlement. Those issues are addressed in the story, to some degree. There are bursaries, children who are ‘wards of the school’, and so on.

And magic and demons and possession and all sorts of things. It’s the present day, and entities from the demonic plane are drawn to systems, to complexity. There’s an imp possessing the photocopier, and it’s dangerous to turn on your phone in an area where there’s a lot of magic about.

And it’s a story for adults, so we get love and sex and risk-assessment forms and all those sorts of things, too. The viewpoint character is a teacher, the Director of Magic. She’s very, very, good at her job. The magic aspects of it, especially. But sometimes it takes more than being good at magic to save the school. Or the world.

By the time I was about halfway through this I was hoping Tesh had a sequel planned. Maybe several sequels. A magic school is going to be there a long time, after all (this one is already 600 years old), so why not?

I see it’s on the BSFA Awards longlst², which is only right and proper.

And I say ‘English’ very specifically and deliberately. We don’t call them that in Scotland. And even the Wikipedia article I linked to says ‘England and Wales in the body, despite saying ‘United Kingdom’ in title and stub. I’d normally approve of that, but here it’s wrong. ↩︎
That page is bad, as it’s not dated, so it’s likely to have next year’s longlist in a year’s time. Who’s running the website over at the BSFA these days? Not me. ↩︎

📚 Books 2026, 1: The Cold Six Thousand, by James Ellroy

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:38:00 +0000

The first book of this year, or the last of last? I started reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand a couple of weeks before Christmas, set it aside for some Christmas books, and then went back to it.

I started reading it once before, years ago, and didn’t get far. And I think that’s because of its very strange style. Ellroy uses a chopped-up style of extremely short sentences, much repetition of names, and almost no use of pronouns. For example:

The witnesses were antsy. The witnesses wore name tags. The witnesses perched on one bench.

Or:

Wayne ducked by. Wayne passed a break room. Wayne heard a TV blare.

And that kind of thing is repeated across 600+ pages. It can be hard work at times. The only relief comes in some chapters that purport to be transcripts of phone conversations recorded by the FBI.

We are in the real world here, in the sixties. Right at the start, JFK is assassinated. The three viewpoint characters are all dodgy members of various law-enforcement agencies (Las Vegas police, FBI, CIA) and are all connected to the conspiracy behind that event (spoiler, it was the mob, but certain others, like J Edgar Hoover, weren’t too bothered and/or were sort of involved).

The story carries on through the sixties up to the other to big political assassinations, of Martin Luther King and RFK. And guess what? Our antiheroes — or some of them, at least — are involved in those too.

It’s a novel of the sixties, then, about conspiracies and secrets. Not unlike my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy. So why don’t I love it, then? Mainly, I think, it’s that stylistic choice. I don’t see the point of it, and I found it quite annoying, until eventually it became almost comical. And I did enjoy the book (otherwise I would have stopped reading, what with life being too short to read a book you’re not enjoying). Just not as much as might be expected from the setting.

There’s also this: I learned when I was around half way through that this is actually the middle volume of a trilogy. I’ve noted before, though perhaps only in footnote, that publishers seem to hate putting numbers on books¹, or otherwise letting the reader know important details like that. And it doesn’t matter that much here. It works OK as a standalone novel. But I realise now, part of the strangeness at the start may have been a kind of sense that we were expected to know the characters to some degree. I wrote about something like this fifteen(!) years ago, and the sensation I had this time (I now realise) was similar.

Lastly, it’s a very brutal book. There are many acts of extreme violence, described in casual, if not loving, detail. And the casual racism of the language will probably upset some people even more than the violence.

So I’m glad I’ve finally read it, but I don’t see me searching out the other parts of the trilogy.

‘The Cold Six Thousand? I haven’t read volumes one to 5999 yet!’ ↩︎

Latter-Day Musical

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:39:49 +0000

The Book of Mormon was good: fun, if a bit daft in places. As I said, I had no idea about the story when we set out. Turns out it’s abut two young Mormon men being sent out on their missionary work, to Uganda.

As you’d expect from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it takes the piss out of the Mormon faith — especially its origin story — and belief systems in general. But it’s surprisingly positive about Mormonism overall. In fact what it’s really about is how schisms in religions form.

And it goes to some unexpectedly dark places, talking about female genital mutilation, and warlords controlling territory by violence.

But the songs are good!

The American President 🎥

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:48:28 +0000

The American President is another Sorkin/Reiner collab, and another one we watched over the Christmas break.

it’s also Sorkin’s dry run for The West Wing, being the story of — well, you can guess the post of the main character.

it’s pretty good. Feels weird, having Martin Sheen in the Leo role, but you get used to it.

The Godfather 🎥

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:18:00 +0000

Can’t remember if we watched this on Christmas Day or Boxing Day, but it turns out to be a Christmas movie itself. At least in part, and as much as Die Hard is. Or maybe not quite. The point is it does have a scene — quite an important one — at Christmas.

Anyway. I thought I had seen this before. I mean I had, I watched it. But I couldn’t remember anything of the story after the famous horse’s head scene. Maybe that’s because I watched it on my own, so didn’t talk about it afterwards? I don’t know.

It is, of course, very good. There are some strange missed or dropped elements. Michael marries a woman while he’s in hiding in Sicily. She is assassinated by a car bomb, and never mentioned again. Not even as part of his motivation for revenge on the other Mafia families.

I don’t doubt, though, that if (when) I watch it again, I’ll find many parts I missed or have forgotten. That may be the mark of a great film, you can keep going back to it. Or, I don’t know, maybe the mark of a bad one, that you don’t remember it! (I don’t really think that.)

Bowie: The Final Act 🎥

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 23:27:06 +0000

Watched: Bowie: The Final Act 🎥

Very good documentary about Bowie, starting approximately with Young Americans and moving forward — though moving back and forward in time. A lot of focus on the years in which he (hushed tones) wasn’t cool!

Interviews with Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine, Earl Slick, Tony Visconti and others. Well worth a watch.

📗 Books 2025, 30: Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:04:34 +0000

It’s interesting to discover that this is a great read even though I’ve seen the TV series. An interesting parallel with early last year, or rather last thing in 2024, when I read Conclave, not long after seeing the film.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ stories, the series is up to four seasons now — or is it five? — on Apple TV. And it’s really good. This is the book that started it all, and it’s excellent. A group of misfit MI5 spies, each of which has been shunted aside from the main track because of some mishap or fuckup.

📗 Books 2025, 29: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:01:00 +0000

This is, of course, a classic of Old English literature, translated into a modern verse form by the poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.

It’s a deeply weird tale. Why, when an uncanny knight turns up at King Arthur’s court — not just dressed in green, but green-skinned and -haired — and issues a challenge that involves both striking the knight with an axe and agreeing to receive a similar blow from the knight in a year’s time; why would anyone agree to that?

Chivalry, I guess? Or arrogance, we might call it today. Either way, Gawain accepts, and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and rides off, saying, ‘See you in a year, you’ve got to find me or you’re a big fat coward,’ basically.

Gawain proceeds to do nothing about it until the year is almost out. This, at least, I can identify with.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I might take issue with the modernness, the casualness of some of Armitage’s word choice. But who am I to do so?

2025 in Blogging and Reading

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:28:11 +0000

My personal tradition requires me to post a brief summary of last year’s posts, early in the new year. I also note how many books I read.

In 2025 I read — I’m going to call it 30 books, even though there are only 28 posts so tagged at the time of writing. I’ve finished two in the last week or so that I consider 2025 books, and I’ll be posting about them soon.

And 134 posts so dated, which is up on 2024. Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month	Posts
Jan	6
Feb	13
Mar	14
Apr	27
May	15
Jun	15
Jul	8
Aug	8
Sep	5
Oct	11
Nov	7
Dec	5

And on we go into the new year.

Xmas 2025

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:14:55 +0000

📗 Books 2025, 28: The Book of Dust vol 3: The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 23:20:41 +0000

I said I wouldn’t say much about the previous book till I’d read this one, since they’re really all of a piece, a single story spread across the two. And now here we are. Oh, and there are spoilers below.

Trouble is… it doesn’t feel like we’re quite finished.

To summarise: I mostly enjoyed the story very much. There were points where I was just wanting it to end, but in the sense of wanting to find out what happened, not of wanting it to be over. Lyra and Pantalaimon can separate, since their adventures in the original trilogy (something I had completely forgotten when I first read volume 2, which is part of the reason I reread the originals back then). And they’re not getting on with each other at the start of volume 2. In fact, Pantalaimon leaves Lyra, goes off on his own, to find, he says, her imagination.

Which sets up the main driver for the two books. Or one of the main drivers. Because there’s a lot going on beyond Lyra and Pan’s life. Specifically, the Magisterium is up to its old shenanigans and a whole lot of new ones, and there’s a war brewing. Or being brewed. But it’s not clear to the ordinary people of Brytain (as they spell it over in Lyra’s world) who or what the war is against.

Lyra and Pan travel east by different routes. Along the way they meet gryphons and witches and humans and, of course, daemons. Some of the humans seem to barely believe their daemons exist, which is odd.

And there are still windows between the worlds — presumably opened by some past bearer of the Subtle Knife — and the Magisterium is trying to destroy them with explosives and some success. Because, they believe (or their new pope-like leader claims to know) the windows let evil into the world.

Or something like that. The ravings of religious nutters doesn’t make much sense. This new pope-like guy is, by coincidence, Mrs Coulter’s brother. That is, he’s Lyra’s uncle. We assume, therefore, they’ll meet towards the end.

Reader, they do not meet. And that’s only the least of what feel like a great deal of loose ends. In fact there are so many points of interest that we might have expected to be resolved that are not, that this feels like the middle volume of a trilogy, not the final one. Which makes sense, considering the first volume of this trilogy was a prequel to the originals, while the second two comprise a sequel. It feels like Pullman wanted to, or should have, written a full sequel trilogy.

I mean, I don’t mind a few things not being resolved. Stories never end, really, they just stop. But there’s just so much here feeling like untold stories. Maybe he’ll release a series of standalone shorts, as he has before with things like ‘Lyra’s Oxford’. Maybe he really has another volume up his sleeve, but if it takes another six years to write it… well, he’s not getting any younger.

Where we’re left is not terrible. Lyra and Pan are back together and reconciled, and the immediate active dangers are stopped. But they’re in another world that doesn’t seem great, and if they go back to their own, they’re a wanted terrorist, thanks to their uncle’s work!

I express the previous paragraph in the way I did to make a point that occurred to me about Lyra’s world. All humans have daemons, which are part of themselves. An externalised part of their personality or psyche. The human and daemon talk to each other, and will talk about themselves doing things, saying, ‘When we sneaked into the catacombs…’ and so on. We. The thing Pullman missed, I think (and I’m sure his Exeter College predecessor, JRR Tolkien, would not have missed) is: language would be different. Ordinary, everyday language. There would hardly be a personal singular pronoun. Or it would still exist, but be used in a different way.

There would probably be different forms of the first-person plural, too. A ‘we’ that means one human and their daemon referring to themselves. And another form of ‘we’ that means a group of people (and their daemons) together.

Anyway. Just a thought about language. And I want more, Mr Pullman, but I don’t expect it. Still a great story, just not quite the ending I was hoping for.

Bringing Up Baby, 1938 - ★½

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 17:50:37 +0000

We tried to watch this several months ago and it was so annoying we gave up after a few minutes. But it turns up on so many lists of best comedies, we thought we'd give it another chance.

Which maybe wasn't a mistake, but wasn't a great use of our time.

It's not terrible, but it's pretty poor. Rich people being daft, and all the comedy relies on no one communicating even close to sensibly.

But it has a few moments, and there's a collapsing brontosaurus at the end. Sorry if that's a spoiler for you.

Crucial Track for 30 November 2025

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:23:08 +0000

"Come Home" by James

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Share a song that perfectly soundtracks your commute.

If I hadn't already listed 'Sit Down' as a Crucial Track, it would be perfect, because most days my 'commute' involves going into a room in my house and sitting down at my desk.

Still, we can stay with James: 'Come Home' is just as appropriate.

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

Listen to my Apple Music playlist

Crucial Track for 30 November 2025: Come Home

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:23:08 +0000

'Come Home' by James

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Share a song that perfectly soundtracks your commute.

If I hadn't already listed 'Sit Down' as a Crucial Track, it would be perfect, because most days my 'commute' involves going into a room in my house and sitting down at my desk.

Still, we can stay with James: 'Come Home' is just as appropriate.

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

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📗 Books 2025, 27: The Book of Dust vol 2: The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:39:12 +0000

I started to dip into the new one, but as I said I might, I decided it had been too long. I went back and reread this one. And I’m very glad I did. I had forgotten many of the details, remembering only a few high and low points.

I really enjoyed it, and won’t have much to say about it till I’ve finished the new one, which I’m already well into, you won’t be surprised to hear.

There is the suggestion that some gates between the worlds are still open. Are any of them to our (Will’s) world? And would we want Lyra and Will to be reunited, if that were possible? It would undermine the ending of the original trilogy, but if done right…

That said, I don’t think that’s where it’s going to go. Just the idle musings of a shipper.

This Is Spinal Tap, 1984 - ★★½

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 19:49:31 +0000

This isn't as good as I remembered, nor, in all honesty, as good as its legend suggests. It's well done, certainly, and the iconic moments are all there, of course. But it's not really that funny.

Some moments, are humorous enough, to be sure.

I wonder if the forthcoming sequel will go up to 12.

📗 Books 2025, 26: Matrix, by Lauren Groff

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:38:53 +0000

A book about nuns in the 12th century? Why not? Austin Kleon rates it, which is how I came to it.

About one nun, more accurately, a real historical figure, who may or may not actually have been a nun at all: Marie de France. She was definitely a poet, though.

None of that really matters, though. The book isn’t a biography, it’s fiction. A novel based loosely on a historical figure about whom not much is known. She’s descended from a fairy, or said to be in the story. She has visions of (or from) the Virgin Mary. She saves an abbey full of nuns from starvation, and turns it into a power in the land.

It’s very good. In my ongoing, unstructured notes on how writers present speech, and such: there is no direct speech at all in this. Or there is at times, but it’s not punctuated as such. I would have expected to find that annoying, but actually I hardly noticed it.

Groff is an excellent writer, I would have to say. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more by her.

📗 Books2025, 25: Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 22:47:45 +0000

I enjoyed this, but it hasn’t really stuck in my mind. By which I mean, I finished it a few weeks ago, and don’t really recall much of it now. I’ve read two of Hannu’s hard-SF trilogy, but never got to the third, despite what I predicted back then. They were hard work, as I recall, which is probably why I never got to the third.

This one, which was recommended by Warren Ellis is much more approachable. It’s 1938 and the afterlife has not only been discovered, living humans can communicate with the souls in it. And the intelligence services of the the Great Powers are making use of it to extend the reach of their empires.

It’s good, but thinking about it now, one idea that’s mentioned and doesn’t really get explored is this. People no longer fear death. When you know there’s an afterlife — and especially when your one of the privileged ones with a ‘Ticket’, that means your soul will persist in ‘Summerland’ and not dissipate — then there’s nothing really to fear.

But it’s a spy story, so the focus is on the plot, as it should be, and it’s a good one. Thought it maybe slightly runs out of steam at the end. Worth checking out, though.

📗 Books 2025, 24: Under the Glacier, by Halldór Laxness, Translated by Magnus Magnusson

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:01:22 +0000

This is a very odd little book. Laxness won the Nobel for Literature back in the fifties, but I had never heard of him before I read Jack Deighton’s review of it earlier this year. This is often the way with Nobel laureates, or so it seems to me. The committee members know of many more writers than you or I.

In her introduction, Susan Sontag includes science fiction in the group of labels of ‘outlier status’ which apply to this novel. Only, I would say, if some characters believing they are ‘in communion with the galaxies’ makes it so. Yet it somehow has something of the feel of SF. Maybe because our unnamed narrator is exploring a landscape in which he is lost and confused.

It’s the psychological landscape of a small community who live by the titular glacier, though. And that glacier — Snæfells — is the same one Jules Verne’s characters start their Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Which gives it a tentative connection to one of our ur-texts. But nothing explicitly fantastical happens. Unless it does. Resurrection? Maybe. Somebody disappearing mysteriously? Possibly.

We, the reader, are as lost and confused by the behaviours of the characters as is the narrator, who has been sent by the bishop of Iceland to find out what has been going on in the distant parish.

It muses on a lot of ideas (SF is ‘the literature of ideas’, of course, so there’s that), but has no plot as such. It’s intriguing, though, and well worth a read.

Asteroid City, 2023 - ★★★½

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 06:31:24 +0000

Daft fun from Wes Anderson. The story isn't much here, but every frame is a painting, as that YouTube channel had it. Gorgeous to look at, filled with famous faces, highly mannered acting.

The film isn't SF, but the play within the film is very lightly SF. Nothing is made of the alien's visit, though, because that's not the point.

I enjoyed it a lot.

Mission: Impossible II, 2000 - ★★½

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 06:26:17 +0000

God, the plots of these are stupid, aren't they?

Mission: Impossible, 1996 - ★½

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:14:25 +0000

I didn't see this film when it came out, but I used to love the Mission: Impossible TV series back in the seventies.

So this really annoyed me. Why the fuck would you make Jim a traitor? The heroic leader of the IM team for years? The man to whom the self-destructing message was always given. Give him a peaceful retirement, for god's sake. Or just leave him out of it. Don't have him betray everything he ever stood for.

I mean Jesus fuck almighty. It's like if Star Trek: The Next Generation had come along, and they were like, oh yeah, Kirk? He was a Romulan agent all along. Blew up the old Enterprise and everyone on board.

That's the kind of betrayal this film starts with.

Anyway, some shit happens. Things explode. Restaurants, helicopters, trains. Fuck knows.

Crucial Track for 10 October 2025

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:20:40 +0000

"Clash City Rockers" by The Clash

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Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?

Today's prompt is:

A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.

Well, I mean. If the golden age of music is 14, as the old saying has it, then we're talking about 1978. Let's go straight to the top, then, with The Clash, and 'Clash City Rockers', indeed. Can't go far wrong with that.

What does it mean to me? I first became aware of it by hearing friends who already had it, singing it. Brendan, I think. And the first time I heard it might have been at a gig by the band he was in with Friendy, The Varicose Veins, doing a version of it.

I certainly didn't buy it when it came out (14, remember), but a couple of years later, at one of the Glasgow record shops. Possibly Listen Records on Renfield Street, but it might have been the Virgin Megastore, down the bottom of that street — or rather its continuation, Union Street — on the corner with Argyle Street. I think it probably was, because they had a lot of space and kept a lot of browsable back catalogue.

Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.

'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'

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Crucial Track for 10 October 2025: Clash City Rockers

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:20:40 +0000

"Clash City Rockers" by The Clash

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?

Today's prompt is:

A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.

Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.

'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

Listen to my Apple Music playlist

📗 Books 2025, 23: How to Solve Your Own Murder, by Kristen Perrin

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 06:31:49 +0000

Most sites describe How to Solve Your Own Murder as ‘cosy crime’, which I suppose it is. It has a first-person protagonist, so the reader doesn’t think there’s much chance she’ll die. She does find herself in some danger, though, and hell, she might not inherit her great aunt’s fortune, if she doesn’t solve the mystery of her murder.

The great aunt’s murder, that is. Our heroine has never met the great aunt at the start, and never does, because she’s murdered right away. But we know from a prologue that the great aunt always expected to be murdered. A medium told her so — or at least implied as much — when she was 16. It became the defining fact of her life, which is quite sad.

The great aunt is a secondary first-person narrator, by way of her diaries. So we get alternating chapters of the past and present. It’s a good read.

I did something unusual for me at the end: I read the few pages fom the sequel that are included at the back. Usually I skip that kind of thing. Especially when it’s not from a sequel, but from another book entirely. Not this time, though, and I’ll be seeking out How to Seal Your Own Fate (‘Book two in The Castle Knoll Files’) at some point.

📗 Books 2025, 22: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 22:41:54 +0000

A Booker winner, no less. And a science-fiction novel, too. Well, of sorts. It’s set in space, but very much the non-fictional, real space of the International Space Station, and the present day. And nothing weird or fantastic (in the fantastika sense) happens.

Yet it is set slightly into the future. On the day it takes place — the whole story happens across a single day, sixteen orbits of the space station — a new mission to the moon is launched. A crew of four, scheduled to land on the moon a few days later. Is that enough to make it SF? Kind of. If it were up for SF awards, which I’m sure it must have been, few would quibble.

But none of that matters compared to how gorgeous the prose is. This is a very writerly novel. The language is lovely, almost poetic in places; yet with a lot of lists, oddly, both from the author and from at least one of her characters.

I was, however, mildly annoyed at times, in two aspects of my being. The physics graduate disagreed with some word choices. Right in the opening line, for example, a space station in orbit is described as ‘rotating’ round the Earth. While that’s not exactly wrong, it’s not how we’d usually phrase it. Orbiting or circling, we’d say. It might be rotating too, but that would be around its own axis. A tiny thing, though.

Then the writer and user of English was mildly disturbed by how the small amount of dialogue was presented: no quote marks. That’s not uncommon nowadays, but it can be distracting, and what purpose does it serve?

It’s a delightful work. There isn’t much plot, but there are fragments of all the six crew members' stories. We see them at work, performing experiments and maintaining the station; watching a typhoon building on Earth and worrying about the people in its path; and musing about and remembering their lives and families back home.

It’s incredibly skillful to conjure so much from so little text — it’s unusually short for a modern novel. A worthy winner, and very highly recommended.

Sliding Doors, 1998 - ★★½ (contains spoilers)

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 15:23:47 +0000

This review may contain spoilers.

Well my goodness, but this is a strange old film. I've known about it and kind of wanted to watch it for years, because I knew it was about alternative realities, paths not taken, that kind of thing.

What I didn't know is it's also a romcom. Or two. Of sorts.

And a tragedy. I mean, spoilers, but…

What were they actually trying to make here? Part of me thinks the idea was, 'Hey, what if we have a romcom but tragic, and the heroine dies at the end?' And the studio, or co-creators were, like, 'No way.'

'Unless…'

And you end up with two romcoms. Sort of.

📗 Books 2025, 21: The Book of Daniel, by EL Doctorow

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:14:14 +0000

It’s a strange thing, or so it seems to me, to deal with a political event of your own lifetime, by writing a fictional version of a life. And not of one of the protagonists, but of an imaginary version of one of their children. Yet this is what we have here, and it’s on the whole successful.

Doctorow takes the story of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage against the USA, convicted, and executed in 1953. Changing their name to Isaacson, he tells the story of their son, Daniel, along with his younger sister, Susan. In reality the Rosenbergs had two boys, but their ages were similar, and some of what happened to them after their parents' arrest, according to Wikipedia, is similar to the experiences of Daniel and Susan.

As a novel it’s extremely well written, both readable and literary. It uses a number of devices — I might call them gimmicks, if that didn’t seem too dismissive, but I’m not sure I understand the reason for them. It switches frequently between Daniel’s first person and third — sometimes within the same sentence —, and also jumps around in time. One section is told from the point of view of the father and mother, which makes sense, as it’s when they are in prison and on trial, where Daniel would have no access to them.

The whole thing is presented as the thesis (or part of it) that Daniel is writing for his PhD, so there are several levels of meta involved. The main problem I had with it was the adult Daniel is at times a thoroughly objectionable character. There are a couple of early scenes where he sexually humiliates his young wife that nearly made me throw the book across the room.

Protagonists don’t have to be pleasant characters, of course, but this seemed prurient to me. I suppose we’re meant to understand he’s been damaged, if not abused. by his experiences, and goes on to abuse in turn. But I’m not sure the two sides tie up that well. The scenes of the young kids trying to make their way after their parents are gone, running away from an awful children’s home and returning to their now-empty house, are very moving.

Susan is in a mental institution at the start, and apparently dies there. Her story is the one that’s missing from this, in fact. We learn about her as a kid, certainly, and there are some interactions with Daniel when they’re older, then they’re estranged for a while. Then he visits her at the institution and she dies offstage. It feels like a gap, but again, maybe that’s how life feels sometimes.

As I say, it’s an unusual choice. Doctorow could have written a story about children torn from their parents and all that implies, without making it so closely tied to real events. Or he could have written a biography of the Rosenbergs. The latter would be a different kind of thing, though, and probably have a different readership. You’d only read such a biography if you were specifically interested in the case or the people, while you can read this as a novel without even knowing it’s inspired by real events. And maybe that’s the reason for using the events as the seed.

📗 Books 2025, 20: The Hallmarked Man, by Robert Galbraith

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 16:45:19 +0000

The mighty JK Rowling’s latest reaches us, at long last. After the bombshell ending of The Running Grave two years ago, we have the next installment in Strike and Robin’s story. (That should really be ‘Strike and Ellacott’s’, or ‘Cormoran and Robin’s’, but sometimes you’ve got to write things in the way that feels right).

The case is way complex. I’m not sure I followed all the twists, or even quite had all the characters figured out — especially actual and possible victims, even more than culprits. That’s partly because of the speed I read it at, and the late nights my reading caused.

Anyway, I’ll not say too much more because of spoilers, but I think The Ink-Black Heart is still my favourite.

The Italian Job, 1969 - ★★★½

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 16:19:14 +0000

I would have said I had rewatched this inside the last five years or so (after seeing it as a kid). But I remembered next to nothing of it, apart from the overall idea and the iconic scenes.

It's still pretty good. Oddly, it kind of makes me want to see what they did with the remake, but let's face it, the answer is probably, 'made a mess.'

📗 Books 2025, 19: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:18:14 +0000

It’s unusual to get a science-fiction novel that was also longlisted for the Booker, as this was. The question, though: is it science fiction?

It certainly has science: most notably marine biology. Also space travel to the edge of the solar system via a new, unexplained drive; something which might be a first contact event; possible time travel; and a kind of ascendence. In fact there’s a section near the end that had strong resonances of 2001: A Space Odyssey for me.

So yes, it’s SF. But it feels somehow incomplete. Not unfinished, except in the way you might say that about 2001 itself. It keeps the pages turning OK, but I’m not entirely sure exactly what it’s trying to achieve, and (therefore) whether it’s successful.

It tells two stories at once. And I do wonder whether MacInnes was similarly torn between his desire to write a mainstream, literary novel, and one diving deep into fantastika.

Leigh, the marine biologist who ends up on a space mission, had a physically abusive father, which not surprisingly affects much of her life. Though her sister appears not to have suffered similarly, and there are hints that Leigh is not entirely a reliable narrator. (But then again, who is?) The adult Leigh is torn between her career and her desire to visit her mother, who is showing signs of dementia.

As a marine biologist Leigh experimentally engineers algae which is intended to feed, oxygenate, and cheer up the small crew of a year- (or more) long voyage. But there’s a lot going in the background of the story, that Leigh and most of the other characters are not privy to. Secrets kept by companies and governments. We, the readers, are also kept outside the walls of secrecy.

So it’s very good at evoking the situation of someone who is a cog — albeit an essential one — in very complex machine, but who has no picture of the machine as a whole.

All of which leaves it convincing, but frustrating, especially if you’re looking for a nicely wrapped-up story.

📗 Books 2025, 18: Glory Road, by Robert A Heinlein

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:24:58 +0000

I had a sudden hankering to reread this old Heinlein book (even older than me, it turns out, being first published in 1963). I read it as a kid, from the library, and if I ever bought a copy it isn’t accessible now.

I searched my local library’s catalogue. No joy. But the excellent World of Books duly had an old copy or two, and one was soon here.

It is almost exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it’s a tale of derring-do, sword-and-sorcery adventure, where the sorcery is sufficiently-advanced technology. We don’t learn anything about how it works, and it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fun story, very much of its time.

The first-person male protagonist is one of those highly-capable men beloved of that era’s male American SF writers. But he is relatively lacking in self-confidence at times, which is surprisingly refreshing for the type. The female lead is mostly great, and considerably more capable than the guy, even if he doesn’t exactly realise it.

Anyway, loads of fun, and I’m glad to have read it again after all these years.

The Naked Gun, 2025 - ★★★½

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 05:59:01 +0000

Remakes can be just as much fun as the original, it turns out. I note I gave that four stars, which seems high, but you know how it is: we award these things in the moment.

Anyway this new version updates the old without losing any of its zany charm and laugh-out-loudness. Well worth a couple of hours of your time.

The Ballad of Wallis Island, 2025 - ★★★★½

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:41:42 +0000

I forgot to write about this when we saw it a couple of weeks back. I went in knowing nothing about it but the basic setup: rich guy invites faded, formerly popular, folk duo to his island for a private gig.

I didn't even know it was a British film. The above description gives kind of Glass Onion vibes when you tell it to people, but this is nothing like that. It's much more gentle and charming and sad yet happy.

The music's great too. Highly recommended.

📗 Books 2025, 17: Theophilus North, by Thornton Wilder

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:35:45 +0000

I had never heard of Wilder until a year or so ago, but I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey toward the end of last year, and now I’ve read this one. I picked it up at a secondhand book stall at our local market a few months ago — at the same time I got Blitzkrieg Bops, actually — and now here we are.

It’s 1926. The twenties are undeniably roaring, for some people at least. The titular Theophilus, or Teddie, as he prefers to be known, starts the story by leaving his job teaching in a boys' school. He goes on the road, buying a car from a friend, and at first you think it’s going to be a pre-Kerouac kind of thing. But within a few paragraphs he’s reached Newport Rhode Island, sold the car, and settled down for the summer.

Well, ‘settled down’ is not quite the right term. In fact, in modern terms, he has to hustle to make a living. Staying at the YMCA at first, he manages to get various jobs teaching kids tennis, tutoring languages, and reading to people. It was long before audiobooks, obviously.

But really, what he’s doing is sorting out relationships. Various kinds of relationships, but not that varied kinds of people. Newport is a summer home for the wealthy, the kind of people familiar from that other book about the twenties. You know, the one I’ve never managed to like. This lot have more problems, and are more interesting, than Gatsby’s crowd. And some of them are kids, too.

He is astonishingly capable, and since the story is told in the first person, it can come across as a tad self-serving, almost boastful at times. But North is so charming, so thoroughly good for people, that it’s hard to criticise.

Oh, I should add, it’s a comedy of sorts. Among a certain class of reader, myself included, mention Rhode Island and you’ll conjure up soul-sucking, squamous, cosmic horror. But there’s nothing even vaguely Lovecraftian here. The only horrors are the fear of social ostracism, and one house that is supposedly haunted. North finds a way to remove that stain from the house and ensure that servants will stay there again.

Oh well.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it’s a strange little one. It does just about dip into hints of magic realism at a couple of points, but those are mainly North (or Wilder) criticising the kind of people who prey on the vulnerable by offering healing and such.

It’s maybe not fair to compare it to The Great Gatsby, just because it’s set around the same time. Fitzgerald was writing about his own time, while Wilder was writing fifty years later, making it just on the border of a historical novel for him (though he lived through the time, so not exactly). But I couldn’t help drawing the comparison, and I enjoyed this much more.

📗 Books 2025, 16: The Cracked Mirror, by Chris Brookmyre

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:04:54 +0000

I’ve read a few of Brookmyre’s over the years, and always enjoyed them, but I don’t seek him out. So when I chanced on this in Waterstones a week or two back, I had a look. The title immediately made me think of Agatha Christie, of whose books I’ve read a few recently, and my partner and I have watched all of the Poirot series, and several of the Miss Marple TV adaptations.

So when the blurb said this:

You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.

You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.

Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide.

there was no way I wasn’t buying it. Yes, it’s a mashup between Miss Marple and a hard-boiled detective. How? Why? These are questions you’ll have to read it to find out.

It’s good. A gripping read, a page turner. The ending maybe falls a little flat but that might just because I’d guessed (or worked out) something fairly early on. I think you’re meant to, though.

📗 Books 2025, 15: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 11:37:52 +0000

Slightly oddly, I bought this in a bookshop in Canada on our recent trip. I mean, it’s not that odd. Toronto is an English-speaking city, with decent bookshops: why wouldn’t I get it there? Just that it’s not in the least Canadian, and it gave me extra weight to carry home.

But it was such a nice bookshop I wanted to support it (BMV on Queen Street West, if you’re interested), and this is a book I’ve meant to read for years.

Does anyone actually reach the titular maritime safety device/residence? That’s one of the things I wanted to know, as well as what else the story was about. Well, it’s Woolf, so as I wrote about Mrs Dalloway, it’s mainly about the inside of people’s heads.

Not in a gruesome way; not like that thing they do in House, where the camera goes up someone’s nose and into their brain (we’re watching the first season at the moment). I mean their minds, obviously.

Slightly to my surprise, it’s set in Scotland. Specifically, a Hebridean island, generally taken to be Skye, although there’s no lighthouse like the one in the story there. A family with about four (five, six?) children — ranging from young adults about to be married off, down to a boy of five or six — have a holiday home there. and spend the summer, along with various guest they’ve invited along.

Conversations happen, walks are gone on, and many thoughts are thought. Will James, the young boy, get his desired trip to the lighthouse? Only if it’s fair tomorrow, which his father assures him it won’t be.

In fact, we never learn if he goes there on that visit. Part two of the book is entitled ‘Time Passes’, and it certainly does. Ten years, in fact, including the First World War. Several characters die offstage. Woolf is content to tell us, in her inimitable style. Showing that kind of thing would not make sense here.

Then in the third section, what’s left of the family and invited guests visit the house again. Suffice it to say the weather is fine enough to make the trip, but the sixteen-year old James and his sister Cam do not want to go with their father, but are dragged along anyway.

I’m making light of it (ha ha), but it’s a work of complete genius in the way she takes us inside people’s thoughts. It is so convincing, even — perhaps especially — the teenage James. It can be difficult at times, but not in an unreadable way. Just in the complexity of the thought processes. Woolf was all about the interiority. It wil bear another reading, I’m sure. Probably several.

📗 Books 2025, 14: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 06:52:51 +0000

This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and I saw in a bookshop the other day that it’s now published just as Mistborn. Which is more sensible. I can’t help but imagine some potential readers were put off or confused by that ‘final’ in The Final Empire.¹

My son basically made me read this. He’s a Sanderson fan and I had read none. He (my son) also told me Sanderson wanted to write a fantasy where the good guys had lost. Like what would have Middle Earth been like if Frodo and Sam had failed on their trip to Mordor? Sauron would have got the one ring back and basically been all-powerful.²

So this is basically that, with quite a different setup. The empire is ‘Final’ because it has lasted a thousand years or more and is never expected to end. Most people live as peasants, near slaves, and few noble houses are allowed to exist because the empire needs trade and internal tensions and what have you. The emperor — The Lord Ruler, as he’s known — is basically all-powerful, invulnerable. He’s said to have survived various assassination attempts up to and including a beheading. Which seems… wildly improbable, but hey, this is fantasy.

But some people — the titular Mistborn, and others — have special abilities, and there are pockets of resistance.

Sanderson writes a good enough page-turner, but I don’t know if I’ll be going on with the series. First of all there are just too damn many. But more importantly, and surprisingly, this first book is actually quite a complete story, with an ending. Sure, it’s a reasonably open ending, with hints of the kind of troubles the characters are going to face, and so on. But if there were no more books, you wouldn’t feel unsatisfied to leave it there.

And I don’t care enough about any of the characters to want to invest my time in it. Which is probably its biggest weakness. I even left it at home when we went on holiday to Canada recently. I was about 100 pages from the end and didn’t want to have to pack such a huge book that I would probably have finished on the flight over. Which is not how I’d have treated The Lord of the Rings back in the day, just to give one example.

Especially in the absence of that which publishers hate: numbers. ↩︎
In fact I see from the Wikipedia page I linked to it was actually Harry Potter he was thinking of, but the same idea. ↩︎

Clue, 1985 - ★★★½

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:22:42 +0000

This was daft, but quite fun. A film based on a board game. Specifically on Cluedo. Which in America, strangely, seems to be called 'Clue'. Why would you not use such a great, clever name as 'Cluedo'? Unless they don't have Ludo there? But that seems impossible.

Anyway, it's probably the second-best thing I've seen Tim Curry in. Hmm, he was in Times Square, wasn't he? I remember enjoying that, but not much about it.Right now I'd have to but this ahead of it. He plays the butler, and since one couple turn up in the same car, and it's a stormy, rainy night, I was getting serious Brad & Janet vibes. I was disappointed when they had an umbrella on getting out of the car, instead of a newspaper.

Anyway, the writers had to struggle a bit to fit the conventions of the game into an actual story, but they did OK. There are shenanigans, murders, betrayals, multiple endings. All in all, not bad.

📗 Books 2025, 13: No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:28:54 +0000

This was published in 2000, and my partner’s parents gave it to me that year or the next. I have a vague feeling I also knew about it from somewhere else. Maybe just saw it in a bookshop and thought it looked interesting. Either way, I never got round to reading it till now.

It’s the story of a Scottish family — clan, almost, and certainly they’re referred to that way in the Gaelic terms that pepper the book — that migrated to Canada some time after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s 1745 uprising. It’s simultaneously the history of that migration, and the story of a present-day descendent of the family, now a successful orthodontist in Ontario; and his older brother who is in less successful circumstances. And most of all, of how they came to be that way.

I decided, since we were taking a trip to Canada, that now might finally be the time to read it. I started it on the way to the airport, but I don’t think I read any while we were still over there.

I’ve finished it now, though, and it’s pretty good. Nice use of parallel storylines, various bits about Scottish history and modern-day (well, actually the modern parts are set in the 80s) Toronto, and so on.

MacLeod came up in conversation while we were over. Not apropos of this; I just recognised the name. He was mentioned as a poet, I think, and I believe that’s how he’s better known. Still, he’s a decent novelist too.

Persuasion, 2007 - ★★★

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:05:12 +0000

Decent Austen adaptation. I haven’t read the book, which, I understand, many say is her best. I thought the ending fell a bit flat.

Crucial Track for 18 June 2025

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 21:43:30 +0000

"How Was It for You?" by James

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Share a song that makes time feel like it's standing still.

I’m not sure this exactly fits the bill, but a chat at work today led me to play James’s Gold Mother for the first time in a while, and ‘How Was it for You?’ had me waving my arms in the air like I just didn’t care, or like I was back at the Brixton Academy in 1990 or so.

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Crucial Track for 18 June 2025: How Was it for You?

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 21:43:30 +0000

"How Was It for You?" by James

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Sneakers, 1992 - ★★★½

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:37:10 +0000

Watched this on the return flight from Canada home. I feel like I’ve been hearing about it for years, as a not-bad early hacking/cracking type of thing.

Which is basically what it was, with an element of heist movie thrown in. Pretty good.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022 - ★★★★½

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:34:29 +0000

After watching this in Paris with French subtitles, I finally managed to see it again. This time on a plane to Canada.

It holds up really well on a second viewing. The Air Canada seatback screens were pretty good. And this time I was able to get all the jokes and nuances in the non-English parts.

I love this film.

Farewell, My Lovely, 1944 - ★★★½

Mon, 26 May 2025 07:43:34 +0000

This appears as Murder, My Sweet, on Letterboxd, TMDB, and IMDb, but is actually Farewell, My Lovely. Apparently it was re-titled for the US market back in 1944, because there was a musical with the original name.

The original being, of course, one of Raymond Chandler's novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe. This is a really good adaptation, with what sounds like most of Chandler's dialogue (I mean, why would you change it?).

It's proper, classic noir. But/and there's a scene where Marlowe is captured by the bad guys, drugged, and interrogated, that feels more like the mind-control paranoia of sixties films like The Ipcress File. The visual ideas for suggesting that kind of thing go back a long way, obviously.

📗 Books 2025, 12: The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus

Thu, 22 May 2025 22:46:57 +0000

This is a strange wee beastie. The edition I have was published in 1998, and I must have bought it then or not long after. I vaguely remember reading a bit of it and finding it amazing, really powerful. And I obviously started it, because I had a bookmark in it, a few pages in.

But every time I’ve had a look at it since, it hasn’t really grabbed me. Until recently, when I started it again.

And… I’ve no idea what I saw in it back then. It’s a work of surrealism, but it’s just wilfully obscure. Every sentence is grammatically and syntactically sound, but semantically meaningless. It purports to be a catalogue or almanac of a society, with sections titled ‘Sleep’, ‘God’, ‘Food’, and so on. And within them chapters, or short stories, called ‘Sky Destroys Dog’,‘Ethics of Listening When Visiting Areas That Contain Him’, ‘Hidden Ball Inside a Song’.

It can be strangely compelling in places, almost reaching the level of poetry. But mostly it’s a bit of a chore to get through. If I hadn’t had it and kept it so long I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

A very curious work.

📗 Books 2025, 11: Blitzkreig Bops, by Alli Patton

Thu, 22 May 2025 06:49:37 +0000

I picked this up at a stall at the local market a few weeks ago. It’s a slim volume, taking its title from the Ramones' song ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and subtitled, ‘A Brief History of Punks at War’. Alli Patton is a music journalist from the southern US and this slim book takes a look at how punk, from the 70s through to the 20210s, has been used to resist war, and call for peace and justice.

She starts with Stiff Little Fingers and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and moves on through apartheid South Africa to Chile during Pinochet’s regime and punk bands in East Germany during the Cold War.

And then beyond that, decade by decade. There are always wars and oppression, and it seems there are always punk bands resisting and calling for peace.

Worth a read, and she includes a YouTube playlist of some of the artists she covers.

Waiting for Yellow Ribbons

Fri, 16 May 2025 23:35:35 +0000

Searching for the Man

The state of internet search these days is such that it can be hard to find things that — while you don’t know they’re there — you know must be there.

It’s as if the search engines give up after a bit and just show more links to the same videos. Or lyrics sites, in this case. I found myself at the Wikipedia page for answer songs, and idly scrolled through it. Mainly I wondered what they’d say about ‘Here Comes Your Man’, by the Pixies. If you’ve swum in the same pools of the indie/punk/post-punk floodwaters as me, you’ll have long realised that Black Francis must have written that song, in part at least, as an answer to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. (Note the formulation of the title from the first album; many people and versions characterise it as ‘Waiting for My Man’, since that’s what the lyrics say.)

There was no reference to the song on the page. Slightly odd, I thought. I looked at the song’s own page. No reference there to the Velvets or Lou Reed.

If you doubt the connection, just listen to the two songs. There’s the riff on the Pixies song, plus all the references to ‘waiting’ in it, as well as the obviousness of the title. Sure, it’s not only that, or even, really, about ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ in any sense. But it’s unthinkable that the one didn’t inspire the other. Let’s not forget Black Francis wrote, in another song, ‘I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed/I like Lou Reed.’

Others must have written about this, I thought, and started googling around. Well, I use DuckDuckGo, but you know. And I even tried switching to Google. Nothing came up, except for the odd little Reddit post saying, ‘Hey, this song’s a bit like that song.’ Yet you’ve got to imagine — it’s hard not to imagine – people will have written about it. Music journalists, bloggers… hell, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned it before now.

But nothing turned up. I’m sure those pages are out there, lost for now in the deep pools of the web. But the search engines just don’t want to go there anymore.

Tying Ribbons

I was looking into answer songs because I’d been reading the page on ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, and it mentioned there being an answer song.

I was looking at that page because we were talking about the origin of people tying yellow ribbons when they’re waiting for someone to come home. I thought it might have originated with the song. It was certainly the first time most of us here in the UK heard the expression. When Americans festooned buildings with yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage crisis, it seemed like a reference to the song.

But the page suggested the origin is much older, possibly going back to the US civil war. So much for that.

We were talking about yellow ribbons because people are displaying them again: waiting for the remaining hostages in Gaza to be freed.

Israel’s government is doubtless guilty of war crimes, probably crimes against humanity. And October the 7th was a crime against humanity. I’m all for freeing Palestine, but free the hostages too, and if you can get rid of Hamas too while you’re doing it, so much the better.

Free Palestine from Hamas.

Paddington in Peru, 2024 - ★★½

Fri, 16 May 2025 19:41:52 +0000

Has its moments, but let's face it. Paddington is inherently funny because he's a bear in London, out of what should be his native habitat. When you put him back into what should be his native habitat, it just loses something.

London Town, 2016 - ★★½

Mon, 12 May 2025 18:14:41 +0000

I'm not, honestly, sure this deserves even the two-and-a-half stars I'm giving it. It's a daft story, but it gets extra marks from me for its Clash connection.

It's 1978. A 14-year-old boy lives in Wanstead with his dad and six-year-old sister. Their mum has left and is living in London's squatting scene, trying to make it as a singer. She sends the boy a tape of the first Clash album. It somehow later becomes the record and has '(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' on it, which it the first album didn't. (The US version might have, but that's not what he's got.)

That's far from the most absurd thing. After the dad gets injured by a piano (which isn't absurd, as he runs a music shop and was delivering it) the boy tries to keep things together for his sister.

In so doing he — and here is the real absurdity — learns to drive and starts driving his dad's black cab, taking fares and avoiding the cops.

Yeah, I know. He picks up Joe Strummer one night. Obviously.

Honestly, it's daft as a brush. I quite liked it, but mainly for the music.

Crucial Track for 11 May 2025

Sun, 11 May 2025 16:33:09 +0000

"Walk on the Wild Side" by Lou Reed

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I don't know whether I can honestly say this the song 'feels like home' to me, but I do recall once, long ago, arriving in Edinburgh from London, and walking up the Bridges with Transformer playing, and thinking it felt like coming home.

'Walk on the Wild Side' is the second track from Transformer to feature on Crucial Tracks, I note, but that's not surprising. I'd consider it a 'crucial album'.

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Crucial Track for 11 May 2025: Walk on the Wild Side

Sun, 11 May 2025 16:33:09 +0000

"Walk on the Wild Side" by Lou Reed

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'Walk on the Wild Side' is the second track from Transformer to feature on Crucial Tracks, I note, but that's not surprising. I'd consider it a 'crucial album'.

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📗 Books 2025, 10: The White Album, by Joan Didion

Sun, 11 May 2025 16:24:47 +0000

I read one of the pieces from this, ‘At the Dam’, on my MA course. It didn’t make a huge impact on me at the time, but enough to keep Didion’s name in my mind, and eventually to stir up enough interest for me to get this.

It’s a set of personal essays covering various events around the end of the sixties and the early seventies. It struck me, reading this, she’s kind of a gonzo journalist, or at least gonzo-adjacent, in that the often puts herself in the narrative. Which is good and proper in my humble opinion. Not as intense as HST, but still.

There’s a lot of good, interesting stuff here, including one piece that involves her hanging out with The Doors, waiting for Jim Morrison to arrive. It’s not much about music, though, and I don’t know why she chose to call it The White Album.

One minor annoyance about at least this edition is, although the front matter credits the various publications the pieces originally appeared in (Life, The New York Review of Books, etc), it doesn’t tell us which piece appeared where.

But that doesn’t detract from the pieces themselves.

Crucial Track for 02 May 2025

Fri, 02 May 2025 16:42:01 +0000

"Sit Down" by James

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Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?

Not sure this is a thing I've ever done in the musical kind of sense, but I guess somebody might say, 'Tell me a song you love,' or something. I could answer with 'Sit Down' by James, for sure.

I saw them live a ton of times in the late eighties/early nineties. They're probably the band I've seen most, along with The Pogues and The Fall. Including on my 25th birthday, headlining the Reading Festival. Actually The Pogues were on that day, too. Or so my memory says, even if the Reading histories don't.

An interesting thing about 'Sit Down' is that they released it as a single and it didn't do much. I saw the video a load of times on the old ITV Chart Show on Saturday mornings back when I lived in Walthamstow.

But like a year or so later they didn't just rerelease it; they rerecorded it, with reordered verses, and a more upbeat performance. Here's the original video on YouTube.

The new version, of course, became a huge hit.

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Crucial Track for 02 May 2025: Sit Down

Fri, 02 May 2025 16:42:01 +0000

"Sit Down" by James

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Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?

Not sure this is a thing I've ever done in the musical kind of sense, but I guess somebody might say, 'Tell me a song you love,' or something. I could answer with 'Sit Down' by James, for sure.

But like a year or so later they didn't just rerelease it; they rerecorded it, with reordered verses, and a more upbeat performance. Here's the original video on YouTube.

The new version, of course, became a huge hit.

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Crucial Track for 1 May 2025: Mario Y Maria

Thu, 01 May 2025 23:22:02 +0000

“Mario Y Maria” by Butch Hancock

It’s annoying that the song I want to use for the prompt, ‘Share a song that tells a great story,’ isn’t found on Apple Music. It’s sitting right there in my music library being fantastic, ever since I ripped it from a cover CD from Uncut magazine, back in 2002.

It tells the tale of a pair of lovers that we might describe, in the clichéd form, as ‘star-crossed’. But it’s not a tale of young lovers. Rather, the titular pair are experienced, world-weary (certainly by the end), but they keep on keeping on.

I don’t know if creating this entry will even work with the song not found, but if it doesn’t, I’ll create the post manually. (It didn’t; I did.)

Turns out it’s on that there Tube thing, though.

Masked and Anonymous, 2003 - ★★★½

Thu, 01 May 2025 20:58:13 +0000

I'd give it five stars for the soundtrack: all Dylan songs. The story is also all Dylan. And the lead actor: Dylan too.

Yes, in 2003, Bob Dylan wrote and starred in this film. In a country in state of constant revolution and war, with the dictator-president dying, a singer is released from prison to play a benefit concert. It's not clear why, but 'The Network' wants to broadcast it.

And Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman, is hoping to get rich from it. It can't end well, and Jeff Bridges, as a journalist who talks a lot more than he writes, listens, or observes, is supposed to be uncovering the corruption.

It can't end well, and frankly it's a bit incoherent. Enjoyable enough though, and certainly interesting to the Dylan fan.

Incredible Story About the Smallpox Vaccine

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:58:51 +0000

Astonishing story in The Atlantic, about the smallpox vaccine:

At the heart of history’s most successful eradication campaign is a mystery. The smallpox vaccine—now also being deployed against monkeypox—contains a live virus that confers immunity against multiple poxviruses. But it is not smallpox or a weakened version thereof. Nor is it monkeypox. Nor is it cowpox, as suggested by the vaccine’s famous origin story involving pus taken from an infected milkmaid to immunize an 8-year-old boy.
Sarah Zhang https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/mystery-inside-monkeypox-vaccines/671256/

The vaccine predates systematic, controlled manufacture, so several or many versions were made from various sources. And they were transferred by sending infected children around the world! I do seem to recall hearing that last part before, but not the fact that its true origin is shrouded in mystery.

Well worth a read. Via Kottke

Crucial Track for 30 April 2025

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 17:19:29 +0000

"Death or Glory" by The Clash

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I don't know if this song always makes me feel better, exactly, but I love it to bits and want it played at my funeral. So there's that.

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Crucial Track for 30 April 2025: Death or Glory

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 17:19:29 +0000

"Death or Glory" by The Clash

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I don't know if this song always makes me feel better, exactly, but I love it to bits and want it played at my funeral. So there's that.

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Crucial Track for 29 April 2025

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:00:59 +0000

"Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen

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As far as representing my current mood goes, I'm actually just hungry. But Springsteen's 'Hungry Heart' is always a good choice. The story goes he wrote it for The Ramones, or at least was going to offer it to them. But he decided to keep it, and of course put it on The River.

That album — and most of his gigs since — wouldn't have been the same without it. But I'd still love to have heard The Ramones do it.

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Crucial Track for 29 April 2025: Hungry Heart

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:00:59 +0000

"Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen

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That album — and most of his gigs since — wouldn't have been the same without it. But I'd still love to have heard The Ramones do it.

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Crucial Track for 28 April 2025

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 22:45:02 +0000

"The Prince" by Madness

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Madness: At the heart of the ska revival of the eighties. I’d have gone to see them in Glasgow, on the Two-Tone tour, with The Specials and The Selecter, if it hadn’t been at an over-18s-only venue. I was 16.

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Crucial Track for 28 April 2025: The Prince

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 22:45:02 +0000

"The Prince" by Madness

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Crucial Track for 27 April 2025

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 21:45:09 +0000

"Ticket to Ride (2023 Mix)" by The Beatles

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It’s interesting that, although I could give you various answers to the ’first single’ question, I don’t actually know what the first album I bought was.

Still, it’s bound to have been a Beatles one. So let’s go with the Red Album, and ‘Ticket to Ride’.

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Crucial Track for 27 April 2025: Ticket to Ride

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 21:45:09 +0000

"Ticket to Ride" by The Beatles

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It’s interesting that, although I could give you various answers to the ’first single’ question, I don’t actually know what the first album I bought was.

Still, it’s bound to have been a Beatles one. So let’s go with the Red Album, and ‘Ticket to Ride’.

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Crucial Track for 26 April 2025

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:30:42 +0000

"I'm So Free" by Lou Reed

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Lou Reed is one of my all-time faves, both with the Velvets and solo. This one popped into my mind this morning as we were walking back from badminton (playing the game, not the place where they have horsey things). It’s from the mighty Transformer album.

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Crucial Track for 26 April 2025: I'm So Free

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:30:42 +0000

"I'm So Free" by Lou Reed

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Crucial Track for 25 April 2025

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:23:49 +0000

"Baby, I Love You" by Ramones

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First love, eh? 'Music was my first love,' as an old song has it, 'And it'll be my last.' But that's not what this is about, really, is it?

Let's go with The Ramones (they were going to turn up some time, in one or another form, of course), where they made it on to Top of the Pops. Maybe because Phil Spector was at the controls, though we'd have to hope not.

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Crucial Track for 25 April 2025: Baby, I Love You

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:23:49 +0000

"Baby, I Love You" by Ramones

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First love, eh? 'Music was my first love,' as an old song has it, 'And it'll be my last.' But that's not what this is about, really, is it?

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Crucial Track for 24 April 2025

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 07:55:09 +0000

"Leonard Cohen" by boygenius

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'What is your favorite song from last year?' I am asked by the daily prompt from Crucial Tracks.

'Favourite,' I say. The 'favorite' spelling reads like a made-up element from thirties SF, or some such.

But I'm avoiding the question. The thing is, what this tells me is, I don't listen to much new music these days. Or, when I do, it doesn't impinge, doesn't resonate with me, become something I go back to.

I spent a chunk of 2024 listening through a list from The Guardian, of the 50 best albums of 2023, in order to check out what was good and recent. I had already heard the PJ Harvey, the Gina Birch, and the Boygenius albums, all of which I liked.

None of the others made enough of an impact to count, sadly. That is, none of them got a second play. One, I think, I gave a decent chance, but couldn't even finish.

And anyway, they were all new works from the year before last, not last year.

So for the purposes of this prompt, I'm allowing 'new to me' to count. And while I love PJ Harvey, so you might expect one of hers to make the cut, I Inside the Old Year Dying is too much an album. It's its own unique thing, but I don't recall a specific standout track from it.

So I'm going with Boygenius and, in another acknowledgment of my lack of new-music-attention, their one that namechecks an old singer — one of my favourites.

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Crucial Track for 24 April 2025: Leonard Cohen

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 07:55:09 +0000

"Leonard Cohen" by boygenius

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'What is your favorite song from last year?' I am asked by the daily prompt from Crucial Tracks.

'Favourite,' I say. The 'favorite' spelling reads like a made-up element from thirties SF, or some such.

None of the others made enough of an impact to count, sadly. That is, none of them got a second play. One, I think, I gave a decent chance, but couldn't even finish.

And anyway, they were all new works from the year before last, not last year.

So I'm going with Boygenius and, in another acknowledgment of my lack of new-music-attention, their one that namechecks an old singer — one of my favourites.

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Crucial Track for 23 April 2025

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:00:06 +0000

"Paradise By the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley

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I did not sing along to anything today, as the daily prompt asks. But I did find myself singing this Meat Loaf ditty, at least in my head. Maybe aloud, who knows?

Interesting that it appears as by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley. Entirely appropriate, as it's a duet. But I don't think it was originally billed that way, and the modern approach would be to include 'Feat Ellen Foley' right in the title text. As I wrote about several years ago in [Little, Feat...(https://devilgate.org/2017/03/06/little-feat/)

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Crucial Track for 23 April 2025: Paradise by the Dashboard Light

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:00:06 +0000

"Paradise By the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley

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I did not sing along to anything today, as the daily prompt asks. But I did find myself singing this Meat Loaf ditty, at least in my head. Maybe aloud, who knows?

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One to One: John & Yoko, 2024 - ★★★★★

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 16:57:36 +0000

Oh my god, this film. This film is so, so good. Fantastic footage and sound from a gig that I've never even heard of before (though I think I've seen some of the footage). Great extracts from TV news broadcasts of the time, all sorts of great stuff.

Turns out there was an asylum/hospital/children's home kinda place where hundreds of kids with learning disabilities and other problems were kept in horrific conditions. Seeing the footage of it, I was reminded of the Romanian orphans that led JK Rowling to set up her Lumos charity.

John & Yoko learned about the place back in the day and set up the titular One to One benefit concert, raising money to help to provide better lives for those kids.

The strangest thing is that I've never heard about this concert before.

I will be watching this film again, you can be sure.

Crucial Track for 22 April 2025

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:18:54 +0000

"No More Heroes (1996 Remastered Version)" by The Stranglers

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Today's prompt is 'Share a song that changed your perspective on music.'

I'm gonna have to go back to 1977 for this one. That year may not surprise you, being as it was the core of the original punk days.

I was 13, as of August. 'No More Heroes' came out in September, Wikipedia tells me. I can't tell you when I first heard it, but I do know it was on a Sunday afternoon, after a week in which my friend Brendan had strongly urged me to get into punk.

It came on the radio, and it was the first punk song I heard.

The Stranglers were less punky than the Pistols, Clash, Damned, etc, of course, being older and to some extent, bandwagon jumpers. But who gave a fuck about that when they made a song as good as this?

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Crucial Track for 22 April 2025: No More Heroes

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:18:54 +0000

"No More Heroes (1996 Remastered Version)" by The Stranglers

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Today's prompt is 'Share a song that changed your perspective on music.'

I'm gonna have to go back to 1977 for this one. That year may not surprise you, being as it was the core of the original punk days.

It came on the radio, and it was the first punk song I heard.

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Operation Mincemeat, 2021 - ★★½

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 07:47:06 +0000

This has a slightly interesting connection to home for me. Just last week we were walking past St John of Hackney churchyard, a common route from the Narrow Way home, when we stopped to look at a plaque outside the Hackney Mortuary. It describes the top-secret military operation the film is named after. The dead body that was used to deceive the Nazis was stored at the mortuary for three months. You can see a picture of the plaque at the Wikipedia page for the mission.

So why not watch the film? It's an interesting story, it's got an impressive cast, and it's on Netflix.

Good thing about that last, because we'd have been mildly annoyed if we'd had to pay extra for it. Trouble is, it's not very good.

It's not terrible. Two-and-a-half stars from me means it's OK, but just barely. On another day I might have given it three. The problem might be with us: knowing the story in advance could remove all tension, except from the romance subplot. But no, I think that was OK. I think it's more that sometimes the various parts of a film — which is a complex thing to create, after all — don't come together well enough, for reasons that are hard to define.

Crucial Track for 20 April 2025

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 21:23:21 +0000

"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles

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My earliest musical memory might be this. I was well under five, maybe only three. My gran — my mum’s mum — was staying with us because she wasn’t well. I walked into her room with my big sister, singing.

Says gran, ‘Is he swearing?’ My sister had to explain that I wasn’t saying, ‘Oh bloody’ something.

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Crucial Track for 20 April, 2025: Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 21:23:21 +0000

"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles

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Says gran, ‘Is he swearing?’ My sister had to explain that I wasn’t saying, ‘Oh bloody’ something.

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Crucial Track for 19 April 2025

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 14:38:01 +0000

"London Calling" by The Clash

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It seems wildly unlikely that I — or indeed, anyone — could have a single ‘favourite song’ throughout high school. Not least since ’high school’ itself is not a commonly-used term here in the UK. Though my secondary school did actually have ‘High School’ in its name.

Secondary school lasts six or seven years, though (true, back then, some got out after four, but even so). Who’s going to keep the same fave for that long, especially during such formative years?

At the start, if I had a single fave, it would have certainly been by The Beatles. By the end it would have been The Clash or Stiff Little Fingers.

So let's go with 'London Calling', a Clash song that mentions The Beatles, albeit negatively: 'phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.'

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Crucial Track for 19 April, 2025: London Calling

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 14:38:01 +0000

"London Calling" by The Clash

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Secondary school lasts six or seven years, though (true, back then, some got out after four, but even so). Who’s going to keep the same fave for that long, especially during such formative years?

At the start, if I had a single fave, it would have certainly been by The Beatles. By the end it would have been The Clash or Stiff Little Fingers.

So let's go with 'London Calling', a Clash song that mentions The Beatles, albeit negatively: 'phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.'

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Crucial Track for 18 April 2025

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 10:32:08 +0000

"Another Girl Another Planet" by The Only Ones

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What is a song that instantly energizes you?

I feel I should answer that with something relating to Star Trek, but that’s the wrong kind of ‘energize’ (or ‘energise’, as I would spell it).

Although ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ does sound like it could be about Captain Kirk.

I’ve heard it described as Peter Perret’s love song to heroin, but also seen a more recent interview where he said it wasn’t about that.

Anyway, if you want to get me on the dancefloor, this one’s chugging intro is always a good bet.

‘Space travel’s in my blood,’ after all.

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Crucial Track for 18 April, 2025: Another Girl Another Planet

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 10:32:08 +0000

"Another Girl Another Planet" by The Only Ones

Listen on Apple Music

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What is a song that instantly energizes you?

I feel I should answer that with something relating to Star Trek, but that’s the wrong kind of ‘energize’ (or ‘energise’, as I would spell it).

Although ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ does sound like it could be about Captain Kirk.

I’ve heard it described as Peter Perret’s love song to heroin, but also seen a more recent interview where he said it wasn’t about that.

Anyway, if you want to get me on the dancefloor, this one’s chugging intro is always a good bet.

‘Space travel’s in my blood,’ after all.

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

Crucial Track for 17 April 2025

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:01:06 +0000

"If I Can't Change Your Mind" by Sugar

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The prompt was 'What song do you wish you had written?' So many, of course, especially since I used to play guitar very badly and sing in bands, and I have written a few songs.

But for some reason, the one that popped into my mind was 'If I Can't Change Your Mind' by Sugar. Bob Mould's work after Hüsker Dü was varied, but this track off Sugar's first album is just glorious.

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Crucial Track for 17 April, 2025: If I Can't Change Your Mind

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:01:06 +0000

"If I Can't Change Your Mind" by Sugar

Listen on Apple Music

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The prompt was 'What song do you wish you had written?' So many, of course, especially since I used to play guitar very badly and sing in bands, and I have written a few songs.

But for some reason, the one that popped into my mind was 'If I Can't Change Your Mind' by Sugar. Bob Mould's work after Hüsker Dü was varied, but this track off Sugar's first album is just glorious.

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

I'm Still Here, 2024 - ★★★★

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 07:20:10 +0000

Outstanding drama based on the true story of a Brazilian family's experiences under the dictatorship in the 70s and beyond. Eunice Paiva's husband, Rubens, is taken in by the military. She, too is detained for several days and questioned, though released. One of her four daughters is also taken, but released after a night.

But Rubens is never seen again, his body, like that of many of his countryfolk, never found.

Sad, yet life-affirming, as it's about the resilience of the family, and Eunice's strength as a mother. She went on to become a human-rights lawyer.

Recommended.

📗 Books 2025, 9: The Interpreter, by Brian Aldiss

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 18:37:26 +0000

I have loads of old SF books that I’ve picked up in various second-hand shops over the years, some of which I haven’t read. This year I seem to be working through a few.

I couldn’t honestly tell you whether I’ve ever actually read anything by Aldiss before. I mean, I feel like I must have, if only out of the Balloch library, many, many years ago. But offhand, I couldn’t name any.

And if this were a prime example, I don’t think I’d bother with more, sadly. It’s not a bad idea. The titular interpreter is a human on a far-future Earth that is occupied by a tripedal alien race. Their empire has developed by trade and trickery as much as by military conquest, and it seems that’s how Earth was taken.

It’s a far-flung outpost, one of four million systems in the empire, so there’s bound to be corruption. An emissary is sent from the imperial centre to investigate reports of the Earth administrator abusing its people, which he/she/it (they’re a sexually trimorphic species) is. Our far-from-heroic interpreter might just have a chance to get the truth out.

As I say, not a bad idea, just not that well told. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the writing, except for the dialogue being stilted. Oddly, it’s fine between the interpreter and the aliens — maybe the fact that we know he’s translating lessens the effect. But between the humans, it’s just clunky.

And the plot is just about believable. Just. Luckily it’s only 126 pages; and I did sit up to finish it last night, so I guess it’s got something.

📗 Books 2025, 8: The History of Rock ‘n‘ Roll in Ten Songs, by Greil Marcus

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 18:13:31 +0000

I got this as a Christmas present some several years ago, and read bits of it. It’s episodic, though — a separate essay on each of the songs, plus an ‘Instrumental Break’ — so I dipped in and out of it. I was encouraged to pick it up again recently because of the name-similarity with a great podcast I’m listening to and keep meaning to write about here: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.

Marcus’s title is overconfident to the point of arrogance by calling the book the history. As if there was and could be only one. To say nothing of the idea that it could be encapsulated in ten songs. Hickey’s is more aware, and he makes the point repeatedly that his is only a history.

But Marcus is a terrific writer, and, like Hickey’s, the title is not literal: when discussing any one song he’ll touch on several others, plus various events in the lives of the artists and the goings-on in the world.

I can’t honestly say that I learned much from this, or retained much of what I may have learned, but it’s a joy to read. The pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, 2024 - ★★★★½

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 07:01:29 +0000

Absolutely loved this jazz-fueled documentary about the events running up to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first and short-lived prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1972.

It's a bleak, dark story, but so well told, and with such a great soundtrack, that you rarely feel anything other than pulled along by the narrative.

Which itself is kind of a piece of jazz in the way it's structured. The style has some similarities to Adam Curtis's work in its use of archival footage and the way it lets text, sound, and images overlap and interact. Though Curtis uses a voiceover narrative (or at least did in the one I've seen, while Johan Grimonprez here, does not, simply letting everything speak for itself.

The Ipcress File, 1965 - ★★★★

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:17:04 +0000

Great, stylish sixties spy story, with Michael Caine. He's a man who cooks! and makes coffee in — get this — a cafetière (french press to our American friends). Très Moderne!

More to the point, British scientists have been giving up their roles and/or disappearing mysteriously. The word 'defecting' is never used, The USSR is not mentioned explicitly. But this 'brain drain' is harming Britain's defensive capabilities. Harry Palmer joins a team that is investigating the disappearance of the latest scientist.

The plot isn't all that good, to be honest, it's a bit bumpy in places, not as coherent as I'd like. But the overall style of the thing, the way it plays to fears of mind control and brainwashing, and the general verve with which it's done, get it a high mark from me.

The Philadelphia Story, 1940 - ★★★★

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:53:41 +0000

Really fun romcom from 1940. It cleverly keeps you guessing about who's going to get together with whom till very nearly the end.

📗 Books 2025, 7: The Productions of Time, by John Brunner

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 19:16:22 +0000

I remember seeing Brunner at a convention 30 years ago, or more, talking about ‘the death of the midlist’: how writers who sold their work steadily to publishers, and to readers, used to be able to make a living from doing so, but no longer could. I wonder what he’d make of the publishing scene today.

Anyway, this slim book from 1966 hides its science-fictional nature till almost the very end. Unless you’ve read the blurb. Or indeed, this post, or the wikipedia entry about it. A theatre actor, a recovering alcoholic not long out of a sanatorium, gets the chance to work with a hip writer and director.

They’re going to get a troupe together, coop them up in a house in the country, and work collaboratively to construct a play.

Or at least, that’s what they want the cast members to think.

It’s not bad, if a little inconsequential.

📗 Books 2025, 6: The Pale Horse, by Agatha Christie

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 20:08:13 +0000

An Agatha Christie book from 1961, and set round about then, too. We start in Chelsea espresso bar, where the main narrator, Mark Easterbrook, observes a fight between two beatnik/proto-hippie rich girls, and the first clue is sneaked in.

Easterbrook is no famous detective, though, either professional or amateur. He’s a historian who is trying to finish writing a book. But things happen, and soon the action moves to the English countryside where its author is most comfortable.¹

He meets Ginger Corrigan, who the blurb describes as ‘his sidekick’, which suggests to me an ongoing series and many adventures. And maybe that’s what Christie had planned, who knows. But this is standalone.

Anyway, the titular Pale Horse is a former pub where three women live, and perhaps cast spells. Certainly they give seances and such. But are they using magic to murder people remotely? Well that’s what our heroes have to find out, of course.

I really enjoyed it.

Though to be fair, Poirot was set in London, and moved all over the world. But we’re watching the Miss Marple series at the moment, and she doesn’t travel far. ↩︎

The Severed Floor is not the Black Lodge

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 18:01:08 +0000

I’m finding season 2 of Severance quite annoying. The pacing is glacial. Every episode, I wait for something to happen, and they pile up more mysteries. Very slowly.

Take episode 7, for example, where they filled in Mark & Gemma’s backstory. All very nice, but completely unnecessary. We already knew they’d been a loving couple. We knew she was dead, and that she’s not actually dead. They didn’t need to spell out every little detail. What’s going on with her now is intriguing, but I no longer even care much about what is going on, just why? And when are they going to burn that fucking Lumon cult to the ground?

There’s this idea with modern ‘prestige TV’, that telling a story (or adapting a book) as an eight- or ten-episode series is better than trying to squash the same story into a two-hour film. And there’s a lot to be said for that. Give the story room to breathe.

Severance spends too much time listening to its own breathing.

I wouldn’t mind all this so much if I knew how much more of it there was to go, and that there was a fully-planned story, and that it would actually get made. I’ve not forgotten the deep disappointment of Netflix’s completely random cancelling of The OA. And there we know Brit Marling had the whole thing planned out across five seasons.

Also the reason for my title: it’s trying too hard to be Twin Peaks, and failing. You’re not David Lynch. No one is any more. Stop it, and just tell the story. A bit quicker.

Maybe You Can Post Your Way Through Fascism

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:55:58 +0000

There was a post about how ‘You can’t post your way out of fascism’ that did the rounds a few weeks ago. I have a feeling it might have done some harm.

I didn’t read it in detail. Saw the headline, skimmed it, got the gist. Resistance to Trump/Muskism and the other right-wing authoritarian risings around the world: it needs more than tweets, toots, blog posts.

Fair enough.

But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do, it’s what we are. We need to write. And I know I’ve felt some discouragement a few times lately, when I might have written about Trump, or Musk’s nazi salute, or the general horror of things. I’ve thought, ‘Yeah, but “You can’t post your way…"’

I wouldn’t go so far as to say my memory, my knowledge of the existence of that post has stopped me posting. Other things, or a combination of things, have done that. But it’s in there, like a spectre at the writing table, saying, ‘No, this isn’t enough, so you shouldn’t do it.’

That is almost certainly not what the writer intended. But I think it’s unhelpful at best, and may be harmful to some people at worst.

Posting won’t be enough to get us out of fascism, but it might help some people to get through it.

So please, everyone, don’t be discouraged; and don’t stop posting.

📗 Books 2025, 5: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 13:43:01 +0000

As The Dispossessed starts with a wall, Annihilation starts with a tower. And as LeGuin’s wall round a spaceport both closes the planet off from the rest of the universe, and encloses the universe, depending on how you look at it; so VanderMeer’s tower has its topological oddity. It starts at ground level and goes down, into the ground underneath it, rather than rising into the air.

Or so the Biologist sees it, But this is Area X, and things are rarely as they seem.

The Biologist is the first person narrator. Accompanied by three other women — the Psychologist, the Anthropologist, and the Surveyor — they are the latest in a series of groups sent in to investigate the mysterious zone.

Almost everything is unexplained in this book. It is incredibly compelling, gripping, even, but everything remains unexplained, the ending is open. Yet while there are three more books in the series, I feel it’s such a perfect little nugget, beautifully crafted, that to read on would almost spoil it.

I suspect that’s not true, though. We are in safe hands with VanderMeer, so I expect the continuation will be sound. I remember my friend Simon having a similar response when he read Hyperion. Its perfectly-crafted open ending seemed to him like it didn’t need a sequel. But of course The Fall of Hyperion was magnificent, and so were the two Endymion followups.

Anyway, this is great, but you probably already knew that, what with winning awards and being ten years old.

📗Books 2025, 4: Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:46:41 +0000

We started watching Miss Austen, the BBC serial about Jane’s sister Cassandra trying to get hold of Jane’s letters a few years after her death. That made me want to read some more Austen, the only I’ve read before being Pride and Prejudice.

So I tried Northanger Abbey. Which is mainly a spoof of the gothic novels that Austen herself would have been reading at the time, and also, of course, a romance.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it ended very surprisingly. It has the omniscient narrator you might expect for a book of its time, but it’s mostly written in close third-person. We are privy to Catherine’s thoughts and fears. But the thing is, when we get to the climactic scene, when everything is going to be resolved and our heroine end up happy (it’s not much of a spoiler), Austen (or the narrator) turns away.

Instead of being with Catherine as the hero rides to her emotional rescue, we are told about it. We’re kept at a distance, no longer aware of what’s going on in her head. It’s an absolute masterclass in the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ in writerly terms; but the wrong way round for a really satisfying experience.

Perhaps it was a continuation of the style of those gothic romances she was parodying, but read today, it’s a strange choice.

Sweet Smell of Success, 1957 - ★★

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:09:29 +0000

This film is at number 95 on this Time Out list of the hundred best films of all time that we've been dipping into.

Why?

It's really quite a bad film. Characters of no merit, dialogue that sometimes reaches snappy but often sits in the leaden cliché realm, and just general horribleness.

It's good for the scenes of New York, the crowd scenes in bars and restaurants, and yes, it has its moments. But overall, no, didn't do it for me.

It's not like amoral characters make the film amoral, but you need to have someone to root for. That should be the gossip columnists's sister and jazz guitarist who were a couple. Sadly they're just too feeble (and too sidelined) as characters.

📗 Books 2025, 3: The Great When, by Alan Moore

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:27:02 +0000

I think I read somewhere that this ends on a huge cliffhanger. It doesn’t. Or I wouldn’t describe it in those terms.

It has an epilogue, entitled ‘The Old Man at the End’, set 50 years or so after the main story. Someone we take to be the protagonist fears for his life; and the close-third-person narration hints at or mentions some events that intrigue. But we’re not left hanging.

The book is described as ‘a Long London novel’. though, so we certainly expect additions to the series in time.

The term ‘Long London’ is not used in the book, I think, though our normal, everyday London is called ‘Short London’ at one point. ‘The Great When’ is used, and is one of the terms for another London that exists parallel to ours in some sense. Certain people, with certain kinds of imagination (or damage), can find and use some few portals between the two realms.

You know the sort of thing. Parallel worlds, unseen realities, aren’t exactly new. But Moore is such a good writer, this is a high, fine example of the form, even if there have been others like it before. The richness of his description and believability of his characters make this a five-star affair, if I gave stars to books.

And books are key here. It all kicks of in 1949, when Dennis Knuckleyard, 18 years old, orphaned in the war, and working in a second-hand book shop, comes into the possession of a book that doesn’t exist.

It is imaginary, being named in an Arthur Machen tale. Which means he has to get it back to the other London before very bad things start happening.

Highly recommended, and I eagerly anticipate the next volume, despite not being cliffhung by this one.

Blogging and reading in 2024

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:08:01 +0000

A much-delayed summary of last year.

I read 26 books in 2024. One less than in 2023, but one every two weeks on average.

But only 98 posts, which is down on the year before. Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month	Posts
Jan	13
Feb	10
Mar	6
Apr	6
May	8
Jun	5
Jul	6
Aug	7
Sep	10
Oct	12
Nov	9
Dec	6

Light blogging year, then, but I’ve written quite a lot of fiction, so there’s that. To say nothing of things like the currently-1500-word essay on my thoughts and feelings about AI, wherein I try to understand those things. That might appear here one day. I hope so.

📗 Books 2025, 2: Vivaldi and the Number 3, by Ron Butlin

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 23:19:10 +0000

I read about this some four years ago on Jack Deighton’s blog. It sounded interesting enough that I tried to order it via Pages of Hackney. But they told me it was out of print.

I couldn’t even find it on Amazon; no Kindle version. So I left it.

Until just recently, when I had cause to by some second-hand books from World of Books. Something made me think of this one. Quick search, and there it was.

And it’s even weirder and more fun than I imagined from reading Jack’s review. It’s a series of short stories, with some interconnections, about various classical composers (plus some philosophers). But it’s all deeply surreal. You’ll find Beethoven living in present-day Edinburgh, for example.

What’s it all for? I don’t really know. But they’re great little vignettes, easily digestible, and lots of fun.

Tales From Right Now

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 21:41:08 +0000

I haven’t really picked up on blogging properly since this year started. I didn’t, for example, write a summary post about last year’s entries, as I generally do. I’m also behind on books updates. The other day’s post was about a book I finished very early in January.

In fact, I’ve been kind of off the whole thing since November or so. Maybe earlier, but the USA’s apocalyptically stupid choice of head of state was the anti-icing on the un-cake of my feelings about the world in general.

I feel like I might be coming out of that downturn now. And strangely, I think I’ve got my new blog theme to thank for it. In part, anyway.

It seems daft, but just freshening the place up can make a difference, you know? So thanks once again to @Mtt, or Matt Langford, for the lovely Bayou Theme.

And we’ll see if things pick up a bit, here on the Bitface.

📗 Books 2025, 1: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:01:31 +0000

I got this by Agatha Christie for Christmas and started straight after Conclave, so technically last year. But I didn’t finish it till the new year, so 2025 it is.

Another great one from Christie, with a killer twist. Poirot has retired and is living in the country. But that kind of character never really gets to retire, do they?

A Complete Unknown, 2024 - ★★★★★

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 09:50:05 +0000

This is a glorious film. A dramatised version of Bob Dylan's early years on the New York folk scene and ascent into fame.

He visits Woody Guthrie in hospital, where Pete Seeger just happens to be visiting too. Seeger takes Dylan under his wing, encouraging him to focus on folk music.

Clearly some liberties have been taken with the details of events, but it's all in service of the story.

Timothée Chalamet gives an incredible performance as Dylan, and Monica Barbaro is luminous as Joan Baez. Their voices work beautifully together when they harmonise, and it's notable that both actors did all their singling vocals.

We see moments of the next few years, culminating in Dylan's famous appearance with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival.

For a film set in the sixties, it's surprisingly pure. Not just in the sense of Seeger and the other folk purists on the Newport organising committee. There's hardly any suggestion of sex, and no drugs at all.

No drugs. In the sixties. Unless you count cigarettes (of which there are a lot) and alcohol (most of which Johnny Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook, has already consumed). There are scenes where Dylan, at least, is clearly meant to be stoned, but no consumption.

I think that says something about our times, rather than the time of the movie, but I'm not sure what.

Will you enjoy this if you're not already a fan, and/or know some of the story? Probably not as much as I did, but see it for the beautifully-realised exteriors and interiors of old New York, for the performances, and of course, for the music.

I want to go to a singalong showing now.

Unpleasant Men

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:49:16 +0000

This morning I read the whole of the Vulture article about Neil Gaiman. That link’s to an archived copy, because someone said on Facebook that the original has had the references to Scientology removed because of legal threats. And also it’s paywalled.

It’s so depressing that a man who seemed so decent, so generally a positive force in the world, can turn out to have been an abuser all these year. Allegedly, I suppose I must say.

You know, Paul Cornell included Gaiman as a character in one of his Shadow Police stories, The Severed Streets. If I remember the ‘Neil Gaiman’ character was a villain. We took it as fun at the time; but I wonder if Cornell had an inkling that he wasn’t the nice guy he seemed.

In other shitty-men news, Matt Mullenweg has been blowing up most of the good feeling people have about WordPress over the last few months. I’m glad I moved my site off it a few years ago. But now he’s attacked a woman who used to work on WordPress but hasn’t for years. For no very obvious reason, it seems.

Just being shitty.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 1967 - ★★★½

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:55:46 +0000

Surprisingly funny in places, a film about race in America in the sixties. Still relevant today, in some circles at least, I'd imagine.

Highly enjoyable, even if the point is extremely heavy-handed at times.

📚 Books 2024, 26: Conclave by Robert Harris

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:47:15 +0000

After my recent viewing of the film based on this, my daughter got me the book for Christmas.

It’s surprising how compelling a book can be when you know exactly what’s going to happen, and it’s about something that you wouldn’t normally give a toss about. Though on the latter, I suppose the boy can leave the church, but it always leaves its mark, or something.

Anyway, it turns out this Harris guy can really write. Who’d’ve thought?

I note with interest that the ‘why this story, why now’ question that I mentioned when writing about he film, never even crossed my mind while reading this. I approach a book with a different set of expectations from how I do a film, maybe.

📚 Books 2024, 25: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:34:22 +0000

Finished reading several weeks ago, in fact. I’m way behind with the change of year.

Anyway, this is an odd little book. I stress the ‘little’ because it’s very short. We’re in Peru. An ancient rope bridge, of Inca origin, collapses one day, killing the five people who were crossing it. A priest, Brother Juniper, witnesses the event and decides to use it to prove God has a plan for humans.

The narrator, however, tells us that Juniper’s eventual vast book on the subject was derided, destroyed, and in any case incomplete. The narrator knows things about the people that Juniper never learned. How the narrator knows these things is never stated — we might assume it’s because the narrator is also the author, though that’s rarely a safe assumption.

That’s the start. The rest of the book consists of the stories of the victims and how they came to be there on that day.

It’s good. Won the Pulitzer.

📚 Books 2024, 24: A Jura for Julia by Ken MacLeod

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 16:44:08 +0000

Short stories by Ken 📚. I mentioned this in my Nineteen Eighty-Four post, since the first and last stories are inspired by Orwell’s novel. The last being the title story.

Both they, and the others, are very good. Ken’s usual concerns are here, of course: the future, politics, Scotland, and more.

Also the cover and internal illustrations are by Fangorn. Highly recommended.

Conclave, 2024 - ★★★½

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 15:06:34 +0000

When I was a kid, brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, my Mum taught me that, when a pope dies, all the cardinals get together to choose a new one. God guides them so they vote for who He has chosen, and it has to be unanimous.

Whether or not that unanimity requirement was ever really true, I can't say. But that's certainly not how it happens in this film. I imagine this tale is closer to the reality, humans being political beings with preferences and schemes. And God not existing, of course. Or, if 'He' does, certainly not taking that kind of hand in human events.

I enjoyed this story of the events after an unnamed, imaginary pope's death. It's well acted and beautifully shot. It does have one or two moments that tend to the over-theatrical, let's say.

But I have to wonder why the filmmakers chose to tell it, and why now. It's an adaptation of Robert Harris's novel from 2016, and could ask the same question of him: why that story, whey then?

And I guess you tell the story you want to tell, and why not? If other people enjoy it, or get something from it, that's all that matters, really.

📚 Books 2024, 23: Death's End by Cixin Liu, Translated by Ken Liu

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:09:05 +0000

I laugh gently at my past self, musing that this volume, based on its title, might have a less bleak universe-view.

Reader, it does not.

In fact, that’s the thing I liked least about this whole trilogy, the dark view of the universe, of sentience. The idea that every species that develops intelligence and advances to the point of thinking about space travel and the idea of possibly communicating with other intelligent species; that they would all have a xenocidal¹ instinct. Have it, and routinely, casually act on it, by wiping out the star systems of other species they detect.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be so. As one explanation for the Fermi paradox it’s exactly that: one explanation. But it’s just too fuckin bleak for my tastes.

Otherwise, this story, and the trilogy as a whole, is jam-packed with ideas, stuff about relativity, higher and lower dimensions, all sorts of good hard-SF stuff. The characters are kind of blank, undeveloped: I don’t think they’ll be sticking in my memory. But I enjoyed it overall.

Apart from when I was annoyed/disturbed/upset by the dark forest idea.

Your central idea: I do not like it.

The word is Orson Scott Card’s invention, but/and it’s a good one. ↩︎

It Happened One Night, 1934 - ★★★★

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 23:21:25 +0000

Great screwball comedy. Lots of fun. Don't know why the poster is in colour when it's a black & white film.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, 1988 - ★★½

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 23:20:23 +0000

Daft film about con men. I think I saw it back when it came out, but didn't really remember it.

I'm a week or so behind with posting this.

Trumpeting

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:53:18 +0000

I was shocked, but not exactly surprised, by the US election result. Or no: I was surprised. I think I had somehow internalised that idea that Kamala Harris would win. It seemed unthinkable that Americans would elect Trump again.

But then, it seemed unthinkable that they would elect him the first time.¹

We shouldn’t be too surprised though. Among the presidents in my lifetime, we’ve had Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and W Bush. All of them considered to be dangerous warmongering borderline fascists at the time. And/or comical and incompetent choices, to consider Reagan and W Bush, specifically.

Yet America elected all of them (notwithstanding that the popular vote nearly always favoured their Democratic opponent).

Trump, of course, rolls the ills of all of them up into one great ugly package, and adds narcissism on top. And the times could hardly be worse for women in America in particular, with reproductive healthcare under attack with the overturning of Roe v Wade.

What can you do, though? Life goes on. We’ll get through it, except for those of us who don’t.

For some reason I couldn’t find that post when I wrote this, so I said, ‘I’d link to my post from back then, but apparently I didn’t make one. Only a couple before the election and this general one in early 2017. Sometimes it’s all too much to write about.’ But I did write about it, and used the same title as on this post! Oh dear. ↩︎

📚 Books 2024, 22: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, Translated by Joel Martinsen

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 11:20:33 +0000

This is somehow much less obscure and strange than the first one. I don’t know how much that is to do with it having a different translator, but it’s possible. The third one is back to Ken Liu, who translated the first one, so maybe we’ll see.

The other odd thing is that when I added this to Micro.blog’s Bookshelves feature, it came up with a subtitle I’ve never heard of before: ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2’. On the book’s title page, and in any other discussion I’ve heard of, it’s always referred to as ‘The Three-Body Trilogy’.

Getting to the story itself: perhaps the least believable thing about the whole thing is the idea humans could be convinced to believe that an alien invasion force was on its way to Earth and would arrive in 450 years. To believe and act toward resisting the force or ameliorating the situation by escaping or anything else.

I mean, in the real world we can’t even get people to believe in, get governments and businesses to act on, the climate emergency, and its effects are visible day by day.

The climate is largely ignored in this book, as well, though in the latter part, set two hundred years after the start, we see some extreme desertification in China.

It’s pretty bleak in places, in its philosophy, this one; especially as regards the Fermi paradox, or a solution thereto. But it leaves us at a point where I’m thinking, ‘Where now? That feels like a decent ending.’

But Death’s End (great title, and potentially a much less bleak philosophy, if it matches the title) is sitting waiting, all 700+ pages of it. Why does each volume of a trilogy tend to be longer than the one before?¹ So we’ll see where that takes us.

I enjoyed this. There’s a lot of telling, and the characters maybe aren’t very clearly differentiated, but it’s full of ideas.

Not the ur-trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: a large part of The Return of the King was appendices, making it the shortest of the three. ↩︎

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000 - ★★★★★

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:23:07 +0000

An early showing at the BFI IMAX at 11 am on a Sunday! But the chance to see this incredible film on a giant screen was too good to miss.

I first saw it a year or two after it came out, probably on DVD. So twenty or more years ago; and pretty much all I remembered was the spectacle: the fighters running up walls and flying over rooftops and so on.

I had exactly zero memory of the story. Which is strange, because it's a pretty good one. That 'Sword of Destiny' is actually cursed, in my opinion, but you know: there's always going to be some youngster coming after the greatest gunman; someone trying get the Elder Wand from its current owner. That kind of thing.

I'm giving this the coveted five stars because I don't really see how it could be better than it is. That puts into the group of 'One of Martin's favourite films,' and that's fine, because I think it belongs there.

Panel discussion afterwards with a group of women who work in action films in the UK in various ways, including a couple who are stunt performers. That was good too, though people need to be more conscious of their microphone technique in a big space like that.

Persepolis, 2007 - ★★★★

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:05:16 +0000

Great animated film about a girl growing up in Iran through the revolution and overthrow of the Shah, the war with Iraq, and the start of the Islamic regime. As such it's pretty horrific in places.

She escapes in part by being sent to live in Vienna with a friend of her mother, who kicks her out after a few days. Various places to live and experiences ensue before she goes back to Iran as a young woman.

And gets more shit from the Islamic regime before leaving for good to live in Paris.

Autobiographical, based on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel, and adapted and co-directed by her, too.

Memories, Facebook, and The Clash

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 22:27:05 +0000

It seems Facebook still has the odd use, apart from keeping in touch with family and friends who still use it. I popped in late last night, and it told me I had memories on this day. It seems the 29th of October has been a day on which I’ve often posted in the past, because there were several. But the one that really caught my eye was this one:

15 years ago, it tells me, in 2009, I wrote:

Jason Ringenberg doing The Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets Gl Joe’: a thing of rare beauty. Spotify URI: http://is.gd/4Hcr7.

Now that’s quite telling, in several ways. First of all, remember the is.gd URL shortener? Remember URL shorteners that aren’t t.co?

Also, I haven’t used Spotify in a long time, being a happy Apple Music subscriber. But that doesn’t matter. What’s really weird is that I have absolutely no memory of Jason (out of Jason & the Scorchers, as I’m sure you know) doing any Clash song, much less a surprising choice of Sandinista album track.¹ And back then I was listening to Jason quite a lot.

Obviously I quickly searched for it on Apple Music. To find that it’s part of an album. Not one by Jason, though. The Sandinista! Project² is a compilation album of covers of the entirety of Sandinista by different artists.

Why was I not told such a thing existed?

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I was told of it, one way or another. Some passing mention, a mental note, quickly forgotten… maybe it was mentioned in Jason’s newsletter or some such.

I mean, it’s not a totally off the wall idea. It’s subtitled ‘A Tribute to The Clash’, and I’ve had or listened to things like it before. I had something called London Booted once, which was sort of techno-ish covers of some or all of the tracks from London Calling. And I remember listening to a reggae version of that album, or tracks from it, at least.

But this is every track on what is famously a triple album. Yes, including ‘Career Opportunities’ (though not, to be fair, ‘Blowing in the Guns of Brixton’). And the great thing about it is, almost no track is a carbon copy of the original. We get jazz instrumentals, ska versions, rocked-up versions of ones The Clash took slowly, and everything in between. Most of the performers are little known, or unknown, to me at least. But we get Katrina of Katrina and the Waves, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Wreckless Eric, The Coal Porters, and of course the aforementioned former Scorcher.

It is really, really good. Highly recommended if you’re a fan, and even if you’re not, I imagine you’ll find something to enjoy. Go on, find it on your favourite service here.

Incidentally, I love that the label it’s on is called 00:02:59 Records. ‘The band went in/And knocked them dead/In two minutes fifty-nine,’ as ‘Hitsville UK’ says.³

Not that Jason being a fan would be in the least surprising. ↩︎
I don’t remember the the exclamation mark being part of the title. But the Wikipedia article renders it that way, and indeed, there is an exclamation mark right there on the cover. Still, I don’t think we wrote it that way back in the day. ↩︎
Katrina’s version runs to 3:44, but then the original is 4:22 or so. ↩︎

📚 Books 2024, 21: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu , Translated by Ken Liu

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:47:29 +0000

Spoilers below.

This is a really strange book. I know it’s probably cultural differences in storytelling style, and what have you. But there is something deeply odd about the way this is told. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is (and at least part of it will be to do with the translation).

At a plot and character level, one thing that surprised me is that when someone starts seeing unexpected visual effects — specifically, a countdown timer superimposed on the world around them — they don’t ever seem to think that the explanation is they’re actually in a simulation. That would seem like the logical first attempt at an explanation, given the recent history of SF and indeed discussions outside of it.

We never learn what was meant to happen at the end of the countdown. And (not connected to that) the character we’re first sympathetic to betrays all of humanity!

I liked the early parts about the Cultural Revolution in China. They linked surprisingly well into my recent Nineteen Eighty-Four deep dive. Which is amusing because not long ago I read something about someone encouraging someone else to read this, where they said you just had to get past that part to really start enjoying it.

I did enjoy it, mind. I went right out and bought the sequels and have started The Dark Forest. I just find it weird. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

This is actually a reread, but it’s nearly a decade since, and I only remembered two scenes.

Spectre, 2015 - ★★

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 07:56:49 +0000

It’s a Bond film. What can I tell you? It’s fine. There’s no real tension, because you know he’s going to survive.

1984: A Year With Gravity

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 18:10:13 +0000

Ministry of Plenty

It’s 2024. It’s 40 years since 1984. So I guess that’s why there have been a lot of things turning up that are related in one way or another to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four¹. It’s considerably more than forty years since the novel was published: more like 75 years. Which is a memorable enough number in itself.

At Worldcon in Glasgow in August, the last panel I went to was about the book. People discussing when they had first read it, how it had affected them, the effects it had on literature and culture more broadly, and so on.

Then a few weeks later the podcast of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time dropped into my feed, with an episode about it. It was described as a ‘summer repeat’. I assume the programme is off the air but they like to keep the feed fed. It was originally broadcast in 2022, so nothing to do with any anniversaries in this year, but no matter.

All of this served to remind me of two things: one, that it was high time I read it again. And two, since read it in my teenage years and never since, I had shamefully never quite read all of it. Because there’s that bit in the middle where Winston is reading ‘The Book’, as it’s called. And when you’re fourteen or fifteen that can seem terribly dull and easily skippable.

Also at the convention² I picked up a copy of Ken MacLeod’s new collection, A Jura for Julia. You might guess from the title that there’s some sort of connection, what with Julia being the only female character in the original book, and Jura being where Orwell spent the last months of his life writing it.

And indeed, the collection is bookended by two connected stories comprising a sequel to Orwell’s novel.

So I was going to revisit the original and then read Ken’s stories. But I realised I didn’t actually have a copy. I think I read it from the library all those years ago. We got our son a copy at some point, but that’s either with him or in a box in the basement. So I decided just to buy a new one.

While I was in Foyles I noticed another connected work: Julia by Sandra Newman. I remembered reading about this when it came out and thinking I’d like to read it. It’s a retelling of the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Julia’s point of view. It came out last year, so I’m sure author and publisher had anniversaries in mind, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Not Forever

So what about these books, then?

There are two things Ingsoc got right, I mention in passing: going over properly to the metric system — which leads to the oddity of a prole barman who has never even heard of a pint — and going to full use of the twenty-four-hour clock, giving us that famously startling opening line about the clocks striking thirteen.

Not much else, though. It’s a bit odd thinking about it now that the ideology is called ‘English Socialism’ when the geopolitical bloc Airstrip One is part of, Oceania, is clearly dominated by America. The renaming of the UK makes that clear. And indeed, the switch to decimal measurements and twenty-four-hour time are even stranger, given how America in our world is the biggest holdout against those.

I suppose the ‘English’ in ‘Ingsoc’ could mean the language. But a socialism dominated by America? Something that calls itself socialism, at least: it’s no more socialism than Germany’s ‘National Socialism’ was.

I’ve said before that I dislike dystopian fiction as genre or background to stories. I wonder if that dislike was caused in part by early inoculation with this work. But what I found really weird about reading it after all these years is how weirdly cosy it all felt. Maybe it’s just because I knew what happens; maybe because there are these sequels by other hands to consider; or it could be somehow inherent in the writing. But I had no real sense of bleakness, nor even of menace. Strange, really.

It is, of course, a tragedy, among other things. Winston and Julia know that they’ll be caught by the Thought Police and taken to the Ministry of Love eventually; but they believe that, whatever they have to go through, there will be a core of them, deep in their hearts, that will survive, uncorrupted, undefeated. I was reminded of Evey, in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. About how you’ll survive — maybe win — as long as they can never reach that last half inch of you (I write from probably inaccurate memory).

That turns out not to be true for Winston and Julia, as they each betray the other. O’Brien’s assertion that ‘We will empty you out and fill you up with us’ proves true; and the novel closes with Winston loving Big Brother. There is no hope. A boot stamping on a human face.

Except, then we get the appendix. It tells the story of Newspeak, and does so wholly in the past tense, describing plans the party had for the minimal, stripped-down language. How it was expected to limit the capability for thoughtcrime — for thought itself — in the populace forced to use it. But it is presented as if it were an academic work, part of a history of the Big Brother times in what was then called Airstrip One, and is now called Britain again.

Hope in an appendix. I like it.

Keeping it Short

So we come to the first sequel I want to speak of, which is composed of Ken MacLeod’s two short stories. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’ picks up on Winston’s story. He’s taken from the Chestnut Tree café thinking he’s finally going to be killed. But in fact it’s the revolution. Big Brother and the party are overthrown. Winston is to be Minister of Truth in the new government.

And then in ‘A Jura for Julia’ it’s a decade or two later. Julia is a researcher in ‘computational literature’, mechanical writing. She used to be a mechanic who worked on the machines that created cheap novels for the proles. Now she’s an academic studying the technology behind the machines. She travels to Jura because she has heard there is an important link there to the history of the machines. What she finds ties her story and Winston’s together with Orwell’s in a fascinating way.

A Woman’s Perspective

I hadn’t heard of Sandra Newman before Julia, but she’s written several books, and been nominated for various awards. This one is authorised by Orwell’s estate and tells the familiar story from Julia’s perspective, expanding it both in worldbuilding, character, and time.

It’s a much richer story than Orwell’s, in that Julia’s character is dramatically expanded from the original, and we learn a great deal about the society, or the various societies that exist in Airstrip One. It’s all well done, very convincing, and completely in keeping with the original. There’s nothing added that couldn’t have been imagined in Orwell’s time.

Julia the character is not much more than a cipher in the original, and here she has a rich inner life, and is wonderfully and believably changeable.

One chapter opens with the line, ‘She was in Love.’ Which jars you for a second, because the previous chapter ended with her and Winston’s arrest. Till you remember that she refers to the ministries just by their key words: ‘Truth’ for the Ministry of Truth, and so on.

It takes us to a an ending not so very different from MacLeod’s but perhaps a more ambiguous one.

And that’s enough Nineteen Eighty-Four for a while, and enough 1984, too, though it strikes me that the novel I’m writing at the moment is set then. It’s a year that still has a massive gravitational pull on the imagination.

Note that the title is always written in words and properly hyphenated. ↩︎
Strictly I ordered it afterwards, as it was sold out at the con by the time I tried to get it. ↩︎

Adam's Rib, 1949 - ★★½

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 14:57:21 +0000

Moderately amusing Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film about two lawyers. He's an assistant DA, she's a defence attorney. How could they not end up on two sides of the same case? Could it be about anything other than a woman trying to shoot her philandering husband?

It's pretty good on discussing the law and how it should be applied, though not exactly deep. Enjoyable enough, though.

Evil Under the Sun, 1982 - ★★½

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 07:24:10 +0000

After our recent slow binge of the TV Poirot series, which I don't think I've written about here, a small look at one of the other actors who played the great Belgian detective. To wit, Peter Ustinov.

At first I didn't think I was going to enjoy this. Ustinov isn't David Suchet, and all the other actors seemed to be hamming it up to almost comical levels. But it settled down and/or I adjusted to it. I enjoyed it enough on the whole.

Not a great detective movie, but a pleasant enough one.

California Suite, 1978 - ★★★

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 18:40:07 +0000

This quadripartite tale of four groups (three couples and one pair of couples) at a Los Angeles hotel on the night of the Oscars is, inevitably, a tale of parts.

We decided to watch in honour of Maggie Smith, who died the other day, and who won an Oscar for her role as an actress nominated for an Oscar. That feels like a sort of irony, but is nothing to do with the film itself.

To my mind we have two good stories — the Maggie Smith/ Michael Caine and the Jane Fonda/Alan Alda ones — and two others that vary from farce to racist stereotyping, without adding much to the overall experience.

Which is a shame, because the two good parts are pretty good.

What's Up, Doc?, 1972 - ★★★★

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 16:13:06 +0000

Fancied watching a screwball comedy. I remember seeing this with my parents when I was a kid. They loved it, and so did I.

Turns out it stands up pretty well. Four people arrive in San Francisco and check into the same hotel. They have identical suitcases. What could possibly go wrong?

Contains what was probably the first car chase I ever saw, and remained the funniest until, I'd guess, I first say The Blues Brothers.

The Death of Stalin, 2017 - ★★

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 19:37:35 +0000

It's a comedy, but I have to say, I find very little humour in it. Especially not the first half.

Certainly there's farce: moving Stalin's body around, all that. But the terror, the killings, the torture, the rape: none of it shown, exactly, but all right there in front of you. It's mostly just too fucking serious for me to laugh at it.

Murder on the Orient Express, 1974 - ★★

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:35:07 +0000

We've been watching the old <cite>Poirot</cite> TV series, inspired by me getting the book this film is based on last Christmas . More on the series later, perhaps, but it drops in quality in later seasons, when the production company changes.

And in season 12 it does <cite>Murder on the Orient Express</cite>; and it frankly does quite a bad job of it. Not least in the suddenly-Catholic Poirot's struggle with his conscience.

Having him struggling with his conscience over his decision at the end isn't automatically a bad thing. But in the context of the series, it's just not the same character as earlier.

However, we're talking about the 1974 Sidney Lumet film version here. It's no more than OK. If you didn't know the story maybe it would be better, but I'm not sure. It's quite a stellar cast, and most of the individual parts are played well, but in the end it all just comes out as not very good.

Maybe the source material is to blame. Or more likely, the setting. It's like a bottle episode, in that it almost entirely takes place on the train. That maybe doesn't lend itself well to good cinema.

Wicked Little Letters, 2023 - ★★★

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 10:46:22 +0000

Billed as s comedy, and based on a true story. It's good, but unfortunately all the funniest moments are in the trailer. So don't watch that if you want the best comedy experience.

It's more drama than comedy, anyway. It's the 1920s in Littlehampton on the the south coast of England, and a woman in her 30s who lives with her parents starts receiving expletive-filled, ranting letters. The whole community is shocked, and who're you going to blame? Obviously the Irish woman who lives next door.

Worth a look.

To the Polls!

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 07:49:13 +0000

And don’t forget your photo ID.

It feels like 97, but I have a niggling fear that we’ve been played and it could still go all 92 on us. Articles like this one: Tories concede defeat with 24 hours until general election polls open, from The Independent yesterday, feel like tactics, more than news.

The intent being, of course, to reduce the anti-Tory turnout (and the overall turnout).

So go and vote. Please. Don’t let these fuckers do any more harm to our country.

One More Week to Hang On

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 06:59:49 +0000

I seem to have largely stopped blogging. Certainly, as a general election approaches, I’ve written nothing publicly about politics.

Consider: in just over a week we could be rid of this appalling Tory government. The Labour one we get in its place (or, just possibly, a coalition) will probably not be much to write home about, but even if its policies are far from perfect, its plans to tax the rich and invest in the country’s infrastructure far weaker than I’d like: things can hardly be worse.

Indeed, they can only get better, right?

I saw Keir Starmer speak at the Fabian Society a few years back. 2020, surprisingly, but January, before the pandemic really got going. He came across there as a thoroughly good and decent, left-wing, progressive guy. I can’t remember anything he said specifically, but it was positive, you know?

Now, he’s generally seen as timid, scared of appearing to be too left-wing, that sort of thing, or worse. While at the same time seemingly fierce at purging the left of the party. And poor on women’s rights, to say nothing of his dealings with women MPs and candidates.

Still, after the shitshow of the last few years, I’ll accept competence, as long as it’s not right-wing competence.

The Man with Two Brains, 1983 - ★★★

Mon, 20 May 2024 18:56:48 +0000

I like Steve Martin movies a lot. Or I did like them back when I watched them years ago. It's been a while.

This doesn't stand up as well as I might have hoped, and there are some downright shocking moments, with one casual use of several racial slurs.

But it still has its moments, still has the pointy bird and the scum queen, so I'll give it that.

Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical, 2022 - ★★★★

Fri, 17 May 2024 17:46:17 +0000

We've seen the stage version, seen the older film, read the book to the kids, and this is probably the maddest of the lot.

Tim Minchin's songs are excellent, of course, and the young lead, Alisha Weir, carries the whole thing so well. And Emma Thompson has come such a long way from Suzi Kettles. whom I still always think of her as.

Wonderful.

Spotlight, 2015 - ★★★★

Fri, 17 May 2024 17:39:49 +0000

We saw this maybe back when it came out, or not long after. It's really good, stands up incredibly well. The story of how an investigative team at the Boston Globe, the titular Spotlight, broke the story of the vast web of child abuse by Catholic priests, and the long-standing coverup by the church hierarchy.

Beverly Hills Cop, 1984 - ★★★

Thu, 02 May 2024 06:27:25 +0000

Stands up well after all these years. I saw it in the cinema when it first came out. Eddie Murphy is great as the titular cop, Axel Foley.

It's number 18 on this list of fifty best comedy films we've been using lately. I don't think it deserves to be quite that high, but it certainly deserves to be on it.

Perfect Days, 2023 - ★★★★½

Thu, 02 May 2024 06:22:04 +0000

Wim Wenders's strangely compelling, meditative piece about a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. Sounds like it shouldn't be anything, but is the best thing I've seen all year so far.

Good use of music, with our hero listening to the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and others, as Hirayama plays cassettes in his car.

It's far deeper and more complex than all this would suggest.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, 1988 - ★★★★

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 08:16:36 +0000

This stands up surprisingly well after all these years. A hilarious romp. Some of the worst parking you’ve ever seen.

A list of 50 best comedy films we were looking at puts it above Airplane which I don’t personally agree with. But it’s up there near it, certainly.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, 1988 - ★★★★

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 08:16:36 +0000

This stands up surprisingly well after all these years. A hilarious romp. Some of the worst parking you’ve ever seen.

A list of 50 best comedy films we were looking at puts it above Airplane which I don’t personally agree with. But it’s up there near it, certainly.

Game Night, 2018 - ★★★★

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 20:43:43 +0000

A gloriously funny romp. A farce in the best sense. A couple like to have regular game nights. His brother likes to win. So do both of the couple, to be fair.

But the brother wants to put on a special game night. And things get crazy.

Society of the Snow, 2023 - ★★★½

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 12:50:52 +0000

A dramatisation of the horrifying experiences of a rugby team from Uruguay whose plane crashed in the Andes on the way to Chile in 1972. Of the 43 people aboard the plane, 16 survived to eventually be rescued 72 days later!

This film contains some terrifying, extremely well-executed scenes. The crash itself, an avalanche that buries the plane after a few days. It's all immensely powerful and affecting.

Not a fun watch, exactly but a worthwhile one.

And yes, they had to eat what you imagine they had to eat, to survive. It's very well handled.

Dune: Part Two, 2024 - ★★½

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 18:41:24 +0000

To the IMAX at Waterloo last Sunday, with a group of fellow writers from the Spectrum group. <a href=“ https://devilgate.org/2024/02/22/dune.html”>As I said, I wasn't that impressed when I watched part 1 on Netflix. Still, this would be wholly different, not least because of it being on a giant screen.

Which was true enough. That screen is almost too big, certainly when you're sitting in row G and there's a closeup: Timothée Chalamet's face shouldn't be gigantic! Luckily there weren't too many of those occasions.

More to the point, this a spectacular movie, in the literal sense: it's all about the spectacle. And there's plenty of that. Battles, explosions, sandworms, duels.

And it's all a bit… not that good really, I thought. I liked parts of it. But really disliked the overall narrative arc. As I said last time, I remember the book hardly at all. So the transition of Paul Atriedes from teen duke trying to find his way with the Fremen, to world leader and messiah figure challenging the galactic emperor himself? Frankly, I don't buy it, and I didn't like it.

My favourite moment was Chani (Zendaya) turning away and walking out when everyone else bowed down to him. In fact in acting terms Zendaya is the best thing about this film. She can express so much just with her face, it was incredible.

Of course that ability might have been exaggerated by her face being the size of a bus, but no one else was doing that.

The worst thing about it in a ways was that it didn't feel like the end brought us to a conclusion. It felt like the middle volume of a trilogy. And I'm quite sure the original book didn't feel like that. I know there are several sequels, but I don't believe it was written as the start of a series. It was a self-contained work.

In fact I started the second one, <cite>Dune Messiah</cite> (and yes, that title should have given me some clues to the above complaints) all those years ago, and couldn't get into it. Didn't finish it.

The odd thing about all this is that it makes me slightly want to go back and read the book (and maybe carry on this time).

Anyway, there we are. There had do be someone who didn't think it's the best thing since freshly-baked baguette.

The Aviator's Wife, 1981 - ★★★★

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 19:28:56 +0000

Yet another in our Eric Rohmer fest. I think this might be my favourite of them so far. A guy follows a couple around Paris because the man is the (married) ex of his girlfriend, and he wants to know what the man — presumed to be the titular flier — is doing with the woman he's with (is she the titular spouse?), when he's supposed to have left the city.

Daft but fun, as usual.

Part 3 of the Bucatini Trilogy

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 08:24:52 +0000

I didn’t know I was writing a trilogy, but here we are.

After finding the mysterious pasta shape last weekend, having learned about it in early 2021 from an article by Rachel Handler in New York Magazine, we finally tried it last night.

Rachel believes bucatini is ‘the only noodle worth eating; all other dry pastas might as well be firewood.’ And she describes it as:

spaghetti but thicker and with a hole in it, meaning it absorbs 200 percent more sauce than its thinner, hole-free brethren, due to math.

Rereading the article now, I had forgotten that she did a whole investigation about the shortage, writing it as if it were about a grave conspiracy, and hoping she might be called ‘the Bernstein of Bucatini’.

So what of it?

It was… fine, I guess? Like spaghetti, but thicker.

But I fear we might not be getting the real thing. From the photograph accompanying the article, the hole through the noodles looks quite substantial. Whereas in the packet we have — the brand being Tesco Finest — the hole is quite narrow. The New York photo might be exaggerating the holiness, but I suspect we’re being fobbed off over here, with fakeatini.

Certainly there’s no way it collected three times the sauce that standard spaghetti does.

Of course, if you go back to my picture from the other day you’ll see that the packet describes it as ‘Spaghetti’ in big letters, with ‘bucatini’ underneath, in much smaller type, like a subtitle.

Maybe, rather than a fake, we have a hybrid.

Dune, 2021 - ★★½

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 23:37:58 +0000

I'm joining an outing of my writing group to see part 2 at the BFI IMAX next month, so I thought I'd better watch the first one.

It's decades since I read the book, and not much less since I saw the David Lynch version, but I think I know the story too well (even though I don't remember it that well). Because I found this mostly kind of slow.

Certainly at first. It's well done, of course. The effects, the ornithopters, all that. But I was a bit underwhelmed, truth be told.

Still, it did pick up as it went along, and we'll see what happens with part 2, I guess.

Days of the Bagnold Summer, 2019 - ★★★½

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 23:18:30 +0000

Fun wee story about a teenage metal fan and his mum one summer. With music by Belle & Sebastian into the bargain.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends, 1987 - ★★★

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 14:45:06 +0000

We watched this on BFI Player, where its English title was the direct translation of the French one: _My Girlfriend's Boyfriend_. But Letterboxd knows it as _Boyfriends and Girlfriends_. The French title is both better and more accurate, and the potentially-ambiguous meaning of '_amie_' is matched by that of 'girlfriend' when used by women.

Anyway, another of Eric Rohmer's excellent gentle comedies. And why not?

Custom and Use

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:14:57 +0000

In the lone footnote of his latest post, Ian Betteridge bemoans the use of the term ‘users’ for people making use of software:

I’ve always hated calling people users rather than customers. You owe “users” nothing. You owe your customers everything.

I remember seeing this complaint years ago. ‘Why do we refer to people with a term that comes from the illegal drugs trade?’ was a common refrain.

It’s true, people taking illegal drugs are sometimes referred to as ‘users’. But only really in 70s cop shows. I grew up on Starsky & Hutch and Kojak as much as the next guy my age, but I don’t look to them for appropriate linguistic terms today.

More to the point, the term ‘user’ doesn’t come from the drug trade, it went to it. The term just comes from the English language: from the verb ‘to use’.

Anyone who uses any item is a ‘user’ of that item. If I cut a slice of bread, I’m a user of the bread knife. If I go into the garden to gather the still-uncollected autumn leaves, I’m a user of the rake. And so on.

Ian prefers the term ‘customer’, and that’s fair enough if you bought the item in question. But he also writes about using Obsidian, which is a piece of software that is available at no cost. I use it every day, but I’m not a customer of the people who make it. Ian may pay them, as it’s possible to do for certain features, or just to support them. But there are plenty of examples of software for which that is not the case. It’s just free. You’re not a customer of Linus Torvalds when you use Linux, for example.

Anyway, my feelings are almost the opposite: being a user — or a reader or a listener or viewer, for that matter — is the truth, is the state that has power, has meaning. Not the tawdry commercial act, the mere fact of when or whether we bought a thing.

A Good Marriage, 1982 - ★★★

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 20:05:47 +0000

I like these Eric Rohmer films, with their low-key humour. In this one, Sabine breaks up with her married boyfriend and decides that she wants to be married. So the next step is to find a suitable man.

No man can resist her (she and her friend both tell us); but she doesn't want to seem to be chasing him…

The Harder They Come, 1972 - ★★★

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 23:37:48 +0000

Classic Jamaican film starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't seem the great thing today that people say it is. A long time has passed since it came out, though.

📚 Books 2024, 2: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 18:04:37 +0000

I can see why this won the Booker ~~last year~~ the year before last. It’s beautifully written, with a kind of light, easy style. And yet it goes to some very, very dark places.

The titular Maali is dead at the start, finds himself in the afterlife, and doesn’t know how he died. He’s given seven days — the ‘moons’ of the title — to find out, or not, before he has to decide whether or not to go into ‘The Light’.

There are ghosts, ghouls, demons, and horrors. Most of the latter two are living humans, because we’re in Sri Lanka’s civil war, and Maali was a photographer who photographed the horrors. Many of the dead he meets died in atrocities, and they’re not shy about sharing their stories.

I can highly recommend this, but not if you’ll be too disturbed by stories of atrocities. So think of this as a content warning.

📚 Books 2024, 1: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 18:31:10 +0000

A Christmas present from my son. I know I read it before, but that was on Kindle, and he didn’t know that, and this is a nice physical book.

It’s a lovely story as well as a lovely book, about two near-immortal warriors, competing and falling in love as they range up and down the timestreams.

All that I said in 2020 still applies.

Anatomy of a Fall, 2023 - ★★★★½

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 22:16:03 +0000

My god, but this film is good! Courtroom drama, French style, that manages to make you doubt your initial belief in the main character's innocence repeatedly, before swooping you back to her side again.

Utterly compelling. Certainly the best film I've seen this year; and while that's obviously a joke, it might remain the best for quite some time.

And unlike my other recent trip to the cinema, here everything isn't spelled out and all ambiguity removed.

Maestro, 2023 - ★★½

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 22:07:55 +0000

We ended last January watching a film about an imaginary conductor, namely Tár. We closed out 2023 watching this one about a real conductor and composer.

The pure fiction was much more interesting and enjoyable than the biopic.

I noticed early on that we had seen no performers; not shots of the orchestras Bernstein was conducting, or only of them taking a bow. Some of him playing the piano, certainly, but where were the others?

We did eventually see an orchestral performance, with Bradley cooper massively exaggerating a conductor's movements — though that might be an accurate reflection of Bernstein's style.

But as my beloved pointed out today, what was really missing from this film was the music. There is music in it, certainly, but it's not really _about_ the music, or Bernstein as musician, composer, conductor.

It's about his marriages and his philandering, mostly. Which is fair enough. But why, then, call it Maestro?

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee (Books 2023, 27) 📚

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 19:02:23 +0000

Back in 2021, when I read Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I expressed an interest in this book, Edinburgh, largely because of its title. As I said then, ‘the Edinburgh connection in the novel didn’t survive the writing and editing process, but he kept the title anyway.’ There is, in fact, a tangential character in this who has a loose connection to the city, but it’s not relevant.

What we have is a bildungsroman, the story of a boy becoming a man, knowing he’s gay from an early age, and going through various experiences both because of that fact and having nothing to do with it.

But about halfway through, the first-person narrative switches to a different character’s first-person narrative, which caused me some confusion. The sections are headed with the name of the narrator, but since there is only this one change, then a change back for the last quarter, it wasn’t immediately obvious what was going on.

That was OK though. What I didn’t enjoy so much was a kind of allusiveness that really became vagueness, which at times made it slightly hard to see what he was getting at. Especially in the last quarter.

And that last quarter is the most difficult and problematic part of the whole. See, early on, the first narrator is abused, along with several classmates, by a teacher. This doesn’t seem to have much effect on the narrator, though it does on some of the other victims.

But in the end the main narrator becomes an abuser himself; of the other narrator, who is linked to the whole story in a way that is, frankly, too coincidental. And it all ends in a kind of unresolved ambiguity which I found left a bad taste.

All in all, I preferred his nonfiction.

Saltburn, 2023 - ★★½ (contains spoilers)

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 22:04:12 +0000

This review may contain spoilers.

It's unusual to go in to see a film with essentially no idea of what it's about. Unusual, but sometimes quite a good way to approach something. I think I had read something to the effect that someone was invited to someone's country home. But as far as that, I knew nothing about this, going into the cinema today.

Except, maybe, that there was some major surprise twist or reversal.

There are, in fact, no surprises in this.

Or let's say, I found nothing particularly surprising in it.

I enjoyed it, and had a good conversation about it afterwards. But it would have been better — the conversation afterwards in particular — if the the first twenty minutes and the last five were shaved off.

The first twenty minutes because, we know: Oxford is shit if you have no friends and no money; and it's better if you have both. We don't need it explained in elaborate detail.

Or maybe that's not so obvious. I have some insider knowledge there.

But the last five or so minutes. I mean, really? Do you have to explain everything? Spell everything out in minute detail? Confirm that every possible thing that we thought might have happened — but that was, until now, pleasingly ambiguous — had actually happened?

I feel like the ending was focus-grouped to death; a few people didn't understand, so they dropped in some tiny flashbacks. Yes, he was that manipulative. I had suspected that from about forty minutes in, and my suspicions only increased. But I'd rather have had them left as suspicions.

All that said, I enjoyed this a lot. I just feel I could have enjoyed it a lot more.

---

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (Books 2023, 26) 📚

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:39:58 +0000

The first Christmas-present book, finished on boxing day. Short, and a page-turner.

I’ve never read an Agatha Christie before, perhaps surprisingly. I’m not even sure I’ve seen any significant adaptation, except I once caught the end of one. Of this novel, unfortunately. So I sort of knew what the conclusion was, which meant I was seeing how the clues pointed in that direction.

No matter, it’s still a great read, and makes me want to read more.

Nine to Five, 1980 - ★★★★

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:32:22 +0000

I don't know why I didn't see this back in the day. It's a mad romp, and a deeply feminist one. Full of surprising stylistic switches, dream sequences…

Highly recommended.

The Holiday, 2006 - ★★★

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:28:26 +0000

I've watched this before, but it looks like I forgot to log it on Letterboxd. Fun Christmas romcom. Does exactly what you expect it to.

Who Do You Think You Both Are?

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:05:55 +0000

I suppose I should tell you what I thought of the three Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials.

They were good. Not great, but good. My favourite of the three — and I think probably the best, too — was the middle one, ‘Wild Blue Yonder’.

As to the ending, the ‘bi-generation’ thing was daft, but fun. It was good to give the leaving and arriving Doctors the chance to interact, and a Doctor ending without it being a death was good.

However, let us speak of the extension of that effect, as explained in this Radio Times article. I was directed there by @BenSouthwood, via a conversation on Micro.blog.

As I said there, I loved the idea of the Timeless Child, and the expansion it brought to The Doctor’s past and the prehistory of the Time Lords. But this ‘every Doctor is now bi-generated’ idea just seems like it leaves things in a mess.

Sure, you can explain it all away with branching timelines, alternative realities and all that. But it all just seems a bit too chaotic, you know? Even if they never use it, it feels unnecessary.

And then there’s this idea of making an expanded ‘Whoniverse’, in the vein of what Marvel and Star Wars have become. Disney’s money is going to allow this, presumably. More shows, even, than when we had Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Trouble is, from my point of view, that I’ve lost interest in both Star Wars and Marvel exactly because there’s so much stuff. It’s all just too much.

So I hope my favourite programme doesn’t go the same way. Or at least, if it does, that the original programme will always remain at the hearts of the franchise, and not depend on any of the expansion packs.

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith (Books 2023, 25) 📚

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 22:24:00 +0000

A reread so soon? Hell, yes, why not? I think I enjoyed it even more this time. It’s amazing how compelling a book can still be on a reread.

The Affirmation by Christopher Priest (Books 2023, 24) 📚

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 15:48:03 +0000

I’ve had this book for years, and I thought I had read it. Took a look at it a week or two back and realised I hadn’t. So I did.

What I also didn’t realise was that it’s a Dream Archipelago story. Which is surprising, since it starts in present-day (1980s) London. In fact it’s the first novel (though not, I think, the first story) to use the Dream Archipelago as a setting, or state of mind.

Peter Sinclair suffers various crises in his personal life, and decides to write an autobiography to better understand himself. Through various revisions his writing becomes more fictionalised, until he’s writing about the islands. Or living in them. Is it alternative world or madness? Portal fantasy or mental breakdown?

Or maybe both, or neither. You could argue that as a story it doesn’t entirely make sense, but I don’t think I’d go there. I mean, I’d go there, to the Archipelago, for sure (it feels a lot like Greece to me, and indeed Sinclair and his ex/not-ex girlfriend met there, we are told).

It’s a novel that leaves you questioning its realities, and maybe your own. And that seems like a good thing to me.

… And Took the Road for Heaven in the Morning

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 20:41:17 +0000

In a way it was surprising that Shane MacGowan survived this long, considering his noted and dramatic habits. But it’s still sad that he’s died.

I count The Pogues as one of the bands I’ve seen live most of all. The only other one that comes close would be The Fall, and either could be the winner. Goes back to 1985, either way.

The Pogues were vey much a band of supremely talented musicians and songwriters. But Shane was the driving force. What they did was to meld punk with Irish folk music. The former, of course had helped me through my adolescent years and would remain a lifelong love. The latter: well, I came from a Scottish Catholic background, so it was pretty familiar, between Scottish folk and Irish songs sung at Celtic matches.

So on the instant that I first heard them — certainly on Peel, and probably ‘Sally MacLennane’, I’d say — they clicked. There was no learning curve, no adjustment to this new sound. It was just there, it belonged, as if it had always existed.

The Pogues may have been inevitable, but Shane was a genius. And his songs, as I wrote when Phil Chevron died were steeped in death imagery.

I’ll leave you with a couple of excellent screen grabs from Twitter (where, just to note, as I write, ‘Sodomy and the Lash’ is trending under a ‘food’ heading, which is just beyond weird.

First, this excellent mashups of the day’s deaths of noted figures:

And this typically topical ‘Fairytale’ reference (even if it does misspell his surname):

So it goes.

8½, 1963 - ★★★

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 13:56:18 +0000

Fellini's 8½ is a weird, fragmentary, confusing, semi-autobiographical piece about a filmmaker who's trying to make a movie and is creatively blocked.

People come and go, scenes change almost at random, none of it really makes sense. And yet, in a weird and surprisingly charming kind of way it all does.

And it's one of those classics where you can see hints of the things or people it inspired. Most notably for me, David Lynch. I feel like he must have mainlined this.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Books 2023, 23)📚

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 10:32:55 +0000

Why did nobody ever tell me that this book is funny? I had it in my head as a slightly worthy, if much-loved, courtroom drama. But the trial is only part of it, and quite small part at that. Though its ramifications play out to the end, and echo back to near the start.

Scout is an endearing narrator, wise beyond her years, tough, smart. Lee conjures a believable, well-formed picture of life in small-town Alabama in the thirties. A place of community and friendship, gossip and criticism, poverty and hard work. And a few people, notably Atticus, of course, willing to do the right thing in the face of dangerous racist neighbours.

It’s intriguing, from a writer’s perspective, how the narrative voice changes in the courtroom scenes when they do come.

And Boo Radley gave the band their name. I don’t think I knew that, or if I did I’d forgotten.

You don’t need me to tell you it’s a classic, and it turns out, for good reason.

All About Eve, 1950 - ★★★½

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 10:20:18 +0000

Not dissimilar in themes to the various A Star is Born instances we've been watching, in that it's partly about fame and performance.

A successful stage actor is not-quite-stalked by a fan, the titular Eve, who then becomes her personal assistant, and gradually moves almost to replace her.

Which makes Eve sounds more sinister than she comes across in the film.

And despite the title, it's really more about Margo than it is about Eve.

Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler (Books 2023, 22) 📚

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:18:00 +0000

There is no evidence in the text of this book that it is SF. Yet here I have a copy, published in the SF Masterworks series.

Graham Sleight addresses this in his introduction, but doesn’t try to give a conclusive reading either. There is no definitive answer, as the work is deliberately ambiguous.

The titular Sarah is a woman described as ‘ugly’ who turns up in the camp of some Chinese men who are working on railroads in the USA of the 1870s. She speaks no known human language, though she does make sounds. She gains her name later because, a character says, ‘she sings like an angel’. One of the men, a young man called Chin, is volunteered to try to find where she belongs, or failing that, at least get rid of her, so she stops distracting them.

So begins a trek across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Along the ways we meet various characters with various good and bad qualities.

The ending is, as I say, ambiguous. We never find out who or what Sarah Canary is. But the journey is quite enjoyable.

A Star Is Born, 1976 - ★★★

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 18:25:15 +0000

Three stars because this is a bit better than the fifties version that we watched a couple of months ago.

It's the same story, with tighter telling, slightly better songs, and seventies fashions.

Here, both the fading male star and rising woman are singers. not actors, but that doesn't make much difference. The ending is more ambiguous, but not much more.

And it does a good job of showing the negative side of fame. I quite enjoyed it.

GoodFellas, 1990 - ★★★½

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 18:47:59 +0000

I somehow wasn't interested in this when it came out in 1990. Gangsters didn't really appeal at that time, I guess? Maybe the idea of a based-on-a-true-story gangster film? Although I don't think I knew that about it back then. I think I only learned it when we decided to watch it now.

In the intervening decades, of course, it has come to be considered a classic, on peoples' greatest of all time lists, all that kind of thing.

Turns out past-me might have been right. It's well told, reasonably interesting once it gets going, but it didn't do a lot for me. I'm glad I've finally seen it, but it won't be going on any of my favourite lists.

White Riot by Joe Thomas (Books 2023, 21) 📚

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 22:15:51 +0000

I picked this up because of the title, taken as it obviously is from an early song by my favourite band. I bought it because it is set in and around the famous anti-Nazi festival in Victoria Park in London. Or at least it starts there.

Though that’s not quite true. It starts even closer to home for me: my kids' primary school is mentioned early on, and many other streets, pubs, takeaways and landmarks that still exist are visited.

Joe Thomas was born in 1977, so he’s doing this from research, not memory, but it captures the area very well, and the time — well, from what I know of those times in London, I think he’s done a great job.

It’s not mainly about the music scene, though. Thomas is a crime writer, and this is, kind of, a crime novel. And becomes more so as it goes on, and jumps to 1983. As you might imagine, given the notoriety of Stoke Newington Police Station of the time, it’s about bent coppers. And one more-or-less decent cop who is — we think — trying to bring them down.

I say ‘We think’, because it’s not finished. It turns out it’s the start of a trilogy, with Red Menace and True Blue to follow. This one was only published this year, so I guess it’ll be a while before we see the followups.

It’s all pretty good. It uses a slightly odd, cut-up sort of style: half sentences, fragments ending in dashes. But it’s very readable. As I say, I was drawn to it by the music and the locations, but I enjoyed spending time with the characters, and the situation is compelling. Real life events are stitched into fictional ones (or vice-versa).

Unsurprisingly, then, it’s a very political book. And surprisingly Thatcher turns up as a character. I’m not sure why Thomas choose to do that. Maybe since most of the characters are on the left, it was to provide some sort of balance. Why not go as far up and right as possible, I suppose. I don’t mean Thatcher is the furthest-right person in it, to be fair: the National Front are heavily involved, too.

The main police character is running ‘spycops’, and has operatives inside both the NF and the loose coalition of groups that oppose them (the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, the Socialist Workers' Party). I expect as the series goes on we’ll see some version of the scandals around that whole business, too.

Velvet Goldmine, 1998 - ★★

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 22:21:35 +0000

This is a kind of fake story of some of the singers who inspired and were part of glam rock. There's a central character who's obviously based on Bowie, another who's mostly Iggy Pop. Various others take elements of Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, and so on.

The music is a mixture of actual music from the time and specially-written tracks. The performers in the bands appearing on-stage and on the soundtrack are impressive: Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwod, Thurston Moore, Bernard Butler, Ron Asheton, and more.

But the story is thin, and overall it's kind of boring. Apart from the songs, the main interest for me was in looking for parallels to the real people. Which is not really enough to sustain a film.

The Exorcist, 1973 - ★★½

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 23:34:50 +0000

It’s slightly surprising, perhaps, that I’ve never seen this horror classic, given my sometime, occasional, interest in the genre. But then, it wasn’t available or was hard to get in the UK for the core years when I might have seen it.

Turns out it’s on iPlayer just now, so I rectified the situation.

Except I almost didn’t get past the first ten minutes. Honestly, I was so bored with the slow, tedious Iraq-set grave-robbing scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the story!

And the film as a whole is weirdly fragmentary, disjointed after that, at least for the first half.

Then the last third is just one big advert for the Catholic church. Though I would note that the exorcism fails, the old exorcist is killed offscreen (and weirdly, he turns out to be the archaeologist/grave robber from the start).

It’s the self-sacrifice of the doubting Jesuit Father Karras, that gets the demon out of the girl. His ending is one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen in a film. And those steps were the scariest thing in this film.

Presumably the necklace/coin-like artefact that somehow made its way from Iraq was supposed to have had something to do with allowing the demon into the girl, but no use or sense of that was made in the story.

Decent effects. good makeup, and a great performance from Linda Blair (if slightly wooden performances from most of the rest of the cast) leave this as just OK, and far from the classic of its repute.

In my humble opinion, of course.

Tenet, 2020 - ★★★½

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 16:53:43 +0000

It’s not Nolan’s best, and I’m not sure it entirely makes sense. But it was better, and easier to understand, than I’d been led to believe. Of course, I was watching it at home, with subtitles on, so that always helps with making out mumblecore actors.

But the time-flipping: I realise it’s well thought-out, but I’m not sure it’s quite well thought out enough. A second watch might give me clarity on that, but unlike say Interstellar or Inception, I don’t think I’d particularly want to watch this again any time soon.

Which, since I’m realising that as I write it, surely means half a star off?

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (Books 2023, 20) 📚

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 15:27:12 +0000

This isn’t the kind of thing I’d normally think of reading, but I’ve joined a book club at work, and this was the latest book. The China Míeville I read recently was the first.

This one is a historical novel based on the true story of the Mirabal sisters, three women from the Dominican Republic who were assassinated for political activism by the regime of the dictator Trujillo, in 1960. Among the history of Latin American dictatorships, that was one I had never heard of.

A fictionalised story, bringing the characters to the fore. There’s relatively little about what they actually did regarding revolutionary activities, but lots about them as daughters, as mothers. It’s told from four points of view: each of the murdered sisters, Patria, Minerva, and Mate; and that of their surviving sister, Dedé.

It’s a beautifully written novel, heartbreaking because you know how it’s going to end, and because the characters are so well-realised, so brought to life.

The day they were murdered, the 25th of November 1960, is memorialised by the UN as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith (Books 2023, 19) 📚

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 21:53:38 +0000

It’s only a few days since I finished — just over a week since the year-long wait was over — and it seems like ages. Now we’re back into another wait — hopefully not more than a year — till we find out what’s next for Strike and Robin.

Here, Robin has to go undercover to investigate a cult. By which I mean, she has to sign up as if she were a believer, and go deep, deep undercover. It gets very tense.

Minor spoilers follow.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as the previous one or two, I think. Certainly at first I was a bit disappointed because of the time-jump. We’re eight months after the end of The Ink Black Heart, when I had expected it to continue straight on, the way Troubled Blood flowed right into IBH.

But I think the main problem was that the two main characters are separated for much of it, precisely because she’s undercover, so can’t really communicate with him.

Of course, once it all kicked into gear, the pages kept turning like they always do. But, while it was great to see them bring down an appalling cult, it just wasn’t as emotionally resonant for me as, especially, the previous two.

The Net, 1995 - ★★½

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 21:23:44 +0000

I know I’ve heard comments about this over the years, but I can’t remember whether people say it's surprisingly good, or so bad it's good.

It's somewhere in between, of course. It's very much of its time, which was 1995 — the same year as The Matrix, if I’m remembering correctly. And while it comes from a place not that far from The Matrix — it’s about hackers and how our lives are tied up with computer systems, after all — it’s very different.

Not least because it’s far more a realist piece, compared to the SF/fantasy stylings of the Wachowskis' film. Here, Sandra Bullock is a freelance computer expert of loosely defined skills, who gets caught in the backwash from the corruption of a sometime client’s security software.

Something like that, anyway. It starts very slowly, despite a dramatic prelude incident, but she’s soon on the run, wooed and threatened by a glamorous hacker/gangster.

Out on her own with no one she can trust, she has to trust herself.

It's not bad. Probably not so-bad-it’s-good, either. Just OK.

Canal Dreams by Iain Banks (Books 2023, 18) 📚

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:11:10 +0000

I’ve always considered this the least of Iain Banks’s novels. As, I think, did he. If I remember correctly, this was the one about which he said he wrote it without a plan, and he’d never do that again.

So it’s strange, coming back to The Great Banksie Reread, and reading this for the first time in many years, to find that I liked it far more than I expected to. (Funny to note that my only other reference to it here was saying it was better than I remembered.)

It’s not that bad at all. It doesn’t meander the way you might expect the ‘no plan’ thing to imply. What is striking is how apt the title is. A significant proportion of the narrative is taken up with the main character’s dreams. All of which either illuminate her past or tie in to other events in the plot, so they make sense.

But whichever novelist it was that I remember saying, ‘Never have a dream sequence’ — Chris Priest, I think — must hate it.

A Star Is Born, 1954 - ★★½

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:07:01 +0000

The 1954 version of A Star is Born has in it the bones of a great film. It is not, however, the great film it’s reputed to be.

I should start by noting that our enjoyment of this was marred by the fact that the sound was out of sync. We rented it from Apple TV on our Roku box, and it was out from the start. I tried all the suggestions I could find online to fix it, short of a factory reset. Thing is, all of those were about the sound being out of sync on the Roku.

But the Roku was fine, in every other app, and in other things in the Apple TV app (great to have The Morning Show back). No, the problem here was that particular file, it seemed like.

Maybe there was a way we could have forced a redownload of it, and got a different version. If so, it wasn’t to be found.

But you adjust, you put up with things. We were startled half an hour or so in (to a three hour film, I note) when the video stopped and was replaced with a sepia-toned still image. Clearly a production still. The audio, and the story, carried on. The picture changed to another still. Visuals came back, to a long shot. Then another still.

This was strange enough that it deserved duckducking. Turns out we were seeing the result of studio meddling. It seems a producer, believing it was too long, made the decision to cut it. Without the director.

And later the studio, in a BBC-Doctor Who-video-wiping level of stupidity, melted the offcuts down to reclaim the silver.

Thing is, the producer may have been wrong at the time — according to that story, the shortened version was less popular — and he was certainly wrong in what he cut; but he wasn’t wrong about the film being overlong.

That may be unfair. Three-hour films can work perfectly well, after all. No, the edits should have been made at the script stage.

Or maybe at directing.Because this film is incoherent at times. A sudden cut and it’s months or years later with no sense of what went on in between. That can be fine, it can work well. Except here it felt like they had a series of scenes that they wanted to show, and they just bashed them together without a thought for how the story would flow.

There are some great moments. Judy Garland has a fantastic voice, of course, and is a perfectly fine actor, and a very good physical actor, it turns out.

A great voice, rubbish songs, unfortunately. Getting her to sing a song that includes the word ‘somewhere’ does not make it as good as the song she’s most famous for.

Honestly, that and the song-within-a-film-within-the-film (‘Born in a Trunk’, I think it was called) are as much as I remember about the music.

I’m sort of keen to see if the seventies or twenty-tens versions are better. I’ve got to imagine they must be.

Shorter, anyway

Fatal Revenant: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 2 by Stephen Donaldson (Books 2023, 17) 📚

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 19:36:19 +0000

Wordy, as I mentioned before. Long. Unnecessarily repetitive.

But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I’m quite glad, though, I don’t have the other books yet. I feel it’s best to take a break after a story like this. Let it sink in. Prepare yourself, maybe, for the next one.

Anyway, more of the same: The Land is in danger, Linden Avery’s son is in Lord Foul’s clutches, and she’s prepared to do just about anything to save it, and him. But especially him. I expect we’re going to see a situation where she puts the whole Land — the whole of Earth, indeed — in danger, by trying to save Jeremiah.

Maybe she already has.

Oh: people have far too many different names in this. I mean, names by which various people refer to them. In the very last chapter someone refers to ‘The Timewarden’. I was like, ‘That sounds like The Doctor; what the hell is going on?’ But they just meant Thomas Covenant.

In the Heat of the Night, 1967 - ★★★

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 07:33:57 +0000

A Black cop helps a white police chief investigate a murder in a southern (US) town. After first being arrested on suspicion of the murder, of course.

Compared to how things appear today in the US, this feels very gentle. Even when Sidney Poitier's Mr Tibbs is threatened by racist thugs, there's no real sense of menace.

But it's a good story, sending positive messages, and well worth a watch.

Straight to Hell, 1987 - ★★

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 15:54:52 +0000

Alex Cox made a spaghetti western, with Joe Strummer, the Pogues, Elis Costello, Courtney Love 'acting' in it. Plus some proper actors.

The plot is completely incoherent, but I'm glad it's there.

Still, the best bit is the closing credits. Not because it's over, but because The Pogues' 'Rake at the Gates of Hell' plays over them.

Frances Ha, 2012 - ★★★½

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 14:30:32 +0000

It’s as if a French New Wave film had been made in New York in the early 2000s (with a quick visit to Paris thrown in for maximum effect).

Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Bauerbach, starring the former and directed by the latter. Frances is a would-be dancer/choreographer with friend, relationship, money, and apartment troubles.

Well worth a watch.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (Books 2023, 16) 📚

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 16:33:59 +0000

Normally speaking I’d claim a novel written in the 1930s and set in the late 40s for science fiction. But this doesn’t quite reach the threshold. There are around three obvious things that are futuristic: a reference to the Anglo-Nicaraguan war of 1946; ‘air mail’, where a package sent from London is dropped into a field in Sussex; and the astonishing combination of phone and television, allowing the callers to see as well as hear each other! Or rather, one caller to see the other, since phone boxes don’t have ‘television dials’ (but must at least have cameras).

Oh, and the train service has become rubbish, not because of the car or Beeching, but because (wealthy) people mostly fly.

But all that is nothing compared to how funny and overall good this novel is. Stella Gibbons wrote many other novels, but all of them are out of print but this, which is a great shame.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (Books 2023, 15) 📚

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 16:12:57 +0000

I started reading this a few years back, and stopped after the first chapter or so, because it seemed too similar to the thing I was trying to write at the time. I didn’t want to be overly influenced, or worse, unconsciously plagiarise it.

But it’s always been in the back of my mind. And recently I’ve been trying to get back into that novel I was working on then, and finding it difficult. So I thought maybe reading the space opera I backed away from because it was too similar to my own nascent space opera would be just what I needed to get me kickstarted.

That hasn’t quite happened yet (maybe because I read it on holiday), but I loved the hell out of this.

Great characters you enjoy spending time with. A plot that’s just believable enough, with stakes that are high for the characters and then get higher. An interesting, believable galactic political background, with Earth as very much the minor player.

None of the nonhuman characters feel really alien, except from in their physical descriptions, but that’s OK.

I’d say, if you liked Firefly, you’ll like this.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Books 2023, 14) 📚

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 17:13:02 +0000

I’ve been meaning to read this since I read a review of it back when it came out, in 2017. So, six years on, I finally did.

It’s surprisingly slight, given all the fuss and praise. I wasn’t familiar with Saunders before reading that review, but he is famous for his short stories. I’ve read a few of those since — at least one during my MA — and they’re fine, but to my mind tend to suffer from the problem that many short stories have.

I’ve mentioned this here before, though seemingly only once. Often, when I read a short story — even, or perhaps especially, by one of the supposed greats of of the form: Carver, Hemingway, even Chekhov — I’m left thinking, ‘So what? What was the point of writing that, and why did you leave it where you did?’

However, I recognise the skill that it takes to conjure a life, a character, in few words. And Saunders makes good use of that ability here. Because the story is not very much about Abraham Lincoln. It’s not even that much about his son, Willie, who is the one who is actually in the ‘bardo’, a place where souls wait after death in some schools of Buddhism. Rather, it’s about some of the other souls that are trapped in the same Washington graveyard. We get a whole host of compressed backstories.

And we get altogether too many quotes from books and articles about Lincoln and the death of his son. I haven’t investigated to see whether these are from actual Lincoln biographies, histories of the American Civil War, and so on, or they are cleverly invented by Saunders. (This Wikipedia article suggests it’s a mixture.) But I found them much less interesting than the stories of the dead souls. A few would have been fine, for background, but it feels like they make up about half the book.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Books 2023, 13) 📚

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 16:30:04 +0000

Piranesi has always lived in the house; even if that’s not his name, which it may not be.

A fantastic and fantastical, strange book, this; much simpler and shorter than Susanna Clarke’s previous, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I loved. I kind of love this, too.

I don’t have a lot to say about it, though, as to say much would be to spoil it.

The Runes of the Earth: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 1 by Stephen Donaldson (Books 2023, 12) 📚

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 22:28:48 +0000

Forty years ago it was: towards the end of school, Watty — he of the Number 6 badge, celebrating The Prisoner — turned me on to The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

‘What does he not believe in?’ I asked.

‘Everything!’ said Watty with relish.

It took me a while to get into the first book. There was an early section where I ground to a halt. But I went back to it, and ripped through the five books of the two trilogies that were out yet.

Then I had to wait. This is largely why I try not to start a series before its author has finished writing it. Those weeks and months through the first year of uni were interminable. (Only in that one regard, though, to be fair.)

There was a guy on my corridor in the halls of residence who was similarly waiting, and when White Gold Wielder came out, he bought it at once.

In hardback. I was shocked by the profligacy, and didn’t emulate him. Besides, it wouldn’t have matched my paperbacks.

But after he’d read it, he lent it to me. I wish I could remember his name.

So it should be clear that I liked the books a lot. However, I was thereafter corrupted by the general consensus that these were not well-written books, not a good example of the genre.

And yes, sure, they’re not particularly well-written. Donaldson can be over-wordy and repetitive at times. But he knew how to weave a tale that gripped me.

And now, forty years hence, after my son had borrowed my old copies and read them (including my paperback of White Gold Wielder, which I bought to complete the set, but have never read, since I never reread the series) he discovered (something which I vaguely knew) that Donaldson had written a ‘final’ trilogy. Which has since turned into a tetralogy. I don’t know when that happened. This volume that I read — my son’s — says it’s three volumes.

So how is it? Pretty damn good, actually. A copious ‘What Has Gone Before’ leads off, and reminds me how much I don’t remember about the original six books. And then — well, I don’t want to get into spoilers, but after the first hundred or so pages, it’s a real page-turner for the next four hundred or so, and leaves me keen to know how it all ends.

So expect more of this stuff here, in due course. This time, it’s all finished, and there will be no need for me to wait for a final volume.

The City & the City by China Mieville (Books 2023, 11) 📚

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 22:36:59 +0000

It’s like China wanted to write a police procedural, a detective story. But being China, there was no way it could be set in the quotidian world of today.

Which is great.. The setup here is that there are two cities, Besźel an Ul Qoma, somewhere in Eastern Europe; but they both occupy the same space. People in on can’t interact with those in the other.

That’s about as much as I knew about it before I started.

In another way it feels it’s kind of an extended metaphor for how we don’t notice things that are right under our noses. Or, as my beloved said, just for how we can live in a city like London alongside people from other cultures, people who look and dress differently, who even move differently; and never interact with them

This is both good and bad, of course. Or can be both or either depending on the circumstances. Because we’re ignoring other people, whole swathes of them. The live their lives, full, rich, desperate, happy, sad; and we know nothing of them. They know nothing of us. Yet we don’t get in their way. We don’t interfere with them. We let them get on with their lives, and they us with ours, not causing them problems, as they cause us none.

Or only the most minor of inconveniences as we avoid each other on the street.

But is there even a third city, co-terminal with the two we know about? Some believe there is. Does Orciny exist?

You’ll have to read it to find out.

The Importance of Being Earnest, 1952 - ★★★½

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 21:57:24 +0000

Watched on Monday August 14, 2023.

Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962 - ★★★½

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 21:56:57 +0000

Watched on Friday August 11, 2023.

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (Books 2023, 10) 📚

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 18:39:20 +0000

To tide me over until the new Strike book comes out (in just under two months) I suddenly decided to reread JK’s single non-pseudonymous, non-magical book. It’s over a decade old now, which is kind of hard to believe.

And it’s still bloody heartbreaking. How she can make us feel so much for so many flawed characters (but especially one or two) in so few words, never stops amazing me.

It’s a slice of small-town England, in which a parish council member dies, leaving the titular vacancy. And all that proceeds from that. It shouldn’t be as compelling as it is, based on that description. But there you go.

Barbie, 2023 - ★★★★½

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 10:09:43 +0000

Best musical moment for me: ‘Closer to Fine’ by the Indigo Girls, repeatedly. That was unexpected.

And overall, it’s a great movie.

Oppenheimer, 2023 - ★★★★

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 07:45:29 +0000

I’ve never seen the Hackney Picturehouse as busy as it was when we arrived last night. A rainy Monday in July, and it was packed. The Barbenheimer effect, of course. But I was there on the first weekend of Black Panther, I was at the opening night of the last Star Wars movie… Neither was as busy as this.

Oppenheimer was incredible. Hard to make out the dialogue, at times, of course, You expect that from Nolan, and we've maybe got worse at listening to screened entertainment, due to nearly always having the subtitles on at home.

But I didn't feel I missed anything too significant.Oppenheimer's story is quite incredible. I had the vague impression, since I knew only that he'd been instrumental in the Manhattan project, that he was more experimenter than theoretician, maybe an engineer, rather than a physicist. But it turns out (assuming the film and the book it's based on are right) that he was very much a theoretical physicist — even theorising about black holes — and very much not an experimentalist.

Later 'more politician now than scientist', as one of the many other characters says. And those other characters: so many names from the history of physics, many with parts so small you don't even realise they were there till you look at the cast list. Feynman, for example.

Heisenberg (I didn't know his politics were so uncertain); Bohr. Einstein, obviously, though he wasn't involved in the Manhattan Project.

Artistic license: how far were they from the trinity bomb, the initial test detonation? The longest distance they mentioned was twenty miles, for the longest-distance observers, and the closest 1000 yards. That must have been the blast radius, though: there's no way anyone was that close!

But as represented, the time between the light and the sound seemed ridiculously long. It created quite a chilling effect, though: I may never have experienced such a silence in a cinema.

Good film, would watch again. Preferably with subtititles.

Falling for Figaro, 2020 - ★★

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:46:51 +0000

A woman gives up her high-paid fund-management job in London to try to become an opera singer. You could probably write the rest.

This was what you might call a slight movie. It has some feeling of being a romcom, without much of either rom or com.

It was moderately funny in places. It has Joanna Lumley as a faded opera diva now teaching in the Scottish Highlands, after all.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Books 2023, 9) 📚

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 21:47:35 +0000

I mentioned in May, that I had been reading this. It’s taken me till now to finish it.

In another sense it’s taken me a lot longer: I first started reading it in 2004. Back then I was doing an Open University literature course. In one module an extract from Daniel Deronda was one of the options for us to write about. I think I must have chosen it, because my tutor sung its praises, saying it was a great one to read over Christmas, ‘curled up next to the fire.’

So I bought it and started it at the time. I can be fairly sure of this, as the bookmarks I found in it, when I picked it up back in May, were a pair of old-school paper train tickets from 2004. Two markers, of course, because this is a classics edition with comprehensive endnotes.

The main bookmark was around page 200, so I got a decent way into it. Except this is a book of over 800 pages, so actually not that far. I don’t know why I stopped. Probably just got distracted by other books and petered out. I started from the beginning again this time, and found I remembered almost nothing of what I read nearly 20 years ago.

But enough meta story about my history with the book. What of the book itself?

It’s really two main interwoven stories. The title character appears briefly, wordlessly, in the first scene, and then is not seen again for the whole of the first book (it was originally published serially, and is internally divided into eight books). First we get the start of the story of Gwendolen Harleth, a young woman of fair but limited means, who might expect to marry well. Until her family falls into poverty.

Her story at times feels like it’s going to be a conventional, Austenesque romance. It is not, of course: it’s much more complex than that.

The other story is about how Daniel Deronda rescues a young Jewish woman from self-inflicted drowning, and finds her a home, and what follows from that. This section is largely about the way Jews were treated at the time (the 1870s), and the idea that they might seek a homeland. The start of Zionism, in effect. Deronda is sympathetic to the plight of the Jews generally, as he is to Mirah, the woman he rescued. But then, he’s synmpathetic to just about everyone.

The darkest part of this story shows us how terrifyingly restricted, locked down, controlled, a married woman could be in those times. Even if the husband in question is not physically violent, he simply controls all aspects of their lives, and hence her life. She has no hope of escape. It’s powerfully understated, and all the more chilling for that.

Some sentences are overly long by modern standards, and some of the language is complex or old-fashioned enough to be confusing, but it usually becomes clear with careful reading. And it doesn’t detract from the power of the storytelling.

Chevalier, 2022 - ★★½

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 09:11:51 +0000

Watched on Friday June 16, 2023.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, 1997 - ★★

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:58:20 +0000

I first heard of Mike Myers in 1985 or so, at the Edinburgh Fringe. Someone was giving out flyers for a comedy show (I know, at the Fringe, right?) If I remember correctly it was the opening night that evening, at St John’s on Prince’s Street.

A comedy duo called Mullarkey and Myers. We had probably heard of Neil Mullarkey, and there was an added incentive: a free bottle of Moosehead beer (owing to the Canadian nature of one of the performers) if you turned up with the flyer.

I don't remember anything about the show, but the name and its existence stuck. Years later came Shrek, in which the same Mike Myers did a Scottish accent for no very obvious reason. I assumed he had learned it that year in Edinburgh.

Somewhere along the way he made this, too. It's fine, but I already watched Our Man Flint this year, so…

In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the ringtone from Powers’s communication device is lifted from the presidential phone in Flint.

Films, Books, Blogging, and Giving Up

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:49:56 +0000

I’m realising I need to get back into the habit of putting things on the blog. More than film notes from Letterboxd and book notes. There won’t be another book note for a while because I’m reading Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. It’s 800 pages and I’m around the 200 mark.

I started reading something else after Eastercon — did I mention I went to Eastercon this year? Oh, yes, I did, but only briefly. it was in Birmingham, but not in the heart of the city with its many curry restaurants. It was at the Hilton Metropole, out near the airport and NEC.

Anyway, one of the guests of honour was Adrian Tchaikovsky, who I’ve been aware of but never read for lo! this several years. He seemed personable and interesting, and my friend Simon recommended his Children of Time. Turned out I already had that on my Kindle from some offer, so I started it.

And I stopped after about a third. I just wasn’t really enjoying it. The spider characters were kind of interesting, and the human ones much less so, and I just didn’t care that much about the plot.

Then I discovered that it’s the start of a series (or at least that it has sequels, which is not necessarily the same thing). That just put me off more, because if I’m not that interested in 400 pages or whatever, how much less interested am I going to be in three times that?

I’m not in the business of reading things because I “should”, either because they’re in some way classic, or just because I’ve started them. Sorry Adrian, sorry Simon.

The Matrix Resurrections, 2021 - ★★★½

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:14:20 +0000

Forgot to log this when I watched it a month or so ago. I know I expressed high enthusiasm for this when it was announced in 2021 (that long ago?), but when it came out… actually, who knows?

Anyway, I finally watched it, and it's OK. It's fine, it was good to see some of the old gang back together. The references to the original and the expansion of the story were coherent (at least as coherent as the originals).

But it didn't wow me, which I suppose is kind of inevitable. The first film is one of my all-time favourites.

Far from essential.

Blue Jean, 2022 - ★★½

Tue, 23 May 2023 07:02:26 +0000

In the 1980s, under the fear of the Tory government's Clause 28, a teacher has to keep her sexuality hidden if she wants to keep her job. The arrival of a new student throws things up in the air.

It's pretty good, gives a real sense of how much fear the terrible legislation caused, while also showing how women can support each other — and sometimes fail to do so.

The Green Ray, 1986 - ★★★

Fri, 05 May 2023 17:29:42 +0000

Watched on Thursday May 4, 2023.

After Love, 2020 - ★★½

Fri, 05 May 2023 17:28:56 +0000

Watched on Sunday April 30, 2023.

Pain and Glory, 2019 - ★★★

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 18:45:13 +0000

Or Dolor y gloria, to give it its Spanish title.

Pedro Almodóvar's latest, and filled with his colourful imagery. Especially red. Man, that guy loves a bright red. And why not?

As I was watching, I remember thinking, 'This is the most pro-heroin film I've seen since Pulp Fiction.' Which is not to say that's what it's about, at all.

Antonio Banderas plays a successful film director who has mostly retired, largely due to his health problems. He has pain from back problems, and various other things.

In flashbacks (or are they?) we're told of his young life. In the current time, he meets an old colleague who introduces him to heroin, which doesn't seem to help much with his pain, and then an old lover, who had been an addict himself.

Not the most consequential of stories, maybe, but worth a watch.

Punk Publishing: A DIY Guide, by Andy Conway & David Wake (Books 2023, 8) 📚

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 12:19:58 +0000

I bought this on my recent visit to Eastercon, from one of the authors, David Wake.

I hadn’t really thought about the possibility of self-publishing before this, but Wake was on a panel about what to watch out for when you first get a publishing contract (his point: nothing, if you self-publish). He made some good points about the advantages of doing it yourself versus the traditional publishing route. For example, you don’t send your sample chapters and synopsis in then wait two years for someone to decide. And even if they say yes, it could be another two years before your book is published.

I don’t know which way I’ll go with my recently-finished draft, but I thought it was worth spending a fiver on this to check out the possibilities. And it seems a decent guide to how you can approach publishing both ebooks and paperbacks, for minimal outlay.

It doesn’t go into things like cover design and marketing, which, of course, are some of the things that traditional publishers handle.

I might give it a spin, though, with a novella that I’ve got sitting around. We shall see.

Anyway, take a look at this if you’re interested in the possibilities. Their website is here.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022 - ★★★★½

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:52:31 +0000

Saw this in Paris on a recent trip. In English, with French subtitles.

The only problem: it's not all in English. So there were a number of scenes where I was relying purely on the visuals and a very hazy understanding of a very few French words.

But I think I got the gist of most of those parts, and I'd have wanted to watch it again anyway.

It is, of course, totally brilliant.

Beyond the Reach of Earth by Ken McLeod (Books 2023, 7) 📚

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:48:35 +0000

The sequel to Beyond the Hallowed Sky, which I read at the start of last year.

It’s an excellent followup, with a very good summary of the previous novel at the start, which is useful. Top quality SF with politics. Scotland, and the Union (the EU++), are expanding into interstellar space, joining the other two power blocs.

Like the last, and perhaps even more so, this ends in a place that is quite satisfying. No cliffhangers, and if there were no more books, it wouldn’t matter.

Though at the same time it’ll be great to see what happens in book 3.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Books 2023, 6) 📚

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 12:19:55 +0000

Atkinson’s Life After Life was the wonderful story of Ursula Todd, who kept repeating her life, dying in different ways each time. One interpretation or explanation for this strange experience is that she was trying to create (or find, or reach) a version of her life in which her beloved brother Teddy survives the Second World War and lives to grow old.

A God in Ruins is the story of that timeline.

Or maybe a couple of timelines. While this is in most ways a more straightforward tale than its predecessor, we do see two or three possible different endings for Teddy. It’s also about his descendants: his daughter the infuriating Viola, and her two children. It’s kind of a redemption tale for some characters.

I enjoyed the bits about Teddy’s wartime expreiences as a bomber pilot most. Overall it’s not as good as Life After Life, but not bad.

Interzone 294 Edited by Gareth Jelley (Books 2023, 5) 📚

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 22:30:21 +0000

I posted a photo of this when it arrived, to show its new paperback-book format. It’s an issue of Interzone: it’s fine, but nothing in it was particularly outstanding. Several decent stories, an interview with Christopher Priest, the usual book and film reviews and ‘Ansible Link’, the cut-down version of Dave Langford’s Ansible newsletter(the mailing list of which, I realise as I type, I seem to have fallen off; I haven’t seen it in a few months).

Interzone is worth getting to keep up to date with the scene, if nothing else.

That all sounds bad. People worked hard on these stories. I think I just don’t really get on very well with short stories, something I’ve mentioned here before.

Sister Act, 1992 - ★★★

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 08:36:42 +0000

A daft but fun enough romp, in which Whoopi Goldberg is a nightclub singer who has to hide out from the Mob after witnessing a murder. Obviously the safest place to hide her is in a convent where Maggie Smith is the Mother Superior.

Obviously the convent has a terrible choir, so she can whip them into shape. With completely predictable results. But as I say, it's fun. Spawned not one but two sequels, I see.

On the Basis of Sex, 2018 - ★★★

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 22:34:52 +0000

Decent film about the early legal career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As a film it's pretty decent. As a biopic, it left me wanting more. I'd have liked to see about a bit more of her career than just the big breakthrough case that first brought her to public attention.

That case, though, is interesting. It was a sex-discrimination one¹ where the discriminated-against party was a man. He was a carer for his elderly mother, and the fact that he had never been married meant he wasn’t entitled to a tax credit, where a woman would have been.

Ginsburg was able to convince the judges to declare the law unconstitutional, as it discriminated arbitrarily, on the titular basis. And with the ACLU, she was then able to tackle the many laws that discriminated similarly against women. Clever.

Or gender-discrimination, as they renamed it, because ‘sex is all over the brief’, and it would distract the judges — male, of course; at least, according to the film. And I wonder if we can draw a line of causality from that decision to the position of gender in the culture today. ↩︎

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald, Translated by Michael Hulse (Books 2023, 4) 📚

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 15:33:49 +0000

The Rings of Saturn is a very unusual book. My copy has this classification on the back: ‘Fiction/Memoir/Travel’.

Well make up your mind, I might say!

And yet, it is all those things, and the combination makes a compelling, readable whole. Sebald (or the narrator) goes on walks around Norfolk and Suffolk. Along the way his thoughts carry him on paths that both parallel his physical ones and diverge far from them in both time and space. He muses on history, architecture, biography, geology, ecology, and much more.

This Guardian ‘Where to Start With…’ article saves it for last, as ‘the one you’ll want your friends to read’. Which is fair enough.

I still don’t understand why he gave it that title, though.

Suzanne on the Stage

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 15:21:24 +0000

To Cambridge, on Thursday just past, and to the Corn Exchange, to see Suzanne Vega. My one-word review: spellbinding.

I had never been to the Corn Exchange before (to be honest I’ve rarely been to a gig — especially an indoor gig — outside London these last thirty-six or so years). But it’s one of those places that feels slightly legendary to me, because I’d see it listed among the tour dates in Sounds or NME back in my youthhood.

Turns out it’s a lovely, clean, modern venue, with Old Speckled Hen on tap. We were seated in the balcony (on the balcony?), which was fine.

And as to Ms Vega: I’m not steeped in her work, so the fact that she essentially played a ‘Greatest Hits’ set was ideal for me. She even explicitly said, ‘I’m gonna play some of the well-known ones early, so people don’t worry that they won’t get them.’

This after she’d opened with ‘Marlene on the Wall’, followed by ‘Small Blue Thing’.

She had one accompanying musician, a guitarist called Gerry Leonard, who has worked with Bowie, among others. He was great, making heavy use of those sampling/looping pedals, making him sometimes sound like three or four players at once.

So, like I say, the whole thing was spellbinding.

Penny-Farthings and Paranoia

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:05:20 +0000

Watty was wearing a badge, one of the big, old kind. Probably two inches across, round. They used to advertise them in the back of Sounds, NME, Record Mirror (and I think there was a fourth member of the British weekly music press, but I can’t recall it). They always included the size, in old-fashioned imperial units: one-inch, two-inch. Probably inch-and-a-half.

In the early days we wore the big ones. My first one was almost certainly a Beatles one, but I don’t remember what design it had. I do recall a glittery Thin Lizzy one, when I went through my period of them being one of my faves. Wings, maybe? Probably.

Anyway, with punk, the badge size that was considered cool, or even acceptable, reduced. Anything bigger than an inch across would lead to mockery, for sure. Although I think Brendan’s Stranglers badge, saying ‘Something Better Change’ (‘Because I like the song and I like what it says’) was of the two-inch persuasion, but that was in the early days.

Watty’s one, the one that I’m talking about: that was probably even earlier. It was white, with the outline of what I had to get quite close to realise was a penny farthing bicycle. And a number: 6.

‘What’s that about, then?’

‘It’s The Prisoner! Do you not know about it?’ Watty wasn’t too bad in this way, but the default reaction to someone being ignorant of something you liked was mockery, back then, when we were 13, 14. To be honest, probably for a decade or more after that, too. Instead of the healthier attempt to infect the ignorant one with our own enthusiasm. Or at least inform them about it.

I learned, though, that it was a weird programme that was on late at night, and anyway it was over now, so even if it hadn’t been on at a time that I wouldn’t have been allowed to stay up on a school night, it was finished, so there was no chance I’d ever get to see it.

Pity.

Of course, The Prisoner was originally broadcast in 1967-8, so if Watty was watching it ten years later, it does show that repeats were a thing. If only there were a way we could have our own copies of TV programmes. But what a fantastic, farcical idea!

I know it was the early days, because the name ‘The Prisoner’ did not immediately make me think of The Clash. The B-side of ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’ shares a title with Patrick McGoohan’s paranoid cold-war ex-spy drama. I don’t think it has anything else in common with it, but you can’t be sure.

I finally saw some episodes in the early nineties. I bought some on VHS, along with my friend Johnny, who also hadn’t seen it. But that didn’t prove very practical, as we live in different cities. And VHS was expensive. Two episodes per tape for, what fifteen quid? So that petered out.

Much later I got the DVD box set. And it’s been one of the things we’ve been watching over the last few months. Er, years, maybe. It might have started in lockdown.

Tonight we finally watched the last two episodes. Which were much better than I had been led to believe.

It’s kind of amazing, saturated as it is with sixties fears about mind control, brainwashing, hypnotism. Is anything real after the unnamed main character gets gassed in the opening of the first episode (repeated in the opening credits of almost every episode)? Maybe the whole thing is a hallucination induced by the gas, you know?

There are certainly plenty of actual induced hallucinations or dreamlike states in the series. Which is why you can’t trust the increasingly psychedelic ending.

The whole thing is a mindfuck. I loved it.

Gosford Park, 2001 - ★★★½

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 08:34:13 +0000

Another old one that I’d never seen before.

Considering it’s by the same guy who wrote Downton Abbey, it’s much more negative about the landed classes than that is.

Comfort and Joy, 1984 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 23:38:28 +0000

This review may contain spoilers.

Kind of daft film that somehow I’d never seen.

Set at Christmas, as I should have realised from the title, But not a Christmas film. Great opening scene with the shoplifting, And then the bizarre next scene, where she’s leaving him, but hasn’t got round to telling him yet.

Then the actual plot gets going and runs on down to quite a flat ending. Makes me wonder if all the ice-cream stufff was his delusion caused by grief at his beloved leaving.

Our Man Flint, 1966 - ★★½

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 08:54:19 +0000

I remember seeing this as a kid and absolutely loving it. We talked about it at school, probably played at being Flint.

It’s a Bond spoof. James Coburn as Flint is a super agent who is brought out of retirement to save the world from some mad scientists who are controlling the weather.

I only remembered two things about it. His ability to stop his heart for maximum rest, and the device in his watch that got him started again; and his lighter, with ‘82 functions… 83 if you want to light a cigar.’

It’s daft nonsense, but fun in places. There’s even a lesser agent called 0008 (Triple Oh Eight) who tells him ‘It’s bigger than SPECTRE.)

Watched on Saturday February 4, 2023.

Tár, 2022 - ★★★★

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 23:48:09 +0000

Tár is a much-discussed, disputed, disagreed-upon tour de force. Not since Moonlight have I read so much about a film after seeing it.

Lydia Tár is a conductor who is rehearsing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for what should be the pinnacle of her career, a live recording of Mahler's Symphony No 5. But she has a past, and it's coming to get her.

Perhaps my favourite interpretation is the too-long-titled 'Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?', from Slate. It posits that the last third or so is, essentially, fantasy, hallucination, or similar.

There's a lot to get out of this — not least encouraging me to listen to Mahler's Fifth — and I'm looking forward to watching it again.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (Books 2023, 3) 📚

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 14:04:04 +0000

Fantastic graphic novel about the inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines and the first programmer.

Together they fight crime.

Well, not quite. But they do meet Wellington, Brunel, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot), and other famous Victorians, and have adventures.

A fabulous romp.

Bomber Jackson Does Some by Bob Boyton (Books 2023, 2) 📚

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 16:31:41 +0000

First, cards on the table, Bob is a friend of mine. Bomber Jackson Does Some is his first novel, self-published in 2012. He gave us a copy back then, and it’s taken me till now to read it.

Just because of the size of my to-read piles, not any quality concerns.

Bomber is an ex-boxer and an alcoholic. At the start of the novel he has just got out of prison. As you might imagine from such a setup, things largely go downhill from there. His thoughts include a fair amount of slang, some of which I didn’t understand, but the meaning was usually clear from context. For example, he refers to two homeless men as ‘real old-fashioned paraffins’. Paraffin lamp = tramp, I assume.

It’s written in first person, present tense, which I think is quite a hard voice to sustain. Bob does a good job of getting us inside Bomber’s head, and the story flows along at fine old rate.

All in all, top stuff. Recommended if you can get hold of a copy.

All Quiet on the Western Front, 2022 - ★★★

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 19:17:25 +0000

Watched on Saturday January 21, 2023.

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, 2016 - ★★★★½

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 19:17:08 +0000

Watched on Tuesday January 17, 2023.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, 2022 - ★★★

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 09:29:30 +0000

The usual Marvel daftness. I enjoyed it, but really, there's just so much of this stuff now that it's become ridiculous.

And I kind of hate what they've done to Wanda between this and WandaVision, which this kind of follows straight on from.

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), 2021 - ★★★★

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 20:53:25 +0000

Excellent documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, an outdoor music festival in 1969. The same year as Woodstock, but much less well-known. The footage was shot at the time, but lay in a basement for fifty years, because the then-filmmakers couldn't get it broadcast.

We get Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly & the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder…

If I have a complaint it's that I'd like there to be more of the music and less of the interviews. Or not less of them: the interviews are good. I especially liked the ones that started with some of the surviving performers watching their younger selves. But for most of the acts we just get one song, and an interview gets superimposed over part of it.

Well worth a watch, though.

Together We Will Go by J Michael Straczynski (Books 2023, 1) 📚

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 14:54:44 +0000

Content warning: suicide

The first book of the year. JMS of Babylon 5 fame tells the story of a group of people who, each for their own varied reason, want to end their life.

One of their number arranges a final bus trip, across the USA, with the plan being to drive off a cliff in California. There are legal implications, so the law gets involved.

It’s desperately sad, yet happy and life-affirming at the same time. It’s told through first-person accounts of each of the characters, who have been asked to journal their experience. They’re very well-developed and you grow attached to them.

So you don’t want them to die. But you do want them to make it.

A Look Back at my 2022

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 18:25:32 +0000

The Year in Blogging

Only 98 posts in 2022, broken down as follows.

Month	Posts
Jan	11
Feb	11
Mar	7
Apr	5
May	2
Jun	5
Jul	4
Aug	6
Sep	11
Oct	7
Nov	11
Dec	18

I’m shocked that I posted less than 100 times, but there you go. I’ve been busy with other things.

Other Things

Writing a Novel

What time I had for writing outside of work, I tried to spend mainly on completing my novel. You’ll recall that I did a Creative Writing MA in 2020–21. I graduated in May 2022. My dissertation was essentially the first 15,000 words of a novel (along with a preface on how it had all come together). I promised myself that I’d finish it by the end of the year. I haven’t quite achieved that goal, but I expect to in the next couple of weeks.

New Job

But to that ‘outside of work’, above: I started a new job in February. I never quite got round to writing about it here, except on my /now page, which is an infrequently-maintained page that’s meant to say what I’m up to at any time. I was and am glad to have it, of course, but it’s amazing how much working 9–5:30 again takes away from your ability to do other things.

The job itself? I was employed as a Java Developer — that’s literally in my job title — and I have written precisely zero lines of Java.

Instead, I found myself plunged into the exciting new world of infrastructure as code, or IaC, and the Terraform language. I might write more about that at some point, but in short, it seems I work in DevOps now, and I’m enjoying it.

Digression: On Writing at Work

I’ve written over 70,000 words of a novel over the past year-and-a-half or so. But since February I’ve written something like 100,000 words at work. This comes from keeping copious notes on what I’ve being doing and what I’ve learned, and so on. I thank Obsidian for making it easy to do so, and for working in a way that matches how I want to work. But I wonder: why didn’t I keep notes like this before? I always wrote things down, of course, but not this systematically, this comprehensively.

It’s a mystery.

Jury Duty

In May I spent three weeks on a Jury at Wood Green Crown Court. That was an interesting experience. I might write more about it one day.

Etc

And all the other things that make up life. Hey, I even read 33 books last year!

RRR, 2022 - ★★★½

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 12:52:45 +0000

A mad, wild ride, by turns gruesome and hilarious. It's essentially a superhero bromance set in India during the Raj.

A lot of fun, but maybe just a tad too long at over three hours? Good way to see out the old year and see in the new, though.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Books 2022, 33) 📚

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 12:49:05 +0000

Not just another murder mystery, but an undeniably cosy one. OK, the deaths aren’t cosy, obviously, but the mood and vibe of the book certainly is.

The club in question is made up of four residents at a retirement village. They start out by speculatively investigating cold cases that a former member, who had been a police officer, had records of. But soon a hot case lands right in front of them, and things get interesting.

It’s hilarious in places, moving, well-plotted, and, let’s face it, a tad unconvincing. But you don’t let that bother you while you’re reading it.

Which you should do.

Knives Out, 2019 - ★★★★

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 14:22:17 +0000

Watching the sequel the other day led us to a rewatch of the original. I see I only gave it three and a half stars (though no comments) in 2019. I’d probably tend toward four now, because I’m feeling more generous.

A murder mystery. If it wasn’t for alliteration, would that be such a popular genre?

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, 2022 - ★★★★

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 10:00:43 +0000

Fun murder mystery.

The Perfume Burned His Eyes by Michael Imperioli (Books 2022, 32) 📚

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 14:45:03 +0000

As any fan will realise instantly, the title of this comes from Lou Reed’s ‘Romeo Had Juliet’. So that’s going to draw my interest right away. Then from the blurb we learn that Lou himself is a character in the story.

Turns out it’s a kind of coming-of-age novel about a seventeen-year-old boy from Queens in 1976 or so, who moves with his mother to Manhattan, and into the block where Lou Reed is also living. The boy, Matt, becomes something of a friend/assistant to Lou for a while.

In a parallel narrative, Matt falls for a girl at his new school, who might be involved in some withcrafty kind of stuff. It’s not obvious exactly how the timelines of the two strands relate, but things come to a head — or a couple of heads, you could say.

The book closes with a chapter entitled ‘Afterwords’ (note the plural) in which the narrator — or the author — writes after Lou’s death. This section makes it seem as if the early section was based on real events. The author is a successful actor, so who knows?

I want to quote this from that last section, about Lou’s music, because I love it:

And more than anything else, it was punk. Which should come as no surprise since you were its creator. I don’t care what Detroit says, you were doing it when Iggy was a mere Osterberg and Kramer was trying to figure out who the other four would be. As for the lads from my neck of the woods (famous for their “One, two, three, four” count-off and three power chords) who are considered by some as the progenitors of the movement… well, that just makes no sense chronologically or otherwise. Not to mention (but I will) that they basically wrote the same song over and over again. And however great a song it may be, it renders deep catalog cuts redundant. Sorry, kids, I guess you had to be there—on the Bowery when it happened. But I wasn’t.

And the same goes for the little London boy. Just the first few sentences you speak to the audience on Take No Prisoners relegates John-John to a corner with some crayons and a finger up his nose. The revolution you started was one of art and intellect. It inspired the defeat of tyranny in Czechoslovakia, for Christ’s sake. God save the queen, indeed.

‘The little London boy.’ 😀

Something about the length, the writing style, and the age of the narrator, suggests that this book should or would be considered young-adult (YA). But the Lou Reed connection makes it much more likely that people in my age group will be drawn to it. I don’t know what that means.

I enjoyed it, anyway. And it was a Christmas present from my daughter.

Nothing Compares, 2022 - ★★★½

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:40:23 +0000

Great documentary about the wonderful Sinéad O’Connor.

A bit light on her music, mainly having fragments of live performances and TV appearances like Whistle Test and Top of the Pops.

I was assuming that was because they couldn’t get the rights, and at the end they said in a caption that Prince’s estate had refused to let them use the near-titular ‘2U’ track. Which is a bit wanky of them.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014 - ★★★★

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 10:55:16 +0000

So after downgrading this the last time we watched it as a family, a Boxing Day re-rewatch leads me to boost it back up to four stars.

Mood and state of mind can have a large effect on enjoyment, clearly. Who’d have thought?

Rocannon's World by Ursula Le Guin (Books 2022, 31) 📚

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 14:12:55 +0000

I’m quite pleased to have read as many as 31 books this year. Not sure quite how I’ve managed it, what with writing my own, and starting a new job, and all. Partly a lot of rereading of page-turners, of course.

Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World was not a reread for me, though I’ve had it on my shelf for years. Bought second-hand, I’m sure, I don’t recall where or when, but it’s an edition from 1978. And it’s a super-slim volume. It probably wouldn’t be classified as a novel at all, in today’s publishing world. It’s kind of a slight story, about a person from an advanced species — an Earth-human, essentially — getting stranded on a planet at bronze-age levels of technology, with various species of native humanoid.

The titular Rocannon has to make his way across the world to find the other high-level aliens who have caused him to be stranded, avenge himself, warn his people about their aggression, and maybe try to get rescued.

It’s not bad, but it’s maybe most notable for being, I believe, the place where Le Guin first used the term Ansible for a faster-than-light communication device. She went on to use it in many other novels, and other SF authors adopted it.

And now it’s also the name for something in IT automation. Infrastructure as code. Of which concept, though not Ansible, more later, probably.

Twenty Years Without Joe

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 19:55:06 +0000

I missed posting this yesterday, what with one thing and another. Twenty years ago yesterday, the 22^nd of December 2002, my friend Tony texted me and the other members of our then-band, Burn, to the effect:

Nooooooooo!

Strummer’s dead.

I was at work, and immediately googled for the story. Joe Strummer, dead at 50 from an undiagnosed heart defect. We didn’t hear the reason at once, of course.

I wrote The Death of a Hero at the time. Not much has changed, in some ways. I still play his music, both The Clash and his solo stuff. I sometimes wonder what he’d have to say about the times we live in now.

Hard to imagine he’d have been 70 this year. Such is life, and death.

Illuminations by Alan Moore (Books 2022, 30) 📚

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 20:17:15 +0000

It’s amusing, this one coming straight after this year’s behemoth, since the last book I read by Moore was a similar year-spanning (and reading-year-consuming) monster.

This one, however, is much more straightforward and shorter read than Jerusalem. It’s a book of short stories. Or more accurately, a book containing some short stories and one that is more or less long enough to be a novel on its own.

That one — ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’ — is a fractured history of the US comics market. It tells of the two big companies — American and Goliath — and a few smaller ones that mostly got gobbled up over the years. American famously has the eponymous Man of Storms as its most famous character, along with King Bee, Moon Queen, and many more.

We get the stories of how various young fans attend conventions and end up as professionals, and what happens to some of them afterwards. But why are some odd things happening to people who work for American?

That one’s the centrepiece, but I think my favourite might be ‘American Light — An Appreciation’. Subtitled as ‘by C. F. Bird’, it presents an annotated version of a poem, the ‘American Light’ of the title, by a beat poet called Harmon Belner. In 26 pages and 86 footnotes, Moore manages to give us a pretty good beat poem, and tell parts of at least two life stories. You’ve got to read all the footnotes, though.¹

The other stories are good, too. ‘The Improbably Complex High-Energy State’ takes place in the first femtoseconds of the universe.² ‘Location, Location, Location’ is the story of an estate agent and her client after the world has ended.

Highly recommended.

They are the point. ↩︎
Well, a universe. ↩︎

Falling for Christmas, 2022 - ★★½

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:39:43 +0000

Daft but fun Christmas-based romcom. All the ingredients you could want are here.

The Silencers, 1966 - ★½

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 22:13:26 +0000

When I was a little kid my family used to go on holiday to Millport, on the Isle of Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.

We didn’t go to the cinema often, if ever, back then. But Millport had a small cinema, and we always went once or twice when on holiday.

I don't recall any of the films we saw in the four years we holidayed there. What I do remember is the film posters, because they were always there, so I saw them year after year. And unusually, they were round the walls inside the auditorium. So while you waited for the lights to go down, you saw adverts for films that once shown there.

It's where I first heard of the Dollars trilogy. Only the first two then, in a double poster for A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. When Eight Bells Toll. I think Ice Station Zebra.

And one called Matt Helm Gets it in Denmark. I eventually saw all the others, but not that one. As I got a bit older, if ever the name came back to me, I wondered what kind of ‘getting it’ the title referred to. I probably kind of looked like an adventure film, so it was probably more likely to be a threat to his life, than any other interpretation. But the entendre was clearly double.

I recently found that our Roku has a strangely-named channel called ‘Movieland Tv’ [sic as far as the lowercase ‘v’ goes]. I had a poke around, and it seems to specialise in old movies from the 60s and 70s that are not what might now be called classics. Though there are a couple of Bond films: Thunderball (the first Bond film I ever saw) and Diamonds are Forever.

But I came across one called The Silencers. The blurb described it as ‘The first Matt Helm movie’. Well! Here was the mysterious figure from my childhood. If not getting it in Denmark, then at least in danger of being silenced. The blurb also told us he was an agent who’d got out of the game and his superiors wanted him back.

Fair enough, sounds like it could be OK, and I fancied something like a spy film tonight.

The first surprise was the star: Dean Martin. Now, that poster back in Millport might have shown his name in large type, and if it did you’d think the collision of his last name with my first would have stuck with me. But if so, that fact is lost in the mists of memory.

After an opening where four hit men are given bullets with ‘Matt Helm’ written on them, it starts with a woman dancing. And, basically, stripping. It’s obviously trying to be like a Bond opening scene, but, way sub-even-that-standard.

And then another woman starts singing, and the credits include original songs by Elmer Bernstein, and a choreographer. Is this a musical?

Well, no, but if you’ve got Dean Martin in the studio, you’d be daft not to get him to sing a bit. Which he doesn’t do in character, but does in a couple of scenes in voiceover, in effect. Oh and there’s a joke with Sinatra coming on the radio and Helm saying, ‘Turn that off, I can’t stand his voice.’ They retune, and a Dean Martin song comes on, and he says. ‘Now this guy can sing.’

I know, it’s not much of a joke.

It's a daft spy romp, and from Helm’s amorous adventures, I think it's now clear which kind of ‘getting it’ will be happing in Denmark. Though probably a bit of both.

I'm giving it one star for making me laugh several times, though mainly at the ridiculousness. And half a star for the fantastic mobile bed. Why move to answer the phone when you can flick a switch and have your bed rotate you to where it is? And when you want to have a bath, just let your bed take you there and drop you in.

Honestly, that bit wouldn’t have been out of place on Tracy Island.

Other than that, it’s complete mince.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Jennifer Croft (Books 2022, 29)

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 23:09:17 +0000

I am unreasonably happy about having finished this before the end of the year. I started reading it at the start of the year. In fact, possibly before the start of the year, since it was a Christmas present.

Of course, I’ve read 28 other books while intermittently dipping into this behemoth, something I alluded to once or twice.

It’s a historical novel set in the middle and end of the 18th century, telling the story of Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who led a cult, or alternative religious community if you prefer. He converted to Islam, then to Catholicism, taking his followers with him on the second of those changes. But they remained ‘true believers’, treating Frank as the true Messiah.

It took me so long to read partly because it’s so long, and certainly not because it was uninteresting. In fact it’s surprisingly compelling, considering the subject matter. But it is complex. Not least because of all the Polish place names and names of people. The latter is compounded when they get baptised into the Catholic church. They take on new names, so now most characters have two sets of names.

I got a surprise when I first picked up the book to find that it’s numbered backwards. Chapter 1 of Book 1 starts on page 892. The story ends on page 27. (There are some notes and blank pages after that.) At first I thought I might have to read it ‘backwards’, but no: the story proceeds in the direction I’m used to. It’s just the numbering.

I wondered if this was a reference to the direction of Hebrew writing, and Tokarczuk’s note at the end confirms that it is,

as well as a reminder that every order, every system, is simply a matter of what you’ve got used to.

Which is fair enough. I quite liked knowing how many pages I still had to go, with having to subtract. Especially as I got near the end.

Coincidentally, in the last couple of weeks I read this in ‘Shift Happens’, a newsletter about a book about keyboards:

(in Poland and parts of Europe, books have their tables of contents at the end, and so will mine).

Which isn’t the case here, but I thought it was an interesting slightly-connected idea.

It’s a huge work, in more ways than one, and also an incredible example of the translator’s art.

Next Songs, Elon Musk, and Joe Strummer

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 17:50:48 +0000

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been confirmed, there has been a lot of chatter about free speech. Musk, we are told, describes himself as a ‘free speech maximalist’, and there are fears that he’ll have Twitter reinstate the accounts of Trump and other white supremacists.

But I’ve been thinking about Joe Strummer.

More specifically, I’ve been wondering why his ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was popping into my head so often. It wasn’t a problem: getting an earworm of a song I like doesn’t bother me. But I wondered what was triggering it.

I can often work out why I get a song in my head. I knew, for example, why I often had The Clash’s ‘The Prisoner ' in my head through the summer. The words ‘The Prisoner ' are written on the whiteboard in our kitchen, along with the titles of the other serieses we’re watching.

And in fact I sing ‘The Prisoner’ every time I hang out the washing, owing to its line referring to ‘hanging out the washing and clipping coupons and generally being decent.’

It clicked today, though. You know how — if you’re an old-school album listener (or just old) like me — when you play an album, one track’s ending often triggers the expectation of the next? So that, when you hear a song in isolation, on a playlist or on the radio or something, and the wrong song plays next, it can be quite jarring?

The song before ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is ‘Techno D-Day’. Joe’s celebration of illegal raves ends with the line, ‘And this is about free speech!’

So it turns out my head was just playing the next song whenever the phrase came up.

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 28)

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 21:50:54 +0000

And so I circle back and reread the book I read just over a month ago.

This has been a most enjoyable experience, reading through the whole series. Rereading this one so soon was an excellent opportunity to see if I could spot any clues that I missed the first time (certainly one or two).

The apparent logical jumps the characters make at the climax made more sense this time, so that was good.

Excellent stuff. I look forward to the next one.

The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022 - ★★★★

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 21:27:29 +0000

Martin McDonagh’s latest is sad, hilarious, tragic, and true. Or feels like it could be true, even if some of the decisions characters make are baffling, to say nothing of gruesome.

On a rugged, beautiful island off the coast of Ireland in 1923, with the civil war going on on the mainland, two friends fall out. Or rather, one says he doesn’t like the other any more. A whole sequence of events flow out from this simple, almost child-like choice.

The funniest part happens when one of them goes to confession.But that’s only to be expected: confession’s a pretty funny kind of thing, when you think about it.

(Updated 2022-12-11 at 18:47:58)

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 27)

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 20:31:05 +0000

For some reason this is the one whose title never sticks in my mind. When I try to think of the books in the series I always seem to have a hard time bringing this one to mind.

Which is by no means because of the story, which is excellent. Strike and Robin take on a cold case, 40 years old. When I wrote about this before I said I thought there was too much time spent on the other cases. That didn’t seem so this time.

Also back then, I was recovering from being sick. This time I was just starting to be. And indeed, I was reading a section where Strike gets flu and tries desperately to convince himself that he can’t be getting it; to no avail, of course. I was reading that and thinking, ‘Yes, I’m definitely getting it.’ And not flu.

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 26)

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 20:19:11 +0000

The rereading continues. It’s actually now a couple of weeks since I read this, this time. what with forgetting, and then coming down with Covid, and what have you.

Politics is the background for this one, with Robin going undercover at the House of Commons to try to find out who’s blackmailing a government minister — or rather, why? The blackmailers are known, but nobody outside of the minister’s family knows what it is they have on him.

All good stuff, as ever. I had totally forgotten who was behind it all (where ‘it’ is the murder that follows the blackmail), which just goes to show you can easily enjoy a whodunit a second time.

Barry Lyndon, 1975 - ★★★½

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 17:04:45 +0000

I had never seen this Kubrick film, and it was a little hard to get my head around it as a comedy. Which it kind of is, though I've also seen it described as a drama, and it has elements of both. Tragedy too.

It's a strange one. Beautifully shot, many scenes composed like paintings, and a great score. I mostly enjoyed it, but it's definitely not up there with 2001, in Kubrick's work.

Wednesday Night is Music Night

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:42:02 +0000

God, I have missed this so much. Live music FTW.

I get emails from the Joe Strummer Foundation . The most recent one told me that their artist of the month for September was someone called Gemma Rogers. I hadn’t heard of her, but was interested when I read that she’d had an album launch at Paper Dress Vintage. That’s a place just down the road from me on the Narrow Way. It used to just be a second-hand clothes shop, but now it’s more, I guess.

Anyway, the thought that she might be a local piqued my interest, as well as the JSF recommendation, so I gave her a listen, and liked what I heard a lot.

She was booked to play at a place called Folklore, on Hackney Road, so I thought, why not? In support was Gabi Garbutt and the Illuminations , who I saw once a few years back, because Sean Read, whom I know from round these parts, was producing them and playing in the band. Back then. Not anymore. Not tonight, at least.

Going to a gig in a small venue? No big deal, right? Except… this is the first gig I’ve been to since I saw Glen Matlock. At the end of February 2020.

It felt like quite a step.

But after a bite to eat across the road, we made our way in through forbidding, castle-like doors. Inside is a smallish bar area, and a classic pub backroom. The stage made of two layers of forklift pallets topped with hardboard. It was smoky. Visually, it was like being back in the eighties. But of course, it was stage smoke-machine smoke. Exactly why it filled the air before anyone had taken to the stage escapes me.

Unless it was to show the lasers. It looked like this:

The back room of Folklore Hoxton

Anyway, Veronica Bianqui brought her Hollywood-fuelled LA tones to Hackney Road. Though it turned out she had been on the bus with us down from Clapton.

Veronica Bianqui on stage

I probably enjoyed Gabi Garbutt’s performance most of the three. Because at times? At times they sounded a bit like late-period Clash.

Gabi Garbutt on stage

They sounded. Like. The Clash. Combat Rock-era. I think it was mainly the bass player sounding a bit like Paul Simonon. Whatever, I can pay no higher compliment. No higher compliment can be paid.

But Gemma Rogers was also great, with the singalong of ‘Rabbit Hole’ being the highlight. Not often you get the band applauding the audience.

Gemma Rogers on stage

But yes: I had missed it so much more than I realised. Just getting together in room with a hundred or so people, while others make rocking sounds up the front? How could I have forgotten?

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 25)

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 10:35:37 +0000

This is, by far, the most gruesome book in the Strike series. The crimes, the killings are, that is to say.

It also gives Robin the most action she’s had, as well as the most danger.

And I still, since reading it seven years ago, haven’t investigated Blue Öyster Cult. Oh well.

God Save Your Mad Parade

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 21:14:20 +0000

I surprised myself, really. I, an avowed republican and atheist, watched the Queen’s funeral.

It was a historic event, there’s no doubt about that. If only because we need reminding once in a while that we live in a militarist theocracy.

Sure, the Prime Minister — elected, but just barely having any democratic legitimacy — was involved, reading one of the weird stories from the strange Christian book, The Bible. But look at the start of the ceremony. The military led the march to the church, surrounding the coffin throughout. Just inside the doorway they handed over to the religionists, who led them down the aisle.

All the living Prime Ministers were there, and some other politicians too, I expect. But it was not a day for them, for the elected; nor for their electors, for ‘commoners’, except to bow their heads and throw flowers.

I kept an eye on Twitter throughout, but it wasn’t nearly as snarky as I imagined. A few comments about dropped papers and spiders, but mostly just revelling in it.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 24)

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 17:05:49 +0000

A satire of literary London wrapped in a murder mystery. Robin gets more to do than in the first one.

Which comment makes it mildly amusing to me that I wrote seven years ago that there isn’t enough of her.

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 23)

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 15:46:53 +0000

So we move into a(nother) period of rereading. Reading the new Strike novel immediately made me want to go back to the start. Mainly, I think, because I wanted to stay with these characters. As I type I’ve just finished the second in the series.

The characters, though, are very different back here. Well, Strike not so much. Robin is new-minted, still unformed, and doesn’t get nearly as much pagetime as she deservedly does in later books.

Good stuff, this tale of a famous model who dies in a fall from a balcony. The police have written it off as suicide, but Strike, when asked to investigate, has other ideas.

Keeping the whodunit alive, I had completely forgotten who actually was the guilty party. Or rather, I remembered it as being someone other than it was. So I was surprised by it, which you don’t really expect on a rereading.

Molly's Game, 2017 - ★★★½

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 22:06:43 +0000

Aaron Sorkin not quite at his best. Decent film, based on the memoir of Molly Bloom. Who is nothing to do with Ulysses, but parents who either were huge James Joyce fans, or had no knowledge of him whatsoever. I lean toward the latter.

She nearly becomes an Olympic skier, but is put out of action by injury. She falls into helping to run a poker game for extremely rich people. Takes it over and it becomes even bigger, even richer.

Even more dangerous. The mob gets involved. The FBI get involved.

Great dialogue, as you’d expect, but mostly presented by characters who are seated, rather than walking at high speed. Perhaps playing poker while walking at high speed would have improved the whole thing.

Not bad, though.

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 22)

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 20:53:12 +0000

This may be the best so far of the Strike books. My favourite so far, anyway.

Despite being set in 2015 (time flows differently in Galbraith world) it’s very much of now. People being bullied online, right-wing terrorist organisations. Crossrail still being built. Oh wait, they finished that. If the novels ever catch up with reality, Cormoran and Robin won’t have to pick their way past roadworks around Denmark Street.

And The Tottenham pub won’t be there any more. What will Strike do then? Well, OK, he’ll just complain about it being renamed The Flying Horse, I imagine. I think I was in The Tottenham once, years and years ago, and didn’t think too much of it. But who knows.

Anyway, the book! Yes, it is excellent. I loved it. The only thing I didn’t like was the sheer physical size. It’s over 1000 pages, and when it’s not breaking your wrists, it feels like it’s breaking its own spine.

The titular Ink-Black Heart (it should, of course, be hyphenated, as an adjectival phrase) is a cartoon series, initially on YouTube, moved to Netflix. Having read the description, I really want to see it.

It spawns a fan-created game, and therein lies the problem. Fans, you know? They can be troublesome types. Even dangerous.

Parts of the book are presented as in-game chat threads, with up to three streams running in parallel down the pages. It could get very confusing. It doesn’t, it’s fine.

Read.

The Title of The Smiths' Third Album

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 19:04:35 +0000

I’m a republican, but you’ve got to acknowledge that old Queenie had a good run. Apparently the direct descendent of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I didn’t know.

My favourite story about her is the one about the landrover and the Saudi crown prince.

The weirdest thing about the change of monarch for me? The King’s Speech is an Oscar-winning movie, not something to ignore on Christmas Day.

Excession by Iain M Banks (Books 2022, 21)

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 18:27:59 +0000

Yes, I’m only reading Iain Banks at the moment. What of it? Or I was for a brief period up until the book after this.

Probably my favourite Culture novel, and possibly the best. Mainly because the ships are most prominent and coolest and it’s all just huge fun!

I talked about it back in 2013 god how can this have been going on for so long? Where by ‘this’ I mean The Great Banksie Reread. On the other hand, I suppose as long as I reread his books, it’ll be going on, no matter how many ’re-' prefixes we might want to apply.

There are a couple, though none of the SF, that I’ve still only read once. I think maybe literally a couple: Stonemouth and The Quarry. And one, the poetry collection (with Ken McLeod), that I’ve only partly read.

But anyway, Excession: pure dead brilliant. If by some odd means you’ve read his SF and haven’t got to this yet, you have a treat in store for you. Or if you’re just starting out. Or if you’re re-re-rereading, like me.

The Culture meet an object? Entity? Being? That they don’t understand and can’t cope with. An Outside Context Problem, as they call it. It’s excessive, so it’s an excession. Things are set in motion. (Some of them very very fast things.)

Dead Air by Iain Banks (Books 2022, 20)

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 14:27:49 +0000

Banksie’s most political book, I think it’s fair to say. In the sense that the real-world politics and opinions of the author and the first-person narrator most closely align, and that it was written at about the time it is set and is often about the time it was written, as well.

It starts on 9/11, though that tragic event is only background. A London-based Scottish radio DJ and commentator gets up to mischief and into trouble.

It stands up well twenty years on.

All the President's Men, 1976 - ★★★½

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 21:49:04 +0000

I read the book years ago, and of course knew the broad outlines of the Watergate story. This was a good dramatisation of it.

Or rather, of part of it. Because its ending is weird and disappointing. Just when things are really starting to ramp up, it seems, and political dominoes are going to fall, we get a teleprinter like you used to get at the end of Grandstand on a Saturday, when you were waiting for Doctor Who.

And it prints out a summary of who was convicted and what sentences they got.

And that's it. We're done.

A very deflating ending, I felt.

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks (Books 2022, 19)

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 21:15:44 +0000

The last of the Culture books and Banksie’s SF books, both at all, and that I had only read once.

The odd one about this, as a Culture book, I realised only very late on, is that neither Special Circumstances nor even Contact are involved, directly. Just a random grouping of ships who take an interest in the matter.

The matter in question being the decision of a species called the Gzilt to sublime, or leave the material realm for higher dimensions. This a common endpoint (or new beginning) for civilisations in the Culture universe, and I wonder whether, had Iain lived, he would have taken us to the point where The Culture itself was making that decision.

Anyway, the sonata in question is one that is barely playable because it was written for ‘an instrument not yet invented’, which turns out to be be the Antagonistic Undecagonstring, or Elevenstring. An instrument with some 24 strings (some not counted in the name, because they are not played, they just resonate) designed to be played with two bows simultaneously.

Our hero — or at least, the main humanoid viewpoint character — Vyr Cossont, has been surgically adapted to have an extra pair of arms to allow her to play it. It is still next to impossible, but she has made it her ‘life task’: something to do while waiting for the day when your civilisation sublimes. The decision for them to go was made long before she was born.

But her playing the sonata is only a side issue. The real problem is that maybe someone is trying to sabotage the sublimation. Or maybe not, but odd things are afoot, and various people and ships get involved, and it’s all a whole shitload of fun.

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick (Books 2022, 18)

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 17:44:18 +0000

On my MA course, in the Creative Nonfiction module, we were assigned the first chapter of this as one of our readings. It intrigued me enough that I ordered a copy.

Pages of Hackney had to order it from the US, and it took a long time to arrive. The module (and possibly the course, though I don’t actually think so) had finished by the time it arrived.

It took me even longer to finish reading it, despite it being a very slim volume.

It’s subtitled ‘The Art of Personal Memoir’. She starts one section by saying:

Thirty years ago people who thought they had a story to tell sat down to write a novel. Today they sit down to write a memoir.

And it was published in 2001, so she was seeing a change since the seventies. That may be even more true now, as creative nonfiction, memoir, the confessional story: that’s a huge publishing category.

But I’m not sure to what extent this book will help people who want to sit down and write one.

Gornick likes to teach by example. I would estimate that between 40 and 50% of the words in this book are other people’s. All properly cited and credited, of course, and the relevant permissions listed at the back. But she uses huge long quotes.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. How else do we first learn to write at all, other than by the examples of things we read? But I felt she spent too much time quoting the examples, and not enough explaining why she chose those. I don’t know, maybe use smaller examples, or break the big quotes up with interjections on technique.

Early in the book she talks about the nonfiction writer:

Here the the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses [sic] and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from. It’s like lying down on the couch in public … Think about how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself

The casual synecdoche of ‘couch’ to mean ‘therapy’ or ‘analysis’ amused me. So commonplace must analysis be in her circles, that she assumes everyone knows what ‘lying down on the couch’ is like. Whereas most of us, I would guess, only know about it from seeing it in films.

Interzone Issue 292/293 Edited by Andy Cox (Books 2022, 17)

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 17:12:31 +0000

Not strictly a book, but a double issue of a short-story magazine seems substantial enough to treat as one.

I don’t know when the last issue came out, but I had actually forgotten that I still had a subscription. It was good to get this, not least because it’s going to be the last to be edited by Andy Cox and published by TTA Press — Interzone 2.0, we might call it, after the David Pringle years.

From the next issue the editor will be Gareth Jelley, and the publisher MYY Press. The surprising thing about that is that the press is based in Wrocław, in Poland. Which is odd because then, is it a British SF magazine anymore?

That probably doesn’t matter, because of course it’s an international genre, and it’s not like they ever only published British writers. But still, quite a dramatic shift. It’ll be intersting to see how the magazine changes.

I enjoyed this a lot. There was perhaps too much Alexander Glass¹ — three stories and an interview — but I guess sometimes you have a special focus for an issue (or two). And they’re all good.

Several of the stories suffer from something I’ve complained about before, which is to say, they don’t have endings. Or, put another way, the authors chose to end them at a point that I find unsatisfying; or I don’t understand why they chose to end there.

But in this case, I don’t think any of the ending-choices let the stories down too. much.

Who weirdly doesn’t seem to have a website. Or at least, I can’t find it, and it’s not linked from his Twitter, which is what I’ve linked to here. ↩︎

We're No Angels, 1955 - ★★½

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 21:47:37 +0000

Daft wee film — a Christmas film, I was surprised to realise — from 1955 in which Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov or two of three prisoners who’ve escaped on Devil’s Island.

Their escapades are odd, and the ending is not quite as predictable as I expected.

An odd one, but enjoyable enough.

The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester (Books 2022, 16)

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 06:46:08 +0000

This starts out with the main character escaping from some obscure threat and reaching a friend’s place. The friend sends him into the past — so you think it’s going to be a time-travel story. In the past he tries to save a struggling artist by giving him gold.

And that’s the last we hear of time travel. It’s actually a story of humans who have attained bodily immortality through various traumatic incidents, and things going on with them. There’s some space travel, and, not surprisingly given the tite, a computer connection.

It’s pretty strange in the way that Bester can be. Not one of his best, but interesting enough. Harlan Ellison praises it — and Bester — highly in the introduction.

I had one of those, ‘Have I read this before?’ experiences through the first few chapters, but it soon stopped. So I wonder if I started it once before. If so, I don’t know why I’d have stopped, as it kept me going this time.

The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Books 2022, 15)

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 19:15:40 +0000

I’m not sure that I’ve read any of Priest’s ‘Dream Archipelago’ stories before now. Certainly the ones that I’ve tagged with his name are all outside of that loosely-connected set. But you can’t have been interested in SF as long as I have and not be aware of it.

This one, though, well.

Its conceit is that it is a gazeteer of the Dream Archipelago (which is, I’m slightly surprised to discover, what its residents call it: I had thought it was more… dreamy than that).

The archipelago is essentially impossible to map, because of some kind of time-distorting vortices that occur over the world it is on. No one is sure how many islands there are or the names or locations of even the main ones. The writers of the gazeteer try their best in any case.

By way of the would-be-factual entries, plus a number of fairly straightforward short stories (which don’t fit the gazeteer format, but then nothing really ‘fits’ here) we get something of the backstory of the archipelago, and fragments of the lives of a few of its prominent citizens.

It’s all highly readable and makes me want to know more about this odd world and its people (who seem to be essentially human).

Still Life by Val McDermid (Books 2022, 14)

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 18:54:45 +0000

‘A Karen Pirie thriller,’ the description on the cover says of this. I’m not sure ‘thriller’ is quite the right term. It’s exciting enough, but there isn’t the tension that would take it up to ‘thriller’ level. Not least because Karen Pirie is never in any danger, other than possibly pissing off her boss, the deputy chief constable of Police Scotland.

I’ve never read Val McDermid before, so picking up one of her later ones — possibly her latest: published in 2020, set just before the pandemic, and ending as lockdown starts — would be a strange choice. But sometimes you’re in a holiday house and there are some books and it’s not so much a choice as an offering. I’ve fancied checking out some tartan noir for a while, anyway.

It’s good. I enjoy a crime novel from time to time, and this one certainly kept the pages turning. Backstory was filled in very efficiently, without it feeling like infodumping. And reading about the chill autumn in Scotland (with slight detours into France, the north of England, and Ireland) took the edge off some of the Greek heat.

The title is a little confusing. There is some art involved in the story, but none of it is a still life. There’s at least a double meaning to the phrase, of course, and that makes sense in context. But maybe the French term, nature mort, is even more applicable. Not least since Karen Pirie works cold cases for the Scottish police force.

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson (Books 2022, 13)

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:22:17 +0000

Greece is probably the best place to read this novel, which is good, because that was where I was when I read it. It’s a work of fiction mostly set on the real island of Hydra during 1960-61. There was a famous community of anglophone expats there at the time, one of whom was Marianne Ihlen. They were notably joined by Leonard Cohen.

The first-person narrator is fictional, but nearly every other character is real. It’s an unusual approach for a contemporary novel, though perhaps not for historical fiction. Which, at sixty years distance, you could consider this. Some of the people are still alive, though, which is probably what makes it feel a bit odd.

Not Leonard or Marianne, though. The books starts with the narrator visiting Cohen’s old house on the morning after his death was announced. Which — and I had forgotten this — was just after Trump got elected. Everything else is flashback.

It’s very good. Captures the feeling of a Greek island summer, the listlessness of the young drifters, and the bitterness of the older writers who still struggle for success.

Software and Wetware by Rudy Rucker (Books 2022, 11 and 12)

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:36:43 +0000

Or the first two books in the Ware tetralogy, as they now are. I read Software many years ago, and enjoyed it, though not as much as some of Rucker’s others, notably White Light.

This time round it was fine, and so was the second one, but not really anything to write home about. I’ll read the other two, since I’ve got the combined edition on my Kindle, and they’re not very long. But there’s a spark that Rucker has when he writes about things like infinities, that just isn’t there when he writes about the themes here.

Which are artificial intelligence, machine sentience, and the possibility of transferring human consciousnesses into robot bodies and vice versa. Those are fascinating concepts, but the stories don’t quite jump off the page enough for me.

Ubik by Philip K Dick (Books 2022, 10)

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:16:18 +0000

I had associated this in my head with Dick’s VALIS, which is one of his latest works (written 1978, published 1981, according to Wikipedia). I think just because of the similarity of names.

Ubik is in fact more of a mid-period novel (written 1966, published 1969), and it shows. Though according to the Wikipedia entry, ‘it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest novels since 1923.’ I find that a tad surprising, as it’s far from one of his better ones to my mind.

Certainly some of his tropes are there: strange warps to reality, confusion over who is and isn’t dead, that sort of thing. But it’s just not as compelling as, say, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, or A Scanner Darkly; nor as weird and fascinating as VALIS.

The characterisation is weak — which is probably true for most of Dick’s work, to be fair. But the story just doesn’t really get off the ground.

Firefox Rolls Out Total Cookie Protection

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 18:48:56 +0000

Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac and Linux. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.

– Mozilla, Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users worldwide

Sites can only see their own cookies. This is the way the web should always have been.

I’m forgetting my netiquette: I should have said, via Ben Werdmüller.

Bloody Ebooks!

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 23:11:49 +0000

I read Inverted World on the Kindle. It always annoys me that you’re put at the start of the text on opening. I like to go back to the cover and work forward. Sometimes I use the contents links for that, and I think I might have done so here, skipping the introduction, because they nearly always contain spoilers.

So I started with the famous opening sentence I wrote about. But because I linked to the book’s Wikipedia page, I skimmed the article. Which mentioned a prologue, that I had somehow missed.

As it happens, missing the prologue didn’t really matter, didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book. But first, I don’t know how people can refer to the first sentence of Chapter 1 as the opening sentence, when there’s a prologue full of sentences before it.

And second, be careful how you read your ebooks. You might miss something.

Inverted World by Christopher Priest (Books 2022, 9)

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 18:38:04 +0000

With its fairly famous opening line — ‘I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.’ — I kind of thought I had read this before, long ago, maybe as a teenager. But no. It turned out definitely not.

A young man learns his place in a city — Earth City, as they call it — which is moving. Rails are placed before it and lifted up behind it so they can be laid in front again. The city is winched along on the rails by fits and starts. Why? Why is it in motion, and why do the inhabitants work desperately to keep it so? And why is the fact kept hidden from city dwellers who are not ‘guildsmen’?

The answers, or some of them, are within. Though there is no answer to why ‘guildsmen’ is the correct word. Women are second-class citizens in the city. And worse outside it, on the whole.

The people of the city are human, they speak English mostly. They know their ancestors were from Earth planet, as they refer to it. The people in the villages they pass also seem to be human, and they mostly speak Spanish. The sun appears not as a sphere, but as a kind of disk with spikes top and bottom. What can be going on? The title suggests some kind of inversion, but what is it?

Ultimately the mystery isn’t solved in a very interesting way, and the ending is sad, but maybe happy, but maybe sad.

Priest has written much better books, but it bears reading.

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Books 2022, 8)

Wed, 18 May 2022 13:04:22 +0000

This was prompted by a Guardian article — listicle, you might say, since it’s basically a big list — of books for the summer (last summer): Summer reading: the 50 hottest new books everyone should read. I borrowed it from my local library. Kind of great that you can borrow ebooks from the library. Especially during lockdowns, when the buildings themselves were closed.

It is a magic realist novel set mostly in Britain and faerie; or the sidhe, as it’s called here. It starts with the story of the tragic death of the main character’s sister, when they were both in their late teens or early twenties. Was it murder? certainly the driver of the car that killed her was imprisoned.

The loss of her sister haunts Taryn’s life, predictably. But if there are hints that the death is somehow linked to the other mysteries that run through the book, then it is never satisfactorily resolved that there is or isn’t any connection.

That aside, we soon find ourselves — unexpectedly, for me at least — in another world. It seems that all the otherworlds exist: Munin and Huggin, Odin’s ravens, turn up. We hear that ‘The Great God of the Deserts’ went mad because his believers had too many different ideas of what he was like, so heaven is closed. A visit to purgatory is made.

Taryn finds out she is damned, because of an action she took — or didn’t take, a sin of omission — regarding her sister’s killer. And seems to accept this, and another evil at the heart of the Sidhe, without trying to understand it, without raging against it.

It’s good, but there are definite weaknesses. I found the action scenes very confusing. Some of the geographical descriptions, too. And it feels a bit… maybe unfocused is the word? Hard to say what exactly I mean by that, but I guess it’s that some things are hinted at when they should be explained. At least eventually.

There are a few oddities. It’s set mostly in Britain, but some Americanisms creep in where they wouldn’t. Can’t think of any specific examples, but it’s on the level of saying ‘highway’ instead of ‘motorway’. That kind of thing.

Well worth a look, though.

Musky Times

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 18:32:12 +0000

I wasn’t going to write anything about Elon Musk buying Twitter, because I mostly don’t care. But Robin Sloan, in his newsletter, which isn’t really a newsletter, because he just sends a link to a blog post (with a few added words), says this:

An industrialist intends to purchase Twitter, Inc. His substantial success launching reusable spaceships does nothing to prepare him for the challenge of building social spaces. The latter calls on every liberal art at once, while the former is just rocket science.

I wanted to quote that because I loved ‘just rocket science.’ The common expression, ‘It’s not rocket science’ has always mildly amused me, as a physics graduate. Because rocket science is relatively both simple and easy. It’s straightforward Newtonian physics. Mass. Acceleration. Forces. The physics is simple, the sums are easy.

You don’t have to go anywhere near even Special Relativity (still straightforward, if harder), General Relativity (much more complex), or of course anywhere close to quantum physics (frankly the most complex and confusing thing of all).

All of which is just to say that physics has more and less difficult areas. Rocket engineering, of course, is quite another matter. There you’ve got all sort of complex materials science, chemistry, end even — if crew are involved — biology, sociology, psychology. Those are much harder.

As far as common similes for the ease of something go, I’ve always preferred ‘It’s not brain surgery.’ If I think about it I’m amazed that operating successfully on a living human brain is even possible, and I bow my head to those who can do it. While hoping they’ll never have to go near said bowed object, of course.

Anyway, that would have been that for this post, except that I pasted the above quote from Sloan into a text editor. But it didn’t look like it does above. It looked like this:

An indus-tri-al-ist intends to pur-chase Twit-ter, Inc. His sub-stan-tial suc-cess launch-ing reusable space-ships does noth-ing to pre-pare him for the chal-lenge of build-ing social spaces. The lat-ter calls on every lib-eral art at once, while the for-mer is just rocket science.

Where did all those hyphens come from? They look like they’re non-printing characters. Ones that won’t show up when a web page is rendered, but are there in the source code. Why? I can only imagine two reasons:

a deliberate ploy to make it harder to copy quotes, as I have done above. But Sloan is a pro-web kinda guy, as far as I can tell. It doesn’t seem like something he’d do.
A glitch. An artifact of the software he used to create the post. It’s most likely that. Weird one, though.

Stranger still is that the character is not even a hyphen. As I discovered when I search-and-replaced it in BBEdit, it actually appears to be this: \x{AD}.

I don’t even know what that is. Some kind of hexadecimal representation of something. An invisible hyphen, presumably. Which I had to search-and-replace with actual hyphens to make them visible above. Looking at the source code, it’s written as the HTML entity , which the DuckDuck tells me is a ‘soft hyphen’.

All very odd.

I have positive feelings about Sloan, except for his closing image. I’ll risk another paste:

Wishful descriptions of Twitter as “the de facto public town square” or “the closest thing we have to a global consciousness” sound, to me, like Peter Pan begging the audience to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell.

You don’t have to clap.

Yeah, but… of course you have to clap. Without wanting to get all metaphysical on you, if you don’t clap when Tinkerbell is dying, you’ve got no soul.

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan (Books 2022, 7)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 18:41:38 +0000

This came to me by way of The Guardian’s summer reading recommendations last year. I ended up reading it in the tail end of winter, or spring, but that doesn’t matter. In his review, M John Harrison describes it as ‘brilliantly strange’, and that’s about right.

It’s a tale told across times, and tied to place. That place is number 10 Luckenbooth Close, in Edinburgh. Just off The Royal Mile, in fact, which is a place I lived as a student. I was in an alley called James Court, though, not the fictional Luckenbooth Close.

The close may be fictional, but the idea is not: luckenbooths were a kind of market stall in the High Street (part of The Royal Mile). Presumably that’s where Fagan got the street name from.

Though I discover today that a luckenbooth is also a piece of jewellery: a kind of heart-shaped brooch , named after the market stalls in turn.

The book, though, is about none of those things. Instead it’s about a series of people who live in the titular tenement block across the centuries. We start with the Devil’s daughter, who — well, I won’t go into spoilery details. William Burroughs is one of the characters, strangely. Apparently he did visit Edinburgh.

It is an astonishing work, involving the saving of ghosts, murders, the Millennium celebrations, homelessness, and much more. Highly recommended.

The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2022, 4–6)

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 21:56:24 +0000

Yes, all I do is reread. Sometimes it seems that way, anyway. Well, it was the end of 2014 when I read this last. Seven and a quarter years seems fair. It’s a lot of fun, which is why I keep returning to it, I guess.

The missing scientists, that I mentioned last time? True, it’s never explicitly explained where they went, but I think it’s clear that they found out how to move into other worlds, and went off to visit next-door universes.

The three volumes are entitled The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons, by the way.

I’m still making my way through the mammoth book that I mentioned before, but slowly. It’s The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, and you’ll read about it here eventually.

Propaganda and Suffering

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:19:44 +0000

I’ve seen a strange set of opinions popping up on Twitter over the last week or so, essentially blaming the US, the UK, and/or NATO for Putin’s illegal and horrifying war on Ukraine. Which on the face of it is bizarre, at best.

It’s possible that NATO’s expansion over the last couple of decades was unwise. Yet who could blame small countries close to Russia from seeking the protection that membership brings? Putin’s belligerence was well known even before the current attack.

George Monbiot makes the point well in his excellent Guardian piece:

There is a strong argument that Nato should have been disbanded at the end of the cold war. But while Putin’s sense of threat seems to have been heightened by Nato expansion and mission creep, Nato expansion has also been driven in part by Putin’s belligerence. Are we really to believe that Estonia and Latvia joined because they wanted to attack Russia? On the contrary, it’s because they fear attack. While Nato’s growth is likely to have contributed to the crisis, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Russia is not the aggressor.

– George Monbiot, We must confront Russian propaganda – even when it comes from those we respect

He suggests that Russian propaganda is at least partly to blame. It seems have made inroads on the left. Monbiot mentions the Stop the War Coalition, which normally we would think is an admirable goal and organisation. But their recent letter claims the British government ‘have poured oil on the fire throughout this episode.’ I’m no supporter of Johnson or the Tories, but I don’t think that’s fair. They also say that they ‘do not endorse the nature or conduct of either the Russian or Ukrainian regimes.’

I don’t know what the Ukrainians have done except prepare to defend themselves, and then do so. I’m as against war as any former CND member from the eighties, but when a country is invaded, it has a right to fight back.

Monbiot says it well:

True anti-imperialism means opposing not only the west’s imperialism, essential as this is. It’s about opposing all imperialism, whether western, Russian, Chinese or other.

– George Monbiot, As before

As always, of course, it is the ordinary people who suffer. I recommend donating if you can, to one of the organisations working to help the people of Ukraine:

The Velvet Underground, 2021 - ★★★★

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 23:01:39 +0000

There's a lot to like here if you're already a fan — or at least, have some interest. Probably not too much if neither of those apply.

It has interviews with those who are still with us (or who were when it was made). Not just John Cale, Moe Tucker, Doug Yule, but members of Andy Warhol's Factory crew (the 'Superstars'), like Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga.

I'd like to have heard more of the songs, especially the less well-known ones, and seen more footage of them, such as there is. It uses the documentary style that just films people speaking and edits those interviews together. That has a certain power, but I feel it might have helped to have a narrative, a voiceover elaborating on the story.

Recommended, though.

See in Letterboxd

Withnail & I, 1987 - ★★★★

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 21:13:26 +0000

Long time since I saw this, so all I remembered really were the quotable bits ('We've gone on holiday by accident!')

The high dinginess and run-down state of Britain as the sixties ran down is skilfully evoked. It's very male, though. The only female character is the woman in the tearoom who refuses to serve our heroes. If that's the right word.

It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it has aged surprisingly well.

See in Letterboxd

13th, 2016 - ★★★½

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 17:31:13 +0000

A documentary about the prison-industrial complex, this is a tough watch. The title comes from the 13th amendment to the US Constitution. While abolishing slavery, that amendment also allowed for slavery to continue — at least for those incarcerated for a crime.

Tough, as I say, but it should be seen.

See in Letterboxd

Legally Blonde, 2001 - ★★★

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 20:42:08 +0000

We’ve been enjoying the more recent work of Reece Witherspoon lately, in The Morning Show and Big Little Lies, so it was interesting to go back to see her in her younger days.

It’s a fun enough film. There were no surprises, in part because I’ve seen the live musical, but mainly because it’s not the kind of film that offers surprises.

See in Letterboxd

Dateline: 2022-02-22

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:19:38 +0000

Just wanted to note the loveliness of today’s date: 2022-02-22 in ISO format, or 22/2/22 or 22/2/2022 in either US or normal numeric date formatting.

All those 2s. I find it very pleasing. There won’t be another date like it for a while. 200 years, in fact.

The Kids by Hannah Lowe (Books 2022, 3)

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:47:31 +0000

I don’t think I’ve ever written about a book of poetry here before. That’s because I don’t read that much of it. Whenever I do, I think, ‘I should read more poetry.’

This won the Costa, but that’s not the main reason I picked it up. The author, Hannah Lowe, was a tutor on my MA course. She taught my Creative Nonfiction (CNF) module. Which sounds a long way from poetry, but a person can have skills in more than one type of writing. She was very good as a tutor, and in fact I got my highest single mark in CNF.

It’s a very short and easy read, but some of the poems go to some dark places. Others — most, I’d say — are highly positive and life-affirming. They were inspired by her time teaching sixth formers in English schools. Which made me wonder on my CNF class chat, should we be worried about what her next collection’s going to be about?

Hopefully she won’t repeat herself. These are all sonnets, or in one cases a series of sonnets under one title, and very good, as the awards people clearly think.

Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram by Iain Banks (Books 2022, 2)

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 13:18:09 +0000

Posting about books is slow because I’m reading something gigantic. More of that later (possibly much later). But in the interstices, a return to The Great Banksie Reread). My friend John mentioned recently that he had just read this for the first time, which prompted me to revisit it (that, and perhaps some great whisky I got for Christmas).

Mildly surprised to realise that when I wrote about it before in The Whisky Post it was not one of my typical book posts. I guess in 2003 I wasn’t doing that. It was just over 18 years ago. Wow.

I concur with my earlier opinion, but note this quote:

Banks gives us a brief overview of the steps in the distilling process, fairly early on, and then makes appropriate use of the various technical terms during later distillery visits. All fair enough. But there is one term for part of distillery’s apparatus — the lyne arm — that he starts referring to without ever explaining what it is (I’m fairly sure: it is possible that I just missed that explanation, but I don’t think so).

Well, I offer an eighteen-year-late correction: he does define the lyne arm on first use. I must have missed it the first time. And I note with mild but resigned annoyance that the link in the quote above is dead, even though the site, Whisky Magazine, is not.

Anyway, well worth a look if you haven’t read it. You may not learn that much about malts, and the scene has changed a lot over the time, but it’s still a joy to spend time with him.

And it seems like Glenfiddich no longer make the Havana Reserve expression. If you search for it online there are prices quoted of around £400 a bottle(!), though no actual bottles for sale. Which is a shame, because it was good, and I’m sure it would still sell if they made it. Maybe they stopped being able to get the rum barrels.

The Word on Wordle

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 17:30:48 +0000

To celebrate the news of Wordle’s sale to the New York Times, here’s my result from today:

Wordle 227 2/6

🟨🟨⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

The first time I’ve got it on the second line.

While I don’t blame Josh Wardle for making a ton of money out of it, it does perhaps slightly undercut the narrative over the last few weeks about how he did it for his partner and for fun. But like I say, who can blame him?

It does seem likely that the NYT will put it behind their paywall eventually. As they did with the formerly-free review site The Wirecutter when they bought it, for example. Which would be a shame.

Something I meant to write about before, but never got round to, was how all the mainstream press wrote about it. They made it hard to find, and, I think, helped to encourage the scammy app store rip-off versions. Because they (mostly, from what I saw) did not say that it was a web-based game, and worse, they didn’t link to it. That’s sloppy at best.

Anyway, it seems I’ve done it successfully for 21 days in a row:

Day 21 of my Wordle streak

You Can Call Me Master

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 19:40:10 +0000

I should note here that I finished and passed my masters. I now have a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Or don’t exactly have yet, since I haven’t graduated. Technically I’m a graduand, not a graduate.

I’ll write more about the course later. I just wanted to put this out there.

Out, and Into Town

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 17:09:58 +0000

I’ve just been into the West End of London, to various shops. Travelled by bus, masked of course, unlike many.

I’ve still not been back on the Tube since about January 2020, though I have been on short train journeys a couple of times.

Just checking in with the outside world.

The Beatles: Get Back, 2021 - ★★★★★

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 19:25:01 +0000

I wish I could give this six stars or seven. Hell, why not ten? Actually watching it twice in two months and giving it five stars each time is giving it ten.

It is so, so good, in so many ways.

Apparently Disney are releasing an IMAX version of just the rooftop concert soon. That'll be interesting, if too short. I mean, I'd watch the whole thing in a cinema with a good sound system. And I speak as one who once watched the eight-hour version of Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World at the BFI, so you know I mean it.

Cold Winter Morning

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:07:41 +0000

I was never a huge Meat Loaf fan, but I always liked Bat Out of Hell, and of course enjoyed him in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I’m saddened to hear of his death.

I’ll be playing Bat Out of Hell today.

Nomadland, 2020 - ★★★½

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 10:43:39 +0000

The scenery is bleak, and the setup is sad, but in the end this movie is neither. Frances McDormand's character may have lost her home, job, and even town — she comes from a company town called Empire, which is closed down when the business fails — but she finds companionship along the road.

Sometimes that companionship is herself: she is someone who is happy in their own company, and that's okay. She lives in her van. She's not homeless, 'just houseless,' as she says.

I spent parts of this film wondering if something terrible was going to happen, but it's not that kind of story at all. The worst thing happened before the start, and all the rest is — just life. There's no plot to speak of, but that's okay too.

And though the scenery is bleak, it's also beautiful.

See in Letterboxd

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (Books 2022, 1)

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 16:07:53 +0000

This extremely short book is only a novella, but it took me some time to get through it because of the density and obscurity of the prose. James is, I think, notorious for writing long sentences, but that’s only part of it. It’s the textural density, the complexity, and, I think, the wilfully archaic (even for the time) formulations, that make it hard work.

It’s a ghost story, though the status of the ghostly presences is disputed, or at least discussed: are they all in the governess’s mind? The bulk of the tale is the first-person narrative of the governess, but it starts with an odd framing sequence of tales being told round a Christmas-eve fireplace. One of the company is reminded of a manuscript he has, and sends for it. The rest is him ‘reading’ from it. And I’m not sure that ‘framing’ is the right term here, because we never return to the reading party. It seems like a device to let James write from the point of view of a woman.

Once you attune yourself to the style, it’s pretty compelling. Chilling in places.

Don't Look Up, 2021 - ★★★½

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 22:37:41 +0000

Fun, if bleak, satire about the end of the world. Two astronomers try to get people — though mainly a Trump-esque US administration — to believe that a civilisation-ending comet is on course for Earth. With predictable results.

See in Letterboxd

Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod (Books 2021, 28)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 12:25:08 +0000

Ken posted about this on his blog, along with a link to the first chapter on the publisher’s site. I read the chapter and instantly ordered the book from my local bookshop. Finished it on New Year’s Day, so it counts as 2021.

He describes it as ‘the first volume of the Lightspeed Trilogy’, and adds that ‘the second volume is well underway.’ Which is fine, but I usually make it a rule not to start unfinished serieses. So not so much a rule as a preference, let’s say.

This particular book ends in a way that is satisfactorily complete, but open enough for the followups to go in all sorts of directions. Plenty of unanswered questions, but none so burning that the wait should be annoying.

It’s set in 2070, after that initial chapter which is three years earlier. Humanity is about to develop lightspeed travel. Or it already has. What intelligences will be waiting out there? Some people think the answer is ‘none’, because of the Fermi Paradox.

The political situation is interesting. The countries of the world have largely coalesced into three blocks: the Alliance, which is the Anglosphere minus Scotland and Ireland, but including India; the Union, which is most of Europe including Scotland and Ireland; and the Coordinated States, which is Russia and China. We don’t hear anything about Africa or the Middle East. There has been (or is ongoing) an event called the Cold Revolution.

Also artificial intelligences are commonplace, including androids that are essentially indistinguishable from humans.

And if you need to build a starship, obviously you’re going to add the FTL drive to a submarine. And where do you build such ships? On the Clyde, of course. A lot of this is set in places from my childhood, which is fun for me.

Lost at Christmas, 2020 - ★★★

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 15:48:22 +0000

That strangest of things, a Scottish Christmas film. A very low budget, fun enough, story about two people meeting on Christmas Eve and getting stranded in a lonely inn in Glencoe.

Clare Grogan features in a very small part. Even though there is singing, she doesn't sing, which is a shame.

And for a seasonal Doctor Who connection, both Sylvester McCoy and Frazer Hines are also in it.

Starting the Year (and a Brief Look Back)

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 14:33:40 +0000

2022. That’s a lot of 2s. Though just wait till the 2nd of February.

Happy New Year to one and all. Who knows what 2022 will bring, but let’s hope it’s at least some relief from the difficulties of 2020 and 2021. But the coronavirus doesn’t care about calendars, and neither does viral evolution.

Anyway, I posted 143 times in 2021, which is broadly in line with recent years. Here’s the breakdown, because why not?

Month	Posts
Jan	22
Feb	12
Mar	17
Apr	14
May	10
Jun	11
Jul	12
Aug	6
Sep	14
Oct	6
Nov	8
Dec	11

2020’s stats, and 2019’s.

This Site Now Has a Dark Theme

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 14:54:05 +0000

As you’ll have noticed if you’re looking at this post on a device set to dark mode, I’ve added a dark theme. At the moment it’s just automatic: if your device is set to dark you get the dark mode, if light, you’ll see it as it has been for the last year and a half. I might add an option switch at some point.

Let me know if anything looks weird.

Mary Poppins Returns, 2018 - ★★★½

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 11:02:21 +0000

Fun sequel to a Disney classic. Good songs, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Probably not as memorable as the original.

See in Letterboxd

A Note I'd Like to Send Back Through Time

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 16:15:55 +0000

If you’re dealing with family photos back in the seventies, eighties, nineties, it’s great that you write the date and place on the back (thanks, Mum). That’s super useful. But could you please name the event and the people, too?

Yes, of course, you know what it was and who they were. But you’re not writing it for you. You’re writing it for your descendants, decades later, who want to know who these people were.

Why yes, I am scanning some old family photos, why do you ask?

Oh, and also: don’t waste film on scenery. The Scottish hills and moors are lovely, but I’m not interested in scanning old photos of them. Give me people, family, friends. Give me backgrounds, the wallpaper in the old house. Show me bookcases, wood-effect stereo systems. Old streets and shop signs.

And people, above all, people: that’s what casual photography should be for.

You know what no one took pictures of in the film days? Food. I’d actually love to see some old Sunday roasts or birthday cakes, but I don’t suppose they’d look that different from today’s.

Planetfall by Emma Newman (Books 2021, 27)

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:14:15 +0000

This is a novel about a human colony on an unnamed planet. There are, as we soon learn from the first-person narrator, Renata, lies and mysteries at the heart of the colony. Not least of those is how and why the humans came to live on this particular planet, in this particular place.

The place is at the foot of a mountain-like, biological, probably engineered structure they call the ‘City of God’. Twenty years ago — or more: the colony has existed for twenty years, but it’s not clear how long the journey through space took — a small group of humans managed to get there in a spaceship. They were led by ‘The Pathfinder’, a woman who, we discover through flashbacks, knew what planet to head for because of a revelation she had had after ingesting the seed of a mysterious plant.

The intrigue of the novel is about how that backstory and the rest is filled in, how the colony keeps going, and what happens in the ‘now’ of the story, when a mysterious human arrives.

How they designed and built a ship capable of getting there is not explained, and how far away from Earth it is is never stated. But I don’t think Newman really understands the scales applicable to astronomical distances. On several occasions characters refer to having travelled (or in flashback, being about to travel) ‘millions of miles’ to get to the new planet.

Our sun is 93 million miles from the Earth. If we’re talking about distances that are sensibly expressed in terms of millions of miles, then we’re talking about places inside our own solar system. And this is definitely not that.

Just to check, I asked Siri how far in miles it is to Alpha Centauri. It looked up Wolfram Alpha and told me, ‘About 25.8 trillion miles.’ That’s the closest star system to our own. It’s not wrong to call that ‘millions of miles’, but it’s not exactly accurate. A trillion, after all, is a million million. And that’s just the closest system.

It doesn’t affect the story, but it’s a weird thing for an SF writer to have missed, for no beta reader to have picked up, for an editor working at an SF publisher not to have caught.

Other than that, she does a great job of telling a first-person narrative from the point of view of someone who has some mental issues. All narrators are unreliable, and perhaps this one more so than usual. So we wonder how much we can rely on her telling of what happens, especially at the end.

There’s a religious background to this: the Pathfinder believed — and convinced those who came with her — that they would find God in the mysterious ‘city’. Did they? Maybe, maybe not.

It’s part of a four-book series, which apparently can be read in any order. The next one (in terms of when they were written) looks like it takes place back on Earth, so we may learn nothing more about what happened in the colony, which was cut off from home.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots (Books 2021, 26)

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 18:15:30 +0000

The title comes from ‘henchman’ — or -woman. We are in a world where superheroes exist, and thereby, also super villains. Anna Tromedlov works as a ‘hench’ — or tries to. As the novel starts she’s using a temp agency, trying to pick up work.

At first it seems to be a comedy, but then she’s at a press conference given by the villain she’s working for, when the heroes arrive. Things get a lot darker.

Are superheroes, with their disregard for public safety, the real danger in a world like this? This novel takes a good look at that question, with accompanying adventure, threat, and romance.

It’s good. Cory Doctorow recommended it.

If she didn’t start out planning to call herself ‘The Palindrome’, would you ever think to read her surname backwards?

Pour One Out for Joe

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 22:20:33 +0000

Or maybe that should be ‘flame one up for Joe’, considering his preferences. It’s the anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death today. Nineteen years. I still miss him.

'Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021 - ★★★★'

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 10:52:47 +0000

Pretty good follow-on from the earlier Spider-Man films. My daughter tells me ‘All the fan theories were right.’ I wasn’t aware of them, so I hope that’s not a spoiler for anyone.

Turned out Doctor Strange (long my favourite Marvel character) wasn’t being quite as idiotic as I’d thought from the trailer, so that was good. Sets things up nicely for his next film.

See in Letterboxd

Comet Weather by Liz Williams (Books 2021, 25)

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 12:56:23 +0000

An enjoyable present-day story of magic in Somerset and London. Mostly the country, with Glastonbury and Avebury and such places featuring in passing.

Four adult sisters are making their different ways in the world, but their mother disappeared a year ago. Ghosts and the spirits of stars sometimes wander the family home, where one of the sisters still lives, and the others come and go. A comet is due in the sky soon, and magic threats appear to be building.

Magic realism, you could call it, in the sense that it’s set in the real worlds and magic is just there, for this family and a few other people at least. Everyday problems of relationships and such are part of it. The boyfriend of one of the sisters is a ghost.

I enjoyed it, and will probably read the sequel, which is out. My main problem with it was that the four sisters' voices weren’t distinctive enough. The story is told from their multiple viewpoints. This is helpful to me, because it’s something I’m struggling with myself. Indeed, my supervisor suggested that maybe I shouldn’t have so many viewpoints.

Three. I have three. Hands up who thinks that’s too many?

A Song Needs Words

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 15:58:51 +0000

On What a Song Is

It seems like I’m increasingly often hearing people — especially, but not exclusively, Americans — referring to things as ‘songs’ that are not, in fact, songs.

For example, Doctor Who does not have a theme song. Nor does Eastenders — though long ago a song using the Eastenders theme music made a dent in the UK charts.

Red Dwarf and Firefly, to take two more science-fictional examples, do have theme songs.

Because here’s the truth of it: it’s not a song if it doesn’t have words. One or more human voices singing (because the verb sing goes with the noun song, obviously) is what is needed to make a piece of music into a song.

Those first examples above? Those are theme tunes. It’s not hard to understand the difference. For the Eastenders-based hit, somebody wrote words to go with the music; somebody sang it.

I’ve been thinking of this as a recent thing, people referring as ‘songs’ to pieces of music without words. But I recalled why Eastenders came to mind. Long ago in the distant past (the 80s) I had a housemate who had an American girlfriend. That programme came on the telly, and she said, ‘Oh, I love this song.’

Much more recently, on the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP), John Siracusa was trying to locate a beeping sound that something in his basement was making.¹ It was a series of electronic tones, played in a melodic fashion. a little tune, in other words. But he repeatedly referred to it as a ‘song’. Which it very definitely was not.

Other Takes

I’m not saying there are no grey areas here. What about the voice used as an instrument, where it only makes wordless tones; mouth-music, as we used to call it? Or pieces that are largely instrumental, but have one vocal piece thrown in, like Glenn Miller’s ‘Pennsylvania 65000’, where the band stop playing at a couple of points and shout the title?

Or Mendelssohn has a series of pieces entitled ‘Songs Without Words’. What are those, then?

Birdsong, or whale songs? The clue there is in the adjectives, of course: just as nut milk is a milk-like drink made from the relevant nut (or similarly, oats, soya, etc), so birdsong is a song-like thing made by a bird.

Since I’m seeing this as mainly an American thing, let’s consult America’s favourite dictionary, Merriam-Webster:

Definition of song (noun)

the act or art of singing

poetical composition

a) a short musical composition of words and music
b) a collection of such compositions

a distinctive or characteristic sound or series of sounds (as of a bird, insect, or whale)

a) a melody for a lyric poem or ballad
b) a poem easily set to music

a) a habitual or characteristic manner
b) a violent, abusive, or noisy reaction (put up quite a song)

a small amount (sold for a song)

3a is the key one in my argument, clearly. 5a moves disturbingly in the opposite direction, since it refers to ‘a melody’. But since the melody is specifically ‘for a lyric poem or ballad’, the fundamental need for words still stands.

In the end, if it hasn’t got words, it’s not worth a song.

Spoiler: it was the freezer. ↩︎

Boosted

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 12:31:00 +0000

Just got my booster vaccination. I now have a dose of Moderna sloshing around my veins. So we’ll see how that interacts with the previous two Oxford-AstraZeneca doses.

Yes, we should be sending all this extra vaccine to poorer countries, because that would be the right thing to do, the moral thing. But even for self-preservation, we should be doing that. Every infected person is a mutation factory, so the fewer infected people there are in the world, the less chance there is of a mutation that’s vaccine-resistant or worse.

That’s self-preservation on a societal scale. But that same sense, at a personal level, lets me say, if they’re offering it here, I’m going to take it.

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones (Books 2021, 24)

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 17:25:49 +0000

I read this because I happened on an article about it on Tor.com: ‘Diana Wynne Jones’ The Time of the Ghost Breaks All the Rules of How To Write a Book’, by Emily Tesh. Let’s ignore the incorrect possessive apostrophe in the title¹; it was the assertion about it breaking all the rules that drew me, made me want to read the article. A few paragraphs in I realised that I wanted to read the book, and the article was heading deep into spoiler territory. So I stopped reading it and downloaded the book. Read it as soon as I finished the last one.

It’s the story of four neglected sisters, whose parents run a boys' boarding school and have no time for anything else, including their daughters; and of a ghost that is haunting them, and who might be one of them. And of an ancient darkness that the sisters accidentally invoked.

But the real darkness is the neglect.

Highly recommended, and the article I linked above is very good and insightful (but deeply spoilerific) too.

Jones is not plural, so it should be Jones’s. ↩︎

'The Beatles: Get Back, 2021 - ★★★★★'

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 12:51:36 +0000

I already wrote about watching the first part, but the whole thing is just as fantastic.

The middle episode does feel like it has some 'middle volume of a trilogy' longueurs. It definitely dips a bit. But that reflects the state of the band at the time. They're trying to bounce back from George walking out and returning, they've moved from the Twickenham warehouse to a new studio in their Apple HQ, and they're rethinking the whole project.

They're contemplating what it's all about.

The third part leads up to the famous rooftop live performance, which is glorious, and delightfully presented with split-screen images showing interviews with people in the street below and two bobbies coming in with 'Thirty complaints about noise.'

I wrote before that this is only for the true fan, but I think the third part would work even if you only have a passing interest.

See in Letterboxd

The French Dispatch, 2021 - ★★★★

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 12:42:52 +0000

Wes Anderson's latest is a wild romp, slightly incoherent at times -- or, not incoherent, exactly but confusing in a good way. Until you realise afterwards that it did all hang together and make sense.

It tells the tale -- several tales -- of the eponymous fictional magazine, which is loosely based on The New Yorker. Here, it is a supplement to a Kansas newspaper, published from a city in France.

There are four stories, wrapped in a framing sequence of the editor-in-chief dying and his will saying that the magazine should cease publication.

There's chaos, slapstick, wild events, and Anderson's usual painterly visuals. It's loads of fun.

See in Letterboxd

The Caledonian Gambit by Dan Moren (Books 2021, 23)

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 18:03:53 +0000

Dan Moren writes about Apple stuff over at Six Colours, and at Macworld and so on, but he’s also an SF writer. This is his first novel, and there are already a couple of sequels. The series is described as ‘The Galactic Cold War,’ and that’s a pretty good description.

There are several planets, linked by wormholes. From what I can tell, they’re all originally Earth colonies, but there is at least one empire and one commonwealth, and Earth itself has been conquered by the empire. No aliens, at least so far.

It’s pretty good, in an ‘SF meets cold-war thriller’ kind of way. There’s nothing groundbreaking, but a set of characters I wouldn’t mind spending more time with, and an intersting situation.

What struck me, as a Scot, was the ‘Caledonian’ part. Moren is American, but he spent some time in Scotland. Caledonia is the name of one of the colony planets – predictably, the one where most of the action happens. Part of its capital city is called Leith. Just down the coast there’s Berwick.¹ Various other towns or areas have names drawn from Scotland. It has moons called Skye and Aran. A group of terrorists or freedom fighters are called the Black Watch – though slightly oddly their leader is called De Valera.

Worth a read.

Berwick is not actually in Scotland, though it has been at various times in history. North Berwick is in Scotland. ↩︎

Get Back to Christmas

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 16:02:19 +0000

We subscribed to Disney+ last night, so that we could watch Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. I had thought it was going to be a movie, but it turns out it’s a miniseries: three two-hour episodes. The second drops today, and the third tomorrow.

It’s built from hours of footage that were recorded for the Let It Be documentary back in 1969. I remember watching that once and being disappointed by it. The main problem was that it was presented as a fly-on-the-wall thing, but the fly was aurally challenged.

In other words, you couldn’t make out much of the chatter between the guys. That, almost as much as hearing them rehearsing and working on the songs, was kind of the point.

If you were making a documentary like that today you’d probably have all the band members wearing microphone packs, as the participants in reality TV shows do, so that what they said would make it to storage. Back then, though, even if that had been practical,¹ it was far from obvious that the individual Beatles would all have complied. Plus we’d want to hear from Brian,² and Mal, and Glyn, and the other George, as well as John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

That’s a lot of microphone packs. So of course, the original producers relied on ambient miking. It’s fine when the speaker is near one of the vocal mics, or when they’re right under a boom, but otherwise… well, as I say, Let It Be was a frustrating experience.

However, technology has come a long, long, way in the succeeding fifty years. Every word in this is clear as a bell,³ undoubtedly with the help of modern digital audio editing. It’s slightly ironic to note that one of the first things the band say is that the place they’re working in – a warehouse in Twickenham – is acoustically bad. An odd choice of a place in which to work on writing and performing songs.

Anyway, as of the cliffhanger ending of episode one, this series is fucking amazing! Totally brilliant!

But only if you’re a fan. If you only take a passing interest in The Beatles, or (weirdly) none at all, you probably shouldn’t waste your time on this.

The Disneyfication of Christmas

Disney have made a genius move in launching this when they did. We will be far, far, from the only people who took out a subscription to watch this, with the intention of cancelling it after a month.

A month. What’s a month after yesterday, the 25th of November? Oh yes.

All those subscriptions that are due to renew on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? So many of them won’t be cancelled, either just to have things to watch over Christmas, or to keep the kids happy, or because people will forget with everything else going on.

I don’t mind, I’ll probably try to catch up on some of the newer Marvel and Star Wars stuff, of which there is just far, far, too much now, in my humble opinion.

But there’s not too much Beatles.

It wouldn’t, because they would have had to be wired microphones ↩︎
I don’t know what I was thinking here. Obviously Brian Epstein was dead by 1969 and isn’t in the film. My thanks to Tony for pointing this out. ↩︎
The odd line is given a subtitle, but I think those are more about Scouse accents than inaudibility. ↩︎

The Origin of Angels?

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 20:01:47 +0000

I was surprised just over three weeks ago when I learned – from the Saturday Guardian, the physical newspaper, of all things – that Doctor Who was staring the next day. I was aware it was going to be happening this autumn, certainly, but somehow I’d missed any hype about it online.

I was perhaps more surprised to learn that it was going to be a single story. Surprised, and pleased: a six-parter, just like the old days, like the ones I grew up with. Of course, back then you’d get a few four-parters and maybe a six, all across what felt like many weeks. In this case, the six parts will make up the whole season. But still. There would be cliffhangers.

Now we’re three weeks in, halfway through.

There are cliffhangers. So many cliffhangers. Cliffs hung so thoroughly that the metaphor breaks down. The whole thing even started with The Doctor and Yaz hanging upside down. Not from a cliff, but still.

Hang those cliffs. The angels have the blue box.¹ No, wait, that’s for later. Or earlier. This time haze is getting to me.

This season, series, story, whatever you want to call it, is incredible. I am loving it. If they can hold up this quality, and especially give it a good ending – stick the landing, as people say for some (I believe gymnastics-related) reason – then it could be the high-water mark of Doctor Who.

And even if they don’t manage a great ending, the ride will have been worthwhile.

But I want to get something out there before we get too much further into the series, and spoilers ahead, probably, so stop reading if you haven’t seen at least up to episode 3, ‘Once, Upon Time.’ Also if you think speculations can be spoilers. I, personally, don’t.

OK, so, we’ve seen glimpses of the Weeping Angels in these episodes. These creatures feed on time energy, and in this story, time energy is going wild, has been unleashed in dangerous ways. Whatever all that means (‘Time is evil,’ as one of the priest-triangles said).

I think we’re seeing the origin of the Weeping Angels. Or we’re going to see it. Something that happens in this story will bring the Angels into being. No idea what, mind you. I thought the Mouri in the Temple of Atropos might end up turning into them, but I think we’ve moved away from there now.

Anyway, all is well in Who-land.

I may never even write this, but I have been completely Berenstained by this phrase. I firmly remember it as blue box, and some places on the net do say that. But most say phone box, and I just played the relevant part of Blink and, indeed, that says phone. According to the transcript on Genius it goes ‘They have taken the blue box, haven’t they? The angels have the phone box.’ So both terms are used, but not the key one in the way I remember it. ↩︎

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (Books 2021, 22)

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 18:08:22 +0000

Talk about not remembering books: I’ve got to ask myself whether I ever did read this one. I remembered one thing from it, but it’s not how I remembered it. When people jack in to the matrix they use headsets – ‘trodes’ – with electrodes that connect to their temples.

There is a transition between the real world and cyberspace when they connect, and I had this memory of one cowboy (people who enter the matrix or cyberspace are called ‘cowboys’ or ‘jockeys’) who had a set of trodes that made the transition feel like the world was falling apart. I’ve been half waiting for that bit through these three books. Here’s a quote:

‘Ready?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and Tick’s room was gone, its walls a flutter of cards, tumbling and receding, against the bright grid, the towering forms of data.

‘Nice transition, that,’ she heard him say. ‘Built into the trodes, that is. Bit of drama…’

So that must be the bit I remembered, but if you had asked me I’d have said I thought it came a book or two earlier, and was mentioned more than once.

But what of the book itself? It keeps up the standard, maybe raises it slightly. We have four interconnected stories, four viewpoint characters, told in alternating chapters. One of the stories – that of Kumiko, who is experiencing the flutter of cards, above – isn’t really relevant, in the sense that it doesn’t drive the plot at all. Things that happen around her do affect the main plot, but she’s not really aware of them.

What surprised me about this and the three books overall, is how much they really are a trilogy. I had the impression that they were considered only to be very loosely connected at best; essentially three stories set in the same milieu. But in fact not only do characters recur, everything here ties back to the events of Neuromancer, which happened some fourteen years before.

All very worth reading if you haven’t already.

Songs and Singles

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 20:18:11 +0000

You’ve probably heard a song off an album – you’ve heard the album, maybe a few times, but it’s just kind of washed over you, not really made much of an impression – you hear a song, maybe on the radio, maybe some random or curated playlist, and you go. ‘Wow! What a great song!’ And then you realise it’s from that album, the one that washed over you.

That’s what singles were for. Still are for, since they’re still released, though it’s not quite the same.

I just had that experience with Radiohead. Kid A never made much of an impact on me, but when I turned BBC 6 Music on tonight, a killer track was playing. Steve Lamacq back-announced it. He was playing the whole album, and the track was ‘The National Anthem.’ I knew Kid A had a track of that name, but it had never really got to me. But there, now, tonight, it was just amazing.

A similar, if inverted, effect is when the album is so good that it kind of drowns out a brillant single. I can only think of one example of that at the moment. If you cast your mind back (assuming it goes that far) to when The Jam released ‘The Eton Rifles,’ it was an incredible song.

But Setting Sons is such a good album that I hardly notice ‘The Eton Rifles’ on it.

Anyway. Singles. Yes.

Adventures in Mac Repairs

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 17:20:00 +0000

I have a 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2017. It’s in perfect working order, except the battery was past its best. ‘Service recommended,’ it always said when I checked. But it was fine, I could get a couple of hours out of it, and I rarely use the computer away from somewhere I can plug in. Especially this last couple of years.

But the screen had developed a problem. There were marks on it that I couldn’t remove. They were kind of hard to photograph, but you can see them here:

MacBook screen with delamination marks

I discovered there was a known defect in models of that era called ‘screen delamination.’ The top layer of the screen’s coating was becoming detached from the underlying one.

People had solutions, which involved careful cleaning with various solvents or mild abrasives: isopropyl alcohol, or, I don’t know, toothpaste, maybe.¹

Inevitably, the whole affair has a ‘gate’ name: Staingate. Perhaps less inevitably, but unsurprisingly since it’s a manufacturing defect, Apple have long since acknowledged the problem and offered a free repair programme. As long as your machine was no more than four years old.

I discovered these facts back in the summer. Dug out my receipt. I bought the laptop four years and four days ago. Damn!

At the time I was deep in working towards my dissertation, so I wasn’t going to spend any more time on it. In September, though, I thought it would be worth contacting Apple support and seeing what could be done. I couldn’t get a Genius Bar appointment, but I could take it to an Apple Authorised Service Provider called MR in Shoreditch. They had a look at it and said, yes it’s the delamination thing, you’re outside the free programme, we can fix it: 800 quid.

Too much. But! they also said that it would be worth taking it in to Apple. They might, depending on who you saw, do it for free anyway.

I was slightly sceptical, and we were getting ready for a trip to Scotland at the time, so I left it. Eventually, though, I booked it into the Genius Bar.

You’re outside the programme, they said. But we’ll fix it under consumer law. No charge.

The Sale of Goods Act (or its successors) for the win again: a laptop screen should last longer than four years.

During the tests they run, the guy noticed that the battery was poorly, and offered a replacement. £199 seems steep, so I said no thanks.

Yesterday I got an email to say it was ready to pick up, so I toddled off to Westfield. The staff member who brought it out to me asked me to wait while she checked something. Came back and said, ‘You know how you rejected the battery replacement? Well it seems they did it anyway. We won’t charge you.’

So that was weird. The work note that came with it said ‘Battery won’t charge at all,’ which was not true when I took it in. But here I am with a good-as-new battery. Well, actually new.

All of this required what they call a ‘Top case replacement.’ ‘Top case with battery,’ in fact, which suggests the battery is in the screen part of the laptop, not the keyboard part, which seems weird.

The big downside – but one that had been prepared for – is that I lost all my stickers. I had heard of this kind of thing happening, so I took photographs.

The stickers on my MacBook

The questions now are how and whether to replace them.

Don’t clean your computer screen with toothpaste. ↩︎

Count Zero by William Gibson (Books 2021, 21)

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 17:30:56 +0000

The only thing I remembered about this was its opening line, which is nowhere near as memorable as that of its predecessor.

It’s also not as good as Neuromancer, by a long shot. Difficult second album syndrome, I’d imagine. It came out a year or two later. It’s not actively bad, don’t get me wrong. But it just doesn’t have the spark, it never quite catches fire, you know?

Still, plenty of gritty Sprawl-drama, and the obligatory trip to a space station.

No Country for Old Men, 2007 - ★★½

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 17:54:02 +0000

This film is infuriating. It reminded me of Shallow Grave, at least at the start, in this way: if you find a load of money that's obviously come from a drug deal gone wrong, or otherwise somehow involved in organised crime, there is one thing you should not do. That is try it keep it all, to run away with it or hide it, and expect to survive the wrath of the criminals.

The safest thing, of course, is to just walk away from it all and call the cops. But if you must get into it, then obviously what you should do is take some of the money. Not a lot. Say, 10%. An amount that the gangsters might plausibly accept as having gone missing during the the shootout, or whatever. Leave the rest, call the cops, and let them handle the aftermath. You might get away with it.

Here, the main character does exactly the wrong thing. What's worse, in story terms, is that from the start we have no one to identify with: no character who is obviously the 'hero,' if you like. No one to root for. Because it all starts off without us having any particular reason to root for Llewelyn. And as it goes on, and we do start to want him to make it — if only because the focus is mainly on him — he continues to annoyingly make terrible choices.

Worse still -- and spoilers ahead -- worse still, his story is just dropped on the floor. He doesn't even get the respect of us seeing his end. The narrative hands over to a secondary character (though to be fair, that character, the sheriff, is the first character we meet, if only in voiceover).

And the end is just... nothing.

It is by far my least favourite Coen brothers film.

See in Letterboxd

Star Ratings

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 12:38:22 +0000

Giving star ratings to things I’ve watched, read, etc, is not something I ever did until I started using Letterboxd. It looks like I started logging films in September 2019 (the August ones were a bulk mental dump when I first set up my account). I didn’t start them automatically posting here until the November, and I’m sure I’ve missed one or two along the way.

My initial thought was just to log the films that I watched, as an aide memoire as much as anything. But Letterboxd encourages you to give the films star ratings. I’ve been doing that, but all the time I wonder what exactly I mean by them.

Which sounds like a strange thing to say. I made the choices, after all: I set the rating. Surely I knew what I meant when I did it?

And that’s true enough on each occasion. I know what I mean when I give the rating. But that’s the thing: it’s what I meant at that time. All it means is what I thought of the the film at the time I added the entry to Letterboxd. I’m not trying to make a statement about what is good in absolute terms. I’m just saying something about what I thought about the film at that time.

I like to think that I judge each film on its own merits. At the very least, I try to judge it in terms of what it’s trying to achieve. A five-star drama and a five-star comedy are very different things. It won’t be very meaningful to compare the ratings I’ve given to different films and see if there’s a hierarchy of my preferences. Though it is fair to say that any film with five stars is one of my favourites.

While Letterboxd encourages star ratings, it pleases me that you don’t have to give one. Unlike, say in some online surveys, where zero is not an option. I don’t know, though, whether a Letterboxd ‘no stars’ should count as ‘zero stars,’ or just the choice not to rate it. I intended the latter with Can’t Get You Out of my Head, as I made clear in the post.

It seems that I rarely watch anything less than three-star, though. Either I’m very discerning, or I only watch things I know I’m going to like.

The Matrix Revolutions, 2003 - ★★★½

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 21:40:01 +0000

If only in the interest of being ready for the new one, it's worth being up to date with this. But actually it's a much better film than I remembered.

Sure, the Zion battle scenes go on for much too long, and the overall story is not entirely coherent; but it's much more coherent than I remembered, and just that much better. In the sense that it sits well with the second one, which I loved when it came out.

Neither of them is as good, as effective, as the first on its own, of course, but the whole ends up being more of a cohesive trilogy than I thought. XKCD notwithstanding.

See in Letterboxd

Neuromancer by William Gibson (Books 2021, 20)

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 13:40:28 +0000

I’m on a bit of a reread thing at the moment, partly because I moved some books around recently, which revealed some older ones.

This is another one that stands up really well. It has some amusing out-of-time moments, like ‘three megabytes of hot RAM’: imagine having that much computer memory! And the well-known geostationary satellite over Manhattan impossibility.¹ But we don’t let those things bother us.

What’s interesting is just how much it influenced The Matrix. It was always fairly obvious that the Wachowskis named their virtual world after Gibson’s cyberspace, though Doctor Who got there first, and possibly others did too. But there’s a scene in Neuromancer where Case sees drifting lines of code overlaid on the reality that he’s perceiving. Very much seems the inspiration for Neo seeing the Matrix.

Anyway, it’s still a fine story, with some striking prose.

You can only have a geostationary satellite over the equator, in case you don’t know. ↩︎

Our Last, Best, Hope for TV?

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 13:32:44 +0000

You wait years for a beloved three-letter-creator to return to a beloved SF show, and then two happen in one week. After the news of RTD returning to Doctor Who, we have… JMS returning to – and rebooting – Babylon 5?

I did not see that coming. And I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. Babylon 5was among my favourite programmes of the nineties. It was groundbreaking, in that it was probably the first such show to be planned from the start as a single long (five year) story. With many sub-stories and side plots along the way, as you might imagine.

It was, of course, flawed, especially in the rushed completion of season 4. They thought they were going to be cancelled, so JMS tried to tie up most of the loose ends in that season. Then season 5 was saved, and ended up being slow and underpowered by comparison.

For this proposed reboot – it’s TV, so nothing is definite till it’s in the can – he says he will ‘not be retelling the same story in the same way because of what Heraclitus said about the river’, but that ‘this is a reboot from the ground up rather than a continuation’.

If anyone else was running it, you could count me out. Straczynski could make it great again, but I sort of wonder why he wants to. Not unlike my wondering about why RTD wants to return to Who. I suppose we’re never entirely satisfied with our creations, so getting the opportunity to go back and rework them can be tempting. But I’m not sure it’s always healthy.

Still, we live in hope.

Lanark: A Life in 4 Books by Alasdair Gray (Books 2021, 19)

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 15:43:52 +0000

I read this a long time ago, and the strange thing now is that everything I remembered of it happens in the first two books: that is, in Book 3 and Book 1. As I’m sure you know, the internal books are ordered 3, 1, 2, 4.

Which sort of suggests that I didn’t finish it all those years ago, but I’m sure that isn’t the case. There were odd moments of the slightest sense of the familiar in the other books, so I guess it’s just vagaries.

Anyway, it was and remains a monumental work. It struck me as odd that the blurb describes it as ‘a modern vision of hell.’ I had never thought of it in those terms. True, Lanark’s situation is dark, difficult, and confusing, and he can be seen as Thaw after death, if Thaw dies at the end of Book 2, which seems likely. But hell? That seems extreme. Lanark has difficulties, but he’s not in a state of eternal torment.

He is, however, quite a frustrating character. He is thrown into a situation – several situations – where he doesn’t understand what is going on, or how the world works; and for the most part he doesn’t ask even the most obvious questions, or make any attempt to gain understanding. So he’s not so much protagonist as a character being pushed around by circumstance. Or by his author, whom we meet in the fourth-wall-destroying epilogue towards the end of the book.

Much more obviously, Lanark’s experiences in Unthank and beyond are a satire of late-stage capitalism. Which you could say is a form of hell, so maybe that’s what the blurb writer was getting at.

The Manchurian Candidate, 1962 - ★★★

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 14:47:43 +0000

This is a strange film. I knew the broad outline, or thought I did. An American gets brainwashed and ‘turned’ by the ‘other side’ during the Cold War, and then gets into the position of running for president. That’s not quite it, as it turns out, but it’s not far off.

The thing that surprised me, compared to how something like this would be done by a modern filmmaker, was how explicit the brainwashing was. Most modern writers and directors would, I think, be more indirect, so you’d be thinking, ‘Is he or isn’t he?’ throughout. Here it was very clear that he was, so the question was more, ‘What’s he going to do?’

Which is a perfectly fine way to tell the story, too. It was OK, through not as good as I expected, and there were some very odd pieces of dialogue (‘Are you Arabic?’) and a couple of strange jumps in the plot.

Worth a look, though, if you haven’t seen it.

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Rusty's Return

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 16:39:45 +0000

Well that answers the question I asked in July. At least the bit I described as ‘arguably more important’. Russell T Davies is going to be the new showrunner.

That’s an interesting decision, and one I have mixed feelings about. At his best he was great, and some of the things he’s done since have been stellar. And I’m astonished to find that I’ve never mentioned either Years and Years or It’s a Sin here. Not least because I can remember recommending at least one of them online. Maybe it was just on Twitter, but I don’t originate many tweets there. Nearly everything that isn’t a reply comes from here.

Anyway, the great RTD is coming back, like the 456 in Torchwood. And I’m sure it’ll be great. I just think it’s kind of sad if the BBC couldn’t find someone new to take over. There must be plenty of people willing to take it on. Both willing and capable? That’s another question. But hell, JMS¹ offered. He’s certainly capable, and it would have been amazing.

Also it’s a shame that RTD won’t get to work with Jodie Whittaker, because I think that could’ve been quite a combo.

Then there’s the reaction on much of Who-related Twitter, which seems to be, ‘Doctor Who is saved!’ When it doesn’t need saving due to having been really good for the last season and pretty good the season before that.

Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be fun.

Of Babylon 5 fame. ↩︎

First Line of Defence?

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 21:04:52 +0000

Dave Winer may be a very smart guy, who effectively invented blogging, RSS, and podcasts, but he’s lost his mind in this post:

We are now all complete newbies when it comes to understanding how networks can be used to spread misinformation. We might look back in a few years and realize that our first line of defense was Facebook, Inc. Maybe tearing them down is like the press tearing down HRC in 2016. I don’t trust their judgement on this stuff, do you?

– Dave Winer, Untitled Scripting News post

The first sentence is fair enough, but the second? Facebook is the first line of attack, rather, on our democratic freedoms. See Cambridge Analytica stories, passim. Or if not the first, then the most powerful tool in the armoury of the anti-democratic forces that plague us.

The ‘them’ he refers to is, I think, journalists. Or ‘journalism,’ as a collective entity:

I judge journalism in the aggregate.

In other words, I say “journalism” did this or that.

– Dave Winer, Journalism in the aggregate

One of the main things he does these days is to rail against journalism.

Dissertation Submitted

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:01:44 +0000

Just an hour ago I submitted my dissertation for my creative writing MA.

This means my course is effectively over. The novel is far from complete, though: I have what I think will be about a quarter of it. So we press on. But for now, I’m taking to the hammock.

An American Story by Christopher Priest (Books 2021, 18)

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 11:39:25 +0000

It was strangely timely that I decided to start reading this a few days before the 9/11 anniversary, since it concerns a man’s obsession with what happened on 9/11. The narrator is a journalist who lost his partner in the attacks. Except her name doesn’t appear on any passenger manifest, and there are multiple mysteries around the whole event.

As there are in real life. But this story takes place in a slightly altered reality. Scotland already has its independence, and England – or at least the little we see of London – has become increasingly dystopian, plagued by militarised police and surveillance.

The action switches back and forth in location between the Isle of Bute (where Priest also lives) and various parts of the USA (and sometimes those places are oddly coterminous). And also jumps around in time, from the present of the story – roughly 2017-8, when it was written and published – to before and during the 11th of September 2001, to various points between the two. It even dips a few years into the future.

It touches on ideas and discussions that are considered the domain of conspiracy theories, but largely avoids going down those rabbit holes. As one review I read said, ‘Conspiracy theories purport answers, often paranoid and outlandish; An American Story is about questions.’

It’s well worth a read, though there a couple of threads that he starts and leaves hanging, that I think would have been interesting to follow.

I usually forget to link to the books I write about. Here we are.

One Week Away

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 10:51:13 +0000

My dissertation is due in just under a week. I’m seeking an extension, because I’ve been a bit poorly and have lost a lot of work time over the last week, but I still hope to get it in on time.

But that will mean my course will be over. Which is a little bit saddening. I’ve enjoyed being a student again, even though this academic year’s particular situation has meant that the experience has been distinctly unlike a classic student one. Even, I’m sure, for Birkbeck, ‘London’s evening university.’

I have, for example, met none of my classmates in person. I’ve met exactly one member of staff, and that in the park in Gordon Square. I’ve never been in the department’s building. I’ve been into any Birkbeck building – the library – I think three times, maybe four.

Online classes have been fine, though. I wonder if creative writing, in its common workshopping format, works especially well over Teams or Zoom. Everyone takes turns to comment on the piece that’s being discussed, and there’s much less scope for interruptions, compared to in person. Of course the downside of that is that there’s less scope for conversation, for organic discussion. So we probably lost out in some ways, too.

Less, though, than students on other courses, and especially first year undergraduates. Like my daughter, who has done a year of uni and met practically no one on her course. It’s a strange state of affairs, to be sure.

But we move on. This novel extract isn’t going to dissert itself.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (Books 2021, 17)

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 16:44:16 +0000

The absence of an apostrophe in the title has disturbed me slightly since I heard of this book. I think I concluded that it was meant as a verbal statement: rainbows do end, after all. The fact that the last chapter is entitled, ‘The Missing Apostrophe’ comforts me.

The other Vinge books that I’ve read (which would appear from that to only be one, but that is misleading) are galaxy-spanning space operas. This, in contrast, is very compact in scale, being set almost entirely in San Diego, and on the net. It’s a near-future thriller about medical and technological advances and how things might be for someone who was nearly dead from Alzheimer’s and then was brought back.

It’s pretty good, but 2025, the year in which it is set, feels pretty close now. I guess it didn’t in 2006.

Big Planet by Jack Vance (Books 2021, 16)

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 19:19:56 +0000

I actually read this before the previous one, but forget to write about it. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t enjoy it very much.

Jack Vance is considered one of the greats of SF, and I realised recently that I hadn’t read anything by him. And I had this big volume that Gollancz gave away at a convention some time, containing this and two other books (another novel and a collection of short stories). A sort of literary compilation album.

But not a Greatest Hits — or if it is, then things are pretty bad.

The main problem is that it’s dated. Usually we can work around that sort of thing, and I did — look at me, all finished with it — but the main thing here is that it’s just badly written. Cardboard characters, dodgy sexual politics, and a plot that, while interesting enough to get me through it, is far too easily resolved.

And there’s the background of an Earth empire or federation or similar, that we see essentially notthing of. Instead the action is all confined to the eponymous planet. It ‘revolutionised the planetary romance,’ according to the blurb. And, indeed it was important to the form according to the linked SF Encyclopedia entry.

So much for that. All I can say is, it didn’t do a lot for me.

Whit by Iain Banks (Books 2021, 15)

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 17:39:28 +0000

The human memory is an amazing thing. In this case, it’s amazing what it’s possible not to remember.

To wit: I remembered almost completely nothing about this book. That the main character was part of an odd religious community based near Stirling in Scotland; and that she had to make a trip to London by slightly unusual means to track down a musical and possibly apostate cousin: that’s as far as my memory went.

It came out in 1995, so twenty-six years have passed since I first read it. I would have said that I had reread it once, which you would hope might lock things down a bit in the brain. But on the plus side, it meant it was almost like reading a new Iain Banks book, so in that way the forgetting was good.

As you’d expect, a great deal more happens than what I remembered. It’s another family drama, in the vein of The Crow Road¹ and The Steep Approach to Garbadale. Also has a very endearing main character, as well as religion that doesn’t sound too bad in its beliefs, apart from its rejection of most technology.

Which I note that I’ve never written about here, except indirectly. Is it time to rerereread that, do you think? ↩︎

MA Latest

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 14:33:18 +0000

I realised the other day that it’s a year ago that I was applying for creative writing MAs, before being accepted on and choosing the one at Birkbeck.

Well that went fast.

2021 feels like it’s being disappearing even faster than 2020 did, which is strange. Or maybe not. The pandemic is far from over, of course, many things are still up in the air, and it could all change again in an instant.

But I’ve been lax in reporting on what’s been going on with the course . The summer term was all an optional lecture series, which largely consisted of members of staff interviewing writers, along with one or two pieces about the craft of writing. One on the structure of the novel, and one a session with some agents.

That last one probably had the most practical value – at least potentially – but they were all interesting.

Other than that, My dissertation is due in a month. Actually now just under four weeks. It consists of 15,000 words of creative writing (plus or minus 10%, so up to 16,500), plus a 3000-word preface (also plus or minus 10%). I have 23,000 words, of which I can’t use the first five or six thousand, because I already submitted them for an earlier assessment. So there’s plenty to work with.

It feels a little odd to have paused the forward flow – I intend this to be a novel, after all – to work on editing what I have so far. But it ought to be worthwhile for the novel, as well as being necessary for my dissertation. This period of working over what I’ve already done should give me a firmer base on which to build the rest.

I think I miss classes. I only had two a week for the first two terms, and a slightly more erratic schedule averaging to one a week for the third, but they provided structure, as well as a feeling of connection with others on the course. So I’m looking forward to an informal workshop session some of us have arranged for this week.

But beyond that, the future. What’s next?

The Matrix Reloaded, 2003 - ★★★½

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 23:40:40 +0000

Watched on Saturday August 14, 2021.

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London Centric: Tales of Future London, Edited by Ian Whates (Books 2021, 14)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 14:28:12 +0000

Great collection of stories set in and around London. Or various Londons, depending on how you look at it.

Standouts for me were the opening story, ‘Skin,’ by Neal Asher, and ‘War Crimes’ by MR Carey, but there’s a lot to enjoy here, and not one bad one.

It’s good to know the science fiction short story is in a good state, despite what I said about it… err, seven years ago.

The Exes by Pagan Kennedy (Books 2021, 13)

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 16:26:14 +0000

Another one suggested by my supervisor. It’s about a band, and the novel I’m working on involves a couple of bands. And it’s also a multiple viewpoint third-person narrative, as is mine.

Like the last such, it handles the multiple viewpoints in quite an extreme way. There are four band members, and a quarter of the book is told from the point of view of each. Four chapters, no returning once one PoV is finished with.

The title is the name of the band, and their schtick is that they are all exes of someone else in the band (in practice, it’s two former couples, but there’s obviously a certain amount of will they/won’t they about any other possible hookings up).

So really it’s about the relationships, and how each person handles the pressure-cooker of being in a band together, touring, all that. Along with a fair chunk of backstory for each.

It’s set in Boston (and a few other places) in the early to mid nineties. The ending is – open, let’s say, but not in annoying way. In fact, it’s quite satisfying, though I could happily have read more.

Who's Next?

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 16:56:52 +0000

Sorry, that’s, like, the most obvious title in known space. Jodie and Chris are leaving Doctor Who after the next series and specials. Late 2022, that is.

That BBC News report is almost comically self-flagellatory. After quoting Jodie Whittaker’s hugely positive statements about the show, they say this:

While many have praised Whittaker’s casting, some fans and critics have criticised the show’s recent narrative direction.

The Telegraph described recent episodes as “flat, worthy and woke” despite Whittaker’s talent as an actress, while The Sun reported viewers were left furious by the show’s “unbearable political correctness”.

– Uncredited BBC reporter, Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall to leave in 2022

If those publications are making those criticisms, I’d say that’s a big win. Stop beating yourself up, the BBC. The programme is and remains a success, the jewel in the BBC’s crown.

Significantly further down the report they say:

Episodes such as Rosa, Demons of the Punjab and Spyfall thrilled audiences, and netted the show two Bafta Must See Moment nominations, along with multiple National Television Award, Bafta Cymru, TV Choice and Critics Choice nominations.

In 2020, Whittaker was voted second most popular Doctor of all-time in a poll of 50,000 fans for the Radio Times, losing out to David Tennant.

– As before, Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall to leave in 2022

So there you go. Now: who’s going to the the next Doctor? And – arguably more importantly – who’s going to be the next head writer?

Or will they just put the show on ice for a few years? I read a piece recently that suggested that’s what it needs to revitalise itself, citing the gap from 1989 to 2005 as the model.

I hope they don’t do that. In fact, if it needs revitalisation at all, then last season’s big revelations about the Doctor’s origins are just what they need for that. You could, for example, have a season or two of Jo Martin’s Doctor. She’d be great, though such a move would confuse people, since it would be in the past of the Doctor we know.

We can only look forward to finding out.

Dragonfly, or Not?

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 14:51:53 +0000

In Dragonflies and The Twisties, Austin Kleon writes about dragonflies.¹ He links to a Washington Post article from 1989 by Henry Mitchell. It’s about gardening, and it contains the wonderful line (of the insects in question), ‘They are nothing but good and fair, a sufficient reason for summer to exist.’

Coincidentally, I was in the sitting room with the window open the other day, and one flew in. I’ve only seen them very occasionally in the wild, skimming along above a river or pond. I’ve always found them slightly disturbing, because they’re so big for an insect. It’s an echo of the utter revulsion I remember feeling in a biology lab back in my schooldays, where there were stick insects. Some people were happy to take them out and hold them, but I could barely stay in the room.

It’s borderline phobic, I realise: stick insects don’t even do anything, they just sit there being camouflaged and inoffensive. But there’s nothing we can do about that kind of gut reaction.

Except maybe allow time to pass. Back in the sitting room with the visiting dragonfly, I was surprised, but felt more fascination than revulsion. I closed the door so it wouldn’t go further into the house, opened the window wide, and waited to see if it would go out. There wasn’t much else I could do: even if it settled, it was much too big to catch under a glass to release outside, as I would a spider.

The pattern of its flight was strange and erratic-seeming. Very different from the flies, wasps, and moths that much more commonly come into houses. Something to do with those double wings and that long tail, maybe. It pootled around, approached the window a couple of times, without going for the open part, but didn’t bang itself against the glass as the smaller visitors do.

Once it rested up on the plaster moulding near the ceiling.

Eventually it flew towards the window again, found the opening, and was gone. It’s a short walk, and a shorter flight, down to the River Lea, its likely habitat round these parts. But I wonder what brought it all the way up here.

And now looking at the Wikipedia article, I wonder if it was actually a damselfly:

Dragonflies can be mistaken for the related group, damselflies (Zygoptera), which are similar in structure, though usually lighter in build; however, the wings of most dragonflies are held flat and away from the body, while damselflies hold their wings folded at rest, along or above the abdomen. Dragonflies are agile fliers, while damselflies have a weaker, fluttery flight.

I’m not sure how it held its wings when it rested, but that ‘weaker, fluttery flight’ does sound more like my interesting summer visitor.

And also about the incredible Simone Biles. ↩︎

Passport to Pimlico, 1949 - ★★★★

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 02:29:21 +0000

I think I probably saw this classic Ealing comedy, or part of it, when I was a kid, but it was good to watch it properly on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Set a few years after the Second World War, it tells the story of the discovery of a hoard of treasure and a royal proclamation that makes Pimlico in London part of the ancient Duchy of Burgundy. The locals promptly claim the treasure and proclaim their independence from the UK.

Problems ensue for the Home Office -- or does the Foreign Office have jurisdiction?

The ending is a little weak, but it's a lot of fun getting there.

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Multiple Points

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 15:28:46 +0000

Just last month I wrote Single Points, about the Fastly CDN outage. This morning many, many sites were down or inaccessible because of an outage at Akamai. A content delivery network again, though they’re saying the outage is caused by ‘edge DNS.’ I’m familiar with DNS, but not the ‘edge’ variant. In fact, I realise it’s capitalised and is the name of an Akamai product or service.

More evidence that the increasing centralisation of internet services is a problem. On the plus side, it was resolved quickly. When a service provider has the kind of major clients we’re talking about here, then that company is going to have to be able to respond quickly and get things back up. If a random small or midlevel company ran all its own server hardware and software, an outage would only inconvenience that company’s customers. But the company would need to have the staff available to sort the problems out. That would be a large and arguably unnecessary overhead.

So I understand the desire to offload responsibilities to a service provider, and the economies of scale that a company specialising in running network services can bring. But I fear it’s only a matter of time before one of these events results in serious damage or even loss of life.

Not that I’m claiming to know what the answer is.

Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden (Books 2021, 12)

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 15:11:30 +0000

A famous film director arrives in ‘the Italian city of B’ to attend a festival and premiere his new film. He meets a woman who shows him a graffiti mural that was painted by her dead boyfriend.

The whole thing takes place over two or three days, and each chapter is a single paragraph. The latter is kind of annoying, because it makes it hard to find a good place to stop reading. Also all the dialogue is integrated into the paragraphs without speech marks. This kind of different way of representing dialogue is becoming increasingly common, it seems to me.

The story’s good, though I found the ending a little weak. And slightly reminiscent of the ending of The Magus, strangely. That same sense of slightly-incomplete explanation.

Black Widow, 2021 - ★★★★

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 22:05:54 +0000

I was last in a cinema in February 2020, to see Parasite. Today I went to the same cinema to see Black Widow. It was great and strange and moving to be back in a cinema at all, and when the Marvel ident started playing at the start... well, it was pretty special.

And the film itself is great. I'm not going to say too much about it, obviously, but it's a fitting debut for Black Widow in a solo film, and farewell for Scarlett Johansson playing the character.

At the screening I went to, at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon, there were my daughter and me in row H; one guy sitting two or three rows in front and far off to one side; and somebody sitting right up the back and also far off. So it wasn't like we were crowded in with people like in the old days. That was quite comforting, but I can't imagine the film is grossing the way Marvel ones have tended to. Still, everyone knows why that is.

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Summerwater by Sarah Moss (Books 2021, 11)

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 22:55:38 +0000

My other dissertation supervisor, Julia Bell, suggested that I read this. It’s a multiple-viewpoint work, which is something I’m doing. This one takes it to extremes, though. Each chapter is from the point of view of a different character, and we never go back to any of them.

They’re all members of families who are staying at holiday park of log cabins deep in the Highlands of Scotland, one week when the rain never stops.

It does an excellent job of showing us the inner lives of the different people, as well as the minutiae of what goes on at the park in such difficult circumstances (no internet, miles from anywhere, and constant rain).

And the ending is – well, it’s something else, I’ll say that.

Hinton by Mark Blacklock (Books 2021, 10)

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 11:13:00 +0000

The author is one of my MA supervisors, so take that under advisement, I guess.

This is a historical novel, based on the real life of Charles Howard Hinton, a Victorian mathematician who studied the idea of a fourth spatial dimension. In fact, at least from this I’d go further: he believed in the existence of such a dimension. He, I learned, was the originator of the term tesseract, which – as I’m sure you know – is the four-dimensional equivalent of a cube.

So much for that. What of the story? It’s interesting, a little odd, and slightly experimental, in terms of its telling. It makes use of letters, diagrams, and other documents from Hinton’s life. But a lot of the really interesting bits of Hinton’s life – his bigamous marriage and being convicted for the same, and subsequent departure for, and time in, Japan, for example – are told largely offscreen. Or second-hand and partially, via some of those letters.

Which is all fair enough, but I feel that we didn’t really get to know Hinton as a person. I could have done with more of that. In fact we get to know some other members of his family slightly better, as the story’s focus changes in the second half.

The book is split into sections called ‘Point,’ ‘Line,’ ‘Square,’ ‘Cube,’ ‘Tesseract,’ ‘Cube,’ ‘Square,’ ‘Line,’ ‘Point.’ Numbered chapters or subsections, 1 to 14, are included across the first ‘Line’ and ‘Square.’ But chapter 9 is missing, or skipped. I kept trying to find some mathematical reason for this – 9 is a square number, of course, but it’s not the only square number in the list, and there’s nothing special about 9 in the text, that I noticed. Nor is it one of the numbers we associate with a cube. Six faces, eight vertices, but not nine of anything. So I suspect it’s actually a mistake. I might email Mark and ask him.

I first came to know of Hinton through Rudy Rucker’s books. The fourth dimension is one of Rucker’s great interests, along with infinities, so Hinton was bound to come up. Apparently I’ve never mentioned Rucker on my site before. That’s a little surprising, but I suppose it’s a good few years since I read anything by him. I’m slightly surprised to find he’s still alive: I thought I remembered hearing of his death (and was surprised I hadn’t noted that here). Oh well, the Mandela effect, I suppose.

Lastly, I noticed it was on the list of eligible titles for this year’s Clarke Award (and my apologies for linking to Medium). Which is odd, as it’s not really a novel of the fantastic in any way (except maybe, the slightest hint of something towards the end). But it wouldn’t be the first novel the the Clarke Award has noticed for which that is true. And Hinton wrote some SF himself, and inspired various SF writers as well as Rucker, so it kind of sits near the genre.

Hit Me Up in the Comments

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 16:43:14 +0000

It’s been a long time coming. When I moved my website to Nikola last year, I said:

All the comments on the blog will disappear. They’re not lost, and I plan to get them back, but I need to find the best way to do that. For now, comment via Twitter or Micro.blog.

– Me, Last year

Getting them back, and setting up another system for comments, has taken me till now. I’ve had other things on my mind.

That post was in April 2020. In May I wrote about various commenting systems I had experimented with:

But Disqus is known to track its users and show ads, and I don’t want that for anyone who might comment here. … So far I’ve tried:

Isso: you have to run a service on your site. I couldn’t get the service to respond.

Staticman: I couldn’t get its service to start. A problem with configuring the private key setting.

Remarkbox: at the time of writing this is still active, but I’m not sure I’ll keep it. It works like Disqus, in that the comments are hosted on a third-party site, which is not really in keeping with the whole static site/indieweb ethos. It’s not advertising driven like Disqus, but it behaves a bit strangely, at least on here. We’ll see, though.

– Also me, Not quite so long ago

Remarkbox was active for a while. It worked, but it was just too weird in the way it handled users. I also tried Intense Debate, which is made by Automattic, the WordPress people, and is hosted on their servers. It worked, but I could only post comments using Chrome, for some reason. I’m a Safari user, and even if I weren’t, that’s a no-no.

So for a while I didn’t have comments at all. I wonder if anyone noticed.

But recently I tried Isso again, and something clicked this time. It worked more or less without me having to do anything – at least, that is, when I ran it from the command line on my server. When I ran it as a service – that is, automatically, in the background, the way something like that needs to run – it just didn’t work. A bit of Ducking led me to this post, which, despite being partly about Apache, when I use Nginx, gave me the pointers I needed to get it all working.

Isso keeps the comments on my server, rather than being an external service, so it’s much more in keeping with the principle of owning my own content. And I’ve imported the old comments from the WordPress site. I got some error messages when I ran the import, so I don’t know if they all made it over, but at least some of them are here.

I need to work on the styling a bit, I think, but other than that it’s all good to go.

Not So Quiet

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 14:48:27 +0000

Just over a year ago I was posting, in passing, about ‘the quiet of early lockdown.’ Actually that particular phrase was a quote, but I was definitely aware of how quiet things were outside.

Including – particularly, in fact – in our back gardern. We live in a terrace, which means there are other people’s back gardens in all directions around us, and quite close. A year ago it was quiet, not just from the lack of cars in the distance, of planes overhead, but also because no one much was in their gardens.

Today, it’s a cacophony: music playing, dishes clattering, children shouting… I guess it’s part of our return to ‘normal’ – or toward ‘normal,’ at least. But it’s strange. It suggests that, last year in spring and early summer, people were scared to go out, not just into the streets, into shops, but into their own gardens.

No one caught Covid over a garden fence. Or so I imagine. At the same time, it didn’t hurt to be cautious.

Not Killing It

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 21:50:36 +0000

We got to the end of The Killing tonight.

Don’t read on if you care about spoilers.

OK?

What a disaster of an ending that was! There are ways to bring a series to a close without having the lead character act completely out of character!

Jesus. What an utter letdown for what was mainly a really good series, if frustrating in places (call for backup! And turn the lights on!) and repetitive in others (too many politicians who might be corrupt or maybe it’s their advisors doing things without being asked).

Anyway. The Bridge and Borgen are both better. If that’s not too alliterative.

Two Weeks

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 07:45:15 +0000

They say the vaccines give maximum resistance ‘two to three weeks’ after the second dose. I hit the two-week mark yesterday, and now consider myself ‘maxinated,’ more or less.

So I’m going swimming later today. It has been approximately fifteen and a half months since I last swam. Back in February 2020 and the preceding months, I was going two or three times a week, most weeks. So I’ve missed it.

I had hoped to go to London Fields Lido: start outdoors, to keep things maximally safe. But it’s all booked up till Monday, so I’m going to the much closer, but less busy, King’s Hall, my local pool.

Both, predictably, require bookings, so there’s little chance of them being crowded.

In other covidian matters, remember back in March last year, when I shared a video of someone showing how to clean your shopping? And then I quickly walked it back, on better advice? Well, at that point we were already wiping down all items arriving in the house, much as the guy in the video was doing. And we continued to do it. I’ve used more antiseptic wipes this last year than I’ve owned in any previous year.

Yes, we soon learned that Covid was almost entirely transferred by air, and hardly by surfaces at all (though we also learned the word ‘fomite'). But the idea that anything crossing the threshold was a potential infection vector burned deep, and remained.

Now, post vaccination, post maxination, will we keep on doing that? Probably not. It’d be nice to get the time back when bringing the shopping home or receiving a delivery. But I don’t know, it could take a while to stop feeling suspicious of things that have come in from out there.

Covid has made germophobes of us all.

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch (Books 2021, 9)

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 14:48:36 +0000

The second of Aaronovitch’s series about the division of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical goings-on. It’s a fun romp – I laughed more often than you might expect.

I don’t know how long ago I read the first one, Rivers of London, but I didn’t write about it here, and it must be a while, because I don’t remember much of it. Still, the backstory is handled nicely here, so I could get by fine.

A lot of it is about jazz and jazz musicians. It’s likely to make you check out the odd track.

Single Points

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:35:07 +0000

I noticed that GitHub was down this morning – or not down, exactly, but its web pages were profoundly broken. I tried different browsers, then jumped on Twitter to see if it was widely reported.

It was. People were saying the problem was Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN). Also that it was affecting other sites. I don’t know when CDNs started being a thing. I think they might have been recommended by some when I was still using WordPress. The idea being that a CDN can host your site’s static assets – images, mainly – while WordPress carries on with the dynamic bits, generating HTML pages on the fly, as it does. The CDN’s scale will mean it can serve those files faster than your little server.

I didn’t bother with them, not having that much traffic. But in the back of my mind there was always the thought, ‘What if the CDN goes down?’ The idea, of course, was that the CDN would be big, multiply-redundant, reliable: it’s not going to go down!

Here’s a CNN report about the outage. It affected a lot more than GitHub, it seems.

So, are CDNs single points of failure? Obviously there’s more than one CDN, but if the failure of any one can disable large chunks of the web, do they put us in a better position?

Jonathan Richman and the Handwritten Interview

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 13:58:43 +0000

Great story about interviewing Jonathan Richman, by writing a letter to him and receiving one back.

‘Jonathan doesn’t use the internet, email etc. and has never owned a computer or cell phone.’

– Oscar Zambuto, An interview with American music legend Jonathan Richman – all in handwriting

Though he does have an assistant who can say that.

Friends: The Reunion, 2021 - ★★★

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:42:25 +0000

It was fine. Good to see what they're all like now. Some funny bits.

Slightly surprised to find that this is on Letterboxd, because it's not what you'd normally think of as a movie, but hey.

See in Letterboxd

That Summer Feeling

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 13:25:39 +0000

I’m sitting in the garden, writing on my iPad, and am wearing shorts for the first time this year (not counting cycling and exercising). Summer is here.

Also listening to Psychocandy. The Jesus and Mary Chain are a surprisingly summery band. Well, not that surprising, considering their surf-pop influences.

‘Feedback-strewn pop narcosis,’ as an uncredited Apple Music contributor describes ‘Just Like Honey.’

It's Never Good When a Useful Site Gets Bought

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:43:26 +0000

News comes out that Stack Overflow is being bought by something called Prosus. I’ve never heard of them, but they’re ‘a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world,’ to quote their own site.

This doesn’t bode well. Stack Overflow is without doubt the most useful site in the world, at least as far as programming and other technical matters goes. And its sub-sites cover a vast range of interests beyond the technical: use of English for both beginners and experienced people, for example; or science fiction; parenting, martial arts, the great outdoors, and a hundred more.

When a big company buys up a small one, it rarely ends well for the users of the small company’s products or services, or so it seems to me. Yahoo bought Flickr and let it largely wither on the vine.¹ Similarly with Del.icio.us. Google has bought numerous properties and either rolled them into its own products, or abandoned them.

In this case the purchaser is not a technology company itself, but just a holding company. Those ones tend to result in the bought company coming under pressure to make more money. The buyer wants to recover its investment. That tends to end up with the the bought company either selling intrusive advertising space, or selling its customers' data.

It doesn’t have to go that way. Maybe this Prosus will be different. But I can’t help thinking it’s a sad day for mutual help on the web.

It’s much better again now that it’s owned by SmugMug. ↩︎

Vax 2

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 14:52:50 +0000

Got my second dose of the vaccine today, just about an hour and a half ago. Down to a local pharmacy, fifteen minutes early for my appointment, and home before my actual appointment time. It was empty! Worryingly so. Why aren’t people queuing up to get their jags?

Me, after vaccination, with the pharmacy in the background

Can't Get You Out of My Head, 2021

Sun, 30 May 2021 22:28:24 +0000

Convention dictates that I should give a star rating to this. I’m not going to, though, because I’m not sure what it was trying to achieve. What I try to do with star ratings is judge how well, in my opinion, the film achieves what it was trying to do. I don’t claim I always manage that, but when it’s not clear what the film’s purpose was, it becomes next to impossible.

Or: you can’t reduce something as long and complex, audacious and challenging as this, to a mere zero-to-ten scale. ¹

Across six films, totalling around seven hours, Adam Curtis gives us ‘An Emotional History of the Modern World,’ as the subtitle calls it. As I mentioned in my last post, Kerry Thornley of Discordian fame is interviewed early in it. That is, an interview with him is used. He’s dead, so it’s not like he was interviewed for these films. Indeed, as far as I can tell, nothing was shot for these films: the visuals are entirely comprised of library footage.

Curtis narrates over them — sometimes with quite a disconnected effect, where the images have no obvious connection to the story he’s telling. Similarly, the use of music can be quite jarring. Sometimes it’s completely relevant to the matter at hand, but often there’s no obvious connection. And the titular Kylie song is not used at all.

It’s not even that obvious why the series is called that, come to think of it. And some of the individual episode titles are even more opaque, notably the last one: ‘Are We Pigeon or are We Dancer?’ I feel sure it’s a quote, and I think it’s probably from a song, but I was alert to it turning up, and as far as I could tell, it didn’t.

OK, a quick DuckDuck gives mainly hits about the episode, but also some about a track by The Killers called ‘Human,’ which includes the line ‘are we human or are we dancer?’ So it’s probably alluding to that. Oddly that line is inspired by a Hunter S Thompson quote that I’m not familiar with, ‘We’re raising a generation of dancers.’ Which sounds pretty good to me, even if Hunter meant it critically.

Anyway, what’s this absurdly long film about?

It’s a bleak, depressing, but nonetheless compelling vision of human history, covering conspiracies and conspiracy theories, wars, revolution, surveillance capitalism, and capitalism more broadly, the tension between the collective and the individual, and a whole hell of a lot more.

But Curtis never gives a thesis statement. He never tells us, in the news journalist’s way, what he’s going to tell us. Or more to the point, what conclusions he’s going to draw from what he’s going to tell us. And his style is very disjointed: he dots about in time and space, with little more to connect the dots than a ‘but’: ‘But in China…’

In that particular tic, it’s not at all unlike the postmodern games of Illuminatus!.

He does come to kind of a conclusion at the end of the two-hour-long sixth episode, but it’s not a very satisfying or convincing one. Which is fair enough, I suppose. One of the recurring thoughts is the idea that society today is too complex for anyone to understand it fully. The problem with that, that he draws our attention to, is that that understanding has caused many politicians to give up trying to change things for the better, which tends to result in burgeoning corruption.

He does end with a note of possible hope, but I think I might have to watch parts of it again to get all of the nuances.

See in Letterboxd

Letterboxd supports half stars, so five stars is ten points.↩︎

Mark E Smith (Co-)Wrote a Screenplay

Tue, 25 May 2021 16:27:34 +0000

A screenplay by Mark E Smith, cowritten with Graham Duff? Sounds like it could have been great:

… Smith was an unexplored writer of strange fiction. Duff sums up the narrative of the film: “Essentially, the Fall are trying to record an EP at a studio on Pendle Hill, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of a satanic biker gang and a squad of Jacobites who have slipped through a wormhole in time.”

– John Doran, Satanic bikers, time portals and the Fall: the story of Mark E Smith’s secret screenplay

Never made, sadly, but it’s coming out as a book: The Otherwise: The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was.

BSAG On Creativity

Mon, 24 May 2021 13:53:48 +0000

The mysterious long-time blogger known only as ‘But She’s A Girl’ has some wise thoughts on how her creative process is affected by deadlines:

What I need to remember is that it is always like this. Deadlines are a fact of life and I just have to deal with them when they come up, but the pressure they impose is temporarily disastrous for my creativity. This means that I need to have solved any problems relating to the task which require creative thought long before the suffocating fog of the deadline descends. It’s also why I sometimes go quiet on this blog for weeks at a time. It’s not that I don’t have time to write here, but more that I don’t have the mental space to play around with ideas.

– But She’s A Girl, Creativity

Winter’s Writing

Fri, 21 May 2021 15:34:16 +0000

David Mitchell (the novelist, not the comedian) on Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, which is a book I love:

I’ve never understood why writers who write on writing get charged with creative onanism when artists are allowed to paint themselves until the Rembrandts come home or a work like Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra - music about music, right? - is fine with everyone

– David Mitchell, Enter the maze

It’s a fair point. There’s nothing wrong with a writer writing about a writer. I think the practice gets criticised because it became so common in literary fiction as to be a cliche.

The article also contains the revelation that Cloud Atlas was at least partly inspired by Calvino’s novel.

Sisters with Transistors, 2020 - ★★★★

Thu, 20 May 2021 22:25:31 +0000

Great look at some of the women who were the unsung originators of electronic music. Tape loops before Steve Reich, backwards tapes before The Beatles, use of feedback before The Velvets… not to mention the best TV theme tune of them all.

And all narrated by Laurie Anderson. Well worth a watch.

See in Letterboxd

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (Books 2021, 7)

Wed, 19 May 2021 17:34:25 +0000

I know, JK Rowling is a somewhat troubling figure now. When this book came out, last year, my daughter was adamant that we not buy it, because of Rowling’s anti-trans statements, and I had respected her feelings up till now; as well as having my own concerns. But… the art, not the artist, I guess? Even if I’m further enriching her by buying the art?

The truth is twofold: one, I don’t think she’s actively antithetical to trans people. She has a complex, nuanced position about various aspects of the situation, which gets blown out of all proportion on Twitter, when nuance, as it does, heads over there to die. And which, surprisingly and disappointingly for a wordsmith, she doesn’t seem able to elucidate that well.

And two, I really like the books and wanted to read it.

Furthermore, I was sick, and I had decided that I was going to treat the time on the sofa as an extension of the holiday, and not try to get back to working on the novel/dissertation till the Monday. I wanted some comfort reading, and this was what I wanted. I knew I’d rip through it in a few days, even if I was trying to work at the time. So I killed two birds with one stone.

It’s good, as ever. I don’t really understand how she makes the pages turn so fast (there are a lot of them, especially as an ebook). I did pick up a couple of typos, and some odd line break errors, which might be to do with the translation to ebook – either way, it’s very sloppy editing/proofreading by the publishers. Also some – several – places where I would have edited a line to make it better. I noticed fewer of those as the plot roared on, unsurprisingly. Which at least means I’m reading even a book like this in a more writerly fashion. Or I was at the start.

The main other weaknesses are:

Everything comes together just a bit too tidily.
There’s too much about some of the secondary cases the agency is working on, over and above the main one. Those can be interesting or amusing, and sure, it’s realistic that they’d have to have more than just a forty-year-old cold case to work on, over a year. But in the end they feel like padding.
As the denouement unfolds she uses a gimmick where the characters learn or work out something, which they relate to each other, but which is not revealed to us. It’s kind of annoying, because it’s suddenly hiding info from the reader that the characters have, where earlier in the story that wasn’t happening. I think she’s done it before in some (maybe all) of the Strike novels.

But a lot of fun, anyway.

Pastieland and Getting Sick

Fri, 14 May 2021 13:53:24 +0000

I’ve not posted here for a while. We managed a week-long trip to Cornwall – yes! Leaving home, leaving the city, staying in a rented house. It’s almost like things are getting back to normal.

Though not quite. Mevagissey is a great wee town, but it’s far from fully open yet. Almost none of the restaurants have any outside space, what with it been squeezed in between the bottom of a steep hill and the sea, so they haven’t reopened yet. The takeaways were open, but it’s a sleepy place, and most things close early.

We stayed in Tregoney House, on the hill of the same name, which I mention here as much for my own records as anything else. Nice house, though.

We got to see family and eat pasties, fudge, and fish & chips. And visit the Lost Gardens of Heligan. It was all quite exciting, really.

Then the day after we got home, I got sick. Not Covid, I’m pleased to say, but it knocked me out for about four or five days. No writing, just some reading.

I’m all better now, though, and starting to buckle down for my dissertation. It’s due in four months time, which suddenly seems perilously short.

Bernard and the Cloth Monkey by Judith Bryan (Books 2021, 6)

Mon, 10 May 2021 11:25:27 +0000

This is a story of a family – especially two sisters – and things that brought them together and pushed them apart. It varies between straightforward realist events, and ambiguous, almost fantastic scenes, which may be memories, or partly memories, or a way for the character to deal with memories.

It’s part of a series that Bernardine Evaristo has curated for Penguin, called Black Britain: Writing Back, aiming to bring lost works back into publication. This one won awards back in 1997 (even though, confusingly, the copyright date is 1998). It’s been out of print since.

Worth checking out.

Ocean's Eight, 2018 - ★★★½

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 23:06:00 +0000

A fun heist romp with a slightly flat ending. And you don’t need to have seen any of the other ‘Ocean’s’ films to enjoy it.

See in Letterboxd

A Dead Cat in Downing Street

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:23:45 +0000

This story about Boris Johnson redecorating in Downing Street is too stupid not to be a deliberate distraction. 10 Downing Street, along with 11 and others, are government buildings. Their maintenance should be paid for with government money. And since they are also places where people live, it’s not unreasonable that there should be money available for redecoration when the resident changes.

And I guess it’s also fair that the new resident can pay extra for the work, out of their own money, if they choose to do so. Any money coming from other sources would have to be declared in the Register of Members' Financial Interests.

This is all normal. If Johnson has failed to declare contributions from his party or donors, that’s the offence. It’s pretty straightforward.

So the fact that it’s filling the headlines with leaks and all, suggests it’s a smokescreen for something else.

But what?

At the Olympic Park Again

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 15:55:24 +0000

Cycled down to the Olympic Park today. Took a few photos.

I’m writing a story at the moment – a novel, part of which will form the dissertation for my MA – which is set during the London Olympics. Nine years ago. Nine years! Anyway, the ArcelorMittal Orbit will probably play a role.

OffMail

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 17:41:41 +0000

I just got an invite/reminder email about a service called OnMail. I must have signed up to be notified when it became available. Could have been months ago: they apologise for it taking so long.

They should apologise for being bad for the email infrastructure that binds the world together.

I’m exaggerating, but only a bit. Email remains the most important thing on the internet aside from the web. Whenever you sign up for a service, or order something online, you expect to get an email confirmation.¹

Without reliable email, a lot of things would fall apart.

A while back I wrote about Hey, the new email service from Basecamp. There, I was bothered by it not being based on the standard, open protocols that underlie email, at least to the extent that you can’t get your Hey email using a third-party, standard client.

OnMail seems both visually and functionally similar to Hey, and it’s got exactly the same problem.

This trend is bad for email, bad for people who use email. It should be possible to give us the kind of powerful, automated controls over our inboxes that these services offer, without stopping us from using the apps we prefer. It is possible to do that, as companies like SaneBox show.

I do not like this trend.

Oddly, I had this expectation confounded just today, when Birkbeck’s submissions system didn’t send me any confirmations about the pieces that I submitted for assessment. ↩︎

Emma., 2020 - ★★★

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 14:54:50 +0000

Watched on Saturday March 20, 2021.

See in Letterboxd

This Is England, 2006 - ★★★★

Sat, 24 Apr 2021 09:26:42 +0000

A gritty, realist tale of British skinheads in Thatcher times. We get the good skins — into ska, soul, and having Black friends. And then the bad ones — into ska, soul, racism, and joining the National Front.

But it’s mainly about a young boy whose dad died in the Falklands.

It’s good. Kate from Line of Duty (Vicky McLure) is in it, too. Disappointing that the Clash song of the same name is not used, but since that was released in 1985 and the film is set in 1983, it wouldn’t have made sense.

See in Letterboxd

Heartburn by Nora Ephron (Books 2021, 5)

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 16:55:39 +0000

When I wrote about watching When Harry Met Sally… last year, I said that ‘Nora Ephron may be my favourite screenwriter after Aaron Sorkin, where dialogue is concerned.’ The dialogue in this novel isn’t so sparkling, but the narration is.

It’s a fictionalisation of the breakdown of her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein, and it’s amazing how funny she makes it, considering how painful the experience clearly was.

Seems to be her only novel, which is kind of a shame.

The strangest thing is that the woman Bernstein had an affair with is the daughter of prime minister Jim Callaghan.

Far more interestingly, though, is that, according to Wikipedia, Ephron was one of the few people who knew the identity of Deep Throat.

None of which has anything to do with the book, which you should just read.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, 2020 - ★★★★

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 17:41:00 +0000

A great story about a competition we all grew up with, and then stopped caring about because it was endlessly uncool, and then started taking an interest in again because it was so daft and fun.

Maybe that's just me.

Anyway, this film (made with the cooperation of the European Broadcasting Union, which is the body behind Eurovision) pokes fun at the competition in all the right ways, and does it with love and a big heart.

See in Letterboxd

North Star

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 17:32:52 +0000

I wrote recently about not enjoying or finishing Claire North’s 84K. In her latest blog post she lists her (improbably large) back catalogue, with notes. On 84k:

My most miserable novel ever.
…
The word “dystopian” has been applied to it a lot, and I’d say that’s fair.

Claire North [devilgate.org/2021/04/1...](https://devilgate.org/2021/04/16/north-star.html)

However, she also tells us about her forthcoming Notes from The Burning Age, which sounds amazing:

To make up for just how monumentally dystopian 84K is, Notes from the Burning Age is a look at the distant future of the earth… in which we’ve got it right. We sorted our shit out, we built an environmentalist utopia of clean energy, social justice, respect for all and so on. And we did all of it partly because we really learned to love and value this beautiful, glorious planet, as well as each other, and partly because the spirits of the earth awoke, provoked by our blundering destruction, and nearly stomped us into tiny tiny bits.

If you think that’s the pitch, you will be potentially surprised to know that’s just the first 50 pages, and the book is actually a cat-and-mouse espionage thriller.

Claire North https://www.clairenorth.com/claire-north-posts/2021/04/16/the-entire-blacklist-ever-summed-up/

She really has written an astonishing number of books, under three different names. I’ll be sure to try some of the others.

Bookshops are Back

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 17:21:18 +0000

Sometimes you don’t even realise what you’ve been missing. Or how much you’ve been missing it. I went to our local bookshop, the lovely Pages of Hackney, to pick up a book that I had ordered and that had to come from the US.¹

They’ve stayed in business through this mad year, and I’ve ordered several books from them in that time. If a book’s not in stock they can usually get it in in a couple of days. I just had to walk up the road and collect them at the door.

No going in, though. Apart from collecting an order, all I could do was look in the window.

So it was fantastic to be able to go into the shop and browse. I’d almost forgotten what that’s like.

The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick. I don’t know why it had to cross the ocean. ↩︎

Good Vibrations, 2012 - ★★★★

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 22:23:46 +0000

Great fun story of Terri Hooley, who ran the eponymous record shop and label in Belfast.

Great music, and an appearance by John Peel; or at least an actor doing his voice very badly.

See in Letterboxd

Palm Springs, 2020 - ★★★★½

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 23:16:17 +0000

Brilliant time loop film (oh, spoilers, fuck off), let down only slightly by the ending. I’d have rolled credits when it goes black.

Not that the ending they did have is bad; just that it’s the weakest part of what is a totally great film.

See in Letterboxd

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (Books 2021, 4)

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 14:33:44 +0000

Despite the title, this is not a writing ‘how-to’ book, except maybe by example. Nor is it a novel itself; it is a collection of essays. The subjects they cover do include writing and writing courses, most notably the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That was one of the first, if not the first, postgraduate-level courses in creative writing, and Chee studied on it.

But the book covers a lot else, too. As Chee is a mixed-race gay man, you won’t be surprised to hear that those details feature in a number of the essays. As does living in New York and trying to make it as a writer. And growing roses, and the origin of Catholic rosary beads.

I was drawn to this because one of the essays was assigned reading on the MA early this term, and he was also cited at various other points on at least two modules.

His debut novel is called Edinburgh, which immediately interests me. Though you learn from a couple of the essays that he hoped, when younger, to go to Edinburgh to study parapsychology, but didn’t; and that the Edinburgh connection in the novel didn’t survive the writing and editing process, but he kept the title anyway.

I don’t know what his fiction is like yet, but he’s a fine essayist.

On Giving Up On a Book

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 22:26:06 +0000

This is not, as you might have guessed from the title, about writing. It’s about reading.

How long should we give a book by even a beloved author, before giving up on it, if we are not enjoying it?

It’s relatively rare for me not to finish a book that I start. There are a few that I took a couple of runs at, having to start again – Ulysses springs to mind. And some that I haven’t finished, and would have to start again: Gravity’s Rainbow, Swann’s Way. I might never bother with either of those again, but you never know.

I’m fairly sure I’ll never get further than the the two or three pages I’ve managed into Finnegan’s Wake. And there’s the odd other one I’ve abandoned. One that I accidentally left on a train, and realised I didn’t care. It was something to do with an excise inspector in Scotland. No idea what it was called or who it was by.

Most of those above are what people would call difficult: something about the style, form, or content makes reading them a challenge. Overcoming that challenge can be rewarding, but we should never feel guilty about abandoning them if we’re not enjoying them, I feel. Reading for pleasure should not be a chore.

But now we come to a strange case. Claire North is an author I like a lot. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was great, and so was Touch, which I read the last time I was out of the country.

So I was pleased to get her 84k for Christmas. And I’ve tried to read it twice, but I just can’t get into it. It’s not that it’s boring or hard to read.

It’s that it’s unpleasant.

That probably doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. Lots of books have unpleasant characters, or depict upsetting or hurtful events. Lots of entertainment shows those things, TV, movies, songs…

I have mentioned here before that I don’t really care for dystopias as a subgenre.¹ I’m not sure I can easily explain why that is, but they just don’t appeal.

And this is set in one. It’s largely a version of Britain, more or less present-day, but things have gone so far into privatisation, rampant capitalism, and generally Conservative party policies, that everyone knows the value of a human life.

That’s what the title means. That’s how much, in pounds, the rich have to pay to get away with murder. They can do anything else they want, too, as long as they can afford it.

I’m sure it will have a positive, maybe even uplifting, outcome. But I won’t be carrying on with it. I got about thirty pages in on my second time of starting it (only a couple the first time), and it’s just too bleak, too grim, for me to want to spend any more time there.

Maybe it’s partly the times were living in. But it’s not for me.

If that’s the right thing to call them. ↩︎

End of Term 2

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 13:02:23 +0000

Here we are at the end of the second term of my masters. In fact, the end of the taught part of the whole thing. Teaching is finished. In the summer term, which starts a month today, We have a series of lectures from various writing teachers and people from the writing and publishing fields. But no more seminars, no workshops, unless we, the students, organise them ourselves.

I have two 5000-word pieces to submit in a month‘s time – one for the Creative Nonfiction module, and the other for the Writing Workshop. After that it‘s just solid writing and editing until I submit my dissertation in September.

That‘s not quite the whole story. I will also have two meetings with my dissertation supervisor. Or actually, supervisors, because we have been assigned two. The reasoning seems to be that more people seeing our work is a good thing. I can certainly see the sense of that. But at the same time I wonder whether we‘ll lose the advantage of continuity. What if the first one recommends some changes, I make them (or at least, integrate their suggestions with my own ideas), and then the second recommends their opposite?

Oh well, it probably won‘t happen, and I‘ll deal with it if it does.

As for the two pieces I‘m submitting in a month, right now I have the required number of words for both. So I have a month to manipulate them, structure them, and make sure they‘re the best words. A process we writers call ‘editing.‘

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, 1987 - ★★★½

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 09:05:29 +0000

Watched on Saturday March 20, 2021.

See in Letterboxd

Alphaville, 1965 - ★★★

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 09:04:58 +0000

Watched on Saturday March 13, 2021.

See in Letterboxd

They Don't Call it 'Fastmail' for Nothing

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 13:54:00 +0000

I was opening a ticket with Fastmail (not a problem, just a query), and when I hit ‘Submit,’ the confirmatory email was in my inbox before the next web page finished loading.

It’s a really good service which I highly recommend, and if you were to sign up using the above link, you’d get 10% off your first year. I would get a small kickback too.

Break away from big email!

Astral Zen

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Phase one complete, for me. I’m not long back from the vaccination centre (a vacant unit at the Westfield shopping centre, slightly weirdly) where I got my first dose of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. I can feel my immune system surging, boosted with superpowers, and a strange, unearthly calm descend upon me.

I exaggerate. But it feels pretty damn good to have taken this step. I don’t get the next one until June, and it’s not like we’ll be out of the woods even then; not even personally, and certainly not the country or the world. Especially given the panic over a statistically meaningless set of blood clots, and the news today that the UK’s supply is going to be temporarily constrained.

But considering that it’s only just over year since we learned about this virus and the terrible disease it brings, it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate the scientists and doctors who were able to develop the vaccines so quickly. Not to mention all the NHS staff who are getting it to people.

This Is A Test

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 22:43:02 +0000

A test post from the Taio app.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things, 2020 - ★★½

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 23:51:09 +0000

Charlie Kaufman lets us down, by being deliberately, viscerally confusing, to the point of meaninglessness. Yet I find it quite compelling after the first twenty minutes or so.

Ultimately empty, though.

See in Letterboxd

Corona Vu

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 18:45:16 +0000

This article was in yesterday’s Independent. I felt like I had travelled back in time to last May:

Crucially, the report, which was written by independent experts, concludes that NHS guidelines failed to consider airborne infection, a key way the virus is transmitted.

– Sean Russel in the Independent, NHS Covid guidelines ‘fundamentally flawed’ and need replacing, says nursing union

It further says:

But research now suggests that airborne transmission – where tiny droplets of saliva from people talking, calling out or coughing can remain suspended in the air – can be a particular problem in poorly-ventilated rooms.

– As above, Independent article

‘Now’? Research now suggests that it’s airborne? We’ve known that since at least June of last year. In fact, I first posted about masks, and about going out with a rudimentary one, in early April!

How can NHS guidelines be so ludicrously far from what we understand? It would be comically far if it wasn’t so serious.

The Mystery of Henri Pick, 2019 - ★★★★

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:24:29 +0000

Watched on Sunday March 7, 2021.

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Education, 2020 - ★★★½

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:38:44 +0000

Watched on Friday March 5, 2021.

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Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (Books 2021, 3)

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 11:29:41 +0000

This book is infuriating. At times, and in certain ways, at least. Or not the book, but some of the characters.

For example, the parents, especially the dad – are so fucking pathetic it makes me angry. He can’t even boil an egg for his kids' breakfast when his wife’s away.

And throughout the early part you’re wondering why do they both love Lydia much more than their other two kids? Even before she dies, I mean?

Oh, yes it’s a dead girl story, did I mention that? Lydia is fridged in the first line, so it’s not a spoiler. It’s totally a fridging, though. That page tells you that the term means killing a female character ‘often as a plot device intended to move a male character’s story arc forward.’ Lydia’s death drives the whole plot, including the actions of her father and brother, so it definitely qualifies.

Her mother and little sister too, but that doesn’t lessen the truth of it.

It’s a very good exposition of a family with secrets at its heart. Though in the case of some of the secrets, there’s no very good reason for the person to keep them secret. A lot of problems could have been avoided – including, probably, the death of Lydia – if people had just talked to each other. That’s part of what’s so infuriating about it at times.

But maybe that – the difficulties people, families, have in communicating – is the point.

I also wondered why she chose to set it in the time she does. The present day parts are in 1977-8. I think it’s so that she can write about the particular immigrant experience she does: second and third generation Chinese immigrants to the US.

I picked this up because one of my tutors recommended it to me, due to its use of an omniscient narrator. I’m trying something similar with something I’m working on at the moment. This article in the New York Times practically credits Ng with bringing omniscient narration back into fashion. I don’t feel that it ever really went away, but maybe it has remained more common in SF than in literary fiction. Though as I write that I’m not sure I could cite an example from recent SF either, so maybe I’m wrong.

Here’s a good article by Ng herself about her decision to use the device. It’s been useful to me, anyway. And I actually enjoyed the book, aside from being annoyed at times.

No Project, Plenty of Fear

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 16:15:26 +0000

All through the Brexit debate, and after, people warned that it would cause problems in Northern Ireland. And now here we are:

Loyalist paramilitary groups have told the British and Irish governments they are withdrawing support for the Good Friday agreement in protest at Northern Ireland’s Irish Sea trade border with the rest of the UK.

– Rory Carroll in The Guardian, Brexit: loyalist paramilitary groups renounce Good Friday agreement

Brexiters dismissed those concerns as fearmongering.

I don’t know what the end result of this will be, but I can’t imagine it being good.

After the Money's Gone

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 22:12:50 +0000

Robin Rendle raises a concern we should all (who write on the web) have:

But if my URL is dead, my website dies with it.

My work shouldn’t be presented in the Smithsonian behind glass or anything, I’m just pointing at this enormous flaw in the architecture of the web itself: you’re renting servers and renting URLs. Nothing is permanent because on the web we don’t really own any space, we’re just borrowing land temporarily.

– Robin Rendle, Inheritance

What happens to our websites after we’re gone? There needs to be a way to memorialise them, make sure they’re still around in some form. Archive.org is great, but it doesn’t keep the canonical URLs alive. Famously, Tim Berners-Lee wrote, ‘Cool URIs Don’t Change.’ Disappearance is the biggest change of all.

Although I see from there:

Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running.

– Tim Berners-Lee, Cool URIs Don’t Change

Hmm, is that a good reason? and it’s surprisingly slanted towards companies, considering the origin of the web, and TBL’s place of work.

(And speaking of cool URIs – or domains – home.cern? That is fantastic!)

The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, 1993 - ★★½

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:58:41 +0000

After watching Call My Agent! on Netflix, we wanted to watch some French films, and maybe with some of the actors and/or directors who were in the series. So we started with this.

It's described as a comedy. It's mildly funny in places, but it's mainly a kind of social commentary thing about land use in rural France. Enjoyable enough.

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A Year Passes Like Nothing

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 15:42:00 +0000

It’s exactly a year since I last went out to an event.¹

I referred to ‘being out on a cold, virus-infested night’ to see Glen Matlock in Leytonstone, and it seems really weird now that I did it.

What were we thinking? Gathering together in a small hall, where people were singing and shouting. And not a mask to be seen! Masks? who had masks? How would we have drunk our beer while wearing a mask? You probably wouldn’t have been let in if you had turned up wearing a mask.

Although I had good social distancing at the start, when I was almost the only one there.

Memory, eh?

I actually thought it was on the last day of February 2020, which was the 29th, not the 28th, making it hard to hit the exact anniversary, but my blog and calendar both tell me I was wrong. ↩︎

Pretend It's a City, 2021 - ★★★½

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 18:29:45 +0000

Date is approximate, and anyway we watched the various parts over two or three weeks.

Really good, though annoying in places. Fran Lebowitz is great on many things, misanthropic on many things, and would be fun to talk to. Scorsese is a great interviewer, but he doesn’t have to laugh at everything she says.

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Rocks, 2019 - ★★★★

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 18:25:02 +0000

Great, moving film about a teenaged girl whose mother leaves — it’s never stated why, but most likely because of mental health problems — who tries to keep life going normally for herself and her little brother. Inevitably there are problems, with school, with social workers.

It’s set and filmed in and around Hackney, so I feel like these could be people I see on the streets, people my kids went to school with.

Refreshingly, many clichés are avoided: the problems are not about drugs or gangs, or even race.

A top piece of work.

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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Books 2021, 2)

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:55:57 +0000

It took me quite a long while to read this. I enjoyed it whenever I read a section, and I read it in large chunks at a time; but between times I wasn’t particularly drawn back to it. I think that’s probably because it doesn’t have any significant plot.

Instead it’s a series of character explorations, looking at a series of Black women (and a few men) over several decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first.

Each story is compelling and enjoyable, and they’re all interlinked – almost too interlinked at times, you might say, because there’s an element of coincidence. But that doesn’t matter: coincidences happen, after all.

Perhaps the major downside is that you get interested and invested in a character, and their chapter ends and we move on to another one. So it’s like you’re always starting fresh. Or fresh-ish. That’s probably also part of why I had the experience I described at the start, of not being drawn back to it.

Because of my course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the choices writers make. So I was particularly aware of Evaristo’s unconventional choices regarding punctuation and capitalisation. Specifically, she capitalises proper nouns, but no other words. So sentences all start with lower-case letters. And she eschews almost all punctuation. Only the comma, the apostrophe, the question mark, and an occasional exclamation mark, are used.¹ {.has-dropcap}

No full stops means – and I only consciously realised this when looking it over to write this – that every sentence starts a new paragraph, and comprises the whole of the paragraph. Even when a sentence does end with a question mark or exclamation mark, she has it end the paragraph.

All of which is fine. I found it noticeable, but not distracting. I just wonder what the intended effect is. Some people say they find things like quotes to delineate speech intrusive, and I’ve heard it said that leaving capitals off the start of sentences feels more informal. But I feel generally that most established conventions have good reasons for existing, and that the best approach is to keep to them, unless you have a very good reason for not doing so. I don’t think this novel would in any way be lessened if it were capitalised and punctuated conventionally.

And then I would be talking more about the content, not the form.

There may be the odd colon or semicolon, but I couldn’t find any on looking it over just now. And there are probably a couple of dashes and brackets. ↩︎

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (Books 2021, 1)

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 18:04:35 +0000

It looks as if I haven’t read anything yet this year. That’s far from true, of course, but this is the first book-length work I’ve finished. Though that ‘book-length’ is extremely deceptive, as it’s very short.

I read it for my course – specifically the Creative Nonfiction module that I’m doing this term. It’s a powerful statement about the position of Black people in America in the early 60s, when it was written. Things have sadly not changed much.

In terms of presentation, it’s a little odd. It’s titled as two letters: one to his nephew, and another ‘from a region in my mind.’ The first is short, and does read as if it were a letter. The second, not so much.

It’s more of a personal essay, combining memoir and political analysis. It shows a great deal of empathy, both for Black people and the white majority in his country. And it ends with a note of hope, that America can still become the country it claimed to be. I wonder what he’d think of things now.

Both parts are available at those links, so you don’t even have to buy it if you want to check it out, which you should.

Red, White and Blue, 2020 - ★★★★

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:54:04 +0000

Watched on Saturday February 6, 2021.

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Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, 2019 - ★★★★½

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:33:19 +0000

Brilliant. Not enough full song footage used.

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Official Secrets, 2019 - ★★★★

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:17:41 +0000

Watched on Saturday January 30, 2021.

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It's the Wrong Time of Year for Shorts

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:36:02 +0000

At least in the northern hemisphere.

When I watched the film The Big Short last year, I doubted that it would help people gain real understanding of financial markets and the problems that caused the crash of 2008-9:

You might come out of this film with a better understanding of the events that led to the 2008 financial crisis — or you might not. More likely, I think, you’ll sort-of understand it while you’re watching, but be none the wiser when it’s all over.

– Me, The Big Short, 2015 - ★★½

I count myself very much in that none-the-wiser position, then and now. In particular, while I knew that the ‘short’ involved somehow betting that the price of a share would go down, it had never clicked with me exactly how the ‘short seller’ could make a profit.

Until today, when I saw this tweet, apropos of the members of a subreddit bringing a hedge fund to bankruptcy, by taking advantage of the fund’s short position. The tweet contains a screen grab of the written explanation, unfortunately, and the tweeter doesn’t know the originator of the text, but here it is:

Thank you to whoever explained this - @reddit is incredible

😩🤙🏻 pic.twitter.com/zKRlbP41gJ
— Jimmy Kelly (@_jimmykelly) January 28, 2021

The key step that I had never understood was the the short seller borrows the shares, and then sells them at the current price. If they drop in price, the seller buys them back and returns them to the original owner. I don’t think I ever realised that you could borrow shares. If you can own something, you can borrow or lend it, I guess, even if it’s imaginary, so it does make sense. If I had ever thought of it, I would have thought, well why would you borrow something that you can’t do anything with?

But you can do something with it: sell it.

Lovers Rock, 2020 - ★★★½

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 23:18:01 +0000

Watched on Tuesday January 26, 2021.

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Mangrove, 2020 - ★★★★

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 23:17:24 +0000

Watched on Saturday January 16, 2021.

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Rebecca, 2020 - ★★★

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 09:25:51 +0000

Date is approximate.

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The Personal History of David Copperfield, 2019 - ★★★½

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 09:24:36 +0000

Watched on Saturday January 23, 2021.

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Four Years Gone

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:03:50 +0000

Four years ago, in a piece called ‘Which is Worse?,’ I wrote that:

Brexit is worse than Trump, because Trump is only for four years — less if he gets impeached or twenty-fived, which is almost certain; but Brexit is forever.

– Me, Which is Worse?

Who would have thought, back then, that, while Trump would be gone (having been impeached not once but twice) but Brexit, in its final form, would only be getting started?

I use the word ‘final’ facetiously. David Allen Green has been writing about this too, and he avers:¹

In 2016, American voters (via the electoral college) elected Trump for a term of four years, while those in the United Kingdom voted for Brexit with no similar fixed term.

One decision was set to be revisited in four years, the other was not.

[…]

There will be no cathartic Biden-like ceremony to bring Brexit to a close.

This is because of the nature of the 2016 referendum (which, unlike the election of Trump, was not a decision for a fixed period); and because of the dynamic structure of the new relationship as set out in the trade and cooperation agreement; and because of the unsettled politics both internally in the United Kingdom and of its relationship with the European Union.

And so, to a significant (though not a total) extent, the United States was able to bring what it decided in 2016 to a formal and substantial end, the United Kingdom cannot similarly do so.

For the United Kingdom, 2016 is here to stay.

– David Allen Green, The United States had its cathartic post-2016, post-Trump ceremonial moment – but the United Kingdom cannot have a similar post-2016, post-Brexit moment

His ‘here to stay,’ and my ‘forever’ could be overstating the case. I feel sure that the United Kingdom, in some form, or at least parts of it, will join the European Union again one day. How far away that day is, and what form the accession country or countries of the time will have, we can only learn by living through it. It will be more than another four years, that’s for sure.

As he loves to do. It would be hard to find one of his posts without the word ‘aver’ in it. I think they get inserted by automatic operation of law.

He also loves a long title: ‘The United States had its cathartic post-2016, post-Trump ceremonial moment – but the United Kingdom cannot have a similar post-2016, post-Brexit moment’. ↩︎

Performing Pages

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 13:32:51 +0000

Every month Google, or specifically the ‘Google Search Console Team’ sends me an email showing the ‘Top performing pages’ on my site. Presumably that means the ones to which they, Google, have sent the most people.

Consistently, the top one is a post from 2012, about a particular use case of Pandoc. Specifically: Tip: using Pandoc to create truly standalone HTML files.

So it’s clear that if I want more engagement here – or at least more drive-by readers – I should write more technical-support-type articles.

That’s unlikely to happen at the moment. That page was a complete mess, though. There were artifacts left over from WordPress plugins, and the whole thing was displaying at the wrong width for reasons that I don’t understand. So I’ve cleaned it up, and now at least it looks a bit more welcoming for the hundreds of visitors who come every month.

I’m not even sure what it describes is still necessary – Pandoc has had a lot of changes since then – but it’s not wrong, so oh well.

A Pasta Mystery

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:15:39 +0000

I’ve never heard of the pasta shape called bucatini before (though the Mac spellchecker has), but it sounds fabulous, and I want to try it now. I won’t be able to, though (even if you can get it in the UK). This article by Rachel Handler in New York magazine is great: both hilarious and fascinating by turns.

Things first began to feel off in March. While this sentiment applies to everything in the known and unknown universe, I mean it specifically in regard to America’s supply of dry, store-bought bucatini. At first, the evidence was purely anecdotal. My boyfriend and I would bravely venture to both our local Italian grocer and our local chain groceries, masked beyond recognition, searching in vain for the bucatini that, in my opinion, not to be dramatic, is the only noodle worth eating; all other dry pastas might as well be firewood. But where there had once been abundance, there was now only lack. Being educated noodle consumers, we knew that there was, more generally, a pasta shortage due to the pandemic, but we were still able to find spaghetti and penne and orecchiette — shapes which, again, insult me even in concept. The missing bucatini felt different. It was specific. Frightening. Why bucatini? Why now? Why us?

– Rachel Handler, What the Hole Is Going On? The very real, totally bizarre bucatini shortage of 2020.

Blog Stats 2020

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 16:24:42 +0000

As convention dictates, a summary of 2020’s posts. 173 in total, which is up on 2019’s total of 130. No SQL needed, unlike previous years. I just have to look at the archive pages.

Month	Posts
Jan	18
Feb	13
Mar	14
Apr	14
May	19
Jun	15
Jul	18
Aug	18
Sep	6
Oct	9
Nov	18
Dec	11

2018’s post; and 2017’s

The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick (Books 2020, 30)

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 18:10:47 +0000

The first of my Christmas books, so I could count it as next year’s; but since I had finished it by the day after Boxing Day, it definitely belongs to this year. And it also brings me to a nice round 30 books for the year.

A writer is isolated in a lonely alpine chalet to write about a book he hates. Which very quickly turns out to be Frankenstein. He is visited by – well, that would be telling, but just let’s say that the novel he’s writing about and its creator are very significant.

It’s written – at least at first – as if it was the writer writing to his publisher, though that conceit soon disappears. There are various details around the way it’s printed, that look as if they should be significant, but they aren’t really.

It’s good. Check it out.

Endings

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 13:15:00 +0000

Well, this year of infamy is finally lurching towards its end. I don’t think too many of us will be sad to see the back of 2020.

With it, though, we have to also say a final goodbye to Britain’s membership of the European Union. I don’t think too many of us will be happy about that. Even people who are pleased about it now will realise over time that leaving is a huge mistake.

At least with the exit agreement in place, we shouldn’t see the immediate shortages and queues at the ports that we feared. That agreement is problematic, though.

To get an example of its dangers, I refer you to David Allen Green’s Law and Policy Blog. Yesterday’s post is entitled ‘The Bill implementing the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is an exercise in the Government taking power from Parliament,’ and in it he says:

The draft bill is complex and deals with several specific technical issues, such as criminal records, security, non-food product safety, tax and haulage, as well as general implementation provisions.

Each of these specific technical issues would warrant a bill, taking months to go through the normal parliamentary process.

But instead they will be whizzed and banged through in a single day, with no real scrutiny, as the attention of parliamentarians will (understandably) be focused on the general implementation provisions, which are in Part 3 of the draft bill.

[…]

This provision will empower ministers (or the devolved authorities, where applicable) to make regulations with the same effect as if those regulations were themselves acts of parliament.

In other words: they can amend laws and repeal (or abolish) laws, with only nominal parliamentary involvement.

There are some exceptions (under clause 31(4)), but even with those exceptions, this is an extraordinarily wide power for the executive to legislate at will.

These clauses are called ‘Henry VIII’ clauses and they are as notorious among lawyers as that king is notorious in history.

Again, this means that parliament (and presumably the devolved assemblies, where applicable) will be bypassed, and what is agreed between Whitehall and Brussels will be imposed without any further parliamentary scrutiny.

– David Allen Green, The Bill implementing the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is an exercise in the Government taking power from Parliament

The whole piece is worth reading (and note the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references).

Take back control, right enough: take it back from the elected representatives of the people, and give it to the executive.

2020 made 2016 look like 2012. 2021 offers hope to the world as the Covid vaccines roll out, and hope for America as Trump is rolled out of the White House. But things still look decidedly dodgy here in the UK.

Xstabeth by David Keenan (Books 2020, 29)

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 10:20:10 +0000

Following on from number 27, then, we have David Keenan’s latest novel. Again we’re in a kind of magic-realist setting, without any obvious magic. In St Petersburg a young woman lives with her father, who is a failed or fading musician. The daughter – who is the viewpoint character – starts a relationship with her father’s friend, and gets pregnant. She keeps all of this from her father.

Her father, meanwhile, puts on a show at which he performs some seemingly-otherworldly music. He starts to believe that it was actually created by some sort of mystical entity called Xstabeth.

For reasons that escape me at the moment they go to St Andrews,¹ where they get involved with a professional golfer. The ‘tenuous, ambiguous, confusing event’ that I referred to in the earlier note happens from this side too, but you’d only notice it if you’d read The Towers The Fields The Transmitters.

The novel is presented as if it were an academic work about a novel called Xstabeth, by someone called ‘David Keenan,’ who killed himself by jumping from a tower in St Andrews. So there are cod-academic sections or extracts between the chapters.

It’s all very meta, and I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I totally understood it. The strangest thing about it, in some ways, is the use of punctuation. Almost the only punctuation used is the full stop. But that doesn’t just mean he’s avoided using commas and semicolons, and constructed appropriately short sentences. It reads as if he wrote it with conventional punctuation around dialogue and so on, and then replaced every other mark with the full stop.

For example, consider this:

This is singular. He said. This is music that cannot be repeated. This is music that can never be toured. This is music that can never be applauded. I pointed out to him that there was applause on the record. Muted Applause. Awkward applause. Uncomprehending applause. But still. Applause. What is the sound of one audience member clapping. I asked him. He laughed. Yes. He said. Yes. Yes. There is no mechanic in the world for this music. He said.

A more conventional way to punctuate that and lay it out, might be:

‘This is singular,’ he said. ‘This is music that cannot be repeated; this is music that can never be toured; this is music that can never be applauded.’

I pointed out to him that there was applause on the record. Muted applause; awkward applause; uncomprehending applause; but still: applause.

‘What is the sound of one audience member clapping?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, yes. There is no mechanic in the world for this music,’ he said.

There are, of course, other ways you could present it. As an experimental way of presenting text, it’s interesting enough. I found it intruded, in that I constantly noticed it; but not so much as to be annoying. Though there were places where it was slightly confusing. I paid particular attention to it because we recently discussed ways to present dialogue on my course.

Still needs an apostrophe. ↩︎

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Books 2020, 28)

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 11:01:47 +0000

Read this for the young adult (YA) section of the Genre module on my course. It’s a powerful story inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

In an unnamed US city, a teenaged girl is the only witness to her friend being murdered by a police officer. She has to find her way through the complexities that follow, including family, school, friendships, the law, and the streets of the neighbourhood she grew up in.

It’s a tough read at times, as is it should be. But it’s also very funny in places. Well worth checking out.

Rees-Mogg and the New Depths

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 14:29:00 +0000

Just when you think that this Tory government couldn’t possibly sink any lower, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, says this:

I think it is a real scandal that Unicef should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, I think, 25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order.

Unicef should be ashamed of itself.

– The Guardian’s Politics Live, Rees-Mogg accuses Unicef of ‘political stunt of lowest order’ after it funds food aid in UK

This in response the a news report that Unicef, the UN’s relief fund, is contributing money to help feed kids in Britain for the first time ever.

And the top-hatted tosspot thinks Unicef should be ashamed. We should all be ashamed; but the government most of all.

The Towers The Fields The Transmitters by David Keenan (Books 2020, 27)

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 12:46:16 +0000

Strange one, this. I read Keenan’s This is Memorial Device a couple of years ago, so when I saw a new one by him listed on my local bookshop’s ‘forthcoming’ page, I had a look.

That book was Xstabeth, and more on it in a few posts' time. It hadn’t yet been released at the time, but there was a special offer from the publishers: upload proof that you had preordered it (such as the receipt from your local bookshop) and you’d get a free novella-length ebook prequel: The Towers The Fields The Transmitters.¹

So I did all that, and here we are.

I’ll note right away that, having read both, they seem to be connected only by location and one tenuous, ambiguous, confusing event.

In fact those terms apply throughout this book. It’s kind of a magical realism piece, set mostly in St Andrews.² A businessman visits the town to audit the books of a military facility, and starts trying to find his missing daughter. Why does he think she might be in St Andrews? That is never explained. Nor does it need to be.

Time goes weird, with second-world-war bombers appearing in the skies. Or on the phone, at least.

The more I try to write about this, the more it feels like a hallucination I had a few weeks ago. Very strange. Worth reading.

That title needs some commas, I can’t help but think. But that’s the way it’s given, so [sic], I guess. ↩︎
Which town needs an apostrophe, it seems to me, but doesn’t have one according to Wikipedia, so [sic]) I guess. ↩︎

Stop Your Glasses Steaming Up by Sticking the Top of Your Mask to Your Face Using Micropore Tape

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 13:35:00 +0000

The problem

If, like all sensible people, you wear a mask over your mouth and nose when you go out these days; and if, like me and millions of others, you wear glasses; then you will have experienced your breath causing your glasses to steam up.

The cause is a fundamental flaw in mask design: the mask fabric makes a straight line from our cheeks to the bridge of our noses, leaving a gap between face and mask seam. Most of our out-breaths are directed that way, just by taking the path of least resistance.

Some masks have a wire insert that lets you mould the top section around your nose. I find that improves things, but is still imperfect. There are always gaps.

The Bigger Problem

This means that the masks are not as effective as they should be for their primary purpose. All that warm, damp air that’s condensing on our glasses is also the air that might be carrying virus particles.

So while this solution helps with the steamed-up glasses problem, it also helps to make masks more effective, by ensuring that more of our potentially-poisonous breath goes through the fabric.

The Solution

It’s quite simple: apply a strip of micropore tape to the section of the mask that goes over the bridge of your nose, and seal it down well.

Mask and Micropore

Micropore tape is normally used for fixing dressings on wounds, so it’s designed to stick to skin and come off with minimal fuss (though see below).

The roll we had when I thought of this is quite wide, so I’ve been folding a piece over and attaching it to the inside of the mask (at @FranChats’s suggestion).

Mask With Micropore

As you can see, it’s not attached very tidily, but we’re not in this for the aesthetics.

Martin With Mask With Micropore

And it’s not actually visible when the mask is on.

The New Problems: Removal, and Sensitivity

Taking the taped mask off is the worst part, in my experience. I’ve been doing it quickly: take off my glasses (otherwise they might go flying across the room); unhook the ear loops and take a firm grip of them; close my eyes; then tug sharply forward.¹

It can make your eyes water, but honestly, for clear vision outside on these cold days, it’s worth it.

Removing it slowly might be better for some people. And the whole thing will not be for some. If you have very sensitive skin, or get a reaction to the adhesive, then this won’t be for you. But if you can take it, I highly recommend it.

Lastly, my pictures show a reusable mask, but it works for disposables too.

Though see my later post. I think I’ll be doing it slowly from now on. ↩︎

How to Make Sure You See My Posts

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:50:10 +0000

If you’re reading this, it may not apply to you, but I want to let you know that there are a number of ways to make sure that you see all of my posts. Should you wish to.

Now With Added Email

If you follow that link on the left labelled ‘Subscribe,’ you’ll see all the ways.

RSS, Twitter, Micro.blog, WordPress.com; no surprises there.

But if you prefer to use the oldest protocol of all (at least for these purposes), there’s a form on that page that will let you sign up to get the posts by email.

So now you never have to miss a post again.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72 by Hunter S Thompson (Books 2020, 26)

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 09:44:32 +0000

I thought it might be interesting, in this year of a US presidential election, to reread this account of a different reelection campaign of a terrible president.

In this one, of course, the president – Nixon – was successfully reelected. And it was only in his second term that he was impeached – or nearly so. He resigned first, and Ford, his veep, now president, pardoned him. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump and Pence try the same sort of thing in the next couple of months.

This book doesn’t get as far as Nixon’s resignation. Thompson followed the Democratic campaign, and then George McGovern’s campaign once he got the nomination, as part of the press pack. He was National Affairs Editor for Rolling Stone at the time. A title and role that he created.

So this is essentially a fix-up of his columns, with some edits, and the odd footnote adding information that wasn’t available at the time. It’s classic HST, of course, with not quite as many illegal drugs as in some of his works.

The most intriguing thing in the whole book for me was this quote from p189:

For almost a year now, he [Pat Cadell] has been George McGovern’s official numbers wizard. Cadell and his Cambridge Research Associates have been working the streets and suburban neighborhoods in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts for McGovern, then coming back to headquarters on election nite [sic] and calling the results almost down to the percentage point…

Emphasis mine, ellipsis his. I’m just struck by the name of the organisation, and the fact that they’re doing a not dissimilar thing to Cambridge Analytica – in terms of analysis, if not manipulation – in a pre-computer age. There doesn’t seem to be any connections between the two organisations.

On the very next page we have this:

Even reading and watching all the news, there is no way to know the truth – except to be there.

Which resonates profoundly in today’s ‘fake news’ world.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Books 2020, 25)

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 19:53:06 +0000

Read this for my course. It’s very good, unsurprisingly. Historical fiction isn’t usually my thing (Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle notwithstanding) It has a striking stylistic tic – if that’s the right word – in the way she refers to Thomas Cromwell. It’s always ‘he said,’ or ‘he did such-and-such’; very occasionally, for clarity, ‘he, Cromwell…’ But never just, ‘Cromwell said…’

Not a big deal, but in a work of this size, it stands out. It feels significant. And it is; ‘tic’ is the wrong word for something so definite, so chosen. Mantel has said that she wanted the viewpoint to be ‘over Cromwell’s shoulder.’ So ‘he’, rather than ‘Cromwell.’

One of the most subtle things about it as how Cromwell switches from just being an advisor to the king to rounding up certain priests, and I don’t really understand how it happened. It’s a masterpiece of characterisation.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Books 2020, 24)

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 18:05:58 +0000

I wasn’t quite sure about this at first. I know it won awards and all that. It was assigned for the ‘Genre’ module of my Creative Writing masters,¹ but it didn’t immediately grab me.

But I came round to it. It’s set in the very far future, because there are examples of technology that is old, but people don’t understand it. Reminiscent of Viriconium or Against A Dark Background in that way. And ‘Home is the pink one’ – star – suggests that Sol has got very old. Like, billions of years older than now. Which feels wrong, because humans should have changed a lot more in that time.

The titular character is the first of her people to leave Earth (we assume it’s Earth, anyway) to go to Oomza University, which appears to be a whole planet that’s a university, and takes people from many different species and civilisations.

Things happen on the way, as you might expect. It’s good, and I’m keen to read the sequels.

As such it’s an odd choice: for the crime and historical fiction we got long novels, and even for YA it’s a full-length novel. But for SF: a novella. ↩︎

Masters Update

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 12:01:22 +0000

We’re halfway through the first term of my Creative Writing masters course. Those five weeks went fast, but 2020 is The Year When Time Was Weird, for everyone. How is it going, you ask.¹

Pretty well, thanks. At first glance, with only two actual sessions, the workload looked light. But as is common with postgraduate courses, you have a lot of work to do on your own. Add to that, it’s a writing course: we have to write, and you can’t do that while sitting in a class.

Or you could, for small exercises, and I think maybe they would be asking us to do that kind of thing if this were a conventional year and we were sitting in a seminar room in Bloomsbury. It is, however, the most unconventional of years, and we are sitting in our own homes on Microsoft Teams.

There are two modules. Everyone does the Writing and Reading Seminar, where we focus on short stories. Each week we read and discuss two or three assigned stories, with there being a theme or area of focus: Character, Voice, Territory, for example. Then we workshop pieces submitted by three members of the class. Everyone gets to submit a piece of up to 4000 words, twice this term.

For my first piece I decided to get out of my comfort zone (such as it is) and write a purely realist piece. No spaceships, no magic; no element of the fantastic whatsoever. I think it worked out pretty well.

Those pieces are not assessed, but in January we have to submit a 4000-word piece that will be. I only recently learned that this piece has to be a reworking of one of the two pieces we’ll have workshopped in class. I don’t think I’d have done anything differently, but I would have liked to have known that sooner.

The second module I’m doing is called Contemporary Writing 2: Genre², or just ‘Genre.’ We spend two weeks on each of these genres: crime, science fiction, historical fiction, and young adult fiction.³ There’s a novel assigned for each one. The first week has a two short, prerecorded lectures, and in the seminar we discuss those, and techniques, and the assigned novel.

For the second week we each write a 1000-word piece in the genre in question, and some of us have the pieces workshopped. We got to choose the genres in which we wanted to be workshopped. I chose SF and crime. Even those of us who aren’t being workshopped in a given week have our pieces discussed on the class forum.

So as you can see, there’s quite a lot of reading, analysis, and commenting, as well as actual writing.

I’m enjoying it a lot, but if you were to ask me what I’ve learned, I’m not sure I could specify that yet. However, the practice, the fact of looking at my own writing and that of others, professionally-published and not, in great detail: that alone is bound to improve my writing, I feel.

Right now it’s reading week. I don’t recall having such a thing back when I was an undergraduate, but maybe we did. They’re standard now, just like half-term breaks at school.⁴ So we have no classes, and some extra short stories to read, and time to catch up on the novels. I finished Wolf Hall yesterday, so I only have The Hate U Give to read for YA. Plenty of time to get some writing done.

Oh, and a couple of homework assignments, too. All work is homework, of course.

I’m always confused about how you should punctuate that idiom. I’m asking a question: it needs a question mark. But neither of these look right:
- How is it going? you ask.
- How is it going, you ask?
It should really be:
- ‘How is it going?’ you ask.
But that makes it too much like I’m writing dialogue in a a second-person narrative, and it doesn’t really fit with the overall feel of a blog post.

The way I’ve written it above has no question mark at all, and that can’t be right. ↩︎
I’ve yet to learn what ‘Contemporary Writing 1’ is, or was, or if there ever was one. ↩︎
I’d argue that YA is a target market, not a genre, but never mind. ↩︎
It was during my primary school years that Scotland introduced the week-long half-term break in October. ‘The October Week,’ as it was called, and it was definitely a new thing at the time. I was aware of it particularly because my Mum was a primary school teacher. I can’t find any evidence of it now, because there are so many other pages about half-term holiday dates and history projects for October half term. But if my memory is not totally faulty, that’s the truth of it. ↩︎

When Election Night Went On For Days

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 10:07:23 +0000

For the first time in my life (apart from occasional odd minutes in hotels on business trips) I’m watching CNN. It’s 5am on the US east coast, 3am on the west; yet every few seconds, it seems like, we get this:

An ad break on CNN International

Sometimes, too, there’s an actual advert, but luckily I’ve been able to scrub through them.

The actual coverage is good, though. They’re providing good information, lots of details. They’re also calling out Trump’s lies, as is the proper thing to do.

Of course, since most of the time there’s nothing much happening, they’re having a hard time of it.

We remain gripped.

Writing About Writing About Typography

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 23:29:41 +0000

Robin Rendle writes about writing about typography, but he has lessons for all of us who want to write well.

Though I don’t entirely agree with his viewpoint about the particular sentence he criticises. Here it is:

A revival is based on historical models, made suitable for contemporary use, adapted to the typographical and technical needs of today, but nevertheless relies on a personal response to the historical style.

– The Rosart Project, The Rosart Project

The ‘revival’ it’s talking about involves recreating old typefaces, and/or building new versions of them. It’s from a site called The Rosart Project, set up by some students of typography.

Rendle’s essay at an improved version of that sentence is this:

Type designers will often look at letterforms that were made in the past and then redraw them for modern day use. This is called a “revival” by the type community but I like to think of it as a remix: a type designer will unavoidably apply their own style and harmonies, their own deviations and melodies to the song.

Every remix is different, every remix is important.

– Robin Rendle, Writing about Typography

Which is certainly brighter, has a bit more sparkle, and arguably is easier to understand. But I don’t think the original is that bad. Certainly not as bad as Rendle thinks. He says:

what does any of this mean? The words make sense but it’s written in a style that’s familiar to anyone that reads about the field of typography. It’s what’s known to folks outside the field as “academic writing” but it’s what I consider to simply be bad writing—it’s waffling and unclear.

– Robin Rendle, Writing about Typography

It’s what is often called dry, I’d say, certainly compared to the alternative. But I don’t think it deserves quite the fire he brings to it. Of course he’s only doing it – he says, and I believe him – because he loves the project, and wants to ‘see the whole typographic community break the shackles of this style of writing.’

Which is fair enough. I’d certainly rather read a piece in Rendle’s style than much academic writing. So I guess maybe I do agree with him after all. His final advice to the typographic community could apply just about anywhere where words are used:

write to swoon, to convince, to make a stranger fall in love. Abandon the academic style, because it’s making your beautiful work so very boring.

– Robin Rendle, Writing about Typography

The Secret Place by Tana French (Books 2020, 23)

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:05:50 +0000

Crime fiction set in Dublin. In a posh boarding school, specifically, which causes it to have elements of young adult (YA) fiction. We studied it for the ‘Genre’ module of my MA course. It also dips into magic realism, so it’s particularly appropriate for that module.

I hadn’t read any of French’s books before. This is volume five in a series about the Dublin Murder Squad, but they’re only loosely linked. I enjoyed it a lot, and wouldn’t mind reading more.

She has a great way with colour imagery, and compelling characters.

In the Sky With Diamonds

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 12:37:48 +0000

This is stone-cold genius. Making diamonds out of carbon dioxide from the air, solar and wind power, and rainwater:

UK millionaire Dale Vince says lab-grown gems will be ‘world’s first zero-impact’ diamonds

…

“Making diamonds from nothing more than the sky, from the air we breathe – is a magical, evocative idea – it’s modern alchemy,” said Vince. “We don’t need to mine the earth to have diamonds, we can mine the sky.”

– Jillian Ambrose, Ecotricity founder to grow diamonds ‘made entirely from the sky’

‘Sky Diamonds’ is a great name for the company, but I feel he’s missing an obvious Beatles tie-in.

Wheeling the Reinvention

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 23:51:00 +0000

Dave Winer has ideas:

ideas for rethinking blogs and feeds. I found, as others have, that I need another kind of document to include in my personal CMS other than a story that’s part of the blog. Everything about blogs are set up to be written, then lightly edited, and never touched again. It’s temporal writing. But there are other things that I want to develop over time, keep coming back to, revising. A few years back I started this.how to hold those docs.

– Dave Winer, Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 16:05

He’s talking about what I like to call ‘web pages,’ surely? You don’t need any fancy CMS for those, as Dave of all people should know. And if you want to use such a thing, well, even WordPress has its Posts/Pages distinction.

Colliding Names

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 15:20:29 +0000

A few years ago I wrote about how I was notified about the wrong band called (The) Nails. In that case the names were different, though only by the subtle presence or absence of the definite article. Things have got even more confusing recently.

I have an app on my phone called Music Harbor (sic). The idea is, you give it access to your music library, and it notifies you of forthcoming releases by artists you already have tracks by. It sometimes throws up some oddities, like people I’ve never heard of just because they’re ‘featured’ on something I have. But mostly it’s pretty good. It’s how I know that Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out in a few days, for example.

A few years back I heard a track called ‘Bass Down Low,’ by someone called Dev. I liked it, both musically and lyrically. I mean, it’s not profound, but ‘I like my beats fast and my bass down low’ is a sentiment I can get behind.

So there was a new track by Dev out today. However, the guy rapping on ‘El Erb’, is not, I feel sure, Dev, the female singer & rapper of ‘Bass Down Low.’

It’s also a scunner of a name to search for, what with it being an abbreviation for developer, the TV show, and Google completely owning the .dev top-level domain.

Multiple people with the same name: it’s a problem. It’s why actors have Equity names, I guess.

Still, there should be no problem with the early nineties Scottish indiepoppers Bis, right? Who’d have thought they’d be back with a new single, this long after ‘The Secret Vampire EP’?

No-one, it turns out. This Bis is someone else (and his single ‘Streets’ is also nothing to do with The Streets).¹ It’s also hard to search for, not least because it’s an abbreviation for several different organisations. I even used to work for a company called BIS.

I don’t think the English language is running out of names, but if you’re planning on using a short one as your professional persona or brand, you probably want to check out whether or not someone has already used it in your field. Though it’s not always that easy, as I’ve noted.

There’s even a music magazine called Clash, which has nothing to do with The Clash.

Still, ‘Sugar sugar kandy pop/Push it down and pull it up,’ as I’m sure we can all agree.

Shit, and I’ve just found out he was murdered last year. ↩︎

Covid Track

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 17:49:46 +0000

This is one of our local parks. Look at that desire-line track, fading into the distance (click or tap on the picture to see it bigger).

A path made by many people, avoiding each other

The paved footpath is off to the right. That track – a simple, direct route, that avoids the footpath – wasn’t there a year ago. The novel coronavirus changes the landscape.

Not Discworld, Not Batman

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 17:48:16 +0000

Neil Gaiman makes great use of metaphor to criticise BBC America’s The Watch:

It’s not Batman if he’s now a news reporter in a yellow trenchcoat with a pet bat.

– Neil Gaiman, quoted in The Guardian

Though I’d watch that series.

When the Going Gets WEIRD

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 09:19:39 +0000

In the New York Times Daniel C Dennett reviews a book by Joseph Henrich called The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Sounds like an interesting book, and the review itself is engaging. I just wanted to note a few points.

First, we have the acronym WEIRD, which stands for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.” Apparently being WEIRD makes us weird, in psychological terms. Non-WEIRD and WEIRD people have differences that can be observed, measured.

I was intrigued by this quote:

To point to just one striking example: Normal, meaning non-WEIRD, people use left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but we WEIRD people have co-opted left-hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population. Until recently few researchers imagined that growing up in a particular culture could have such an effect on functional neuroanatomy.

– Daniel C Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory

I wonder if this can apply on an individual scale: are people whose focus has been language less able to recognise faces? Answering just from within my own head, I’d say maybe? I’ve been what my Dad used to call a compulsive reader all my life, as well as being at least somewhat interested in writing, and I’m very poor at facial recognition. Bordering on prosopagnosia, I sometimes think (though far from anything like the poor woman in this story, who can’t even recognise herself in a mirror).

If my experience suggests that, I have counter examples right in my own family. My beloved and our daughter are both linguists, and both border (to my mind) on being super recognisers¹, which is the complete opposite of me.

None of which tells us anything useful, except maybe that the ability to recognise faces, like many things, exists on a scale.

More interestingly, Dennett introduces (to me, at least) the delightful term ‘Occam’s Broom’:

A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all sound but he would want them examined rigorously by the experts. That’s science. Experts who don’t have the technical tools — historians and anthropologists especially — have an important role to play as well; they should scour the book for any instances of Occam’s broom (with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug).

– Daniel C Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory

Occam had a famous razor; why wouldn’t he have a broom as well?

There’s a professional body of super recognisers. Who’d have thought? ↩︎

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (Books 2020, 22)

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 16:06:45 +0000

This is a book about history, biography, gender – and writing.

It’s presented as a biography of the titular character, who starts as the son of a noble family. It’s written for, and partly based an the life of, Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West.

Famously, Orlando’s gender (or biological sex) changes partway through the novel. She spends the latter part of it as a woman. She also lives for four or five hundred years – and presumably is living still. She’s barely got started by the end of the book.¹

The interesting thing about the time difference is that he/she doesn’t experience the passage of hundreds of years, as far as we are shown. It’s like time passes at a different rate for her. She reaches the age of around 30, but the world has moved on through ages around her.

I enjoyed this greatly, and as I said a while back, it sparked some ideas and made me think of associations with Iain Banks. Which can’t be bad.

Indeed she/he turns up in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, switching back and forth seemingly at random. ↩︎

How I'm Going To Master this Writing Lark

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 14:30:34 +0000

Announcing a big life change: I’m going to be starting a masters course in a couple of weeks. An MA in Creative Writing, at Birkbeck, University of London.

Nine Months in Slippers

“How did you get here, Martin?” I hear you ask. Let me take you back to November last year. I lost my job. The reasons are obscure and not that interesting, but I had been working at SPIKA for only six months, and suddenly I was out on the street.¹

If that had happened a couple of months sooner, I might have been studying all this time. I had been vaguely musing on the idea of doing a masters in journalism. I love to write, and I sometimes think that I kind of missed a calling.

I was too late for 2019, all the university terms having already started. So I did a bit of job hunting, but mainly took a break till after Christmas.

When this year that we had no idea was going to be so terrible started, I started looking for jobs, but I also kept thinking about journalism. I started a distance-learning course. Learned a bit of shorthand, and read up on some of the other aspects of the craft. A journalism MA, starting this year, was still on the table.

Then Coronavirus arrived.

To be honest, the lockdown didn’t change things that much for me: I was at home all the time anyway. But the jobs market, as well as the rest of the world, was affected. It’s easy to work from home in software development, but recruitment was down. I had a few interviews, but no success.

Then somewhere in there I decided that journalism wasn’t for me after all. There are aspects of the profession that didn’t appeal to me: newsgathering and all that side of it, essentially. I’d like to be a columnist or maybe a feature writer, but not so much a reporter. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a terrible time for journalism, with newsrooms laying people off and cutting back.

I kept looking for jobs back in software development. But after a bit, Frances said, “Why don’t you do a masters in your own field?” It was a good idea: it would be intellectually stimulating, and possibly improve my employability. I started looking at courses.

Computer science itself (I’ve never formally studied it), or one of the various data science options? Both had their merits. Either would have been interesting and mentally challenging.

But they didn’t spark joy, to use a tidiness-related term that seems appropriate. I looked at the course outlines, and they were interesting enough, but I could tell I wouldn’t have loved doing them.

There were other subjects, though, and one kept prodding my mind; one that did offer the prospect of joy, the possibility that I would love it.

Like I said, I love to write.

Choosing

Quite a few institutions offer creative writing MAs, in various forms. I applied to all of them. All the ones in London, anyway, and a few others that offer distance learning. Each needed a personal statement and a sample of writing. Every single one had unique requirements of the sample, in terms of word length and type of piece. Royal Holloway, for example (who rejected me), wanted a short story extract and, uniquely, a piece of critical writing. Most just wanted the fiction.

There were differences in the course titles, too. London Met’s was ‘Creative, Digital, and Professional Writing.’ Westminster’s was ‘Creative Writing: Writing the City,’ though they had closed entry for this year.

City, University of London has several. But the plain ‘Creative Writing’ was showing a message to the effect of ‘Applications suspended.’ I emailed to ask if this meant that they were full for the year, and was told that no, they had suspended entry for 2020 because there wasn’t enough interest. So I applied for another one they have, ‘Creative Writing and Publishing.’ They got back to me after a few days and said the course was full. Seems to be a slight disconnect there, maybe?

I got offers from London Met, Kingston (by distance learning), and Birkbeck. Birkbeck were the only ones who interviewed me first (I still haven’t heard back from several, and Glasgow’s website was too broken to let me apply – and they didn’t reply to my query). And just today, Teeside, another distance learning one, offered me a place. Far, far too late. I shouldn’t criticise, though, since I was very late in applying.

For a variety of reasons I decided Birkbeck was the best of the offers, not least that I liked Julia Bell, the course leader, who interviewed me from her shed. Birkbeck is ‘London’s evening university.’ It was set up to provide adult education to people who are working. All the classes are in the evenings.

Why, and Why Now?

This is probably something I should have done thirty years ago, but we didn’t know about masterses back then. Well, I didn’t, anyway. And I don’t think creative writing masters courses existed at all.² Anyway, as the saying more or less has it, the best time was then; the second-best time is now.

Will it help me be a better writer? I damn well hope so. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see.

And Beyond…

What comes after this? In an ideal world I’ll make my living as a writer. I’m well aware how hard that is to achieve, though, so I might end up going back to programming. The best might be some sort of hybrid. We’ll see, but I’m not going to worry too much about it for the next year or so.

One thing I do plan to do is to blog about the course as I do it, so expect to see more here.

Specifically Victoria Street, Westminster. It was a very convenient office for popping down to Parliament Square to protest illegal proroguing. ↩︎
A little research tells me the famous UEA one started in 1970, so I’m wrong there. ↩︎

How Johnson’s Lawbreaking Plans Will Harm the UK

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 19:32:07 +0000

Here’s a Twitter thread (readable on a single page here) that clearly explains how the prime minister’s plans to break international law will damage UK/EU relations, endanger peace in Ireland, and of course, harm the UK’s position in the world.

Is it possible to charge the prime minister with treason?

Walker, 1987 - ★★★½

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 07:41:30 +0000

I really thought I’d seen this before, but remembered nothing about it. Having watched it now, I doubt that I ever actually did see it, because none of it was familiar.

I have the soundtrack album, of course, cos the music was written by Joe Strummer.

It’s a weird film, but it may actually be Alex Cox’s best apart from Repo Man, given that Sid & Nancy wasn’t as good as I remembered, and Straight To Hell is... its own thing.

See in Letterboxd

If the Prime Minister's a Junkie, the Public Has a Right to Know

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 10:14:56 +0000

John Crace, writing his Guardian parliamentary sketch:

“If he was a decent man, he would apologise,” Starmer said. But Boris isn’t a decent man, so he didn’t. Instead he continued to rush on his run.

– John Crace, Boris left flailing as his limitations become clear for all to see

Any Velvet Underground fan immediately recognises that as reference to their song ‘Heroin’:

When I’m rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t know

I don’t know if ‘to rush on one’s run’ is a common expression among heroin addicts, but John Crace has been there himself, so presumably knows what he’s talking about. Is he, then, trying to tell us something about Boris Johnson’s predilections?

Perhaps not; perhaps he just means that Johnson’s enjoying the high of parliamentary debate, of being in the chamber, of being prime minister. But since the rest of the piece is about what disaster PMQs was for him, that seems unlikely.

Is this one of those open secrets that everyone in Westminster knows, including political journalists, but no-one reveals, because it’s not the done thing, old chap?

I do hope not; but we should be told.

On Devs

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 23:59:44 +0000

Just watched the last episode of Devs. Several friends recommended it after I said “What shall we watch next?" a few weeks ago. The question was intended rhetorically, but they gave answers anyway, which was nice.

In terms of its pacing, Devs was likened to Kubrick. Fair enough. I saw some Lynchian overtones in it. Or sub-Lynchian, anyway. I enjoyed the journey, but was slightly disappointed with the destination.

Not, however, as disappointed as I feared I was going to be halfway through the last episode. I practically cheered when Lily threw the gun away. But then poetry-quoting Stewart fucked everything up.

Of course, as soon as you (the programme maker) introduce simulations, you (the viewer) can no longer trust that anything is “real,” so everything gets slippery and to some extent, what’s the point?

Where it disappoints, I think, is that Forest’s incorrect determinism-based view was not actually overturned by the ending. We don’t see him and Lily living in an alternative branch of the multiverse, but in a simulation that could be entirely consistent with his belief that reality proceeds on tram tracks – thereby obviating the guilt he feels for contributing to his wife and child’s death, and also getting him off the hook in his mind for his complicity with his murderous ex-CIA security chief.

I found the first episode quite disturbing: the music was screechingly discordant and set my teeth on edge, and that creepy statue towered over everything. And the fact that the statue was still there, still creepy, at the end was confusing. Surely he’d only had it built because his daughter died? But in the sim where his daughter survived, it was still there and the company was still named after her. Only Devs (or Deus) the project was missing. Which suggests that he had named the company and had the statue built, not as a commemoration of his daughter, but because – I don’t know, really.

The other weird thing about the first episode was that, not having seen the cast, I spent the first ten minutes saying, “Is that Ron Swanson?” The fact that one of the first things he says was a complaint about government regulation feels like a clue. Nick Offerman does an impressive job of disappearing into the part, but he couldn’t hide his voice.

Still, I’ll never be able to watch Parks & Rec in the same way.

Also Katie, when explaining Devs to Lily, uses “reason” when she means “cause.” Her pushing the pen is the cause of it rolling across the table. The reason it happened is because she chose to push it. Reason (to me, at least) implies intelligence or at least sentience behind the action. Cause is the correct word to use when discussing cause and effect.

And when she asked Lily to name a truly random event, Lily should have said, “Nuclear decay.”

Another Superb Nightmare Courtesy of Charlie Kaufman?

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:16:52 +0000

A new Charlie Kaufman film? Hell, yes! The interesting thing about this four-star Guardian review is that the trailer makes it look much more interesting than the review does. But then, I suppose that’s the purpose of trailers.

Anyway: I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Woolf Banks

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 10:31:10 +0000

I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the moment, and enjoying it very much. There’s a bit right at the beginning, gruesomely involving a severed head, that I think Iain Banks might have been echoing in The Algebraist – considerably more gruesomely.

My bike ride this morning took me to Bloomsbury, Woolf’s old area. On my way back, going through Islington, I thought of Walking on Glass, and I suddenly realised that we have multiple characters walking around there with a lot going on in their heads, which is very similar to what happens in Mrs Dalloway – though in Central London

If you follow that link you’ll see that I noted the stylistic connection between the two back in 2018, which I had forgotten today.

There have probably been theses written on such parallels.¹ And Banks was an English graduate, after all, so he’d surely have studied Woolf. I have no great insight here, just a morning’s literary musings.

Though a little googling suggests not; or at least nothing public. ↩︎

Arrival, 2016 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:35:42 +0000

This review may contain spoilers.

This is glorious. I'd give it five stars if it wasn't for the fact that I don't think they had to have Hannah die. They could have misdirected us at the start a different way.

Plus, that first few minutes means we start off feeling sad. It's a serious film, but it doesn't have to be sad.

Not that there's anything automatically wrong with sadness ("Happiness for deep people." -- Sally Sparrow). Still, I think effectively fridging a little girl -- or not, but that's how it appears at first -- weakens the whole piece.

Great to see a complex problem resolved with communication and compromise though.

And! Sequel, please: I want to see what the heptapods need from humanity on 3000 years.

See in Letterboxd

My Contributions to Nikola

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 17:39:34 +0000

A few months ago I wrote that I had switched the way my blog was handled. Not just the blog, the entire site, of which the blog has always been only a part. From being a WordPress blog, with a simple static front page, I moved to the whole site being statically generated: written in Markdown and converted into HTML using a tool called Nikola.

One of my reasons for doing that was to have control over the tools I use. If I chose one that was written in a language that I know, namely Python, then at the same time as changing my tools, I would have the chance to improve my knowledge of the language.

As you might expect, then, I’ve made some contributions to the Nikola project. First I fixed a few minor bugs. And now I’ve created both a new theme and a new plugin.

Blogging Inspirations

There are a couple of styles of blogging that have inspired both elements of my own networked writing, and the things I’ve contributed. Those are:

The ‘link posts’ used by John Gruber of Daring Fireball (and others, but I feel Gruber popularised them). In these, the post title becomes the link to the item the blogger is writing about. The blog post’s own permalink is also present, but indicated by another element, such as the timestamp. On daring fireball it’s the star after the title.
Titleless microblog posts, as popularised by Dave Winer at Scripting News. Again, lots of other people do these too – not least many on Micro.blog – but Winer was an early and is a continuing advocate.

I wanted to be able to use both of these techniques myself, and with only a small fix and some tweaks to template files, I could. But I also wanted to make them first-class citizens of my site, and to make them easily accessible for anyone else who use Nikola. So a theme that handled them well, and a plugin to ease their creation (well, creation of titleless posts) seemed like the way to go.

The GruberWine Theme

Given the inspirations, I named my theme ‘GruberWine’. It’s available in the Nikola theme repository. The details are here. It’s based visually on another theme, called zen-jinja, but I made a lot of changes to the CSS.

The Nikola Micro Plugin

Nikola provides a command-line tool for creating posts: nikola new_post. But that makes you enter a title. You can tweak things afterwards to remove the title, but if you know up front that your post won’t have one, you can now use my ‘Micro’ plugin, by running nikola micro. The details are here in the plugin repository.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (Books 2020, 21)

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 15:30:08 +0000

This short novel feels surprisingly modern. Indeed, maybe it’s modernist. It was written in the fifties, and is set in the thirties. The modern part is mainly the way it plays with time. Starting at a point and then flashing back is simple enough, but then we get various flashforwards and explanations of what’s going to happen to the various characters. It’s all very elegantly done, with the changes smoothly integrated, so they don’t feel like jumps at all.

Jean Brodie is a teacher, and kind of an educational reformer, in that she thinks her students should be taught a broad array of things, and should learn about the world, rather than just follow a narrow, fixed curriculum. She would never “teach to the test” – which phrase is never used, but Brodie would be strongly against that modern malaise.

But she very much plays favourites. Her “set” get all her attention (outside of school as well as in it), and all the other pupils – those who have no chance of becoming “la crème de la crème” – are ignored. She is, ultimately, exceedingly self-centred.

Notoriously, she also has exceedingly dodgy – or maybe just deeply naive – political views. Here is Sandy, the main viewpoint character, when Brodie has shown the class a picture of Mussolini and his fascisti:

They were dark as anything and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie’s disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it.

It gets worse, though, when she:

was going abroad, not to Italy this year but to Germany, where Hitler was become Chancellor, a prophet-figure like Thomas Carlyle, and more reliable than Mussolini; the German brownshirts, she said, were exactly the same as the Italian black, only more reliable.

She sees the error of her ways, though, after a fashion:

After the war Miss Brodie admitted to Sandy, as they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel, “Hitler was rather naughty."

She has some more positive views, though:

“We of Edinburgh owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.”

*Sigh*

But my favourite quotes involve religion:

The Lloyds were Catholics and so were made to have a lot of children by force.

And getting back to those Fascisti:

By now she had entered the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.

It’s a sad story, in the end. Worth reading, though.

Ad Subtract

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 18:55:46 +0000

Amused by Dave Winer’s comment: “can’t stand podcasts with advertising.” I’m far from a lover of advertising, but podcast advertising is, to me the best kind. Or the least-bad kind, anyway. I use Linode, and TextExpander, and 1Password, and Hover… all because I first heard about them on podcasts (and/or because I got discounts on them from podcast ads).

But maybe that’s a particular kind of podcast, or a particular kind of ad. They tend to be independents or small companies like Relay FM; ads that are read by the presenter, in their own voice – sometimes, though not always, in their own words. (Sometimes not their words, but weirded up.)

Dave goes on to say:

What’s even worse is podcasts with advertising with the proceeds going to charity. WTF goes through their minds. Why do they even bother.

– Dave Winer, Untitled

Not sure what he’s talking about there.

What I don’t like is adverts that are injected separately from the body of the podcast. Another voice cuts in (or precedes, or concludes), talking about something irrelevant. Those ones are comparable with TV advertising, and I always skip them.

2020: An Isolation Odyssey

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 21:51:27 +0000

You should watch this. It’s only short. Indeed, only as short as the last section and closing credits of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And do watch the credits. You’ll learn the name Lydia Cambron.

2020: An Isolation Odyssey from Lydia Cambron on Vimeo.

And you know what? It’s nice that a video is not on YouTube for once. I always somehow preferred Vimeo anyway.

The Guardian Might Stop Being a Printed Paper

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 11:34:58 +0000

Colin Morrison, writing at ‘Flashes & Flames’:

The Guardian, which has arguably become the world’s most sophisticated digital news operation, may be contemplating an end to its printed newspapers. That may have been signalled by the recent decision to cut 180 jobs (or 12% of its UK workforce) as a result of Covid.
...
But, tellingly, newsstand print sales, at £49.3m, were 50% down compared with 2016. Last year, print accounted for 42% of revenue (£94 million) and an estimated £75 million of production, distribution and marketing costs. So, the printed newspaper may last year have delivered almost £20m of real profit. But now Covid is pushing it into losses from which it may not be able to recover – without dramatic change.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

Interesting and unsurprising to learn that Saturday is (was?) its biggest day for print sales:

Like most UK national newspapers, The Guardian has been highly profitable on Saturdays because of higher prices and sales volumes. Pre-Covid, The Guardian had been selling 100,000 copies at £2.20 on weeekdays. But, on a Saturday, it was selling 246,000 copies at £3.20 – and with more advertising revenue too.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=03c6c90989-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-03c6c90989-396542471

After our local newsagent stopped delivering the Saturday Guardian, we went out and bought it most weeks… until Covid and the lockdown. We haven’t bought it since, probably, March. But we do pay online, as supporters and subscribers.

I don’t think I’d mind that much if it went digital-only, though it would be the end of an era. You’d think they could keep just the Saturday edition, but:

The management may already have concluded that any plan to print a newspaper only on certain days (including the weekend) will not be viable. Much of the experience (especially of the Newhouse family’s Advance newspaper group in the US) seems to show that reducing the daily frequency seldom works: once the daily habit is broken, newspaper buyers quickly seem to stop buying the paper altogether. A consolation print option could be the expansion of the 101-year-old news magazine Guardian Weekly which claims readers in more than 170 countries.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

I’d guess they’ll maybe keep The Observer going for a while: Sunday papers have their own distinct identities.

The contrast with digital could not be greater. The Guardian has 160 million monthly uniques across the world, some 25% in the UK. More striking, though, are those digital editions in North America and Australia/New Zealand which, respectively, have advertising revenue of £25 million and £11 million. These are now strong operations, evidenced by Australia where The Guardian is the fourth largest online news service with an audience of 11.6 million (more than 50% of the adult population) – ahead of News Corp’s national daily, The Australian.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

Good to know it’s beating Murdoch on his home turf.

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes The Guardian as “a weird newspaper” because: it has nearly two-thirds of its readers coming from outside its own country; started in one city and moved to another; and is owned by a trust that mandates it promotes liberal journalism in Britain and elsewhere.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

“A weird newspaper”: works for me.

People Still Aren't Getting It

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 22:10:20 +0000

I got back on the bike today. First time since I came off back in April. Both because I felt the need to add some variety to my exercise regime, and because so many people are riding these days. And also because I missed it.

It was good. Nice to be back on the bike. A bit annoying the way the mask makes your glasses steam up, but nothing that a bit of slipstream couldn’t clear.

But it was very disappointing regarding people’s behaviour. I cycled around central Hackney for half an hour or so from about 9-9:30. It was pretty busy.

I counted 11 people wearing masks (and two chin-wearers, so they don’t count). I must have passed about 500 people? 700? That’s just a guess, but it was a lot.

Eleven masks.

My mask was protecting all of them: why weren’t they protecting me, and each other?

I mainly blame the government, of course. Incoherent messaging and absence of care. But… some of us have learned what’s best, even given the government.

Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate by Robin Sloan (Books 2020, 20)

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 16:16:40 +0000

My 2020 reading reaches 20, which is pleasing. And with another novella, which is something of a theme.

I read Sloan’s Sourdough a couple of years back, and only thought it was OK, but I still get his newsletter, which is where I learned about this. It was originally serialised in a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper,¹ and published via an interesting experiment with online writing, and a new software package for publishing books on the web.

That said, I read it on my Kindle.

It’s good. Lots of fun, even if you don’t know the Bay Area. A detective and her assistant try to stop multiple timelines being crashed together. But it starts with burritos. What’s not to like?

One unusual thing is that the assistant, who is also the narrator (a veritable Doyle, though not as useful) never has any quoted speech. You’ll get an exchange like this:

I wondered if Scheme had worked up any theories.

“Sure. Most likely explanation is, Stella Pajunas was never real to start with. Ectoplasmic projection. Mass hallucination, maybe.”

Scheme was theorizing that the ABCD—really, the whole Bay Area—had been managed for ten years by a mass hallucination?

“It would explain some things, wouldn’t it?

A piece of narration is answered by the other character. The implication is that the narrator said it. I don’t recall ever seeing this in fiction, but it is used in some interviews. It used to be the norm in the NME back when I read it. In interviews, I much prefer that technique to the purely transcriptional approach, which can look like a play script at times. As to using it in fiction, it works well enough here, in such a short work, but I think it would get wearing at greater length.

Anyway, you can read it for free, so you might as well.

Or two, as it turns out. ↩︎

HEY, Ho, Let's Not Go

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 17:48:04 +0000

This has been sitting around in my drafts folder for about a month, so it’s long past time to get it out there.

HEY (they always capitalise it, which I don’t care for) is a new email service from Basecamp, makers of fine (I’m told) collaboration software for teams. The video walkthrough lasts about half an hour, but/and gives you a good overview of what it’s like.

Hey was also in the news recently over the way Apple was treating it regarding App Store rules. Apple were clearly in the wrong, and things have been sorted out now.

But that’s all another story. I want to talk about Hey, and why I think it is bad for users. Even at the same time that it’s probably good for users. A company, a service, can — like a person — contain multitudes.

The Good

If you watch that video you’ll see that Hey looks like an unusually interesting and capable email client: good for organising mail, getting the unimportant stuff out of your way until you want to look at it, and making the important things highly visible. It’s both powerful at automatically helping the user, and attractive to look at.

The Bad

But it’s built on a proprietary platform. Email’s biggest strength since its invention has been that it was built on open standards. Whether you were using a Unix command-line client at a university in the early days, or Gmail, Outlook, or another IMAP provider today — none of that matters. If you know someone’s email address, you can contact them, and they you. And more importantly for this discussion: if you want to use different email client software, you can.

That’s because email is built on open protocols: SMTP, POP, and IMAP. Not that you have to understand those – or even know about them – to use email, any more than you have to understand an internal combustion engine to drive a car.

More importantly, if you want to change from one email provider to another, you can do so. This is harder than it should be because the culture of people having their own domain never really caught on. All those josmith1989@gmail.com and hazy_harriet@hotmail.com type of addresses could, instead, have been jo@josmith1989.net and harri@hazyharriet.org.

They still could be, in fact. And when they are, then you can change the underlying email provider without anyone other than yourself having to know or care. To take a not-made-up example, martin@devilgate.org used to go by a complex combination of Gmail (for the spam filtering and search) and 5quidhost.co.uk and its eventual purchaser, TSOHost, because that’s what I used for web hosting, as much as anything else. But a few years ago I switched it to Fastmail. No-one I correspond with had to know anything about the change.

But Hey’s email service does not use the open protocols — principally IMAP — that makes all that possible. Instead they have their own proprietary system. If you move your email into Hey’s service, you might not find it too easy to move it out again.

Secondly, right now they don’t support custom domains, so your correspondents will certainly have to know. While josmith@hey.com might be available right now, if they have any success we’ll soon be back to appending birth years or random numbers to the end of common names, just like on Gmail, Hotmail, etc. Though they have said they intend to support custom domains, so there’s scope for a better solution there.

The Alternatives

Andrew Canion had the same thought I did when I watched the video: you can do most of this in MailMate.¹ At least the viewing, the ‘The Feed’ kind of thing. Though he had the added experience of using SaneBox to automatically file and sort your emails.

Andrew also went further than I did: instead of just thinking, ‘I could do that with MailMate,’ he went ahead and did it, and documented the process (with a tiny bit of help from yours truly).

I had heard of SaneBox through its sponsoring of various podcasts, so I was familiar with the idea, but I hadn’t tried it. I’m now trying it out, along with some of Andrew’s suggestions, and it’s altogether a pretty good setup. Now, all that comes into my main inbox — the only things that appear on unread counts, and hence activate icon badges — are actual emails that I want to see. All the newsletters, receipts, confirmations, and other stuff that isn’t spam but that I don’t want appearing in my inbox, and especially in my unread count — those are all there, but tidily away in other mailboxes, where I can deal with them at my leisure.

That said, SaneBox is not free (though it’s cheaper than Hey), and I don’t get that much annoying email. So I don’t think I’ll continue with this exact setup when the free trial ends. But it’s worth knowing that there are good ways — and standards-compliant ways — to achieve similar functionality to Hey’s.

We Built This City on IMAP

What this all shows is that there’s nothing in Hey’s service that you couldn’t create by building on top of IMAP, except the user interface – and that doesn’t have to know about the underlying protocols in any case. It’s possible that is exactly what they have done: implemented it on top of IMAP. In fact, doing anything else would mean giving themselves a lot of extra work, as they would have to effectively reinvent IMAP in any case.

If I were going to build a service like Hey, I’d start with an off-the-shelf IMAP service, probably open source, and build the filtering rules and all that around it.

So I hope that’s what they have done, and that at some point in the future they make their service available to ordinary email clients via IMAP.

And probably plenty of other mail clients. ↩︎

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison (Books 2020, 19)

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:33:05 +0000

I read about this in a Tor.com article about the use of Jack the Ripper in fiction. It’s a story set in Victorian times, about two men living Baker Street in London; one a detective, the other a doctor.

But the detective is an angel, called Crow; and the doctor is JH Doyle, recently back from Afghanistan, where he was injured in an encounter with one of the Fallen. And someone is murdering women in Whitechapel.

In other words, it’s an interesting riff on the Sherlock Holmes stories. The hunt for the Ripper is spread through the whole book, while some of the well-known cases have versions interspersed. The Sign of the Four appears, Baskerville Hall is visited. When someone dies and the only visible wound is twin puncture marks, was it a snake, as in ‘The Speckled Band,’ or a vampire?

Because most of the creatures of myth and legend exist in this London, often with an unusual twist. James Moriarty can’t enter your home unless you invite him. But werewolves are respected landlords.

Vampires can enter public buildings, of course: “Any building with an angel.” Angels only have consciousness and names – names are important – if they are attached to a public building. Churches and synagogues have their angels, obviously; but so too do pubs, hotels, and stations. The angel of King’s Cross makes an appearance.

But not the angel I was half expecting. The Angel, Islington is a pub,¹ and we’d have to refer to its angel as ‘The Angel of the Angel, Islington,’ which would be weird and unwieldy.

Speaking of language, the Victorianism is handled pretty well, I think, but the author is American, and it shows where a few terms creep in. ‘Sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’; ‘baseboard’ instead of ‘skirting board.’ ‘Row houses’ where we would say ‘terraced houses.’ ‘Sundown.’ ‘Paper folded into fourths’; a British writer would say ‘quarters.’

These are mildly jarring, but not that important. Certainly not enough to detract from the fun of the story overall.

Sadly now a Wetherspoons. #NeverSpoons. ↩︎

Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (Books 2020, 18)

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 16:29:12 +0000

The second-last Culture book, and a long-delayed return to Mr Banks. This book is ten years old, and I didn’t write about it in 2010. Not sure why, but I didn’t post much in 2010.

Anyway, this is pure dead brilliant. Even better than I remembered – and I, as is common, remembered surprisingly little.

But you don’t need me to tell you about it. It’s a Culture book. Just read the damn thing.

The Latest Tory Plan to Attack the NHS

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 17:47:00 +0000

This is terrifying:

The prime minister has set up a taskforce to devise plans for how ministers can regain much of the direct control over the NHS they lost in 2012 under a controversial shake-up masterminded by Andrew Lansley, the then coalition government health secretary.

The Prime Minister’s Health and Social Care Taskforce – made up of senior civil servants and advisers from Downing Street, the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) – is drawing up proposals that would restrict NHS England’s operational independence and the freedom Stevens has to run the service.

– Denis Campbell in The Guardian, Boris Johnson plans radical shake-up of NHS in bid to regain more direct control

Looks like Johnson’s life-saving hospital stay has been soon forgotten.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot (Books 2020, 16 & 17)

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 20:37:37 +0000

I suppose I could have counted this as four books, since the first part is in three volumes. A reread of a great set of graphic novels about the timestream-jumping psychic adventurer, and (then) his offspring.

Well worth checking out if you haven’t, and if the above description sounds like your sort of thing.

A Reply From the Masks Petition

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 10:23:33 +0000

That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve had a reply like this from a UK parliament petition before:

Dear Martin McCallion,

You recently signed the petition “Make it mandatory to wear a face mask in public during Covid-19 Pandemic”: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/304397

The Petitions Committee (the group of MPs who oversee the petitions system) have considered the Government’s response to this petition. They felt that the response did not directly address the request of petition and have therefore written back to the Government to ask them to provide a revised response.

When the Committee have received a revised response from the Government, this will be published on the website and you will receive an email. If you would not like to receive further updates about this petition, you can unsubscribe below.

Thanks,
The Petitions team
UK Government and Parliament

– The Petitions team, Make it mandatory to wear a face mask in public during Covid-19 Pandemic

That’s from the one I linked to a week ago.

It’ll be interesting to see if we get anything more back. In the meantime, it’s still at just over 14,000 signatures: keep signing.

And keep wearing a mask.

The Monster (Wear a Mask!)

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:58:38 +0000

Dr Sayed Tabatabai writes beautifully about the horror of working in an ICU at the moment.

Sometimes when people sound quieter and calmer during a respiratory issue it’s a sign of impending doom.

You can’t make noise if you can’t breathe.

– Dr Sayed Tabatabai, The Monster

Go read. It’s a Twitter thread. Only 22 tweets. ThreadReaderApp doesn’t seem to be working.

And please: start wearing a face covering if you ever go out.

The Cold War Never Ended

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:37:08 +0000

Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, writing in the New York Times:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

– Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

The Cold War continues. And Trump’s on the Russian side of it:

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

– Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

Tell Them to Tell Us to Wear a Mask

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 17:16:19 +0000

The government has already replied to this petition, but it’s still worth signing if, like me, you think people should be wearing masks in public:

Make it mandatory to wear a face mask in public during Covid-19 Pandemic

‘My mask protects you, your mask protects me.’ It’s the public-spirited thing to do, but most of the public aren’t doing it. The least the government could do is to encourage it.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Books 2020, 15)

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 14:29:21 +0000

This has won all the awards, and rightly so. Or not quite all: it’s a finalist for the Hugo novella award. At the time of writing, we don’t know whether or not it will win.

Unless I’ve travelled downthread and found out.

It’s a novella, which may be the perfect length of story, in some sense. It’s a love story across time and space and multiple parallel existences… It’s pure dead brilliant.

The actual nature of the war, of the sides, even of the protagonists, Red and Blue, is ambiguous at best. But that doesn’t matter because the writing is so exquisite.

The Wikipedia article describes it as an epistolary novel. That’s only partly true, and not just because it’s a novella. The letters are there, and are fundamental, but I feel that to be truly ‘epistolary,’ the whole story must be told in letters, and that is not the case here. But that doesn’t matter.

One minor oddity I alluded to above: The future is referred to as ‘downthread’ and the past ‘upthread.’ That seems the wrong way round to me, but maybe it reflects the fact that, normally, we can’t stop sliding down into the future.

Go. Get. Read. VVG. They’re adapting it for TV. I can’t quite imagine what that will look like, but I’m keen to find out.

Friday by Robert A Heinlein (Books 2020, 14)

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 23:21:23 +0000

Friday Baldwin is genetically engineered ‘artificial person.’ Indistinguishable from a conventional human, she nonetheless is psychologically constrained by the way her society discriminates against her type.

That’s pretty much her only constraint, though. Her engineered nature also gives her enhanced strength, reflexes, sight, hearing, and smell, as well as genius-level intelligence. She starts out as a courier and soon becomes a fugitive.

This stands up pretty well, all these years since I first read it. The fragmented, Balkanised future North America is interesting. Easy travel everywhere by ‘tubes,’ which are presumably underground trains, and suborbital rockets. Corruption so pervasive that the characters don’t even notice it. You hand over your passport with ‘the appropriate squeeze’ folded inside it, and are waved through.

You Are Your Thoughts (I Think)

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 15:36:53 +0000

Quiet Thoughts

Colin Walker links to a post by Julian Summerhayes¹ about silence:

You see, I’m missing the silence of early lockdown.

No, I’m really missing it.

I can’t say everything’s back to normal but as soon as I step outside, BOOM, there it is! That infernal, torrid background noise, cars everywhere (the air smells dirty) and it’s like nothing ever happened.

– Julian Summerhayes, A quiet space

I can relate. I haven’t noticed the increased noise yet, but I have been enjoying much about lockdown, and the general quietness of things, especially when I sit out in the garden, is part of that. As is the cleaner air here in London.

Unthinkable Thoughts

But Julian goes on to say something that just seems so bizarre, so alien to me, that I can scarcely comprehend it:

But when you realise that you’re not your thoughts, notwithstanding the apparent hold they have over us, and see that they flow naturally much like my beloved River Dart and there’s nothing we can do to orientate them one way or the other, life becomes a lot easier.

– Julian Summerhayes, A quiet space

Emphasis very much mine. We are not our thoughts? I can’t help but think that there’s a missing pair of words in that sentence: ‘nothing if’:

… you’re nothing if not your thoughts…

Now that makes a lot more sense to me. If we are not our thoughts, then what are we? If our thoughts are not us, then who is doing the thinking?

People sometimes use phrasing like, ‘My brain told me to…’, which raises the same question: you are your brain, surely? If not, then what? We are our whole bodies, certainly, and perception and experience encompass all of our physiology, not just our brains. But the brain is the seat of consciousness, and we are conscious beings.

Perhaps – just possibly – people are making a distinction between brain and mind. Maybe that would make sense for the latter formulation, but I’m not convinced that’s it. And certainly it doesn’t explain Julian’s concept of thoughts. Because whether thoughts happen in the physical organ we call brain, or the somewhat more metaphysical and amorphous mind: thoughts are what we are.

In Other Heads

Or so it seems to me. But I shouldn’t dismiss alternative perceptions. Over the last few months I’ve heard several conversations on podcasts, and read a couple of articles, about the different ways people’s brains/minds/psyches/consciousnesses work.

There is aphantasia, which names the fact that some people do not form images in their minds. They have no ‘mind’s eye,’ in effect. Just yesterday I read an article about it and severely deficient autobiographical memory, or SDAM, which seems to be related.

There has also been talk about whether or not we think in words. That can get confusing when people with different experiences discuss ‘the voice in your head.’ One will ask something like, ‘Whose voice is it?’ The answer – from my perspective – is that the voice in my head is my thoughts. That’s how I think. Hmm, except when I think in pictures, as I’m not aphantasic (aphantastic?)

It’s hard to talk about these ideas in ways that someone whose experience is dramatically different will understand. And I find it surprising that we are so different. I wonder if we are just hitting the limitations of language (of English, at least). Maybe people’s experiences are not that different, but it’s just so hard to describe what goes on inside your own head in a way that is meaningful inside someone else’s head.

Or not. After all, some people do hear voices in their heads which appear not to be their own. We generally categorise those people as having a mental illness, and sometimes medication changes their mental experience. And of course psychoactive drugs cause us to have experiences in our own heads that are different from our normal state, so it’s clear that thoughts and perceptions are at least partly chemical.

This is all both fascinating and confusing, and I have no conclusions about it.

And fascinating to learn that someone is still using LiveJournal. Good to know. ↩︎

Assignment in Eternity vols 1 & 2 by Robert A Heinlein (Books 2020, 12 & 13)

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 15:14:48 +0000

I should probably start a special tag for all this Heinlein rereading I’m doing (I have another one in progress). These books are so short that they hardly count as one novel between them, never mind each, but I’m counting them as two because I have two physically separate books.

Plus they’re not only not one novel, they’re not even two. They are, in fact, four stories – the longest no more than a novella – loosely connected by the idea that humans don’t use all of their brain power, and we could do incredible things if we did.

Oh, and an early analysis of what it is to be human, and whether human rights should be accorded to uplifted intelligent animals.

All in all, a good enough, if slight, set of stories.

Site Update

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:18:34 +0000

As you might notice if you look around here, I’ve made some changes to the layout and presentation of the site. Nothing very dramatic, but the header and sidebar look a bit different.

I’m open to – and seeking – constructive criticism. How does it look? Is anything misaligned, or confusingly laid out, or hard to find?

Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter.

The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert A Heinlein (Books 2020, 11)

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 20:31:28 +0000

A set of linked short stories, this, all part of Heinlein’s Future History. In these days of companies launching rockets to the International Space Station, the title story seems slightly relevant. In it, businessman DD Harriman attempts to launch the first mission to the moon – it was written in the 40s, long before Apollo.

They’re all decent enough stories. But we are in a very masculine world. The dodgy sexual politics of the last one are largely ignored by the almost complete absence of women. Except in ‘Let There Be Light,’ in which a women is effectively co-inventor of solar power panels.

Heinlein’s writing of women characters is generally considered to be poor, and I’m sure that’s true. But it’s interesting to think how he developed from these early stories to the later novels, where at least there are women, and they are major characters.

What Must Be Said

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 20:00:24 +0000

I hope I don’t need to say this. But silence is complicity, so:

Black Lives Matter.

My daughter went to the London demo on Wednesday (note: there was no riot, contrary to some bullshit hashtag that was trending yesterday morning). I am so proud of her. Her whole generation seem so thoughtful, so engaged.

Why didn’t I go? To be honest, it’s because I was scared. Not of the demo, or anything that might have happened there. I was scared of the virus. Of the close contact that was sure to happen.

I gave her a lift to her friend’s house. They walked for two and a half hours to Hyde Park. I picked her up in Camden afterwards. But part of me wishes I’d gone myself. She said it was a much younger crowd than the Trump or Brexit demos. Sure, it was a weekday, but more of us olds – me included – should have been there.

How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 11:50:00 +0000

Great piece in The New Yorker, by Elizabeth Kolbert, about how Iceland handled the coronavirus. Which is by actually being guided by science. The experts decided what needed to happen, and it happened, without interference from politicians.

Of course, it’s a country of less than 400,000 people, so the scale is different from even the UK, never mind the US. But it does make you dream of what might have been.

Peel Sessions

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 11:39:37 +0000

Warren Ellis draws our attention to this incredible listing of links to Peel Sessions. They’re on YouTube, so there’s always the chance that any of them will go away, but in the meantime, what a resource.

Got to ask, why doesn’t the BBC make this available officially?

I have only one complaint about that page: it needs use stop-words in its sorting, or otherwise deal with bands called ‘The’ Something. I scrolled down to the ‘F’ section and thought, ‘Well there’s a bit of a large gap here, surely?’ Until I scrolled down to ‘T’, where we find The Fall.

Also, it would be even better if we had Peelie’s introductions, but I guess those aren’t in the released versions.

I’m listening to Dolly Mixture as I write. Who remembers them? Well, hardly even me, to be honest. But they introduce themselves in their very first track.

Beyond This Horizon by Robert A Heinlein (Books 2020, 10)

Sun, 31 May 2020 20:17:39 +0000

I like these short books you can read in a day.

A reread, of course. I read most or all of Heinlein from my early days of reading SF. But I read the blurb on the back of this and didn’t recognise it at all. Started reading, and it still wasn’t familiar.

Then as I got closer to the end, it did start to seem familiar. Did I read the last quarter of it recently? Or is there a short-story version of part of it that I read not long ago? I don’t know, but it’s often strange how memory works.

Anyway, the first point about this: the sexual politics are horrific. It’s a future society where men go armed routinely – and so it is a ‘polite’ society. It may be where the phrase ‘an armed society is a polite society’ comes from. I wonder what Heinlein (assuming that to be his actual view) would think of today’s armed society in America.

Women, on the other hand, do not go armed, or do much else apart from be decorative and have babies. Mostly. One woman character wears a sidearm, but the protagonist does not exactly treat her with the respect he gives to other men.

Men can choose not to go armed, in which case they have to wear the ‘Brassard of peace,’ and are treated as second-class citizens by the armed ‘braves.’

But it’s not mainly about any of that. It’s about eugenics, and how and whether it’s possible to improve the human race ethically.

In story terms it’s OK. It’s interesting enough that you want to know what happens, but it feels like its main purpose in existing is to examine the philosophical questions around eugenics. I note that it was published in 1942, so before the Nazis' experiments were known about.

Glasgow Fairytale by Alastair D McIver (Books 2020, 9)

Sat, 30 May 2020 19:31:22 +0000

This is exactly what its title says. Take all the best-known (in Britain, at least) fairytales, mash them up together, and set them in present-day Glasgow.

It’s hilarious, and tons of fun.

Boiling a Frog by Christoper Brookmyre (Books 2020, 8)

Fri, 29 May 2020 20:32:41 +0000

The last Brookmyre I read was Pandaemonium, in 2010. Before that, his first, Quite Ugly One Morning, before I started writing here. The second of those introduced campaigning journalist Jack Parlabane. There’s another one before this, but you don’t need to read them in order. There are also a stack more.¹

Anyway, what’s it like? No bad, as we say in Scotland. It starts off with Parlabane in prison. Part of the story, including how he ended up there, is told in flashback. It’s all set in the early days of the new Scottish Parliament, around 2000, 2001.

It’s a decent page turner, I can’t deny. My main criticism in writerly terms is about the old ‘show, don’t tell,’ thing, which we’ve discussed here before.

In at least one of those pieces I counsel against setting that injunction in stone. But it’s notable how much of this novel violates or ignores it. For large chunks of the flashbacks we’re told what happens. It’s fine. The writing style flows and it doesn’t feel like infodumps, but I was certainly aware of it.

Worth reading. I’ll probably read more of him, eventually. Still looking for a sequel to Pandaemonium, though.

Apparently I’ve also read Be My Enemy. I don’t remember anything about that one, and I only mentioned it in passing there. ↩︎

We Have No Idea How Many of the Deaths Attributed to Covid-19 Really Were Due to the Disease

Fri, 29 May 2020 10:24:19 +0000

Dr John Lee, writing in The Spectator (paywall, but free access to a few articles), explains what pathologists do, and goes on to say:

We are still struggling to understand coronavirus. I can think of no time in my medical career when it has been more important to have accurate diagnosis of a disease, and understanding of precisely why patients have died of it. Yet very early on in the epidemic, rules surrounding death certification were changed — in ways that make the statistics unreliable.

– Dr John Lee, The way ‘Covid deaths’ are being counted is a national scandal.

We’ve moved from needing two doctors to certify death, to only one if the cause is believed to be Covid-19. And sometimes the ‘cause’ is decided from a statement from care-home staff, who are not usually trained medical professionals.

So at a time when accurate death statistics are more important than ever, the rules have been changed in ways that make them less reliable than ever. In what proportion of Covid-19 ‘mentions’ was the disease actually present? And in how many cases, if actually present, was Covid-19 responsible for death? Despite what you may have understood from the daily briefings, the shocking truth is that we just don’t know. How many of the excess deaths during the epidemic are due to Covid-19, and how many are due to our societal responses of healthcare reorganisation, lockdown and social distancing? Again, we don’t know. Despite claims that they’re all due to Covid-19, there’s strong evidence that many, perhaps even a majority, are the result of our responses rather than the disease itself.

– Dr John Lee, The way ‘Covid deaths’ are being counted is a national scandal.

It sometimes seems like we’re trying, as a country, to handle this whole thing as badly as possible.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Books 2020, 7)

Tue, 26 May 2020 13:58:30 +0000

I decided I needed something SF-y that I knew I’d enjoy: a reread, in other words. Something with spaceships. Prowling my shelves, this is what I came to. No spaceships, but fast skateboards and faster motorbikes, katanas and glass knives; and of course, the Metaverse.

I was struck by how little of it I remembered, but it is something like 26 years since I read it (published 1992, so I’m guessing I read it in 94 or so).

Hiro Protagonist, the fantastically-named hero, is a hacker.¹ He’s also the greatest samurai swordsman alive, supposedly. And he’s delivering pizzas for the Mafia. Which fact is the first view we have of how the world – or at least America – has changed. There is almost no government, no laws; and everything is split up into ‘burbclaves’ and franchises, run by companies, churches, or criminal organisations.

But there is the Metaverse. Nothing we have today is close to what it is like, but it’s what virtual reality wants to be, and maybe will be one day.

The internet is everywhere (which of course wasn’t the case when it was written). Though phoneboxes still exist, and using them is one way to get into the Metaverse. And if you want mobile access, you have to ‘go gargoyle.’ Which is to say, wear your special goggles and carry a computer around with you, strapped to your body. There are mobile phones, but the conversion of them into pocket computers is not something that Stephenson foresaw. Or at least, not something he made use of here.

The Ending

I had the impression that everyone thought that early Stephenson had problems with endings. I mean, I had that impression myself, and have alluded to it here before. And I thought that this was one with a slightly weak ending.

But it isn’t at all. The bit that I remembered – the climax that takes place in the Metaverse – comes at the end of a tense chase/fight sequence, and while it depicts a scene that might be anticlimactic for the people in-universe who witness it, it’s fully satisfying and sound to us, the readers. Then the last couple of chapters wind things up neatly back in the outer world.

The criticism that might be levelled at it, especially in SF terms, is that we don’t see how the world has been changed by the events of the story. But I think that can easily be left to our imaginations.

A genuine classic.

Interesting to note that even programmers for the government are called ‘hackers’ here. In the positive sense, of course. ↩︎

Lying Sack

Sun, 24 May 2020 09:06:27 +0000

Nice to see the gentle description of Mary Wakefield in Wikipedia this morning:

In case you don’t know, Wakefield is married to Dominic Cummings. She works for The Spectator, and wrote the now-famous piece about her and Cummings’s experience suffering from Covid-19. All without mentioning their drive across the country.

Hence the delightful opening – now removed, predictably – in Wikipedia, describing her as “a lying sack of potatoes”.

The Beat(les) Generation is Slipping Away

Fri, 22 May 2020 16:30:48 +0000

Sad to read in The Guardian that Astrid Kirchherr¹ has died. She was 81. That’s not a bad age, and it’s not like I had followed her career. I just knew her as a photographer who had worked with The Beatles, and been Stuart Sutcliffe’s partner till he died.

But from my early reading of Beatles books – like The Beatles: An Illustrated Record – onward, I was aware of her as part of their story, their mythology.

More than that, though, as the article above, as well as her obituary, will tell you: she was the one who gave them their early look. She made them the “lovable moptops.” They’d have been successful without the haircuts, of course, but there’s no denying the importance of that early image.

I think I’m saddened more because of what her death represents. I was born the year The Beatles took America. They had long split up by the time I developed any musical awareness.² But they were the first band I really got interested in, when my sister gave me a tape. They were my favourites until punk came along, and I love them still.

But that whole generation is ageing – well, who isn’t, of course – and will soon be gone. And mine not too far behind it. So what it all comes down to is that Astrid’s death reminds me of my own mortality, and there’s no excuse for that!

Brilliant photos, though.

I note that I always thought her name was Kirchnerr. But there’s no “n” to be found. ↩︎
Though I did shock my grandma when I was very small, by singing “Obla-di, Obla-da.” She thought I was “swearing”. And it might have been The Marmalade’s version that I’d heard at that time. ↩︎

Tip: How to Snooze iPhone Alarms Using Hardware Buttons

Tue, 19 May 2020 09:49:28 +0000

I don’t know whether people know about this iOS feature. I discovered it by accident a year or two back. Before that I used to snooze my alarms by drowsily scrabbling for my phone, prying my eyes open, then trying to tap the correct onscreen button.

Then one morning the alarm was too loud – or it might have been too quiet, I don’t recall – and I tried to change the volume. When I pressed the volume button, the alarm instantly stopped. I thought I had cancelled it by accident, until it rang again the customary nine minutes later.¹

Since then I’ve always snoozed my alarms that way. But nearly every time I do, I think, “Do people know about this feature?” Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written down. And I’m going to post this without DuckDucking first, so that the existence of some article in The Verge or somewhere doesn’t spoil my flow.

I had thought that pressing the power button cancelled the alarm, rather than snoozing it, but I just checked, and it also snoozes it. So if you reach out, eyes closed, and press anything on the side of your iPhone, you’ll get another nine minutes.

In the interest of fully informing you, dear reader, I’ve just checked what the Home button does; and it appears that does cancel the alarm. So keep your presses to the sides.

I should note that I still have an iPhone 7. I’ve no reason to believe the behaviour is significantly different on more recent models, but obviously on the 10-series phones (X, XR, XS and the various 11s) you don’t have the Home button, so something different might happen. Let me know if you find out.

Why nine minutes, I’ve always wondered? Presumably ten is just a bit too long, and anything else would be too short. Why isn’t it configurable? Because, I assume, Apple have always been a highly opinionated company. ↩︎

Homemade Rolls

Wed, 13 May 2020 20:39:40 +0000

Not to blow my own trumpet, but I made these rolls today. They are the closest thing I’ve ever had this side of Scotland to the rolls I grew up with.

I used this recipe that was published in The Scotsman. It involves overnight fermentation in the fridge, and the trick to getting the crispy outside is coating them with a mixture of plain flour and rice flour before baking.

Main problem is 500g of flour makes only eight rolls! And it’s kinda hard to get bread flour at the moment.

This Is No Time to Unlock

Tue, 12 May 2020 17:58:20 +0000

Boris Johnson’s update to Britain’s – or in fact, only England’s – lockdown conditions has confused people. But even if it hadn’t, it’s too soon for us to be opening things up again.

By “us” I mean everyone: the human race as a whole.¹ Everywhere in Europe, to go by the papers, there’s talk of easing lockdown conditions. In Australia people can meet in groups of up to ten.

But the virus hasn’t gone away. It’s still out there, being breathed out and in. Waiting for our preventative measures to fail. Not to anthropomorphise it.

It’s not over. It’s not close to being over. It won’t be over till there’s a vaccine. Or a cure, but a vaccine seems more likely.

Don’t get me started on how politicians, at least here and in the US, have been referring to a “national emergency,” when it’s so much more serious than that. ↩︎

When Harry Met Sally..., 1989 - ★★★★

Fri, 08 May 2020 23:46:14 +0000

Somehow I’d gone this long without ever seeing this. I’m glad I put it right now. The dialogue is glorious! Nora Ephron may be my favourite screenwriter after Aaron Sorkin, where dialogue is concerned.

The ending flops a bit. In fact, I think I’d have enjoyed it more if they hadn’t got together, but hey, what can you do?

See in Letterboxd

Returning Blogs

Wed, 06 May 2020 18:41:36 +0000

Here’s a reason (another reason) why feed readers are great: Tom Coates of PlasticBag.org has written his first post in seven years. There’s no reason to unsubscribe from blogs that haven’t posted for a while – no reason even to notice that fact normally – so up it pops in NetNewsWire¹ today.

The post itself is good – a bit meta (entirely meta) – but there’s nothing wrong with that.

I keep seeing suggestions that blogging is undergoing a renaissance, and I think it might be true. Of course, lots of us never went away, either as readers or writers. But it’s good to welcome Tom back.

Other feed readers are available. ↩︎

No More...

Mon, 04 May 2020 18:15:56 +0000

Sad to hear of the death of Dave Greenfield from Covid-19. The Stranglers were not really like other punk bands. But they were the band that got me into punk. I heard ‘No More Heroes’ on the radio one weekend, after hearing my school friends talk about punk, and I never really looked back.

I never saw them live, and I didn’t follow their career after the first three or four albums; but there’s a lot of good stuff in those early ones.

Greenfield is, I think, the first musician of that generation to die from the pandemic.

Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade (Books 2020, 6)

Sun, 03 May 2020 22:31:07 +0000

This is Richard Ayoade’s detailed analysis of the 2003 film View From the Top, directed by Bruno Barreto and starring Gwyneth Paltrow. It is, by all accounts, a masterwork.

By Ayoade’s account, at least. I haven’t seen it. Ayoade is a comedian. The book is pretty funny. The film, I suspect, is quite bad.

Static Leads to Static

Fri, 01 May 2020 17:20:48 +0000

I’m almost beginning to wish I hadn’t switched my site to static generation. Not really, though. I’m very pleased with the way the site is performing, with how it looks, and with how easy it is to change things.

It’s just the non-static parts that I want to get working that are complex. By which I mean comments, of course, and Webmentions.

Comments are obvious. And the “obvious” way to make them work with a static site – and one that has good support built into Nikola, the generator application I’m using – is Disqus. But Disqus is known to track its users and show ads, and I don’t want that for anyone who might comment here.

So I’ve been trying other options. But none of them work as easily as you’d hope. There are always complexities, difficulties, bits you have to glue together or even build yourself.

So far I’ve tried:

Isso: you have to run a service on your site. I couldn’t get the service to respond.
Staticman: I couldn’t get its service to start. A problem with configuring the private key setting.
Remarkbox: at the time of writing this is still active, but I’m not sure I’ll keep it. It works like Disqus, in that the comments are hosted on a third-party site, which is not really in keeping with the whole static site/indieweb ethos. It’s not advertising driven like Disqus, but it behaves a bit strangely, at least on here. We’ll see, though.

Lots of blogs manage without comments, of course, including many of the most successful and long-running ones. But I’ve always had a fondness for them. They were building communities online long before there was a Facebook or a Twitter.

The other way to join the conversation is to send and accept Webmentions. I won’t try to explain those here, but again, there’s a certain amount of infrastructure needed to get them working, and I’m not quite there yet.

Still, it all means I’m learning things, which is good. And my posts and pages are just text files, which is as they should be.

Repairability Is Good

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 11:34:05 +0000

It’s good when you can repair things. We had a problem with the switch on the kettle the other day, and I was able to open it up, put various bits back in place, and get it working again. It tripped not one but three circuit breakers in the house and blew the fuse in its plug, all while it was failing, but that’s what safety devices are for, I guess.

And today I’ve just fixed the switch on our hoover. Actually it’s a Miele, and this video by an Australian repair person was really helpful. He’s dealing with a different model, but it’s the same problem – the switch wouldn’t stay on – and the same construction and even part number.

I was able to get the footswitch off following what he did, and order a replacement part online. It arrived today, and all went back together really smoothly, and now our ~~hoover~~ Miele vacuum cleaner¹ is working again.

Oddly the part number on the replacement is different from that on the broken one, which matched the number the video guy quotes.

Anyway, while I’d have tried these repairs under normal circumstances, it’s especially useful at the moment, when it’s not like you can go shopping, or get someone to come in and fix things.²

I’ve never taken to calling them “vacuum cleaners.” I grew up with Hoovers, so that always seems like the right word. ↩︎
If there even are still people who do that. ↩︎

Tate and Tennant Killing It

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 22:39:45 +0000

I see that, unlike Little Britain, Catherine Tate is still very funny when she brings back old characters for charity. Especially with David Tennant’s help.

“Being Scottish is not an underlying condition!”

Misbehaviour, 2020 - ★★★½

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 23:14:44 +0000

Good wee film about the women who protested at the 1970 Miss World show. Based on what actually happened.

Surprising to learn that the phrase “Women’s Liberation” only originated then.

See in Letterboxd

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (Books 2020, 5)

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 09:55:49 +0000

I’ve never read Greene before, except for I think one short story, and a chapter or two of his autobiography. This is fascinating. It’s the story of a Catholic priest in Mexico at a time when the church was banned. I had no idea that such a time existed: I think of Mexico as a very Catholic country, so such oppression is surprising.

The genius of it is that all the characters are so convincing. From the “whisky priest” himself – sinful, still believing, considering himself damned, yet trying to do what he can for people he feels are his parishioners; through to the hardline atheist lieutenant of police that is trying to find him. No-one is entirely good or bad, but there is sympathy for them all.

It’s justly considered a classic.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988 - ★★★

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 08:53:16 +0000

Well this is a lot funnier than the title would suggest. I think I had always thought it would be kind of bleak, but it’s not at all. There’s betrayal, attempted suicide, attempted murder, and a lot of property damage; but it’s very lighthearted.

See in Letterboxd

Sunset Boulevard, 1950 - ★★★½

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 23:43:52 +0000

Good to watch an old movie for a strange. Great example of starting with the end and telling the whole story in flashback. The voiceover gets a bit wearing, especially when it’s telling you things you can see perfectly well happening on screen.

It’s quite a strange film, and another example of Hollywood telling stories about itself.

See in Letterboxd

Website Changes

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 14:15:01 +0000

Abstract/TL;DR

I’m changing my site. Everything should go on working, but comments will disappear for a while.

Details

I’m changing both the server my site runs on, and the way it’s built. I’ve been using WordPress for the blog since I started it in 2006 (before that I used LiveJournal, and at some point I imported those posts, so the earliest entries go back to 2002). Just recently, though, I started having a problem with it.

Everything was still running OK, but I couldn’t post to it from external sources. So I couldn’t use MarsEdit, which is my preferred way to post, or the Micro.blog app for status updates, or even services like IFTTT, which has been adding notes and ratings for all the films I’ve watched over the last few months, from Letterboxd.

I’m sure I could have tracked down the cause and fixed it. But then there’s also the fact that I recently got round to upgrading to WordPress 5¹. I had avoided that because I didn’t like the new editor when I tried it out before. I don’t know quite why, but eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded.

And I hate it. I never really cared for the online editing experience at the best of times, which is part of the reason I preferred using MarsEdit. But I just have a visceral bad reaction to the new editor.

Add to that that static sites are a) much faster to serve and b) what “all the cool kids” are using nowadays. I started to look into moving to a static site.

The two big players here are Jekyll and Hugo. I’ve used Jekyll before, when I was at SAHSU. The documentation for the RIF² is hosted at GitHub Pages, and that uses Jekyll, so it’s worth having a local implementation for testing, which I did.

But as a programmer, there can be times when you want to change the tools you use. Jekyll is written in Ruby; Hugo is in Go. I don’t know either of those, and while I like learning new languages, that wasn’t the purpose of this exercise.

In short, I wanted something that is written in Python, and I found it in Nikola.³ For reasons too boring to explain, I had trouble with it on my existing server, so I’ve set up a new one at Linode. I’ll be switching over to it later today. You shouldn’t see any changes, except:

All the comments on the blog will disappear. They’re not lost, and I plan to get them back, but I need to find the best way to do that. For now, comment via Twitter or Micro.blog.
The Atom feed may be broken. I’ll try to get that fixed. The RSS feed should still be fine, and at the same location as before. Anything that uses it should carry on working without any fuss.
If you follow me via WordPress.com (Hi Andrew), sorry. That’s going away. Try my RSS feed instead. Or Twitter; all posts automatically get Tweeted to my timeline.

Which may have in part caused the problem. ↩︎
Rapid Inquiry Facility. ↩︎
Named after Nikola Tesla. ↩︎

The Last Bike Ride

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 11:04:09 +0000

I came off my bike today. Don’t worry, I’m not hurt, beyond a couple of scrapes. But as I was going down – you know how people say things go into slow motion? It wasn’t quite like that, but I did have time to think, “Shit, I hope they don’t have to call an ambulance.” And once I was down and realised that nothing was broken, I thought, “I hope no-one comes running to help, cos I’ll have to wave them away.”

No-one came to help, of course – mainly because there was no-one around. But all this is ironic, given that I read a piece a week or so back by a keen cyclist, saying he wanted to ride, but wasn’t going to, because if he got hurt then he’d be taking much-needed resources from the NHS.

“That’s very noble,” I thought, and then proceeded to completely ignore the implied advice.

No longer. From now until this is over, I’ll be exercising indoors, or at most, in the garden. It’s a shame, because I do love to get out on the bike, especially in the spring. But everyone has to put up with limitations during this, and this is a pretty minor one.

Howl's Moving Castle, 2004 - ★★★★½

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 23:47:47 +0000

I read the book to the kids years ago, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen this. Turns out I hadn’t, though I must’ve seen a few scenes, because I was familiar with the imagery.

Anyway, this is wonderful. Right up there with the best of the Studio Ghibli fims.

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Erin Brockovich, 2000 - ★★★★

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 23:45:44 +0000

I wouldn’t have expected that a film about someone fighting an evil corporation that is poisoning people could be so feelgood. But this achieves it.

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Wear a Mask! And Celebrate Your Immune System

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 18:57:11 +0000

Yesterday’s XKCD “Pathogen Resistance” turns things round and shows the current crisis from the point of view of the virus. It is genius. And even has a Watchmen reference in the mouseover text.¹

But more importantly, and unrelated: it turns out that wearing a mask — any kind, even just a scarf– will help to reduce the spread of the virus. This is contrary to what we were told initially, but it makes complete sense even without technical analysis. Anything coming between someone else’s droplets and your lungs, or your droplets and someone else’s lungs, is better than nothing coming between them.

It’s like wearing a cycling helmet: I’ve always thought that something between my head and the ground, should I come off, is better than nothing.

And there are designs online for making masks out of any old cloth. I feel #blessed that my daughter has an A-level in textiles and a sewing machine.

On the question of masks, though, something has been confusing me since this all started. And to an extent, before that, really, when I’d occasionally see people out and about wearing what appeared to be a hospital-style mask. Which is, where did people get such things? How did they come to have what looked like professional medical supplies in their private possession? Aren’t these things controlled?

Clearly not, for the last one. And I wondered why? Why did people have them? Now, that seems like a foolish question. And it ignores the cultural differences, whereby in parts of Asia it’s considered rude not to wear a mask if you are sick. Makes sense, though I always wonder how horrible it is if you sneeze while wearing one.

“We’re not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.” ↩

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Books 2020, 4)

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 17:02:04 +0000

I like this quote from near the end:

The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.

When I read Tokarczuk’s Flights at the start of last year, it was actually this one that had led me to her. Warren Ellis recommended it in his newsletter, if I remember correctly, and the title intrigued me. What I didn’t realise then was that the title is a quote from William Blake: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead,” he says, in Proverbs of Hell. With that spelling, I note.

Apparently it caused a great fuss when it was published in Poland. I don’t understand why, but cultures are different.

Unlike Flights, it’s a complete, single story. It’s also much simpler. The narrator is an interesting character, though her practice of astrology adds nothing to the story and gets in its way to an extent.

Each chapter has a quote from Blake as an epigraph. I don’t think she used the thirteenth proverb of hell, though it could be seen as the narrator’s north star:

All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.

The Big Short, 2015 - ★★½

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 15:15:08 +0000

You might come out of this film with a better understanding of the events that led to the 2008 financial crisis -- or you might not. More likely, I think, you'll sort-of understand it while you're watching, but be none the wiser when it's all over.

The question of what happened is explained, but not the one of how it was allowed to happen.

But I think the problem with this as a movie is that it tries to dramatise the events, using versions of some of the real people involved as characters; but it doesn't go far enough in that. We don't see anything of their lives outside of their financial dealings, so it fails to humanise them sufficiently. As characters, I ended up just finding them tiresome.

To really help us to understand the whole thing, it would need to be a documentary, and that would have been harder to sell. So by not quite being enough of one thing or the other, it fails at both.

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Writing News

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 18:03:58 +0000

I wrote a screenplay and submitted it to the BBC Writersroom (which they always present that way, probably to avoid having to decide where to put the apostrophe) “Interconnected” competition. The idea was to write a five-to-ten-minute piece with between two and four characters, communicating via videoconferencing app. Very now.

I only heard about it (from my friend Andrew on Facebook) six days ago. I don’t think I’ve ever written a finished piece so quickly.

They will, of course, get thousands of submissions, so mine stands little chance of being one of the chosen four, but it was very satisfying to get it done.

Crazy Rich Asians, 2018 - ★★★½

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 12:25:38 +0000

In considering how rich families try to control who their progeny marry, I found it interesting to see if this mapped on to Pride and Prejudice at all. Only if if you stretch things quite a lot. “Darcy” and “Elizabeth” are already together at the start, after all.

It’s a fun enough romp if you don’t mind the fantastical displays of fabulous wealth. Interesting too, to see Michelle Yeoh as a controlling mother rather than a kickass starship captain.

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Venturing Out: A Status Report from Hackney

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 18:24:00 +0000

I had cause to go to Westfield in Stratford the other day. It looked like this at about noon:

The Levis shop was open. I was picking up some jeans that had been in for repair. That’s a good note for when this is all over, incidentally. If your Levis wear into holes or get torn, most of their shops offer a repair service now. They may have done for years; I only learned about it a month or so back. But it means that for significantly less than a new pair of jeans, I have two good-as-new pairs, including the ones which were already my favourites. One antidote to fast fashion.

There was almost no-one around, and no-one was getting very close to anyone. In Lakeland I was able to get a refill (really, replacement) for one of our SodaStream CO₂ cylinders. But they didn’t have any new ones. It seems unlikely that those have been panic-bought, but I was thinking of getting an extra one in case it becomes hard to get replacements, so others might have been ahead of me.

In and out within half an hour, and the parking was the least I’ve ever paid at Westfield: £3. I wouldn’t normally drive if I wasn’t buying much, but getting on the Overground would have been the opposite of social distancing.

Or maybe not, if it had been as empty as the mall.

But just yesterday I gave my daughter a lift to a friend’s house — same idea, avoid the bus — and up in Stamford Hill at around 4:30pm it was really busy with pedestrians. A lot of cars on the road, too. Maybe that was normal or less than, for that time on a Tuesday, though.

Dropped into the wee Sainsbury’s on the way back. No fresh fruit or veg at all. Most tinned goods and bread gone — no toilet rolls, obviously — plenty of snacks and crisps, surprisingly. Either panic-buyers prefer healthy options, or Sainsbury’s are quicker at getting unhealthy supplies back.

I have to confess to feeling a small amount of smugness at having stocked up over the last year or so. Brexit was the initial trigger, but I soon realised that having a supply of non-perishable items is actually pretty useful. If you can afford to buy a bit extra from time to time, and you’ve got the space to store it all, of course.

On the other hand, meals are going to get dull really fast without a regular supply of fresh things.

But if that’s the most we have to worry about, we’re doing better than many. I hope you are coping OK, dear reader.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan, 2015 - ★★★★★

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 23:06:52 +0000

I loved this film more Than I can possibly say. Sure, it’s sentimental as hell, but if you can watch the tale of a mute Pakistani girl who gets lost in Delhi, and looked after by a Hindu Indian guy, without a tear in your eye, then you have no heart.

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Booksmart, 2019 - ★★★½

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 22:47:57 +0000

Watched on Friday March 6, 2020.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Books 2020, 3)

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 21:20:29 +0000

Harry Potter fan fiction, by Merlin’s beard! I heard of this book — HPMOR, as it’s known — from my son, a couple of years ago. Didn’t think about it for a while, and then recently I saw a tweet from a friend-of-friends, @ciphergoth:

The correct quote is "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion." https://t.co/n3qAmdyhV2 pic.twitter.com/Agxq7FruRk

— Paul Crowley (@ciphergoth) January 28, 2020

The fact that it was a quote from Harry Potter, and that I didn’t recognise it — indeed, it didn’t seem like something Harry would say — intrigued me, so I clicked through.

And then I shortly found myself downloading the ebook and reading it for the next… actually, month or so.

Because this book is looooooong! It’s a retelling of just the first Harry Potter book, along with much more, and it’s about half as long as all seven of the JKR originals.

In fact, it could have done with an editor. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it has some weaknesses.

First, the strengths, though. Yudkowsky can write a page-turner almost as well as Rowling. What we have here is an alternative universe in which Petunia Evans marries someone else, not Vernon Dursley. They adopt Harry, and bring him up in a loving home. Harry’s adoptive father is a scientist, which is where he learns his rationality. So his first thought when he discovers that magic exists is to try experiments to understand its capabilities and limits. Experimentation soon gets overwhelmed by events, though, as the plot gets going.

There are other differences from the original, of course, and the end result is very different.

Part of what Yudkowsky does is takes the literal translation of Voldemort’s name — “flees from death,” essentially — recognises the rationality of that feeling — who wouldn’t prefer going on living, to dying? — and builds from there.

The major flaws are wordiness and couple of authorial tics that get repetitive and mildly annoying. He has a tendency to refer to people by their role, rather than their name: “The Defence Professor,” rather than “Quirrell,” for example. Which is fine if used sparingly, for variety. But he has people referring to other people like that, when they just wouldn’t.

There’s also overuse of scenes that start like, “The boy stood in the forest…” and only slowly revealing which boy. Again, fine occasionally, but he overdoes it.

And a few Americanisms creep in: like calling the staff of Hogwarts the “faculty.” And anachronisms: nobody apologised for their snarkiness in 1992, since the word hadn’t been coined yet. Well, I could be wrong there: this site says it goes back to 1906 or earlier. No-one in Britain, then.

But I shouldn’t complain. It’s an astonishingly well-constructed work, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Clash On Display

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 21:27:27 +0000

Paul Simenon’s Smashed Bass

My favourite band have become a museum piece.

Or at least, some of their instruments, clothing, lyrics, and memorabilia are in an exhibition which the Museum of London¹ has been running since the fortieth anniversary of London Calling in December. I popped along today.

Clash Shirts and Guitars

It’s small, but pretty good. The centrepiece is Paul Simenon’s smashed bass from the famous cover photo. It lies under glass on a red velvet cushion, like a fallen warrior lying in state (see above).

It’s actually kind of gruesome. “That’s no way to treat an expensive musical instrument,” as someone once said.

Joe Strummer’s White Telecaster

I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, I don’t think. Except maybe that Joe had a backup white Telecaster, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use, either live, in video, or in photos. His iconic black one is in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I believe. Or another museum.

Oh, and see the poster in that shot? “Two for a fiver”? When I bought London Calling it was only £3.99. Both times, as I’ve written about before.

Anyway, worth checking out, especially since it’s free. My main complaint: there are a lot of songs that could have been playing, even if they kept it to the relevant album. Instead they had a loop of just three (“London Calling,” “Train in Vain,” and “Clampdown,” the latter two live versions).

Big Display of the London Calling cover

Which I had never before visited, in thirty-two years living here. ↩

Glen Matlock Remembers How to Rock, but Nearly Forgets the Songs That Put Him Where He Is

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 14:13:43 +0000

Glen Matlock doesn’t seem to have much time for the past, except the past as he sees it. Cover versions of the New York Dolls, or one or other size of The Faces, are fine. But the songs that he co-wrote? The songs that are responsible for what fame he has — for 200 people being out on a cold, virus-infested night, to see him?

Those songs — that single song, in fact ¹ — is relegated to the encore.

Glen Matlock and his band at the Red Lion Ballroom in Leytonstone

There’s nothing wrong with keeping your best-known songs for the encore, of course. But when the ticket site said “Curfew: 10:30,” and it’s 10:27 and there hasn’t been a single Pistols song, you can start to get a bit twitchy.

On the plus side, he did introduce “Pretty Vacant” by saying, “This is ‘SOS’,” referring to his borrowing of the intro riff from the Abba song.

It was a good night, though. His originals and the covers were all fine. It’s just that, if you heard a no-name pub band playing those songs — well, you wouldn’t bother going out specially for it.

The night was billed as “Glen Matlock + Earl Slick.” I’m embarrassed to admit I had to look up who Slick was. Turns out he only replaced Mick Ronson in Bowie’s band, and worked with John & Yoko! And now he’s playing lead guitar in Glen Matlock’s band. Oh well.

There’s no point in asking what that is. You’ll get no reply. ↩

Late Night, 2019 - ★★★

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 20:37:29 +0000

Watched on Thursday February 20, 2020.

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Parasite, 2019 - ★★★★½

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 14:49:41 +0000

A richly deserved Oscar winner, despite what the Leader of the Free World might have to say about it. He should start by watching it, obviously.

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Fighting with My Family, 2019 - ★★★½

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 14:32:40 +0000

I didn't expect to be watching a film about wrestling, much less one made in association with the WWE. I mean, if had been about the old British wrestling matches they used to show on Sundays on ITV -- Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Kendo Nagasaki -- then maybe.

But this turned out to be a lot of fun. Written and directed by Stephen Merchant, it's based on the true story of a wrestling-mad family in Norwich, and how they try to get into the giant American wrestling entertainment business.

Not bad at all.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014 - ★★★

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 12:12:19 +0000

I note that I gave this three-and-a-half stars when I added it to Letterboxd, some time last year. Watched it again last night, for, I think, the third time. My inclination is to reduce its number of stars. I don’t dislike it, by any means, but I don’t love it the way the rest of my family do.

Last night I was more puzzled by it than I recall being before. Why the three layers of story? I’m not sure that adds anything. I like the look, and I originally loved the weirdness, but... in the end it just feels kind of shallow.

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The Cabin in the Woods, 2011 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 13:18:35 +0000

This review may contain spoilers.

I'm surprised to find this is from 2011. I saw it when it came out, but it doesn't feel like eight or nine years ago. Three or four, I'd have said.

The fact that I'm surprised to find that Chris Hemsworth is in it probably reflects the length of time that has passed, though.

Anyway, it stands up really well, though the question I asked the last time: why do they have a big red "Release all the monsters" button? That still stands.

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Springsteen On Broadway, 2018 - ★★★★

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 12:14:58 +0000

I finished this last night, but actually watched it over the course of several weeks. Not the way I'd normally watch a film, but since it's mainly about the music, the interruptions don't really matter.

Except... it's actually equally about the music and the storytelling. Both are valid and worthwhile. There was no single overarching narrative, though. The stories are a set of recollections of Springsteen's life. There are connections, of course, but each one stands alone well enough to watch it in this disjointed way.

Anyway, my main complaint is that it was too short and could do with having more songs. He's written a vast number, after all. Well worth watching if you're a fan. If not, then you probably won't want to.

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Jojo Rabbit, 2019 - ★★★½

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 12:29:27 +0000

I liked this a lot more than I expected to. When I saw the trailer (I think back in December, when we saw Knives Out) I was a bit freaked out by it. What’s this, you’ve got a film about a kid in the Hitler Youth, with Hitler as a character, and they seem to be playing it for comedy? This looks well dodgy.

My kids knew it was by Taika Waititi , though, and that seemed to make it likely to be OK? I dunno, but eventually I decided to give it a chance.

And it turns out to be really good. A sweet film in many ways, though with plenty of menace and darkness, as you'd expect from where and when it's set -- which is an unnamed German town or city in the dying days of the Second World War. Waititi himself plays Hitler, who is not in fact the real one, but an imaginary friend that lets Jojo, the ten-year-old title character, talk to someone about the things he can't talk to anyone else about.

So I enjoyed it, but I can't help asking: why did he choose to make this film? Why that story, why now? It's based on a novel, Caging Skies by Christine Leunens. But Wikipedia's description of it as "the internationally bestselling Hitler Youth novel" leaves me none the wiser.

Not, of course, that there has to be a specific reason for a creator to make something. And it's far from the first comedy about Hitler or the Nazis. But there's just something about the idea of it -- not the actuality -- that leaves me a little uncomfortable, in a way that The Great Dictator or The Producers didn't.

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The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (Books 2020, 2)

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 11:31:58 +0000

Translated by Stephen Snyder. I asked for this for Christmas, because I saw it reviewed in The Guardian and it sounded interesting. And it is, but I had some problems with it.

Let’s look at the blurb:

Hat ribbon, bird, rose.

To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.

When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?

That “[f]or some reason” is where this book doesn’t quite work for me. The setup is fine: a type of item, and the memories, the very idea of that item, disappears. The titular police make sure that all instances of the item — roses, hats, photographs… — are removed. But some people keep their memories and the ideas, and try to keep the things. The Memory Police find them and cart them off.

The protagonist’s mother was taken in that way when the protagonist was small.¹

Why is it happening? How is it happening? Who are the Memory Police, and what happens to the people they take? Can they be resisted, and how can the islanders get their memories back? These are the sorts of questions you would expect to have answered, were this a science fiction novel. Are the islanders the victims of some sort of mind-control experiment? Are they in a simulation?

This is not a science fiction novel.

“For some reason”. Don’t read this expecting to find out what the reason is, or to get answers to any of the other questions.

All that said, I enjoyed reading it. The sense of danger, of menace, is palpable, but subtle. It’s about people trying to live their lives under these bizarre conditions. It’s just frustrating thinking about it now, about the unanswered questions.

But maybe I’m reading it wrong. In her essay “SF reading protocols,” Jo Walton writes:

A reviewer wanted to make the zombies in Kelly Link’s “Zombie Contingency Plans” (in the collection Magic For Beginners) into metaphors. They’re not. They’re actual zombies. They may also be metaphors, but their metaphorical function is secondary to the fact that they’re actual zombies that want to eat your brains. Science fiction may be literalization of metaphor, it may be open to metaphorical, symbolic and even allegorical readings, but what’s real within the story is real within the story, or there’s no there there. I had this problem with one of the translators of my novel Tooth and Claw—he kept emailing me asking what things represented. I had to keep saying no, the characters really were dragons, and if they represented anything that was secondary to the reality of their dragon nature. He kept on and on, and I kept being polite but in the end I bit his head off—metaphorically, of course.

The essay is largely about how there is a “toolkit” for reading SF — a set of understandings, of tropes — without which some can find the genre difficult to understand. We learn that toolkit, or build it, from early reading of the genre. But she follows the above quote with this:

When I read literary fiction, I take the story as real on the surface first, and worry about metaphors and representation later, if at all. It’s possible that I may not be getting as much as I can from literary fiction by this method, in the same way that the people who want the zombies and dragons to be metaphorical aren’t getting as much as they could.

Maybe that’s what went wrong for me with The Memory Police: Ogawa wrote a metaphorical work — about people trying to live their lives under bizarre conditions, as I wrote above. I read it with the expectation that the bizarre conditions would have an explanation, and they don’t, because they are “only” metaphors.

For, I would have to suppose, a totalitarian state, where the slightest infraction of arcane and obscure laws leads to being carted away by the secret police.

We also get sections of the novel the protagonist is writing. It is about a woman who loses her voice, and communicates using a typewriter. Then the typewriter is taken away from her. It works as a metaphor for the situation the protagonist lives in: a metaphor within a metaphor.

And from the Guardian review that started this:

Why this is happening is unknown; the ideology of totalitarian control and cultural isolation is implied, rather than explicitly outlined, and its intersection with the supernatural strengthens the feeling of allegory.

So maybe I should have been warned. Calling it “supernatural” suggests something more in the magic realism vein. That might be a better way to approach it. Magic needs — or at least, generally gets — less of an explanation.

Note the lack of names, too: the editor is given an initial, R, but the only character given an actual name is a dog. ↩

The End of the Dream. The Start of the Resistance

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 13:19:27 +0000

Ian Dunt, writing at politics.co.uk:

What is happening is a tragedy. A betrayal of Britain’s role in the world. A betrayal of the Europeans who came and made this their home. A betrayal of the idea that this is a calm, sensible country, that thinks in practical and pragmatic terms about what it is doing, that deals in small ideas instead of grand ideologies.

– The end of the dream. The start of the resistance.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Thing 2: Horsin’ Around

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 20:12:16 +0000

The second of the two good things today is that Netflix now has the last few episodes of Bojack Horseman.

It seems my only reference to it here was one allusive comment on the first episode. But it has consistently been one of the best things on telly. People dismiss it because It’s a cartoon with talking animals, but it’s so much more than that.

Issues of addiction, depression, fame, guilt, and so much more, sit alongside the funny animals. And it can be very funny, too.

Thing 1: How Good is the Place?

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 19:54:31 +0000

The first positive thing about today that I was talking about earlier is that tonight brings the final episode of The Good Place.

As this programme progressed it got hard to imagine how they were going to end it. And that remains true for me: they’ve already given us two good endings in the last two episodes, either of which would have been fine as a way to close the show. So how will they do it for real?

We’ll find out tonight.

In the Departure Lounge

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 15:21:26 +0000

Here we are, then, on the last day of the UK’s membership of the EU. We fought, we lost, and now we’ve got to live with the consequences.

Which won’t really start to take effect until the start of next year, of course, because we’ll be in the transition period until then. Until 2021 we’ll still be able to travel freely; there will be no added tariffs on goods; food standards will still be the high ones we’re used to.

Ah yes, food standards. Just the other day I had a realisation — no, it was something that I already knew. More a dawning fear of how close a bad thing was. What brought it home was this headline in the Independent: “Brexit: US insists chlorinated chicken must be on menu in any UK trade agreement.”

Obviously no-one’s going to force anyone to buy or eat chicken, chlorine-washed or otherwise. But remember why chicken in the US is washed in chlorine, and why importing it into the EU is banned: it’s because the food standards are significantly lower than those in the EU. The chlorine washing is to kill off bacteria and make the meat fit for human consumption.

So what that headline means is that a US trade deal could depend on the UK lowering its food standards. That’s what Brexit means: our government could choose to lower the standards of hygiene required in food production. Sit with that thought for a while.

There are a couple of good things to think about on this bleak day. Both of those are also from America, and neither has anything to do with Brexit. But I’ll leave them for later posts. Stay tuned.

I leave you with this delightful snippet of Alex Andreou, on the Remainiacs podcast, suggesting how to cope with today, and the future.

Irony Failure Among Elite Headteachers

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 10:23:16 +0000

“Private schools criticise plans to get more poor students into university“. Of course they do.

Sally Weale writes in The Guardian:

Leading private schools have challenged plans to widen access to the most selective universities in England, warning they could lead to discrimination against young people “on the basis of the class they were born into”.

Which doesn’t happen at the moment. Not at all.

Who, Yes!

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 16:21:35 +0000

After my highly negative assessment of episode 3 (“the worst episode of Doctor Who ever“), episode 4, “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror,” was fine, if forgettable.

And then last Sunday, we got — wait…

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Don’t read on if you haven’t yet seen episode 5, “Fugitive of the Judoon.”

OK. Last Sunday we got “Fugitive of the Judoon.” Which is without doubt the best episode of Chibnall’s time as showrunner, so far. And may well be the most important episode since the programme came back in 2005. Or at least, be the start of the farthest-reaching changes since Russell T Davies brought us the concept of the Time War.

Two genuinely surprising reveals! Jack’s back; and… so is The Doctor? Whaaaattt???!!?

Fandom is, of course, rife with speculation as to where Jo Martin’s Doctor falls in The Doctor’s timeline. Future? Past? Or an alternative universe? And what of this “Lone Cyberman”?

Halfway through this, season, and it’s shaping up to be something very special. I just hope they don’t let us down.

Little Women, 2019 - ★★★★

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 13:15:47 +0000

Greta Gerwig’s dual-timeline approach makes this more interesting than a straightforward adaptation would have been.

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Brazil, 1985 - ★★★★★

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 13:12:52 +0000

I first saw Terry Gillian’s weird dystopia at its premier, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1985. I feel I must have seen it again since, but watching it last week, much of it felt unfamiliar. It stands up really well, though.

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JetBrains Mono: Equal or Not

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 23:37:15 +0000

I just installed the JetBrains Mono font. We programmers need monospaced fonts, and this is a very nice one. It comes installed with recent versions of JetBrains’s IDEs. My copy of IntelliJ was not recent, it turned out.

Anyway, the most interesting thing is ligatures for programmers. Take a look at this:

You see that “not equals” sign? The crossed-out equals that we were taught to write back in secondary school? That’s not a character in any normal ASCII typeface. Plus, this is Java: even if it were a character (there is a Unicode character for that symbol), it’s not part of the language. The compiler wouldn’t recognise it.

What that actually is is the standard not-equals of C-based languages: !=. But the font has detected it and replaced it with the more attractive and traditional symbol.

It’s a setting you can disable, and I’m not sure I’ll keep it that way, but it’s impressive and unusual.

Who the What?

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 10:57:02 +0000

You probably want to know what I think of the new series of Doctor Who so far.

It got off to a really strong start with ‘Spyfall’ part 1. Not least with its genuinely surprising reveal at the end. And then part 2 followed up on it. Not everything made total sense, but what the hell, it’s Doctor Who. There were some complaints about the way the nazis and The Master were handled, and I get that. And it had the memory-wiping thing. But all in all, I found it a strong, promising start to the new season.

And then we got ‘Orphan 55.’

Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie me. This was, for me — I’m not going to sugarcoat it — the worst episode of Doctor Who ever. At least in the modern era.

The story was confused and confusing, the direction was incoherent, the character motivations made no sense… Oh, and the message — admirable though it was, to say it was beating us over the head with a stick is to understate how heavy-handed it was.

I thought it must be a first-time writer and director. But no: it was written by Ed Hime, who wrote ‘It Takes You Away’ last season, which was very good. And it was directed by Lee Haven Jones, who directed ‘Spyfall’ part 2, just the week before.

So what went wrong? Hard say, but I’ve got to hope they pick things up again on Sunday.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa (Books 2020, 1)

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 20:16:57 +0000

This is a sweet little story, exactly described by its title. The professor in question is an elderly mathematician who has had a brain injury that has left him with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. The housekeeper, therefore, has to introduce herself to him every morning when she arrives at his house.

She has a son who comes along sometimes, and there are maths puzzles and baseball.

It doesn’t sound like much from that description, and it’s very short. But it’s thoroughly compelling and enjoyable.

2019 in Bloggery

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 17:02:02 +0000

Only 130 posts in 2019. That’s disappointing after 261 and 163 in the previous two years.

Month	Posts
Jan	15
Feb	7
Mar	22
Apr	8
May	10
Jun	4
Jul	6
Aug	5
Sep	11
Oct	7
Nov	11
Dec	24

Christmas Day by the Lea (or Lee)

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 17:03:55 +0000

It’s our family custom on Christmas Day to go for a walk down by the River Lea (usually shown on maps with the addition “or Lee”, as both spellings have been used historically). Often it’s been cold and dreich and we’ve seen almost no-one. Two days ago it was a gorgeous sunny day, and there were hundreds of people out.

And some boats were moving:

While others were just parked:

And this is us; Frances, me, and our two young adults, who don’t normally like to be photographed, and who have never appeared here before:

Transition by Iain Banks (Books 2019, 25)

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 16:46:26 +0000

This post was written in the new year, but the book was read in the old, and accordingly backdated.

This is a strong as it was ten years ago when I first read it, but still has the same narrative flaw. That’s not surprising, but the flaw in the universe-hopping detail is so jarring that I read it half-hoping to pick up on something that I had missed the last time.

It was not to be. Our heroes and villains still hop to uninhabited Earths, and yet find a body there to receive them.

And of course, the ethical question of possessing another human being remains barely addressed.

All that said, though, it’s still a great read.

Eyes Full of Tinsel and Fire

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 15:15:28 +0000

Christmas is the time of year when the devil doesn’t have all the best tunes. The other side gets some of them too.

I love Christmas songs. Not all of them. of course, but many. And that includes some of the Christmas carols. A full choir singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ or ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’? I’m there.

The best Christmas songs, though, do belong to the — let’s say — secular side of things. I have a hierarchy of my personal favourites. Things move around a bit, and very occasionally new ones arrive; and you won’t be surprised to learn that ‘Fairytale of New York’ remains unassailable in the top spot.

One of my other favourites is Greg Lake’s 1975 hit, ‘I Believe in Father Christmas.’ Now, if you haven’t listened to the words too closely — written, I’m surprised to discover, by Peter Sinfield, of whom I had barely heard before researching this — you might think it’s a simple celebration of Christmas, set to a jaunty tune, much like Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody,’ from a couple of years earlier (and every year since). It’s not, though. It’s much darker and more interesting than that:

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
They told me a fairy story
Till I believed in the Israelite

And that closing couplet:

Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or hell
The Christmas we get we deserve

Lake and Sinfield have argued that it’s not anti-religious or atheistic. Well, you can have your interpretation, guys. I know what I think.

I mainly wrote this because I’ve wanted to use the line I’ve stolen as a title for years. And I’ll leave you with the wishes the song provides:

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year

I think we’re all going to need some hope and some bravery in 2020.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (Books 2019, 24)

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 14:33:44 +0000

The final volume of Moore’s League stories, and, he says, his final work in the comics medium. If so, it’s not a bad closer.

It occurs to me that a significant portion of his comics output has been built on the work of others. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it could be said to be true of all literature, maybe all art. Moore’s use is more frequent than most, though: The Watchmen characters based on those from old Charlton Comics; Marvelman/Miracleman a revival of Mick Anglo’s creation; Promethea digging into mythology and fiction, as I wrote very positively about last year; and so on.

In the League it’s at its most explicit. The main characters are Mina Murray from Dracula, Virginia Woolfe’s Orlando, and Alan Quatermain from H Rider Haggard’s novels (although he isn’t in this volume). Even the subtitle of this one is from Shakespeare.

There is, as I say, nothing wrong with any of that. It’s like sampling in music: it doesn’t matter that you’re using part of an earlier creation; what matters is what you do with it.

And what Moore and O’Neil do with everything here is pretty spectacular. I won’t go into any detail, but suffice it to say that pretty much all the threads from the earlier volumes are tied up, and everything is over at the end. Everything. Well, not everything everything. Not quite.

I wouldn’t start here, though: go back to the beginning if you want to read any of these. Read them all.

Calling From London

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 17:25:40 +0000

Forgetting for a minute the slightly-disappointing conclusion of a 42-year-old story that we spoke about the other day, this month gives us the 40th anniversary of an even more significant creation, for me at least.

The Clash released London Calling in December 1979. Rolling Stone went on to call it the best album of the 80s, but it got a later release in America. And in any case, many wouldn’t have heard it until 1980. ¹

Including me. I remember being at school, at the start of a term, so it must have been January, and Watty saying, “I envy you: you haven’t heard London Calling yet.” That idea of how important the first listen is. I’ve said similar things myself over the years, about various things.

But honestly, I couldn’t tell you anything about my first hearing. I had probably heard the title track — it was a single, after all — and I went and bought the album, most likely at John Menzies in Dumbarton (though maybe at Hall Audio, the nearby hi-fi shop, or Woolies, or Boots, who used to sell records in those days). I do know it cost £3.99, because the band took a reduction in their royalties so it — a double album — could be sold at the same price as a single album. Excellent value, for one of the greatest records ever made.

Though I paid for it a couple more times over the years. Someone walked off with my copy during a party at my student flat in Edinburgh. I replaced it with a second-hand copy, probably from Record Shak (sic) on Clerk Street. Though possibly that was much later and in London. I had a tape of it to tide me over. I do know that the replacement cost the same: £3.99.

The CD must have cost me a bit more, but I didn’t get that until the 25th-anniversary version, with The Vanilla Tapes, the rehearsal-room recordings of early versions of several of the songs.

I could probably tell you a few things about the 7852 ² times I’ve heard it subsequently, though. But it would be better for you to listen to it yourself.

And lastly, just a reminder that tomorrow is the 17th anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death.

Or at any time in the intervening 40 years, to be fair. ↩
Approximately. ↩

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, 2019 - ★★★½

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 23:49:18 +0000

Well, 42 years after seeing the first part of this story (if fourth episode, though it wasn't called that then), we finally get its end.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I don't think it quite lives up to the legacy. I've given it three and a half stars here, but it hovers, Force-suspended, between that and four. Obviously I was hoping for a five, or at least a four and a half.

There were some daft parts, some annoying parts, and many spectacular parts; but no really outstanding parts; nothing that we'll look back on as being iconic.

See in Letterboxd

The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks (Books 2019, 23)

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 15:06:27 +0000

One interesting thing about this book that I don’t recall noticing when I read it twelve years ago is that the story itself is the titular approach. We don’t get to Garbadale House until about two-thirds of the way through, and then the rest of it is set there. With a few flashbacks and -forwards thrown in to both sections.

Banksie always plays with form and structure, and this is no exception. Not just the aforementioned directional flashes, but use of different viewpoint characters and tenses. Mostly it’s from the viewpoint of Alban McGill, one of the many members of the Wopuld family. Some scenes are from that of a cousin of his. There are even a couple of instances of promiscuous PoV, or “head-hopping,” where we get the thoughts of another character within the same scene.

Also some parts switch to present-tense, while most if it is past. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious function to those switches: it’s not like the tense reflects the timeline within the story. It seems arbitrary, almost random — though maybe I’m missing something there.

None of this harms the story, it’s just worth noting. The strangest of these devices is that there are three or four sections in first-person, from the PoV of a minor character. All the rest is third-person. That gives the impression that this character is more significant than he is. The text in those sections is also rendered with spelling mistakes and grocer’s apostrophes, as if it was the direct transcript of what this relatively poorly-educated character has scribbled down.

What’s the point of all that? I’m not sure. Just writerly games, maybe. I wonder if it suggests that Banks didn’t think the story itself was interesting enough to sustain the narrative, which might be a valid criticism. A well-off family with a secret at its heart has to decide whether to sell its business. The secret comes out, but it doesn’t make much difference. It would be significant to the characters affected, but we hardly see them after the reveal.

Endearing characters, though, and even on a second read (I didn’t recall the secret), it keeps the pages turning.

As I said twelve years ago, “In a book like this, the pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.”

Knives Out, 2019 - ★★★½

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 23:33:50 +0000

Watched on Sunday December 15, 2019.

See in Letterboxd

OA Going Away

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 11:16:27 +0000

I just discovered via a conversation on Micro.blog, that Netflix have cancelled The OA.

This is very disappointing. The OA was an incredible, confusing, glorious piece of work, and Brit Marling, its co-creator, has assured us that it all has a plan and an ending.

Now (or back in August, anyway) she’s had to write its obituary. I suppose some other company might pick it up, but since it’s mostly Netflix who do that these days, it seems unlikely.

Presumably the two completed seasons, 16 episodes in total, will remain on Netflix. I‘d still recommend watching them. Just remember that you’ll be left somewhere strange.

Broken Glass

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 17:55:10 +0000

I’ve been feeling kind of sorry for Jo Swinson today. Also for myself, and the whole country, especially underprivileged people, people with disabilities, the young, the old, minorities, the marginalised… Anyone who’s going to suffer under the new regime.

But Swinson lost her seat by just 149 votes, which must be especially heartbreaking. She always impressed me as someone who knew what she was talking about and was on top of things. She was part of the Cameron/Clegg coalition, which is problematic, but let’s let that go.

She’s quoted as saying:

One of the realities of smashing glass ceilings is that a lot of broken glass comes down on your head.

which is great, and sad.

People criticised her for making the Liberal Democrat campaign too presidential, too much about her, and that probably was a mistake. Though would they have criticised a male leader in the same way?

And there’s the business of promising to revoke Article 50. Which I was and am completely in favour of, even if it can seem undemocratic.¹ The problem was not the promise, but the messaging. The story should have been, “Elect us to government and you’ll give us a mandate to revoke. Give us less power and we’ll work for a second referendum.” That was the story: she just seemed to have some difficulty expressing it in clear, simple terms, at least in the debates I saw.

All that said, I’m still baffled as to what has happened to the country.

it wouldn’t be if handled properly, but it’s too late to go into that now. ↩

The Politics We Deserve?

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 02:08:37 +0000

Well tonight is a fucking disaster. Even if the reality is lower than the exit poll, it looks like it’s going to be a landslide for the Tories. We’ll get a hard Brexit starting in a month and a half (and taking years and years before it “gets done,” of course). We’ll see more privatisation in the NHS. We’ll see more austerity, I don’t doubt, despite the spending pledges that might have been in the Tory manifesto. And we’ll see moves to restrict what parliament and the courts can do to protect ordinary people.

Our best hope is that Johnson is incompetent, and that’s not something we should have to rely on.

What is wrong with this country? Why do people continue to vote against not just the interests of the most vulnerable in society, but against their own self interest?

On Twitter a lot of people are blaming Corbyn, and I think they’re right. I said just the other day that I didn’t understand the dislike; but a thread by @RussInCheshire has helped to clarify my thinking. This regards not so much why people generally dislike him, but why he was ineffectual or worse as a leader. The key points:

People will say “the media is biased”. Yes. But that’s the environment Labour leaders always operate in. Complaining about it is like trawler captains complaining the sea is wet. Yep. Learn to thrive in those conditions, or get off the boat.

People will say “they treated him worse than any previous leader”. They did. Cos he was shit at working the press, had a history of opinions that could be easily made to look awful, was inept on antisemitism, shifty on Brexit and cantankerous on TV.

People will say “no way is he racist”. Perhaps. But if people accused me of antisemitism, I’d be able to clearly defend myself, demonstrate my credentials, and put in place a strategy to stop accusations. He couldn’t. If he’s not antisemitic, he’s inept.

People will say “voters love him in person”. I’m sure. But we’ve been in the age of broadcasting for 80 years. What the hell use is being warm and cuddly to 600 people in a field, when you come over badly to 60 million people on TV?

The thread starts here, but it might be easier to read here, as expanded by the Threader App.

I still don’t understand — I never will — people who switch from Labour all the way to Conservative. They just vox-popped someone on the telly who used to vote Labour, but “couldn’t, in conscience,” vote for them with Corbyn as leader. Fair enough. But she voted Tory. Why go all the way over to the party that diametrically opposes the values she claims to support, when there are other progressive parties, that support some of those values. The party she voted for opposes those values.

Baffling. Utterly baffling.

Fear and Loathing All Over the Land

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 22:53:33 +0000

The time is almost upon us, and I have The Fear. Or at least, I understand The Fear.

I understand the fear of Brexit; of giving the Tories control, yet again, of the NHS, and of the economy; and of their plans for changing the constitution in all the wrong ways, since I feel it myself.

But despite my problems with Corbyn, I don’t understand the loathing for him. It doesn’t seem to come from dislike of his policies. Some of the people who say they don’t like or don’t trust him seem to be Labour voters, who you’d expect to have similar beliefs. Even if those people have more centrist beliefs, you’d think they’d be close enough to the party’s current policies not to be put off totally.

It seems almost to be personal. Do some people dislike him as a person? Strikes me as odd, as he comes across as quite moderate and reasonable to me. To be sure, he can get snappy with interviewers at times, but it’s nothing compared to some people. And at least he doesn’t bluster; doesn’t lie; and always gives the impression that he knows what he’s talking about.

Yet some people say they don’t trust him. Sometimes those same people say they do trust Johnson, even as they acknowledge he lies. It’s unfathomable.

On tonight’s Channel 4 News they interviewed a guy in Johnson’s constituency who claimed to be a socialist, but who is going to vote for Johnson this time. They didn’t push him for an explanation.

In the same constituency there was a business owner who had always voted Tory but is not going to this time, because of the way the party has been taken over by the far right. It takes a Tory businessman to recognise what a “socialist” can’t. We are through the looking glass and no mistake.

Anyway, I’ll be voting Green. I hope everyone reading this will get out and vote on Thursday, for anyone who isn’t the Tories, and to stop Brexit.

Interstellar, 2014 - ★★★★½

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 20:16:41 +0000

I watched this again last night, and it’s really an outstanding film. There are some places where the gravity and/or relativity choices don’t quite make sense, but mostly the science is handled very well.

The philosophical aspects are also treated well. Do you put survival of the currently-living members of humanity above the survival of the species as a whole, or not?

The least believable thing, in a film full of challenging ideas, is the fact that our hero has been a pilot for NASA, but has somehow fallen off their radar, when they actually need people like him and have a base within a day’s drive of him.

See in Letterboxd

You Gev It Away

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 15:02:10 +0000

I got Whammed¹ in the bakery this afternoon. Walked in, took my earphones out, and, Wham! there it was. George Michael geving his heart to someone. Ever noticed that? He doesn’t say “gave,” he says “gev.” My daughter pointed this out a couple of years back, and now I can’t unhear it.

Oh well, there was never a chance of not hearing it, and to be honest, I don’t hate it like I used to. Remember back when we thought that bands like Wham! or Duran Duran were somehow “the enemy”? Those were stupid ideas. Music is music, and people have different tastes. Let’s let everyone enjoy what they like without judging them.

The most amusing part was that I heard a little girl in the queue behind me saying to her mum, “I just got Whammed.”

Also it’s odd that I haven’t heard ‘Fairytale of New York’ yet this year, except as a weird brass band version that was on the telly advertising some programme.

Sense 2 at the time of writing. There doesn’t seem to be a way to link to a specific definition, which is surprising. ↩

Watchmen on TV

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 15:08:30 +0000

I succumbed. As I suggested I might.

It felt a little grubby, going to the NowTV site and setting up an account. As you know, Sky TV and I have a history. Or maybe an anti-history, insofar as I am anti everything that their former owner stands for. But the key word is “former.” With Comcast now owning it, I can feel a little better about giving them my time and possibly some money.

Still, though: grubby.

But what’s worse, as a viewing experience, is that their app is the worst video-playback app I’ve ever used. It’s fine at all the basics; it even has a ten-second jump back and forward feature, which is good. But! It completely fails at subtitles.

Now, in this era — this platinum age of television — subtitles are often an essential part of viewing. And that isn’t true just due to my age, because my kids, who are young adults, are at least as likely as us olds to want them on. Mumblecore actors are to blame. Or maybe bad sound on our TV. Or a combination. Doesn’t matter. We watch with subtitles on a lot of the time, and I wanted them on for Watchmen.

But NowTV — in its Mac app, at least — just can’t handle them properly. They either freeze, so you get the same sentence stuck on the screen for five minutes; or they just get out of sync. Sometimes they rush through minutes of text at a time, as if trying to catch up. In the end I turned them off.

But I watched one episode on my iPad, and the subtitles were fine there. So I guess it is the actual Mac app. The Mac plugged into the telly is an old one. A nine-year-old MacBook Pro, in fact. I’m impressed that it’s still working, though I did upgrade it at one point.

Anyway, that can’t be the reason it’s bad, because I’ve also tried it on my 2017 MBP, with exactly the same results.

But what about the programme?

It’s a sequel to the comic, set around thirty years later. I found the first episode kind of annoying, though I’m not quite sure why. Too much of it set in the past, maybe? But as we’ve got to know the characters and things have moved along, it’s definitely interesting. I’ve watched the first five episodes so far. Up to which point it’s kind of a cop show with an unusual background. Cops go masked so that criminals can’t identify them. Criminals go masked too, of course, specifically in Rorscach-style black and white masks.

And there’s a mysterious old guy who puts on plays reenacting the origin of Doctor Manhattan. You’ll have guesses about who he is, if you know the source material. Well, one guess.

I like the way they’ve built on the comic, and are weaving the backstory in. Though I think it must be extremely confusing for anyone who hasn’t read the novel, or at least seen the movie.

My main question (apart from the obvious ones, like what’s going on with Veidt?) is: why is Laurie using her father’s surname? It doesn’t make sense to me that she’d call herself Blake, instead of Juspeczyck.

Oh, and whatever happened to Dan Dreiberg? I want to see some Nite owl action. Something that looked a lot like the Owlship appeared in the first episode, so maybe he’ll turn up. As, I imagine, will Doctor Manhattan.

The Favourite, 2018 - ★★★

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:08 +0000

What were they doing with the justified text in the captions and even credits? Made it barely readable.

See in Letterboxd

Labour and Antisemitism

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 16:07:20 +0000

I don’t doubt that many Jewish people are put off voting Labour because of the antisemitic actions of some of its members, and the leadership’s seeming inability to control or remove those people. Plenty of non-Jewish people are put off by it too.

There are two things I don’t understand.

If there are antisemites in Labour (which, again, does seem to be the case): why and how? Who are these people that have joined a party of the left, a party that has always been anti-nazi, anti-racist, pro equality and human rights — who join it, and yet stand in direct opposition to its core values? It’s like a climate-change denier joining the Green Party.

Further, why now? Why has this blown up in the last couple of years? These invasive members presumably haven’t just joined the party. It’s hard to imagine that they joined because of Corbyn being the leader.

Unless that’s exactly what it is. Maybe Corbyn’s seeming weakness on responding to the problem. and/or a willful misunderstanding of his stance on Palestine and the government of Israel, has attracted such people to the party. In which case — in any case — the obvious thing to do is to find them and eject them; just as they can easily eject members who suggest voting for another party.

I see that The Guardian has published an “everything you need to know” guide on the matter. Which is good, but it doesn’t really answer my questions.

Corbyn has spoken out against antisemitism again. He may have appeared vague on Brexit, but I don’t think he could be any clearer on this.

The Book of Dust vol 2: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (Books 2019, 22)

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 21:39:23 +0000

You shouldn’t read this book.

Yet.

I broke a personal rule, that goes back to 1982: Never start reading a fantasy series if the final volume hasn’t been published.¹ 1982 was the year I was reading Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The fifth volume (or second volume of the second series) was out, but the sixth and final wasn’t.² I waited on tenterhooks.³ Eventually the hardback came out, but it was much too expensive for a poor student like me. Luckily, not for another poor student on my corridor, who lent it to me.

I learnt my lesson, back then. More or less: I was reading Harry Potter while it was still being written. But this is one of the main reasons why I never started A Game of Thrones, for example.

But here we are. Two-thirds of the way in to a compelling, thrilling story… actually that’s not quite right, what with the first volume being prequel. More like halfway through a very long story, and all I can say is… not very much without going into massive spoilers.

I like that Lyra is using Silvertongue as her surname: a name she was given, that she earned. There are aspects of the world, of Lyra’s relationship to it, that are surprising, given what she went through in His Dark Materials. But then, it is eight years later, and she has grown up a lot.

Politics and events in the world of the Magisterium sometimes parallel those in our world.

It’s a lot darker and more adult-themed than the original trilogy. I don’t know if the whole will end up being as legendary or as moving as the original, of course, but at this point, balanced on the fulcrum of change, I like it almost as much.

I lied at the the start: you should read this book. But be prepared for the fact that we might have to wait two years for the conclusion.

At a pinch, if the author hasn’t finished writing it. ↩
White Gold Wielder was released in 1983, I see. And I gather that he’s since written a third trilogy, but… nah. ↩
Well, maybe about five or sixterhooks. ↩

Election Debates: Maybe Better Left

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:02:28 +0000

I watched the election debate between Corbyn and Johnson on ITV. It was unedifying, and not very revealing. Corbyn was, predictably, calmer, more sensible, and less blustering. He needed to answer the “What way would you campaign in a second referendum” question that Johnson kept going back to, but otherwise he handled it pretty well.

Johnson, of course, is the epitome of bluster, barely gave a straight answer to anything, and went over his allotted time on every question, as well as his opening and closing statements.

I criticise him for that since he was violating the agreed-upon format. But the time-limited questions may have been the worst part of the event. The purpose is to limit bloviation, I suppose, but it seemed like often the chair was cutting the speaker off while they were still trying to make a point. I saw a tweet while it was going on, to the effect that part of the problem in politics is that everything is reduced to soundbites, with no opportunity to go into details. I’m inclined to agree.

However, much more interesting, and a bettter format, was the interviews, an hour later, with the leaders of the some of the other parties: Jo Swinson, Nicola Sturgeon, Siân Berry of the Greens, and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage.

One interviewer, one interviewee at a time, and it was all much more sensible. That is, in part, because of the people involved, of course. The three women were all good, especially Wee Nicola, as we like to call her. But perhaps it wouldn’t have worked so well if Johnson had been in the interviewee’s chair. He’d have been havering and talking over the interviewer, no doubt. Though to be fair, Farage managed not to do that, so who knows.

But overall, I think that the debate format is not the best way to present your ideas.

Kieron's Comic, Brontë's Book

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 11:25:28 +0000

One of the comics I read is Kieron Gillen’s¹ Die, which is about a group of people who get sucked into a fantasy world. The world is based on a role-playing game — or at least, it seems to be at first. The other night I started the latest issue, 9. Unexpectedly — but not surprisingly — Charlotte Brontë turned up as a character (or maybe not, but let’s run with it). The story was about how she and her siblings had created complex fantasy worlds in part as stories for their toy soldiers. And maybe the world of Die is based in part on those.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke the next day to hear on the radio news that a tiny book — “no bigger than a matchbox” — written by Charlotte, was being auctioned in France. It is filled with stories of the fantasy worlds created by her and her siblings.

The book has been bought by the Brontë Society. It will be kept in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where it was created.

Two completely unrelated events, of course, but interesting how things collide.

He seems not to have website of his own, bizarrely, but he has a Tumblr, and a newsletter. ↩

His Dark Materials on TV

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 23:37:47 +0000

Minor spoilers ahead.

I am loving what they’re doing with HDM¹ in the BBC/HBO adaptation. It has just enough variation from the books to keep it interesting (especially since I re-read them recently). Yet it manages not to distort the story in the way that so upset my then-ten-year-old son in the film version of (part of) the first book.

Bringing in the scenes of Lord Boreal crossing to “our” Oxford, and finding out about who Grumman is, is inspired. It will have the effect of making more sense of the inciting incident for Will, when he turns up. In the book it was never entirely clear who the people who searched his house were sent by, and why the authorities were interested in him. This way, it will.

I’m looking forward to next week’s arrival of Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby.² And we’ll get Iorek Byrnison, too. That’ll be a big test of the CGI.

Which leads me to the only thing that slightly lets it down: Pantalaimon’s default form as an ermine. It looks a little too fake and plasticky to me. Most of the other daemons look fine, so I don’t know why the lead one should be so poor. Maybe it’s because he’s the only one that gets much screen time where he talks.

On that note, two points about Mrs Coulter’s daemon, one which struck me on my recent reread, and the other just tonight. We never learn its name. Nearly every other daemon that gets a mention, gets a name. And it never speaks. Certainly not so far in the TV version, and I’m fairly sure it never does in the books, either.

Which no doubt tells us something about the character of the woman.

As I imagine no-one calls it. ↩
Pity it isn’t a singing part. ↩

I, Daniel Blake, 2016 - ★★★★★

Sat, 16 Nov 2019 18:20:28 +0000

Watched on Saturday November 16, 2019.

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Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (Books 2019, 21)

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 23:49:41 +0000

I like to reread this from time to time, and right now I’m considering watching the TV version that’s currently on. It’s HBO, which means Sky over here, which would traditionally have ruled it out on ethical grounds. But times and corporate ownerships have changed. The Murdochs no longer own Sky TV, so I can let myself watch it.

But then we have the other ethical question, about Watchmen in particular. Which is to say, since Alan Moore feels that he was cheated by DC over the ownership of the creative work, and repudiates all derivative works, shouldn’t we avoid them too? I saw the movie version, but I didn’t get the Before Watchmen spin-offs.

Well, it’s been a long time; Moore and Gibbons must have known what they were signing up for, even if things didn’t go quite as they expected. I recall seeing Moore at a convention in Glasgow in 1985 or 86, where he said, “DC are utter vermin.” Yet he went on to work with them often after that.

Plus, I’m already reading Doomsday Clock, which brings the Watchmen universe into the DC multiverse, so personally, that ship has sailed.

How does the story stand up today? It’s still excellent, I would say. With the obvious weakness of the ending. Though thinking about that, what’s weak is how preposterous Veidt’s plan is. Accepting that, that part of the story is well executed.

It’s still one of my favourite comics.

Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (Books 2019, 18, 19 & 20)

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 21:20:56 +0000

His Dark Materials, as I said.

Holy hell, this trilogy is good! I think I’d forgotten just how good it is.

In the first book we meet Lyra, a wild orphan who lives in fabled Jordan College in a parallel Oxford. Plots and adventures quickly ensue.

The second volume starts with Will, a boy who lives in our world, and who has to run from his home because he has killed someone. How will his story connect to Lyra’s?

And the third builds on everything that has gone before, and a whole lot more.

There are armoured bears, angels, daemons, airships, witches, harpies, the dead, and much else. The fate of worlds hangs in the balance.

If you haven’t read it, you should. You could start watching the TV series instead, but I expect there’ll be a long wait between the seasons, and the books are right there.

Of course, I’m going to find myself in a similar position with the sequels. It was eighteen months ago that I read part 1, so presumably we won’t get the conclusion till some time in 2021.

I like what they’re doing with the TV series so far. Enough changes to keep it interesting, not enough to spoil it.

8 Women, 2002 - ★★★

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 17:16:06 +0000

Watched on Sunday November 10, 2019.

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Election Blues

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:46:20 +0000

I don’t fully understand the rationale of the Lib Dems and SNP pushing for an election at this point. No-deal is still firmly on the table, it seems to me, and if the Tories get a big majority — or even just an actual majority — then we remainers are done for.

Yet Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk describes it at as “one last chance” for remainers. He makes a compelling case. If he hadn’t gone for the election, Johnson could likely have got the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) through parliament. This way, at least there’s a chance. A hung parliament, a coalition that gives us a second referendum.

A new Remain campaign that is successful.

That’s a lot of “ifs,” and we lose everything if any one of them goes the wrong way.

And Carole Cadwalladr reminds us that the illegality and foreign money in the referendum have never been addressed.

Another “if”: if Johnson could have got the deal through parliament, why did he back down and go for the election? Maybe it’s just be that he expects to get a majority, and thereby make it easier to get the WAB through in a new parliament. But I can’t help thinking that he’s up to something. That he and Dominic Cummings have some plan that will get around parliament somehow.

Hard to see what that could be, but how far would you trust those proven liars and crooks?

On Pausing Stories

Sun, 27 Oct 2019 23:56:42 +0000

Almost exactly a year ago I started reading a novel, then put it on hold. This year I’ve done the same, for different reasons.

I started The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers in October of last year. I quickly put it aside as November approached. I realised that it — or at least its start — was much too similar to the novel that I planned to start for NaNoWriMo.

I haven’t got back to it yet.

This year it was the new Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust vol 2: The Secret Commonwealth

Now, you’ll recall that I said I might do this after I read the first of the new trilogy. Other things got in the way of that, though.

So I read a chapter or two of the new one, and realised I needed to refresh my memories. There’s a whole thing that we learn about at once that I don’t remember. Or at least don’t remember how it happened.

There’s also a TV series coming. I was aware it was in development, but not of how soon it was going to be. Turns out it’ll be on in a week or two.

So now I’m worried that watching it is going to be a bit like the recent Good Omens series was for me; really well done, I appreciated it… but I had re-read the book too soon before watching it, meaning it was all just a bit too recent in my memory for maximum enjoyment. But we’ll cross that ice bridge to another world when we come it it. The trailers look great, anyway.

The difference with this year’s pause will be that, while I will get back to the Chambers eventually, I’m obviously not in any hurry to do so. Whereas I fully expect to restart The Secret Commonwealth as soon as I’ve recovered from the ending of The Amber Spyglass. Which I’ll probably be starting quite soon.

For Sama, 2019 - ★★★★★

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 21:45:00 +0000

Watched on Saturday October 26, 2019.

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Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence by Michael Marshall Smith (Books 2019, 17)

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:02:49 +0000

No, it’s me, not London Below: this has also faded quickly from my mind, despite the fact that I love MMS, and I really enjoyed this as I read it.

Still, it’s very good. Hannah is an ordinary girl living in present-day California with her dad and (maybe) mum (sorry, mom).

Until the devil turns up, and her grandfather turns out to be his engineer. And he knew Bach.

Inevitably, the world needs to be saved.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (Books 2019, 16)

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:59:28 +0000

While I was reading this I thought it was probably my favourite of Gaiman’s prose works. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. But just a couple of weeks later, as I write, it’s already fading from my memory.

Maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s London Below.

Either way, well worth a read.

More on Tarantino

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 23:38:14 +0000

Following on from my musings of a few weeks ago, regarding Tarantino’s introducing a slight degree of counterfactuality into a fictionalised version of the real world, we watched Inglourious Basterds the other day. (That film is ten years old. How?)

So it seems like adding counterfactual happy (happier) endings to real-world things is what he does now? I don’t know what happens in Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight, though. Turns out I haven’t really watched his stuff since Jackie Brown.

Otherhood, 2019 - ★★★½

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 23:31:39 +0000

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2019.

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Inglourious Basterds, 2009 - ★★★★

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 11:39:02 +0000

Watched on Saturday October 12, 2019.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Books 2019, 15)

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 23:27:20 +0000

It’s to my shame that I hadn’t read this classic of modern literature before now. And it turns out, now that I have, that it’s really good. Surprise, surprise. I don’t really care for dystopias, as I’ve said before. Interesting that the book I linked to there had just won the Clarke, and the one we’re discussing was the inaugural winner of that award.

For the first few chapters I was distracted by wondering how this situation, this state, could have come to be. Strangely what I found difficult to cope with was not the restrictions, the rolling back of rights — they are horrific, but I could and can easily imagine an America (or, hell, maybe even a Britain) that could enact those laws.

No, what I found hardest to believe in was the dress codes. The way not just the Handmaids, but the marthas (domestic servants), econowives (lower-class, probably infertile women, assigned to lower-class men) and even Wives (the wives of the ruling-class men) all dress in the standard costume of their class.

Somehow I feel — or at least felt — that it would be harder to get everyone to dress the same way than to obey laws that restrict more important freedoms.

As the chapters went on, those concerns evaporated. The telling of the backstory through Offred’s reminiscences outlines a convincing route from 80s America to Gilead. Though a lot more could be told: it is only an outline. Still, it’s enough.

These days, with actual nazis poisoning our political discourse, and attempts to roll back reproductive rights even in France, it sometimes feels — as Atwood no doubt intended — that Gilead is not so much a fable as a warning.

Downton Abbey, 2019 - ★★★★

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 19:57:39 +0000

Watched on Saturday September 28, 2019.

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Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, 2004 - ★★★½

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 22:31:58 +0000

Watched on Thursday September 26, 2019.

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The Seventh Function of Language, by Laurent Binet, Translated by Sam Taylor (Books 2019, 14)

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 23:07:18 +0000

I need to start making notes about where I hear about books. This hasn’t been on my Kindle for long, but I have no idea what prompted me to buy it.

I’m glad I did, though. This is great. It’s set in 1980, and Roland Barthes, the philosopher and semiologist (semiotician?) gets knocked down I the street by a laundry van. He dies later in hospital.

That much is true. But Binet uses it as the jumping-off point for a mystery caper of sorts, in various picturesque cities in Europe (and a brief dip into the US). Because Barthes was believed to have been carrying a paper detailing the titular function.

Along the way we learn things about semiotics and linguistics, aided by the police officer who is investigating the case

It’s a strange one, but pretty good.

Isle of Dogs, 2018 - ★★★★

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 21:42:44 +0000

Watched on Friday September 20, 2019.

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The End of Newspaper Delivery

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 21:42:56 +0000

We’ve been getting The Guardian delivered on Saturdays for several years. Not any other days, because who has time to read paper newspapers except at the weekend? But it’s great to get up and have the paper there to read over breakfast.

Sadly, a couple of weeks back we got a note with our delivery:

Sorry, we are stopping deliveries from the 1st of October.

Not too surprising, I suppose. It’s hard to imagine that enough people get deliveries to make it worth their time and effort. And it’s not like they’re going out of business: they’ll still be selling papers, just not delivering them.

So I suppose we’ll have to go out and buy the paper on Saturday mornings, like it’s the — actually, not like it’s the past at all. I’d bet that there have been newspaper deliveries as long as there have been newspapers.

Still, it’s not like they’ve stopped everywhere. I expect there are still a few places out there that still deliver. But what next? Will our milkman stop delivering?¹

In this golden age of home deliveries, remember that we depend on people being willing and able.

Yes, we get milk delivered three times a week, since you ask. ↩

Jason & Dan

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 12:45:22 +0000

If you saw my post the other day complaining about typography, you might have been confused. I went to see Jason & The Scorchers last Friday. They were playing in a co-headline tour with the Kentucky Headhunters and Dan Baird & Homemade Sin.

On the night we saw them, the order they took the stage was: Headhunters, Scorchers, Homemade Sin.

That was completely the wrong order, at least for the audience at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on that night. The energy and connection of the Scorchers meant that the peak for the whole event came as they finished their set — in the middle of the evening.

No doubt you think I just think that because I’m a fan of the Scorchers, and not particularly of Dan Baird. And there is some truth to that. But I watched the last twenty minutes or so from off to one side — OK, I was standing at the bar — so I had a good view of the front of the crowd; and it was clear that they weren’t as excited, as into it, as involved, as they had been an hour before.

No matter, it was still a great night, and I’m sure some people were happy that the running order was that way round. What drove me to post that picture, though, was the distraction that backdrop caused me. I couldn’t really appreciate the music for staring at it.

In case it’s not obvious to you, take a look at the ampersand, and tell me how there’s any possible way it can make sense in that orientation.

Tarantino Thoughts

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 18:49:16 +0000

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is kind of a love story, kind of a biopic, and kind of a history.

Note that this post contains spoilers. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled.

Or maybe “buddy pic,” rather than “love story;” but the relationship between the two leads will be analysed for its homoerotic content, no doubt.

How it certainly has been described is “a love letter to Hollywood,” and that’s fair enough. What it also is, is a counter-factual, or alternative history. But don’t worry, I’m not going to claim this one for SF.¹

The main characters – fading cowboy actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his regular stunt double Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt – are invented. But most of the other named characters, and many who are mentioned or appear as extras, are real people. The most significant of these is Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. And it’s her story that makes this film most interesting, and maybe problematic.

Because of course she died tragically, murdered by members of Charles Manson’s “Family” cult. And in this version — she doesn’t.

If you know the history — which of course, many younger people won’t, which makes for different ways of experiencing the film — then you spend half the time expecting the massacre. There are captioned dates, and even though most of us wouldn’t know the date of the murders, there can’t really be any other reason for showing them. And then when it comes, something else happens.

The violence in that scene is gruesome, over the top, ludicrous — almost hallucinogenic, making me wonder if the tripping Booth² is meant to have hallucinated some or all of it. But there’s no need for there to be so much of it, or for the majority of it to be directed at women. The “Family” did consist largely of women, I guess, but I can’t help but feeling that Tarantino is revelling in it a little too much.

And on top of all that, as my family agreed after seeing it: there’s no real need for the whole Sharon Tate thread of the story. It would have made a fine tale if were just about the two actors against the backdrop of late-60s Hollywood. I wonder what the point of it was. Did Tarantino feel he could in some way “save” Sharon Tate?

Although that might be an interesting exercise. There isn’t really enough after the big change to make it worthwhile, though. ↩
There’s probably no significance to his having the same surname as the killer in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Probably. ↩

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (Books 2019, 13)

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 23:23:19 +0000

A genuinely chilling, even scary, ghost story, is not something you read that often. Or I don’t, these days, at least.

Combine that with compelling characters, comedy, and tragedy, and you’ve got kind of a small masterpiece.

I only say “small” because it’s quite short. I only know Jackson from a film version of “The Lottery” that they used to show us in school. I’m not sure why they showed us it, exactly, because we didn’t study it in English, and as far as I recall we didn’t discuss it. I think maybe it was a sort of treat, and the school only had a few films, that it showed repeatedly. These were actual films, I should add. Played on a projector, watched on a screen.

Anyway Jackson’s story always stuck with me, and now this one joins it.

The 392 by Ashley Hickson-Lovence (Books 2019, 12)

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 19:32:38 +0000

The 392, with a flat peach

We went to WOMAD a couple of weekends ago, and in the literary tent we caught the end of a reading from, and an interview with, this young Hackney writer. It was an interesting talk and the book sounded compelling, so we bought a copy (and got it signed).

It’s set over 36 minutes on the inaugural journey of a new (nonexistent) London bus route, from Hoxton to Highbury. Told as the thoughts and conversations of various passengers (and the driver).

If you’re familiar with the area and the local slang (which may in fact be national or global slang in places), it’s particularly enjoyable. But the themes are universal, so don’t suppose it’s only for Hackney & Islington folk.

I have my problems with the ending, but it’s well worth checking out (and it’s very short, and in bite-sized pieces, if you’re looking for something easy).

What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (Books 2019, 11)

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 20:39:55 +0000

A Kindle showing Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost next to an origami bird

This was recommended to me by an Open University tutor when I was doing the creative writing course a few years back. Which experience, I note, I barely wrote about here. I have a Diploma in Creative Writing, don’t you know?

Anyway, there was an exercise which included writing a plan for the next major piece we were going to write. I wanted to write something that was set in an exotic city, and I mentioned in my plan that I wanted the city to be a character in the story. I was thinking maybe of something like China Miéville’s Bas-Lag.

My tutor suggested that the shopping centre in this book might be a similar kind of thing. Which turns out not really to be accurate. It’s set largely in and around the mall, and some people say they have a sense of it watching them, but nothing is ever made of that.

It’s strange, in that it starts off apparently being a kids’ book, or at least YA; but after the first part it takes a turn, into something else entirely.

It’s not bad, but I wouldn’t particularly recommend it.

Milkman by Anna Burns (Books 2019, 10)

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 14:49:04 +0000

Anna Burns’s Milkman alongside a lemon

This is not mainly a book about The Troubles; nor about religion or politics, though it is about all of those. It's a book, above all, about gossip and rumour and silence, and the harm that those can do to a person, to a society.

The unique approach — no-one is named, almost no proper names appear — I found quite endearing. And far from obfuscating things, it many ways it makes the story easier to follow. Instead of having to remember whether Mary, Margaret or Roisin is the oldest sister, it's “first sister.” “Oldest friend;” “maybe-boyfriend.” Honestly, all books should be like this. Relationships are important, after all.

Though you can also see it as a sly reference to the common complaint about living in small communities, that you're always someone's daughter, someone's brother — never yourself.

Anyway, Booker Prize winner, and all. Dead good.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson (Books 2019, 9)

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 22:51:24 +0000

Nigeria, 2066 (and various years before that). Our hero, Kaaro, is a sensitive. An alien entity sits in a dome at the heart of the city of Rosewater, and many strange things happen.

The start of a trilogy, and I'll be getting the sequels, you can be sure. Top stuff.

Touch by Claire North (Books 2019, 8)

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 14:12:31 +0000

I enjoyed North's previous novel , with some reservations. This one was similar. I read it in a day — it's quite the page-turner — and it has a compelling plot trigger.

The first-person narrator is an entity who can jump into any human body from its current host, just by making skin-to-skin contact — the "touch" of the title. Male or female, young or old, it doesn't matter. The host doesn't know anything about it while they are possessed, and is left unharmed — unless, of course, something happens to their body while the possessor is in control.

Sounds pretty gruesome like that, so it's impressive that our sympathies are with the narrator throughout.

Good story, slightly flat ending. Hey-ho.

In Dreams: A Unified Interpretation of Twin Peaks & Other Selected Works of David Lynch, by H Perry Horton (Books 2019, 7)

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 14:57:28 +0000

This is an incredible piece of work, about an incredible body of work.

I don’t recall how I heard about it. I think I saw a tweet, or something, thought it looked interesting, and instantly bought it because it was only a few quid on Kindle. It’s a huge book which tries — successfully, in my mind — to explain how the bulk of David Lynch’s creative works can be considered part of a single story, which Horton refers to as The Dream.

Now obviously Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Twin Peaks: The Return are all part of the same story. As are the various spinoff books: Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and Scott Frost’s The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, from back around the time of the original broadcast; and Mark Frost’s more recent The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, which I’ve written about here.

But Horton argues that the whole story gets kicked off in Eraserhead, and that Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr and Inland Empire are side stories related to the main branch. The overall story being about an eternal being, The Dreamer, who dreams reality into existence, and also creates another being, known as Jowday, or Judy, who becomes his adversary. BOB, the possessing spirit of the original Twin Peaks, is a creation of this entity, and the Black and White Lodges are the vanguards in the battle between the two beings.

Sure, on one level it’s just good vs evil, heaven & hell — “just,” I say, as if that wasn’t enough. But the sheer scope of it is astonishing. The eighteen hours of The Return has been hailed as an incredible masterpiece of visual storytelling. But when you include all that I’ve listed above, and three of Lynch’s paintings to boot — it must be one of the greatest — in terms of size, at least — creative works by a single visionary. True, it’s far from being by a single creator, but the vision behind it is solely or primarily Lynch’s, or that of Lynch and Mark Frost.

And even if the connections to the other films are just in Horton’s head (and, to be fair, those of others whose work he acknowledges): the obviously-connected stuff is still amazing, and the current work, Horton’s book that I’m writing about, is something a of a creative triumph itself.

One that is slightly marred by its self-published nature and obvious lack of an editor — there are a lot of typos — but a hugely impressive one nonetheless.

Though obviously it’s only for the very serious Twin Peaks fan.

Rational? Twitter, Micro.blog and Social Engagement

Sat, 22 Jun 2019 20:12:35 +0000

I had vaguely seen references to “ratios,” and was aware it was something to do with engagement on Twitter and elsewhere. But I hadn’t understood what exactly people meant by it. Then last night I saw a tweet in which someone said, “I accept I’ve been ratiod.” (Should the verb form rather be “ratioed”? Hard to say. Neither looks quite right.)

A search for understanding led me to this article on Know Your Meme. It tells us:

The Ratio refers to an unofficial Twitter law which states that if the amount of replies to a tweet greatly outnumbers the amount of retweets and likes, then the tweet is bad

and goes into some detail about the origin of the term.

It makes me sad to read that. Imagine an interaction system where, if people reply to something you say, that’s bad. Well, it seems we don’t have to imagine it: we can see it right here on the “social” web.

I like to get replies on Twitter or elsewhere. A reply means, to me, that someone has read what I’ve written, thought about it, and found it worth responding to. I’m aware that I speak from a position of some privilege, in that I’m not in a group that is likely to experience the mass abuse that many do. But something has broken down in our systems of interaction if getting replies mean what you said “is bad.”

I’m far from the first to have made that observation, of course.

But consider Micro.blog, the still-young social network based on blogs that I’ve written abut before. Micro.blog has replies, but it doesn’t even have the concept of likes or retweets/reblogs. If you read a post and want to say something about it — even just that you like it — you have to reply. With words, in human language.

It’s a much friendlier place than Twitter.

This conversation from the last day or two gives a good flavour of the kind of thing you can expect.

If you clicked through that link you’ll have seen that it appears to be — and is — on the blog of the user who made the original post. The responses appear as blog comments. But while every Micro.blog user has a blog, you don’t have to interact with it as a blog if you don’t want to. You can do it all through the Micro.blog app or one of the third-party clients, or just the Micro.blog website, where you can see the same conversation.

Similarly, you can see all my posts here, as well as at their natural home.

It’s well worth a try if you’re looking for a less toxic social-media environment.

Europe Elects

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:38:41 +0000

I hope you’ve been watching Russel T Davies’s new series, Years and Years. It’s really good. But he’s showing British politics going to some dark, dark places.

Tomorrow — today, as I write — we have a chance to show we don’t want that kind of politics. We have the chance to vote for a more positive, inclusive way of life. Inclusive of all of Europe, indeed.

I hope you’ll get out and vote for a party that believes in Europe, that believes in the European Union. Send people to the European Parliament who think that it’s a worthwhile body, that the act of being there has value. Not people who only want to pocket the salary and cause trouble.

Me, I’ll be voting Green. Unless I decide to go for the Liberal Democrats at the last minute. But almost certainly Green.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (Books 2019, 6)

Tue, 21 May 2019 19:52:33 +0000

A re-read of Pratchett & Gaiman’s comedy-horror masterpiece, prior to the forthcoming TV series.

I remembered little, and/but enjoyed it immensely. Probably more this time than whenever it was I last read it. You don’t have to have read The Omen to enjoy this, just in case you thought that.

Oh, turns out it was in 2007: the twelfth book I read that year. I’m starting to repeat myself.

Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassady (Books 2019, 5)

Mon, 20 May 2019 23:56:07 +0000

You’ve probably wondered what’s happened to my reading lately. Truth is, I have several things on the go, some or all of which I’ll finish eventually.

Meanwhile, here’s the latest of my reading of Warren’s superhero-type things. It’s pretty good: better than Stormwatch, which I wrote about last year, or The Authority, which for some reason I didn’t. The latter group make a guest appearance here. Multiverse-crossing, and all that.

Not the best thing I’ve read, but not bad.

Two Wheels Good

Wed, 15 May 2019 22:44:18 +0000

Back when the internet was young — or at least the commercial, available-at-home internet — I sent an email with the subject line, “Bicycle on the Superhighway”. It was about me having a publicly-accessible email address for the first time since uni (as opposed to one that was only usable within the company where I worked at the time).

This was back when people — inspired, if I recall correctly, by Al Gore — were calling the net the “Information Superhighway.”

This post is not about all that, though; this is about literal cycling on a literal superhighway: specifically London’s “Cycle Superhighways.”

Since the building where I now work has showers, I decided it was time to get back on the bike. And since it’s in Westminster, it turns out there’s a really easy route, that uses CS6 and CS3: down Farringdon Road and west along Embankment, by the river.

These are fantastic cycling facilities, especially the Embankment one. Properly separated from the motor traffic, plenty of room to move and overtake, great sequencing of traffic lights so you hardly have to stop. It’s hard to fault it. Especially compared to nearly every other pathetic painted cycle lane in the city.

It gets a bit hairy where it all ends, in Parliament Square: the traffic there is unfeasibly heavy. Who drives near parliament?

If there’s a downside to it all, it’s this: I suspect that the motorised traffic is busier and faster, exactly because it’s not tempered by having bikes in the mix. I can’t be sure — I’ve never used Embankment before, and it’s years since I used to cycle regularly on Farringdon Road — but it feels to me that there’s a crazy amount of traffic and that it’s going faster than ever.

The latter can’t really be true — there are still speed limits, and they either won’t have changed or might have dropped to 20 mph in sections. But I still get this sense that, freed from interacting with the fragile two-wheeled minority, the armoured legions behave more like they’re on a motorway.

Whether that’s the case or not, the number of people cycling — especially in the recent bright spring weather — is huge. The only time I’ve seen more cyclists together was when I did the London to Brighton ride many years ago.

And also in the mix now are electric scooters and electric skateboards, which makes it all the more interesting. There’s even the odd cycle rickshaw.

It’ll be interesting to see how the volume changes with the seasons, but you can’t beat it for a way to commute: it’s faster than the tube, it saves you money, and you get some exercise. I recommend it for anyone who’s able.

New Job Obtained

Wed, 08 May 2019 19:10:10 +0000

Yesterday I started my new job. It all came about very quickly in the end: it’s not even a month since I finished at SAHSU. And I didn’t really start hunting in earnest until then. In fact I had two offers to choose from, which was nice. I turned down Capgemini, a massive consultancy, in the hope that the smaller one, whose offer I did accept, would feel more comfortable, more human-scale.

Though they do have some massive clients.

You’ll note that I’m not naming the company. That’s because the staff handbook makes it quite clear that they don’t want us to do so. I guess they don’t want the company name linked with arbitrary random sites on the web. I mean, we all know I’d be fine, but you never know what someone might say.

Here’s how good they are though: in a company full of PCs, when I said I preferred to work on a Mac, they said, “No problem,” and ordered one in for me. I’ve just been setting it up today. 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2018 model. Lovely. Much like my own one, though mine’s a 2017 model and Space Grey, rather than silver.

Not much more to report yet. I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into some projects.

Words Matter. Phrasing Matters

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 08:32:09 +0000

On the BBC Radio 3 news this morning:

As part of the Brexit extension process, Britain is obliged to take part in the EU elections.

Instead of making it sound like a burden is being placed upon us, how about saying something like:

As part of the European Union’s democratic processes, Britain, like all member states, enjoys the right to hold elections for members of the European Parliament.

How you express things affects how people think about them.

Job Changing

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 18:34:40 +0000

I started at SAHSU in Imperial College London in March of last year. I finished there today. Well, yesterday: today was my last day of employment, but I had holiday entitlement to use up. It was a fixed-term contract for a year initially, and they were able to extend it by a month or so, but there was no more funding, and without funding, no job.

So I’m job-hunting again. I had an interview yesterday, and they’ve asked me back for another one next week. I have one with another company next week too, so there are jobs out there. I just need to find the right one.

So if you happen to know of anyone who’s looking for an experienced Java developer with a side-order of Python, and various other skills, point them my way.

Parrots! In Hackney!

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 16:53:11 +0000

There were four parrots in the tree across the road. You can see three of them here. Not great photo quality, unfortunately.

My daughter tells me there was a story about them escaping from the zoo recently. I couldn’t find that, but here’s a story with much better pictures about London’s feral parrots.

EU Citizens

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 15:18:59 +0000

It’s sad when even pro-European organisations get things wrong about us.

Last week I signed up for, and tweeted about, a programme designed to encourage people to vote in the EU parliamentary elections:

The European Parliament’s outreach team (or “institutional, non-partisan communication action”) is encouraging us to sign up at This Time I’m Voting. I will be, as I always do — assuming, of course, that we in the UK are able to. https://t.co/cB4TVpTBZ6

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) March 25, 2019

Today I got an email from “This Time I’m Voting,” containing the following text:

If you are one of the 3.5 million EU nationals still living here in the UK
…
Therefore, whether you are British or an EU citizen
…

Last time I looked there are around 67 million EU nationals living in the UK. At least until next week, and hopefully for a long time after that. I mean, that’s kind of the point of this whole struggle we’re having, isn’t it?

The fact that (some) people in the UK fail to identify as EU citizens is partly what has got us into this mess.

Marina's on Fire Again

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:20:55 +0000

Marina Hyde may have written her greatest line (so far):

the Commons decision to take the prime minister into special measures

The whole piece is, as ever, glorious.

OK/Cancel

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 01:18:25 +0000

The other day I was explaining to my daughter why I thought a second referendum would be right and democratic. I reached for an analogy, and came up with the idea that you don’t (usually) do something as serious as deleting a file without getting a confirmation dialogue to confirm that you really mean to go ahead.

So now I’m planning on making a banner with some version of the image below for the “Put it to the People” march on Saturday. Just trying to perfect the wording. All suggestions gratefully considered.

Not shown: my Unix-based joke alternative, which would be something like:

# Leavers be all like:
rm -rf britains-special-place-in-the-eu/

Though maybe “Abort, Retry, Fail” would be more in keeping with the times.

Partners

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 01:12:26 +0000

Equal Civil Partnerships badge

We went to Parliament Square this morning for the passing into law of Equal Civil Partnerships (the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registrations etc) bill — or now, act — to give it its full name).

It has taken a long time, but different-sex couples can now have a civil partnership if they want to. Or will be able to, later this year or early next, once all the paperwork has been processed.

It’s not the biggest issue in the world — it wasn’t even the most important thing happening in Parliament Square this morning (those kids were noisy, and rightly so) — but it means a lot to us. Those of us who have problems with traditional marriage. Which just means that it isn’t right for us; it’s up to everyone else what’s right for them.

Rebecca & Charles Addressing the crowd

Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, who took the case to the court, and ultimately the Supreme Court, were there, as was Tim Loughton, the Liberal Democrat MP whose private members bill it was. The government supported it, which is why it was able to get through; but of course they had to do something once the Supreme Court had told them that the existing situation was unlawful.

Tim Loughton MP addressing the crowd

The stupid thing is that all the time and money and stress could have been saved if civil partnerships had included mixed-sex couples in the first place. I was sure I’d had this thought back when they were introduced for same-sex couples. I thought I had written about it here. Not much, it turns out. There was a post expressing disappointment with a setback at the Supreme Court before the final decision.

But there was this post about Tony Blair’s legacy, where I said in an aside, “though why not for het couples?”

I took a few pictures. Did you know there’s a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square? I didn’t. Seems rather strange, but why not, I suppose.

Statue of Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square

After a week of Brexit insanity and a on a day of horror in New Zealand, it’s good to have some positive news.

What's Next for Brexit?

Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:46:55 +0000

Parliament has again voted against May’s deal — the only one on offer. If, as is highly likely, they vote tomorrow against leaving the EU without a deal, doesn’t that leave only one option?

The one we’re all hoping for: revoke the triggering of Article 50.

Or at the very least, take the whole thing back to the people for a second referendum.

The Beats: a Very Short Introduction (Books 2019, 4)

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 23:00:09 +0000

The Beats VSI alongside a heart-shaped pottery gift

Since I announced back in October that I’m writing a novel called Delta Blues: Beat Poet of the Spaceways, I thought I should learn a bit more about the Beats. Not that my character is necessarily going to be very like the actual Beats, and maybe her poetry won’t be like theirs either, but you need to know about what you’re using for inspiration, right?

Books in the “Very Short Introduction” series do exactly what their shared subtitle suggests, and this is no exception. You get a brief prehistory and history of the movement, then a look at the major novelists, another at the major poets, and then a piece on their influence.

In common with the last two books I read, The Clash get a mention, because Allen Ginsberg worked with them, adding spoken-word part to “Ghetto Defendant,” on the Combat Rock album.

I know more about the Beats now than when I started, and that’s exactly what I wanted out of this book.

England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, by Jon Savage (Books 2019, 3)

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 23:50:20 +0000

England’s Dreaming alongside a shaving brush

I didn’t start reading this just because I read a book about The Clash recently. In fact I started it sometime last year. But reading the Clash book did make me want to get back to this, and refresh my memories of the early days of punk.

Reading a history of a time you lived through is interesting. Not that I was involved in the events, but I was distantly aware of at least some of them. In the years the book covers I was between 12 and 15. Or maybe just 14, as it only gets as far as early 79. It’s a short period of time, looking back, and they — the Pistols, and most of the other bands too — were incredibly young. They were just 20 and 21 when they signed their first deal. And their second. And their third.

At times Savage appears to think that punk was over when the pistols split, if not before. And generally to have quite negative thoughts about it as it developed Though he undercuts that contempt later, in the appendices and in the notes scattered through the huge discography at the end. He acknowledges the influence of punk, though considers it just to be one of a range of genres or forms that influences popular music. Which is fair enough, though there are still, even today, bands that consider themselves to be punk. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know.

Something that came out of it that surprised me — though doesn’t, now that I know the facts — is that you can no longer get the film of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle in any form (though you can still get the soundtrack album). That’s because it was McLaren’s project, it sets him up as hero, and makes Lydon the almost-unseen villain. Lydon hated McLaren by the end, and eventually won control of the Sex Pistols name and assets in a series of court cases. Presumably he controls whether it will ever be released.

I find this mildly annoying, because I saw it couple of times when I was a student, and enjoyed it, and wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Second-hand DVD copies are available, but they’re mostly pricey and/or being shipped from the States.

I suppose the more recent, documentary film, The Filth and the Fury, might be worth seeing. I see that, like The Swindle, it is directed by Julien Temple. Clearly Lydon didn’t mind his work on McLaren’s film.

What doesn’t come through very much is any sense of Jon Savage himself. What was he doing, and how did he get involved in all this? I gather he wrote a fanzine, London’s Outrage, and he became a journalist writing for Sounds, according to his Wikipedia entry. While he has done extensive research, and interviewed many of the participants, some of the story clearly comes from his being there at the time.

But the only real sense of that we get is that, towards the last third or so of the book, a series of dated, italicised entries appear. They clearly are — or are meant to be — diary entries from the time. Or notes for articles he wrote at the time, perhaps, giving us something of a first-person view of some to the gigs and so on. I would have liked to see more made of these, or more generally about his experience and from his point of view. A book about punk ought to be a bit more gonzo, I think.

But on the whole it’s a great read.

Chile Trip, Part 3: Valparaíso, City of Colour

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 18:02:34 +0000

This port city is a bit rougher than Santiago, but its artwork is more established and more substantial.

This is where we stayed, and the view from the window of the breakfast room:

And here’s the same mural from ground level.

Some of the artists like figures with way too many eyes:

[aesop_gallery id="5518" revealfx="off" overlay_revealfx="off"]

Or way too many crowns:

[aesop_gallery id="5519" revealfx="off" overlay_revealfx="off"]

The art doesn’t stop taggers, though:

If your canvas is a wide stretch of concrete, sometimes your subject has to be sideways:

[aesop_gallery id="5522" revealfx="off" overlay_revealfx="off"]

And a few more:

[aesop_gallery id="5524" revealfx="off" overlay_revealfx="off"]

It was hard to reach the sea because of the port and the railway line. So we took the train a few kilometres along the coast to Viña del Mar, where there’s a beach:

[aesop_gallery id="5527" revealfx="off" overlay_revealfx="off"]

Back in Valparaíso proper the dogs are parked everywhere, as usual, and there are funiculars, because it’s very hilly:

[aesop_gallery id="5528" revealfx="off" overlay_revealfx="off"]

The Honest Graffitologist

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 13:37:21 +0000

Nothig to say.

Unhelpful Thoughts On Brexit

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 20:18:48 +0000

You could spend a lot of time wondering what makes Theresa May tick.

She says she supported remain and voted to stay in the European Union. So her increasing fervour for Brexit has been one of the most confusing factors in British politics over the last two and a half years.

Taking over the Tory leadership after David Cameron resigned was always going to be a poisoned chalice. No-one would have had a good time in that position, except maybe a genuine hard quitter like Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s probably why Gove and Johnson pulled out.

If she truly believed that staying in was best, though, she would not have rushed into triggering Article 50 (nor would she have gone to court to fight for her wish to do so by diktat; luckily National Hero Gina Miller had the nation’s back on that one).

If she had used more care, collaboration, and consideration, she might have had an easier time when Article 50 finally was triggered and the negotiations started. In fact if she had been more thoughtful in the first place she might even have said something like, “The vote was close; the country is clearly divided. We will discuss the possible ways forward in parliament and with the rest of the EU, and come back to you, the people, for confirmation when we better understand what Brexit means.” ¹

But no: “Brexit means Brexit”: she knew up front what it meant, and never deviated. Even if the majority of the country had no idea what it would mean.

She then proceeded as follows:

ignore any idea of cross-party talks and so involving parliament (the UK’s sovereign body) in the negotiations;
trigger Article 50 as soon as she could;
negotiate with the EU27 almost in secret;
have inflexible “red lines” to appease the hard quitters, leaving herself no room for compromise in the negotiations.

It’s a truism, even a cliche, to say that she puts the Tory party before the country. But the only way I can explain such a dramatic change of heart is that her love for the Tory party overruled her knowledge that being in the EU was, is, and will be the best situation for the UK. And that she somehow convinced herself that she could heal her fatally-divided party.

In fact, the very thing that Cameron was trying to do by calling he referendum in the first place.

“Tory eurosceptics” used to be a common enough phrase, but it denoted a tiny fringe of the party: a few loons like John Redwood. But in trying to appease them, two Tory leaders and prime ministers have turned them mainstream and brought us to where we are today, on the brink of leaving the EU without any kind of agreement for our future relationship.

And their party is as divided as ever.

That’s fanciful, of course. But it’s what a sane, thoughtful person, who cared about what might happen to the country would have done. ↩

We Are The Clash by Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki (Books 2019, 2)

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 19:56:50 +0000

We Are The Clash with the Cut the Crap CD

This is the book that I mentioned before Christmas. The subtitle is “Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of A Band That Mattered,”¹ which captures well its structure. It interleaves the politics of what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic — the miners’ strike, Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, the Iran/Contra scandal — with what was happening with the most political of the original punk bands.

It’s interesting to read a history of a time you lived through and were, however tangentially, involved in. Andersen and Heibutzki more than do justice to their material. The research they must have done is impressive. I know personally that Andersen came to the UK on a research trip, but aside from that they have interviewed the three non-original members of The Clash, Kosmo Vinyl, and various other people who were involved or just had something useful to say.

And they must have spent a lot of time listening to concert tapes and studying set lists — which doesn’t sound like a chore to me, it’s fair to say.

I learned two major things: first, I’d forgotten how good Cut the Crap is. I haven’t listened to it in ages, and when I went to do so on Apple Music, I found it isn’t there. Nor is it on Spotify. I have it on vinyl, but I don’t currently have access to a record player.

Luckily Amazon and CDs both still exist, so I put some more money the way of… Bernie Rhodes, as it turns out.

That’s the other big thing I found out: how — difficult, let’s say — Rhodes was. Not least since he signed the band — well, Joe and Paul: the others were effectively employees — into a contract that gave him, Rhodes, control over the album, as well as the name “The Clash.”

But worse was the way he treated the new members while they were with the band. Constantly haranguing them, telling them they weren’t up to scratch, shouting at them… it’s a wonder they stayed. It sounds like an abusive environment.

Joe could and should have stopped it, but it seems like he was still to some extent in Rhodes’s thrall — Bernie did bring the band together, after all — and possible suffering from depression. Certainly he was drinking heavily, and during that time his dad died and his mum got ill, and he became a father himself. It was a difficult time for him.

I have more to say about the album, but I think that’s for a separate post. For now, this is a great rock book about a little-discussed time in the history of my favourite band.

Good to see the proper use of the Oxford comma there. ↩

The Compulsive Pursuit of a Product That Does Us Only Harm

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 16:39:32 +0000

Rafel Behr analyses our national condition:

It looks like British social awkwardness elevated to the scale of a constitutional meltdown. It is the stiff upper lip chewing itself to pieces rather than name the cause of our suffering: not the deal, not the backstop, not the timetable, not Brussels, but Brexit. The poison in our system is Brexit. We need a path to recovery, not May’s frantic hunt for a stronger, purer dose.

At The Guardian

Bragging

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 23:46:48 +0000

Went to see Billy Bragg in Islington on Friday. A benefit for Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist organisation, it was the most mainly-political gig I’ve seen from Billy in — well, maybe ever. By which I mean, ‘Sexuality‘ and ‘Upfield‘ were the only non-political songs he did. And at least the latter of those actually is political (“I’ve got a socialism of the heart,” after all), despite being about meeting angels.

He was on great form. He’s turned sixty now, and was joking about having a bus pass.

Support were The Wakes, a Glasgow band with obvious Irish connections. Very much in a Pogues mould. I only heard the tail end of their set, but thoroughly enjoyed it.

Oh yes: and I think this was the first time I’ve ever seen Billy when he didn’t do ‘A New England.’

Nick Cave on AI and Songwriting

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 15:18:39 +0000

If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend?

Mr Cave’s latest newsletter muses on the potential songwriting abilities of AIs.

“Why’s it taking so long? We should just leave!” | The Reinvigorated Programmer

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:07:13 +0000

Good analogy:

Suppose your family lives in a flat that’s rented from a housing association. And you have come to feel (rightly or wrongly) that it’s not a very nice flat, and that the association interferes too much. So you discuss it as a family, and you think about all the lovely houses out there that you could live in, and eventually you decide to leave. So far, so good.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (Books 2019, 1)

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:19:36 +0000

The novel Flights with some elephants

I’m pleased to have finished the first book of the year — and the first of my Christmas books — already. It’s a book about travel, and the human body, and some people and things that happen to them. Is it a novel? It consists of a series of short sections, and a few longer ones. I can’t really call them chapters: some are no more than a paragraph, even a sentence. It does have characters, though: notably the narrator, who is the voice of most of the shorter sections. She appears to be someone who spends most of her life travelling around the world without necessarily any destination or purpose in mind.

That doesn’t make it sound as compelling as it is. There are connections between at least some of the stories, which make me think there must be more connections that I missed. A lot of it regards the preservation of dead bodies, from early embalming techniques to the “Body Worlds” plastination of Gunther von Hagens.

In the end it doesn’t quite form a unified whole, so in that sense I’m not sure we can really call it a novel. But it’s strangely compelling, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Italian Coffee is the Best

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 20:00:47 +0000

This post on someone who’s trying to bring Starbucks-style coffee shops to Italy is kind of annoying. Not least for the closing quote:

“It’s not that Italian coffee has always been bad,” Campeotto said. “They have been geniuses. The god of coffee is the Italian espresso. The problem is, they have been stuck there. They stopped.”

If they had already achieved the “god of coffee” (which I happen to agree with), then why would they do anything other than stop? If you’ve already achieved perfection you have no need to improve. Just make sure you maintain that level.

I spent twelve months of 1989-90 in Turin. A cappuccino was 1200 lire, or about 60p (around 45-50 US cents, probably). And it was delicious. The best coffee I had, or have, ever tasted.

The growth of Starbucks and the other chains came after that, and I’ve been looking for coffee as good ever since. I’ve never found it. The closest I ever found in London was Costa in its early days. It has slipped down to the level of Starbucks and Caffè Nero, though.

Which is not to say that any of those are truly bad: not, at least, compared to what was available before they came on the scene.

But nothing matches my memory of Torinese cappuccino.

Bing Me the Head of the Marketing Team

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:15:59 +0000

I keep seeing these posters around town saying, “I’m a binger.” And I think, “What’s that, is it someone who uses Microsoft’s search engine? One who uses Bing?” It’s for a broadband provider — TalkTalk, I think — so it sounds plausible… just.

Then I realise it’s “one who binges.” There’s no obvious way in written English to specify which of the two pronunciations you mean. You’d have to write “binge-er” or something. Not ideal.

You’d have thought someone in the marketing team would have spotted the potential confusion and suggested taking a different tack. But then again, maybe they did, and they thought that the momentary confusion would draw people’s attention and make them notice the poster.

Which clearly worked.

Who's Who?

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 23:20:12 +0000

Right, let’s get 2019 off to a start by talking about my favourite TV programme. I haven’t said anything about the recent season of Doctor Who here since my appreciative post at the end of the first episode. Not for any reason other than not getting round to it.

I absolutely love this iteration of the series. Jodie Whittaker is fantastic as The Doctor, and the supporting cast is brilliant as well. I like the crowded Tardis feel. It does have the limitation that some of the characters don’t get as much time or as many lines as others. That’s been notably true of Yaz — except in the “Demons of the Punjab” episode, of course.

But there’s plenty of time for her to be developed further, assuming they’re all sticking around. And the focus being more on Ryan and Graham was entirely correct, since if there was an overarching theme to the season, it was grief.

It’s not perfect. There have been several occasions when I’ve thought that the writing team don’t really understand what a galaxy is, or the scale of it. Lines like “half the people in the galaxy are unemployed,” or “they’ve crossed four galaxies to get here,” just don’t really make a lot of sense. And there have been several episodes where things maybe weren’t as tidily resolved as we’re used to.

Tonight’s New Year special episode, “Resolution,” was a classic example of the kind of story where the ideas are good, but the whole thing could have been improved if they’d taken the time to come up with slightly better ways to make things happen. Some way of defeating the enemy that didn’t involve the microwave oven, for example. And the whole vacuum/supernova bit at the end was kind of farcical.

But no matter. This season was all about the character dynamics, and those were great. It’s a strong start for Chris Chibnall as showrunner, and an incredibly strong start for Jodie Whittaker.

Blogging the Bitface, 2018 Style

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 22:31:52 +0000

Like last year, I present the figures for my blogging in 2018. 163 posts in total, counting this one, broken up as follows.

Month	Posts
Jan	20
Feb	13
Mar	11
Apr	15
May	23
Jun	16
Jul	11
Aug	8
Sep	9
Oct	13
Nov	12
Dec	12

The formatting has improved, as I mentioned last time. I’m not sure what I did that made it better. The SQL is the same as before, with the obvious year change.

100 posts less¹ than last year, but not bad. I’ll try for something closer to daily in 2019.

Some would say that should be “fewer,” but it turns out that was never a real rule, just some guy’s choice that got locked into style guides. ↩

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda (Books 2018, 31)

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 22:09:53 +0000

Hey, I made it to 31, by reading the last chapter of this on the last day of the year.

This book, subtitled “Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” is written by the software engineer who worked on the original version of the iPhone’s software keyboard. It’s an interesting view into how things were for someone working at Apple at the time.

That’s not something we often get, with the company’s noted dedication to secrecy, so it’s good for that. But while I did get a sense of what it was like, I feel that there’s an awful lot more he could tell, especially about the people. We do get a sense of some of them, but not much insight. And especially not about he author himself. We learn next to nothing about him outside of his work.

Maybe that’s the way you have to be when you work at somewhere as high-pressure as Apple. Worth a read if you’re interested in Apple and their products.

Stormwatch by Warren Ellis, Tom Raney and Bryan Hitch (Books 2018, 30)

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 17:46:57 +0000

I don’t always include all comic-type things here. No particular reason why, except maybe that they sometimes feel too short and not substantial enough. I probably wouldn’t have included this, except that it conveniently gets my total for the year to thirty.

It’s a post-Watchmen story of superheroes handled in a vaguely realist fashion. At least in the sense that there’s some consideration of politics. Stormwatch is a UN body, an emergency response team. It has its base in a satellite, and superhuman beings who are tasked with dealing with incursions from other worlds, or other, nefarious, super-powered beings. The US is usually antagonistic to it, because of its UN status.

It’s not bad, but honestly not much to write home about.

The Drifters by James A Michener (Books 2018, 29)

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 17:28:27 +0000

I think I’ve read this more times than any other book except Illuminatus!, and maybe The Lord of the Rings. Which may be only three or four times. A friend got into Michener when we were teenagers. None of his books much interested me, until I looked at this.

It’s a tale of hippies and others in 1969. Six young people from various countries meet each other in Torremolinos, and drift around the Iberian Peninsula and parts of Africa. The narrator, seemingly detached third-person at first, turns out to be an older man who knows some of the young people, and arranges business trips so that he can hang out with them from time to time.

It’s about what was going on in the world — Vietnam, the Arab/Israeli conflict, drugs, music — and about the characters. They aren’t that well developed — indeed, he largely abandons character development after the first six chapters where he introduces each one — but those introductions are enough to see us through.

Actually, thinking about it now, I wish he had written more about some of them. A sequel would have been in order.

It’s partly, I suspect, Michener’s own struggle to come to terms with the way society is changing — he was born in 1907, so he’d have been 62 at the time this is set. It was published in 71, so maybe a tad older when he wrote it. The narrator, George Fairbanks, is younger than that, I think — probably in his fifties, maybe even forties, but people seemed to become old at a younger age back then.

Well worth a read.

I’m In A Book About The Clash

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 22:18:02 +0000

Joe Strummer died 16 years ago today. The Joe Strummer Foundation has a good memorial piece.

But for me it’s amusing or ironic or something, that it should be today of all days that, out shopping, I see (and buy) this book:

I’ve been waiting for this for around five years. You’ll recall, I don’t doubt for a second, that back in 2013 I posted a link to a Kickstarter that the authors were running to help them fund the writing of the book.

What I don’t seem to have posted about is that a year or so later, in June 2014, one of the authors visited the UK and interviewed me for the book. He didn’t come over just to interview me, I should stress. It was a research trip, and he visited various places and interviewed lots of people, some of my friends included.

We’ve exchanged emails a couple of times since then, when he had followup questions, so I kind of expected to hear when the book came out. Coincidentally I was recently thinking about emailing him, to talk about something on the Joe Strummer 001 collection of obscurities that came out a month or two back. Had I done so, I would of course have said, “So when’s the book coming out?”

But here it is. I am extensively quoted (well, quoted a couple of times) in the section on the busking tour’s visit to Edinburgh, which was mainly what he wanted me to talk about.

Here’s the publisher’s page on it. Here’s its GoodReads page, and its Amazon UK and US links. Probably too late to get it for Christmas. Try a bookshop.

Here’s a page with me:

Atmosphere

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 23:54:10 +0000

Hackney, this evening.

EU Figures Rule Out Concessions as May Postpones Brexit Vote

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 21:36:49 +0000

Honestly, she has no idea what she’s doing. Plus, she seems to be acting alone. We don’t have a presidential system here. The Prime Minister is not the entire executive.

EU figures rule out concessions as May postpones Brexit vote

Na? No

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 20:26:28 +0000

I expect you’re all wondering what happened with my NaNoWriMo attempt this year. Sadly, after last year’s success, this year I failed.

As you’ll have seen if you clicked through to look at my stats, I averaged 595 words per day, for a total of 17,800. It’s not nothing, and it’s still a decent start on the new novel, but it’s nothing like last year.

Why did I fail? A better question is, why was I successful last year? This year’s result is comparable to other years when I’ve tried it. Last year’s success looks like the aberration.

The big difference between last year and any other was my commute. I’ve tended always to have a commute of about an hour — except when I worked at the bank in the City, when it was shorter. Last year I was working in Croydon, which took me an hour and a half or more to get to. The one good point was that, picking up the Overground from Dalston Junction, I nearly always got a seat within a few stops. And on the way back had one from the start (coming from West Croydon, which is the start of the line).

So I was able to get forty or fifty minutes of concentrated writing time in each direction. Add to that the fact that the office I was in was really horrible, so I didn’t want to spend my lunch hours in it. I mostly went out and wrote in cafes or at Boxpark Croydon. The one thing I miss about that job is the the places to eat, especially a little pizza place in Boxpark.

Whereas now, working at Imperial, I’m back to a one-hour commute, with much less guarantee of a seat. And I really like both job and office, so I’m quite happy to go back there after I’ve got my lunch.

One other point is that last year I had worked out how I was going to end the novel I had been working on for years, so I was running downhill towards that end. This year, starting a brand-new one — even though I’ve got a plan, it feels much more uphill.

Still, we press on, writers against procrastination, borne forward ceaselessly into the future.

Rude and Rough

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:43:43 +0000

I watched Rude Boy for the first time in many years. It is, in case you don’t know, a film from 1980 about and featuring The Clash. It’s kind of a fictionalised documentary, in that the titular character, Ray Gange, is both someone who was a sometime roadie for/hanger-on of The Clash, and playing the part of “Ray Gange.”¹

The worst part of it is, as I recalled, his “acting.” Well, that’s not quite true. Viewing it as a film, that’s the case. But viewing it as a document of the end of the seventies, the worst part of it is the casual racism. And indeed the organised racism of the National Front rally shown at the start.

Also bad are the violence from police and bouncers, and the general horribleness of Britain in the seventies. Nothing looks clean, everything looks run-down or broken. It looks, in fact, far worse than I remember it being.

Don’t worry, by the way, if you don’t remember what it was like, are too young to have experienced it, and/or don’t want to watch the film. It’ll be like that again in a couple of years if things go as we fear.

The best parts are, of course, the scenes of The Clash live and in the studio. And we won’t get them back after Brexit.

Also, in looking up the IMDB article, I discover that a) Ray Gange has actually been in a couple of other movies, and b) far more importantly, there is a 2016 movie called London Town, which is a drama about those times. With people acting as The Clash. Whaaaat? Why did no-one tell me about this?

Or not quite. That’s how I remembered it, but Wikipedia suggests the story is slightly different. ↩

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 17:24:32 +0000

I realised after yesterday’s post about Corbyn and Brexit that I’ve said similar things before. So today I’ve put talk into action. I’ve cancelled my direct debit for my party membership, and written to my constituency party secretary tendering my resignation.

I also did this:

Cut-up Labour Membership Card

Perhaps most significantly, at least symbolically: look up there. ⬆️ This blog has been called “A Labourer At the Bitface” more or less since it started, partly as a reference to my political stance, as I explained in this post.¹ It’s now called “Tales From The Bitface,” which was the name of my Livejournal version. That’s still there, but it, along with the whole site, pretty much, is moribund.

I still support the principles of the Labour party, and I’m sure I’ll vote for them again. But not until they sort themselves out about Brexit.

Even then, I note, I was “consider[ing] my future in said party.” ↩

Ex-Corbyn Fan

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 13:40:28 +0000

You know what? I’m done with Jeremy Corbyn. This interview in Der Spiegel, in which he says “Brexit can’t be stopped,” is the clincher.

As always, literally everything else he says is on the good side of politics — the side I tend to agree with, to be less judgmental. But he refuses to resist — even, really, to engage with¹ — the thing that is the most important political issue and biggest political mistake of our lifetime (setting aside for the moment climate change, which is not just a political issue, and is global in scope, not just European). Look at this:

DER SPIEGEL: Not just Labour, but the whole country is extremely divided at the moment — not least because of Brexit. If you could stop Brexit, would you?

Corbyn: We can’t stop it. The referendum took place. Article 50 has been triggered. What we can do is recognize the reasons why people voted Leave.

This is that “will of the people” nonsense, the idea that it would be undemocratic to ask again. The will of the people can change, and almost certainly has. And you don’t agree to a deal with going back and checking that it’s still OK. Having a confirmatory referendum would be considerably more democratic than not having one.² And we can stop it. Parliament, which is, and always was, sovereign, could revoke Article 50.

Back to the interview:

I’ve been critical of the competitions policy in Europe and the move towards free market, and obviously critical in the past of their treatment of Greece, although that was mostly the eurozone that did that. My idea is of a social Europe with inclusive societies that work for everyone and not just for a few.

You don’t build a “social Europe with inclusive societies that work for everyone and not just for a few” by leaving the EU! You build it by staying in, and working to build that society! God, it’s infuriating.

I voted for him as leader, I respect and believe in most of his policies, but he needs to go. Labour won three general elections under Tony Blair, and was able to do a lot of good. They could have done more, they could have been better, and Blair destroyed his legacy by throwing his lot in with George W Bush and the Iraq War. But those were times when things were improving in the country and we looked to the future with positivity. It can be like that again.

But it won’t — for decades at least — if we destroy our economy, hobble worker’s rights, and undercut food-safety regulations, by leaving the EU.

Note, for example, his complete absence from the country on the day of the People’s Vote march. ↩
“Measure twice, cut once,” as the old saying goes. Or in this case, better not to cut at all. But at least measure twice so you’re sure a cut is what’s wanted. ↩

Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith (Books 2018, 28)

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 20:49:43 +0000

I think I’ve read this twice before, but as ever, my memories of it are not strong enough to support that thought. Doesn’t really matter. I read it years back and loved it. When I started it this time, at first I wasn’t so sure. It felt like it wasn’t living up to my memories. Maybe I was reading it for the wrong reasons.

But there can be no wrong reason to read a book. Just sometimes you’ve got to be in the right mood for a particular one; or it needs to be the right book for you at that time.

Luckily reading changes us. So we might be in the wrong mood at first, but the book brings us around. That’s what happened this time.

I wish MMS would go back to writing SF. I suppose his crime/horror fiction as Michael Marshall (the second-most transparent pseudonym in literary history) is more lucrative — and to be fair, maybe he enjoys it more, or just as much. But god, it feels like a loss to SF.

Anyway, this was a mighty debut, but thinking about it now, it’s actually more like magical realism than SF. There’s no attempt to explain Jeamland or how the narrator and others get to it.

“I can send you a postcard, but you can’t come to stay.”

“Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don’t bring the whole of yourself with you, you’ll never see the sun again.”

March in October

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:40:49 +0000

Numbers

After the Trump thing earlier in the year, another walk through London on Saturday just past. This time with over half a million people — 770,000, by some estimates. That’s a hugely impressive number, and a measure of the strength of feeling in the country against Brexit. Or at least against the idea of the government pushing it through without us having another say on the matter.

You’d imagine it might be enough to make them at least consider enquiring as to the will of the people. But I highly doubt it.

The March

A group of us from Hackney joined at Green Park. There’s an exit from Green Park station that comes out in the park itself, which I don’t think I knew before.Then it took us an age to get out of the park, because of the crush a t the gate. Quite a lot of people were trying to get in at the same time, which didn’t help.

We milled around on Piccadilly for a while. The main march started on Park Lane, so we were ahead of it, and it wasn’t clear to us whether the head of it had already passed us, or if not, then when it actually reached us. It looked like nothing was moving ahead of us. My assumption was that they hadn’t yet closed all the roads between us and Parliament Square, but there was no way to know for sure. Eventually we started moving.

The mood was universally peaceful and cheerful. There were hardly any police to be seen.

I tried to post a couple of photos, but inevitably the network was swamped and nothing would work. I guess even if people weren’t trying to post, just that many phones trying to register with a cell tower would slow things down dramatically.

The Rally

By the time we got to Whitehall Parliament Square was full, and we couldn’t get in. The organisers had set up some big screen-and-speaker systems, so we could hear the speeches (at least when the hovering helicopters weren’t too close).

Conclusion

There isn’t one, really. Like I say, the Mayhemic leadership of the country won’t pay any attention. But if nothing else it helps to keep our spirits up in these dark days.

Chile Trip, Part 2: Santiago, Street Art, and More

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 14:07:49 +0000

As you’ll recall if you’ve been paying attention, I started what appeared to be a series of posts on our trip to Chile. But then stopped. Well, not exactly, because here we are again. It just takes me a long time to sort out all the photographs.

We spent three days in Santiago (and another one at the end, just before we flew back).

You can click on any of the photos or galleries below for a bigger view.

Santiago Street Art

There’s a lot of street art, much of it showing some of the artists, musicians, and writers who have come from Chile or had an impact on it.

There are plenty of other subjects, though.

As well as oddities like this gym which is supporting the most popular Linux distribution:

Santiago Street Art

And there is more formal public art, too.

Up Hill, Down Cable

Funicular Castle

Santiago is in the foothills of the Andes, at 500m above sea level, so mountains are all around it:

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Though it’s hard to tell the mountains from the clouds in that first one.

But there’s a hill in the city itself, big enough to have both a funicular and a cable car. We went up one and down the other.

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Apart from the ride, you get great views, of course, but the main attraction is the giant statue at the top: Our Lady of the Radio Masts:

A statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary that has been used to support various radio and mobile phone antennas.

Also known as the Ladderback Virgin:

A statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a ladder up her back.

(OK, those are just my names for her.)

This is the kind of thing you really go up for, though:

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Flags and Padlocks

A bridge covered in padlocks

La Moneda is the President’s official residence. Outside it we find the biggest flag I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t windy enough to really get the effect, unfortunately.

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And then there’s this lovely bridge:

A bridge in Santiago, Chile

Which demonstrates that “love locks” get everywhere (and they didn’t originate in Paris, as I have just learned):

A bridge in Santiago , covered in padlocks

More later.

Promethea by Alan Moore, JH Williams III, Mick Gray & Todd Klein (Books 2018, 27)

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 22:46:51 +0000

This is five volumes of graphic novel that I read over a period of about a month or so, and — OK, you know how we all thought that Watchmen is Moore’s magnum opus, at least in comic terms?¹

We were wrong. Promethea is the best thing Moore has done, by some margin.

In my humble opinion, of course.

The character Promethea is sort of a personification of the human imagination. She has manifested through various women in history, called from the immateria into the “real” world by an artist — usually unknowingly, at least at first — when she is needed.

There are, of course, forces ranged against her, from demons to the FBI. The Earthbound part of the action takes place in a sort of alternative comic-book New York, where there are “science heroes” like the Five Swell Guys.²

University student Sophie Bangs is writing a term paper on the recurrence of the character of Promethea through myth and literature and comics, when she is attacked by a mysterious shadowy entity. A version of Promethea turns up to help her, and… well, read it and see.

And as well as the storytelling, the art is incredible, with some wildly challenging layouts; but it never gets in the way of the story. It is magnificent, spanning all of fiction and myth and religion and magic, and reminding us that those are all the same thing. Looked at one way, anyhow.

Jerusalem is even more magnum, obviously. ↩︎
There aren’t four of them, and they aren’t fantastic, but you get the idea. ↩︎

Musical Malady

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:28:23 +0000

This morning I saw a poster for Heathers: The Musical. Err, What?

I rewatched Heathers fairly recently and I thought, this could never get made today. I figured teenage suicide is too high-profile, and the facts of people being driven to it, and the fear of copycatting — these would put a treatment of it like the one in Heathers off the table today.

Yet there’s a musical version playing in the West End, apparently.

Not that you can’t make a musical about serious subjects. I’ve just been to see one about the founding of the USA, after all. But Heathers is not what you’d call sensitive about the subject. It could have been changed significantly for the musical, of course, but to remove that aspect would be to take out an important part of the story, so I don’t know where they’d go with it.

Turns out that it’s been around since 2014; and that there’s a even a “High-School Edition,” made more suitable for kids.

Furthermore, it seems there’s a TV series based on the film as well, so what do I know? But it makes me wonder if I’m remembering a different film.

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (Books 2018, 26)

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 22:33:00 +0000

JK Rowling does it again: Robin and Strike are back, and the pages turn like lighting, as I’ve said before. Too fast, really. A week or so after finishing this, it’s already faded quite far from my mind.

But, as you’d expect, mysteries are solved, Doom Bar is drunk, and Strike doesn’t take proper care of his leg. And — it’s maybe a spoiler to say this, but not much of one — a scene happens that I’ve been waiting for since the first book.

If you’re a fan you’re already on board, and if not, never mind.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Books 2018, 25)

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 23:54:23 +0000

I didn’t really know what to expect with this. I knew it was about, or set around, a party — in part because I’ve seen The Hours.

But it’s about so much more; and not really about the party very much at all. It’s an intriguing look at the mental lives of a range of people in London on a day in the 1920s. Not a very wide range of people, in that they’re all very much upper-middle to upper class. There are a few people from what would have been called the lower classes, but they’re just passersby, background colour. There is, however, a sympathy towards all people — from at least some of the characters.

Given the limited range of types of people, we get a remarkably effective insight into their mental lives. And it’s all done with reported thought. There is some actual dialogue, but very little. And we jump around from head to head promiscuously, but incredibly smoothly. There’s usually some handoff: the current viewpoint character sees someone, and then we’re in that person’s head. Or they might just think about someone, and now we hear the other person’s thoughts.

I guess this, along with Joyce, is one of the originators of the stream of consciousness as a literary device. An interesting thing to me is how it reminded me of other, later, works; which of course shows its influence. Most noticeable: Illuminatus! Now Robert Anton Wilson was a Joyce scholar, so he was probably coming more from that direction, but there are definitely some similarities of style, or at least echoes.

And — also from this year’s rereading — Walking On Glass. Especially in the contrast between the thoughts of people who are or are not “sane.”

It can be surprisingly confusing at times, such as when someone suddenly thinks of a person or an idea that hasn’t been mentioned before. But that just simulates the way our minds work. Our thoughts jump from topic to topic without an introductory paragraph, after all.

So it’s psychology, feminism, and a critique of (parts of) the British class system. Oh, and it’s also partly a love-letter to London. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan (Books 2018, 24)

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:22:50 +0000

I don’t know where I learned about this. It’s been sitting on my Kindle for a while. I have a feeling that a friend recommended it on Facebook. It’s subtitled “An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978–1986,” which annoys me, but only because of that “An Hallucinated.” Not because it’s a subtitle. I like subtitles.

And this subtitle describes its book extremely well, especially with respect to that incorrectly-articled vision. It’s the fictionalised biography of a band called Memorial Device. Or at least that’s partly what it is. It verges on magic realism at times. It’s presented as a series of interviews and parts written by other contributors (as opposed to the supposed author, “Ross Raymond”). The actual author does a fine job of presenting those different voices and making them sound different. The whole thing reads like an actual music biography where the author has drawn on the experiences of a range of people as well as their own experience.

The hallucinatory part comes from the way some of those people speak, or write. They are variously damaged or otherwise otherworldly, and their mental strangeness comes across well — or is it the world that’s strange?

Airdrie is in the west of Scotland, not far from Glasgow, so it’s very much the same part of the world I grew up in. This feels very realistic: there was a similar swathe of bands inspired by punk and the post-punk/new wave/new romantic scene around Dumbarton and environs. None of the characters were as much larger-than-life as some of the members of Memorial Device — or at least not that I knew — but that’s why this is fictional, I guess.

Not the best thing I’ve read this, year, but not bad.

Chile Trip Part 1: There and Back

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 00:19:31 +0000

We’re not long back from a family holiday to Chile. I plan to write several posts about it. I’m going to take a thematic approach, rather than a purely chronological or location-based one. Though some will be that kind, too. There will be pictures, but not so much in this post, as it’s about planes, airports, etc.

First, then, the whole business of travelling to another continent, and to the southern hemisphere of our amazing planet.

Getting There

We flew on Latin American Airlines, or LATAM. They were pretty good. I have no complaints. Maybe not as good as British Airways to New York a few years ago, but certainly much better than the budget airlines. The only thing was that we couldn’t get a direct flight. There just don’t seem to be any to Santiago. Though a taxi driver told us towards the end of our stay that BA have one direct flight a week. If so, then either we didn’t find it, it was on an inconvenient day, or it was really expensive. Or any combination of those.

So we had a multipart flight out: first to São Paulo, then on to Santiago via Rosario. That was just a stop at another airport, without leaving the plane. Though some confusion in the booking system meant that we had different seats for the second part. We were not alone: it was all a bit chaotic, as new people boarded and wanted to sit in already-occupied seats, as people who were staying on didn’t realise they had to move. Still, it got sorted out.

Also I didn’t realise till later that Rosario is actually in Argentina. It doesn’t count as visiting a country if you stay airside, but still, interesting to have touched down in two more countries than we planned to.

Above all, it’s a long journey. Around 6000 miles, and about 22 hours, if memory serves.

Jet Lag

We didn’t suffer too much from jet lag going out. Except… almost every day for the entire three weeks I woke up around 4 in the morning. Usually got back to sleep OK. Our clock-time confusion was confounded after about a week when the clocks in Chile went forward by an hour. It’s the tail end of winter there, so it’s the start of summer time. But it’s earlier than when clocks in Europe change, relatively. Also it was only Chile: in Bolivia and Brazil the time was unchanged.

Taxis Home and Abroad

While I’m on travel I’ll just touch on taxis. Chilean taxi drivers, in common with those all over Europe, get out of their car and help you load your bags into the boot. This happens everywhere; except Britain. Or at least, except London. When we were getting a cab when we were coming home I was struck by the fact that all these people were struggling into the stupidly-designed-for-luggage black cabs with no help from the driver.

And then I was ashamed when it was our turn, and the driver did get out and help us. But it’s uncommon.

Internal Flights

Chile is distinctive on the map for its length. It runs almost the entire length of the continent. So there are some long distances to travel if you want to see much of it. As it is, I couldn’t say that we saw much of it, but we did see some very distinctive areas. Notably the Atacama Desert and the Lakes region.

They’re quite far apart, though, so we took some internal flights. All by LATAM (we should have signed up for their frequent-flyer programme), and all fine. Security at the airports was generally less intrusive than it is here. We didn’t have to take iPads out of carry-ons, and I once went through security with my metal water bottle full! Radical.

Long(ish) Distance Buses

The only other trip we took was from Santiago to Valparaíso, which was by bus (coach). A couple of hours. Very comfortable, if you could avoid hitting your head on the badly-designed overhead screens.

Santiago Metro and Valparaíso Light Rail

Santiago has a decent Metro system. You get a contactless card like London’s Oyster cards, called Bip!. Which is a great name, in my humble opinion. It also has the advantage over Oyster that you can make multiple journeys simultaneously with one card. So for a family of four, for example, you just put enough money on the card for everyone, and tap in four times.

I don’t really know why Oyster doesn’t support this. My only guess would be that they thought it would cause too many complaints with people accidentally being charged twice.

Return

Coming back took even longer: 23 hours in airports and planes, but 27, 28, if you count getting to and from the airports.

The weird thing here was that we flew from Santiago to Rio de Janeiro; then, after a four or five hour stopover, to São Paulo. An hour and a half there, and finally on to Heathrow. I don’t understand why it was like that, but as I recall it was the only available option when we booked the flights.

The annoying part was that — seemingly because the Rio – São Paulo bit was a domestic flight — we had to collect our luggage in Rio, and then check it back in. We went landside, got Brazilian entry stamps in our passports, all that.

We took off for Heathrow at 22:10, which made it 02:10 in the UK. So I wanted to get to sleep, but first I wanted to eat. On these long flights, though, they don’t rush to serve food like they do on a short European flight. So it was, I think, around 4 am before I could close my eyes.

Adjusting back home wasn’t too bad, though. People always say it’s worse coming east, but, apart from sleeping late on Bank Holiday Monday, I didn’t have too much trouble.

Gilded Cage, Tarnished City, and Bright Ruin by Vic James (Books 2018, 21, 22, 23)

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 19:35:29 +0000

Also known as the Dark Gifts trilogy. I bought the first while at the recent BSFA meeting where Vic James and Lucy Hounsom, another fantasy author, interviewed each other. I enjoyed their conversation so much that I bought the first book in each of their trilogies.

I don’t read fantasy much, and I don’t really care for dystopias in SF, as I’ve mentioned before. So this being a fantasy dystopia, it shouldn’t really appeal to me.

But it turns out it’s great.

Apparently it was pitched in jest as ‘Downton Abbey meets Game of Thrones in a world where Voldemort won.’ And… yeah, I guess. I haven’t read or seen Game of Thrones, and the time period is more-or-less present day. And none of the magical people (or Skilled ‘Equals’) is as out-and-out evil as Voldemort. But it’s not a bad description of the setup.

The idea is that there are people with magical abilities — referred to as ‘Skill’ — and they are the aristocracy and rule the country. Or at least they have been since Charles the First and Last was killed by one of the Skilled, and they — also known as ‘Equals,’ ironically — took over running the country. Britain is an ‘Equal Republic.’ One thing that annoyed me at first is that there is no mention of what happened to Scotland. It appears to be part of Britain in the present day, but Charles the First (in our reality) was before the Acts of Union. Although not before the Union of the Crowns, so I suppose the Equals just took over Scotland too, by getting rid of the monarchy.¹

Anyway, the worst part about the rule of these magical Equals is ‘Slavedays,’ wherein everyone is required to spend ten years of their lives as slaves. They get some choice in when they do it, but while you’re doing it you’re a slave, with everything that implies.

I found it hard to cope with the idea that people would just quietly accept this state of affairs. But I suppose if it’s been that way all your life, and it’s the law of the land… But I couldn’t help but think, wouldn’t people revolt against it?

Not surprisingly, of course, a trilogy like this is not about the maintenance of the status quo.

It’s really good. Well worth a read.

Something of which under normal circumstances I would heartily approve, of course. But not the way it’s described here. ↩︎

Same Desert, Same Day

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 03:49:05 +0000

Two places we visited in the Atacama Desert, yesterday.

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This seems to be my personal altitude limit, though:

Can’t wait to get the photos off the big camera and see what they’re like on a decent screen.

Dreams Before the Start of Time, by Anne Charnock (Books 2018, 20)

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 18:11:26 +0000

I posted about Anne Charnock’s Clarke win a few weeks back, and I’m pleased for her. But when I was about a third through this, I had a dawning realisation: this appeared not to be science fiction. The Clarke Award being for the best SF novel of the year, of course.

At that point there were, to my reckoning, two things that don’t quite exist in the real world today: a self-driving car, and a kind of personal health sensor that can tell how much you drank last night, and if you’re pregnant. Neither is key to the plot or anything else, though.

There was also a hint that global warming has taken a turn for the worse. But it could just be a year with a bad crop, and anyway, that’s hardly fiction, never mind SF.

But then I hit part two, and it jumped forward 50 years, with corresponding technological advances. Part three takes us forward another fifty or so years.

So what we have is a series of vignettes about the experiences of several interlinked families, over a hundred or so years. It’s interesting enough, but it’s limited. It’s about families and the future of how humans conceive, bear (or not), and raise children. Which is fine. But there’s very little about what else is going on in the world, in society. Or even much about the societal effects of the technologies we are looking at. Yes, by the end there are reports of a visibly-pregnant woman being abused in public for giving her baby a bad start in life (by not using the artificial uterus technology and associated genetic cleansing). But that’s it.

It’s interesting enough, as far as it goes, but I’ve got to admit I’m surprised the judges considered it the best SF novel published in Britain in 2017.

The Algebraist, by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 19)

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 00:26:31 +0000

Funny what you remember. Almost all I could recall about this one was the monstrous figure of the Archimandrite Luseferous: a hellish tyrant of the worst sort imaginable. As the narration describes him: “that most deplorable of beings, a psychopathic sadist with a fertile imagination.”

And I remembered it was about gas giants, and wormholes. And an important Secret. I remembered the Secret. Oh, and of course the fact that — in a massive difference from the Culture novels — it describes a galactic civilisation which proscribes AIs; mercilessly hunts down and destroys any hint of machines gaining sentience.

But not really anything else to speak of. So it was really great to read it again.

Highly recommended if you haven’t read it before. Or even if you have.

Walking on Glass by Iain Banks (Books 2018, 18)

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:50:49 +0000

A novel of three parts. Two of them are — probably — tightly linked. By some interpretations, anyway. The third — which is the first as presented — brushes up against one of those two, and is to a small extent influenced by it. But in no way that I can discern is it really linked to the others. Which kind of makes me wonder what it’s for.

I mean, sure, maybe he just wanted to tell that story, with no more reason than that. That would be fine. But since the three are presented under one common title, I’ve got to assume that they share more than just a passing brush with simultaneous walks and some sugar in a tank.

The title itself is interesting. The only people who are literally walking on glass at any point are the two exiles from a galactic war in the far future (if that’s really what they are). But glass suggests fragility, slipperiness: maybe everyone is walking on glass, as everything could collapse under them at any moment.

It also suggests transparency: maybe everyone can be seen at any time. If you walk on a sheet of glass, you can be viewed from below. Which sounds not unlike the crosstime telepathic viewing that people in the castle are apparently doing of people in Earth’s past.

All of which leads me to the conclusion — which I didn’t actually expect when I started writing this — that my long-preferred interpretation is the correct one: that Quiss and Ajayi really are former warriors who have been banished to the castle as a punishment for misdeeds. The castle has the technology to let people live vicariously in the minds of humans from its past. At one point Quiss probably touches Grout’s mind and partly causes the road accident.

Is Grout really an exile from the same war, or a similar one? Probably not, but maybe. Maybe someone like Quiss or Aliya touched his mind at some earlier, vulnerable time, and something of their experience passed in to Grout.

But again, what of Graham’s story, and Sara’s betrayal? What does that have to do with the bigger stories?

I remain unsure.

The Great Banksie Reread

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 00:32:24 +0000

As you’ll have noticed, I have mainly been reading books by Iain Banks lately. This is all part of something I’ve been thinking of as “The Great Banksie Reread,” which has been going on haphazardly for… five years, as I now see.

Turns out that when I started rereading his works back in 2013, as well as doing so only very intermittently, I also didn’t keep records as I thought I had. The ones I know I read, but didn’t blog about, are The Bridge, The Crow Road, Excession, Look To Windward, and The State of the Art — or at least the title story.

As to why I didn’t blog about them, I guess I just didn’t write about my reading in some years. But it’s oddly lax of me. Blogging about them was kind of the point of the reread, surely — as well as my own enjoyment, of course.

Anyway, all these posts are now tagged with “The Great Banksie Reread“.

Radically Interoperable and Universal

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 14:19:08 +0000

In In Praise of Email Dan Cohen writes of how email got things right, long before some of our other ways of interacting online came along and got so many things wrong.

I’ve long thought that email was the killer app of the internet, despite the problems that many people have with it. Those tend to be not inherent in email, but caused by the way we use it.

Here’s one point he makes, in regard to the algorithmic timelines that are ruining Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram:

Although some email systems algorithmically sort email by priority or importance, that is not part of the email system itself. Again, this can be added, or not, by the user, and the default is strictly chronological.

Although my main problem, as I’ve said before, is with some clients that insisting that “chronological” means “newest first.”

REPL Reply

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 12:35:49 +0000

Hjertnes talks about the joy of a REPL:

A REPL or read eval print loop is what we called an interactive prompt back in the day when I learnt Python and Ruby.

He goes on to say:

For a REPL to make sense you need to be able to test small chunks of code. Like this function or this expression; or my typical thing, “would this work” or how the fuck was that syntax again?

I’ve sometimes found that they have a downside. When you are looking for code examples, then if a language has a REPL, very often the examples show the use of a feature in the REPL. Which may be fine, but is not so helpful if you’re trying to find out how to construct a class or a function.

Which point, to be fair, Hjertnes does address:

In other words, if your language require a lot of “foreplay” to run code, like declaring a namespace and a class etc (I’m looking at you Java and C#) it will probably not be the right thing. But if you can evaluate code without much fuss it is.

Java is supposed to be getting one soon, I believe, if it’s not already in version 9.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (Books 2018, 17)

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 23:57:26 +0000

Back where it all began, then: Banksie’s debut. It’s a bit dated, of course. Do you remember pay phones having pips? And “I must convince dad to get a VTR.” Who ever called it a VTR, rather than VCR? Outside of TV companies, at least.

Still a great, crazy story with an ending that, now, seems less believable than it ever did. Well, the whole setup, really: the idea that you could have a child and not register them, and keep them away from all need for interaction with the authorities. Even if you lived on a private island, that’s hard to imagine nowadays.

And I had forgotten what a misogynistic character the narrator, Frank, is. Which is, frankly, ironic.

I recall reading a theory once that Eric, the crazy, dog-burning brother, doesn’t actually exist, that he was all a figment of Frank’s supercharged imagination. I was keeping that at the back of my mind as I read this time, and I don’t think there’s much evidence of it. But I’ll see if I can track down the actual theory.

Here we go: “The Weaponry of Deceit: Speculations on Reality in The Wasp Factory” by Kev McVeigh. Originally published in the BSFA’s Vector magazine.

Reading it again now, McVeigh has a point: Eric can be seen as a metaphor for Frank’s masculinity. But I prefer to take it at face value: sometimes a crazy family is just a crazy family.

The difficulty in searching for anything to do with this novel nowadays is that it’s on the English Literature curricula of both the English A-Levels and the Scottish Highers. So there are lots (and lots and lots) of sites offering analyses of it for students to ~~plagiarise~~ learn from. As well as all the Goodreads entries and blog posts you would expect.

And, oops! I’ve just added to the pile.

Trumping Through London

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 20:08:07 +0000

On Friday I went for a walk through central London with a couple of hundred thousand of my closest friends.

The march was due to start at 2pm from Portland Place. I was a little late. I went straight to Oxford Circus. I came out of the tube station and just stood and watched the people walking down Regent Street. It was amazing, and seemed endless. Then I saw these two with great signs:

A Clash quote and a bad pun? Count me in.

I walked down the pavement alongside the march for a bit, taking more photos.

Before long we got to Trafalgar Square.

There were many speakers and a few musicians. Len McCluskey told us that the police had estimated the crowd was over 250,000, which was surprising, since they tend to underestimate. Anyway, if so, it was the biggest since the Iraq war demo. More amusingly, we were a bigger crowd than at Trump’s inauguration.

That said, I looked around and it didn’t feel that crowded. I’ve seen the O2 full, and I would guess that there were a similar 20,000 in the square.

But it turned out when I left that there were many, many people in the streets around the square. I guess they didn’t want to push forward because the square looked full. I’m quite glad about that.

The atmosphere was fantastic all day. The police presence was pleasingly low (or at least low-key), despite the stories of leave being cancelled and people drafted in from all over the country.

Did it do any good? Probably not, in the sense that it won’t have any direct effect on Trump. But it made a lot of people feel good, and it showed the world that we care.

Matter by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 16)

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:20:52 +0000

Closer to the Cultural action again, though a lot of this happens on a shellworld, one of thousands of weird, ancient, constructed worlds scattered through the galaxy. They are an incredible image, but in a sense they don’t matter.¹ Most of the events that happen on the shellworld don’t have to be on it. Except maybe in this way: it allows Banks to tell a story that includes civilisations both at the musket stage, and at the godlike AI stage.

Civilisations on the various levels of shellworld are allowed to develop at their own pace, unhindered and unhelped by the more advanced “involved” groupings in the teeming galaxy (at least in theory). And yet they know of the existence of the advanced, spacefaring races. I can’t help but think that that very knowledge would have a profoundly debilitating effect on any society. Imagine knowing the Culture existed, but that you were excluded from it.

This is exactly why the Culture generally doesn’t make less advanced societies aware of its existence. It’s the reason for Star Trek’s Prime Directive. Yet somehow this story works even with some of its protagonists having that knowledge.

I wrote about it a decade ago, when I first read it. I seem to have enjoyed it more this time. I didn’t notice the linguistic foibles, and while I was aware of the weird shadow-wrongness of the cover, I’m used to it, so it didn’t trouble me.

See what I did there? ↩︎

Inversions by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 15)

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 16:16:34 +0000

Ah, the Culture novel that some still think isn’t. I feel sorry for anyone who ever read this without knowing about the Culture first. The denouement must be completely mystifying.

The Special Circumstances game applies here, but of course we have absolutely no way of knowing what they’re up to. A Culture agent, alone on a backwards planet (technology at the level of muskets), acting as doctor to a king who’s maybe not quite as bad as some of the other rulers on the planet (or maybe, let’s face it, just as bad).

It’s unusual not to get even the slightest hint of the galaxy-spanning machinations that must be going on behind the scenes, but of course the narrator is a native of the planet and knows nothing about even the existence of other planets.

In some ways it feels like something of an exercise for the author — stunt writing, as Charlie Stross calls it — but luckily the characters are engaging and the stories (there are two running in parallel) are very well told.

Espedair Street by Iain Banks (Books 2018, 14)

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 23:02:35 +0000

This is not a book about an imaginary rock musician: it’s a book about guilt.

Of course, it is about an imaginary rock musician too, but reading it now, for the third or perhaps fourth time, it’s striking to me how totally it’s about guilt. And not very subtly, either. It’s right there at the start of chapter 2:

Guilt. The big G, the Catholic faith’s greatest gift to humankind and its subspecies, psychiatrists . . . well, I guess that’s putting it a little too harshly; I’ve met a lot of Jews and they seem to have just as hard a time of it as we do, and they’ve been around longer

I had forgotten that the character of Daniel Weir (or “Weird”) was brought up as a Catholic. I don’t think any of Banksie’s other characters were. The man himself wasn’t. Not that it makes a lot of difference: his (and our) Scottishness has a lot more impact on his character — and his characters — than any religion his parents may have had.

As always, I had forgotten some key parts, but I remembered more of this than of most. It’s still great.

And I realise that these notes are becoming more about me, and what I remember, than about the books. But that’s fine. It’s my blog, after all, and as much as anything these are for me. They’re just out there in public in case anyone else is interested.

Anyway, if you haven’t read any Banks, then this would be a damn fine place to start. Though it’s interesting to note that — set as it is in the 70s and early 80s — it’s so dated that it feels almost like a period piece. One example: one of the members of the band buys an IBM mainframe and transfers recording-studio tapes to it, so he can play any track at the touch of a button. Something we can do from our pocket computers today.

But there was one point that I thought seemed anachronistic. Maybe not, but aluminium takeaway cartons? Chinese & curries? In 1973? Hmmm. I mean, it is in the foaming metropolis of Paisley, not Balloch. And even we had a Chinese by 1980, 81, or so. Still, I wonder when those things started to become commonplace.

Against A Dark Background by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 13)

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 19:45:57 +0000

Back to the great reread. Some thoughts here. This book is 25 years old. Twenty-five! I think I’ve read it twice before, but (and you won’t be surprised here if you’ve been following along) I don’t remember much about it.

I didn’t recall, for example, that Sharrow, the protagonist, was a noble; or that it’s set as we approach the decamillenium on and around what I at first assumed to be an Earth colony, although one that is long detached from Earth. And it’s in a similar state to the last one I read, Feersum Endjinn, in that we’re in a decadent stage, where technology was more advanced in the past, but things have been lost or forgotten.

The most notable example of that, of course, is the Lazy Gun, the big maguffin at the heart of the story. I had thought it was semi-mystical, or at least alien in origin. But now I think maybe not, it’s just from the more advanced past.

Turns out it’s not anything to do with Earth, of course. Golter is a planet round an extra-galactic star. The million-light-year distance to any other star seems to be the “dark background” of the title. Though I still don’t really get why it’s called that.

Anyway, I still loved it. And strangely the ending felt less bleak than I had remembered. Though it’s still pretty dark. And it turns out he published an epilogue online. Which doesn’t change anything, but it was nice to read.

They Took Something Very Weird and Made It More Usable

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 18:03:50 +0000

Good piece by Paul Ford, writing at Bloomberg on Microsoft buying GitHub:

[GitHub] has a well-designed web interface. If you don’t think that’s worth $7.5 billion, you’ve never read the git manual.

He means the man pages, I assume.

GitHub is “the central repository for decentralized (sic) code archives,” which is mildly amusing. But this:

In the pre-git era, you updated your software annually and sent customers floppy disks. But if you’re running a big software platform, you might update your servers constantly—many times a day or every 20 minutes.

is a bit over the top. There were a lot of changes between sending out floppies and continuous deployment.

I question his (lack of) capitalisation. The command is git, all lower case. But if you’re talking about the application, you should spell it “Git”, with the capital. I think so, anyway. You would write about “CVS”, even though the command was (is) cvs; and “Subversion,” with the command svn. But at least it’s not as annoying as people who write it in all-caps.

Lastly, when he says, “Computers are mercurial,” I’m assuming he’s wryly referencing what was once Git’s major rival in the distributed version-control space. Nicely deadpan, if so.

New iPad Keyboard

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:49:26 +0000

My iPad’s Smart Keyboard broke, and was out of warranty, so I thought I’d try the Logitech (or “Logi”, as they now call themselves) Create Keyboard. Backlit and everything. No bad.

I do (mostly) like the keyboard itself, I think. Certainly I should be able to get used to it quite quickly. But I’m not loving the whole package: as I feared it might, it makes the iPad comparatively bulky.

I think I’ll keep it, though, and see how I get on. I may, for example, only take it out with me if I think I’ll definitely use it.

On the other hand, that could get annoying: the best X is the one you have with you, after all. And it was using the Smart Keyboard (and having the long commute down to Croydon with (more or less) guaranteed seating) that helped me to finish my novel last November.

Oh yeah, having a holder for the Apple Pencil is a nice addition.

Microsoft to Buy GitHub?

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 09:30:58 +0000

I can’t help but feel concerned about the news that Microsoft may be buying GitHub. I know they’re big on open source now, and even use GitHub themselves. But I remember how antithetical to open-source they used to be, so that worries me. And it rarely works out well when a big company buys up a small, interesting one.

A ride in the sky at All Points East.

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 19:02:37 +0000

From Instagram

Beware of Email Apps Storing Passwords

Fri, 25 May 2018 16:00:43 +0000

Email apps, especially ones that offer advanced services like “send later,” may be storing our usernames and passwords on their servers.

To be clear what that means: if you use Gmail, for example, you put your Google username and password into the app when you set it up. You expect the app to store them securely on your device. But some apps may also be storing that username and password — your keys to all the Google services in this example — on computers owned by the company that makes the app. Computers over which neither you nor Google has any control.

I’m not suggesting that the company I talk about below, or any other, is doing anything nefarious. They need to be able to log in to your mail server in order to send your mail later. But I hadn’t realised until now what that means, and I’m guessing neither will a lot of people. And to my mind they don’t make what they’re doing clear enough.

Worst of all, having passwords stored on unknown servers — at the very least, that’s worrying.

Background

On episode194 of the Connected podcast, Myke Hurley and Federico Viticci were reviewing the latest version of the iOS (and Mac) app Spark. It’s a fine email app, which I was using on my iPhone and iPad. So I was alarmed when they mentioned in passing that mail handled by the app is routed through Readdle’s servers. That didn’t seem likely at first. Spark is an email client. You tell it what servers handle your mail, and it connects to them to receive and send. The servers belonging to the company that makes the app have no business getting involved in that.

I did some digging. Whether or not Myke was right™ about mail going through their servers, the reality turned out to be much worse.

Digging

I tweeted at the Spark account. Here’s what happened:

@SparkMailApp Hi, I was listening to a podcast today on which it was suggested that if I use Spark, then my email is routed through your servers. Is that true?

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

Which podcast said that?

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

The latest episode of Connected, with Myke Hurley and Federico Viticci.

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

The only time Spark servers access your email is to create a push notification (to create sender, subject, and message snippet) The content is cached until the notification is sent, but removed after that.

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

OK, seems fair. Thanks. Probably all a misunderstanding, either by them or me. Just out of interest, is the “send later” feature done on the client?

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

Ah, forgot about that one! We will store it on our server until the send later time, then we send it through your email server and it is removed from our server.

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

OK. Isn’t that a problem, in that you must be storing your users’ mail server credentials on your servers? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say that in your Ts&Cs.

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

It’s the second item that we mention in our privacy policy. https://t.co/WpQSIDGPgx

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

I had already found their privacy policy:

OAuth login or mail server credentials: Spark requires your credentials to log into your mail system in order to receive, search, compose and send email messages and other communication. Without such access, our Product won’t be able to provide you with the necessary communication experience. In order for you to take full advantage of additional App and Service features, such as “send later”, “sync between devices” and where allowed by Apple – “push notifications” we use Spark Services. Without using these services, none of the features mentioned above will function.

The wording “Spark requires your credentials to log into your mail system in order to receive, search, compose and send email messages” suggests that Spark the app needs to log into your server, which it does. But nothing about that says that your credentials will be stored on their servers.

Further down, in point 4, “How Long Personal Data is Stored For,” in a table that includes “Type of information,” we see (emphasis mine) :

Email address, email content for Spark Services, mail server credentials

So there it is. They do store your username and password on their servers, and they do tell you; though only if you read well into the kind of document that notoriously goes unread.

Final Thoughts

For features like “send later” they need to store the fact that you want to send an email at a specific time, and log in to your server in order to send it. And to be fair, I’m sure they can’t be alone in keeping that kind of data. Lots of clients offer “send later” and similar services, and all of them will have to log in to your mail server to work. So they have to store your credentials on their servers to do it.

And consider, if you use Gmail, that means your username and password not just for Gmail, but for all Google’s services, are now stored on somebody else’s servers. Their security might be great, but how do we know?

The more I think about this, the more concerned I become. Passwords should only be stored in one place: a secure, trusted password manager. But above all, these services need to be much clearer about the fact that they’re storing our passwords.

It's Inconvenient to Talk

Tue, 22 May 2018 12:58:32 +0000

On Trump’s phone (mis)use:

Trump’s call-capable cellphone has a camera and microphone, unlike the White House-issued cellphones used by Obama.

—Eliana Johnson, Emily Stephenson, and Daniel Lippman, reporting for Politico

I mean, it’s not going to be much use at making calls without a microphone.

The Book of Dust vol 1: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman (Books 2018, 12)

Sun, 20 May 2018 19:29:33 +0000

The first volume in Pullman’s “equel” trilogy: part prequel, part sequel, to His Dark Materials. This one is pure prequel, about trying to protect baby Lyra from the forces of the Magisterium.

If you’re already a fan, you’ll want to read this. It’s a real page-turner. If you’re not already a fan, don’t start here, obviously. You’re looking for Northern Lights.

Which I might be just about to start rereading, because that’s what finishing this one makes me want to do.

Office Foliage

Fri, 18 May 2018 18:35:35 +0000

(Error loading gallery)

At my desk these are attacking from either side.

(Error loading gallery)

The view above, and the room as a whole.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (Books 2018, 11)

Tue, 15 May 2018 23:05:35 +0000

Gaiman takes on Thor, Loki, Odin, and the rest. Most of my knowledge of the Norse gods comes from Marvel Comics, with a bit of general cultural osmosis (for example, everyone has heard of Yggdrasil the World Tree, right?)¹

I enjoyed it, but it feels like a slight work. That’s a shame, because these are mighty tales, or should be. I guess it’s a book meant at least partly for children, but it’s not marketed that way. And even if It’s meant for kids, the telling should be strong.

I suspect that if you already know the tales, this won’t offer much new to you. And that’s where the problem lies, I think. Instead of turning them into real narratives with proper characters, each story is not much more than a summary of the events. So he’s telling us the story of the story, rather than really telling (showing) the story. It’s a shame, because I know Gaiman could have done something much more interesting with these.

I’m probably being too harsh, though. It’s not like it’s bad. I enjoyed reading it.

In searching for the link to put in there, I discovered the existence of Explain XKCD (or just possibly, rediscovered it, as it does seem a little familiar). Which is cool. Some people put a lot of time into contributing to things online, to the benefit of us all, and I salute them. ↩︎

Duplex Duplicity?

Sat, 12 May 2018 10:24:18 +0000

In A Little Duplex Skepticism, John Gruber says what I’ve been thinking about the Google Duplex demo:

It’s totally credible that Google would be the first to achieve something like Duplex, but the fact that all they did — as far as I’ve seen — was play a recording just seems off. It feels like a con.

I’ve only heard a bit of the “booking a haircut“ recording on a podcast. I thought it sounded a) impressive if real, but b) very possibly fake.

That kind of technology will come, eventually; but are we that close to it today?

(If we are, then whether or not we want it to be used in the kind of way demonstrated, is a whole other question.)

Google, of course, gave no timelines, no suggestion of when such a feature might be available. Given that, it makes you wonder why they even bothered to demo it.

Looped

Sat, 05 May 2018 21:33:42 +0000

It’s six years old, but I finally got round to watching Looper. Interesting. Not sure about it. Some of the time-travel stuff didn’t make sense — or was confusing, at least. The loopers do their killing and body-disposal in the past, but by the time Bruce Willis comes into it, everyone involved is in the same time, 2044, the past of the movie.

Also I thought I had heard that it wasn’t well thought of, but Rotten Tomatoes has it at 82% from audiences and 93% from critics. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?

This review at The Mary Sue is good on the weak points. Some interesting discussion in the comments, too.

The future was unconvincing — people still driving petrol-burning cars in 2044 and 2074? And the status of women was terrible. You can be a sex worker or a farming mom in future America. I mean, OK, we didn’t see the rest of society, but it’s not great. And a major Bechdel fail. Oh yes, and: the currency is silver? Actual, metallic silver? Time travel has really messed things up.

I enjoyed it on the whole, though, and the ending is great. We could have done without the voiceover, but maybe Rian Johnson, the director, has plans to release a cut without it in one possible future. Now where have I come across that idea before?

Spring

Sat, 05 May 2018 16:10:15 +0000

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Martin McCallion (@devilgate)

Top-Ten Album Lists

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 22:08:00 +0000

Two album-related memes have been doing the rounds on Facebook lately. Both involve posting cover images of ten favourite albums across ten days. One involves doing so without any comment, but the more interesting one to me involves the poster writing about their thoughts on each album. I was nominated by my friend Peter to join in with the long-form version.

I’m all about owning my own content, as you know, and not having it locked away in Facebook’s walled garden. So my plan is to write about ten albums, but to do so here, on my blog. Links to the posts will automatically be crossposted to Facebook anyway.

I started compiling a list of possibles, and thinking about starting to write posts. First I decided to restrict it one per artist. Otherwise I could just pick five by The Beatles and five by The Clash.

But then I played some albums, and thought some more.

See, I knew right up front that it was going to be almost entirely a white-guy fest. I wanted to approach it honestly, and not try to appear to be anything I’m not, so that’s how it would have to be. It would be reflecting my life as a music fan. As it stands the long list has one woman and no non-white people.

But as I played those albums — albums I love — and as I thought about them, I realised two things:

I know these albums too well. I’m not bored of them, but they can drift past without me really being aware of them, through overfamiliarity.
This won’t be very interesting, and certainly won’t have any surprises for anyone who knows me.

So I’ve come to a decision, I think: I’m going to do it slightly differently. I’m going to write about ten albums that I like now. Ones that I’ve discovered in the last few years, maybe, or that I’ve known for a while but have listened to a lot more in recent years.

I’m not entirely sure what that list is going to look like. I only have two, maybe three definites on it at the moment, and it’s going to take a while to construct it. But I think it could be a much more interesting list — certainly for me — when it’s done.

And I’ll do a post with a rundown of what the original list would have been, just for completeness.

So watch out for those in the next few days.

Marathon Barbers

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 10:50:34 +0000

The London Marathon playing in the barber’s shop.

Injection Vols 1-3 by Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, and Jordie Bellaire (Books 2018, 10)

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 21:20:14 +0000

This is a great story about how some people have to fix things in the aftermath of something they did that may change the world fundamentally, if not destroy it. With that description it sounds very similar to Ellis’s earlier webcomic (with Paul Duffield), Freak Angels.

Which is a fair enough assessment, though the triggering event in this case is a combination of AI, the internet, and old magic; as opposed to the psychic powers in the older work. Ellis has deeply embedded the “start late” advice often given to aspiring authors. Both of the works under discussion, and some of his others, start long after the events that set their plots in motion.

It can be a very effective device. We get to know characters who already know each other, and the past events are revealed gradually, through conversation and flashbacks. And the fact that the protagonists don’t at first fully understand what they did means that we learn along with them.

This is great, but the only frustrating thing is that these three volumes — comprising fifteen issues of the comic — are to date all that there is. I don’t know if they plan to continue it, but the last issue came out in November, and the story is far from over. Googling has not so far revealed the answer to this.

Recommended, though.

Bizarre Romance by Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell (Books 2018, 9)

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 21:12:31 +0000

The book that I got at the British Library event last week. It’s short stories by Niffenegger, illustrated and/or converted into comics by Campbell. Some of them very good, and the collection as a whole is well worth a look.

Themes include cats, angels, fairies, and more. Worth a look.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (Books 2018, 8)

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 22:41:49 +0000

I read this reviewed in The Guardian, and immediately bought the Kindle book. Sometimes a review is like that.

And it lived up to the praise. But here’s the thing: the horror, the weirdness in it: they’re not really what we’d think of as Lovecraftian.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and part of the reason for the title is that a couple of the main characters are fans of Lovecraft’s work, and they refer to parts of New England as “Lovecraft country.” But as the review makes clear, the real horror here is much more down to Earth: the racism of 50s America.

My Kindle edition was slightly oddly titled: Lovecraft Country: TV Tie-In. You expect that on a physical book to some degree. But putting it right in the title is new to me. A page on the author’s site confirms that it is going to be made as a series by HBO (which is annoying, because that means it’ll be on Sky Atlantic over here). JJ Abrams¹ and Jordan Peele are both involved.

I’m slightly surprised to see that Ruff is not black. I wonder how long before he’ll be accused of “cultural appropriation” for writing from the viewpoint of African-Americans.

I mean, obviously: he’s involved in everything, right? ↩︎

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2018, 7)

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 22:29:47 +0000

As I said in the last books post, reading the JAMs’ Illuminatus-inspired attempt made me want to read the real thing again. Seems I read it about every four years or so, based on the fact that I wrote about it last in 2014.

It doesn’t lose any of its charm. I suppose I’d have to say, if we judge by number of rereads, that this must be my favourite book of all time.

If you haven’t read it, it’s probably because there’s a conspiracy to stop you doing so. Kick out the jams and go get it. Hail Eris!

The Audrey and Eddie Show

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 22:20:07 +0000

I went to a thing at the British Library. It was an author event with Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell. They’ve made a book together. And, it turns out, they’re married. To each other, that is.

I had no idea that this was the case. Who’s in charge of telling me about things? Cos they’re falling down on the job.

Not that there’s any reason why I should know, of course. They’re both creators whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past, but that’s all.

Anyway, this was the standard sort of author talk/interview thing, led by a guy who didn’t introduce himself, but according to the event page was “international comics expert, and man at the crossroads, Paul Gravett“.¹

It was all very good. I bought the book, Bizarre Romance. Looks like it’ll be fun. I didn’t stay for the signing, because I’m not that bothered about autographs. And I couldn’t think of any questions at the Q&A, which is also normal.

Interestingly (and maybe this is already common knowledge too) Niffenegger is writing a sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife² to be called The Other Husband.

Oh, OK, he published Escape magazine. I used to get that sometimes. ↩︎
I insist on spelling the title correctly. ↩︎

Tab Convert

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 23:21:39 +0000

That’s convert, with the stress on the first syllable. The noun, in other words. As in, “I am a tab convert.” A convert, that is, to using tabs for indentation of source code, instead of spaces.

A Background of Spaces

From the earliest time that I learned about the tabs vs spaces debate, I’ve been a spaces guy. This is at least partly because of the influence of my then-colleague Benjamin Geer. He has gone on to other, no doubt better, things, but he was probably the best programmer I’ve ever worked with. He introduced me to the idea that you should always use four spaces for indentation. The reason being that if you use tabs, people can have their editor’s tab size set to all sorts of different values, and it leads to source files not looking as you expect them to.

Whereas spaces are spaces: you can’t go wrong with a space (or four).

I’ve changed, though. I have become a convert, in my job, and maybe philosophically, to tabs.

Stack Overflow Survey

About a year ago there was a survey of developers on Stack Overflow. Among many questions, they asked about whether people used spaces or tabs. The detail that got most attention was that developers who use spaces were paid more on average than those who use tabs. I strongly suspect that correlation is not causation in this case, but it seemed noteworthy at the time.

More interesting to me was the fact that more people used tabs, at 42.9% against 37.8%. I was surprised: I thought spaces had won years ago. Though I often wondered (sometimes publicly, and I’m surprised to see that was only last year) why the default setting for Eclipse was tabs.

Maybe that default, and others like it, is part of the reason for the statistics. Most people don’t change defaults. On the other hand, surely developers are the kind of people who are most likely to change defaults?

Anyway, after the survey came out there were various posts about it, notably John Gruber, who said he was “a devout user of tabs”. OK, he’s not a developer these days, but there were others who are who said similar things. The one that struck me was one that I can’t locate now that said “tabs are semantic.” In other words, pressing the tab key means “indent here.” Four spaces means… four spaces? Could be an indentation, could be something else.

Everything Changes Imperially

So I was primed for the idea of switching to tabs, even though I still used spaces in my own projects. And then I started my new job at Imperial College. When I first started looking at the code, I quickly realised that it was indented with tabs throughout. I checked with my co-worker who is the main contributor. He didn’t mind, but they had always used tabs.

Obviously I didn’t want to introduce a mixture. That’s what really messes up the display of code in different editors. You have to be consistent within a project. So if I were to change the project to spaces I would have to change every file. That was an unnecessary step; and per the above, I was primed to use tabs. They’re semantic, after all.

I switched my IDE to indent using tabs, with the tab-stop value set to 4. And so we proceed, tabbing away merrily.

So far I prefer it this way.

2023: A Trilogy by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (Books 2018, 6) 📚🎵

Sat, 17 Mar 2018 20:33:49 +0000

This book could have been written for me. Seriously, during the first part it felt like it was targeted right at me.

I am, as you probably know, a fan and repeat reader of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. As clearly are Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, or the KLF, as they used to be known. This book is — what, a spoof of, a homage to? — Illuminatus. Explicitly modelled on it, referring back to it constantly.

Plus there are lots of Beatles references, and I’ve been into them for even longer. Then among the characters are Alan Moore, who (in this corner of the multiverse) is a member — along with Cauty and Drummond — of Extreme Noise Terror. Our world’s version of that band did collaborate with the KLF, but as far as I can tell they had no connection with Moore.

So don’t expect to get too much accurate information about popular culture out of this. Plenty of references, though. Other characters include Michelle O’Bama, M’Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono (two versions), Lady Penelope, and her chauffeur/hitman Aloysius Parker.

It’s a lot of fun. The downside is that it’s not very well written, at least as far as the dialogue is concerned. Most notable is the complete absence of contractions. Which is fine for an odd thing, or maybe to give one character a particular voice, but when no-one uses them, it all gets a little strange.

The story is fun, though, and I finished it and immediately started rereading Illuminatus yet again, so there’s that.

Speaking of Spring...

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 08:18:53 +0000

Blossom, of course, and… paper boats on the canal? Hmmm. I’m assuming it was a promotion for something, but I’ve no idea what, so it didn’t work very well.

How the Seasons Change

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 23:40:13 +0000

A beach in Norwich in the middle of February.

A London Street at the end of February.

It’s looking a lot more springlike now, though

This was a test of the Sunlit iOS app, though it has long since been edited from that original version.

Looks Like I Chose the Wrong Week to Start Working in Academia

Sat, 10 Mar 2018 00:50:53 +0000

What with the strike on, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of crossing a picket line, but there wasn’t really one. Nobody in the group I’m in was striking, as far as I could tell, and I’m not in the union (yet). And you know, the contract had a start date of last Monday. So one week into my new job, and I’m enjoying it tremendously.

I’ve been bashing bugs in a large and complex codebase. It was very satisfying to take the failing tests from 600 down to 490 with a single commit. That’s 600 failing tests out of 800. And looking at what’s there, it’s hard to see how some of them could ever have passed. I sort of get the impression that a whole lot might have been written but never run.

That big win involved nothing more than changing a class from being all static methods to being one that you can instantiate, and then passing in a test version of a ResourceBundle, instead of trying to read a properties file which wasn’t there in my setup.

More importantly, the people are nice. The commute is shorter than to Croydon, by a good half hour. But it’s a lot more crowded on the Circle Line than I remember from two years ago when I was at Misys.

Imperial Adventures

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 14:48:53 +0000

Just over a month ago I posted a brief note about job news, saying that more details would be forthcoming. I was, as I said then, just waiting for some paperwork.

It took longer than I expected to get that paperwork sorted out, but I received and returned the contract yesterday afternoon. On Monday I start work at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the School of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College.

That’s quite a mouthful, but in short I’ll be working on programming something called the The Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF), which is an open-source tool for studying health statistics.

I’m neither a medical researcher nor a statistician, but I am a programmer (or a software engineer, if you want to be fancy). Our job is to understand the needs of someone — usually referred to as “the business,” but I’m guessing that will be different in my new job — and translate those needs into actions in software. That basic definition doesn’t change according to the problem domain. Whether it’s sending payments from one bank to another, checking a person’s right to work on a government database, or doing something with statistical data about health issues, the programmer’s job is to understand what the user needs and make things happen on a screen.

The big difference for me, I think, will be that in this new role I’ll have the chance to contribute to doing something good in the world. As I said at my interview, I’ve mainly worked in financial software, and while, sure, people need banks, it wasn’t the most socially-usefully thing. The last half-year working at the Home Office had some value, but I was a tiny cog in a huge machine.

At Imperial I’ll be able to feel that I’m actually contributing something useful to society, as well as doing what should be really interesting work.

Oh, and: I’ll be back in Paddington, which I know from my Misys days, and it’s a much shorter commute than to Croydon.

A Special Way of Being Afraid

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:17:25 +0000

I only know one other of Philip Larkin’s poems; it is about parents and children. This one — ‘Aubade’ — is the best poem about death I’ve ever read.

A sample:

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier by Mark Frost (Books 2018, 5)

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 18:04:32 +0000

I watched the new series of Twin Peaks in January, but haven’t got round to writing about it yet. In part, maybe, because I knew I wanted to read this. In part, because I want to watch it all again.

The series was amazing: an incredible, beautiful, challenging piece of art. But, as always with Twin Peaks,¹ there was the question at the back of my mind: is he using surrealism to raise real questions, to investigate mysteries, to raise our consciousness? Or is it just weirdness for weirdness’s sake?²

In the end I lean towards the former. Maybe the whole thing is like a zen koan: if a portal opens in Ghostwood Forest and no-one is there to see it, what will come through?

Anyway, addressing the book at hand, what we have is quite a short volume which is presented as being a report from FBI Special Agent Tamara Preston to Deputy Director Gordon Cole (played by Lynch himself in the show, of course). Its ostensible purpose is for her to summarise what she and the Bureau have learned from the events that the recent series covered, and some other offscreen investigations. It follows on from, and comments on, last year’s Secret History of Twin Peaks.

Much of it repeats what was in the series, but it does add detail and help to clarify some things. For example it’s probably not a spoiler to confirm that the girl in the 1950s in the glorious nightmare of episode 8 was, indeed, Sarah Palmer, as Warren Ellis has speculated. (It was in his newsletter, which doesn’t seem to have a public archive.)

But it also follows up on what happened to most of the characters from the the original series that we didn’t hear about in the new one, giving us much-needed closure. Or at least convincing us that the creators didn’t totally forget about Donna, for example. Along the way it does what the new series failed to do, in that it answers the question raised at the end of the original series: “How’s Annie?”

It’s worth reading, but it doesn’t remove the need for me to watch the whole new series again.

And maybe with all of David Lynch’s work. ↩︎
“Everybody’s wild at heart and weird on top.” ↩︎

Sourdough by Robin Sloan (Books 2018, 4)

Sun, 25 Feb 2018 20:42:31 +0000

Strange one this. I think I learned about it from Warren Ellis, via his newsletter (which is well worth reading, by the way).

A woman takes a programming job in San Francisco. Chance leads her to gain possession of a sourdough starter culture with unusual properties. She learns to bake bread, and some other things happen.

It was OK. Quite fun. And if we’re comparing novels set in San Francisco tech culture, it was better than, say, Transmission, by Hari Kunzru which I’ve read and didn’t enjoy, but didn’t blog about; much, much, much better than The Circle; but probably not as good as All the Birds in Sky.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 3)

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 22:49:18 +0000

The Great Banks Reread picks up again. I was prompted to read this, despite the pile of Christmas books next to my bed, because of Facebook.

I must have Liked the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on there at some point, because a post popped up linking to the entry for Parks and Recreation. Whose very existence is surprising (the entry, that is), but it’s just because the last season or so takes place in the near future.

Anyway, the article refers to something called a ‘slingshot ending.’ This is not a term I had heard before, so I tapped through. To be honest even reading it again now, I don’t really understand what they mean by it.

But the article includes the assertion that Feersum Endjinn has such an ending. I’ve just finished rereading it, and inasmuch as I do understand what a slingshot ending is, I don’t agree that this is one such.

Which doesn’t matter at all. I still loved it. And as with many of these rereads, I was surprised by how many details I didn’t remember. Most notably I had totally forgotten that it is set at a time in the far future when Earth’s survival is threatened by an astronomical phenomenon (a dust cloud that will eventually occlude the sun).

The ending… well, that would be to spoil things. Just read it if you haven’t already.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon (Books 2018, 2) 📚🎵

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 17:28:08 +0000

You know how they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes? Well it turns out that sometimes that includes not meeting them between the pages of a book. I’m not sure I’d call Warren Zevon a hero, but he’s definitely a hugely respected and much missed singer and songwriter.

I knew of the tales of wild and crazy behaviour, though I hadn’t actually read any of them — except inasmuch as they come out in the songs. And anyway, those tales are a dime a dozen in rock’n'roll. A lot of this biography, though, is concerned with the people he hurt.

Which is fine, not least since the author — his wife and the mother of one of his children — is a major one of those people. Most of his bad behaviour happened while he was an alcoholic — or while he was drinking, I suppose I should say, since the standard twelve-step narrative is that you never stop being one. Alcoholics Anonymous helped him to stop, though he eventually stopped going to meetings. He didn’t drink for seventeen years, and the opening chapter tells us that when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer he had a scotch. Who could blame him for stepping off he wagon at a time like that?

So he comes across as a far from pleasant character. But my disappointment with the book is more about the complete focus on the man and his relationships, almost to the exclusion of the music.

“The man and his relationships” sounds like an important set of themes to address in a biography. But in the case of a creative person — or really any person worthy of a biography — a key part of the story of their life is their works. If it’s a writer you’ll expect to read about their books; a politician, their victories and defeats; a general their battles. And of course, a musician, their music. It would be strange to read a biography of Beethoven or the Beatles that told of their personal lives but largely elided the music.

Which may be the key: this isn’t a biography, as such. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive, and there’s no real narrative. Although there are plenty of reminiscences from Crystal, the vast bulk of the book is reminiscences from people in Zevon’s life, directly quoted and preceded with their names; almost like a play script. Presumably Crystal interviewed them all, but she herself comes across as just one of the interviewees.

There are quotes from Zevon’s diaries, but he either wrote them in a very fragmented, abbreviated way, or they have been heavily edited. An example:

Jan. 12, 1975
… Took Jordan, visited Father at the steam baths. He gave me a handsome Seiko watch and $135 … quarreling with Crystal … T-Bone came over for spaghetti and I quaffed vodka martinis all night. T-Bone trounced me soundly at chess which surprised and aggravated me, but pleased me, too, by mellowing my lonely-giant-of-the-intellect trip … Made love.

Jan. 15, 1975
… Snorted coke which kept Crystal awake all night … she’s thinking of pregnancy and worried about chemicals in her body …

(All ellipses in original.)

After he gets sober the diary entries become more frequent, which is good. But as a fan of his music, I would have liked to read a lot more about it: its creation, how it was accepted or not at the time, stories of gigs and recording studios, and all that. Unfortunately Crystal wasn’t really involved in that part of his life, and the interviewees who were — like Jorge Calderón or Jackson Brown — either weren’t asked to talk about it, or weren’t quoted doing so.

So not quite the music biography I’d have liked, but not without interest.

The Fallen

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:11:54 +0000

2018 is working hard to be the new 2016. First Ursula Le Guin; now Mark E Smith has been taken from us.

The Fall were one of the great bands, no matter what lineup. It’s just sad that the last time I saw them, about two years ago, they were terrible.

Sadder, of course, that Smith is dead.

So it goes.

Star Doctors

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 22:33:21 +0000

It was drawn to my attention a couple of weeks ago that I have not yet expressed (publicly) an opinion on either Star Wars: The Last Jedi or the Doctor Who Christmas special. That is both true, and very remiss of me. Trouble is it’s now been quite a while since I saw them both.

Still, I should be able to gather together a few memory cells.

The Last Jedi

I went on opening night, as I microblogged. It was great. There are some points that could have been done differently, or left out, or speeded up; and it had the weird effect towards the end of there being a series of times when I thought it was finished, and it still wasn’t. But all in all a fine work. Not as good as The Force Awakens, maybe. But that’s partly because that one raised our expectations so high.

‘Twice Upon A Time’

Peter Capaldi’s last episode. It was damn fine, loads of fun. Great to see Bill back, even if not exactly. Unnecessary Daleks, but quite a good use of them — or ‘it,’ I should say.

And the introduction of ‘Testimony,’ scooping up people’s memories and saving them, is great. Though how many computer-simulated afterlives can one series have?

And what a dramatic start Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor is going to have.

There you go, only a month or so after the events.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Books 2018, 1)

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 22:04:05 +0000

The worst thing about this book is that it tells you, two or three chapters from the end, that it’s only the first half of the story. Now, I knew there are two other books in the series, but I expected the first book to be at least capable of standing alone. Turns out it isn’t: the ending leaves us hanging right after the big reveal.

The other worst thing about this book is that I’m not really that compelled to read on. I mean, I probably will, but it’s not like when I read Hyperion, say, and had to scurry around the city trying to find a copy of the second volume.¹

After all the fuss about it not being published in the UK, and me not being able to get it, I had high expectations. Probably too high, as it turns out.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s by no means a bad book, and it’s astonishingly accomplished for a first novel. I did enjoy reading it. Its true weakest point— ignore all that complaining above — is that it can be a little bit hard to understand the world she creates. Not impossible, though, and Palmer does go to some efforts to explain it with minimal infodumping. Or at least with infodumping disguised as a conversation with the reader, which works quite well.

It’s about four hundred years in the future, and since the Church War some two hundred or so earlier, the world no longer exists as countries in the way that we know them. Instead people are members of one of seven “hives,” which they can choose to align themselves with at majority. Or not: some people are hiveless by choice.

Countries mean less at least in part because of super-fast international transport by “cars,” which I think are probably suborbital rockets or similar. Though they may have a more advanced propulsion system. The most confusing thing is probably that the leaders of the seven hives are characters and each of them has several names. For any given one of them, each of the others might know them by a different nickname, and the narrator uses these interchangeably. It gets hard to keep track of who’s who.

Global warming appears to have been conquered, or ameliorated to the point where it’s not a major concern. In fact it seems to be very close to a post-scarcity society. People only work at things they want to, and seem to be able to live OK without having to work.

Apart from “Servicers,” that is. Our narrator, Mycroft Canner, is one of these. People convicted of sufficiently serious crimes can end up as one of these. They are essentially public slaves. They are required to work for seemingly anyone who asks them, and are paid in food and board — and occasionally other treats such as cinema tickets. But they have no other way to get these things.

I found it quite a disturbing an idea; though it would almost certainly be better than being in prison; and at least they don’t have the death penalty.

That’s not the most disturbing thing in the book. But I’ll say no more about that.

As I write about it, my estimation of it is going up. Isn’t that strange? If I write enough about it I’ll probably stop to download Seven Surrenders, the next volume.

Oh, yes, as I said, it says it’s “the first half” of Canner’s story; but there are two more volumes. Are they both short, or is the third one more standalone? There’s only one way to find out.

But I have a stack of other things to read first. Also I realise I have no idea what the title has to do with the story. 📖

If memory serves: it was a long time ago, and it may not have happened exactly like that. ↩

Clarke Kickstarted

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 23:28:24 +0000

The Kickstarter for the Arthur C Clarke Award is already fully funded, but now they’re pushing for a stretch goal.

What you get already is pretty good: an anthology of original SF stories of exactly 2001 words each, by a host of great names including past Clarke winners.

But the stretch goal adds a specially-commissioned soundtrack, which is a great idea.

Why are you still reading this? Go and sign up.

Lana, What?

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 19:57:12 +0000

Turns out Lana Del Rey was… mistaken? about Radiohead having brought a lawsuit against her. After me leaping to her defence. I’m very disappointed.

Amanda Petrusich, writing in The New Yorker, tells us:

Eventually, Warner/Chappell*, Radiohead’s publisher at the time of the song’s release, refuted her claim: “It’s clear that the verses of ‘Get Free’ use musical elements found in the verses of ‘Creep’ and we’ve requested that this be acknowledged in favor of all writers of ‘Creep,’ ” the company said in a statement. “To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of ‘Get Free.’ ”

Which seems fairly clear. Read the whole article, though. It’s interesting.

I Never Thought I'd See the Day...

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 16:49:08 +0000

When Gmail launched several years ago offering a free gigantic storage plan of, I think, 1 gigabyte, it seemed impossible that anyone could ever fill that much space with email. Since then, of course, the free allowance has quietly grown and grown. So too has the volume of email, and the average size of individual emails.

Until today, when I see this:

99% of 15 GB. Whoops! Of course, seven years of using it as a repository for daily backups from WordPress will do that. (It’s not the most elegant of backup solutions, but it’s easy and it works.) I deleted everything before 2017 and now it’s down to 60%.

Crazy Copyright Claim

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 14:34:00 +0000

Gotta say I hope Radiohead (or their lawyers) lose this case:

Pop star Lana Del Rey says she’s being sued by Radiohead for copying their breakthrough single, ‘Creep.’

I’m not a fan of Lana Del Rey, but I just listened to her song, ‘Get Free,’ and the only similarity is the chord progression in the first verse. You can’t claim copyright in a chord progression. Or if you can, you shouldn’t be able to.

If the chords and the melody were the same, they’d have a point, but even then apparently they want 100% of the publishing royalties; don’t the words count? Del Rey has offered them 40%, and I think that’s way too much.

I’m amused that the album containing the song gets its title from a doubtless much better one by the same name: Lust for Life. There’s no copyright in titles, of course.

2017 in Bitface Blogging

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 23:24:24 +0000

Well hello. It’s been a while. That daily posting thing didn’t work too well in the latter part of the year, and was particularly weak in the last couple of weeks. Weak weeks.

In fact I posted 261 times in 2017. It’s surprisingly hard to find that kind of thing out from Wordpress itself. I had to dig into the database and run some simple SQL:

select count(*) from devilgate_posts
  where  post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%';

261 is 72% of the days of the year, which is not too bad. Certainly the most posts in any year out of the past fifteen(!)

Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month	Posts
Jan	32
Feb	33
Mar	33
Apr	18
May	27
Jun	15
Jul	21
Aug	17
Sep	18
Oct	18
Nov	23
Dec	6

A strong start, tapering off in the middle, with a rally in November and then a complete collapse in December. I suspect the last is from a combination of post-nano slump and the festive season.

If you’re interested, here’s the SQL that got me that table:

select
  date_format(post_date_gmt, '%b') as Month,
  count(*) as Posts
  from devilgate_posts
  where post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%'
  group by date_format(post_date_gmt, '%m');

As to this year, we’ll see how it goes. I hope at least to keep the frequency reasonably high. And improve both code and table formatting.

Mouse Takes Fox

Tue, 19 Dec 2017 23:00:09 +0000

The news that Murdoch plans to sell 21st Century Fox and Sky TV to Disney is interesting for how it will reshape the media landscape. But it’s good from my point of view for a number of reasons, some relatively trivial and to do with content consumption; and one big.

The X-Men and the Fantastic Four will come under the control of Marvel Studios. Just in time for Infinity War. Well, of course, far too late — even, I would imagine, for Infinity War Part 2. I expect that’s at least planned by now.
Even more trivial, Lucasfilm can put the Fox fanfare back at the start of future Star Wars movies (and add them in to future reissues of the recent ones).
It will become ethical to watch Sky TV. More of which below.

Above all: better Disney than Murdoch.¹

Will Disney own too much? Hell yes. But see above.

On the ethics of watching — and paying for — Sky TV: see this blog passim for my thoughts on that. Like here and here. If Sky had not been owned by Murdoch we might conceivably have got it in the past. But I feel we’re highly unlikely to get it now. Buying a dish in 2017 would just be weird, and our side of the road is not cabled, by some odd historical aberration. But there’s the online version, which I think is called Direct TV. If we had had that I would have been able to watch the new Twin Peaks when it was actually broadcast, instead of now, on DVD, as is actually happening.

Loving it, by the way. And managed to hear no spoilers whatsoever, surprisingly.

I mean, better almost anyone than Murdoch. ↩︎

Burn it With Fire (Stick)

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 00:20:18 +0000

I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick in the Black/Cyber/Whatever sales, because I thought it would be a good way to watch BBC iPlayer, Netflix, and so on, on the telly, without having to plug a laptop in, as we do at present. Tonight I tried to set it up.

Amazon have decided to use replaceable batteries like it’s the 90s, instead of using a rechargeable like it’s today. I found it literally impossible to open the back of the remote.

The very fact that there are multiple YouTube videos explaining how to open the thing should be a giveaway. Unfortunately they all say, “It’s easy enough now because I’ve opened it before; it was really hard at first.”

The Apple TV may be several times the price, and the remote has its critics. But you just know you’re not going to have bollocks like this when you try to start using it.

Right now I’m planning to send the Fire TV Stick back. I’ll have another go when more of the family are around, and maybe we’ll get it. But I can’t help but wonder, what about someone who’s a bit older and maybe has arthritic hands? This is incredibly bad product design.

A Five and Four Zeroes

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 00:17:13 +0000

Actually it’s 50,069 words in total, as of a few minutes ago. And the last 5000 or so were not in the novel that I finished the other day.

Instead I wrote a new opening to the previous novel, which I hope will have moved it towards a submittable state; and a whole load of notes towards the next one, which I intend to start more or less right away.

As soon, at least, as I’ve got the skeleton of a plot, and a vague idea of the ending, so that I don’t go wandering around for years again.

Anyway: I declare myself a NaNoWriMo Winner.

Finished

Sat, 25 Nov 2017 20:07:12 +0000

I have finished my novel. Hooray!

Stats: 121,304 words. 44,107 of them since the 1st of November.

There is, of course, a great deal still to do before it will be ready for anyone else to see, but I’m going to put it away for a couple of months before starting rewrites.

There is one little downside: that 44,000 word figure, while by far the most I’ve ever written in a November (or any other month) does not quite reach the 50,000 required to “win” NaNoWriMo. Which doesn’t really matter, as the whole purpose of the thing is to encourage us to get the words down, get a first draft out onto the solid-state drive.

But I’ve come this far. It would be nice to hit the 50,000 mark. Luckily there is a solution.

The publisher Angry Robot has an open submissions period running until the end of December. That means they accept and will read manuscripts from writers, instead of requiring all submissions to be via agents as normal.

Now obviously I’m not thinking about the just-completed first draft for this. But the one I finished before is ready. Except for two things.

I submitted it the last time Angry Robot had one of these.
I’ve never been happy with the beginning.

Point 1 would bar me from resubmitting, except it wasn’t rejected the last time. I just never heard back from them. So I asked on their comments page, and they said I could assume it got lost, which allows me to resubmit.

Point 2 gives me the ideal thing to work on for the rest of the month: rewrite the beginning of the previous novel.

So it’s time to jump back into the world of The Accidental Upgrade (though I may try to think of a new title).

Jerusalem by Alan Moore (Books 2017, 5)

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 22:10:48 +0000

Yes, it’s halfway through the second-last month of the year and I’ve just finished my fifth book. Five in a year. That’s very poor. But this book was a large part of the reason for that.¹

At over 1000 pages of very small text — close to a million words, I’ve heard — this is a mammoth work. It’s also really, really good.

As befits such a large work, it is a whole made of many parts. It’s split into three main sections, with each of those having eleven chapters; along with a “Prelude” and an “Afterlude.” The first is a series of short stories or vignettes, most of which are not obviously connected. They are all set in and around an area of Northampton called the Boroughs, at various times in the past and present.

In the second we find out what happened to Mick Warren, the closest thing we have to a protagonist, after he died aged three, before he came back to life again. The third brings it all together, after a fashion. Moore has always had trouble with endings — just consider the mighty Watchmen, whose ending was actually improved by the movie.

Did Alma Warren’s pictures save everything, and stop the destructor? Of course not: it always happened that way and always will. That’s the central thesis of the novel, the idea of eternalism, that time is static, and we only experience change because we happen to be moving along that axis at one second per second. This is of course similar to the viewpoint of Dr Manhattan in the aforementioned Watchmen, so we could suppose it’s a worldview that Moore has had for some time, though in his acknowledgements he suggests that he came to believe it during the years he was writing Jerusalem.

There is a chapter in book three that is written in the style of Joyce in his Finnegan’s wake days. It’s hard work to get through, but well worth it (though with hindsight if you were to skip that chapter I don’t think you’d miss much of the plot). Anyway, it’s a monster work, and well worth the time it takes to read.

To be fair, spending a lot of time reading on the web, plus some reading comics, etc: these also need to be considered. ↩︎

Rock and Death

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:22:07 +0000

I appreciate this piece about AC/DC and Malcolm Young’s legacy. I never really cared for them myself. I was on the other side of the punk/metal wars, of course, and screechy vocals always put me off.

I completely understand the spirit of that piece, though, and feel the same way about The Clash, the Velvet Underground, probably others. But there is one telling line in it that says something about the different attitudes of the different sides in those not-really wars. I don’t know, maybe not; but this:

But we thought we were gonna live forever. The music too.

is not how things were for me, for us. We didn’t think we’d live beyond the eighties. The nineties at a pinch As Queen put it, we were the ones who:

grew up tall and proud
Under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

But so too did the author of the AC/DC piece. He’s a decade older than me, but that still means he experienced the cold war.

Maybe it’s not generation, but location. I lived a few miles from the Faslane naval base, where the Polaris submarines were based (and where the Trident ones are still). We knew we’d be one of the first places to go.

Generations are too abstract, too arbitrary to make sweeping statements about in any case. But I still sometimes find myself surprised to be here, now, in this century.

Missing Dates

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 23:43:04 +0000

I’ve just noticed that this WordPress theme I’m using, Independent Publisher, doesn’t show dates and times of posts. And as a side effect it doesn’t have permalinks for posts without titles (the datestamp should be the permalink in that case).

How can this be? Has it always been like this and I just haven’t noticed? I hate sites that don’t have dates on posts.

One way or another, this will have to change.

To Nano or Not?

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 19:24:06 +0000

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and I still haven’t quite decided whether to throw myself into it this year or not. I’ve taken part several times in previous years, but never completed the 50,000 words. And this year I still have the novel that I’ve been working on intermittently for about four years, that I’d like to finish off.

Maybe it would be better, and more in the Nano spirit, to start something new. But I think if I were to do that, I’d never finish this one, and it would sit there forever, haunting me. Maybe taunting me too, who knows.

I should have a better chance of getting the word count up this year, as I have a longer commute, and I usually get a seat at or near the start of the longest part (Dalston Junction to West Croydon, if you’re interested). So it should be entirely possible to get two free blocks of writing time each weekday. But I have found it to be strangely offputting to write in that environment, when there’s a person sitting on either side of me.

Sure, they’re probably not in the least interested in what I’ve got going on, but as Stephen King says in On Writing, you’ve got to write the first draft with the door closed.

Still, I have recently been looking at the novel again, and I think I’ve worked out how to end it. That has always been the problem for me: I don’t do a detailed plot, but I need to know how a story’s going to end if I’m going to have any chance of finishing it. If I just start writing with only an idea, maybe a setting and some characters, I tend to meander around all over the place and never get anywhere. Or at least, not to a sensible end.

I don’t have to know much about the route, but I need to know the destination, in other words. So as I now know the destination — or at least have a much clearer idea of it — I think it’s time to take one last run at this thing.

But this is me declaring that I’m throwing my hat in the Wrimo ring. I’ve signed up, and even given it a working title¹ — by raiding that fount of quotes, The Tempest.

Another problem has been and remains that I don’t have a title for it. Why are titles so hard? ↩︎

On Blade Runner 2049

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 23:39:31 +0000

Spoilers ahead, obviously. Although I don’t go into much detail.

We saw it in the Rio in Dalston, because all the Hackney Picturehouse showings were full (or at least just had a couple of separated seats left). Which makes me surprised to read these stories about it not doing very well on opening weekend. And weirdly, from the balcony. I don’t know when I was last in a cinema with a balcony. I mean, the Rio, obviously, though probably not since Harry Potter 8; but I hadn’t been in the balcony before, and I don’t think I even realised that it had one.

But to the film of the moment. I tried to lower my expectations, I really did. But I’d read that Guardian review, which was so unbelievably glowing. I listened to Mitch Benn hoping they wouldn’t fuck it up and believed that they hadn’t.

But…

OK, they haven’t fucked it up. But I’m going to have to break ranks with all the legions of newspaper reviewers who love it to death & back (honestly, I can hardly find a bad, or even a mixed, review), and nearly everyone else.

Because I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I spent a lot of the time (of which there is a lot) saying, “What the fuck is going on here? Why did they do that?” The former is fine, as long as it becomes clear over time, which it generally did. The latter less so: understanding characters’ motivations is fundamental to understanding and enjoying a work of fiction.

But much worse than those: I spent some of the time bored.

The main reason for that is that it’s paced like an 80s movie. Which is to say, much more slowly than we are used to today.

I should have expected that, I suppose. The original Blade Runner moves slowly even by 80s standards. That’s part of its visual and storytelling style. So it’s reasonable that a sequel, even one thirty years later, should follow suit. But they could have picked the pace up a bit.

The reviews all describe it as “thought-provoking” or similar, and it’s true that the questions of what it means to be human or to be artificial are in there. But to my mind there’s not enough of that. Which in a way is linked to another problem: world-building.

As before the world is very visually striking. What we have is the world of Blade Runner with thirty years of technological advancements. Like the film, the pace of advancement has been slow, but I suppose that’s not surprising, given how damaged the world is.

But slowly or quickly, technology advances in parallel with a conversation about that technology. What’s missing here is any in-world debate about the legal and ethical status of replicants. Certainly there’s a nod to the idea that the casual use of “skin-job” is insulting and shouldn’t be used. But it never seemed that insulting anyway — indeed I think it’s only the voiceover version of the original that tells us it is an insult. Deckard likens it to the n-word. (He does so using that word, which, rightly, would not happen today.)

In a more realistic world there would be a debate about replicants. There would be rights groups campaigning against using them as slaves, and even for them to be given full citizenship status. And from others there would be discrimination against them, abuse of them. That could all be going on in the background of this society — and the debate is not what the film is about — but I think a small acknowledgement that the debate existed would at least hint at a richer society.

That all applies to the original too, of course, but now it’s much more common for the replicants to be living among humans on Earth, so the conversation would be that much more active.

And speaking of that commonality of the replicants on Earth, one question you might ask is, are there any humans actually left on Earth? Because only two characters appear to be unambiguously human.

One is K’s boss in the LAPD, Lt Joshi, who could unknowingly be a replicant, though nothing suggests that. The other, Ana Stelline, who creates the memories that are implanted in replicants. She lives in isolation because of sensitivity to the environment, and the implication is that only a human can provide the memories. But since not all of the memories are actually hers, all that needs is gift for imaginative imagery. And, now that we know that replicants are fully-biological beings who can reproduce (whether only with each other or also with humans is unknown), then anything is possible.

The situation appears to be that anyone with the money and without any disqualifying problem has left Earth. “A new life awaits you in the offworld colonies,” after all. I always suspected that the colonies would consist of grinding hardship based on subsistence farming, but I suppose the idea is you have replicant slaves to do the work.

The Earth that we see is incredibly empty. The original’s LA streets were packed with people, but now it seems sparsely populated at best. Empty highways — because of course nobody’s driving cars anymore. But the air is empty too. Mostly there’s only ever one car flying at a time. All those giant buildings might be filled with people, but you don’t get any sense of them being there.

San Diego is a literal dump, and Las Vegas a nuclear wasteland. Apart from the still-standing casino hotel, of course. A million bottles of whisky and you choose Johnnie Walker Black Label? Come on. (That brand is owned by Diageo, though, which is the first of the big neon advertising signs you see.)

I don’t know, I wonder if it was just my expectation of something more striking, more startling. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t hate it, or even dislike it. I was just disappointed by it. Yet I think I want to see it again.

I loved the music, by the way, though it was perhaps a bit overwhelming in places.

And as a last thought: I still see people talking about the replicants being ‘robots’ or ‘androids.’ If it wasn’t clear from the first film, where they bled what seemed to be blood, it is powerfully obvious now: there are no robots in these films. The replicants are fully biological. They are probably more like clones, genetically engineered for enhanced strength and stamina.

The original book had androids (the clue was in the title); but not these films.

Faces and Feeds

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 23:23:43 +0000

I think I might have to develop an app for reading Facebook the way I think it should work.

There was an article doing the rounds the other week about how “our minds can be hijacked,” which was all about how terrible social networking is for us. I skimmed part of it, but got annoyed when it seemed to be about rich Silicon Valley entrepreneurs deciding to go “off-grid.” That’s all very well for them, but most of us have to make a living.

More pertinently, since the main target for the attack was Facebook, it annoyed me because I use Facebook to keep in touch with people that I might otherwise not. For that, it can be very good.

And yet… it struck a chord with, me to some degree. I realised that Facebook has increasingly become more of a time sink than a pleasure. Not that I spend vast amounts of time on it each day, but when I do open it up, I often end up spending longer than I’d have wanted to. And not reading updates from friends and family, but following links to articles and quizzes and nonsense, most of which I wish I hadn’t bothered with.

By comparison, a similar length of time spent in my feed reader lets me read blog pieces by people I actively want to hear from, and which I’m generally glad I’ve read.

But they mostly aren’t friends and family.

And then there’s the fact that the Facebook algorithm is tuned to show me what it thinks I should see, not what I want to see. What I want to see is all the updates from my friends, in reverse-chronological order. And that’s all. But there’s no guarantee that it will show me everything everyone posts, and the order is close to random at times.

One way to work round this is to visit people’s individual Facebook pages. You could see all your the posts by all your friends by going to each of their profiles in turn. But that would mean you’d have to keep track of all that: remember who you visited and when, and somehow manage the list of people.

Keeping track of things is what computers are good at. The software should be doing that for us.

So I’m thinking that what I want is an app that will do that for me: that will keep a list of my Facebook friends, and show me all their posts (which of course is what Facebook used to do).

As far as I know, no such app exists. This seems strange and unlikely, but I don’t think Facebook make a public API available for third-party clients, so such an app would have to work by scraping the web pages, which is neither good practice nor much fun.

Of course, what this means is effectively turning Facebook back into a set of RSS feeds — or now, especially as I have some experience with them, a set of JSON Feed feeds. Which would then be usable in all sorts of other places.

Web scraping may be bad and painful; still, I think I want to write this thing. Watch this space.

The Kickstarter Corporate Communication Conundrum

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 21:24:23 +0000

Today I chanced to see an email in which a manager was asking his staff to work for extra hours. Well, ‘asking’ is putting it generously, to be honest. There didn’t seem to be much that was optional about it.

The Kickstarter connection, though: you’ll be familiar with the idea of ‘stretch goals.’ If not, the idea is that the basic target is to make X amount of money, but if we make X + 10%, or whatever, we’ll be able to do these other things. Develop additional features, make the item in more colours, or whatever. My guess is that the term originally comes from sports.

So this email included in the subject the phrase ‘stretch targets.’ Meaning we want you to do more this week/month/whatever, than we originally planned. It was clearly written by someone who thinks that the way to develop software faster is to work your staff to the bone. When in fact that’s much more likely to result in people taking shortcuts and making mistakes.

In this team they’re already working weekends, and now they’re being ‘stretched’ even more. It bodes ill. But perhaps co-opting the language of positive things for something so negative is worse.

Blades and Running

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 19:28:02 +0000

Watched Blade Runner in preparation for tomorrow. Chose the original theatrical cut, voiceover and all. I think I’m increasingly down with Mitch Benn’s thinking on the matter.

And you should watch the video of his song, ‘Don’t Fuck Up the Sequel to Blade Runner’

Also started watching Dangerous Days, the ‘making of’ documentary. Fascinating and surprising to learn that Rutger Hauer came up with the ‘tears in rain’ line.

Anyway, more news tomorrow, perhaps.

Trekking

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 23:21:33 +0000

Past

I can remember when I first saw Star Trek.

That’s not so unusual, but if my memory is right — and I’ve just more or less confirmed that it is — then when I first saw it was the absolute first time anyone could see it, in this country, at least.

Here’s the memory (and it’s tied up, as many good things are, with Doctor Who).

It’s 1969. It’s the summer holidays, and we’re in a holiday home with a TV. That in itself makes me doubt the memory, because back then holiday houses just didn’t have TVs. A lot of houses in general didn’t. But this memory has always told me that we were on a family holiday. And it’s Saturday, late afternoon. I’m settling down at the TV, and somebody says — I think it’s my sister — ‘Martin, Doctor Who finished, remember?’ Because it was Doctor Who time.

And I said, ‘But this is like Doctor Who!’

And as the new programme started someone else — my Dad, I think — said, with a tone of surprise, ‘He knows all about it!’ And then the Enterprise swooshed towards me out of the screen.

I’ve long wondered how true this memory was. It was 1969; I’d have been five. But I just checked:

Initially, the BBC was the first-run broadcaster of Star Trek (12 July 1969-15 December 1971).
…
The series was shown in four seasons, the first on Saturday evenings at 5:15 pm (in the time slot usually taken by Doctor Who).

Which exactly matches my memory: summer, Saturday, Doctor Who slot. And the calendar confirms that the 12th of July 1969 was a Saturday.

I wouldn’t be five for another month plus. Not a bad bit of early-memory retention. I wouldn’t have remembered it at all, if it wasn’t for one thing: trauma caused by fear that my parents would turn the TV off just as this exciting new programme was starting burned it into my brain.

My Dad always liked Star Trek too, so I guess I was partly responsible for that.

Present

Yesterday I watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, which are on Netflix (in the UK and Europe, at least; in the US they’re on CBS’s own new streaming service). And I really enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say it felt like being that nearly-five-year-old again, but it did feel like they’re trying something new and potentially very exciting.

Today I was looking at its entry on IMDB. It turns out there are user-written reviews there, which I don’t think I’d been aware of before.

Sadly they are almost universally negative. ‘It’s not Star Trek,’ is a common theme. But there’s a strong whiff of racism and misogyny coming through. Two non-white women as leads means ‘social justice warriors’ are running the show, it seems. Well from what I’ve read of Gene Roddenbery, I think he’d have been happy to be called a social justice warrior. Star Trek was always about diversity and tolerance.

Future

I don’t know how many episodes of this new series they have lined up, but I know I’m looking forward to watching them. So is my inner five-year-old. So would my Dad have been. And so would Gene.

Harvest Home

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 19:22:18 +0000

Collected a load of Apples from the garden yesterday. Started to write this post, too, but left it for a bit, and Micro.blog had lost it when I went back. It felt very autumnal. And the title ‘Harvest Home’ cane to mind because there’s a Big Country song by that name. So I listened to The Crossing for the first time in years. Still really good.

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (Books 2017, 4)

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 22:04:53 +0000

Yes, the end of August and only my fourth book. What on Earth is happening? In short, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem is happening. All 1000-plus pages of it. I’m just over two-thirds of the way through it, and I’m loving it, but I think my target now must be to finish it by the end of the year!

But I got this one for my birthday, and it’s short, so I read it in two or three days while I was on holiday recently. It’s an odd one. It tells a story of some people and some strange videos in the days when there were still video rental ~~shops~~ stores and VHS tapes within them. Which allows someone to insert extracts from strange home videos into some of them, leading our protagonist to start investigating.

It takes place in the farmland of Iowa, and it’s interesting enough, but it’s one of those stories where you end up wondering, Why? Both why did the characters behave like that, and why did the author choose to write that particular story?

Not a bad story, but not that compelling either.

Setting Myself Free of the Bear (and Others)

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 22:16:17 +0000

If you work with plain text, as I prefer to, then you probably try out different text editors from time to time (or, you know, constantly). I recently tried out a nice one called Bear. It’s an attractive environment to write in, syncs well between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, has good previewing and exporting features, as well as a host of different themes to suit your preferences. All in all, it’s got a lot going for it. I used it exclusively for a while, and paid the first month of its subscription.

But I’m dropping it.

The reason why is simple: although it’s all about plain text notes, it doesn’t store your notes as plain text files. Instead, it keeps them all in some kind of database and syncs that via iCloud.

Using iCloud for syncing isn’t a problem, but locking my notes away in a form that’s not accessible to any other text editor definitely is.

Its export features are good, so it’s not that your notes are locked away irretrievably. But while you’re using Bear, you can only edit your notes — or view them, for that matter — in Bear. And that’s just not how I want to work.

It’s kind of antithetical to whole plain-text ethos, to my mind. You should be able to switch text editors without having to even think about it. Just open the file in the new editor and get on with it.

Next I tried the unimaginatively-named Notebooks. A similar setup with the syncing, but you can point it at a directory of files on the filesystem. It has its own strangenesses, though, in that it wants to keep tight control of the directory structure, and when you look at the directory in Finder or another text editor, you find it has been polluted with plist files, one for each plain-text file.

So I dumped that one, too.

And right now I’m trying Ulysses, which is very much of the moment, because it has just switched to subscription-based pricing, and caused much furore in doing so. I happen to also be trying out the SetApp service, which is interesting in itself, and which includes Ulysses as one of the apps it makes available.

It’s fine, but is also prone to dropping the odd plist file in my folder, I see.

In the end I’ll probably stick with nvAlt for short-form notes on the Mac, using a folder synced via Dropbox, and Editorial on iOS. Not forgetting Drafts on iOS, of course, but you only type things there to export them somewhere else, really. And then BBEdit or Sublime Text for longer pieces.

Those last two might become the subject of another piece, about how I don’t get what’s so great about BBEdit. But that’s for another time.

Nuts to Dough

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 22:23:10 +0000

Just thought I should mention, en passant, that when I referred to misspelled donuts the other day, I was talking about the ones that can’t spell “crispy” or “cream”,¹ not the spelling of “donut” itself. I was brought up with it as “doughnut,” but I guess I’ve come round to the other, presumably American, spelling.

And that don’t taste at all like proper do[ugh]nuts. ↩︎

New Job

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 22:34:02 +0000

As you may know, I’ve been between contracts lately. Had quite a lot of interest from my CV, but not been so lucky with the tests and interviews.

Yesterday at about 10am a recruiter called me. Today at just after 5pm I was offered the job. A new contract, six months initially, with the likelihood of extending. Sometimes things go fast.

Some Open-Source Software for Your Delectation

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 21:54:59 +0000

I have made a thing, and pushed it out into the world. Well, really, this is me pushing it out into the world, because nobody will have noticed it before now, and with this, there’s a chance they might.

A couple of months ago Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced the existence of JSON Feed, a new syndication format to sit alongside RSS and Atom; but using JavaScript Object Notation or JSON, instead of XML.

They invited people to write parsers and formatters and so on for it, and I quickly realised that no-one had yet written one in Java. As far as I can tell that is still the case. Or at least, if they have, they haven’t made it public yet.

No-one, that is, but me, as I have written just such a thing: a JSON Feed parsing library, written in Java. I’m calling it Pertwee. That’s the product page at my company site (more on which later). It’s open-source, and can be found at Github

As software projects go, it’s not that exciting. But it is the first open-source project that I’ve released. I hope someone might find some use for it.

Not the Nails I'm Looking For

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 11:20:10 +0000

I got an email from Songkick about a forthcoming gig in Camden by Nails.

You’ll recall, being the avid reader of this blog that you are, that a while ago — OK, six years ago — I wrote about a great song called ’88 Lines About 44 Women’ by a band called The Nails. I know nothing else by them, but the idea of seeing that song live in a tiny basement club is pretty cool.

But I had my suspicions. Especially when the first comment on the Songkick page was all about how it was the loudest gig they’d ever been at. Clicked through to the band’s page, played the video there, and it was immediately obvious that the hardcore band Nails are not indie/new wave/whatever band The Nails.

Just goes to show the difference a definite article can make. Nails sound pretty good, but I don’t think I’ll be going.

Site Moved

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 17:47:41 +0000

This site is now running on a Linux virtual private server (VPS) at Linode. There may be some teething problems from the move, so please let me know if you see anything strange.

Mayday for Human Rights

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 13:37:55 +0000

More evidence, as if it were needed, that this government is not just incompetent, but actively malevolent:

The EU (withdrawal) bill, published on Thursday – known as the “great repeal bill”– which will formally enact Brexit, includes a clause which says: “The charter of fundamental rights is not part of domestic law on or after exit day.”

Yes, Theresa May and her cabal of crazies do not believe that British citizens should have the same fundamental rights guaranteed to them as citizens of the rest of the EU.

Mayhemic Mistake of Two-Year Parliament

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:41:03 +0000

This is amusing. Turns out that May has shot herself in the foot:

May has blundered with the threat to use the Parliament Act to force the Lords to pass Brexit bills: a bill must be rejected by the Lords in two successive sessions before the act can be invoked, but that’s been nullified by May’s creation of a two-year session.

Great New Phone; All the Wrong Reasons

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 18:33:40 +0000

My iPhone 6 was getting slow, and its battery was poor. I have been thinking of replacing it. But September is approaching, and Apple will announcing new iPhones (three new ones, according to rumours). So I had more or less set my mind on waiting till then.

That would also be consistent with my iPhone buying history: 3G, 4S, 6… the next in the sequence is 7S.

Friday changed my plans. I was standing at a bus stop on Old Street, just replying to a WhatsApp message. Something touched my hand, and for half a second I thought someone was bumping into me. Then there was a firm grip on my phone and it was gone. Pulled right out of my hand and off down the road on a moped — which must have come across the pavement from behind me.

I should have been more aware. I knew this kind of theft was a thing. We’ve been hearing about them for a few months. But you don’t always think about it, and you never think it’s going to happen to you. And, yes, OK, drink had been taken. But not that much.

The bus arrived a few seconds later, so there was nothing I could do but get on and head home. There was another guy at the stop who witnessed it, and he very kindly set up a hotspot on his phone and let me use it from my iPad. The Find My iPhone app didn’t find it, so the thief had probably turned it off right away. But I was able to request a remote wipe in case it’s ever turned back on, and I got an email from Apple saying all the card details had been removed from Apple Pay.

All of which meant I had to make a trip to the Apple Store on Saturday. And to the Three store, where it was alarmingly easy to get a replacement SIM. I just had to tell them my phone number and give them a payment card. No questions asked. Not even my name and address.

So I now have jet black 256 GB iPhone 7. Which is lovely. I’m late to all the new features, obviously, but here’s a quick rundown:

TouchID: it’s now insanely fast to unlock my phone. Seems like it’s almost before I touch the home button sometimes.
3D Touch: people on podcasts seem to be saying they’ve stopped using this, but I’m loving it. Especially the edge-press for activating the app switcher (a feature which seems to be going away in iOS 11, I hear, so I probably shouldn’t get too used to it).
The haptic feedback generally. Little clicks that tell you when you’ve activated something. Just makes the whole experience much nicer.
The “taptic” home button. When I’ve tried this in the shop before now I wasn’t too sure about it. But a couple of days using it for real and I think maybe I prefer it to the feel of the old real button.

Plus, it’s black. Really, really black.

Even the box was black.

The cables are still white, of course. Which reminds me, I’ve always disliked Apple’s ear buds, and passed all my past ones on to my kids. But I thought I’d give these a try, not least because I wouldn’t mind trying the AirPods if they’re ever in stock anywhere,¹ and they have the same form factor.

And I don’t hate them. I thought I always had trouble getting them to stay in, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now. The main problem is they don’t give enough sound isolation, so you can hear the traffic and people talking even with music or a podcast playing. I’ve always preferred the kind with rubbery tips, which form a seal. But aside from that, these are better than I expected. Which bodes well for AirPods.

Downside: the battery life doesn’t seem dramatically better than my old one, weirdly. For the first couple of days it was busy downloading updates and restoring things (and getting hot), but that should be over now. I’m assuming that I just have to give it a few full cycles till it beds in and the measurement gets more accurate.

And all the things you have to set up again. That’s not the fault of the phone, though, so much as the way it came to me. If had planned this I would have done an encrypted iTunes backup, which would have meant more things were restored to the new phone.

Anyway, that was a lot of words and no links about not very much.

I asked in the shop if they had them in, and of course they didn’t. ↩︎

Micro.blog iOS Going Universal | Manton Reece

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 23:36:11 +0000

I’d like to be able to use Micro.blog from the iPad — well, I can, but it’s iPhone sized scaled up (or tiny in the middle of the screen) and doesn’t rotate to landscape, so I can’t use it with the keyboard. Manton tells us he’s going to fix all that, which will be great.

A Firefighter's Words On Grenfell Tower

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 18:20:28 +0000

This can’t be spread widely enough: the words of a firefighter who attended the Grenfell Tower fire.

General Election: Vote!

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 18:33:21 +0000

TL; DR: Vote Against the Tories

This is long, and I’ll understand if you don’t want to read it. So, a summary.

The election should never have been called; Labour should have resisted it when it was. But now that it’s here we need to take advantage of it to protect the NHS. And maybe hold out some hope for stopping, or at least softening, Brexit. Because with the Tories we’ll only get a disastrously hard crash out.

Vote to stop the Tories and save the NHS.

And now, a table of contents. Yes, this is that long.

Calling the Election

Calling the election at all was at best a cynical ploy by Theresa May. Labour looked weak. She thought she could get a hugely increased majority for relatively little effort. So despite her repeated promises that should would not, she called a general election.

Now, however, it might have backfired on her. The polls have shifted (though we know we can’t trust polls). Quite dramatically by some measures. It’s looking like she might end up with a reduced majority. Or even — dare we hope? — a radical change. A Labour majority seems implausible, but a hung parliament? That’s beginning to look a lot like a real possibility.

The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act

But what of the act that was supposed to remove prime-ministerial whim from the choice of election date? It turns out it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 contains a clause that allows the current government to call an election if it has the support of the house.

Not, I note, with a simple majority. Obviously that would be ridiculous for anything really important. No, a two-thirds majority is needed.

And was easily obtained, owing to the failure of the opposition to oppose; and now May wants to repeal it anyway. But more on both of those later.

Brexit

When the election was called, my initial reaction was that it would be all about Brexit. Nothing else loomed so large. And that was why I had concerns about Labour, because Jeremy Corbyn seemed committed to carrying on the madness that the referendum started.

I wrote then:

[P]eople will be torn between voting on the normal things they care about: health, security, homes, welfare, the economy… — and the big thing of our time: Brexit.
…
I can’t in conscience vote for a Labour party that won’t clearly place itself against Brexit. I just can’t. This means I have to leave the party, I guess. Corbyn called today for “A Brexit that works for all.” No, no, no.

I didn’t leave the party, and though there’s still some truth in that, things have changed. I’m not entirely sure when, or how; but somewhere along the line — the publication of the manifestos was certainly part of it — the normal things began to matter again. They never stopped mattering, of course, but they came back into focus.

One of the normal things in particular: the NHS.

Saving the NHS

The Tories — modern Tories, at least — have never really supported it. They have always pushed privatisation of it, or as much of it as possible. Though to be fair, the last Labour government at fault there too, with their public-private partnerships.

Tories, of course, have pushed for privatisation in everything, not just the NHS, at least since Thatcher. But even Thatcher kept her hands off the NHS. Not so this lot. Thatcher didn’t leave much to privatise, so their eyes are firmly on the last great publicly owned body.

I fear that if May’s lot get back in, especially with an increased majority, we could see the beginning of the end of free universal healthcare in the UK. We are in that much danger.

Thoughts on Corbyn, past & present

I voted for Corbyn as leader twice. I had my doubts, but he always seemed to be on the right side; and as well, there was no good alternative (not the second time, anyway).

Around the Referendum

Then I felt totally let down by Brexit & after. To be fair, his “trigger Article 50 now” comments were slightly misinterpreted, but expressing himself like that just added to the idea that he couldn’t handle himself with the media.

And that was certainly true in the first several months. It was like he — the party as a whole — had no media management at all.

And at no time did he resist Brexit.

Post Referendum

Then there was a series of mistakes, or bad decisions:

The three-line whip on the first Article 50 vote.
Not resisting the invocation of Article 50 at all, even when criticising it.
Waving through the vote to have the election. Because even if he didn’t want to stop it, how much better would it have been to make the Tories call a vote of no confidence? If only for the schadenfreude.
Then he chose not to join the debate because May wasn’t involved? That’s what we call missing an open goal.

The Big Improvement

Things have — and he has — got so much better since then. Somewhere along the line he started to come across as the dignified, statesmanlike man of principle that we knew he was. What changed? Was it better media management, or did the media actually start to give him some proper time?

I don’t know, but the result is that the polls have turned round dramatically, giving rise to a measure of that most terrifying of things: hope.

Manifesto Destiny

Everything in the Labour manifesto is better for the country than everything in the Tory one. It’s as simple as that. “For the many, not the few” is the tag line they’ve been using, and it’s great. Simple, to the point, meaningful. And accurate.

Not to mention costed. No “magic money tree” here.

Back to Brexit

Although they haven’t said so, I could see a Labour government offering a second referendum. At least you can imagine them being more open to considering the possibility. Especially, of course, if they were in coalition.

Now that takes us to the next question: if it’s a hung parliament, can we trust the LibDems not to back the Tories again?

I mean, surely, this time… But that’s what we thought he last time, and look where that got us. So it’s a worry. But the LibDems are likely to get some of their old seats back, and Labour almost certainly can’t get a majority with the way things have changed in Scotland, so a coalition is our best hope.

May Madness

Now let’s turn our attention to our gloryless leader.

Theresa May has presented an increasingly bizarre face to the world over the last few weeks:

Her “Me, me, me” approach to presenting Tory policy (“If I lose six seats…” you only get one); that’s not how politics in the UK works.
She wants to reverse the country’s stumbling steps toward better voting systems, such as the proportional system for the London Mayor.
Politicising the terrorist attacks:
- first troops on the streets, as I discussed;
- and now she wants to tear up human rights legislation. Next it’ll be internment, I shouldn’t wonder.
She was seemingly scared to debate the other party leaders on TV. Debates may not be quite standard in British elections yet, but that is the way the world was moving.
Oh, and along with voting reversals, she wants to repeal the fixed-term parliaments act, for what little use it was.

In short, it seems like she just wants to go backwards to an imagined Little-England past.

Conclusion

It won’t surprise you in the slightest to hear that I’m strongly advocating voting against the Tories, in whatever way you can have the most effect. I will be voting Labour, of course, but then I live in one of the safest Labour seats in the country, so that doesn’t have a lot of effect.

However, I’ll also be joining other Labour members from Hackney tomorrow in heading over to Westminster North, which is a Labour marginal. I’ll be helping to get out the vote there.

To you I say, please vote. Vote to stop the Tory mayhem. Vote to save the NHS.

Right Wing Pirates to Plague the Med

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 12:45:03 +0000

This is a disgrace on humanity:

Far-right activists are planning a sea campaign this summer to disrupt vessels saving refugees in the Mediterranean, after successfully intercepting a rescue mission last month.

Members of the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant “Identitarian” movement – largely twentysomethings often described as Europe’s answer to the American alt-right – have raised £56,489 in less than three weeks to enable them to target boats run by aid charities helping to rescue refugees.

From The Guardian.

A right wing organisation that wants to stop aid agency boats that are trying to rescue refugees. I hope the coastguards of Italy and Greece shut them down hard.

Extreme Pyramid Scheme

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 14:03:44 +0000

I didn’t intend to discuss these two episodes of Doctor Who together, but watching the first was delayed because I was in Scotland when the first one was on. And I didn’t realise they were a two-parter.

Except (spoilers) — oh, they’re not. They’re the first two of an n-parter, where n equals… who knows? At least three, and I’m sort of guessing from the titles and directors that it might be four.

Anyway, in them we have one really good episode, one not so good.

Episode 6, “Extremis,” was really very good indeed. Right up there with the best of this series so far. And good to get the mystery of the vault revealed early on, rather than letting it drag on to the end of the season and be an anticlimax.

Episode 7, “The Pyramid at the End of the World,” despite the great title, was weaker, largely because of scientific irrationality and foolish plotting. To say nothing of incredibly lax biosecurity.

That said, I did enjoy it while watching it. It’s one of those ones where a little bit more care, a few easily-insertable words, and it would all have held together much better. The problem with bad science or plotting based on foolish mistakes is that they can dump you out of the story. Critical faculties should be engaged after you’ve watched a show, not unceremoniously force-invoked by something happening onscreen.

Never mind, though: the next one looks very interesting.

Losing the War on Terror

Sat, 27 May 2017 19:11:18 +0000

The front page of today’s Guardian has a picture of what it looks like when you let the terrorists win:

Armed police used to be almost unknown on British streets. Now they’re becoming alarmingly commonplace. I saw two outside Liverpool Street Station yesterday; armed, like the two above, not just with pistols, but with big, two handed things that most people would call “machine guns.” This increasing militarisation of the police was taken a step further this week when the Maybot ordered actual troops onto the streets. And I read that armoured vehicles were going to be deployed at the FA Cup final.

Armed police on a beach: why? Was there a reasonable expectation of some sort of attack on Scarborough beach? And if there was: would weapons have helped? Armed police would not have stopped the tragedy in Manchester.

The aim of the terrorist is to cause terror. All this escalation does is make ordinary people feel more worried, more scared. Worry and low-grade fear aren’t terror, but they’re on the same axis. Overreacting like this is playing into the terrorists’ hands. As well, of course, as being a cynical political move in the runup to an election whose calling was, itself, a cynical political move.

Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn gave speech making reasonable, uncontentious points about the links between foreign policy and terrorism. Predictably the right-wing press and Tory politicians went ape.

BBC Close Their Store Without Explaining Why

Thu, 25 May 2017 23:09:16 +0000

I got an email from the BBC today, telling me that the BBC Store is closing in November. Oddly, they don’t explain why. This Engadget article says it’s because “people prefer streaming.”

At least, that’s what the headline says. The article actually says the decision comes “following poor sales and tough competition from streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Video.”

Which is plausible enough, I suppose. Though I doubt that most people could explain the difference between a streaming service and one in which you have to download the file first. And in any case, Netflix and I think Amazon also allow you to download now.

In fact my guess would be more that people prefer subscriptions. Amazon and Netflix are compelling because once your monthly fee is paid you can always watch anything they have. With the Store you had to buy specific titles, and there’s always that hesitation about paying before you watch something.

I only ever used it to watch a couple of episodes of something I had left too late to see on iPlayer. specifically, one episode of Undercover. Apparently I spent £1.89, and I’ll be getting a £2.50 Amazon voucher to make up for it. Whee, an investment.

So I guess I was part of the poor sales.

On the other hand, there is the opinion of some — and it would be of many in Britain, I imagine — that BBC programmes should just be available. We shouldn’t have to pay for them again. “We’re not just listeners and viewers, it belongs to us,” as a great man once sang.

Maybe that’s the solution to the arguments over funding: treat the licence fee as a subscription charge. Increase it, make it optional, but include access to the BBC’s entire back catalogue.

But the Engadget article goes on to say:

If the rumours are true, BritBox — the BBC- and ITV-owned streaming service that launched in the US earlier this year — could be expanded to host more of the BBC’s back catalogue and eventually launch in the UK.

BBC and ITV? Together? Well I never.

The Sound of Audio Formats

Wed, 17 May 2017 00:26:21 +0000

Amusing that in the same week that I post a criticism of software patents, the final patents on the MP3 format expired. Some people are characterising this as the “death” of MP3, which is just nuts.

In fact, far from being dead, it can finally come to life, as Marco Arment makes clear.

Software patents: they’re what needs to die.

In other software-and-the-law news, here’s a story about a case of alleged GPL violation coming to court. The judge so far seems to have made a good decision, by stating that the existence of the GPL and the defendant company’s use of the software does mean there was a contract in place.

Landmark European Court Case Could Curtail Freedoms of British Dual Nationals

Tue, 16 May 2017 07:55:19 +0000

The Home Office refused his application on the grounds that she could not rely on her EU freedom of movement rights, which include the right to bring in a family member, as she was a British national as well as an EU national.

Does this legal case mean that British citizens automatically have fewer rights than EU citizens in general? If that’s the case then we should be leaving the UK, not the EU.

Space Suits You

Tue, 16 May 2017 07:26:48 +0000

Back to form, then, with Doctor Who season 10 episode 4, “Oxygen.” Jamie Mathieson has written some good episodes before, and he keeps up the standard here. A tale of capitalism red in tooth and claw, it reminds us at times of “Silence in the Library,” and also of Duncan Jones’s Moon.¹

It’s a “monster of the week” episode, but the monster is capitalism. This season so far has been surprisingly political. Well, maybe not surprisingly. These are politically-charged times, and science fiction is nothing if not of its time.

There are no particularly egregious pieces of nonsense here, either. Why the suit’s force-field helmets are OK inside the station but not enough outside isn’t really explained, but the real reason is so the actors don’t have to wear helmets for the whole episode, so that’s all right.

Oh, one thing: they’re on a space station: what are they mining? I mean, for copper, but in what? We have to assume it’s asteroids, but they could just have said.

The really interesting stuff is what we might call the “arc” material (if we are harking back to our Babylon 5 days). The shades are back, but only because The Doctor is blind now. Can he fix it by regenerating, maybe? Or by doing a partial regeneration, like Ten? And more about the vault and The Doctor’s oath. Nardole fears what would happen “if that door opens.” But we saw it open last week, so things are not quite as Nardole thinks, at least.

And the very last scene in the “Next Time…” Yes!

Which is a great film that you should see at once if you haven’t already. ↩︎

Wood and Puzzles

Wed, 10 May 2017 22:42:56 +0000

Well, I suppose they couldn’t sustain the excellence forever. I mean, there’s bound to be the odd weaker episode, right? “Knock Knock”, Doctor Who season 10 episode 3 is certainly that. I have to say it’s the weakest episode we’ve seen so far this season.

This is largely because it doesn’t make much sense. Alien bugs turning people to wood? And back again? Well, I guess it’s no more preposterous than many things we’ve seen, but you need to have some semblance of a rationale, and this had none.

Plus it had less of what has really been making this season great: the Doctor/Bill interaction.

Still, it had an interesting season-arc-related ending, with the Doctor taking Mexican food into the Mysterious Vault to share with whoever is in there. And we now it is a “who:” they were playing the piano. And they eat, presumably.

I think there are two possibilities:

Since The Doctor mentioned regeneration, and we know he’s going to regenerate this season, it’s something to with that. Like a future version of himself, for reasons to be explained.
As I said before, it’s The Master, or Missy, since we saw both the latter and the John Simm version of the former in the season trailer. That would be plausible but weird.
Or, and this occurred to me just tonight: what if it’s Susan? His granddaughter from right back at the beginning? Her photograph was on his desk in the first episode… but that’s just fanciful, and why would he have her in a vault?

Protect the Human Rights Act

Tue, 09 May 2017 19:02:12 +0000

There’s a petition at Change.org to get the parties to commit to protecting the Human Rights Act and Britain’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. The latter was drafted by British lawyers, remember, after the Second World War; and now some British politicians are suggesting we should abandon it, as we are seemingly committed to abandoning the EU.¹

The former enshrines the convention in UK law.²

This one is definitely worth signing.

Although I retain hope. ↩︎
Thereby protecting it from faceless Brussels Eurocrats, I dare say. ↩︎

The Syllogism of Betrayal

Sat, 06 May 2017 17:44:44 +0000

Earlier today I added a short microblog post in which I called Nigel Farage a traitor. Its a strong word, and maybe one that I shouldn’t throw around so casually.

I don’t really go in for patriotism, nationalism, and all that kind of thing. But I do want Britain — the country I live in, was born in, and am a citizen of — to be the best country it can be. On the assumption that most citizens would have a similar desire, it seems reasonable to me to think that a citizen who acts against that desire — against the country’s best interests — is betraying the country.

Nigel Farage has made it his life’s work to get Britain to leave the European Union, and has been successful in making (or at least starting)¹ that happen.

Leaving the EU is not in the best interests of the country.

Therefore Nigel Farage has been working against the best interests of the country. Therefore he is a traitor.

It’s a simple syllogism.

Of course, he’s far from alone in this. I count Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and, of course, Theresa May in the same group. And many more.

Indeed, you could argue that anyone who voted to leave the EU is similarly guilty, but that seems unfair. Many knew exactly what they were doing, of course. But many also (possibly many more) were duped.

It doesn’t mean much if I name these people as traitors, but it’s worth recording what my thinking was behind using that term

Brexit can still be stopped, and must be. ↩︎

The Luxury of Outrage

Fri, 05 May 2017 00:34:28 +0000

The Doctor is a burning sun of outrage, but claims never to have had time for it. Season 10, episode 3, “Thin Ice,” sends him and Bill into London’s past, to 1814, and the last great frost fair on the frozen Thames.

There is a beast below the ice¹ There is a racist lord. There are cute dirty-faced urchins, and acrobats, and a fleeting glimpse of an elephant.

I loved almost everything about this episode. In fact the only negative point to me was the use of the old diving suits. You need someone onshore, operating an air pump, to use those, and there was no evidence of such a thing. It’s one of those things that Doctor Who is prone to. Not a big deal in this case, but it wouldn’t have hard to have included a few words about The Doctor modifying them with a compact air supply, or something.

No matter, as I say, it was an almost perfect episode. And we got back to The Doctor’s office at the end, where Nardole was making the tea (with added coffee for flavour).

And who or what is in the mysterious vault? The knocking of course echo’s “He will knock four times,” at the end of Tennant’s run, and that was The Master. And we know that The Master — or at least John Simm — as well as Missy, is gong to be in this season.

But it would be very strange if it were him in the vault.

I’m sure you saw what I did there. ↩︎

Smile, You're on Emoji Camera

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 23:43:50 +0000

Episode 2 of Doctor Who Season 10, “Smile,” featured emoji-faced robots (or not strictly robots), as well as Bill’s first real trip in the Tardis and into (as is proper) the future.

It wasn’t a great story, but it was a good one, and I think it was a great opportunity for character interactions.

Complaints would be that The Doctor was too quick to leap to the “blow it up” solution (shades of Lethbridge-Stewart, maybe); and that the pacing dropped off badly in the last third, with The Doc taking ages to explain things long after it was obvious that he just needed to reprogram the robots.

Still, it was, as I say, great character work — Bill is shaping up to be an excellent companion — and an amazing location. I heard that the main building is in Valencia, and parts of it looked an awful lot like the Eden Project.

I also like that the episodes are continuing one into the next. Will they carry that on through the whole season? Could they? Should they?

Spout Rolla

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 23:46:35 +0000

Back in Balloch in 1981, 82 or so we use to play a Pac-Man clone called Spout Rolla. But there are no references to it on the internet, as far as I can tell. So this is my story about it.

Once upon a time a gang of kids — thinking they were adults, but not really — used to go to the pub, and play a game.

The pub was actually the bar of a place called Duck Bay Marina. I see from that link that they now call it “Duck Bay Hotel.” Either way, it was a couple of miles outside Balloch, on the west bank of Loch Lomond.

Why did we go there, when there were pubs in the town? Two reasons, I suspect. One, some of us had driving licences and the chance to use our parents’ cars, so why not? (I wasn’t yet one of them at that point.) And two, it had video games in the foyer.

That had a dual advantage. We could play the games, and those of us who, let’s say, weren’t quite strictly within the parameters of the legal drinking age, could stay out of sight of the staff.

So: usually two machines, as I recall, plus maybe a fruit machine or two. I first played Frogger there. It was the era when arcade games had started to extend beyond shooting things in space to other tests of skill, like crossing rivers on logs.

Spout Rolla was in a similar vein. But it was a clear derivative of — let’s be honest, rip-off of — Pac-Man. I’m not sure I’d actually played Pac-Man at that point, but I must have been aware of it.

The idea was you guided a paint brush moving around a watery maze, painting the maze behind it. Fish would come out and try to catch your brush. If you painted all the maze you got a new screen (which I think might just have been the same maze in different colours, maybe speeded up a bit).

Instead of the power-pills of Pac-Man, there was one part of the maze that had a paint roller in it. If you approached the roller from the right direction, it went with you and you accelerated just for that section. Then you could turn back and roll over the fish that were following you, for extra points. And that was it.

Simpler times, simpler pleasures, I guess. It never made much sense, but we liked it.

Thing is, everything’s on the net today, right? Well, apparently not. When I googled it today, I found two surprising thing. First, that there are no references to “Spout Rolla game” to be found, with or without quotes round the first two words. Second, that Spout Rolla is a place in Scotland, namely a waterfall in Perth and Kinross.¹

Could this possibly be that most unlikely of things (at least before Rockstar Games): a Scottish game?

My son suggested that there would be people my age trying to remember what the game was called. So I tried googling for a description of it: pac-man clone fish paint roller. That search has selected videos, which I didn’t. But I did find a possible explanation.

It seems there was a game called Crush Roller, also known as Make Trax, and the one I remember could be a rebadged version of that. Plus you can play it at that link. As with many games of the time, it’s not as satisfying playing them with arrow keys as it was with a joystick.

So, no, it’s not Scottish, but it could possibly have been rebadged for the Scottish market. Or maybe just that one in Duck Bay, who knows.

The only thing is that, seeing that version, I had forgotten about there being two rollers. I was fairly sure there was only one, but playing it felt familiar, so I guess Crush Roller/Make Trax is it.

Initially the only Wikipedia page for it I could find was in Swedish. But latterly (2019-12-08), I find it’s better known as “Sput Rolla.” According to the “List of waterfalls of Scotland” article, “‘Spout’ is another common word found throughout England and Scotland for particular types of fall though it is usually replaced by ‘sput’ in the formerly Gaelic-speaking parts of the latter.” ↩

Scattered Thoughts on the General Election

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 23:47:48 +0000

An Election Unlike Any Other

This election is going to be completely unique in our lifetime, probably ever. Because people will be torn between voting on the normal things they care about: health, security, homes, welfare, the economy… — and the big thing of our time: Brexit.

There were close to half the electorate who voted to stay in the EU (close to half the turnout, anyway). There’s no reason to suppose that any of those have changed their minds, even if many now talk in terms of acceptance. There are plenty who voted the other way who wish things had gone differently. And the non-voters are an unknown.

If a party — or a coalition — were to clearly stand on a platform of stopping Brexit, or even of promising a second referendum, they would be in a position unlike any party ever. Or so it seems to me.

Unfortunately only the Liberal Democrats seem to be even close to that position.

I Can’t Vote Labour

I can’t in conscience vote for a Labour party that won’t clearly place itself against Brexit. I just can’t. This means I have to leave the party, I guess. Corbyn called today for “A Brexit that works for all.” No, no, no.

I imagine this means I’ll be voting Lib Dem. Possibly Green. I’m not sure where they stand yet. In one sense, of course, it doesn’t matter, as I live in one of the safest Labour seats, but that’s not really the point. I’ll be writing to Diane Abbot to explain my position, but I don’t imagine it will change hers, which is to support Corbyn, even though her constituency is one of the most pro-remain in the country.

I voted for Corbyn as leader twice, but he’s very disappointing now. Though I have to say that his policies on literally everything else would be dramatically better than the Tories.

Why, and Why Now?

Why has Mayhem changed her mind on a snap election, and why now? The obvious thing is the Tory lead in the polls, and to take advantage of Labour chaos. Nothing to with Brexit at all, not directly.

But something I was seeing on Facebook tonight was the idea that they were about to lose their majority, when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) brings charges for electoral fraud against up to 30 Tory MPs. The prosecutions will still happen, but they won’t affect the position of MPs who get elected this time round (well, unless they get convicted, of course, but I’m guessing the Tories will quietly deselect the ones who are likely to go down).

Effect of Fixed-Term Parliaments Act

My first reaction was, “They can’t: what about the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act?” Turns out that contains a clause that lets the sitting parliament ignore it, as long as they get a two-thirds majority. The irony of that figure was not lost on me, as possibly my most-retweeted tweet shows:

Snap general election called. Ironic that to ignore Fixed-Term Parliaments Act needs a two-thirds majority. Unlike, say, leaving the EU. #fb
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) April 18, 2017

Without Labour voting with the government they wouldn’t get that two-thirds. Corbyn has cheerfully agreed to go along, missing an open goal. First, the opposition should oppose the government, as a general principle. Unless the government is doing the right thing, which is not the case here. More amusingly, if they didn’t get the two-thirds, they would have to go for a vote of no confidence. That is, a Tory MP would have to stand up in the House of Commons and move that “This house has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.” Even if they could come back from that, Corbyn should have forced it just for the lulz.

Polls Can’t Be Trusted

All is doom and gloom, because the polls look so bleak. Except… if there’s one thing the last few years have taught us, it’s that we can no longer rely on polls.¹

On Newsnight tonight Paul Mason says he thinks Labour will win. Gotta admire his confidence, at least.

Or the bookies, and don’t get me back onto that argument about how bookies’ odds can be mapped to percentages of expected voting. ↩︎

Everything Rhymes

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:16:55 +0000

Doctor Who is back! And at Easter, which still feels like the right time of the year.

Now, as you’ll know, I thought last season was the best season of New Who. I may have been being a tad hyperbolic there… but not entirely.

And now we’ve got “The Pilot,” the first episode of the new season. Introducing Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts. Among other things, I’ve got to say that this would be a great jumping-on point; a fine episode for someone new to the series to start.

The story was good, not great; there were unnecessary Daleks, but if that means they’re going to otherwise be given a rest for this season, I won’t complain; and we’ve got the mysterious vault that The Doctor and Nardole are investigating. I suspect it might be most of the season before we find out what’s going on with that.

Nice references to the past with the pictures of River and Susan; and the people who were fighting the Daleks were Movellans, apparently. I learned this on Jason Snell’s Doctor Who Flashcast podcast. I knew I recognised them, so I thought they must be Thals, and that we were right back at the start of it all. It’s a very long time since I saw either.

So, The Doctor has been lecturing at Bristol University for maybe fifty years? Intriguing. And the mini-trailer that we got as well as the usual “Next time…” is even more so. Both Missy and John Simm (presumably as The Master). The start of The Doctor’s regeneration sequence. We know he’s going to regenerate, but not, presumably till the last episode.

Though on that point, Capaldi said on The Graham Norton Show that he had already filmed his part of the regeneration scene, and the only thing they still had to film was the Christmas special. Not surprisingly he wouldn’t give an explanation of that paradox.

I have a theory, or suggestion for how things might develop. They won’t do this, and they shouldn’t; but bear with me.

In a reversal of the now-common trope of The Doctor’s companion falling for him, The Doctor falls for Bill. She, of course, is not interested. So The Doctor regenerates into a female form.

That would be to put Bill’s sexuality too much to the fore, and of course be wildly unlike The Doctor. But it amused me to consider for a few minutes.

So, Entitled

Sat, 15 Apr 2017 00:29:26 +0000

In a recent article in the Guardian, this appeared:

It is no one’s “destiny” to be a published author. That implies a path laid out for us, an unshakeable future that is planned and unchangeable. And it is entitled.

That is a perfectly normal use of the modern sense of the word “entitled,” and it still slightly bothers me, as it has lo! these several years.

Because what it really means is that the person isn’t actually entitled to the thing in question. The older sense of “entitle” is to have the right to something — literally to have the title.

The modern meaning — the “He’s so entitled” formulation — really means “He’s behaving as if he were entitled to…”

Dictionary.com gives the definition of entitle as:

to give (a person or thing) a title, right, or claim to something; furnish with grounds for laying claim

Merriam-Webster is similar;

1: to give a title to : designate
2: to furnish with proper grounds for seeking or claiming something this ticket entitles the bearer to free admission

And neither has the modern meaning at all.

But I’m slightly horrified to find that the built-in dictionary in MacOS only has the modern meaning:

adjective
believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment: kids who feel so entitled and think the world will revolve around them

It’s interesting, though, that its definition of entitle is similar to the two web-based ones. And Cambridge has both. It seems the difference is whether you use the verb or the adjective. The latter is the only one with the modern meaning.

Language changes, and that’s fine. But I wish that people who use it in the modern fashion understood what it is they’re saying, and what it can sound like they’re saying. I suspect they mostly don’t.

They’re behaving like they’re entitled to make words mean whatever they want.

BSFA Awards 2016 by Various (Books 2017, 3)

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:49:42 +0000

Interrupting my Alan Moore reading to check on the short-fiction nominees for the BSFA Awards, reprinted as ever in an A4 booklet.

Good stuff, of course, but maybe not as good as last year (though I realised that I hadn’t read all of last year’s). Let’s go through them one by one.

Warning: spoilers follow.

“The End of Hope Street,” by Malcolm Devlin

This is a strange story, set in the present day, about houses becoming “unliveable.” This phenomenon is completely unexplained, but it is disastrous, and can even be fatal. And it accepted fatalistically by the large, and largely undifferentiated, cast of characters.

“Liberty Bird,” by Jayne Fenn

The favoured son of a noble clan races the family yacht. In spaaaaaace. But he has a shameful secret that should be neither in highly advanced future society. On the other hand, a highly advanced future society shouldn’t have a nobility. I guess societies can go back as well as forward.

“Taking Flight,” by Una McCormack

Another rich person mooches around with no real aim in life, this time in a society that has genetically engineered slaves.

“Presence,” by Helen Oyeyemi

This is the most disjointed, disconnected of the stories. A heterosexual married couple avoid communicating with each other because she’s convinced he’s about to leave her. Until they do, and it turns out instead that he wants to postpone their holiday so they can try out some sort of therapy for grieving people that he has developed. They do, and things get strange. There’s potential here, but all the initial setup about them not communicating is just ignored after they get to the point, so it could have mostly been left out. It really feels like it wants to be two or more different stories.

“The Apologists,” by Tade Thompson

A super-advanced alien race have accidentally killed all by five people of the human race. The five are put to work helping the aliens reconstruct a simulacrum of Earth, while a daily apology is blasted at them out of a sound system (hence the title). They seem surprisingly untraumatised by this situation.

“The Arrival of Missives” (Extract), by Aliya Whiteley

Not sure why this is an extract. Probably the original work is too long to fit in the booklet. A during the First World War a sixteen-year-old girl is in love with her teacher. She decides she has to let him know. The extract ends just when something out of the ordinary is revealed.

Thoughts and Conclusions

Well, I haven’t made them sound very good, have I? I did actually enjoy reading them all, but reduced to capsule summaries, they aren’t going to win any awards. Oh, wait…

I’ve no idea which one I’ll vote for.

Margaret Atwood's Uncanny Ancestor

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 21:32:09 +0000

This is a horrific quote from The New Yorker‘s interview with Margaret Atwood:

Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft. ‘The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,’ Atwood said recently. ‘But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn’t die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive.’ Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary.

But I can’t help thinking, if there’s anything to the story, wouldn’t they have taken her survival as further evidence of her witchy nature, and made sure they killed her next time? As it is, it sounds like she lived on.

You Choose

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 19:37:10 +0000

Funny where thoughts of current affairs take you.

All the fawning (and, to be fair, condemnatory and neutral) coverage of Trump’s bombardment of a Syrian air base in response to Assad’s gas attack have stated the quantity and type of munition that was used: “59 Tomahawk Cruise missiles.”

Those of us who lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud in the 80s will remember that missile. It was the one stationed at Greenham Common, which of course was the subject of much protest, mainly from the Women’s Peace Camp.

The Greenham camp was primarily part of the anti-nuclear movement, as the missiles stationed there carried nuclear warheads. Obviously the ones the US launched a couple of nights ago didn’t, but what the whole thing did was remind me of a song from that time: “Tomahawk Cruise,” by TV Smith‘s Explorers.

I recall hearing that song in my Dad’s car¹ back when it came out. It’s possible that I only heard it that one time, but it has stuck in my mind all these years, just waiting to be shaken loose.

On listening to it on Apple Music I’m pleased to find the chorus is almost exactly as I remembered. The rest of the lyrics are more oblique than I’d have expected. It was an anti-nuclear song, but less obviously than I’d have thought.

It’s very 80s, as you might expect (it was released in 1980), but there is, of course, nothing wrong with that. Inevitably it’s to be found on YouTube and Spotify.

Not sure whether this counts as nostalgia, in terms of my post the other day, but I don’t really care. What definitely isn’t, though, is the album I’m listening to as I type: The Chiswick Story by Various Artists² (most of whom I haven’t heard) is a potted history of the label. Lots of good stuff on there.

Bit weird, as he never listened to Radio 1, and there’s no way it would’ve been on Radio 2. I guess maybe I was waiting in the car while my parents shopped. ↩︎
It was suggested because that’s the label “Tomahawk Cruise” was on. ↩︎

Swim, Test, Shop, Film, Sleep

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 23:31:30 +0000

Yesterday I kind of wilfully skipped a day. At some point in the evening I realised I wasn’t going to write a post, so I just said, “Fine: that’s allowed.”

Today I started by going for a swim. After my new regime of exercise last summer, I got out of the habit once I started a new contract. So it was good to get back to it. (Which is not to say I haven’t swum or gone to the gym in all that time, but it’s been a few weeks at the moment.)

After that I took a HackerRank test for a new job opportunity. It’s a site that does programming tests. This one was, I suspect, a disaster. I hate doing that kind of thing: you’ve got a timer running, and the problem you’re trying to solve is unlike anything you’d have to do professionally… Anyway, suffice to say, it didn’t go terribly well.

This evening was all about falling asleep in front of the telly. We tried to watch 20,000 Days On Earth, the film about Nick Cave from a few years back. I got it a few Christmases or birthdays ago, but hadn’t got round to watching it till now. I enjoyed what I saw of it, but there was definite falling asleep on the sofa and missing chunks. Oh well, it’s a DVD: we can always go back.

Oh yes: there was also a trip to Westfield, the time-void where hours go to die.

Looking Back and Forward

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:47:48 +0000

My recent and forthcoming live music experiences all involve bands of my youth that have reformed and are touring their old material.¹ Wallowing in nostalgia, some might call it.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with bands getting back together. It can be problematic if you are the band that tours as the Dead Kennedys, of course. There’s a whole saga there that I won’t go into, but if Jello Biafra’s not involved, and in fact is actively against it, then it’s not the Dead Kennedys.

Indeed, in his song “Buy My Snake Oil” Jello suggested that a way for old punks to make money off their history would be to

Give in
Ride the punk nostalgia wave
For all it’s worth
Recycle the name of my old band
For a big reunion tour
Sing all those hits from the “good ol’ days”
‘Bout how bad the good ol’ days were

Which is a fair criticism of old bands doing their thing in modern days, I guess. But I see two arguments to counter it, from a gig-goer’s point of view.

Unfinished

The first was made by my friend Andrew, around the time that the Sex Pistols reformed and toured. This would have been in 1996.

“I missed them first time round,” he said when I challenged him about it. “This is unfinished business for me.”

Which was a good point, and kind of made me regret playing the purist and not going.

In 1993 I had investigated going to see the reunited Velvet Underground. But I really didn’t want to see them at an all-seated venue. Partly because I’d had a bad experience seeing Lou Reed a year or so before (despite having had a very good experience with him a year or two before that).

I recall that I phoned the venue — Earl’s Court, I think — and found that it did have some standing room. But those tickets were sold out. So I didn’t go. Regretted that, too. So I’m taking the chance to see bands like the Rezillos, or The Beat and The Selecter, that I missed first time around.

OK, But What is it Really?

The second point about the “punk nostalgia wave” (or any similar accusation of nostalgia) is: that is not what it is.

Because here’s the thing: it isn’t nostalgia if you’re carrying on with something that was always there.

Nostalgia (noun): a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past

according to Cambridge.

But this isn’t that. Because while those bands’ heydays might have been in the past, their music has remained available and frequently-played. You can’t be nostalgic for an album you listened to last week, or last night.

And a live performance always happens in the present.

This train of thought was kicked off for me a couple of years back when there was an article in the Guardian, prior to The Force Awakens coming out. I can’t find it now,² but it claimed that “nostalgia” was part of the cause of the excitement for the new film.

And I thought, no. Well, maybe for some people. But for many of us, if not most of us, Star Wars never went away. We’ve watched it, talked about it, read theories about it, and so on. It has been part of our lives.

Or take Doctor Who. Sure, there were the wilderness years before 2005, but The Doctor never really went away. The Tardis and Daleks are burned into Britain’s cultural memory, and I think they always will be.

Now if I were to see an episode of, say, Marine Boy: that would be nostalgic. I remember it fondly from my childhood, and have never seen it since. I’ve never even seen it in colour, because those were the days of black & white televisions.³

But I can’t be nostalgic for punk bands or Star Wars or Doctor Who, because they never went away. The sense of warmth and shared experience they bring: that’s not nostalgia, it’s something else. Familiarity, at worst. Or better: community.

Or a mixture of old and new, as with The Rezillos. ↩︎
This is why you should always save links, folks. ↩︎
God, I really come from another time, don’t I? ↩︎

Punk and Hugo

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 23:42:58 +0000

I hadn’t come across Garageland London before, though I approve of the name.¹ They came across my radar the other day with a piece called Cease and Desist: An open letter to Brewdog from PUNK, which says:

It has recently been brought to our attention that you are claiming legal ownership of the word ‘punk’ and are sending threatening legal notices to those you feel are infringing on that ownership by using that word.

I hadn’t heard this about Brewdog. If it’s true, they’re being beyond ridiculous (or possibly winding people up). I’ve got a lot of time for a Scottish company making craft beer, even if it’s only OK (and too damn strong most of the time: I like a beer you can drink a few of without falling over). But like the Garageland people, I thought their “Equity for Punks investment portfolio did raise some eyebrows.”

The open letter ends:

Definitions of punk are varied and debates over those definitions have been going on since before you were born. However, one thing punk is not is a bully! That goes against everything punk stands for. If you continue in this vein your punk credentials will be revoked and you will be called upon to cease and desist.

Kind regards and a middle finger salute

and is then signed by hundreds of bands. So many that I can’t really believe the website got agreement from all of them. But I heartily endorse the message.

In other good news, the Hugo Awards nominations were announced, and it looks like a great list, and also like the Puppies have been almost totally wiped out this year. Yay fandom!

I also note that one of the novel nominees is the very Too Like the Lightning that I was writing about the other day. Hugo nominated, and you still can’t buy it in Britain. Come on publishers!

Also: WordPress tells me that this is my 600th post on here. Not that many for the time the site’s been going for, but a milestone — or at least a round number — nonetheless.

It’s named after a Clash song, as if you didn’t know. ↩︎

Big Mac News

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:11:26 +0000

No, that’s nothing to do with hamburgers. Apple today announced that they’re working on a redesign of the Mac Pro. This is huge news. Not least because many people in the tech blogosphere and podcastosphere¹ have been preparing for its death for some time.

My biggest question: will John Siracusa buy one of the revamped placeholder ones now, or will he wait till “not this year” for the redesigned version?

Of course it’s a word. I just made it up. ↩︎

Garden and Barbican

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 23:34:58 +0000

Spent most of today in the garden, making a start on clearing it up for the summer. Not exactly gardening, as such. More gathering sticks and leaves, and putting them into brown bins for collection. Nice day for it, though.

Then this evening to the Barbican, for the New York Philharmonic doing a couple of pieces by John Adams, as part of the “John Adams at 70″ series. Oh, and in the middle they had a cello concerto by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Who was the cellist? Nobody special. Just Yo-Yo Ma.

It was clearly a virtuoso performance, but I didn’t enjoy the Salonen nearly as much as I did the two Adams pieces. Especially the second, “Harmonielehre.” Among other things, it’s good to see something orchestral where the percussionists have some serious work to do.

Not that we could see the percussionists, mostly. We were effectively in the front row. Which is to say, it was row D, but row C was right up against the front of the stage, and not being used because the stage had been extended into rows A and B. That orchestra is big. The downside of having such close seats is that you can only see the first few rows of the orchestra: the string sections, basically.

The big upside of the position, of course, is that you get such a close view and intimate sense of the performance. It’s almost like you’re inside the music at times.

Meanwhile British politics has gone even crazier, with Michael Howard crawling out of the woodwork to threaten war with Spain.¹ But that’s a discussion for another time.

To be fair to Howard, that’s not at all what he said. Just that May should be as steadfast with Spain as Thatcher was with Argentina. But “war” is of course how the papers are hyping it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gibraltarians (96% remain) now wanted to become part of Spain. ↩︎

Homophobia in SF Fandom

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 23:57:14 +0000

As well as being in charge of the website of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA), I also admin the association’s Facebook group. Yesterday a member posted a link to the BBC story about the sexuality of the new companion in Doctor Who. “Doctor Who gets first openly gay companion,” it says. Nice to know, but no big deal in 2017, right?

Wrong, sadly. I woke to 81 comments on the FB post. That’s a huge number by the normal standards of the group. It’s not very chatty. It turned out that a raving homophobe had stormed into the group and started to shout about the corruption of youth and I don’t know what all. The comments were a combination of his, and of calmer and more tolerant heads both calling him out and trying to debate rationally with him. To no avail.

I had no choice — nor any desire — but to kick him out the group and block him. I wrote the following, and I thought I should preserve it here;

I’ve just had to eject a member from the group for making offensive remarks to other members. And worse, making remarks offensive to other members.

Specifically he was being offensive to all our LGBT members, and everyone who supports them, or who just supports humanity and common decency.
Oh, wait, that’s all the other members, isn’t it?

Folks, I don’t need to tell you this, but it’s 2017. You can no longer argue that characters in popular TV programmes should not reflect the whole range of people in society. Nor can you make the argument that a character’s sexuality should have no place in Doctor Who, when it plainly has had a place at least since 2005.

Or don’t these people remember Rose being in love with The Doctor? Martha pining over him? Hell, go back further: Jo went off and married a male ecologist. And I’m sure at least a couple of other female companions went off with guys.

Flaunting their heterosexuality.

We won’t get any of that with Bill, at least.

Unless the next Doctor is a woman.

Interesting Lineup

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 23:43:30 +0000

Interesting generation-spanning lineup at the British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park: Green Day headlining, with the lower-on-the-bill bands including The Damned and The Stranglers. Interesting questions of seniority there.

They should really get Stiff Little Fingers as well, for the full High Fidelity vibe.

Brexit and Northern Ireland

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 23:38:43 +0000

Here’s a great tweetstorm about the effect Brexit will have on Northern Ireland. Worth reading the whole thing.

Another Kind of Town

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:28:31 +0000

After last night’s post, I listened to the rest of episode 2 this morning. And it quickly became a very different story.

Some Town

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 23:58:04 +0000

There’s a new podcast out from the makers of Serial. Seems like it’s going to be very interesting.

It’s called S-Town, which stands for “shit town,” but I guess they don’t want to put a swear in the title. They don’t bleep anything out in the show, though.

It’s about a guy from rural Alabama who contacts reporter Brian Reed to tell him about the corruption in his town. Supposedly the Sheriff’s department is so corrupt that a few years ago a son of a rich family murdered someone, and it was so thoroughly covered up that there’s no trace of it. That’s what John says, anyway.

Eventually Reed starts to look into it, and the story begins. I’m only an episode and a half in and it’s pretty compelling so far. There are seven episodes in total, and, Netflix-style, they’re all available now. Well worth a listen, I’d say.

The Night Before

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:29:07 +0000

I couldn’t let this night pass without acknowledging that tomorrow will be the start of us losing something great. In years to come the names of Cameron, May, Farage, Gove, etc, will be reviled, of course, but that doesn’t help us now. It doesn’t help us prevent the slide into the abyss of small-minded, inward-looking ugliness that I fear we are headed for.

I don’t want to see these islands turning into the nightmare archipelago that they could if we let the insane clowns in government lead us into a cesspit of deregulation, rejection of human rights, and economic disaster.

I reject all that. I choose optimism.

I choose to believe that most people are basically decent and want the best for everyone, even if a small minority of them made a bad choice in voting, guided by liars.

I choose to believe that there is such a thing as progress in society, in culture. It isn’t constant and it isn’t guaranteed, but its arc does bend towards justice.

I choose to believe that the forces of backwardness — the racists, the misogynists, the homophobes, and everyone who condemns their fellow humans for what they are, what they believe, how they live or who they love — that those people will be washed up by the tides of history, left flapping on the shores of the future, and waste away.

Tomorrow we will still be in the European Union, but no longer of it. Brexit can still be stopped, but if it isn’t, if it goes ahead at full crashing speed the way the Tories seem to want: I choose to believe that we can still be the open-minded, welcoming society that I know we are.

And one day, Europe, we’ll come back.

Singles

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 23:43:39 +0000

I was thinking about the loss of singles. Not individual tracks released individually: that still happens, of course; perhaps more than ever. But back in the days of actual, physical singles — 45 rpm records, or even CD singles later — you didn’t just get an individual track.

I’m here to celebrate — and maybe mourn the loss of — the B-side.

When you bought a single you usually knew what the main song was going to be, because you had heard it on the radio, or at least read a review. Or you might just know and trust the artist’s work, and believe that the chosen track would be worth your 75p.¹

But there was always the promise that there would be something good on the other side, too.

Often, of course, the B-side track was really “B” quality, or lower. It was genuinely just filler. Which was always a shame. I remember flipping Elvis Costello’s “Oliver’s Army,” to find out what “My Funny Valentine” was like. I hated it, and never listened to it again. Though as (in other versions) it’s something of a jazz classic, it’s possible that I’d like it more now.

The Members’ classic “The Sound of the Suburbs” was backed by something called “Handling the Big Jets,” which always sounded slightly rude to us² and I think was an instrumental.

But for every one of those you could get a “Jail Guitar Doors,”³ or a “The Prisoner.”⁴ Or almost any Beatles single.

Then there were double A-sides, wherein both sides were supposed to be worthy of being playlisted. They always felt like slightly better value for your hard-earned pocket money.

And when CD singles came along they usually had three tracks, raising them arguably into the EP category.

But now, tracks are realised for streaming or download, completely on their own. It’s very sad, and I’m sure they must feel lonely. Plus if you’re buying the download and you want what would have been the B-side, you have to pay for each individual track.

I was going to say, as well, that if you search for single on your streaming service of choice, you only get one track. But I found out the other day that’s not quite true. I wanted to listen to “Elephant Stone,” by the Stone Roses; and in fact the B-side, “The Hardest Thing In the World” was listed too. Its “Album” tag was given as “Elephant Stone — Single (2009)”.

Which apart from the wrong date (and ok, it could’ve been a reissue ⁵) is not a bad example of misused metadata. Or maybe just misnamed: not every gathering or carrier of a group of songs or musical pieces is an “album”.

Or maybe that’s just a change of meaning: what we used to call a single or an EP is now just a very short album.

Only 50p, in fact, when I first bought them. ↩︎
We were schoolboys. ↩︎
The B-side of “Clash City Rockers,” of course. ↩︎
B-side of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” What, you think I’m not going to talk about Clash singles? ↩︎
But how you should give the date for reissues is a whole nother conversation ↩︎

Publishers and Sinners

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 23:51:51 +0000

Borrowing that title from (what used to be) a regular section in Dave Langford’s Ansible newsletter.

The publishing sin in question, though, is quite astonishingly egregious, if the story is true. And I have no reason to doubt it.

There’s a book called Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer. I read a review of it a year or so back and thought it sounded really interesting. But I didn’t get round to trying to get it at the time.

Something reminded me of it recently, and I tracked it down, at least to the publisher’s site that I linked to there. But I wanted to buy a copy on Kindle, and Amazon had no sign of it. This is relatively rare nowadays. Especially in SF, surely.

I tried again a couple of times, but to no avail. There are a few chapters available on the Tor website; and they were one of the first major publishers to really push ebooks without DRM, so you’d expect something there, but no.

I think you can get a Nook copy at the site above, but Nook? I mean, come on.

Anyway, eventually I duckducked in the modern style, which is to say I just typed the question: “why is ‘too like the lightning’ not available on kindle”.

I was led to a Reddit AMA with the author, wherein she said this:

That [making the book available on the UK Kindle store] can only happen if a UK publisher decides to publish it. Unfortunately UK publishers rarely publish female SF authors; a lot of them feel strongly that only male SF authors are likely to sell. If you want it to come out in the UK Kindle store, the best option is to write a quick e-mail to a couple of your favorite UK SP publishers to tell them you’re eager for these books — hearing from readers makes a big difference when publishers are considering picking up an author for localization.

Emphasis mine. If this is true — and again, I have no reason to doubt her word — I am beyond horrified that such an attitude can be prevalent at UK publishers. In 2017.

Obviously what I want to do now is to buy a physical copy, here in the UK. It’s listed on Amazon UK, but it’s not clear whether it’s an import from the US, or what. (Also very strange is the author’s credit in that entry: “Assistant Professor of History Ada Palmer.” It even makes it into the URL.)

As well as blatant sexism, this is an example of the ridiculous regionalism that publishers still try to force onto the internet age. Also film and TV companies. Luckily Apple stopped the music business doing that.

Bits don’t see borders. And neither should we. But that’s very much another conversation.

Actually, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to see if I can order it from my local bookshop. Support your local, as well as fight sexism in a small way.

Demo

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 19:14:50 +0000

Sadly, I couldn’t make it to the anti-Brexit/pro-Europe demo today. I had a work thing that ended up taking most of the day. But I was there in spirit.

Last night was Comic Relief, which included Red Nose Day Actually. I thought the speech by Hugh Grant’s prime minister character was amazingly relevant to the times. Obviously that was intended, generally; but specifically it had resonance with London’s reaction to the Westminster terrorist attack.

Also about that, Mitch Benn has written a song called “London’s Had Worse,” in which he sings of our resilience and the attacker’s crapness. Not his best song, but no bad.

So Many Black Pixels...

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 09:23:52 +0000

Never, in the field of political reporting, has so much redaction of falsehoods happened to one president.

Podcast Ads and Pricing

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:48:49 +0000

Podcast adverts are the least offensive of all types of advertising. Because even though they’re in your ears, they’re not in your face.

I’m talking, here, about the sponsorship kind, wherein the podcast host reads some ad copy in their own voice. Sometimes copy supplied by the company, sometimes their own words. Sometimes they just read plainly, sometimes it’s more entertaining.

But it’s always relevant and vetted. I’m more likely to look at the product or service mentioned in a podcast that I listen to regularly than any that’s advertised on a website. Especially if the website uses a popup.

And if you don’t want to listen to the sponsor’s message, podcast players make it very easy to skip forward.¹

One organisation that has been sponsoring a lot lately is Away Travel. They make a range of modern, four-wheel, hardshell suitcases. Their carry-on versions have the innovation of including a battery and a couple of USB ports, so you can charge your phone, iPad, etc, while you’re at the airport.²

They seem like they make a pretty good product. But the strange thing is that the podcast hosts all stress how inexpensive the cases are. But they’re not. The biggest one is nearly £300. John Lewis sells a similar Samsonite model for £179, for example.

It’s possible that the Away one is tougher, of course. Impossible to tell without seeing them side by side. But I don’t think Away should be trying to sell themselves on cheapness when they’re significantly more expensive than a high-end brand. Embrace the expense; go for the luxury market. Or something.

It works for Apple.

Unless you’re using AirPods, I guess. ↩︎
Or elsewhere, obviously. But airports, with the long time you spend waiting around in them, are notorious burners of batteries. ↩︎

Laptop Ban Stranger Than I Thought

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 07:21:18 +0000

Today’s Washington Post WorldView newsletter throws more light, a lot of shade, and a lot more confusion onto the ban I linked to last night, on taking laptops and tablets in hand luggage from certain airports.

First, I didn’t realise that the list of affected airports is different between the UK and the US. Second, for the US, it is just a small set of airports, not all airports in the affected countries. The UK takes the broader approach — but for a different set of countries.

The most interesting point to my mind is that this may all be Trump trying to help American businesses:

When pressed by reporters, officials in both countries said the measures were not a response to a specific threat, but rather the result of intelligence assessments that concluded groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are seeking new methods to sow terror in the skies, possibly through hidden bombs in electronic equipment.

And later:

Farrell and Newman suggested Tuesday’s order is an example of the Trump administration “weaponizing interdependence” — using its leverage in a world where American airports are key “nodes” in global air travel to weaken competitors. My colleague Max Bearak detailed how this could be a part of Trump’s wider protectionist agenda. In February, President Trump met with executives of U.S. airlines and pledged that he would help them compete against foreign carriers that receive subsidies from their home governments.

“A lot of that competition is subsidized by governments, big league,” said Trump at that meeting. “I’ve heard that complaint from different people in this room. Probably about one hour after I got elected, I was inundated with calls from your industry and many other industries, because it’s a very unfair situation.”

So unfair. But if that’s what’s behind it, what the hell does our glorious leader get out of going along with a slightly modified version of it? It’s certainly not to protect British airlines, as they (unlike American airlines) are affected by the ban. Maybe my “lapdog” dig was exactly right. For years Tony Blair was referred too as George W Bush’s poodle. Maybe Theresa May is adopting the same role for Trump. Which is a horrifying thought.

Another WaPo article contradicts all that, though, suggesting that the whole thing might be based on some credible concerns:

The U.S. restrictions were prompted by a growing concern within the government that terrorists who have long sought to develop hard-to-detect bombs hidden inside electronic devices may have put renewed effort into that work, according to people familiar with the matter

But it asks the question and fails to get a satisfactory answer, “Why not ban all electronics on flights, then?”

People familiar with the discussions said the restrictions were designed to defeat the particular type of threat that is of greatest concern: the possibility that terrorists could smuggle explosives inside electronics and manually detonate them once on a plane.

Even if that makes sense (after all, its not like a computer in the hold is (or could hide) some kind of timing device): why just from a strange subset of airports, even in the countries of concern?

And if it’s all based on a real threat, why the US/UK difference?

They also raise the real concern that journalists, activists, and just ordinary citizens, will be separated from their personal information, leaving it under the control of unknown people.

Buckle up, folks, this ride is only going to get stranger and more unpleasant.

Stupid Fawning Lapdog Government Apes the US Again

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:53:00 +0000

Our glorious leaders have seen fit to copy Trump and his cronies with banning laptops and tablets on planes — from certain countries. The only possible reason for this madness is to punish people for coming from (or visiting) those countries.

Worse, though: such a ban is only going to:

make things even more confusing and complex at airport security, and
get extended until it covers all flights, everywhere. You wait and see.

Mandatory Options

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 22:32:33 +0000

Where I’m working at the moment we’re using a tool called Splunk for some log file viewing and analysis. I hadn’t come across it, though apparently it’s quite well known.

So wanting to know a bit more about it, I thought I’d have a run through of their tutorial. To do that you have to sign up for an account. That’s fine, it’s free, there’s no obligation. I’ve signed up for plenty of things.

Except… well, look:

Splunk Signup Madness

That little “Yes, I want to receive…” checkbox looks like a fairly standard opt-in. The kind we always opt out of. But look at it. Look at its reddish border. The asterisk. These are fairly standard¹ ways of indicating that a field is mandatory.

A mandatory opt-in checkbox.

A mandatory option.

After grabbing that screenshot I closed the page. How not to get people to sign up.

Though the red is bad UI/UX, because it doesn’t work well for people with colour-blindness. ↩︎

Holding Pattern

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 23:55:22 +0000

I’ve been working on a more substantial piece about music and gigs and nostalgia and my gig-going plans for the year, but it’s getting long, and possibly out of hand. So I’m going to delay it till later.

Consider this a placeholder.

And so it’s got some content of value, let me just draw your attention to the National March to Parliament next Saturday, 25th March. Meet from 11:00 in Park Lane.

I don’t know if it can do any good, but if you believe, as I do, that Brexit must be stopped, then you should try to be there.

Reading Materials

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:36:46 +0000

You’re probably wondering what’s happened to my books posts. Surely I must have read something since January (and I thought I’d posted about two books this year, but apparently not).

Thing is, after the Twin Peaks book, I started something rather large. I’m over 200 pages in, which means I’m about one-sixth of the way through it.

It is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem: a monster hardback with tiny print. I picked it up when I went to see him interviewed by Stewart Lee, back in November. I could have got either the hardback or a slipcased three-volume paperback version. Almost as soon as I started reading I wished I’d gone for the latter, because it’s so damn heavy to hold.

So it’ll take me quite a while till I’m ready to write about it. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, though.

Vanessa Bell and Princess Leia

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:00:25 +0000

We went to Dulwich Picture Gallery today, to see both the permanent collection and the Vanessa Bell exhibition. All very fine. But I was struck by one of Bell’s paintings in particular.

It’s called “The Model,” which makes it hard to search for, being so generic. But it’s clear to me that the hair & makeup people of the original Star Wars must have been familiar with it, since it is totally where they got Princess Leia’s headphone hairstyle.

Bell lived until 1961, so her work is still in copyright, which I expect is why it’s hard to find a decent image online, but Google Image Search has this.

Take a look. Tell me I’m wrong.

The Return of SonoAir

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 23:29:34 +0000

Back in January I wrote about trying to play podcasts through the Sonos. As you’ll recall¹ I had tried and failed to install AirSonos on my NAS, and was considering trying SonoAir on my Mac.

I did try it, but it never quite worked. The app launched, and found the Sonos network and the speaker. But it didn’t appear as an AirPlay device to my phone. I could make it work in one context: iTunes (on the same Mac) could see it and use it as a functional output device.But that wasn’t much use, as the Sonos already has access to my iTunes library from where it’s backed up on the NAS — and also to Apple Music. So being able to play from iTunes to the Sonos brought nothing new.

The added functionality I was looking for was to be able to play podcasts from Overcast, and switch to the speaker when I’m listening in the kitchen. For that my iPhone or iPad needs to be able to see the speaker.

So it all didn’t look too promising. But I was just having another go, and I noticed that the version on the website is 1.0 (BETA 6.1), while I had BETA 4. A quick download and we’re up and running: it works!

Now I just have to keep my MacBook running at all times. Oh well.

I know, you probably won’t. ↩︎

Missed

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 07:11:10 +0000

Well, yesterday genuinely feels like the first day I’ve missed posting this year. A few post-midnight posts have counted towards the previous day, but although I’m writing this early in the morning, it’s definitely the 16th.

It’s for a good reason, though: I went to the pub after work.¹

The occasion was the monthly drinks for ex- and still-current-Misys people. Always good to see folk I haven’t seen for a while. And Misys are in the news at the moment. It looks like my old section, Payments & Messaging, won’t be long for this world (even what little is left of it). This D+H outfit — Vista, the owners of Misys, have bought them and are planning to smoosh them together with Misys — is big in payments. I’d expect that their products will be seen as superior, and our Payment Manager will start to be sunsetted.

That’s certainly the likely trajectory if Misys management end up running the combined organisation. They have a permanent, severe case of inverse not-invented-here syndrome. Any product that the company has been making and selling successfully for years (decades, in the case of Midas and Equation) is automatically suspect and needs to be edged out in favour of something that came from another company, and/or is newer and less capable.

Mind you, those old products have a habit of keeping on keeping on (and making the company money). Because, of course, they meet the needs of customers.

Not that anyone was talking about that at the pub.

I did start to write something when I got home, but it was never going to be anything viable. Looking at it this morning it doesn’t even make sense. ↩︎

Wiretaps and Wipeouts

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:53:01 +0000

Couple of thoughts about the news, tonight. First of all, CNN reports on Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s “counselor,” and her strange thoughts about microwaves:

“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway said, before suggesting that surveillance could take place through phones, TVs or “microwaves that turn into cameras.”

I want one of these magic microwaves. I mean, think about it: you can reheat your leftovers, then take a photograph of them and post it to Instagram. All from the same device.

More sanely (at least slightly) they seem to be backing off from the nonsensical wiretapping accusations. According to Sean Spicer, the Whitehouse press secretary:

“The President used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities”

So that’s OK, then.

In another article they treat it all more seriously, pointing out that doing down your predecessors is a tactic of dictators everywhere:

They, too, use the apparatus of government to support their whims. And worse, they also seek to punish their predecessors in office and political opponents — as we have seen in countries from Iran to Zambia to, of course, Russia.

How long until we hear Trump surrogates suggest that Obama might be guilty of a crime?

Closer to home, the UK government’s Mayhem programme involved them forcing through the Brexit bill, so we’re teetering along the slippery slope, getting ready to run towards the cliff of deadly metaphors.

Jeremy Corbyn has things in hand, though. He tweeted:

Deeply disappointing that govt denied the people, through Parliament, Brexit oversight & refused to guarantee the rights of EU nationals

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) March 13, 2017

We will continue to demand that the stress they, and Brits in the EU, are being put under is ended, and they are given the right to remain

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) March 13, 2017

Labour at every stage will challenge govt plans for a bargain basement Brexit with our alternative that puts jobs & living standards first

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) March 13, 2017

This is the same Jeremy Corbyn who, just a few weeks ago, put a three-line whip in place to make his MPs vote in favour of the initial version of the bill — which is identical to the version that has now been passed, since the Lords’ amendments were all rolled back.

I voted for him as leader, twice, but I regret it now, I’ve got to say. He’s a decent guy, and I agree with him on many — even most — issues. But on this, the most important thing facing our country today, leading to potentially the biggest disaster since the Second World War, he’s been completely useless. Worse: complicit.

Broadchurch Thoughts

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 23:12:57 +0000

I hope everyone’s following the new series of Broadchurch. If you thought the second season didn’t live up to the first, then I think you’ll find that the third brings it back to greatness. Trilogies always sag in the middle, don’t they?

People are being very positive about it on Twitter. Many of the comments are around how every guy you see is a possible suspect. Which is very true. I’m just glad to discover that there are eight episodes, not six as I had thought. Which means we’re still not quite halfway through.

David Tennant and Olivia Coleman are fantastic together as ever. and Jodie Whittaker as Beth is amazing.

Most of all, I think it bodes well for Chris Chibnall’s future role as head writer on Doctor Who.

And Then it Was All That

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 23:06:54 +0000

One of the blogs I follow is called And now it’s all this, by the mysterious Dr Drang. He writes mainly on engineering and provides lots of interesting Python scripts.

What I’m interested in his blog’s title and subtitle, though. “And now it’s all this”; and “I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong.” I’ve been reading it for years, and had only idly wondered about why it was called that, or what it really meant.

I’ve also been listening to, and reading about, The Beatles for years — for a great many more years. And so I was very familiar with John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” line, and the subsequent furore.

But not that familiar, it turns out. Or not with his apology, at least.

We recently watched the excellent Eight Days a Week film, which has lots of Beatles footage I’d never seen before, and puts it all together into a compelling narrative.

Of course, it covers the “Jesus” period. So there was John, at a press conference, making an apology of sorts. And out pops:

I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.

Oh. OK. Right. I should have seen that years ago.

Of course there are two remaining questions:

Why did the good doctor choose to name his blog that?
And what does the “leancrew” mean in his domain name?

Saved Life

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 23:45:16 +0000

In International Clash Day I mentioned a life-changing song: “Wasted Life,” by Stiff Little Fingers. SLF’s anti-military song literally changed my life; or its potential direction, at least. I was probably moving in an anti-war kind of direction anyway, to be fair, but it was definitely a trigger point.

People say — or used they to, at least — that a song couldn’t change your life. By comparison, I don’t think there was ever a similar tendency to say that a book couldn’t change a person’s life. I suspect that is down to their comparative sizes: it seems respectable for something the size of a novel to have a major impact on a human’s psyche, while a three-minute song? Not so much.

Although if it were merely length, then people wouldn’t have complained if you said an album changed your life. I’m not sure that anyone ever said that,¹ but I suspect that if they had, their statement would have been pooh-poohed just as much as the same claim for a song.

At this point I feel I ought to quote Springsteen, giving the opposite view:

We learned more from a three-minute record, baby,
Than we ever learned in school

he sings in “No Surrender.” Hyperbole, certainly, but there is a core of truth to it: the truth of the feeling you can get from listening to a great song.

With “Wasted Life” the feeling for me was of sudden crystallisation, or realisation. I had, for some years, been saying that I wanted to be pilot, join the RAF. This was before the horrors of the Gulf War, or for that matter the Balkans. Though it was in the heart of the Cold War, and British soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland during the troubles — though not so much RAF staff, I would think.

But I was blind to all that, brought up as I was on a diet of Second World War films, Commando comics, and Airfix models of warplanes. I had, in short, a thoroughly romanticised view of war. And I just wanted to fly.

But I didn’t want to kill. I had always known that, I’m sure. But two lines of that one song made it real for me:

Stuff their fucking armies
Killing isn’t my idea of fun²

And that was all it took. I remember that it was a while before I could tell my parents that I had changed my plans. Perhaps because they would have asked why, and I didn’t want to have to explain it. Maybe because I thought they’d be disappointed. I’m sure my Mum wasn’t. My Dad kind of was: “But you were going to be a Spanish-speaking pilot,” he said. He had always been slightly amused that my school taught half of us Spanish, instead of the then-much-more-conventional French.

A life can hinge on such a small moment.

Somebody must have, of course. ↩︎
In an amusing followup to recent thoughts, I originally wrote that as “army,” but find that lyrics sites think this plural too. Correctly, of course. ↩︎

Interrupting-Kids Video and Analysis Thereof

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 17:54:53 +0000

The video of the guy being interviewed on the BBC and interrupted by his kids is great, but even better is Ben Thompson’s analysis of it.

You can see the video and read about it at that link.

Misbehaviour Again

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:29:04 +0000

I'm sure you all pay great attention to the goings on at this here blog. You'll almost certainly have noticed things going very strange yesterday, with the same post being repeated three or four times, in various forms and ways.

No? Well, in case: what we had is (probably) a glitch caused by a Wordpress plugin. Or maybe not. Maybe it was something else entirely. Really, we’ll have to see what happens when this one posts.

But I’ve turned off some of the sharing features for now. So you might not even see this if you’re used to being notified via Facebook or Twitter.

Actually since that’s where most of the interaction comes from, it would be interesting to know who if anyone is not reading it that way. Is anyone subscribed to the feed? that’s how I still do most of my blog reading.

Whether You Want To Or Not

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:15:26 +0000

Note: If you've seen multiple copies of this post, it's because I had trouble with accidentally posting it in the wrong format, and then Wordpress refusing to let me change it. Hopefully be all right now.

“Write even when you don’t want to,” say some people encouraging us to write every day. That would be me right now. The “don’t want to” part, not the “encouraging” part. It’s late and I haven’t written anything yet and I’ve made this daily rod for my own back.

On the other hand, I do love to write, and I can’t deny that I’ve done more of it in this last couple of months.

Though, not, as I hoped I might, any more fiction. I’m still stalled in the middle of the novel which in idea, at least is nearly five years old. It’ll be starting school soon!

And I need to get round to submitting some of the other, finished, things I have. Because they’re no use just sitting here on my ~~hard~~ solid-state drive.

Stiff Little Memories

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 23:52:48 +0000

I’ve just had two slightly odd experiences while researching Stiff Little Fingers.

SLF were the first band I ever saw live, and they had a major effect on my life — which is why I was researching them: I’m writing a longer piece about the effect they had on me.

So as I was reading the Wikipedia article about them, I became somewhat confused. Because it says they split up in 1983, and reformed in 1987. Now the breakup I’d forgotten about, but it seems right. However, I saw them on the tour in 87. I saw them two days in a row. I had tickets for the Brixton Academy gig, which I think was on a Saturday, and then when Time Out came out that week there was a small advert in the back (I’ve no idea how I came to see it), which said:

Tin Soldiers
Belfast’s finest. Shhh: a secret gig!

Or something very like that. It was on the Friday night at the Mean Fiddler. Which I don’t think I had ever been to at that time, and which was a bastard long way from Tooting. But I wasn’t going to miss the chance to see SLF in a small club.

What I mainly remember was that the Academy gig the next night was a bit of a letdown after the intensity of seeing them at the Mean Fiddler.

But anyway, the point of all of this is that as far as I remember things, this all was — or was billed as — their farewell tour. That’s why the t-shirt (which I still have) says “Game Over.”

Now obviously they’re around again, and I’ve seen them since, and bought albums they’ve released since. But my memory says they broke up in 87 (or it could have been 88, but I think not (though actually March 88 if this setlist site is to be believed)), and then reformed later. But Wikipedia and All Music both say I’m wrong.

I don’t know. Who would you trust?

Actually probably not me. I’m becoming more convinced as I look at that setlist site, that I must have seen them several times at the Academy, after moving to London in 87, and the supposed farewell tour must have been later. In which case the Mean Fiddler was a bastard long way from Walthamstow, but that’s still true.

The second odd experience was that I clicked onto the Wikipedia talk page to see whether the history was disputed at all. It isn’t, but around five sections in there’s a section entitled “the?”, in which someone asks whether they were ever referred to as “the Stiff Little Fingers.”

And back in 2007 some guy called “Devilgate” answered firmly in the negative.

Missed Again: What a Catastrophe

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:57:06 +0000

OK, so I didn’t post before midnight. But there’s a good reason: we were getting up-to-date with Channel 4′s Catastrophe, which is a great sitcom.

We only started watching it a few weeks ago. Luckily the whole thing is available on All 4. Thank the tech & TV industries for catchup services.

Channel 4′s even seems to have become stable, and improved its UI. It’s only about a year ago that we stopped watching Homeland because the playback was so choppy. And we couldn’t record it because it was on Sunday night at the same time as Downton Abbey, and we were recording that. (We only have a simple DVR.)

Though it had well and truly jumped the shark by then. What were they doing in Berlin?

Little, Feat...

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 23:58:37 +0000

Many songs these days involve one or more other artists guesting with the main one. Rappers adding a part to a singer’s track, for example. Nowadays such guests are always credited. Quite rightly: we’ve come a long way from the days when Billy Preston played keyboards on some Beatles songs uncredited (though visible in the famous Apple Records rooftop performance).

As featured artists, such guests are nearly always credited using the abbreviation “feat.” “The Beatles feat Billy Preston,” to give an example that was never used.

But “feat” is a word on it’s own, of course, as well as an abbreviation. Which I think may be why I always find the formation slightly amusing. And there used to be a band called Little Feat, if I’m not very much mistaken (I’ve never knowingly heard them).

So I’ve been wondering how the modern crediting style would have worked if they had ever been guests, or had featured guests, on any of their songs. “Little Feat feat Joe Feet.” “Legs & Co feat Little Feat.”¹

Alas, it was not the way back then. Though their Wikipedia article suggests they’re still around, so it could happen.

More surprisingly it tells us that they changed “Feet” to “Feat” as a “homage to the Beatles.”² I had no inkling of that connection when I mentioned the Beatles above.

Yes, I know Legs & Co were dancers. I’m just trying to make up mildly amusing names. I invented Joe Feet. ↩︎
I’m assuming that refers to the story of the Beatles naming that involved them wanting an insect name like Buddy Holly & the Crickets, but changing the spelling so it read as beat music. ↩︎

The Writing Process

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 13:23:39 +0000

In What Writers Really Do When They Write George Saunders gives a great insight into some parts of his working process.

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs.

Or “Writing is rewriting,” as someone once put it.¹

It’s a good piece, and well worth reading. Oddly, in the printed edition (Saturday’s Guardian Review section) it was entitled “Master of the Universe.”

Hard to find who, but it seems to have been Hemingway. Whose writing I don’t like, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. ↩︎

Pivoting Around Words

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 23:48:27 +0000

I should start a new category here, for word-use. In fact, having written that, I just have: language (hopefully that link will work once I publish this).

Today I want to talk about the word “pivot.” As you know, pivot has come, over the last few years, to mean change direction, especially in a political context. A recent example from the New Yorker: Don’t Be Fooled. Donald Trump Didn’t Pivot.

It sort of makes sense, but like many knew usages, I can’t help but wonder why it has come into this use.

And for this one I also can’t help but wonder to what extent Friends is responsible.

You’ll know the episode I’m thinking of, if you’ve seen it: Ross is moving in to a new apartment, and being too cheap to pay the delivery charge, ropes Rachel in to help him move a sofa. Inevitably they get stuck on the stairs, and he keeps shouting at her, “Pivot! Pivot!” to try to get her to turn the sofa in an unspecified direction.

Of course, he might have been using it quite precisely: the sofa probably needed to rotate about a fixed point, which is what “pivot” originally meant.

What it has come to mean, in politics, is a change of direction less than a U-turn (or flip-flop); but still quite a substantial one. I suppose it has a sense of turning without moving forward at the same time. Though I may be overthinking it there. It’s quite descriptive, but it seems like it has becoming ubiquitous incredibly quickly; and is already practically a cliche.

Of course that’s just my view of the optics of the thing.

Reassessing

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 23:24:51 +0000

I never cared that much for Joe Cocker’s highly-rated cover of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” but I just saw it on BBC Four’s … Sings the Beatles, a programme whose title tells you exactly what it’s about.

And… hell, yeah: it’s really good. Apparently Steve Winwood and Jimmy Page are on the recording. But we won’t hold that against it.¹ Sometimes all you need is the passage of time; sometimes it’s just about the mood you’re in. But it’s often worth giving things another chance.²

Now it’s on Petula Clark’s weird-arse version of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” during which the caption tells us that Petula is Britain’s best-selling ever female artist. I’m guessing this was made before Adele.

What? The Punk Wars never ended. ↩︎
I guess. But how far do you go? Napoleon Dynamite? I think not. ↩︎

Footnotes Revisited

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 23:51:26 +0000

Having looked again over yesterday’s piece, I’ve had a slight change of heart.

As I’m sure you noticed, I made a comment in the footnote to the effect that I thought that my misremembering of Neuromancer‘s famous opening line was better than the actual one. I no longer think that’s the case.

Gibson obviously knew what he was doing. “The sky above the port” is more euphonious than my “over the port.”

Glad we got that sorted out.

Under the Television Skies

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 23:57:42 +0000

In The Colour of Television Jack Deighton questions the worth of the famous opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer:

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.¹

Jack questions its meaning, and describes it as “an author, straining, unsuccessfully, for effect.” I commented:

[D]on’t take it so literally. It was obviously meant to mean “the screen of a television set,” but writing’s all about deleting unnecessary words, as Orwell told us.

I always took it to mean a stormy grey sky. Not literally speckled like an old telly on a channel where there was only static, but that was certainly what he was going for. Imagine that roiling, churning, grey-black-white melange, converted into a sky of a similar colour palette.

It’s so evocative, so memorable, it’s almost poetry.

Plus there’s The Doors connection:

I also always took it as reference to the Doors’ song “My Eyes Have Seen You,” that goes, “… under the television sky! Television sky!”

Lyrics sites — and my ears, this evening — say it’s actually plural: “television skies!” But that doesn’t make any difference.

Anyway, I’ve always loved it — that opening, in particular. I mean, I’m fond of the book, but don’t go back to it that often; but the opening is unforgettable.²

In having a look around before writing this, I discovered that there’s an extract on Gibson’s site, which reminds me that it’s all that good. Reading that extract, what think of most is the beats, or Hunter S Thompson.

And interestingly it isn’t done with the sky after the first line:

you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky

and:

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

Which last point suggests that Jack’s over-literal concern about the meaning of the opening might have an answer: maybe the sky was literally that staticy colour of an old TV between channels. If so, I don’t think we ever got a reason for it. But it’s implied there has been at least one war in the not-too-distant past of the novel.

Opening lines are so important. To my mind Gibson’s is up there on that bright, cold day in April, just around Barstow on the edge of the desert, with an exploding grandmother.

But to each their own, of course.

I always remember it as “… over the port…”, which frankly I think is better. ↩︎
Even if I misremember it, as described previously. ↩︎

Tory MP Claims Astrology Could Help the NHS

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 07:21:25 +0000

This should be enough to disbar someone from public life for good: Astrology could help take pressure off NHS doctors, claims Conservative MP — The Guardian. Though I notice the article is two years old. It just came to my attention via ~~Facebook~~ one of Twitter’s occasional emails.

David Tredinnick said astrology, along with complementary medicine, could take pressure off NHS doctors, but acknowledged that any attempt to spend taxpayers’ money on consulting the stars would cause “a huge row”.

Getting his defence in early, he goes on to say that his likely critics (he names Brian Cox specifically):

“… are also ignorant, because they never study the subject and just say that it is all to do with what appears in the newspapers, which it is not, and they are deeply prejudiced, and racially prejudiced, which is troubling.”

Nice tactic: he knows he’s talking bullshit, so accuses people of racism. Last time I checked, astrology wasn’t a race.

Nor was stupidity.

And in the unlikely event that anyone reading this thinks I’m just being reflexively mean and as bad as the critics he fears, here’s a considered scientific opinion. The only possible known way the positions of the planets and stars at our birth could affect us is by gravity. And while gravity does travel all through the universe, it is very, very weak — the weakest of the fundamental forces. Just look at how hard it was to measure gravitational waves. We were only able to do that in the last year, and it took colliding black holes to make enough of a splash for us to measure.

Is it possible that heavenly bodies affect us in some other, as yet unknown way? Yes. And here’s what science says about that: show us how, and we’ll study it. Demonstrate the mechanism by which this influence happens, and we’ll write down the equations that govern it and learn all about it. We’ll have to throw out all existing models of physics, but if you bring the evidence, that’s what we’ll do.

That’s science.

Memorials

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 23:29:35 +0000

The Quietus reports on a crowdfunding proposal to build a memorial to David Bowie in Brixton. I like the look of it, but they’re going to have to go some to make the required £990,000 in 21 days, given that they’re only at £45,000 now.

In other news, the new series of Broadchurch started tonight. Strong start, powerful stuff. But it now seems weirdly old-fashioned to have to wait a week to see the next episode.

Oscar Action

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:02:32 +0000

Went to see Hidden Figures tonight. I absolutely loved it. It’s a feelgood movie about space, computers¹ and civil rights. What’s not to like?

And yesterday we saw Moonlight, which is strange and interesting, and while I enjoyed it, I don’t think I got as much out of it as some did. But I spent a couple of hours this morning reading reviews of it, whch I don’t do with every film, so there’s that.

And a couple of weeks ago we saw La La Land. Which is a bit of pointless froth, but is fun enough.

Anyway, that means that on the day before the Oscars I’ve seen three of the nominated films. I don’t think this has ever happened before.

In fact I might never have seen that many Oscar-nominated films in any year at all.

Original and modern meanings. ↩︎

More Network Nonsense

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 23:55:07 +0000

More trouble with the home network today. We had a smart electricity meter installed a few days ago. Though without the “smart” part, because they couldn’t get a good enough signal down in our basement. You’d think they’d have considered that possibility in designing them, since that’s the kind of place where a lot of people’s meters are. Anyway, I think it was interfering with our powerline connection.

We have a BT HomeHub as our main router and connection out to the fibre. But the wifi was a bit crap up at the top of house. So about a year back I got a couple of powerline connectors and used them to extend the 5GHz network upstairs, using another router that we had accidentally acquired as the other access point.

It worked fine, until just the other day. The first symptom was that the Sonos app couldn’t connect to the speaker. I did some diagnosis, and everything was just weird. We could mostly connect to the outside world without any trouble, but I couldn’t connect to the HomeHub’s web interface by name. Nor, I think, by IP address. And then in one of my experiments I tried a slightly different IP address (one that shouldn’t have existed on our network), and I found myself at… a Sky box.

Now you know my dislike for that bunch. There’s no way I’d let their networking hardware on my LAN, any more than I’d subscribe to their channels. and in any case, just, what?

I wondered if our network could somehow have got crossed with one of the neighbours’. But it seemed so improbable. The neighbouring network would need to be using the same SSID, at the very least.

As you’d imagine, I started taking components out to try to isolate the problem. With just the BT HomeHub in place, things were back to normal. But as soon as I began adding parts, everything went weird.

Eventually I concluded — guessed, really — that the smart meter might be using powerline itself. We’re supposed to get a screen-based device for monitoring usage, and maybe that communicates with the meter over powerline. And the meter could have an embedded sky router? That seems unlikely, but maybe Sky have the contract to do the phoning home for EDF.

Anyway, since the root of the problem seemed to be at least partly to do with IP address conflicts, I decided to factory-reset everything and rebuild with a different IP address range (I’ve never used 172.16.0.0 before). Along with a new wifi SSID and password.

And so far so good. But I’m having trouble getting the second router to route properly via the first, so upstairs is going to be problematic till I can solve that.

All this is doing, of course, is making me wish that we could get Eeros in the UK. A self-configuring mesh network is exactly what we need, and not all this jerry-rigged nonsense.

Mac Wishing

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:37:00 +0000

Those times when you’re typing a document at work on a shonky Windows 7 machine, and longing for your Mac, where you’d have professional text-handling tools, like Marked for previewing Markdown.

Not that you can’t preview, as long as you’ve got a decent text editor such as Sublime Text (well, specifically Sublime). But things are just so much easier with Mac tools.

And I speak as one who has never had the opportunity to use the Mac professionally. I’ve used Windows machines at works since about 1993, and before that green-screen 5250 terminals.

One of these days, though.

Wifi Blues

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:43:49 +0000

I didn’t write a post tonight because I spent most of the evening struggling with wifi configuration. And the less said about that, the better.

“Ping” Pong

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 22:53:00 +0000

When the original Unix designers (or, as it turns out, Mike Muuss) chose ping as the name for the command for checking the status of a network host, it was a moment of inspired genius. The word is almost onomatopoeic in its appropriateness.

But nowadays people are pinging each other all over the place: emails, IMs, even phone calls are “pinged” at each other. “I’ll ping you an email,” they say.

The purist in me cringes a little each time I hear it. But it shouldn’t. The word that was so apposite for those early savants is just as suitable today: it communicates a needed concept. And English, of course, is a living, thriving language. So let people get on with it

Just don’t expect me to use it myself.

Civil Disappointment

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 19:00:19 +0000

I’m disappointed about the ruling on different-sex civil partnerships. But at least there’s hope for the future. The judges agreed that things need to be equalised, but they’re giving the government more time to sort it out.

You’ve got to wonder, though, why is the government bothering to fight it? It’s just a waste of public time and money. Who suffers by removing the difference?

Well, on that last, according to the Guardian article:

Jean Rathbone, a celebrant for humanist ceremonies, said opposition to extending civil partnerships came from the “marriage industry and the church.”

The “marriage industry?” I didn’t know there was such a thing. But the term makes sense when you think of the crazy amounts of money people can spend on weddings.

Anyway, onwards. There’s a GoFundMe page to contribute to help keep the campaign going. I’m in.

Maybe

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 23:55:39 +0000

Sometimes you just want to write something. Maybe you have something specific to say, maybe not. Maybe you have nothing to say at all, but just want to get something out there.

Maybe you’ve set yourself a target, and having missed a day (and being aware that you’ll doubtless miss others) you’ve decided you want to keep the average up. So that at the end of 2017 you’ll be able to look back at at least 365 posts in the year.

Maybe at the start of the year, that was about as many posts as were on your blog in its whole history. So it’s a major challenge. But maybe you keep going, even with nothing to say.

Whoops!

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 09:07:41 +0000

OK, I missed a day. Obviously it had to happen sooner or later. But yesterday I just totally forgot.

Oh well. We pick up and keep going.

Brain Explain

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 23:54:29 +0000

Interesting article on psychology wherein Robert Epstein tells us that “Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer.”

It is, as I say, interesting. But it’s also profoundly annoying in the way he asserts that the human brain is not an information processor, but then makes no attempt to explain what it is, instead.

He asserts that the brain does not hold a copy of a song it has learned, for example, but instead “is changed in a way that allows the person to sing it” (I paraphrase).

But isn’t that just another way of saying that it has stored a copy? If that change does not in some sense denote making a copy, then what exactly does it mean? What is the brain doing when the singer recalls the song? Inventing it anew, exactly (or not) as the original composer intended?

I don’t doubt that what he calls “[t]he information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence” has its limitations; but he has completely failed to explain them or provide an alternative explanation.

The truth is we don’t understand much about how the brain does what it does; and this guy knows more than most of us. But he’s a psychologist. He no doubt has a deep understanding of the workings of the human mind. But I think if you want someone to explain what we understand of the workings of he human brain, then you want that person to be a neuroscientist.

Great Brexit

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 13:13:01 +0000

And while we’re considering alternative viewpoints: “Why Brexit is Great“

Right Message, Wrong Messenger

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:53:37 +0000

I mean, he’s right, but he’s still fuckin Tony Blair.

Tony Blair calls on remainers to ‘rise up in defence of our beliefs’

Why Liberals Are Wrong About Trump

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:45:39 +0000

This is well worth reading. We should all see an alternative view from time to time:

Why Liberals Are Wrong About Trump

It's Not Tomorrow if You Haven't Gone to Sleep yet

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 23:59:48 +0000

Yeah, OK, so I missed my deadline: I’m typing this after midnight. But it’s still the same day I got up in, in sleep-cycle terms. Also in terms of how the TV listings mags give the days, too. Which can actually get a little bit confusing sometimes.

It stems, of course, from the days when all TV would have stopped by midnight or shortly after. Yes, kids, I know it’s hard to imagine, but TV stations used to “close down” at night. One or other of the channels used to even have a wee programme that was actually called Closedown, if I remember correctly. I think it was one of the weird religious things, where a priest or minister would come on and give a Thought for the Day kind of mini sermon.

Anyway, and still on TV, apparently the best comedy show around, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is having that annoying recent habit, a mid-season break. We have no idea when it will be back. And… well, if you’ve watched it…

No, I’m not going to say any more about it. Just hurry up and get back, guys.

I may actually backdate this post, just so my daily posting doesn’t show a gap. After all, I’m treating it as still Thursday 16th of February, even if the clock doesn’t.

All the Things in the World

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 21:13:36 +0000

Do you ever look around and think how amazing everything is? How it all got there? And I’m not talking about the grandeur of nature, the glory of the universe, and all that. I’m talking about all the human-made stuff.

I have often found myself in the middle of a city, or looking out of a train window at a bridge or power station, and thought, “Wow: people built this. Just ordinary people, like me, actually made all this.”

Look at ancient buildings and you realise that they used to do it without the help of modern machinery, too.

And then think about the infrastructure that’s carrying these words from where I’m typing them to where you’re reading them. Hundreds of miles of fibre and copper cables across the country. Thousands of miles of undersea cables. Satellites, and the rockets to launch them.

We’re pretty amazing sometimes, us humans.

Like I say, I’ve often thought about this kind of thing. But today, while not at work because I’m a bit under the weather ¹ I had a slightly different version of it.

I had a sudden, overwhelming sense of how much cultural work we have created. Specifically stories and TV and films. Though in fact it was comics that really triggered it.

As I say, I’m not at my best, so I wanted something simple. I ended up reading a bunch of comics on Marvel Unlimited. And no matter how many I could read in a day, I could only make the tiniest of scratches in the surface.

And in TV, Netflix seem to have a new original series or two coming out every week.

It’s not all great, of course. But just think of all those people, writing away, acting, filming. Making things.

I have a vague memory of someone in a film or TV programme mis-saying that as “beneath the weather,” but I can’t think who, or where. I kind of want it to be Josie in Twin Peaks, but I’m not sure. ↩︎

Why Are MPs Doing It?

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 18:05:18 +0000

This is the burning question of the day: why are our elected representatives in parliament behaving like idiots, frankly?

I wrote most of this a few days ago, but the question still stands.

The “it,” in case it’s not obvious, is waving through the bill to enable to government to trigger Article 50. They did so with very little scrutiny, and without accepting a single amendment. Now as I’ve made clear, I’m firmly of the opinion that Brexit must be stopped. But it’s looking increasingly likely that it won’t be.

We in the populace may have to accept that fact. But members of parliament don’t. They are (or were) exactly the ones who could have stopped it all.

It’s like there’s a bus full of schoolkids. The driver has lost control, and it’s careering towards a cliff edge. The driver jumped out and somehow survived. But the kids can’t get off. Luckily there’s another adult aboard. She grabs the wheel. Hooray, the kids will be saved as she swerves and brakes.

But wait: oh no, she isn’t braking. She’s steering more directly towards the cliff, and putting her foot down.

And all the people who could stop her are at best letting her go on, at worst egging her on. Even the ones who said they didn’t want to go over the cliff in the first place.

This simile may be getting out of hand.

Brexit Hope?

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 19:30:19 +0000

A very small hope. Brexit—take back control by the improbably-named Jolyon Maugham, suggests that a court ruling could be achieved which would ensure that we can back out of Brexit at the last moment:

The effects of an Article 50 notification are not fully understood—and not only because May is still peddling a blind bargain, a Brexit pig-in-a-poke. We do know that, should we ask and the other 27 member states agree, we could remain. But it is brave to assume that two years of exposure to the negotiating skills of Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis will not generate even one hold-out. [...] The preponderance of legal opinion is that we could, after all, decide to remain. That we could, having notified, withdraw that notification. But, given the magnitude of the issue, our parliament must know more than what the answer probably is. It must know what it actually is.
[...]
only the court to which we all subscribe can give an answer: the European Court in Luxembourg.

He/she (I’m guessing “he,” from the writing style) says:

But a case which—along with Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley, Steven Agnew, a Green member of the Northern Irish Assembly and Keith Taylor, a Green MEP—I am bringing in the Dublin High Court seeks to give us the power to travel back if we need it.

And he explains that:

We access it via a national court. And it can’t be one of ours. One of the complaints in the Dublin case is that the other 27 have breached the Treaty by excluding us from Council meetings before we’ve notified under Article 50. And that complaint can only be made by a court in one of those 27. The Irish court is the natural choice

Which all seems fair. The idea seems to be that the European Court of Justice could rule definitively that we could revoke our triggering of Article 50 at the end of the two-year negotiating period. And if the deal is bad, or especially if there isn’t one, parliament is likely to call another referendum in those circumstances, wherein we’ll know exactly what we’re voting for, and get it right this time.

A small hope, like I say. And it doesn’t protect us from the damage that’s being inflicted in the meantime.

But a small hope is better than none at all.

Placeholder

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 18:57:32 +0000

More travel today, back to London. And feeling under the weather. I wrote part of a post on the train, but won’t complete it cos we’re about to go out to see La La Land.

Proper posting will resume tomorrow.

Daily Posting Harder When You're Away

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 12:39:44 +0000

I may not get to do a proper post today, as I’m in Edinburgh visiting friends. As well, my phone’s battery has become increasingly erratic, so it could go down at any moment.

So this is my post for today, unless I get round to writing more.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Ticket Captcha Fail

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 13:12:16 +0000

Just tried and failed to book Dylan tickets. Three nights at the London Palladium in April. I got an email from Songkick telling me about it yesterday, and jumped straight on it.

To learn that tickets didn’t go on sale till 10:00 today. At which time I was going to be traveling to King’s Cross to get a train to Edinburgh, which is a wee bit inconvenient.

As it happened by just after ten I was at KX, and buying my lunch for the journey. But of course at that time I had forgotten about the tickets. By the time I remembered it was 12:44. The Palladium only holds just over 2000, so there wasn’t much hope.

But I wasn’t helped by Ticketmaster’s ludicrous captcha overkill. Seemed like every time I moved from one page to another I had to click an “I am not a robot” checkbox and then select all the pictures containing street signs, or pickup trucks, or storefronts, from an array of tiny shitty pictures. Pickup trucks and storefronts? We barely have the former in this country, and we don’t use the latter term. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s in the pictures. I was doing this on a phone, after all.

I wonder how serious their problem with automated ticket-buying bots is. I guess it must be an issue, given that the whole business of an inflated resale markets and touts at venues still exists.

Anyway, all gone in London, but you may have a chance elsewhere.

"Thread" Dread

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 19:59:38 +0000

I don’t mind people posting a tweetstorm, wherein they have a lot to say and do so via a series of linked tweets. I think there are better ways to do it; better places to host medium-length pieces of writing,¹ but whatever works for you.

And of course I don’t mind other people tweeting a link to the top of the thread and urging others to read it.

But I really don’t care for the habit of doing so while saying nothing other than, “Thread.”

I mean, come on, people: if it’s worth linking to, it’s worth writing few words to tell us why you think we should read it.

This post could fit in five or six tweets. I suppose I should have posted it that way. Except #OwnYourContent.

Actually the typical tweetstorm is probably still quite short. ↩︎

Optics

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 21:48:26 +0000

The word “optics” used to mean the science of light. It still does, of course, but it now also refers to “how things look,” in terms of public image and so on.

And from what I can tell it has only come into this use in the last year or so. I first heard it on tech podcasts, but it was recently in a front-page headline (though the second story) in The Guardian. And I heard it on the telly. I think it was in Agents of SHIELD, wherein they included an explanation of what it means.

I can see how it can be used in its new meaning, but how did it come to be used that way?

And it seems that I’m right that it’s relatively new: Wikipedia, googling: both only turn up definitions like “the branch of physics to do with light.”

Now Urban Dictionary’s top definition is exactly what I’m talking about:

What something will look like to the outside world; the perception a public relations person would have on something. First seen (at least by me) in article by Equity Private on finance blog dealbreaker

Economists repurposing words from real science to dismal? Sounds entirely plausible.

International Clash Day

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 23:50:53 +0000

I saw a hashtag on Twitter this evening: #InternationalClashDay. Well, it doesn’t take a lot, and now my actual favourite Clash song is blasting out of the Sonos: “Death or Glory,” from London Calling.

I say “actual” because if asked I would usually say that “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” is my favourite Clash song (if not overall favourite song, and very probably that too). And then I listen to London Calling again, and am reminded of the glory of “Death or Glory.”

If anyone ever asks who my favourite band is I’ll unhesitatingly say, “The Clash.” Almost unthinkingly, which may not be good; but some things become part of us.

I can almost remember when I first heard them properly. It was at Bob McGarry’s house. He played a single and then tried to impersonate John Peel, saying, “Those were The Clash,” which is how Peelie often used to back-announce things in those days. I don’t recall what track it was: “White Riot,” probably. I wasn’t overwhelmed, to be honest. It certainly didn’t have a life-changing feeling; not like when I heard Stiff little Fingers’s “Wasted Life,” possibly in the same house, or maybe it was in Brendan Conroy’s. I must write about that one someday.

But other songs and albums were waiting. I can’t honestly say what it was that finally did it for me. Maybe “Tommy Gun” or “English Civil War.” Maybe “White Man” itself. I do know that shortly after London Calling was released, my friend Steven Watt said to me, “I envy you: you haven’t heard London Calling yet.”

Somewhere in there, though — after I bought my first copy of London Calling for £3.99¹, and before I bought Sandinista for the same price — I was fully onboard, and searching for all the old singles in Glasgow record shops.

Writing that makes me think that the point of transition might actually have been when I saw my friends’ band The Varicose Veins² doing “Clash City Rockers.” In which case a cover version was key. Which is fine. One of The Clash’s most famous songs, “I Fought the Law,” was a cover, after all.

I should probably be able to explain why they mean so much to me, but I’m not sure I can. It’s probably a combination of affinity for their viewpoint, the sheer raw energy of their early songs, and their lyrics.

But maybe not. Maybe it’s just that the golden age of music is around 14-15, and lessons learned then — lessons burned on the soul — stay with us.

“The only band that matters.” It’s been quoted so often it’s become a cliché. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

It later got stolen during a party in Edinburgh. I replaced it with a second-hand copy for the same price. ↩︎
Said Brendan was the bass player. ↩︎

Criticality Escalation

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 21:56:27 +0000

Part of any kind of bug or problem reporting system is triage: the act of deciding how severe each report is and placing it into the appropriate category.

Common categories in software development are things like “Critical,” “High,” “Medium” and “Low,” for example. They would usually be given associated numeric values: probably 1-4, in this case.

I realise that I mentioned “triage,” which of course means dividing things into three; and then I’ve introduced four levels. That would be quadage, maybe? Tesserage? Anyway, three levels wasn’t enough for people: at some point “High,” “Medium” and “Low” just couldn’t cut it.

But even the terminology is breaking down now. This snippet below is based on values from an actual document written by an actual company, for reporting problems during user acceptance testing (UAT).

Severity	Description
1 – Extremely critical	Critical problem that completely stops testing…
2 – Very critical	Critical problem that prevents some testing…
3 – Critical	Non-critical problem…
4 – Less critical	Minor bug…

Imagine if they used that in hospitals: “The patient’s critical.” “Oh, not too bad, then.”

And I love how the definition of “Critical” is “Non-critical problem…”

Should a Blog Have a Theme?

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 23:34:00 +0000

Yes, yes, it’s all very meta: all I ever write about is blogging.¹ But that is exactly what I want to talk about today: is a blog better if it is only on one subject?²

I suspect that the most successful blogs in terms of size of readership are fairly closely focused on a single subject. I read several technology blogs, such as Daring Fireball, Six Colours and MacStories, which all write mainly about technology with an Apple slant. They have all achieved success by keeping that focus.³

On the other hand, there are some highly enjoyable ones that take a broader scope: Tim Bray’s Ongoing, John Scalzi’s Whatever, or Wil Wheaton‘s blog; those authors write about whatever⁴ takes their fancy.

I, as you’ll have noticed, take the latter tack. But the question is, should I be more focused? Should I concentrate on writing about politics, say?⁵

It’s worth considering, certainly, but here’s the thing: I’m not actually sure what I would focus on. I don’t think I have the single-mindedness to keep to the same subject. I value the flexibility of the old-school, personal blog.

Which is just as well, since that’s what I seem to be writing. So there you go.

Or politics. ↩︎
However broad that may be. ↩︎
Though it’s worth noting that recent world events have caused some of them to get a bit more political than previously. ↩︎
The clue is even in one of the names. ↩︎
Some would say that wouldn’t be so very different from now. ↩︎

Some More Bitface Thoughts

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 15:11:05 +0000

Something I forgot to mention yesterday was that I thought the “bitface” term was useful not just to refer to people who manipulate bits for a living (or hobby) — programmers, like myself. It can also work to discuss anyone who makes digital content: websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, photos, and so on.

We’re all moving bits around. We’re all labourers at the bitface.

The Origin of the Bitface

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 18:58:11 +0000

Things go quicker than you think. This ~~tweet~~ post¹ was inspired by a tweet, and I thought it wasn’t too long ago. But in fact it was April last year.

My friend Yusuf’s tweet inspired me to finally write about the term “biftace” and why I chose it and what it means. Actually I thought I had written this before, but it seems not.

So a long time ago, when I was first thinking of a name for my blog — before it even existed, indeed — I thought about the way the press used to refer to teachers working “at the chalkface.” The analogy with miners at the coalface was probably originally meant to disparage the labour of teachers as being less than that of miners. I’m guessing here, but considering the term seems to have originated in tabloid journalism, and tabloids tend to be disparaging of anything intellectual — though to be fair, they haven’t exactly been friends to miners either, over the years.

Anyway, I quite liked the term, and wanted to come up with something similar to refer to my own industry, that of programming. I tried out one or two for size, at least in my head. “Byteface” felt more accurate (it’s rare for an application programmer to care to much about bit-level things, and I mainly write Java, which compiles to bytecode); but it didn’t feel right.”Codeface” would have been another, but again, didn’t feel right.

“Bitface” did feel right, and so an early version became “The Bitface Diaries.” I don’t think I ever made that live.

When I started my Livejournal (which nowadays is just one of my syndication targets) I went with “Tales from the Bitface,” which I still like. And then when I decided to set up my own site I went with “A Labourer at the Bitface,” which harked back to the original impetus for inventing the word, and also alluded to my support for the Labour Party.

Which means I’m considering a rename now, as I consider my future in said party. But that’s another blog entry.

The conversation with with Yusuf was about hardware, which is not what the term was about. But I never worked out what we should call working with hardware in similar terminology.

Post! This post, not this tweet. ↩︎

Success for Micro.blog

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 20:12:37 +0000

Manton Reece’s Kickstarter campaign for Micro.blog, which I wrote about before, was successful. In fact very successful. He made his stretch goal, which means he’ll be able to employ a part-time Community Manager for the service, which should help with the kind of abuse that we’ve seen on Twitter over the years.

So congratulations to him. And as a backer I look forward to getting the devilgate username shortly.

Not that I’ll actually need a username on the site, I don’t think, as I expect to be using it to post short entries here, syndicated to Twitter. But it won’t hurt to have it. If only to stop someone else masquerading as me, like on Ebay.¹

OK, they’re not actually masquerading, but last time I looked (a long time ago) there was a more-or-less dormant account called devilgate, which wasn’t me. I mean, unless it was, and I had somehow set it up using an email address that I no longer have, or something. ↩︎

Beginning of the End

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 23:56:58 +0000

A total of 47 Labour MPs voted against the Brexit bill, joining 50 SNP MPs and seven Liberal Democrats. Just one Conservative MP, Ken Clarke, joined them in the division lobbies, to applause from Labour rebels.

A fifth of Labour MPs defy three line whip to vote against article 50 bill | Politics | The Guardian

Well done to all the rebels. But really, Tories: only one? Only Ken Clarke? Is that really you doing your duty, acting in the best interests of the country?

We’re living through the death of representative democracy.

One Month Gone

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 22:53:36 +0000

As you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve challenged myself to blog every day this year. Well, the first twelfth of the year (approximately) has gone, and I’ve succeeded so far (my problems posting last Saturday notwithstanding).

One or two posts were extremely short, maybe just a link and a few words. But most of them have been more substantial. So I’m quite pleased with my progress so far. I’m not sure that it’s making me write more — well, by definition it is, as I have to write something every day.¹

So: blogging about blogging. It’s a fine tradition. And thirty-two days in a row now.

I could write posts in advance and set them to publish on a future day, but there’s no need for that. Maybe when I go on holiday I’ll have to do that. ↩︎

Which is Worse?

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 23:29:15 +0000

I’ve been saying for a while now that Brexit is worse than Trump, because Trump is only for four years¹ — less if he gets impeached or twenty-fived, which is almost certain; but Brexit is forever.

But Trump is moving so fast, following through so fiercely on his campaign promises, that even if he doesn’t last, he’s going to do incredible damage to the USA, and to the world.

And then there’s pieces like “Trial Balloon for a Coup?,” which, along with the stories it links to, is terrifying. If the things suggested there were to come true, Trump and his successors could be forever, too.

And even if they manage to get rid of him, that means Pence takes over, which would be its own class of awful. He at least knows something about government and the Constitution, though. I guess?

So I don’t know. Brexit, if we can’t stop it, is going to be bad for the economy, jobs, and society; but despite the hard-right support for it, I don’t think it means the country is being turned into a fascist state. On the other hand, after a Tory-led hard Brexit they could make the UK into what they’ve always wanted: a tax-haven for the rich and sweatshop for the poor, with permanent austerity policies.

And there’s no opposition to speak of.

But Trump…

But Brexit…

OK, it could go to eight, but who really expects that? ↩︎

Things We Can’t See

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 23:30:38 +0000

There are certain interesting TV programmes that I’d like to see but I can’t watch for ethical reasons.

If you’ve been around here much before you’ll be familiar with my contempt for Rupert Murdoch and all his works. I’m far from alone in that attitude, of course. But this means, most notably, that I would never get Sky TV. That has only ever mildly bothered me on the odd occasion when they’re showing a film I’d like to see that isn’t available elsewhere.

But things have taken a turn for the worse lately, and it’s largely the fault of an American TV company that I generally heartily approve of: HBO.

Actually the rot probably started to set in when Sky got the rights for Mad Men Season 5, after the first four had been on BBC 2. I’ve still never got round to seeing the later seasons.

But the problem with HBO shows is that Sky has the exclusive UK right for something like five years. And that means I haven’t been able to see Westworld. Which is a shame, because everyone was talking about it a few weeks ago.

More worryingly by a long way for me, though, is that the new series of Twin Peaks, which is not being made by HBO, but something called Showtime. It’s due out in May, I believe, and guess who has the UK rights?

Showtime seem to have a streaming service, so maybe that’ll work here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t, though.

On the other hand, in doing some research when writing this, I discovered that Westworld is available to download via iTunes, so maybe the same will be true for Twin Peaks.

Either way, it’s going to cost. It would be a lot better if these kinds of things could go to proper channels.

Lost Drafts

Sun, 29 Jan 2017 19:31:02 +0000

You may think my last post was late, in that I didn’t post it on Saturday, but rather today, Sunday. And that is literally true. However, I wrote the original draft of it on Saturday morning. I then saved it as a draft in WordPress (or so I thought).

Later that day, while I was out and about, I tried to put the finishing touches to it and post it. But I couldn’t find it. It didn’t appear in the list of posts in WordPress.

And it was nowhere to be found. Luckily I had written most of the draft in a text editor (Bear, to be specific), and that was still there. So I was able to recover it. And WordPress lets you override today’s date when you post an entry, so I was able to make it be dated on the day it was actually written. I’m giving myself that one, as meeting my challenge. I wrote it on the day, even if I didn’t post it till the day after.

But ths is the second time recently that I’ve lost a draft. An email the last time, but it feels like a worrying trend. I’m going to have to be more careful with things.

On the positive side, today’s post just wrote itself.

Rezillos Gig

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 12:53:27 +0000

To the 229 venue on London’s Great Portland Street last night, to see the Rezillos, about whose reformation I’ve written before, here. I didn’t go to see them back then, so last night I put that right. I had never even heard of this place before, but apparently it’s been around since the sixties. Nice place: good sound system, and fair beer (though the Punk IPA was off).

We had a support band called the Tuts, who are three women from Brighton, and the first band I’ve instantly fallen for since Savages.

Despite what the backdrop and bass drum say, this was actually the Tuts.

Those are they. Check them out if you can.

And then we had the support band that I knew about in advance: Spizz Energi, who are a similar vintage to The Rezillos, and with similar SF-related sensibilities — at least as far as a couple of songs go. But on the night — and after the Tuts — they were actually quite dull.

But the Rezillos killed it. They were utterly fantastic. Eugene was playing guitar for the first song or two, which surprised me, but he soon put that away and just sang, along with Fay, of course.

My only slight regrets were that we didn’t get “Thunderbirds Are Go” or “Teenbeat.” But all the other top hits were there.

I realised as I was there that I only ever Instagram from gigs these days. Gig-gramming, I hereby christen it, though I expect I’m not the first.

Democracy, Representation, and the Will of the People

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 17:19:07 +0000

Further to my letter to Diane Abbot, I saw her last night on Question Time. Disappointingly she was trotting out the line that, irrespective of what they believe, MPs are now tied down by the “democratic will of the people.”

That is utter nonsense.

Did the Referendum Give a Democratic Mandate?

The referendum, as I have said before, did not provide a sufficient majority to change the country’s constitution. In fact, it did not provide a majority at all: thirty-seven percent of the electorate voted to leave. That is under no circumstances a democratic mandate.

Do MPs Have to Abide by the Referendum’s Result?

The referendum was advisory, not binding. That was very clear in the act of parliament that enabled it, though it wasn’t mentioned at all in the discussions running up to the event itself. The MPs were asleep at the wheel when the bill went through parliament: if they had given it the thought it deserved, they would have made its advisory nature explicit in the wording of the question; and more importantly, they would have set a proper threshold for it to take effect. A two-thirds majority is common in cases like this.¹

MPs make up the house of commons, half of parliament, the sovereign body in the UK. Their role is to scrutinise legislation and to vote on it in accordance with what they understand to be the best interests of the country.

No-one can say that Brexit would be in the best interests of the country. (Well, OK, they can say it; but they are demonstrably wrong.) MPs not only can vote against the triggering of Article 50: doing so is their duty.

Why Have Most MPs Switched to Being in Favour of Brexit?

Or at least that’s the way it seems.

I honestly don’t know. I have my theory, though. They are running scared of the tabloid newspapers. And maybe, as one of my friends suggested on Facebook the other day, literally scared for their lives if they were to resist the Brexit onslaught. Remembering the tragedy of Jo Cox, of course.

If the latter is really why they are doing it, then the terrorists have won. And even if it’s only fear of the tabloids, then the tabloid terrorists have won. If I were inclined that way I would call the Daily Mail and Sun traitors to their country for trying to ruin the British economy and damage British society, by forcing us out of the EU and assaulting the European Convention on Human Rights (which, if it needs to be said again and again, was written by Britons and is nothing to do with the EU).

What’s to be done?

Buggered if I know. If our democratically elected representatives won’t do what they’re elected for and act in the best interests of the country, then I can only conclude that we’re fucked.

And to be fair, we, the public, and the media, were equally inattentive to what the bill actually said. ↩︎

Obama in Your Ears

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 21:47:28 +0000

I listen to a fair number of podcasts, but I only recently learned that David Axelrod has one now. Axelrod was Barack Obama’s chief strategist and then Senior Advisor.

On a recent episode of his podcast, The Axe Files, he interviewed Barack Obama, during his last few days as president.

They’re friends, so it’s not what you’d call hard-hitting. But it is interesting. Obama as always comes across as personable, thoughtful, and very, very smart.

Which only makes the current occupant of his erstwhile office seem even worse.

But I highly recommend giving the episode a listen.

A Song of Stone by Iain Banks (Books 2017, 2)

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 23:30:25 +0000

Started towards the end of last year, interrupted for Christmas and post-Christmas reading, and taken up again later. But yes, you read that right: I interrupted reading a Banksie. Now even though it’s a reread, that’s not something that happens normally.

But then this is not a normal Banksie. My memory of it was that although I hadn’t loved it, it was good enough. But all I remembered from it was two scenes, and the overall background.

I’ve got to say now, I’m afraid, that it’s down there with Canal Dreams as my least favourite. In fact when I reread Canal Dreams at some point in the past, I found it was better than I had remembered. This, though: this was worse than I remembered.

I mean, it’s not terrible. If it were written by someone else, it would probably be fine. But no more than that, I’d imagine: no more than fine.

What’s wrong with it? Well, it’s just not compelling in the way I expect Banks’s books to be. There are no characters to speak of, except for the narrator, who is not especially endearing. That shouldn’t matter, but he’s not particularly anything else, either. His attitude to the war-torn environment in which he finds himself is essentially that it is inconveniencing him (and, to be fair, depriving him of his ancestral home).

But the guy owns a castle. I mean, how sympathetic is he going to be?

I don’t know, I think the main problem is just that it’s so bloody bleak. I was convinced that it must have been written while he was getting divorced, or otherwise going through a dark period in his life, but the Wikipedia article doesn’t suggest anything of the sort.

Anyway, there we go. Another reread. But not one that I can imagine coming back to again. And there are plenty others still to come.

I Wrote to my MP

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 21:58:04 +0000

So the Supreme Court agreed that parliament is sovereign Good for them. Must’ve been a hard decision. I decided it was time to ask my MP, Diane Abbott, to do the right thing:

Dear Ms Abbott,

Now that the Supreme Court has made its decision, affirming parliament’s sovereignty, I strongly urge you to vote against triggering Article 50.

The most urgent issue facing our country at the moment is Brexit, and the only solution to Brexit is to stop it happening. As a Labour Party member, and one who voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader twice, I’m very disappointed by the recent reports that he is planning to require MPs to vote in favour of triggering Article 50.

I know it would be unpopular with certain tabloid papers if parliament were to prevent Brexit. But in truth I think it would be popular in the country. It seems highly likely to me that if there were a second referendum now, the majority would vote in favour of staying in the EU.

That may be wishful thinking, but I don’t believe so: people have both realised they were lied to, and seen something of what Brexit will mean to the economy, to jobs, and to British society.

And in any case, parliament is sovereign, and the majority in the referendum was far too small to justify what is, in effect, a constitutional change. Surely an MP’s duty is to vote in the way that is best for the country, and it is clear that leaving the EU would not be in the UK’s best interests.

I urge you to resist the tyranny of the right-wing press, and go with the majority of Hackney North and Stoke Newington voters, and please: vote against triggering Article 50.

Yours sincerely,

Martin McCallion

That ought to do it, eh?

A Touching App

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 23:41:23 +0000

I’m typing this in MarsEdit, from Red Sweater Software, which has long been considered the best dedicated blogging client for the Mac. Daniel Jalkut, who is Red Sweater Software, is also one half of the Core Intuition podcast with Manton Reece, who is creating Micro.blog, and running the Kickstarter I wrote about a few days ago.

Anyway, a while ago Jalkut wrote and released a kind of “Touch Bar emulator” app for Macs. It simulates on-screen the Touch Bar of the new MacBooks. I just installed it, and it’s really very cool at giving you an idea of what the Touch Bar is like. Obviously you have to use it with the mouse or trackpad, as it doesn’t actually turn a section of the screen touch sensitive, but you can see what features each application offers when the Touch Bar is present, for example.

The only real downside is that it covers up a piece of screen. But it’s easy to toggle it off and on with a key combination.

All in all, fun and useful; and with a clever name: Touché.

More on The OA

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:22:13 +0000

I got to the end of The OA. Which didn’t take too long, seeing as it’s only eight episodes.

It was another one where I enjoyed the journey, but the destination was kind of annoying. Though luckily, not quite as annoying as I thought it was going to go at one point during the last episode.

One of those stories where you’re left not knowing what exactly it was trying to say. The ambiguity of the ending is not inherently bad, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind an open ending in general. But I think this falls down slightly because it doesn’t address several of the points it raises.

This (non-spoilery) review catches the mood of it all very well. I note that it describes it as “Season 1.” That may not mean there’s any plan for a season 2, though. I’d be surprised if there were, really.

They’ve also got a spoiler-filled version, which you should only go near if you’ve watched the whole thing.

Trump, Nixon, and Subjectivity

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 23:43:30 +0000

John Gruber reminds us of Hunter S Thompson’s obituary of Richard Nixon, saying it “[f]eels appropriate today” (this was yesterday, of course).

I hadn’t read it in a while, but there are some glorious lines in it:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president.
…
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

They were a crooked bunch, though, the Republicans back then. This on Spiro Agnew:

He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Which is not exactly accurate according to the Wikipedia article, but it’s not too far off.

The quote Gruber draws our attention to is this:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Which reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Which is that I don’t think I want journalism to be objective. At least not in the area of political commentary. News is different, of course. But to me the best journalistic writing comes about when the writer’s personality comes through. When their unique voice can be heard in every paragraph. HST was of course the exemplar of that, but you don’t have to be as extreme as him to write things that have some heart and soul about them, that do more than just recite the facts.

Indeed, that journalistic objectivity is part of the problem. The whole he said/she said reporting of science in particular — just think of the way climate change is discussed ¹; or the MMR fake controversy of a few years back. Journalists need to be able say, “This person says x but they’re wrong because of y and z.”

And that isn’t necessarily even being subjective. It’s just being willing to not treat both sides of a debate as equal when they’re not.

Back to HST on Nixon, and the crookedness of the Republicans:

Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”

which is something that Trump has quoted, I believe. Or if not, it’s clear that it’s what he believes.

In reality there’s no “debate.” ↩︎

Trumpeting

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 23:11:43 +0000

Not a lot to say about today. Trump is president. World War III hasn’t started yet, but presumably he’s got the nuclear codes now.

Actually it’s entirely possible that whoever is responsible for briefing the new president on such matters (and come to think of it, who is it who has that responsibility?) didn’t actually give him the real codes, or the real nuclear football. After all, they’ve probably taken an oath to defend the republic (I’m now assuming it’s somebody military) against enemies domestic and foreign, and one could safely argue that Trump is an enemy of the republic.

Indeed, an enemy of all decent people. But we’re just going to have to live with him now.

At least until they impeach him. Or invoke the 25th Amendment¹ to declare him unfit. Sooner or later one of those must happen.²

Although that will leave us with President Pence, so I don’t know…

I read up on it after the West Wing episode “25.” ↩︎
Please! ↩︎

Syndication

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 19:58:28 +0000

Further on owning your own content, I practise what some call POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. One of the elsewheres, as I’ve mentioned before, is Medium.

Medium, though having troubles recently, is in part a platform that other publications can use to build their own sites.

After yesterday’s Politics and Poetry post, I got an email this morning from somebody called Steve Saul, telling me that a new Medium-based publication called EveryVote would like to use my piece.

EveryVote is made by the people who make a site called mycongressionalrep.org, which helps people find and get in touch with their representatives in Congress. A bit like They Work for You over here, I guess, but with a specific stated aim of resisting the Trump regime.

Obviously I’m broadly in favour of their goals, so I had no problem with saying yes to their using my piece. Though it occurs to me that it’s bad professional-writing practice, as they didn’t even suggest payment (and I must admit I didn’t think of it till now). But let’s face it, I’m not a professional writer, even if I’d like to be. And the possibility that more people might come here and read my stuff, or at least read my stuff on Medium, is a genuine one.

“Doing it for the exposure,” to an extent. But not so much, since I had already done it. Anyway, my piece is currently visible on EveryVote

Poetry and Politics

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 19:55:15 +0000

It’s hard to believe that this is for real: a poem about Trump written by an American, riffing on the orange one’s Scottish heritage (which, I’m sure it’s fair to say, embarrasses our entire nation).

Indeed, something in the headline gives me pause: why would The Scotsman describe it as “created” rather then “written”? I wonder whether it has been generated algorithmically by a program.

It must be a fawning, sycophantic, arse-kissing algorithm of the worst sort, if so. And if not — and if it’s not some particularly subtle satire — then the guy behind it is… unbelievable, assuming he’s writing from the heart. And has one.

But if you’ve gone and read that, then you should wash your mind out with Hal Duncan’s response, which is not only better poetry, it’s written in modern Scots, and contains lines like this:

Ah’ll spit a rhyme for ye: Ye cannae write.
…
Best of McLeod? Don’t make me fuckin laugh.
Yer tangerine nazi rapeclown’s fuckin loathed
by Scots who mind when rebels wurnae naff
gold-shittered gobshite Emperors unclothed.

But don’t wait here. Go and read the whole thing.

Thanks, Obama (for Real)

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 22:26:07 +0000

Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of dthe most prominent whistleblowers in modern times when she exposed the nature of modern warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with a 35-year military prison sentence, is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama.

From The Guardian

Nice one. Next, pardon Snowden?

The Only Good Brexit is No Brexit

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 19:46:22 +0000

38 Degrees is consulting the public on a “DIY Brexit,” wherein the public can give their opinions on what Brexit should look like, and supposedly the results will be looked at by a group of think-tanks who are being consulted on the matter.

The things people have come up with so far all seem pretty good and sound, at a first glance (kind of hard to read, the way it’s presented with big fixed header and footer).

But. But what we want is not the best Brexit we can get. What we want is no Brexit at all.

And I think I can safely say I speak for the majority when I say that. But Theresa May and her crazy government don’t look like they’re willing to listen to anyone about it.

You know how all recent prime ministers get “isms” named after them? Ever since Thatcherism, at least? Well this one gets an alternative suffix: Not Mayism. Mayday!¹

And not the good one. That’s May Day. ↩︎

The Strange Case of the Lost Reply

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 22:56:00 +0000

I’ve tried various email clients on iOS, but for quite a while now my favourite has been Dispatch from Clean Shaven Apps. As well as the many integrations and efficient handling of archiving and deleting emails, I like it because it is one of the only apps that lets you order mail in the One True Way.

Which in case you’re wondering is oldest at the top. Newest at the top is fine for blogs and similar news-based things, but it’s not right for anything else. Call me old-fashioned, but that was the default in Eudora and probably in Mutt and Elm and all those too, and it was and remains the best way.

Even Outlook lets you order it oldest-first. Though disturbingly few people take advantage of it.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that today Dispatch let me down. I was typing a reply on my iPad this morning. The reply composition window looks like this:

I did something — I’m not sure what — that made the composition window slide off to the right. Part of it was still visible, so I tried tapping on it. And it disappeared.

There was no prompt, and nothing in my drafts folder. All that I had typed was gone, like tears in rain.

I’ve just been trying to reproduce it, and I can, up to a point: if you slide the compose window to the right it goes off out of the way, like this:

Which is actually quite useful, because it makes the compose window non-modal and lets you interact with your other messages. But somehow something can go wrong, even though I can’t make it happen now.

Not the end of the world. I retyped the mail. But that’s not good enough, Dispatch. You have to be able to trust your email client.

Oh, Eh?

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 22:27:51 +0000

I watched the first episode of Netflix’s The OA last night. Very interesting. I’m looking forward to watching the rest, and speculating about what “OA” might stand for. “Operational Assistant”? “Overcome with Angst?” I kind of want it to have something to do with UFOs, but that would mean it had to be “Object” something.”Object Activity,” for example.

But none of that would make much sense. And I’m betting that it won’t be anything easily guessable.

One could of course google it, but that would be to walk into a pit of spoilers, and I came into this knowing exactly nothing about it, which is great.

Also watched the first episode of Person of Interest, which my son has been singing the praises of for some time. No bad, looks quite promising.

And (a bit of a TV-fest last night) a few episodes of That 70s Show, which my daughter has been singing the praises of. Quite funny, quite (but not exactly) like the real 70s. The joke may wear thin, but it should be good until then.

Probably a Good Time to Download Your Twitter Archive

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 19:55:32 +0000

This Bloomberg article may not be entirely serious, but it is, you know, Bloomberg:

There’s a strange idea circulating among Mexican currency traders. Well, more of a joke really. But there’s a certain logic to it.

It goes like this: Instead of spending its precious reserves to defend the peso, Mexico should just buy Twitter Inc. — at a cost of about $12 billion — and immediately shut it down.

The idea being that it would be the easiest way to stop the Trumpet tweeting negative things about Mexico.

I don’t know, he’d just find another forum, no doubt. Shit, in a week’s time he’ll be able to put whatever he wants on Whitehouse.gov.

[T]hat the idea was even raised in jest shows how just how frustrated Mexicans are that their economy and the value of their savings are at the mercy of the seemingly random musings coming in 140-character bursts from Trump’s Twitter account. It’s a sentiment that presumably would be shared by U.S. investors in companies like, say, General Motors Co. or Lockheed Martin Corp., but in Mexico, the pain, and the accompanying despair, appear to be on a much greater scale.

A lot more than Mexico is at the mercy of those “seemingly random musings.”

Just to Make the Numbers

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:42:53 +0000

Does it count if you write a blog post just so that you’ve written one today? Well, yes, of course it does. After all, you wouldn’t want to spoil an unbroken run of twelve days.

The purpose of doing this is to make myself write and publish something each day. The act of writing is the thing, even if I don’t have a specific subject to discuss.

I could, for example, mention that while I was reading the Twin Peaks book recently, I ordered the boxed set on DVD. So I’ve started rewatching that. Only two episodes in (or the pilot and one episode, if you want to describe it that way).

I find there’s a lot I don’t remember, not surprisingly, as I haven’t seen it since the 90s. Each episode comes with an optional introduction by The Log Lady. They are suitably obscure and ambiguous.

I hear today that the new series is going to be out in May. How we watch it in the UK is another matter, and I’ll have words to say about that in the future.

Duck(Duck)ing the User Interface

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 21:10:44 +0000

It must be well over a year now since I switched my main search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. I changed partly because of concerns over Google’s handling of privacy issues, and partly just to try out the new one.

DuckDuckGo’s results are usually fine, and if you ever can’t find something and you think Google might be better, it’s easy to redirect your search there by adding “!g” at the end. There are other special codes like this, such as “!w” to search Wikipedia.

So it’s all fine. But what I’ve only gradually realised is that I much prefer the Duck’s user interface. And this is for one simple reason: infinite scrolling.

Now, infinite scrolling isn’t always good, and I’m sure it has a negative effect on things like usability and caching, in at least some cases. But on DDG (as I’m sure no-one ever calls it), it makes the whole search experience better.

Because sometimes there are more than ten Interesting hits. Or the interesting ones are long after the tenth. But with Google, you get ten on a page. And then you’ve got to click or touch a link to go to the next ten. And it just feels so old fashioned.

After just a few months on DDG (as we should all start calling it from now on) you can’t go back to Google without feeling a weird interrupt at the end of a page, before you go, “Oh, yeah, gotta click that.”

It’s just an inferior experience.

Surely There's a Better Answer Than That?

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 19:37:10 +0000

For one reason or another we wanted to remind ourselves¹ of the Spanish word for “south.” I like to ask Siri for that kind of thing, because speaking to your phone is just easier than unlocking and typing sometimes. And Siri is not bad. It quite often gets the right answer for this kind of thing.

Not so much there, though.

So it correctly understood my question; but instead of feeding it to Google Translate or another translation service, it sent it to Wolfram Alpha, seemingly. And that came back with intriguing answer that the Spanish for “south” is “about 99027 people.”

Seems like an unwieldy way to specify a compass direction.

I say “remind” because I learned Spanish at school, my beloved is a linguist, and our daughter is learning it, so we knew really. ↩︎

Social Media is Like the Railways?

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 20:59:15 +0000

There’s a piece in the Guardian entitled “Why social media is like the railways – and must be saved. I’m not sure about the title, but it’s a good piece, by Paul Mason (in fact, looking at the URL I suspect that wasn’t the original title).

He starts by talking about SoundCloud, which is, for me at least, one of those sites that you would never think of going to; you just follow a link to something on it. Mind you, increasingly many sites are like that, and have been since perhaps the early days of blogging. Anyway, Mason says:

The Berlin-based music service started as a super-cool platform for people who made music and wanted to share it. Last week, its owners admitted it was losing a million dollars a week, and could run out of cash before the end of the year.

…

The whole future of the little orange cloud now rests on whether it can get people to subscribe – for money.

Which is interesting, and it’s one of those things that the net is a better place for it existing, and I’d be sad to see go away — but I can’t imagine ever subscribing to it.

In the same week, another achingly cool online publisher, this time of blogs, Medium, also hit trouble.

“Achingly cool”? Medium? I’m not convinced (disclaimer: for what it’s worth, my posts are automatically crossposted to Medium, among other places).

He goes on to talk about how none of the social media sites is profitable, except of course for Facebook. He refers to

the ailing internet platforms – not just Soundcloud and Medium but Ello, a wannabe rival to Facebook, and Tumblr

Tumblr is ailing? that seems surprising, considering how popular it is. But who knows (it’s also one of the other places I mentioned above). He goes on to exhort us to return to these sites, dust off our old user IDs and so on, and enjoy them again:

It will feel a bit like time travel – back to the period around 2010-12, when social media was associated with postmodernity, self-produced music and revolt, not fake news, white supremacy and rule by old men. But usage alone will not save the collaborative tools. We need new, cooperative ownership models. If basic word processors are effectively now shipped free with every device, so too could be a nonprofit music-sharing service, a free blogging platform and a place to keep in contact with our friends, without intrusive data-farming and a deluge of ads.

As to that, a free blogging platform — while not “shipped”, is easily available: Wordpress. And there are others, of course. But it links back to what I was saying the other day: you’ve got to own your own content if you want it to be safe from services disappearing.

As to that “railways” reference in the title, here’s how he finishes:

Medium, Soundcloud and ultimately Twitter are – like the railways – worth saving even if they cannot be run at a profit. 2017 can and should be a year in which the users of platforms reclaim these freedoms not as privileges but as rights.

I’ve got a lot of time for that view, actually, but those sites are mostly set up on a capitalist model (even if they have a community spirit), and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

Blog Misbehaviour

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:20:25 +0000

This blog runs, like so many others, on Wordpress. Recently I’ve noticed some strange behaviour.

When I posted an entry, it wouldn’t show up. Not at first, and sometimes not for a long time afterwards. The entry was there: you could see it if you followed the link, for example if you came from Facebook or Twitter, to both of which I automatically distribute.

Eventually I did a bit of googling, and it turns out that caching plugins can have this effect. I had caching plugins installed. I disabled them, and suddenly everything was displaying normally.

You want to cache your content to help with the site’s performance. Cached pages should be served from the webserver’s filesystem, rather than generated from the content in the database each time they’re requested.

So I’ll need to investigate getting a plugin that isn’t problematic, but for now, if you’ve noticed anything odd about the site, it should all be be OK again.

Independent Microblogging

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 19:27:16 +0000

Twitter is great in many ways, but it’s far from problem-free. (Thought experiment: if Twitter hadn’t existed, would Trump have got elected?)

The abuse and lack of tools to combat it are of course the major ones. Lindy West’s Guardian article on leaving Twitter is only the latest such.

But another problem is the old one of owning your own words. Of controlling the platform on which you publish. I’ve posted briefly about this before (though that was Google, rather than Twitter). Sure, Twitter isn’t likely to go bust and delete everyone’s tweets without any warning. But you never know when they’re going to change a policy, or change ownership, or make some other change that — deliberately or not — shuts down your access, removes your entire history, or otherwise lessens or removes the experience.

There have been attempts to build open alternatives, such as Diaspora, but I confess that I’ve only ever come away from it confused.

It would be better if there were a simple way we could all publish to our own sites, but still get the benefit of Twitter’s network. Say hello to Micro.blog, a new approach from Manton Reece, blogger, podcaster and developer.

It should allow us to post Tweet-style short posts on our own sites, and also send them to Twitter. Which may give us the best of both worlds.

As well as developing the service and the app, he’s writing a book about the subject of indie microblogging, and has a Kickstarter going to help him out. It’s worth offering a few bucks if you’re at all interested in the matter.

Content Provider

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 18:24:38 +0000

I may not get to write a proper post today, as I haven’t yet and we’re about to go and see Stewart Lee: Content Provider, so I probably won’t manage to later.

So this is by way of meeting my challenge.

Things That Should be Easy

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:30:00 +0000

It ought to be easy to install a software package on Linux. I mean, it usually is. All modern distros ship with package managers, right? So all you should have to do is type (Debian-based example):

sudo apt-get install PACKAGE-NAME

and away you go. Right?

Well, usually. But today, not for me.

I have a NAS box from Western Digital, which is really a little Linux server with a biggish disk drive. Some time ago I replaced the shipped distro with a newer one, but it was so long ago, and it’s been so quiet and reliable that I can’t remember what version, exactly.

So first, there seems to be no way to interrogate it to see what distro it is. I mean, there must be, and this page lists several ways, but none of them work on this box. I mean, uname shows me the kernel version and all that, but not the distro.

Anyway, all that doesn’t really matter. I was only doing it to install Node, and I was only wanting to install Node so that I could run AirSonos. We got a Sonos Play:1 for the kitchen recently, and it’s great, but the one weakness is that it doesn’t support playing from an arbitrary source one your phone, such as, say, your podcast app of choice (Overcast, obvs).

AirSonos is supposed to effectively turn the Sonos into an AirPlay speaker, so you can easily send audio to it from iOS devices. And you want it to be running on a server, so it’s available all the time.

But it turns out that Node does not want to install on my NAS. Either by apt-get, as above, or by downloading the binary and unpacking it. (That installs it, obviously, but it won’t run.)

I’m going to try running SonoAir on my MacBook. That’s a wrapper round AirSonos, and obviously it’ll only work (assuming it does at all) when my MacBook is awake. But life’s too short.

Getting Rid of Offensive Publications in Apple News Widget

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 23:56:23 +0000

This is not a “How To” article, it’s a “How Do I?” one. I’ve been googling (or duckducking) to try to find the answer, but to no avail yet.

Take a look at this screenshot:

Screenshot of Apple News widget.

Note that those “Top Stories” include headlines from the Sun and Sky News. Two publications whose names and words I do not want to see polluting my iPad or iPhone.

But I can’t find any way to get rid of them. The widget details are linked to the Apple News app, and in the app itself you can specify preferences, but it doesn’t seem to affect what appears in the widget.

So if anyone has any idea of how to influence what appears there, please drop me a comment, or tweet me a link or something.

And yes I know I could disable the widget and/or delete the app, but I quite like the idea of it, in principle at least. And yes, I also know that avoiding the views of publications I dislike is only going to increase my own bubble effect. But you’ve got to have standards. I could cope with the Telegraph or even the Times (though I’d prefer not to). But the Sun? Come on.

Trump Not Appointing Palin as Scientific Advisor

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 08:06:08 +0000

There’s a story doing the rounds on Facebook that Trump has appointed Sarah Palin as Science and Technology Advisor. Terrifying, if true. But a rudimentary search tells us it’s false.

The clue was the site it was reported on — which I can’t find at the moment as I now can’t locate the post where I saw it (bloody Facebook). Not that I would have linked to it, but I might have given its name. People need to look at the sites they’re reading and evaluate them for credibility. But apparently that’s hard.

The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost (Books 2017, 1)

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 07:18:18 +0000

In case it’s not obvious, the reading year starts and ends on Christmas Day. This was a Christmas present, and is also preparation for the new Twin Peaks series, which is due to air sometime this year (though what we’ll have to do to see it in the UK is an open question, and one which I’ll discuss at another time).

Mark Frost was, of course, half of the team that created the original series. This book is presented as a mysterious dossier which has been given to an FBI agent to analyse. It consists of a series of extracts from government and newspaper reports, and comments by someone who signs themselves “The Archivist.” These are further annotated by the FBI agent.

The subject matter is mysteries: the many UFO reports, going back to Roswell and before; the mysterious goings on around Twin Peaks itself; stories of the Illuminati and the masons, and so on. Some of the quoted reports are, I assume, real. Many are part of the Twin Peaks universe. As a whole the work is entertaining if you like that sort of thing — which I very much do — if a little unsatisfying. Though it has certainly whetted my appetite for the new series.

Recent Events

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 18:01:56 +0000

Just in case you think that I haven’t been paying attention to recent events… yeah, I know, how likely is that…?

Brexit? Trump? Celebrity deaths? 2016 is well behind us — though regarding Trump and Brexit, the worst is still ahead.

But anyway, I haven’t said anything about my work status since back in the summer. So I should bring things up to date.

I had a few interviews, but no serious interest. Then July was ending, and I was beginning to think that soon we’d be going on holiday, and once we got back it would be nearly September. That was longer than I fancied going without having something lined up.

And then I got a call from a recruiter telling me there was a bank in the City looking for someone with my exact skill set for a six-month contract. It was supporting — and to some extent building on — the products that I used to make at Misys. That wasn’t quite what I had seen myself doing. I was looking for something that was more of a change, more of a challenge.

But I went in to talk to them and it all sounded pretty good. A significant number of the people who work there are ex-Misys, and I know them, so it would make for a relatively smooth transition.

But a contract. I hadn’t really intended to go down that route. Still, the idea of being a freelancer appealed. I’d like to have a go at indie development one of these days, and the two can be complementary. We’ll see where that goes. But I decided to go for it. Set up the limited company (more on that in a later post), discussed the contract (including while I was on holiday) and started at the end of August.

And it’s… OK. The people are good, the location is great. But the work is not that interesting, and the internal politics are… interesting.

And there’s the pressure of knowing that you’re dealing (sometimes) with a live system. With real people’s actual money. Having only worked for a software company before, that feels unexpectedly high-pressure.

All things considered, when my contract is up for renewal at the end of February, I don’t think I’ll be renewing it (even assuming they offer it to me, which they probably will). So I’ll be looking for another position shortly. Maybe contract, maybe permanent again. It depends what comes up.

The Year Turns Again

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 23:48:30 +0000

New Year’s Day, by all the fates. Another trip round the sun, another twelve months have passed. As usual I wonder, “Where did that year go?”

I’ve been fairly consistent in blogging over the last year, I think: consistently lightweight, that is. I only missed one entire month, by the looks of it (March). But it’s been infrequent at best.

So as a kind of New Year’s resolution (I don’t really go in for them normally) I’m planning — no, thats probably too strong; proposing, let’s say — to make 2017 the year of blogging every day.

Every day. It’s a big challenge, I know. But I think that it’s only if I put it out there publicly that there’s any chance I’ll carry through with it.

Or not. We’ll see. My thinking is that even a traditional link post will count, since I write at least a few words with those.

Anyway, Happy New Year, if you’re reading this and I haven’t wished you it already.

Complicity and The Business by Iain Banks (Books 2016 16 & 17)

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 07:09:20 +0000

The big Banksie reread finally gets under way again. There’s no particular connection between these two except that I read them back-to-back over two three days, partly when I was off work sick.

Complicity is just as brutal as I remembered, though I didn’t remember all the details, which was good. It feels dated now, but that’s partly just because it’s of its time, and partly, I suppose, because I remember reading it back in 1993.

The Business I remembered even less of — I know I’ve only read it once before, while I think I’ve read Complicity twice. It’s written from a woman’s PoV, and I’m sure some would say it isn’t convincing as such. Hard for me to judge that, but I liked being in the company of the narrator. Probably more so than in the former book.

It’s also Banksie’s first — but not last — to posit a secret (or secretish) organisation with its fingers into everything, that is not an evil conspiracy. Or his first non-SF to do so, at least. The Culture could be described in those terms.

Its major flaw is that there is no real sense that she’s ever in any danger. Even if things don’t turn out quite the way she’d like, the worst that could happen is that her stellar advancement in the titular organisation might be slowed, and maybe she won’t get the married man she’s kind of in love with.

All good fun, though. And they do have one thing in common: they’re both so dated that they spell laptop “lap-top”! Must be a publisher’s quirk, because I don’t think anyone in the real world ever spelt it that way.

Classy

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 01:34:26 +0000

I just watched the last episode of Class, BBC 3′s web-only¹Doctor Who spinoff.

It is really, really good. If you haven’t seen it you should stop reading this now and go and watch. Really. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Eight episodes with special guest appearances at the start and (spoilers) the end, about five young people in the famous Coal Hill School. Famous from the very first episode of Who, of course, right up to the 50th and beyond. It’s now an academy, not surprisingly. And it seems that it is — or always has been — something of a nexus in space and time.

I’ll not say much more, as it would be hard not to get spoilery. But I will tell a little anecdote of how I watched it.

I saw episode 6 first. Why? Because I was careless, and iPlayer has stupid defaults. I went to the site and searched and found the programme, and started watching the first episode it presented me with. Because that would be the first episode, obviously, right?

Wrong. The rationale is sound: iPlayer is a catch-up service; and the episode you’re most likely to want to catch up on is the current one. So the episode I saw first was 6, “Detained”, which must have been current at the time.

Thing is, I don’t think there can have been a “Previously…” at the start — though there was later — or I think I’d have noticed. I was just impressed with how it started straight in, giving touches of backstory in moments of dialogue, so that by the time the five teenagers were locked in the detention classroom and the plot began to unfold, I was really impressed with this in medias res beginning and compact storytelling.

Well, of course, after that I realised my mistake and went back to the beginning. And when I got to 6 again it did have a “Previously…” But if you didn’t start at the beginning, it was probably the best one to start at.

Is it great? Maybe. It’s certainly got the potential to be so. It’s better than early Torchwood, maybe not quite as good as the best of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Well worth watching, and I hope there will be more serieseseseses.

Well, that’s a tautology now, of course. ↩︎

Again, Again

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 14:32:51 +0000

A long time ago — a long, long time ago: I can’t have been more than thirteen, maybe younger — I got an accidental book.

It was in John Smith’s in Glasgow: St Vincent Street’s glory. I thought it was now long gone, but apparently not. I was there, probably with my Mum — no, undoubtedly, as I didn’t go to Glasgow on my own till I was about sixteen — I’m guessing in about January, to spend Christmas money (often given in the form of Book Tokens in those days, of course).

I bought a stack of books. I don’t now recall what any of them were, but they were almost certainly mostly or entirely SF.

As was the freebie that I got by accident. If memory serves I paid at the checkout and gathered up my books, or more likely the assistant put them in a bag for me, and then when I got on to the train back to Balloch, I took them out to have a look.

And found I had more than I’d bargained for. Worse, more than I’d paid for. There was an extra book in my bag. One that I had never seen before, that I hadn’t chosen. One with an interesting title.

Again, Dangerous Visions, Book 2, edited by Harlan Ellison.

My immediate feeling was guilt. I had, effectively, stolen a book. I was a good Catholic boy, and would never have stolen anything.

Then surprise: how had it got there? Presumably the assistant had mixed it up with the purchases of the person before me. There was probably someone sitting on a train right at that moment, realising that one of their books was missing. Poor them.

Poor them, but lucky me. I don’t think I told my Mum it had happened. Or if I did, she must have said not to worry, it was too late to do anything; and that doesn’t sound like her. One way or another, we made no attempt to return it.

But I think among the confusion and excitement of it all, I must have been slightly annoyed that it was the second volume: not much use without that first. And that “Again”: did that mean that the whole thing was some kind of follow-on?

Obviously I know now that it did. When I went to university a few years later and met a community of fans, when they mentioned the famous Dangerous Visions (non-) trilogy, I had some idea of what they were talking about.

I’d like to say that it was some kind of formative experience. That reading those legendary short stories changed my approach to the genre, or my understanding of fiction, or what have you. But I can’t really say that it did.

I eventually read the stories. Not having the earlier volumes of an anthology doesn’t cause any problem. Though I think I took the original, Dangerous Visions out of the library. Some of them were great, but I don’t recall finding any of them particularly memorable (though you never know: some things burrow deep). But one of the titles stuck with me, and is why I started writing this today.

That was “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village,” by Dean Koontz. Though I couldn’t have told you who it was by, and I’m quite surprised to find that it’s Koontz, who I think of as a horror author.

It came to mind because of something my beloved was saying about this interview between George Osborne and Yuval Noah Harari. She mentioned the “global village” idea, and my mind jumped back to the story and the cascade of memories that go with that book. I downloaded the Kindle version of the book (and the first one) and started writing this.

As I recall, that global village involved telepathy, and is very much not the one we are living in. But that doesn’t matter. It’s time to reacquaint myself with some old New Wave SF.

Screwjack by Hunter S Thompson (Books 2016, 15)

Sun, 20 Nov 2016 17:56:04 +0000

Long-time HST readers like me will be familiar with this title. It always appeared on the dust jacket or inside the book in the list of other books by the author. But you never saw it anywhere. Back before Amazon, when bookshops were still a common haunt (and dinosaurs roamed the Earth), you used to look all over the shop for Thompson’s work, because it was rarely consistently filed. That is, not every bookshop put it in the right section. After all, what is the right section? History? Sociology? Politics?

Really, the right section is probably “Journalism,” but most bookshops don’t (or didn’t) have such a section.

Anyway, it turns out that Screwjack wasn’t journalism, but fiction, and in any case was a limited-edition release of only a few hundred or so, and when the web and eBay came along, copies used to go for hundreds of pounds or dollars.

Sometime after he died it got a proper release, and I finally got round to buying it. It’s a slim, small-format hardback, containing three stories. And I’ve got to say that just a few weeks after reading them, they’re almost totally unmemorable. So maybe there was a good reason for not releasing them properly all those years.

Oh well. One for the completists.

Can We Stick With Labour Now?

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 21:11:39 +0000

This story about Labour giving in to Brexit is the latest straw in a… problematic few months. I’m not sure I can stay a member of the Labour Party if the leadership is now as definitively opposed to sanity as this. While still failing to actually oppose this terrible government.

Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock by Amy Raphael (Books 2016, 14)

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 22:34:17 +0000

Been reading this over a period of a year or so, on and off, so it’s not really this year’s book. But that’s no reason not to write about it. It was published in 1994 and consists of interviews with a selection of the women who were relatively newly on the scene, or were established but getting some more visibility, around that time. It was the time of Riot Grrrl, among other movements.

So among the interviewees are Courtney Love, Huggy Bear, Liz Phair, Tanya Donnelly, Kristin Hersh, Kim Gordon… even Bjork. But there’s someone missing from the book. Nearly all of the interviewees, when talking about their influences or other women who were doing something interesting at the time, mention PJ Harvey. And she is not interviewed. Which is a shame. I would have loved to have read her thoughts on making music back then (or now, for that matter). And I’m sure Amy Raphael would have loved to interview her, so I’m guessing she didn’t want to do it.

But aside from that, it’s an interesting work. Very much a document of its time, though no doubt the problems and challenges that these women faced have not changed that much. A similar book today, though, would have a very different complement of interviewees; and indeed would need a different subtitle: women musicians are much more prominent in pop and R&B today, from Beyoncé on down. But maybe not so much in rock, unfortunately.

Well worth a read, though.

Trump/Schulz

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 09:23:34 +0000

If you’re a fan of the Illuminatus trilogy, or the works of Robert Anton Wilson in general, the idea that Trump’s speech is like the last words of Dutch Schulz is particularly amusing.

On the Pronunciation of "X"

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 14:56:23 +0000

Now that the new version of Apple’s PC operating system has launched, some thoughts on something that’s been bugging me for a while.

Apple’s OS was called “OS X” from about 2000 or so. At one time it was “Mac OS X,” then at some point they dropped the “Mac” part. Now, of course, they’re dropping the “X,” (and the capital “M”) and going over to calling it “macOS.”

In the old version, I knew that the “X” was the Roman numeral for 10. It was release 10 of their operating system, so that was fine. But I always pronounced it as the letter “X” in my mind. Not least because, as the version numbers incremented, they were presented like this: 10.2, 10.3, and so on. Or more fully, “Mac OS X 10.2.”

So how were we meant to say that? “Mac Oh Ess ten ten point two”? Surely not. You can see why my internal monologue pronounced it “Oh Ess Ex ten point two”.

And so it was and so I left it. I knew the “X” had originally meant “ten,” but I couldn’t imagine that anyone would still pronounce it that way. Until I started listening to podcasts.

Wherein erudite, knowledgable Apple users such as John Gruber, or the hosts of the Accidental Tech Podcast were clearly heard to talk about “Oh Ess ten.” Though they mostly avoided saying the full, convoluted, Roman and Arabic mix of numbers. I think I did once hear David Sparks on Mac Power Users saying “Oh Ess ten ten point eight” (or whatever minor release number it might have been).

Still, I didn’t let it bother me. It wasn’t doing any harm, after all.

But then people started talking about relative sizes. I think I first noticed it when retina screens were being discussed. If you’re going to provide graphical resources to support both retina and non-retina screens, you have to provide versions of the image files at different resolutions. These are referred to in writing as “1x” and “2x” versions.

Now, it is obvious to me that that isn’t a letter “x” there (even thought that’s what I typed), but a multiplication symbol. More properly rendered as “×”.¹ The idea being that you have the original file, and one at twice the resolution. The multiplication symbol is said as “times.” So we have “one times” and “two times.” Right?

But those pesky podcasts.

Soon they were filled with “one ex” and “two ex.” It was the OS X problem all over again — but this time in reverse!

But I gradually realised I might be wrong in my assessment. Graphics files are complicated beasts, after all. A file suitable for a retina screen doesn’t have twice the pixels needed for an older screen, for example: it has four times as many. There are twice as many on the x-axis and twice as many on the y-axis.

And that’s when I realised that the “x” might refer to the x-axis. Saying a file was “2x” could be shorthand for saying that it had twice as many pixels on both its x- and y-axes.

In which case pronouncing it “two ex” would be right after all. Perhaps the terminology came from developers and designers referring to size of the files.

Except… I have subsequently heard people say other numbers followed by “ex,” when what they clearly meant was a multiplier. Specifically, I heard CGP Grey saying “ten ex” when talking about a tenfold increase in something like YouTube subscribers. And he used to be a maths teacher, so he should really know better.

Can we ever escape from this insidious invasion of “ex” into spaces where “times” belongs? Probably not. But it’s disturbing when otherwise-smart people make themselves sound so ignorant.

(And don’t get me started on the full-stop or period character that splits up those version numbers. Hint: it’s “point”, not “dot.”)

That may or may not look any different from the letter, depending on the typeface you are seeing it in, but it’s a different unicode character. ↩︎

Huffington Trump

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 22:40:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to note that I love the way that every article in The Huffington Post about Trump has this note appended:

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

Reamde By Neal Stephenson (Books 2016, 13)

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:15:09 +0000

It’s a page-turner, an engrossing thriller. I got through the 1040 pages in about a week of being on holiday in Greece (it would have taken me a lot longer at home, especially if I had been working).

Its biggest flaw is exactly how much of a well-oiled machine it is, how beautifully, unreasonably jigsaw-like the pieces all fit together, so that all the players end up together at he right place at the right time for the denouement (which event itself takes up probably close to 200 pages). It’s a bit — no, extremely unlikely that all of the disparate characters could have come together just as they do.

But by the time it’s clear they’re going to, we’re so engaged with them all that we want it to happen just like it does. It’s only when standing back afterwards (or to be fair, during breaks when in the course of reading) that you we think, “This is actually kind of preposterous.”

But still, preposterous fun.

The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman and others (Books 2016, 12)

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 23:27:57 +0000

Gaiman returns to the character and story that made him famous (and wins the graphic story Hugo award by doing so).

This is a prequel to the original story. In that, you’ll recall (or if you don’t you should go and read them), Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, starts by being captured by a wizard as he returns exhausted from an earlier adventure.

This is that earlier adventure. And it’s right up there with the rest of the Sandman stories. Highly recommended.

Normal by Warren Ellis (Books 2016, 11)

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:01:31 +0000

I’m not sure this counts as a novel, by length, but never mind. Released as four Kindle-only ebooks over four weeks, it builds up into at least a novella. And a pretty god one. Very much built on problems of today, it concerns a group of people at an institution that cares for sufferers of “abyss gaze”: futurists who have thought too much about possible futures, until doing so broke their brains.

It’s an interesting idea, and of course to make it a story, a crisis happens. Well worth a read.

Sally Heathcote, Suffragette by Mary M Talbot, Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot (Books 2016, 10)

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 18:18:10 +0000

After Mary & Bryan’s biography/autobiography hybrid about Mary herself and James Joyce’s daughter, they added another collaborator to write this fictional life story about a woman at the heart of the suffragette movement. Compelling, moving, and educational. What more could you want?

The Sadness of Empty Seats

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:51:18 +0000

It is very sad to see all the empty seats at the Olympics in Rio — especially remembering how hard it was to get tickets four years ago.

I expect that not many people in Brazil are well enough off to afford tickets — though you’d think it would be incumbent upon the organisers to set the prices at a level where people could afford them. It’s not as if it’s the ticket-buyers who pay for the bulk of the games’ costs, after all. That would come from the corporate sponsors. Or so I would expect: I don’t have the actual figures.

You’d think that there would be a lot of tourists. I’m sure there are, but it looks like it’s not enough to fill the seats. Maybe getting to Brazil and buying the tickets is just too expensive for many.

And of course there were empty seats visible at London 2012 too, which annoyed everyone — especially when we discovered that many, many seats went to corporate sponsors, who then just didn’t bother to use them. But then, everything was shown as sold out on the ticketing site. Aparently in Rio that is not the case.

Oh well, you get a better view on the telly, anyway.

Proposed New Cycling Race for the Olympics: the "Commuter Race"

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 19:24:33 +0000

This is something that I wrote some notes on around the London 2012 Olympics, and just sitting here watching the Men’s Road Race on day 1 of Rio 2016, I thought I’d dig it out and finally post it.

Competitors have to ride stock bikes — no fancy superlight frames or custom wheels; just ordinary commuter-type bikes. They can be set up for the individual, but they must have mudguards and lights and EITHER a rack and one pannier OR the competitor must carry a backpack or messenger bag; the bag to hold a weight equivalent to (say) a laptop and a change of clothes.

The race to be a typical commute distances (say 5 miles?) carried out over normal commuting streets, during rush hour, with normal traffic.

Competitors get disqualified for jumping red lights or going the wrong way down a one-way street; and receive time penalties for going on the pavement (maybe disqualification there too, actually). They may receive a time bonus (or at least clock-stoppage) for unreasonable delays, as for example when an articulated lorry is reversing across the road and holding everybody up.

To be run as time trials with say a one-minute separation, so competitors should not be directly racing against each other.

An alternative version would have them use bikes from the city’s bike-hire scheme. They’d have to turn up at a designated pickup point, wait if a bike wasn’t available, and so on. This has the added advantage that it forces host cities to have or introduce such a scheme, and to keep the bikes well maintained.

It’s challenge that normal people — ones who commute by bike, at least — could really identify with.

Smith & Jones

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:09:13 +0000

The “other” Labour leadership candidate, as you might say, is called Owen Smith. There is a Guardian and New Statesman columnist and noted left-wing writer called Owen Jones.

It’s easy to confuse them; I saw this article (which is actually from almost exactly a year ago, and is about the first leadership election, but never mind) today and was confused, because it seemed strange that Jeremy Corbyn’s opponent would be writing a piece warning of the attacks that will come if Corbyn wins.

Then I realised that the byline was Jones, not Smith.

All I can say is that Kid Curry & Hannibal Heyes, and Mel & Griff Rhys — and indeed, The Doctor & Martha — have a lot to answer for.

Jerry Doyle Dead

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:13:44 +0000

Sorry to hear about this:

Jerry Doyle — best known for his role on Babylon 5 — died Wednesday.

Some Thoughts On Software Development

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 15:03:30 +0000

Before the job interview that I mentioned the other day, the company asked me to answer some questions in writing. I didn’t get the job, but I was pleased with my written answers (and they presumably helped me to get the interview, at least). So I thought I’d reuse them as a blog post. None of this should be surprising for anyone who knows anything about the software development field, but it’s interesting to reflect on how things have changed across my career.

What are some of the fundamental changes in your approach to software development you have adopted in the last few years?

There are two main changes that are fundamental and independent of languages and deployment environments: agile techniques and test-driven development (TDD).

Agile

Moving from waterfall to agile development was probably the most significant change to development practices in the industry. We always knew that breaking work down into smaller units led to better estimating, more modular code, and just better software. The genius of agile was to extend that understanding to the period of time spent on a block of work. A two-week sprint, with its work being specifically estimated, planned and developed, is just infinitely more manageable than a project phase lasting months.

Add to that:

self-organising teams which include someone from the customer or end user — or at least someone whose role is to represent the user;
accepting that change will happen, and embracing it;
and the discipline of saying that some features won’t be developed;

and we have a recipe for success.

TDD

Good developers always understood that testing was essential, and did it. But they used to follow a written test plan, or just have an idea of what needed to be tested and work to that. Testing was manual, hard to repeat, and error-prone.

TDD brought automation. So instead of writing a document listing the required tests, we can write code. That inherently makes the tests rerunnable, so regressions get caught before they become a problem.

But almost more important than that is the idea of writing the tests first. In an ideal world you write a comprehensive set of tests, write functional code until all the tests pass, and you’re done. It may not always work out exactly like that — in particular, adding tests to a mature codebase can be problematic — but writing tests first encourages us to write code that is easy to test, which tends to lead to better-designed, more modular code.

An added bonus is that the tests can help to document the code, by showing our expectations. And of course they make refactoring easy and safe, as long as they are in place before you start.

If you were to start your last project over again, what would you do differently?

The project I’m thinking of involved rewriting the product’s GUI into a modern, responsive, browser-independent form, using HTML 5 and Twitter Bootstrap.

The existing version was an old frames-based web app that only worked fully in Internet Explorer, and had to be tweaked when each new version of that browser came out. We had long wanted to modernise it, but there were always other demands on development time.

Eventually I got a chance to try a proof of concept for the change. The application uses JSPs and Struts action classes, and the brief was to continue using these as much as possible. I decided to start with one of the main display pages, the one that users spend most of their time in. The idea was to give a quick demonstration of what was possible; and it did, to a point. But what I hadn’t realised was that frames are not part of HTML 5. There are ways to keep using them, but it’s not easy, and not good practice.

So while the new look and feel of a single page was clear, it was far from clear how the various pages would interact, how they would be brought together to form the whole UI, without frames.

If I were to start the project again now, my first step would be to work out how to link the pages together into a single interface, in the absence of frames. Most likely I would use one or other of the forms of JSP includes.

However, if there was the budget to do a more complete rewrite — by which I mean one that did not necessarily seek to use the existing JSPs — I would probably make much greater use of JavaScript and Ajax, and use the action classes just to provide data to the Ajax calls.

What is your approach to testing, and how would you test your application?

I would use a mixture of automated unit testing using JUnit, automated GUI testing, and actual user testing, if at all possible.

This fits well with what I was saying above. There are, broadly, three levels of testing: unit, integration, and system. Though writing automated unit tests is a development activity, rather than a testing one. Certainly we wouldn’t expect dedicated QA testers to work at the unit-test level.

So let’s assume that we have satisfactory unit-test coverage and we are interested in testing the application as a whole. Automation is obviously key here, as well, both because it allows us to easily repeat the tests regularly — for every checkin, in an ideal world (and see below); and because it removes the need for testers to manually step through a written script, which is boring and error-prone.

I have used Selenium for automated GUI testing, with some success. It takes a significant amount of development work, because it’s doing a significant thing, but the effort should pay off.

However, even after all that, there is still no alternative to having someone sit down and actually use the application. Automated testing might pick up outright errors in how the user interaction works. But it won’t catch fine details like misaligned elements, typos in onscreen text, or just generally how it feels to use the application.

What are the benefits of Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration takes us beyond the traditional daily build. It does more than just building, and does it more frequently than just daily.

At the simplest level it ensures that, for every commit, an incremental build of the complete product is made, and all the unit tests are run. In the most advanced case, as well as building and testing, the product can be deployed to test servers and integration tests such as the automated GUI tests mentioned above can be run. Realistically those tend to take longer, so it’s unlikely that you would do them for every commit, but they can certainly be run multiple times daily.

So we get the following benefits:

frequent builds catch problems in code integration;
unit tests are run frequently, catching any regressions;
integration tests are run regularly, catching other problems;
general confidence in the product is increased;
developers are happy to commit changes frequently.

Brexit Latest Thoughts

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 13:33:46 +0000

In today’s "Brexit weekly briefing" from the Guardian, they say that:

May is soon going to have to choose between a soft and a hard Brexit – one that maximises single market access and minimises immigration controls (which the City wants), or the reverse (which a majority of British voters want)

Now, as we’ve discussed before, you can’t really argue that a majority of British voters wanted any kind of Brexit. But let’s assume they mean “The majority of those who voted,” which is fair. Even then, you can’t really, fairly, state what it is that those voters wanted, since they were sold a pack of lies, and many voted that way merely as a protest.

Self-Hosting

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 23:52:33 +0000

One very good reason why you should post at your own site, and not necessarily trust big companies to look after your stuff: Why Did Google Erase Dennis Cooper’s Beloved Literary Blog? – The New Yorker.

Laurie Penny Rules

Sat, 23 Jul 2016 00:43:48 +0000

Laurie Penny’s “I’m With the Banned” is the best piece of political journalism I’ve read since Hunter S Thompson died.

On Corbyn, Electability, and Compromise

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:35:17 +0000

The other night we watched Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film about the US president. It covers just a few months towards the end of the civil war and his life, during the time when he was trying to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution through the House of Representatives (the Senate having already passed it). That’s the amendment that outlaws slavery.

It was dramatised, of course.¹But what struck me, and what held resonances with our current situation, was the sheer amount of compromising he had to do.

Then I read an article on Vox about Hillary Clinton, which included this:

politics, as Clinton never tires of reminding audiences, is about getting real things done for real people.

—Understanding Hillary, by Ezra Klein

This is the problem that Labour is having now. Whether it’s Jeremy Corbyn’s fault or that of the MPs not backing him, in Labour’s current position it has no chance of getting into government. And if we don’t get into government we can’t do those “real things” for “real people.”

However, I’m far from being convinced that Owen Smith, even if he were to be elected as leader, would put us in any better a position. As well as being largely unknown in the country, he has what looks a slightly shady past, with his lobbying for Pfizer and speaking against the NHS. Though to be fair he rejects any talk of privatisation now.

Corbyn is constantly criticised for not building bridges, not reaching out to people within the party – even within his cabinet, as I linked to the other day. I think it’s fair at this point to say that he is at fault to some degree on the Remain campaign. And I’m certainly unhappy with his call, early on the day after the referendum, for Article 50 to be invoked immediately. That does strongly suggest that his support of the Remain campaign was only ever half-hearted at best.

But even if that’s all true, it doesn’t mean he is solely or even mainly to blame for the disastrous result of the referendum.

And the ongoing, slow-motion disaster that is besetting the Labour Party is at least as much the fault of the plotters. In particular, their behaviour at Prime Minister’s Questions the other day was disgraceful. Their point – renewing Trident was party policy, so the leader should not be speaking against it – was a valid one, but the floor of the House of Commons during the most important event of the parliamentary week, is not the place to argue about it.

The idea of Britain still being a nuclear power, and the doctrine of deterrence, are even more ludicrous now than they were during the 80s when I was a member of CND. But like I say, there’s a time and a place to have that argument, and it’s the party conference.

Maya Goodfellow has a great piece about it all in The Guardian:

The coup itself is unique in recent times, but Labour’s navel gazing is not.
…
The tribalism that grasps the Labour party is part of its problem. There’s an idea among lifelong supporters and MPs that you’re born Labour, you call the party your own and you will never leave it. This makes some sense – these are people whose families for generations have been Labour members, who spend their weekends canvassing and invest all their spare time, emotional energy and money into the party. They want to feel they have control over it.
…
But it [the tribalism] is also partly responsible for the current divisions. The people who feel entitled to call the party their own have competing viewpoints; some of them want to see a leftward shift and others range from wanting Miliband 2.0 to the rebirth of Blairism.
…
The idea too often seems to be “Vote for Labour because we aren’t the Tories”.
…
Instead of slinging insults at opponents or branding them all Blairites, Corbyn supporters would do better to focus on the task at hand – winning a future general election.

—When will Labour’s tribal warfare come to an end?

That idea of the divisions on the left go further than just the Labour party. I thought it was well summed up by this banner that I saw on the Palestine Solidarity march two years ago:

“Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist),” it says. You can just feel the layers of splits down the years that have led it to such an unwieldy name. Splits on the left are far from new. It’s an old criticism that we spend more time fighting among ourselves than fighting the real enemies.

Or in this case, than working out how to get back into power. Because going back to Lincoln² and his compromises, to Hillary and her desire to get things done: it’s all for nothing if we don’t get a Labour government into power.

The problem is that Corbyn is “unelectable.” Is he? I’m not sure we know that. He’s sometimes compared to Michael Foot, who famously failed to win an election. But things are very different today from how they were in the eighties. It won’t be easy, but a Labour Party that got fully behind a left-wing leader might well be in a position to win power in 2020, when the next election is due. Or sooner, if May goes to the country over Brexit or otherwise.

In the end I wonder if Corbyn’s biggest problem isn’t just handling the Media. Maybe he needs an Alistair Campbell figure (or hell, why not: a Malcolm Tucker one). Does he even have a press secretary or Director of Communications?

All of this leaves me not knowing how to vote in the new leadership election. My heart is with Corbyn, as most of his policies match my own principles. But if the MPs won’t get behind him again, then we’ll be right back where we are now, with the party not providing a useful opposition, and with no likelihood of electoral success.³

Owen Smith, on the other hand, seems more likely to fight for us to remain in the EU. But can we trust him?

And either way, what will it do to the party as a whole? A party divided against itself, or worse, a party split in two, has no chance of forming a government.

Though I wonder whether anyone with less Hollywood power than Spielberg could have got a film made that was so much about talking and legal and political manoeuvring. ↩︎
No left-winger, of course, though seeing the Republican Party today, it’s impossible to understand how he could have been one of its founders. ↩︎
Because, I contend, of the split, rather then necessarily the leadership. ↩︎

Recent Events

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:34:17 +0000

It’s been a strange few weeks.

There was the referendum, and its immediate aftermath. That’s still ongoing, of course, and won’t be over any time soon.

Then there was my leaving do from work, as I’d reached the end of the at-risk period, and am now redundant, obsolete, out of work, etc. The do was good. We had a decent turnout of current and former colleagues. My boss’s boss’s boss, the one who told us the news that we were being made redundant, turned up (he is the only one of the hierarchy who is based in Britain, the intervening layers being in Manila) and paid off the tab at the time he left, which must have been about 7pm. We still managed to spend just over £250 after that, which was optimal, as there were five of us.

I got an Uber home, and accidentally discovered what the difference between “Pool” and “UberX” is. I found myself in a car with four strangers (including the driver). To be honest I don’t think “Pool” was an option when I last used an Uber. I assume the “X” means “Exclusive.”

Anyway, they were all going to Islington, which left me to snooze on to Hackney, so it worked out fine.

And then I was unemployed. It didn’t quite hit me at first, because my beloved and I had a weekend trip to Avebury, which was fascinating. Here’s a picture of some stones. And a sheep.

But Monday dawned, and I set to with my new daily plan:

8:00 – Get up, go for a swim.
9:00-ish – Home, breakfast.
9:30-12:30 – Job-hunt things.
12:30-1:30 – Lunch.
1:30-5:00-ish – Side projects (indie dev/writing).

As you might imagine, I haven’t exactly been sticking to that 100%. But the idea is that it’s going to be important to have some structure to my day now that I don’t have one imposed by full-time employment. And job-hunting can be very time-consuming, so treating that as my job for at least part of each day seems like the right thing to do.

The first day was strange, because I kept having this sense at the back of my mind, “I’m working from home today, so I’ll be in the office tomorrow,” which would have been true on Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons for the last few years. But then of course it would hit me: no office; no job.

I’m enjoying the experience, though, so far at least. I’ve managed to do pretty well with the schedule, and even extended the swimming to using the gym at the local leisure centre. This is the first time I’ve ever used a gym, except for a few years ago when I had physio after injuring my leg.¹ The guy who did my induction managed to hide his disbelief of this fact quite well. And now that I’ve done a few sessions I’m thinking, “Why didn’t I do this years ago?” Oh well.

So all in all, a time of change and newness – which would generally be good, and some of it is. But see the first point, above, and the debris from that. An unknown new Tory government who don’t seem to be quite willing to accept that parliament is sovereign, and so it needs to decide whether or not to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty. And Labour too busy tearing itself apart to hold the government to account.

As to the Labour leadership business, I’ll have more to say about that when I’ve worked out what I think.

I’m wryly amused to see that at that leg link from 2004 I’m expressing bafflement about people who would want to leave the EU. ↩︎

He is not a team player let alone a team leader

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:36:58 +0000

As I vacillate on the Labour leadership business, and try to decide what's best for party and country, I keep coming upon things that increase my feeling that Corbyn might not be the right one for the job.

Specifically today, two posts by MPs suggesting he is poor at communicating and building bridges with people.

First, Lilian Greenwood of Nottingham on how he undermined her on transport policy and the referendum.

And then Bristol MP Thangam Debbonaire’s Facebook post about the chaos around her being appointed to, and/or sacked from, a shadow-cabinet post.

And yet there’s also this article claiming that those two posts are part of a “scheme to knock Corbyn.”

What’s a person meant to believe?

Pamela Constable on her parents' WASP values

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 11:40:41 +0000

Great piece in the Washington Post by one of their correspondents whose Republican parents would have hated what the party has become:

it occurred to me that our cerebral and courtly African American president, struggling against the tide of an angry, visceral age, had more in common with this elderly WASP gentleman than did many white Republican leaders of the moment.

Source: I rejected my parents’ WASP values. Now I see we need them more than ever. - The Washington Post

After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 16:58:15 +0000

Good advice from The Intercept:

After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For

Putting the "Mental" into Governmental

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:40:14 +0000

This is beyond insanity: Government axes climate department - BBC News

Pokémon Gone

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:57:05 +0000

I am so not a gamer.

Oh, I loved Asteroids back in the day. I solved Monument Valley, and I got on fine with Alto’s Adventure. But I’ve never got more sophisticated modern games. There’s a whole big post about that that I’ll maybe write one day.

But Pokémon Go has lit up the internet for the last week or so, and it sounded kind of fun. So I thought I’d give it a try. Probably more healthy than arguing about the Labour leadership crisis on Facebook, anyway.

I was just out at the shops, and I remembered I had it, and sure enough, there was a wild Golbat outside the local supermarket. You’ve got to throw the pokéball to catch them, right? I’ve seen enough of the TV series with my kids to get that.

But could I catch it? Could I buggery. No matter how many times I flicked up on the screen to send the ball towards it, it just would not connect. I must have tried like fifty times, standing outside the shop like an idiot.

This is why I never get into games. I soon hit upon something frustrating and get bored with them. No doubt I was doing something wrong. I’ll try again, I suppose, but it’s very discouraging.

Oh, and I couldn’t get the name I wanted. “Devilgate” was taken, but so was it along with just about every suffix I could think of, including just random strings of numbers.

Kind of cool to see the pokéball rolling off under the vegetable racks, though.

How in the World are they Making that Sound?

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:26:19 +0000

OK, so why did no-one tell me that Jonathan Richman -- of whom I am, or used to be, a fan -- released a song back in 1992 or so, called “Velvet Underground”? I’ve been a fan of them since long before it was cool, as you know.[^fn1]

OK, so though Jonathan wrote the mighty “Roadrunner” (and apparently was called by some, “The Godfather of Punk”, though I thought that was Iggy), he later moved to a much more mellow, quieter sound. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t always want to to be listening to the loudest stuff.¹

But anyway, it turns out that there’s this song about the Velvet Underground, which is cool as fuck, as you might expect. Jonathan, of course, has been associated with the Velvets since the early days, roadieing for them and whatnot. So who better to write a song that tries to evoke the startling, shocking effect they had on people, on the music scene, back in 1966 or so?

Here’s his description of John Cale in action:

A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kinda shy
Kinda far away, kinda dignified

They were “America at its best,” he says, and who could disagree? If you haven’t heard it, it’s on Apple Music, Spotify and even YouTube, where I understand the younglings like to go.

Both guitars got the fuzz tone on
The drummer's standing upright pounding along
A howl, a tone, a feedback whine
Biker boys meet the college kind

After one of the choruses where he sings, “How in the world were they making that sound?/Velvet Underground,” he says, “Like this,” and launches into a verse of “Sister Ray.” It’s all very, very cool.

Though let’s face it, we mostly do. If there was a god, and it didn’t want us to listen to loud music, then why would it have invented amplification? ↩︎

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Books 2016, 9)

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 01:45:53 +0000

This is an infuriatingly brilliant book. Or brilliantly infuriating. It’s about the tensions between magic and science in a world where both exist. The characters are great and annoying (which only adds to their greatness). The scientists don’t think of investigating magic scientifically, even when a witch helps them rescue someone from an experiment gone wrong, which is annoying. But not very, because it’s so lovely. I predict it will win awards.

Sixty-Three Percent

Sat, 25 Jun 2016 16:49:18 +0000

Future

Yesterday was the strangest day.

Anger, of course. Sadness. And confusion: how could this happen? Why did it happen?

What the hell is wrong with people?

But above all an overwhelming sense of change. Of everything having changed, and not in a good way.

I went out for a walk at lunchtime, and it all felt so strange. What it felt like was that the future had changed.

I know that sounds odd: how can the future change when it hasn’t happened yet? But that’s exactly how it felt. Like some time-meddler had taken the future and given it a twist, so that it was off by forty-five degrees or so.

It’s not like I’m constantly thinking about the future normally, but I guess we just have a kind of background-hum sense of where things are going, and that hum stopped in the early hours of Friday, or changed frequency.

Sums

Enough of the metaphors and similes. I did some basic arithmetic. On a turnout of 72%, 52% voted to have the UK leave the EU. That means 37% of the electorate voted to leave the EU.

Which means 63% of the electorate did not choose to leave.

It’s true that you can’t really assume the desires of the non-voters. But my thinking is that the decision to leave the EU is tantamount to a constitutional change. I don’t know what rules countries with written constitutions have regarding amendments, but my guess is that they will have a higher bar than a simple majority of the turnout. A two-thirds majority, or a majority of the electorate at least, I would expect and hope.

I had this conversation on The Guardian site yesterday, wherein the people I was discussing with were saying in effect, “You knew the rules when you went in.” Which is true enough, but unhelpful. My real point is that the rules should have been different. Now we, the voting public, obviously were not paying close enough attention back in 2015 when the legislation for the referendum was passed. But we have representative democracy, and our representatives – our MPs – should have been on top of this. The referendum should never have been brought with such a low threshold allowed for leave.

I’m surprised that Cameron himself didn’t ensure that it was hard to leave. Maybe he was a secret Brexiteer.

Or maybe he just didn’t believe that the public would ever actually vote to leave. I think with hindsight that that’s where I was: in my heart of hearts I couldn’t believe that this would happen. And that is probably the root of the cognitive dissonance I felt yesterday.

It’s too late now, of course. There’s not much we can do (though there is this petition, which has enough signatures already for parliament to consider it). I wonder if someone could mount some sort of legal challenge, maybe get a judicial review.

Because from where I’m sitting 63% of the UK electorate are about to be dragged out of the European Union without asking for it (or having actively stated their opposition). And that’s not even to mention the people who aren’t in the electorate, who will be most affected of all. My fifteen-year old daughter came home fuming yesterday; her whole school was in turmoil over this.

We’re failing a whole generation if they see possibilities being closed off before they’re even old enough to to vote.

The Reinvigorated Programmer on the Referendum

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 14:57:40 +0000

The Reinvigorated Programmer has some good thoughts, including blaming Star Wars:

Folks: turn on your targeting computers. Use the facts.

Source: Let’s Take Back Control! We Want Our Country Back! | The Reinvigorated Programmer

His followup posts, about bedfellows and fear, are also well worth a look.

More Referendum Thoughts

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 07:30:33 +0000

A few more thoughts to follow on from last night's post:

Turnout

Turnout is crucial. If the majority is narrow, and especially if the turnout is low, the losing side will have a very hard time accepting the result.

For example, imagine if the vote goes 55% for Leave, and the turnout is only 60%. That means that only 33% of the electorate has said they want to leave. 27% would have expressly said they don’t want to leave, and 40% abstained.

But abstention can – and in my view should – be considered as being happy with the status quo. Yes, you can argue that it means that the abstainers are happy to go with the will of the majority of voters, but for such a major change – effectively a constitutional change – I don’t think that’s a safe assumption

So there ought to have been a requirement for a minimum turnout, and/or a majority of the electorate. In fact, for something this major, I’m inclined to think that a mandate to leave should require something like a two-thirds majority – of the electorate, not just of the turnout.

Something like that was the case in the original Scottish independence referendum – approval had to be by 40% of the electorate, not just a simple majority – though not in he 2014 one. I have criticised that fact in the past, but thinking about it now it seems right.

Parliament

Of course, this referendum will not be binding on parliament. If it goes to Leave, it’s possible that a majority of MPs could vote against the legislation that would have to be enacted to start the actual departure. That would have interesting results.

And if the majority is very slim in either direction, there will be calls for another referendum. Whatever happens on Thursday, we won’t have heard the last of this for a long, long time.

Referendum Thoughts

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:19:39 +0000

I have, of course, been meaning to write about the referendum almost since it was called. And let’s go right back to that point: of it being called, and why it was, and whether it should have been.

It was called, as anyone can tell, because David Cameron wanted to finally end the feuding in his party over Europe. The Tory party has been at loggerheads about it for decades. I have never known a time when they weren’t fighting about it.

So Cameron promised a referendum, thinking that if they were elected he could lance the boil, as they say. In fact what has happened in the end is that the boil has grown alarmingly, become infected, and is poisoning its host.

But we shouldn’t gloat. The Tory party in its death throes could take a lot of good things down with it.

I read one piece recently that suggested that he didn’t actually want to do this. That he made the promise fully expecting a hung parliament in 2015, and then he’d be able to say that coalition partners had insisted on no referendum.

Which may well be true, but it doesn’t help us where we are now.

The poison has spread into the body politic of the whole nation, and we are all in danger of becoming infected.

Or am I stretching this metaphor too far?

So much for that. The decision we make on Thursday matters, probably more than any visit to the polls in my lifetime. A decision to leave will be irreversible.¹

Not that I think we would be utterly unable to survive and thrive outside the EU. We’d get by. But we wouldn’t be the best we could be, nor in the best position we could be in.

The EU is far from perfect, but so is the Westminster parliament, the Scottish one, and every other democracy.² But above all, if we’re inside it, we are able to influence it – specifically, our democratically-elected representatives can – but if we’re outside, all we can do is look in.

While having to abide by its oh-so-terribly-onerous regulations if we want to trade with it.³

The Guardian’s editorial today advises us to “keep connected and inclusive, not angry and isolated,” and I think we can all get behind that, surely?

Oh, and don’t let me hear any of that “both sides as bad as each other” nonsense. The Remain⁴ campaign has been lucklustre, certainly, and I’d have liked to see more dynamism from Jeremy Corbyn and the rest of the Labour leadership – if only to reduce the impression that it was all about Tory infighting, or that anyone should vote Leave because Cameron wants the opposite. But lacklustre does not equate to vicious, poisonous, and lying.

“Project Fear,” they called it. I even heard one of my colleagues accuse the Remain campaign of fearmongering. But fear is not being “mongered” when we have a genuinely scary situation.

To end on a more cheerful note, if you only watch one video about the matter, make it this one from John Oliver:

Well, Conceivably we could, at some time in the future, petition to rejoin; but if we did do that, it would be on quite different terms from those that we’re on at present. For one thing, we’d have to join the Euro, as all accession states do. For another, we wouldn’t get the rebate that we currently get. Loath her or despise her, Thatcher did renegotiate our country’s position into a more advantageous one. We won’t need that if we’re out, of course, but we won’t get it back if we ever have to crawl back. ↩︎
And the EU is democratic, despite all the lies of the Leave campaign. ↩︎
Not that onerous, and if they are they’re mostly for good reasons. ↩︎
And shouldn’t the opposite of “Leave” be “Stay,” anyway? ↩︎

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross (Books 2016, 8)

Sun, 19 Jun 2016 23:12:48 +0000

The latest of Charlie's Laundry Files series, and Bob Howard is being considered for promotion. To management. He has to go on a course.

As you can imagine, he doesn’t stay on it for long. And soon things are looking pretty bleak.

It’s the usual Laundry fare: magic manipulated by technology, horrors from beyond the stars, intrigue, form-filling.

It’s great stuff, as always.

A Day of Infamy

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 23:19:20 +0000

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.

From The Spectator. Something terrible did, of course, happen. I hadn't heard of Jo Cox before today, but she seems to have been a thoroughly decent person.

Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? by Paul Cornell (Books 2016, 7

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:04:33 +0000

Some books take weeks or even months to read. Others slip down in just a few days. This was the latter kind.

Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series is part of a thriving subgenre now. He and Ben Aaronovitch started out at a similar time, I guess, and they’re friends, so I don’t know if they came up with the idea together, or what. Maybe it was just steam-train time. But London cops who deal with the magical, occult side of the city’s problems are very much of today.¹

This latest volume picks up not long after The Severed Streets finished, and our characters are in some dark places personally and professionally. But then the ghost of Sherlock Holmes is found murdered at the Holmes museum, and a serial killer starts murdering people in ways inspired by the Holmes stories. The game is afoot, obviously, and our heroes must take part.

This is really, really, good, and highly recommended. Though if you haven’t read them yet, start at the beginning with London Falling.

Though I can’t help but wonder if Charlie Stross started it all. His Laundry Files series is about secret agents with occult dealings, rather than police, but there are obvious similarities. ↩︎

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (Books 2016, 6)

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 23:06:13 +0000

I enjoyed it, but I didn't really understand it.

I’m sure I should have more to say about it than that, but really, that sums it up quite neatly.

But to try to go a bit deeper… The solar system is populated by various species or clans of posthumans, transhumans, AIs, uploaded minds, whatever. Earth is unrecognisable, though some people – seemingly fairly close to basic-human, though it’s hard to judge, with so many strangenesses – still live there.

In some ways the biggest problems with this book, and its predecessor The Quantum Thief, which I read a few years ago, is the sheer number of new or repurposed words. None of these is ever explained: you have to gain an understanding of them from context, working it out as you go along. This is a perfectly fine and valid method of storytelling, but here it all just gets a bit too much.

Maybe it’s my fault for the way I read the book: in disjointed fragments and sections, over weeks. Perhaps if I had read it in a more concentrated fashion, its meanings would have unwrapped themselves for me more easily, more thoroughly.

But at the same time, it’s the storyteller’s job to tell their story in a way that allows the reader to grasp it, to understand it. If he reader has difficulty with that, then it’s not the reader’s fault. It’s the storyteller’s.

And yet, and yet, I enjoyed it, I finished it, I think I’ll probably read the third in the trilogy, which I believe is a thing. Eventually, after some time has passed on this one,

And I’ll probably have just as much trouble with that one when the time comes.

Relaunch

Wed, 18 May 2016 19:55:43 +0000

If you pay attention to URLs and such -- and if you're reading this at all -- you'll be aware that my blog is not sited at the root or home page of the devilgate.org site, but at devilgate.org/blog/. For a long time the home page has been a very basic one, with just a few links to the other places you can find me online.

As of today, it still contains those links, but is a slightly more modern, sophisticated page, and has a new focus.

That new focus is job-hunting. I’ve been working at Misys for more years than I care to think about – well, Misys and one of its precursor companies, BIS, that it bought up in the 90s. And this is the first time I’ve named it in public on the internet.

The reasons I never named it before are to do with keeping work and the rest of my life separate; and more to do with the fact that, as quite an elderly tech company, it didn’t really have any concept of its staff having an online life outside of it – or even inside of it. At least until the last couple of years, when it launched a Twitter account and a YouTube channel… and the less said about them the better.

The same agedness is part of the reason why I have never contributed significantly to any open-source projects: my contract effectively disallowed it.¹

And I’m making it public now – and I’m relaunching my front page – because I’m not going to be working there much longer.

Even in the teen years of the 21st century, we are not past the time of jobs being moved offshore, it seems. Well some jobs, at least; and Misys have been moving development jobs to our – to their, as I should learn to say – offices in Manila and Bangalore for years. It was only a matter of time, really.

So about three weeks ago, me and the four other remaining developers in the team were told that we would be leaving at the end of June.² It wasn’t a shock, or even a surprise. In fact, I think we were all fairly pleased, in the end.

I’ve been expecting it for at least a year, since the last of the developers in another team were sent on their way. To the extent that I’ve been looking around, have been for a couple of interviews; because I didn’t want to be just hanging on there for the redundancy money. That would be a terrible reason for staying. And while the work was still OK, I didn’t have to find a job, so I felt I was in a position of strength.

Now, of course, I’m quite pleased that none of those opportunities came to anything, because I do get the redundancy money. And my CV is up to date, and my LinkedIn and more importantly Stack Overflow profiles are looking reasonably good.

I’m treating this as an opportunity: I’m keen to learn new things, have new experiences, and hopefully work in a development environment with releases more than twice a year, and with end-users I actually get to talk to.

So things are OK, but I am looking for a new job. So if you happen to know of anyone who’s looking for a Senior Software Engineer, or Lead Programmer, or similar, with a lot of experience in Java and various other languages (and who is currently learning Swift), then send them my way.

And I don’t mind being public about all this now, because I fully expect any company I work for in the future to have a more open, progressive attitude to its employees being citizens of the net.

Well, unless Apple are recruiting.³

And, to be fair, I never bothered to seriously investigate changing that. ↩︎
Unless we find other jobs within the company, which is extremely unlikely. ↩︎
They are, as it happens, but their “London” site is in Uxbridge, a kazillion miles on the wrong side of town. ↩︎

I Upgraded my MacBook

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:26:29 +0000

And it's like having a new machine.

I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro, mid 2010 model. I bought it in about September or October 2010. Which means it’s getting quite long in the tooth. The MacBooks have come on a long way in what they offer since then. Mine had 4GB of memory and a 320 GB hard drive. Nowadays they have solid-state drives by default and start from 16GB of memory, I think.

Thing is, it was still fine in most ways, but it was getting very, very slow. It wasn’t too bad once everything was up and running, but waking it from sleep meant I’d be seeing what Ginger out of The Wildhearts called the “spinning fucking rainbow” (and everyone else calls the beachball) for a long time.

Even when it was up, just switching apps could trigger the slowness. So I was thinking about upgrading. But I figured there was life in the old beast yet. I took inspiration from Jason Snell who writes of upgrading a 2009 model.

According to Apple, the most memory this model can support is 8GB. But according to Other World Computing, this particular model, though no others from around then, can actually take more – up to 16GB.

I went to Crucial, which is noted as the best site for Mac upgrades in the UK (OWC is only in the US). Its tool said it could only take 8GB. But I looked around various forums and decided that there was enough evidence that OWC were right. Plus memory is so cheap these days that the difference in price between 8 and 16 was very small.

So I took a chance and ordered 16GB, plus a 500GB SSD.

Installing the memory was trivially easy. You don’t need more than a small Phillips screwdriver to open the case, and the memory modules themselves pop out and slot in very easily.

But with the two 8GB modules in, it wouldn’t boot up. I just got series of three beeps, repeated every few seconds.

A bit of googling told me that means “bad memory,” essentially.

I tried taking it out an putting it back in, swapping round which module was in which slot, and so on, but to no avail. I put the old memory back just to check that I hadn’t damaged something, and it started up like before.

So it looked like OWC were wrong, and I was restricted to 8GB. I was considering sending the memory back to Crucial and hoping I could get I refund. But then I tried one more thing. One of the new 8GB sticks along with one of the old 2GB ones.

And it booted up, smooth as a cliche.

Of course I tried swapping out one 8GB stick for the other, to check for the possibility that one of them actually was bad. But both of them worked. So it seems that this MacBook can take more than 8GB, but not as much as 16. Which is strange, but never mind.

I’d have to say, though, that the difference in performance wasn’t obvious. But I didn’t spend lot of time with it like that, because I still had the SSD to install. That’s very slightly more involved, needing as it does a Torx screwdriver. But it’s very easy.

Before all that I had made sure my old hard drive was thoroughly backed up, you won’t be surprised to hear.

I booted up in the new configuration and told the Mac to set itself up as a new installation. It downloaded El Capitan over the air and installed away.

There was one slight glitch in this process. Something went wrong with the installation and I started getting a kernel panic on bootup. I don’t quite recall the details now, but I just reformatted the SSD and installed again, and it all went fine.

And the difference… The difference is astonishing. Even with many apps open (I currently have twelve), and a whole stack of tabs in Safari, using it is effortless. Apps switch without the slightest lag. I can start anything up with only a few bounces. I’ve hardly even seen the rainbow.

Even Lightroom, which is the heaviest-weight app I use on here, starts in under ten seconds.

In short, this is the way a computer should be.

Awakening

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 20:25:48 +0000

You'll have noticed, I'm sure, that after my brief comments on the three Star Wars prequels late last year, I didn't come back and say what I thought of the sequel. Which was, after all, the main reason I watched the prequels in the first place.

That was lax of me, but in honour of the DVD of The Force Awakens having arrived, here we go now. I won’t go into much detail, though: many pixels, and hours of podcasts, have been generated discussing this movie, and the internet doesn’t need mine at this late stage. But I’ll just quote what I wrote privately after seeing it the first time:

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: I loved every moment, every frame from the scroll onwards. No, before that: from the logo appearing on screen.
Hell, I think “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” comes first.

Anyway, this is a flawless movie. OK, exaggeration: but it is a wonderful, masterful piece of work.

The other thing I thought was, “Move over Empire: there’s a new best Star Wars film."

Selfie Thoughts

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 14:25:55 +0000

Tim Bray speaks wisely on selfies:

Somewhere right now there’s a young woman who’ll lead her nation to war, or write a book that wrenches a generation’s heart, or help make technology that touches a billion lives. Unlike previous generations of such women, her biography’s early chapters will be improved by selfies.

Source: “Photographer”?

Patience by Daniel Clowes (Books 2016, 5)

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:18:04 +0000

As I said, I ordered this right off the back of reading the review. I read it almost as soon as it arrived, and then read it again. It's a fast read, being a graphic novel, and being a timey-wimey story you want to read it again to see how it twists.

It’s really good. Every bit as good as the review suggested – if not quite as good as the blurb suggested.

I’m not going to say much more about it, as almost anything would be spoilers. A time-travel love story. Totes excellent.

ETA: It would help if I could actually spell the title!

Daily Mail Taking Over Yahoo?

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 07:56:08 +0000

Christ, we're gonna have to pull all our photos from Flickr if this goes through: Daily Mail publisher in talks with companies over Yahoo takeover.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Books 2016, 4)

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 07:15:21 +0000

A rereading, this, but I remembered much less of it than I thought, and enjoyed it even more than I expected to.

All I really remembered in any detail was the dog-like pack-based beings, the Tines. Maybe a vague sense of the rogue superintelligent AI that caused all the problems.

And the “Zones of Thought” themselves, of course. A genius idea, which, in brief summary, is this: the further out from the galactic core you get, the more advanced the technology that is possible. Implicitly that includes biology. It’s never explicitly stated, but it seems likely that deep inside the galaxy, in the “Unthinking Depths,” intelligence is not possible. Further out you get the “Slow Zone”, which is where Earth is.¹ Only sub-lightspeed travel is possible here, and machines cannot become intelligent.

But all this changes when you get to the galactic fringes, or the “Beyond,” where FTL and something close to AI are commonplace. And the further up the Beyond you go, the more this is true, until you reach the “Transcend,” where godlike AIs exist.

My memory was that the sections with the Tines were kind of annoying, with a sense of, “I want my space operas to be set in space, with high tech; not on a mediaeval-level world with nothing more advanced than cartwheels."² But of course the story of the kids stranded on the Tines' World are both fundamental to the overall story, and at least as good as the galaxy-spanning main plot.

This book has gone from new, Hugo- & Nebula-Award winner to SF Masterwork in what feels like a very short time. It was first published in 1991, which is 25 years ago. I suppose that’s enough time to become a classic.³ The accolades are thoroughly deserved, of course.

The SF Masterworks edition has an introduction by Ken McLeod, which is well worth reading, and the whole is highly recommended by me.

Or possibly, was: Earth doesn’t feature in this story. ↩︎
I lost interest in Stephen Baxter’s Origin: Manifold Three largely because of the scenes on the stone-age planet. I see from GoodReads that a lot of other people had trouble with it too. ↩︎
Arguably it was instantly a classic, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. ↩︎

Patience

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 23:43:08 +0000

"Would you go anywhere near a book described on its back cover as ‘a cosmic timewarp deathtrip to the primordial infinite of everlasting love’?", begins this Guardian review of Patience by Daniel Clowes.

What other answer could there be but, “Hell, yeah!”? My copy arrived today.

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross (Books 2016, 3)

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 22:18:13 +0000

I read this about a month and a half ago, and already it has slipped quite far from my memory. That's not a good sign, is it?

I’m also almost sure I wrote about it already, but it seems not. I certainly can’t find anything on either my Mac or iPhone.

But never mind. It’s Stross and Doctorow. What’s not to like? It’s also, I think, something of a fix-up. I certainly felt that I had read the early part of it before.

We’re in a near-future, post-singularity world, where our hero, Huw, wakes up with a hangover to find that he has been invited to do jury duty. But rather than determine the guilt or innocence of alleged criminals, this jury’s job is to determine the desirability of a piece of new technology.

Huw is a singularity refusenik, who wants to remain on Earth as a baseline human, rather than take advantage of the ability to upload his personality and live forever in the orbital cloud. The jury’s job is to assess whether a piece of new tech should be allowed to come back from the cloud to Earth.

At least, that’s the theory. It goes a long way from there, as you might expect.

It’s good, but as I suggested above, not that memorable. On the other hand, that could just be my memory.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K Dick (Books 2016, 2)

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 00:16:33 +0000

Nothing to do with stigmata, really, and the titular differences aren't even mentioned until three-quarters of the way through the book. It's almost as if Dick wanted to use the title, and then realised, "Oh, I haven't said what these stigmata are yet, or why. Better throw them in." Because they are also entirely irrelevant to the story.

Oh yes, the story. Hmm. It’s not one of Dick’s best, and a lot of it barely makes sense. Or at least, it makes sense in that it’s internally consistent. But it’s hard to believe. The UN conscripts people using a military-style draft, to go and live on the colonies – Mars is the only one we see, but several other planets and moons within the solar system are implied.

Colonists' lives are so hard and unpleasant that the only way they can get by – and the only entertainment they have, it seems – is to lose themselves in shared hallucinations induced by a drug called Can-D, during which they enter the world of characters called Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt. These are inspired or induced using “layouts” – groupings of miniaturised artefacts that become part of Pat’s life, and hence of the colonists' hallucinations.

In any group entering the shared experience, all the women always take the part of Pat, and all the men that of Walt. Which seems very limiting and heteronormative.

And, oh, yes, the sexual politics.

In some ways they’re not too bad. The main character, Barney Mayerson, is a precog – oh yes, we have those, too, except when we forget that we do – and his assistant, Roni Fugate, ends up with his job, which is a quite a senior one at the company that makes “mins” – miniaturised items for use with the Perky Pat layouts. They use their precognitive powers to know what items are going to be fashionable. Other than that, the existence of reliable precognition seems to have had no impact on society.

Maybe that’s why he wrote “Minority Report.”

Anyway, at the start, she is also his lover, which seems to have happened as soon as she started working with him, almost as a given.

On the other hand, a significant part of the plot is driven by the fact that he has never got over his breakup with his wife – which I think might have been as long as twenty years ago – whom he dumped because she was bad for his career, or something.

In fact she’s a highly skilled potter, who makes artefacts that are miniaturised for use in these famous layouts. Mayerson rejects her latest designs, saying they won’t be successful, when Roni says they will. His attempt to screw up his ex’s career leads her (and her new husband, who is acting as her salesman) into the arms of a rival corporation.

That body has been set up by the mysterious titular character. Palmer Eldritch has just returned from a ten-year trip to the Proxima system, whence he might have bought back a new drug, Chew-Z, that has similar properties to Can-D but is even more powerful.

Also global warming: the world is unliveably hot, so everyone stays in air-conditioned buildings (and makes things worse). In America, at least. We don’t hear anything about the rest of the world. And forced “evolution”: some people go for expensive treatments in Swiss clinics, which give them bigger brains and leathery skin, at least on their head. Though sometimes it goes wrong and their intelligence decreases.

It’s all quite, quite mad, and the conclusion probably makes even less sense. But what the hell, it’s fun enough while it lasts.

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories, by China Miéville (Books 2016, 1)

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 23:39:18 +0000

This set of short stories admirably shows why Miéville's work has been called "weird fiction." Most of these are very strange indeed.

In some of them, though, the strangeness feels like incompleteness. They should be longer, go into more detail, or just have an ending. Several of the pieces are less true stories than vignettes, scenes. Not itself a bad thing, but it slightly belies the subtitle.

None of which to say I didn’t enjoy this. I very much did. Still, I think he’s stronger as a novelist than as a short-story writer.

PC

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:05:28 +0000

Panel 3 just nails the whole “SJW” nonsense.

Source: Brostitutional Rights - Scenes From A Multiverse

January

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 23:07:56 +0000

The first month ends and I haven't yet written a proper post: a very poor start to the blogging year.

Never mind. 2016, eh?

Hello.

Moffat Leaving Who

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 01:04:58 +0000

Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat is leaving, but his final series won’t run till next year. Nothing but a Christmas Special in 2016.

Java isn't slow

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 13:43:26 +0000

So if your Java code is doing something easier than processing 6 million events a second, and it’s slow, you can maybe make it faster!

Source: Java isn’t slow

Great piece by Julia Evans on some really fast Java applications. Notably LMAX.

Woman Who Shot at Home Depot Shoplifters Vows to Never Help Anyone Again - The New York Times

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 07:04:33 +0000

Tatiana Duva-Rodriguez of Michigan, who had been a passerby when she noticed the commotion, lost her gun-carrying permit and got 18 months’ probation.

The NY Times reports this without comment. This crazy woman shot at people who were suspected of shoplifting. Not murder, not terrorism. Shoplifting. And the lesson she says she’s learned is, “I’ll never help anyone again.”

Revenge of the Prequels

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:13:56 +0000

Well, this is more like it. It's far from perfect, but Revenge of the Sith is far and away the best of the three prequels.

And that is largely because it has a story that mostly makes sense, and isn’t too confusing. Sure, there are still plot holes, and flaws in the motivation; but overall it holds together pretty well.

Still not as well as any of the original trilogy, of course.

The biggest point that doesn’t work for me is that we don’t see why Anakin has any connection with Palpatine. He goes over to the latter far too easily. I don’t so much mean his falling to the Dark Side; that was on the cards at least since he murdered the Sandpeople in Clones. I mean the fact that Palpatine was suddenly asking him to spy on the Jedi Council, while the Council were equally-suddenly talking about his closeness to Palpatine. We had seen none of this.

I’ve been reading a lot about all this lately, and I gather that much is made clearer in the ancillary material: novels, comics, the Clone Wars series that was made around the same time. But even if that is so, it means the movies fail. A movie has to be able to stand on its own. You can’t expect the viewer to have read around the subject or watched spinoff series. You can just barely rely on them having seen the immediately-prior films.

Compare and contrast the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example. You can watch The Avengers without having seen any of the prior films. Or enjoy Agents of SHIELD without having seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier, for example. If you have seen the related material then it enhances the whole. But any element can stand without the others.

The love story between Anakin and Padmé remains unconvincing, and Padmé’s death… well, I had gained the impression that she had died in childbirth, which seemed implausible in such a technologically-advanced society. In fact she died of a broken heart, or just gave up the ghost, or something. Which would be more plausible (if still not very) had she not just given birth. It seems more likely that a new mother would tend to fight for life to protect her babies. She died because the plot needed her to, in the end. If, as a creator, you have to do that kind of thing, you should at least find a more convincing way to do it.

Anyway, now I’ve seen all of the Star Wars movies, and I’m ready for The Force Awakens. Which is good, because I’ll be seeing it in about 30 hours.

Hell and Heaven

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 00:13:36 +0000

We come to the end of what I can now confidently say was my favourite series of new Doctor Who so far. No matter how good it was when it all came back with Chris Ecc (as we still like to call him in my family); how much we liked David Tennant; how manically brilliant Matt Smith was from day one: Peter Capaldi was on fire this season, and Stephen Moffat is at the top of his game as showrunner.

Were this last pair as good as “The Empty Child”/“The Doctor Dances” or “Blink”? It’s hard to say definitively, because those were so shockingly good when they hit us. But I think in time we’ll say so. I don’t doubt that Capaldi and the production team will win BAFTAs this year, and I’m sure that one of the last two will get the Hugo.

Awards may not mean that much (though let’s face it, they do) but when you see an award-worthy performance, or read something that you know is likely to win, that deserves to win – you know you’ve experienced something special.

And we experienced something very special in this season of Doctor Who And particularly in the last three episodes.

I just read a foolish comment on a Tor.com post about how great Capaldi is. It said, in effect, “That episode was only about the gender & skin-colour switching regeneration.” Yes, that was it: it was about that one thing and nothing else.

Seriously, though, that was a nice touch.

One thing I haven’t seen or heard mentioned is how terrified the Time Lords were of him – well, Rassilon, at least: one guy, and they send a vast floating gun platform to bring him in. Of course, it turns out that Rassilon was right to be afraid.

One thing about this episode and more importantly, the previous, seems to be causing people some confusion. The Doctor didn’t spend two billion years (or whatever) in the clockwork castle. Two billion years worth of copies of him – each with some awareness of its past iterations, triggered by the word “bird” – go through a near-identical experience.

Though Hell Bent proves that even The Doctor – or Stephen Moffat – is confused by this.

Mind you, the planet on which the castle is built does experience all that time, we must assume, as The Doctor observes how the stars have changed.

What the episode does do is address the old philosophical question of whether matter transmitters make copies. In the Whoniverse at least, they do.

Unless the whole thing is a simulation, including the changing stars.

Anyway, masterful, glorious work. I’m looking forward to the Christmas special.

Memories of 2003

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 19:13:08 +0000

It's only twelve years ago. Twelve years, and it feels like everyone -- the bulk of MPs, at least -- has forgotten about the dodgy dossier; about shock & awe; about Abu Ghraib and everything that followed.

Because here we are again: our elected representatives are banging spears on shields and baying with the desire to follow a weak, shoddy prime minister to war.

Classic political distraction, of course: things are bad at home (to say nothing of in the government’s party), so let’s have a war to distract the populace; the electorate; the “patient millions/Who put them into power,” as Billy Bragg put it.

So far, so unsurprising. But it’s Labour MPs who really bother me. I thought perhaps we had turned a corner with the election of Jeremy Corbyn. That maybe we would return to being a proper opposition, by actually opposing Tory excesses. And by doing so, show the nation that here is a true alternative to the politics of the last couple of decades; to right-wing versus slightly-less-right-wing. Show the potential for a more peace-loving Britain.

But here they all are, the party grandees, howling for bombs alongside the Tories. I shouldn’t be surprised, of course: it was a Labour government that took us into Iraq twelve years ago. In my defence – and theirs, to some extent – we were deceived , then – them by that dossier, us by them. Millions marched against it,¹ but many thought that there must be something to all this talk of us being 45-minutes away from an attack. That the government must know something.

Back then my son was nearly six. When we told him – in an age-appropriate way, as they say – that it looked like there was going to be a war – his first response was, “Will I have to go away?” Those tales of World War II evacuated kids burn deep for a Londoner.

We reassured him that no, the war would be far away, and wouldn’t affect us directly. Two years later we were proved wrong, when the war came to his hometown. ²

And just two weeks ago the current war came to Paris. Does anyone doubt, if our leaders go ahead and escalate this war, that we’ll see it come back to British streets? Maybe London again. Maybe Birmingham, Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow.

More blood on British streets. Blood, which – along with that of the innocents who die in Syria under RAF bombs – will be at least partly on the hands of the MPs who go through the division lobbies with the government tomorrow.

I was sadly absent from that through having small kids and a visiting aged parent. I was there in spirit. ↩︎
Looking back I find that I predicted it. I was far from alone, of course. ↩︎

Heaven and Lords

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:17:54 +0000

I wouldn't have minded if I had guessed it myself. But one little line in the Guardian Guide prompted me. All it did was make me think of something I hadn't thought of before, but it felt like a spoiler: "The Doctor comes closer than ever before to returning to Gallifrey," or some such.

And there it was: “They” from last week had to be the Time Lords.

But why? Why did they do it? Why put the Doctor through that, just to get him to Gallifrey? And also, how? of course: how can he get to Gallifrey when it’s supposed to be locked away in some pocket universe?

And titling: why was it called “Heaven Sent”?

Great episode, by the way. Best of the season. Indeed, I predict a Hugo.

And I expect we’ll find out some of the answers next week.

Raven and... What?

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 17:38:05 +0000

Well. Well, well well.

Well.

I have to say (and spoilers here for “Face the Raven”, if you haven’t seen it yet): that was companion-exit that guarantees they won’t be able to bring her back.

OK, yes, nothing is forever in Doctor Who, and there are already rumours or suggestions that Clara will be appearing in flashbacks or similar in the next two episodes. But that really felt properly final.

And I have to say, I hope it stays that way. Nothing against Clara, or Jenna Coleman – I think she was a good companion played by a very good actor – but it just feels that they’ve done too much of bringing companions back. Sure, we all love to see them again, but really? She’s gone out with a heroic and tragic last scene. It would cheapen it to bring her back.

Unless there was a very good reason, of course.

It occurs to me: if the planned new spinoff programme, Class, is to be set in and around Coal Hill School, where Clara was teaching: what does her death mean for that, for the characters in it? Presumably some of them will be her students, or teachers who knew her.

Anyway, back to Clara, and the Raven. And maybe her death wish?

I was pleased that she mentioned Danny Pink at the end, because I’ve been thinking that it was strange that neither she nor The Doctor had mentioned him in this season. It seemed that she really hadn’t had a chance go grieve properly – or hadn’t let herself do so.

Though we don’t know how long is supposed to have passed. It could be a year, two, since the events of “Death in Heaven”. Which doesn’t mean she’d have stopped grieving – certainly not that she’d have forgotten him. But she could have got to a place where she could carry on without always thinking of him.

But then there’s her mood this series, her mad drive for more adventures, her carelessness – best shown in this very episode with the way she hung out of the Tardis¹

So if we want to psychoanlayse her, we can say that she has spent the last ten episodes (and maybe longer) running away from Danny’s death, from her own feelings about it; or running towards her own eventual death, her sacrifice.

This episode for me was one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. I was considered quite contentious in my family when I said I thought that the current season was the best of New-Who. That led to much discussion of other past seasons, and my eventual acquiescence into the idea that it’s mainly the best because it’s the one that’s happening now. Like my friend Paul said a while back: “My favourite episode of Doctor Who? The next one.”

But I think the truth of it is that it has been a very even series: not great highs (except maybe this very episode) – no “Blink” or “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” or “Father’s Day”. But no real lows, either (arguably the previous episode, but I still think it was worthwhile.) An entire season (so far) of solid, strong episodes, leading to a climax like this – and who knows what will come next?

I note in passing that this reviewer thinks like me.

Anyway. There is much more I could say – like who are the “they” who have kidnapped The Doctor? The obvious answer would be Davros and the Daleks, possibly with help from Missy. That would bookend the season nicely, and make some sense of Ashildr asking for his “Confession Dial”. But that might be too obvious.

But that’s enough for now. Quoth the Raven, “Neverwhere’s all about hidden London, isn’t it?"

I can’t decide on whether to use the old-school all caps, since it’s an acronym, or the more modern approach of making it a standard word. I wonder: what would Nasa do? Oh. Yes. ↩︎

Sleep and No Raven?

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 23:47:18 +0000

Well, as far as we can tell, this one isn't part one of a two parter. So I guess I should write about it on its own.

I enjoyed it immensely – well, quite a lot – but I just wish sometimes they would take the trouble to come up with good, rational explanations for the events. Relatively simple steps, only needing a few extra words – or different words – in the script, could make these episodes be so much better.

The critical example of a story like this from last season is “Kill the Moon”. As I wrote at that link, they could relatively easily have included a few words that would have made the idea less preposterous. It wouldn’t necessarily be good science, but it would at least be less-ridiculous science than the explanation that was actually given.

So too here, then, with “Sleep No More.” The atmosphere and style of the episode were great. And the plot was fine. It was just the execution of the plot, including in particular the explanation for the problem, that let it down.

Let me explain what I mean. The plot, in summary, was: In found footage a mad scientist tells us the story of some soldiers investigating a space station that has dropped out of communication. The crew have been turned into dust-zombies by a machine that enables them to function on five minutes sleep a day. The explanation for the dust conversion is stupid.

The Doctor and Clara, of course, have arrived on the station and help to investigate. Clara gets sucked into the sleep machine, which means she will become a dust monster too.

Our heroes and the surviving troops escape in the TARDIS, and the mad scientist reveals he is a dust monster and is spreading the infection via the very recording we’re watching.

As I write that I realise that the whole Clara/infection thing wasn’t resolved, and nor, of course, was the infection via radio business (it reminded me slightly of Snow Crash, incidentally). So maybe they will revisit it, next week or later.

But the ostensible explanation – before we got the radio part from the mad scientist – was that somehow the sleep-compression machine caused the sleep in the corner of your eyes to – what, grow sentient and consume humans, generating more of itself in the process? It’s hard even to explain what they were getting at.

Yet all they had to do was to say it was an alien intelligence that hade got into the mad scientist’s head and convinced him that helping it to spread was the right thing. then even have the sleep-machines infecting people via nanotechnology.

The aliens could even be cousin-species of the Vashta Nerada, as there’s a certain similarity.

Of course, that way we’d lose the radio-transmission-based spread, which was a nice touch too. So maybe nanotech that is quiescent until activated by the code sent in the transmssion.

Either way, it doesn’t take a lot of thought to come up with an idea that doesn’t break the story, but which also doesn’t jerk the viewer out of their suspension of disbelief.

And don’t get me started on the Star Trek-style powered orbit.

In my family we have concluded that what the show needs is, like UNIT, a Scientific Advisor.

Invasion and Inversion

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:16:02 +0000

I thought of a couple of alternative titles for this: "Old Enough to be Your Messiah." (I'll bet that played well in parts of America.) "The Basil & Petronella Show." "Who's Gonna Make the Violins?" But for consistency with my other posts. I'm sticking with this.

This was a great pair of episodes. True, some will have found it hard to understand what was going on in the first episode; and true also, the whole Zygon plot might not have entirely made sense (why, in particular, do they have electric zappy powers now, and why does that turn people into sparking wire wool?) But the overall mood, and tone, and writing, were fantastic.

Not to mention the fanservice. The references to Harry Sullivan; the portrait of the first Doctor over the safe; “Five Rounds Rapid!” (Which, I discover, is the title of Nicholas Courtney’s autobiography.) I Loved it all.

This season feels to me like it’s really solid. There are no real highs: no “Blink”, no “The Empty Child” or “Father’s Day”. But there have been no really weak episodes yet either.

On second watching I caught an interesting snippet. When the Doctor is telling Zygella why he didn’t press the big button, he says he “let Clara Oswald get into [his] head.” Then he says, “she doesn’t leave.” Maybe that’ll be the big secret reveal of this season: Clara doesn’t leave after all.

No, I realise that can’t be so, as official BBC announcements have been made. But it was an interesting change from the heavy-handed foreshadowing of her departure that we’ve seen. Clara has been the Doctor’s – and our – companion for a long time now, and it’ll be strange for all of us to adjust to someone new.

I loved the Doctor’s speech – soliloquy, you might say – that reinstated the ceasefire. It’s his statement of Doctoriness.

Still wondering if there’s a big thing for this season. I mean, apart from Clara leaving. It has to be something to do with hybrids of some kind – I noticed that the second part didn’t use that word, though the first did. The Osgoods could be said to be a hybrid, but I can’t see them coming back before the end of this run. There’s the Dalek/Time Lord thing, which will have to play out at some point.

Then there’s the Minister of War – which could just be a throwaway name like the Nightmare Child; but I think it was placed too specifically for that. And Lady Me, or Ashildr. I fully expect to see her again.

I expect we’ll have to wait for the closing two-parter, “Heaven Sent”/“Hell Bent” to find out.

But before that we’ve got “Sleep No More” on Saturday. I don’t know if it’s a two-parter with the one after, “Face the Raven”, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (Books 2015, 9)

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:48:52 +0000

The pages, how they turn. I'm sure I've said that before of JK Rowling's work, but not in public, it seems. Amusing to note that The Silkworm was my number 10 last year.

Plenty of Robin in this one, and it’s probably the best of the three. Certainly better than the last one.

Strangest thing about it is the music. By which I mean: the title is taken from a song by Blue Öyster Cult, and quotes from them precede most of the chapters (some chapters have titles, and those are the titles of BÖC songs).

Now, I had no idea that Patti Smith wrote some lyrics for BÖC, but apparently she did¹

Still on a musical note, in passing, one of the ancillary characters roadies for a band who are called Death Cult. Since JK Rowling is about the same age as me, and since she obviously pays attention to music, I would expect her to know that The Cult used to be known as Death Cult, and before that as Southern Death Cult. But perhaps you had to read the music papers in the 80s to know about that kind of stuff.²

Anyway, the Death Cult here have nothing to do with either the famous Cult, nor the Blue Öyster one.

The ending is a tad unsatisfying, as it leaves a number of things unresolved – which is fine, as there will no doubt be more books – and doesn’t really give us enough time post-denoument to decompress with the characters.

Still, highly recommended, as long as you’re not put off by gruesome scenes.

We went to see her at the Roundhouse the other day, incidentally, on the 40th anniversary tour for Horses; but I digress. ↩︎
And it turns out not to be quite as I remember, as according to Wikipedia, the only connection between SDC and Death Cult/The Cult is Ian Astbury. ↩︎

Apprentice and Familiar

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:37:29 +0000

Out of sequence, but for completeness I should write a piece about the first two-parter in this year's Doctor Who series. "The Magician's Apprentice" and "The Witch's Familiar".

Excellent that they managed not to include the word “Dalek” in the title of a Dalek story. A genuine surprise when the boy in the minefield said his name.

And great, great interplay between Missy and Clara, especially.

But if we assume, as we must, that the Magician is The Doctor and Missy is the Witch , does that make Clara both the Apprentice and the Familar? Or is Davros one of all of the above? It’s all very mysterious.

And Dalek/Time Lord hybrids? This can’t end well.

Wait, though: following on from my previous: The Doctor isn’t the Scarecrow: he’s the Wizard. But then, who is behind the curtain?

Attack of the Clowns, or: Send in the Clones

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 23:52:07 +0000

Some time in 2002, as I suppose it must have been, I was driving through Hackney with my then-small son in the car, when he said, "Dad, I saw a clown."

OK, I thought, someone probably dressed up for a kids' party. It was a Saturday, as I recall. “Oh, yeah, where?” I glanced around, but couldn’t see any white faces or red noses.

“On a bus shelter.”

“A clown? On a bus shelter?”

“Yes. A clown. You know, from Star Wars.”

I guess I must have been able to give some explanation of what “clone” means, to a five-year-old. But it wasn’t till last weekend that we finally saw the relevant movie.

And as before… it wasn’t as bad as I’ve been led to believe. Keeping your expectations low always helps.

It wasn’t great, it’s true. In particular I wasn’t convinced by Anakin and Padmé falling in love. Anakin, yes, but Padmé, really, no.

I had a hard time working out what the sides were in the big battle. The clones end up fighting on the side of the Republic? I didn’t expect that.

And this bothers me: if you are an assemblage of planets joined together in common cause by treaty, and some of those planets decide they want to leave – going to war over it should be the furthest thing from your mind. It would be like if a country wanted to leave the EU, and the rest of the EU formed a vast army to force them to stay in it. That’s not the action of a peaceful democratic entity.

It’s also insane. Even if you win and make the would-be-leavers stay, you’ve now got a load of people – whole worlds – who are actively hostile to the grouping they are within. That can’t be healthy.

Now, if a subset leaves peacefully, and then war developed later on, that would be more believeable. After all, we acknowledge the EU’s effect of helping to keep Europe peaceful these past seventy years. It’s one of the reasons I am strongly against the idea of Britain leaving.

But most importantly of all: you can’t say “federation starships” and mean the bad guys. I know they were talking about the Trade Federation, but “federation starship” means something in SF, and to hear it used here was really jarring. Did Lucas have beef with Roddenberry, or something?

Yoda fighting was fun. He’s so tiny.

And I’ve booked a work outing to see Episode VII on the 17th of December, the day it opens.

Died and Lived

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:27:44 +0000

Some quick thoughts on the "The Girl Who Died"/"The Woman Who LIved" Doctor Who diptych.

It’s unusual and intriguing to see what was effectively a two-part story with different writing credits for each part. Yet there was no real need for these two episodes to be shown back-to-back, and indeed I partly got the sense that they might have been stronger if they had been separated by a few other stories.

On the other hand I’m fairly sure that the second part had to happen now because they’re gearing up to something. Maisie Williams’s Ashildr or “Me” character is, I feel sure, fundamental to this season’s overall story, if it has one.

After the first part I had the idea that Ashildr was going to become “The Minister of War”, the mysterious figure that was referred to by O’Donnell in “Under the Lake” as being something that 1980 was before – along with the moon blowing up and Harold Saxon.

Such an ominous-sounding figure is surely going to be an enemy of The Doctor, and at the end of “The Girl Who Died” he had created a near immortal who might not be at all happy with him about the situation, and who might use her longevity to gain power.

As indeed was the case, as we saw in “The Woman Who Lived”. However by the end of the second part I was less sure that Ashildr’s future role will be that one. It seems fairly likely that she’s going to have one, though, with her promise to pick up the pieces after The Doctor runs away, the giant foreshadowing of Clara’s departure, and of course her appearance in the background of Clara’s pupil’s photo.

However I get the feeling that her intentions will be more benign.

All just wild speculation, of course.

This pair of episodes were probably the weakest of the series so far, but they were still very good. Effective lightening of the mood with the comedy elements, while still not shying away from the darkness.

One last thought: in the pub scene at the end there were two people at a table in the foreground. I haven’t checked yet, but I’m fairly sure that the shot was a visual allusion to the Sandman episode whose title escapes me,¹ but in which Death agrees with her brother that she won’t take this one guy, and Morpheus meets him in taverns every hundred years. Which would tie in with the immortality theme, of course.

Oh, and: on Jason Snell’s Incomparable Flashcast about the second part (which episode Mr Snell wasn’t on, but never mind), the alien was likened to an “angry Cowardly Lion”. Now I’m sure there was also a mention by The Doctor of Ashildr’s heart “rusting” or “needing lubrication”, or some such – which was surely a reference to the Tin Woodsman. Which makes The Doctor The Scarecrow?

And Clara is Toto, of course, since Missy already likened her to a small dog.

I’m sure it’ll all make sense eventually.

It’s in The Doll’s House, issue # 13, “Men of Good Fortune”. Hob Gadling; he’s got his own Wikipedia entry ↩︎

Lake and Flood

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 23:20:25 +0000

Well, I'm not quite sure that Toby Whithouse quite managed to make the second episode as good as the first, but I'm loving the new series of Doctor Who.

The Beethoven bit at the start was unnecessary: a rare example of the modern show not expecting the viewer to keep up, but assuming they’ll need an explanation – a pre-explanation in this case, but still. (Also breaking the fourth wall; most unusual.)

On the other hand, maybe some people would have been a bit lost at the end without it. Maybe all of us would have missed the point and weeks later we’d have gone “Wait, but he only did that because he –” Which has its own pleasure too, of course.

My main concern was that The Doctor let O’Donnell die, without any apparent remorse. I have a feeling that might come back to haunt him.

Also: loving the two-parters. Proper cliffhangers and all. How about a traditional four-parter next season?

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Translated by Ken Liu (Books 2015, 8)

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 18:51:50 +0000

I feel that we should be rendering the author’s name in the Chinese way, with the family name first: Liu Cixin. That’s how he signs himself in the “Author’s Postscript”, and that’s how the translator renders all the characters’ names. But the above is how the publishers have done it, so we’ll stick with that for now.

As a work in translation, The Three-Body Problem fits well within the parameters of The Tempest Challenge, which, as I told you, I’m taking this year. It’s also this year’s Hugo winner, so I was keen to read it for that reason.

Right at the start I felt a mild sense of annoyance, because it was only then that I realised it is part of an incomplete trilogy.¹ I’m not keen on starting unfinished serieses (it is so a word).

I finished it last night with a sense of surprise. According to my Kindle I was only at 85%; more importantly it didn’t exactly feel like the end, though to be fair I wasn’t quite sure where it could go from that point. I knew there were notes from the author and the translator, but they surely couldn’t be that long?

They couldn’t. But it turns out that the digital copy contains an extract from the next book in the series. I’m not sure how I feel about this trend in general. I don’t think I’ve ever read one of them. But I do think they’re getting too damn big: this one was fully 10% of the file, according to the Kindle. One tenth of a novel is not in fact that novel, but an extract from the next one? I don’t think that’s a great trend. But to the content. What did I actually think of the work? Umm… mixed. I enjoyed it overall, am glad I read it, and will probably read the sequels. But it has problems that I don’t think are just caused by my cultural expectations. Though they might be: the translator, Ken Liu, in his postscript says:

But there are more subtle issues involving literary devices and narration techniques. The Chinese literary tradition shaped and was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect. In some cases, I tried to adjust the narrative techniques to ones that American readers are more familiar with. In other cases I've left them alone, believing that it's better to retain the flavour of the original.

Which is fair enough, and for “American” it’s safe to read “British”, as well. But perhaps the most important literary technique – or at least, the admonition most often drummed into beginning writers – is “show, don’t tell”. As I have argued myself, it’s not a rule that can or should be set in stone; but there are times when violating it comes across as clumsy at best.

There are many such times in The Three-Body Problem. Long sections of characters' lives are told to us as a history. Similarly with the sections that take place in the “Three Body” game.

There are some great ideas here; in particular the best use of monomolecular fibres since – was it “Johnny Mnemonic”? One of William Gibson’s shorts, anyway. It’s also worth reading for the historical parts: the terror of living through China’s Cultural Revolution is well evoked. But the aliens are hard to believe in.

And part of the initial setup: scientists are killing themselves because things seem to have gone fundmentally wrong with physics. I found that unconvincing. If as a scientist you find things not behaving as you expect – even seemingly randomly – you don’t give up on science and life; you try to find a new theory to fit the facts.

Lastly, I don’t think we ever found out what’s supposed to happen at the end of the countdown.

But I don’t mean to do a hatchet job. I did enjoy it, and as I say, I’ll probably read the sequels. Would it have won the Hugo in a less puppy-infested year? Maybe. You can never tell.

Incomplete in English, at least; the third part is due to be published next year, so it may well be finished in Chinese. ↩︎

Leadership

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 00:48:35 +0000

There has been little in the news lately but the refugee crisis and the Labour leadership election. I'm here to talk, briefly, before the polls close on Thursday, about the latter.

I just voted, and guess what? For Jeremy Corbyn.

I’ve never been a member of the party before.¹ I always thought that I was too independent to toe a party line; too many of my anarchist ideals, forged in the fires of punk, still stood.

Well, maybe. But my anarchism, such as it was, was always on the socialist wing. And I recognise the idealism that drove it. I’d like to think that humans could live without governments and leaders – that we are perfectible, and could form a working society through cooperation. But the fact is, of course, that that is not yet the case. And until it is, there are things worth standing up for, worth believing in. Worth fighting for.

I didn’t want to toe a line; but in May we crossed a line. After five years of a Tory government in all but name, we have a named one. David Cameron and his regime will go down in history as worse than Thatcher’s; but until he does go down, we have to deal with the effects of it.

On the morning after the election I resolved to join the Labour party and do what I could to help. This wasn’t about electing a new leader, though I realised that would be part of it. It certainly wasn’t about Jeremy Corbyn: I made the decision before Ed Miliband had even resigned, and enacted it before the leadership candidates had been nominated.

And for what it’s worth, I joined as a full member, not one of these £3 Supporters that we’ve been hearing so much about.

I think the aftermath of the Scottish referendum had some effect on my decision. Seeing how the failure of the “Yes” vote energised the SNP and led many supporters to join led me to hope that something similar would happen with Labour. As indeed it has.

Anyway, getting back to that choice of leader. It’s long past time that Labour had a woman as its leader, but neither of those standing are right for me. Where we are right now, Corbyn’s views most closely match my own values. When he says things like this:

Paying tax is not a burden. It is the subscription we pay to live in a civilised society.
– “The Economy in 2020”

that is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been saying about tax for years.

There is much else. I’m not convinced about leaving NATO, but I don’t think it’s a fundamental policy. I do think we shouldn’t waste vast amounts of money on replacing Trident. The cold war is over, more or less.² And even if Russia is getting alarmingly expansionist these days, a British not-really-independent nuclear missile submarine is going to worry them much.

Corbyn might not be electable – I doubt that analysis, but let’s go with it for now – but he should at least lead a Labour party in opposition that actually opposes the government. Which, with its slim majority, could actually be vulnerable.

Interesting times ahead.

The title of my blog is partly a nod to my long-time support of it, though. ↩︎
I nearly typed “the cod war”, which is also long over, but was much less terrifying. ↩︎

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Books 2015, 7)

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 11:58:49 +0000

I read this under false pretences. Self-inflicted false pretences, to be sure, but nonetheless.

It won the Clarke Award, as I’m sure you know. All I knew about it when I heard the result, when I saw Mandel’s acceptance video at the ceremony, was the title. But it’s a badge of recognition, if nothing else; a clear signal that a group of people, of our peers, perhaps, think it’s one of the best books – maybe the best – released in the last year.

I downloaded it on Kindle (I think there was a special offer). I hadn’t read any reviews, not even the blurb. But it’s called Station Eleven: it’s got to be about a space station, right?

Well, “Station Eleven” is a space station of sorts. But this isn’t a story set on it, or in space at all. Well, except inasmuch as Earth is in space, which of course is totally.

Thing is, if I’d known this was actually set mainly in a post-end-of-civilisation dystopia, I probably wouldn’t have read it it at all. Such scenarios really don’t appeal to me much, at face value at least. I’m always reminded of a call for stories in Interzone many years ago, which asked for “radical, hard SF”; but which specifically said they didn’t want the kind of post-holocaust story where the hero gazes wistfully at a can of baked beans.

It’s an image which has stuck with me, but this is not that kind of story (though there are elements of scavenging among the ruins).

It’s also not set entirely after the fall of civilisation. In part it tells the life story of a successful actor (who dies on stage while playing Lear right at the start of the first chapter).

I note that Mandel herself seems to reject the SF label, and my thoughts on it – while loving it to bits – centred around wondering why she chose to tell the story of a present-day actor framed or intertwined within the death of civilisation. Looking at some reviews now I see that people treat the central theme as being the attempt to keep culture alive. And while that is an important aspect, I don’t really see it as being what the book is about.

Particularly if we are to consider it as literary fiction¹ wherein characters are usually the main focus. As such it’s mainly the stories of the actor and of the young woman who started out as a child actor who was onstage when he died, but who survived the plague.

The conclusion of this review at the New York Times sums it up well:

If “Station Eleven” reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.

SF or not, it’s well worth reading.

Why not li-fi, I often wonder? ↩︎

On Djs, Beats 1, and Talking Over Songs

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 07:53:21 +0000

I hadn't heard Zane Lowe, as I mentioned before. So when Apple Music launched, with its Beats 1 streaming radio service, for which Zane is the flagship DJ, I was interested to check him out.

A number of sources had led me to the belief that Zane, at Radio One, had effectively been the new John Peel. Nobody can live up to that claim, I suspect, but to me it meant that he must have a particular set of talents and abilities:

plays music of their own choice, free from playlists mandated by the station management;
actively seeks out new music;
communicates their enthusiasm to the listener;
plays the tracks in full, without talking over the beginning or end.

I’ve now heard Zane on Beats 1 a couple of times, and he certainly fulfils the first three of those criteria. But he fails dramatically on the fourth.

The thing with Peelie was, he played the track. He respected it, gave it space to succeed or fail on its own merit. Certainly he’d say, “This is the new one from so-and-so, and I think it’s great,” or whatever; but then he’d let you hear the record. The actual record. All of it. The whole thing.¹

Zane does not do that.

No, I’m afraid he talks over the records. And not just over instrumental intros or “chasing the fade,” either. I’ve heard him popping up right in the middle of a song with a word or two.

One of the people who spoke highly of Zane was Myke Hurley of Relay FM, the podcast network. In particular I had heard him talking on the Upgrade podcast about what a good guy Zane was.

So when I heard Mr Lowe talking over the tracks, I tweeted with the #AskUpgrade tag, which is one of their feedback mechanisms:

#AskUpgrade Myke, if Zane Lowe is so great, how come he talks over the records (err, tracks)? Isn't meant to be in the Peel mould?
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 10, 2015

They read out my question on the next episode, 45, I think. Make said I sounded “very angry”, which I wasn’t – just disappointed. And then we exchanged a few tweets:

[@imyke](https://micro.blog/imyke) Thanks for answering my Zane Lowe question on Upgrade. I wasn’t “very angry”, just disappointed, as I’d hoped for a new Peel.
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 14, 2015

[@imyke](https://micro.blog/imyke) One of Peel’s gifts was that he talked about the music between the tracks. (Which among other things made it easy to record them.)
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 14, 2015

[@devilgate](https://micro.blog/devilgate) I don’t know if I’d call that a ‘gift’
If all you’re looking for is the music, subscribe to zane’s playlists
— Myke Hurley (@imyke) July 14, 2015

[@imyke](https://micro.blog/imyke) No, “trick”, or “technique”, maybe. Thing is I’d like the talk, the enthusiasm; just not over the music.
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 14, 2015

And that’s about where we left it. I don’t think I got across my main point very well (140 characters is hard sometimes). But I’ve expressed it clearly enough up top there, I think.

Beats One is still interesting, and Apple Music has many interesting features. But I’m still looking for a DJ that knows how to treat records right.

Sometimes that was true even when “record” equalled “album”. ↩︎

Mind of My Mind by Octavia E Butler (Books 2015, 6)

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:47:56 +0000

The next book in the Patternist series after Wild Seed, which I wrote about before. I would describe it as the sequel to the other one, except that it turns out that they were written out of sequence.

This perhaps explains why the character of Anyanwu, who, as you’ll recall, I felt was slightly disappointing in the first book, is completely sidelined and, indeed, thrown away, in this one.

The other reason is that the focus has moved on to a new generation of Doro’s descendants. We are in mid to late 20th-century America, and his breeding programme is finally beginning to pay off. More spectacularly than he had ever imagined, it seems, as some of his telepaths – who up until now have not been able to bear being near each other – form a kind of group or meld they call the Pattern.

This makes them able to both work and live together, and increases their power and effectiveness enormously.

Things ensue. It’s good, but still feels kind of weak to me. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t that compelling.

Also I thought I had read this one, years ago, but none of it was even the slightest bit familiar to me, so I guess not.

Drive-By Brucellosis

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 01:28:31 +0000

The day after I post linking to Patterson Hood's NYT piece, I get an email from Amazon recommending a Drive-By Truckers album. I assumed it was a new one.

Not too spooky – I doubt their bots are reading my blog. It’s nothing more than the fact that I’ve bought DBT albums from Amazon before. Only the timing was surprising – plus the fact that I had no idea that the album was coming out. Though further research shows that it’s not actually a new album, making Amazon’s prompt slightly more suspect again.

Anyway the interesting thing about this album – The Fine Print: A Collection Of Oddities And Rarities 2003-2008 – is that it contains a track called ‘Play it All Night Long’. I’m assuming that this must be a cover of Warren Zevon’s song of the same name.

Now, that song is a dissection of DBT’s beloved Lynyrd Skynyrd. Or at least it uses “that dead band’s song” as part of its critique of the South. For DBT to cover it must be an example of “the duality of the southern thing,” of which they speak extensively on Southern Rock Opera.

Of course, large parts of that album are about Skynyrd, so covering a song that is also partly about them isn’t much of a stretch. Thing is, Zevon’s song is less than positive about the South as a whole, or Skynyrd by implication. Not, of course, that the DBTs are entirely positive about the South; that duality again.

‘Play it All Night Long’ is also the only known song – known by me, at least – to contain the word “brucellosis”.

The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 14:43:44 +0000

Paterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers talks wisely about the southern USA.

If we want to truly honor our Southern forefathers, we should do it by moving on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity, the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them.

Wild Seed by Octavia E Butler (books, 2015, 5)

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 16:04:46 +0000

Halfway through the year and only five books in? This is shocking behaviour!

I’m glad I read this, and I sort of enjoyed it, but I wasn’t entirely happy with it.

There are two main characters, both of whom appear to be functionally immortal, though with different mechanisms for keeping them alive. The shapeshifting, self-healing (and healer of others) Anyanwu is an African woman in the seventeenth century when we meet her. She is already two or three hundred years old.

The male immortal, Doro, is even older. For perhaps thousands of years he has survived by stealing bodies. His consciousness hops from his current one to another when the latter threatens him, or just when he chooses it. The personality of his destination body is of course destroyed in the hop, and the body he leaves also dies. Anyanwu is attracted to his power and the fact that they are apparently the only such long-lived people on Earth, but is repelled by the mechanism of his survival.

As she is by his long-term (really long-term) project to try to breed people with special abilities – many of the subjects of which are, or may be, distant descendants of her, or of his original people (most of whom he killed in panic when he first “died” and found himself in a new body).

I was annoyed at Anyanwu as a character at times, by the way she didn’t resist Doro when he had her do things she didn’t want to do. But he is an expert manipulator and is willing to threaten her kids to bend her to his will. And I guess that cleverly evokes the reality of women’s situation often in history, and certainly at that time.

This is the start of the Seed to Harvest series, and I’m keen to see where it goes.

The Phantom Menace

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 01:04:25 +0000

Just who (or what) is the menacing phantom?

Following on from my On things never seen post, yesterday was Father's Day, and we watched The Phantom Menace.

It is not as bad – not nearly as bad – as nearly everyone makes out.

It starts badly, oddly enough. Not just the dull scroll about the Trade Federation, but then you have the Japanese-sounding guys in charge of the blockade and invasion, who are voiced by people who seemingly can't act. Their dialogue is frankly embarrassing.

But much of it is fine. Sure, there are holes in the logic, places where it doesn't exactly make sense; but what film doesn't have instances like that?

Even – and I realise I'm committing a kind of geek sacrilege as I write this – even Jar-Jar Binks isn't that annoying. Could the plot have worked without him, or with him not being a comedic figure? Of course. But having him as he is, does no harm.

But hey: I liked Wesley Crusher, too.

And that's about as much as I'm going to say about it for now.

Test from Editorial

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 01:57:48 +0000

A test from the iPhone Editorial app.

Today's xkcd is weirdly compelling

Tue, 26 May 2015 19:33:18 +0000

Just run your eyes over the names and let the imagined connections form.

And look at the hover text; do you know who the missing doctor is?

The Tories want to reintroduce the Lord Chamberlain

Sun, 24 May 2015 19:11:03 +0000

From The Guardian:

David Cameron has backed plans to give Ofcom stronger powers to prevent the broadcast of “extremist messages” despite concerns from one of his own cabinet ministers that this could amount to state censorship.
The prime minister appeared to support Theresa May, the home secretary, after the Guardian revealed a split in the cabinet over her counter-extremism measures.

Let’s return to the days when creations had to be authorised by a state censor, says Cameron.

The night after, and shame

Sat, 09 May 2015 01:09:07 +0000

Well how the hell did that happen?

There are two questions there:

How could the opinion polls be so wrong? and
Why did all those people make such bad choices?

On the radio they were talking about “shy Tories” as an answer to 1. That’s a term that was coined after the 1992 election, apparently, to describe all those people who voted Tory but who had never let anyone know that that was what they were planning. I remember the aftermath of that one, and the thing that struck me was all those people I worked with who read the Telegraph “for the sport”; and how smug they looked that morning.

I became wise to that. But nowadays no-one comes into work with a paper any more, so it’s harder to tell such things. And how would it help, even if they did and you could?

The thing is, the pre-election polls must have been deceived.

Of course, no-one is obliged to tell the truth to a pollster. No-one is obliged to even answer their questions. But if you do agree to answer their questions: why would you lie?

I can think of only two possible reasons. Maybe you want to deliberately skew the poll results. But that seems unlikely. Sure, some people will feel like that; a few. But not lots. Not enough to actually have a deceptive effect.

And the other reason why, if you answered, you might lie; the only other reason I can think that might make people lie to a pollster.

Because you’re embarrassed about your answer. Or stronger: because you’re ashamed of it.

Shame can be a powerful influencer.

And it makes sense that people would be ashamed of voting Tory. Most of us were brought up to know that we shouldn’t be selfish; that sharing is best, and just being out for yourself is bad. We learn that at our mother’s knee, generally.

This tweet from Irvine Welsh sums up what I think is a good approach;

When you're not doing so well, vote for a better life for yourself. If you are doing quite nicely, vote for a better life for others.
— Irvine Welsh (@IrvineWelsh) May 7, 2015

If you’re reasonably comfortably off, and you’re voting for the party that you think is going to make you better off – no matter how wrong you might be;¹ and if you’re doing it mainly because you think that – then you are selfish and ought to be ashamed of yourself.

And in that attempt to answer the first question, I appear to have answered the second one as well. Why did all those Tory voters make such bad choices?

Selfishness.

It’ll hurt us all.

And that’s a whole nother discussion. ↩︎

On things never seen

Mon, 04 May 2015 23:01:48 +0000

There's a programme on Radio 4 from time to time (and it has made the transition to TV) called I've Never Seen Star Wars. In it Marcus Brigstocke gets a guest to try things that they have never tired before. Conversation ensues, and it can be amusing.

Anyway, the title clearly derives from how unlikely it is that anyone (of a certain generation or three, at least) will not have seen it.

In case you’re worrying, I saw the original – back when it was just called Star Wars, without the Episode IV: A New Hope subtitle – in the cinema (probably second run, not first, but still). And the second and third, of course.

But then there was the prequel trilogy. To be honest, when The Phantom Menace came out, I don’t think I was all that interested. I had known from early on that Lucas had planned the original as part of the middle trilogy of three. But by the time the prequels started, it had been so long that it just didn’t seem very important, you know?

And more importantly, in 1999 when it came out, I had a small child. We weren’t going to many films that weren’t aimed at like two-year olds. And after that, there was always something more interesting, more pressing to see…

I mislead you slightly, here. I did, in fact, see The Phantom Menace, after a fashion: on a shonky old VHS, with a three-year old sweetly chattering on the sofa next to me throughout. It hardly counts. And I definitely haven’t seen the others.

And I know everyone says, “Don’t bother, don’t waste your time, they’re terrible;” but they can only say that because they’ve seen them. And now – now there’s a new one coming down the line. Episode VII, The Force Awakens is due out in December, and I’ll certainly want to see it. Of course, it will follow on from Return of the Jedi, and it probably won’t matter if you haven’t seen episodes I-III; but it just wouldn’t feel right to not see them.

So I intend to watch the prequel trilogy. I was going to start today – the fourth of May be with you, and all that – but events got in the way. Still, over the next few weeks I’ll watch all three, and report back here.

Wish me luck.

Neither tempestuous nor particularly challenging

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 08:30:58 +0000

I'm taking the Tempest Challenge.

I was somewhere in the middle of the third book I read this year when I heard of it, and I realised that all my reading so far was books by women, and so why not?

The idea of the challenge, in case you haven’t clicked through, is to:

take One Year off from reading fiction by straight, white, cisgender male authors and instead read fiction by authors who come from minority or marginalized groups. This includes women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ authors along with a wide variety of other marginalized identities from which to create a reading list: people with disabilities; poor and working class authors; writers with non-Christian religious or spiritual beliefs; and for Americans, even reading books in translation by authors of any background will open up new viewpoints.

Which, when you list as many categories of author as that, sounds pretty easy. And so it is.

So far, as you’ll have seen from my published notes to date, I’ve just read books by women. No trouble there. I’m currently reading Wild Seed by Octavia E Butler, which also adds African-American to the mix.

The only problem – and it is, let’s face it, a very minor one – is when I see a book on my shelves that I think, “Oh, I must read that;” and then I think, “but not this year.” (Though it occurs that if I were to take “writers with non-Christian religious or spiritual beliefs” at face value, then I could, for example, carry on my Iain Banks re-read; but such writers – atheist writers, at least – are far from marginalised in Britain. And it wouldn’t really be in the spirit.)

I’m making two exceptions: one is a book I started last year, about the music scene in New York in the 70s. It’s important preparation for our trip to New York in the summer, so I intend to finish that.

The other is if Robert Galbraith has a new book out this year. :-) And in getting that link I discover that it’s due out in the autumn, which is pleasing to hear.

Apparently some people are offended by the very existence of this kind of challenge. Mostly straight white men, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear. It’s “censorship”, apparently. I mean, what?

You’ll read all about my reading adventures here.

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal (Books 2015, 4)

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 08:27:35 +0000

I won this in the raffle at a BSFA meeting several months ago (actually over a year: October 2013), when Mary Robinette Kowal was the guest. From her talk, it sounded like it would be a lot of fun, and now that I get round to reading it, it lives up to that expectation.

We are in Regency times, except this is not exactly the Regency of our own past; in this one, magic exists. At least in a limited form: “Glamour” allows people to form illusions by manipulating folds of the ether. Most people can do this to some degree, and well-brought-up young ladies are taught the art along with music and painting. But there are those who are more talented.

Our heroine, Jane, is one such. But as the novel opens, and for most of it, she is more concerned about the fact that, unmarried at 28, she seems destined to become (or already is) an “old maid”. Her prettier sister, Melody, is more likely to make a good “match”.

There are, of course, balls, officers, heartbreaks, and more. If you enjoy Austen, and fantasy, you’ll like this, I predict. It’s the first in a series, and I look forward to reading more.

One thing slightly puzzled me. When Kowal was at the BSFA meeting, I recall her saying that she is a Doctor Who fan, and that she likes to slip a mysterious traveller into each of her books. If she slipped him into this one, she did it so subtly that I didn’t notice it, even though I was expecting him. There is a brief appearance from the local surgeon, a Dr Smythe, so I guess that’s him. Oh yes. In fact, she says in that piece, “if you [notice him], then I’ve done it wrong.” So, nicely done.

But anyway, well worth a read, though I daresay the purist would say you should read all of Austen first (which I haven’t; only Pride and Prejudice).

Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 13:13:01 +0000

Why have I never seen this before? Excellent. Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings.

Do you think he might be a fan of Sublime Text?

Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson (books 2015, 3)

Sun, 22 Mar 2015 00:43:19 +0000

This is all very meta. It's a story within a story, with at least one other story within that (the last of which is not very relevant). And the two main ones are more intertwined, rather than one enclosing the other, with typefaces used to distinguish them.

The largest story is that of a young woman during her time at Dundee University – in fact really just a few days in one term thereat. She’s a bit of a drip, just drifting along letting stuff happen to her – including repeatedly getting into a car with an unknown strange man who claims to be a private detective.

But the same time she (and I can’t remember her name, which can be a problem with first-person characters, because how often do you use your own name?) is holding an extended conversation with her mother (who, we’re repeatedly told, is not her mother) on a remote Scottish island whereon they are the only residents. She is trying to get her mother to tell her story. The mother is not keen to do so.

The slice-of-student-life in seventies Dundee is interesting enough. I’ve never been to Dundee, but I was a student in Edinburgh in the eighties, and it doesn’t sound all that different. Indeed, that story could be enough to carry a novel, if you had a slightly more active protagonist, and more of a plot.

The plot, such as it is, is in the island story. Well, the mystery is mainly told there, let’s say.

I enjoyed it all well enough while I was reading it, but can’t help but wonder what it’s really for. That’s not something I would normally ask of a novel – they are their own justification, generally; they exist to tell their story, and that’s all you need. But here, well… there isn’t quite enough of a story. It describes itself – within the island story, of the Dundee story; that’s part of the metaness – as a “comic novel”. And yes, there’s humour in the university story, and maybe beyond. But it ’s not exactly funny, you know?

And the last section is a detective story that the protagonist of the Dundee story is writing. But it doesn’t really relate to either of the other stories – except maybe by some imagery – and it doesn’t go anywhere. So I don’t really see why it’s there.

When I read Atkinson’s debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, I likened it to The Crow Road. Sadly, this doesn’t live up to that promise. Luckily she went on to write Life After Life, which as you’ll recall, I loved.

The first time

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 01:25:46 +0000

I've probably meant to write about this kind of thing for years: first records, the first bands I saw live, and so on. I was prompted to finally visit it by a post over at The Reinvigorated Programmer.

The Programmer tells us of his first record, and links it to his impending trip to see Paul McCartney. I note that, irrespective of his first single, he knows what the first album he owned was. I don’t. I can tell you the first singles I was given (one now spoiled by the epidemic of 70s celebrities having been slimeballs), the first I bought by choice (maximally embarrassing), and various other details. But the first album? I’m not sure. Not sure at all.

I can tell you the first album we owned as a family: it was called Bing and Louis, by Messrs Crosby and Armstrong. We had gone to a hi-fi shop in Glasgow to buy a stereo (which for some reason my parents pronounced “steer-ee-oh”, and did for years thereafter). We hadn’t had any kind of record player before then. I must have been about seven, maybe?

Anyway, the guy in the shop was using this Crosby and Armstrong record¹ to demo the turntable, and my Mum liked it so much that he gave it to us. As I recall it was always really badly scratched – crackly, not sticking – so it makes me wonder why on Earth he was using it to demo anything. Unless it was like, “This system is so good you’ll hear every crackle.”

After that initial record, my parents mainly had soundtrack albums – or at least, those were the ones that I remember listening to. The Sound of Music, Paint Your Wagon, Cabaret… I know, the latter was most unsuitable. Except the music isn’t (unless you’re overly influenced by “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”). It was years later before I saw the film.²

And as I think back to the cupboard under the stereo, I’m remembering a couple of albums that were bought for me that are not the one I was going to mention (inasmuch as was going to mention early albums at all, which I wasn’t when I started writing this).

There was an album of really bad versions of TV themes – mainly SF ones, I think, as the only ones I can remember are Doctor Who and Star Trek. The former was bad, but the latter was so bad that I remember my friend Scot saying, “The shite’s coming out” when it started playing one time, after I had described it as “shite”.

Why did we listen to it, then? I dunno. I guess we were musically starved to death.

And something from when I was a bit younger, called, if I recall correctly, Tubby the Tuba. I don’t even want to google that.

I think there was also at least one Disney soundtrack album. Maybe the animated Robin Hood?

The thing I was thinking of, though, that was at least something like a rock or pop album, was given to me by my brother one Christmas. It was called Blockbusters, and it consisted of songs by The Sweet, Mud and Suzi Quatro, making it a seminal influence on me, considering my origin story. And I still have that one.

The connection between the three, as the well-informed musicologist will know, is that they were all Chinnichap artists. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman were the Stock, Aitken and Waterman of their day.³

It was a great album, with all the hits you could want: “Blockbuster” itself, of course; “Tiger Feet”; “Dynamite”; and of course, “Devil Gate Drive”, and more.

It was only years later that I realised that they weren’t by the original artists. These were the days before compilations like the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, which reliably package up a selection of the year’s chart hits, properly credited and in their original single form. Back then, every year saw another album in the Top of the Pops series, which shared only the name with the TV show. On them you got a selection of the year’s hits, performed by a studio band doing passable clones of the originals.

My Blockbusters album was the same kind of thing, but focused on a single songwriting team.

It was still good, though.

But none of this leads me any closer to remembering what the first album I chose to buy (or asked to have bought for me) was. Possibly it was something by The Beatles. It wasn’t till my sister gave me a reel-to-reel tape of Beatles singles that I really got into music.

But I suspect the only way to be sure will be to do a careful inventory of my records. Which is project for another time.

By now, though, you’re probably desperate to know about those embarrassing or spoiled early singles. Or, you’ve completely forgotten about them.

Some time after we got the stereo, I was given two singles: “The Laughing Gnome” by David Bowie; and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I am)” by Gary Glitter. Who’d have thought that the second of those would come to be the more embarrassing?

Then a few years later, after Britain’s Eurovision triumph, I took a liking to the Brotherhood of Man, and bought “Oh Boy (The Mood I’m In)”. Which – oh my god! – was in 1977. I am ashamed.

I bought it in Boots (the shop, not the footwear), if I remember rightly. Remember when they were kind of a department store, and sold records?

I’m kind of sure it must be this one, except that’s shown as Bing & Satchmo, and I’m sure the title was as I gave it above. ↩︎
And I’ve still never seen Paint Your Wagon. ↩︎
I’m kind of amazed to read that they wrote Toni Basil’s “Mickey”, as well. ↩︎

URLs and searching

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 22:58:51 +0000

URL hiding

A while ago, I read a piece called “Improving the URL Bar" (turns out it’s almost a year old, but never mind). I made both mental and Pinboard-based notes of it, because my response to it was, “That’s not improving the URL bar, it’s destroying it."

Reading it again now, I don’t feel quite so strongly; I partly agree with what the author was getting at. But I feel we lose something important as we make URLs less visible. They show something of the hierarchy of a site, its structure — or at least that’s the origin of the path part.

The argument against that of course is that the path part is an implentation detail that doesn’t need to be seen by users, and perhaps more importantly, the whole thing is meaningless at best, confusing at worst to most users.

Well, maybe so. But to those of us who do understand them, hiding them can be confusing, even annoying.Of course you can click in the URL bar, or press Cmd-L or Ctrl-L, to see the whole thing. More usefully, In Safari, which I’m currently using, there’s a preference called “Show full website address”, which overrides the behaviour. So you can have your choice.

Searching

But then there’s this whole thing that we have now, of browsers doing a search when you type something in URL bar; especially (though not exclusively) when it’s not obviously a URL that you’ve typed or pasted.

I don’t like it.

Or I didn’t. I’ve been using Safari since I wiped and reinstalled this Mac because it was getting really slow (successfully, I might add). I decided to keep things as stock as possible (within reason — I wasn’t going to switch back from Lightroom to iPhoto, for example, or from MailMate to Mail.app). And Firefox can sometimes be a bit of a resource hog.

But I spent quite some time trying to find out how to give Safari a separate search bar like FF has (or can have — it may be a plugin, but if so it’s one that I install without thinking). I had muscle memory that went Cmd-T, Cmd-K (or Ctrl-T, Ctrl-T when I’m on Windows) when I want a new tab I’m going to search in. Still have it, actually, because I still use FF on Windows on my work machine.

It turns out that you can’t have that on Safari. You just have to search from the URL bar. So I just got into the habit of doing that. And now I find I do it even on Firefox (you have both options there).

I don’t know; I still feel that the URL bar should be for URLs, and searching should be something else. but it doesn’t offend me like it used to.

Still, the effect is to further blur the distinction between searching for a site and going to a specific site. I see people — even experienced, technically knowledgable people — going to Google’s home page and typing “facebook.com” into the search box. I mean, what?

Oh, and of course if you search from Google’s home page in Chrome, your cursor jumps to the URL bar! Or it did the last time I used Chrome. Which blurs the distinction between site and browser, as well as between site and search.

In the end it doesn’t matter that much — people mostly get where they mean to go — but by making it less than clear what is going on when we navigate around the web, we make it harder for people to understand how it’s all put together, and I think we lose something important in doing so.

On missing out on Zane

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 13:40:35 +0000

I feel strangely that I've missed out on Zane Lowe -- on knowing who he is as a DJ, as an interviewer; maybe even as the inheritor of John Peel's Radio One mantle. And now he's off to Apple.

I’ve just been listening to an interview with Lowe on Scroobius Pip’s Distraction Pieces podcast, and he comes across as very interesting and informed. And I heard about his Apple move recently on another podcast, wherein Myke Hurley talked about his move and how he had been the best introducer of new music at Radio One since Peel.

(Podcasts are the new rock ‘n’ roll radio: discuss.)

And I’ve never knowingly heard his show.

Which is a shame, on one level. But on another – how often have I listened to Radio One since Peel died? – maybe it’s not really my music any more.

Though on yet another hand, Lowe namechecks Neil Young and various other people that are my music, so…

As to what exactly he’s going to be doing at Apple, no-one outside knows for sure. “Music curation” seems to be the consensus, something to do with the streaming service they might be launching on the back of the Beats acquisition. The Pip podcast was recorded back in October, before he announced the move, so he doesn’t talk about it.

It’s clear, though, that, like Peelie, he’s a music fan above all else.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (Books 2015, 2)

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:24:51 +0000

There's an old saying by Robert Heinlein (or by one or more of his characters): "It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time." Technological advances -- and implicitly, other changes, such as social ones -- will happen when a certain weight of events and situations accrues, irrespective of the individuals involved. The steam engine would have been developed around that time with or without Stephenson; the radio in its era even without Marconi, and so on.

By that token these few years seem to be time-jump-story time. For here we have a story that, superficially at least, is very similar to Life After Life, which I wrote about last year as part of The First Three Books of the Year.

The similarity is that we have a character who lives his life, dies, and then lives it all over again. The major differences in this case are that he remembers his previous lives; and that there are others like him.

Also in this one the characters – some of them, at least – question their situation, wonder about how and why it happens. They make use of their gift or curse. As such it is more a work of SF than Life After Life was.

Claire North, we are told at the start, is the pseudonym of a British author. Turns out it’s Catherine Webb, of whom I’ve written before, here. I see that I was critical then of her plotting, and the ending. The current book is much stronger in both regards.

Though it’s not entirely satisfactory. I find it slightly annoying because – and I’m moving into spoiler territory, so you might want to stop reading – while the people who have this affliction – members of the Cronus Club, or kalachakra, as they are called – do ask some questions of their situation, the only one who really tries to explore, to investigate, to understand it: he’s the bad guy. The engine of the plot is to preserve the status quo.

True (within the book, and probably in reality), messing with the status quo – trying to make significant changes to the way historic events play out – tends to make a big mess of things, because history is too complex for anyone to really understand all the causes and effects and so guide it. But Vincent, the antagonist in question, is at least trying to gain some understanding. An alternative to trying to stop him might have been to work with him, but find a less destructive way to do it.

On the other hand, of course, that would have made for a less interesting, less fun story. And as it stands, this is both. So I can’t really complain.

Sons of Bill, Hoxton.

Tue, 24 Feb 2015 01:12:12 +0000

From Instagram

Never really expected to get another new Iain Banks book. But here we are.

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 19:49:17 +0000

From Instagram

At Hackney Downs station.

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 16:29:43 +0000

via Instagram [ift.tt/1D1BfXa](http://ift.tt/1D1BfXa)

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (Books 2015, 1)

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:19:41 +0000

This is kind of a frustrating one (and could, like the last one have been considered 2014, as I started it before the year ended; but it was well into January before I finished it.

Anyway, Pynchon can be difficult. I read V years back, and remember next to nothing about it; and I started Gravity’s Rainbow once, but ground to a halt and never quite got round to going back (this despite the fact that I was originally drawn to it by Alan Moore talking about reading it).

This one is a lot less difficult, to say nothing of significantly shorter. Its problem is more to do with how our heroine comes to find out about the weird postal conspiracy that she investigates, and why it matters. We have some engaging characters in interesting situations, but it’s hard to get terribly enthused about a conspiracy to route the post by some means other than official government mail channels.

Especially in these deregulated times, when most of the post is deliveries from Amazon anyway. We Await Silent Bezos’s Empire, I guess.

But it’s worth reading.

Newsflash: the Firefly guys were villains

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 22:38:51 +0000

Malcolm Reynolds’ twelve-headed hydra wang of hate for the alliance doesn’t come from outrage over the dubious morality of a couple of black bag cabals within the government

An excellent analysis of Firefly and Serenity, by someone who loves them as all right-thinking people should.

via Newsflash: the Firefly guys were villains | Jay Kristoff - Literary Giant.

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine (Books 2014, 20)

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:58:39 +0000

A Christmas present: started on Christmas Day and finished just after midnight on the 3rd of January. So I could call it 2015 number 1, but it makes more sense to go with the year in which I started it and read most of it. Anyway, it’s all a bit arbitrary.

Viv Albertine, as I’m sure you know, was the guitarist in The Slits. They had only a short time in punk’s limelight (though as I learned from this, they released a second album, not just the one I’m familiar with).

This book is half about her early years and the punk days, and half about after. She went on to work as a filmmaker and then struggled to have a child, had serious health problems. Eventually she re-taught herself to play guitar, and started performing again (I saw her supporting the Damned a couple of years back, and then supporting Siouxsie at Meltdown a year and half back).

It’s really interesting reading about a time I lived through, events I experienced — from afar, true, but still ones I felt part of — from someone else’s point of view. Especially that of someone who was at the heart of many of the events.

And she writes with some style; it’s a compelling read. She makes some strange choices: for example, she only ever refers to her sister as “my sister”; we never get her name. Similarly with the man she marries. At first he’s “The Biker”, and then “my husband”.

I suppose it’s a matter of protecting the privacy of people who are still alive — especially in the latter case, because he doesn’t come out of it terribly well. Indeed, it may be the case that the only people who are named are those who were already in the public eye to some degree.

Any road, if you are into music, especially punk, at all, I would highly recommend reading this. I plan to get her new album — which came out two years ago, it turns out — The Vermilion Border.

Eclipse SVN key bindings not working

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 12:11:32 +0000

I often get problems with the key bindings when I create a new Eclipse workspace. The recent ones with Subversion seemed intractable until I found this answer on the mighty StackOverflow.

It’s a frustrating thing when your muscle-memory has an action and it doesn’t trigger the expected response.

keyboard shortcuts – SVN key bindings not working in Eclipse – Stack Overflow.

The Schrödinger's Cat trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2014, 19)

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:54:39 +0000

A sort-of-sequel to the earlier-discussed Illuminatus trilogy. More sex, more quantum weirdness, and a less coherent story. I don’t think he ever does explain where the missing scientists went, in any of the universes. It’s a lot of fun, though.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey (Books 2014, 18)

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:45:30 +0000

You know when you hear about a book, or read a recommendation, and you think, “That sounds interesting…” And then a bit later it’s available on Kindle for like 79p, so you download it? And then just a short time later you get round to reading it, and you think maybe you’ve heard that the author has written a sequel in the meantime?

And then you get to the end and discover that there are now six books in the series! Six! Do you?

That’s a definition of time passing without you noticing it properly. It’s very bad.

Unlike this book, which is very good; especially if you like tales of people escaping from hell and battling with demons, angels, and other creatures of the supernatural, while running a video store (sort of), drinking Jack Daniels, and stealing cars in LA (why does he steal cars when he has a key to the Room of Thirteen Doors, which can take him anywhere?)

Good stuff. And I daresay the sequels will be up to the mark too; though I’m not going to dive straight into those. I’ll give it a rest first.

The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2014, 17)

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:01:53 +0000

A rereading, of course; in fact, this is probably something like the sixth time I’ve read this. I keep coming back to it. And why not? There’s music, magic, musings, sex, drugs, and conspiracies. Lots and lots of conspiracies.

It felt very on trend, as the trendy types say, to be reading it in 2014. We are at a time when the idea of the Illuminati is not just well known, but is discussed, or at least panicked about, among our nation’s schoolkids. Apparently lots of modern music stars — people like Rihanna, for example — are noted (by paranoid types) for being pawns of (or part of) the “actual” Illuminati.

The clues include any use of triangular imagery in their videos. You get the idea.

The people who believe in that sort of thing are just the types this great trilogy was written for. No, about. No: for.

The Circle by Dave Eggers (Books 2014, 16)

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 22:25:21 +0000

This is interesting. Seems to have got a lot of attention when it came out, but somehow I wasn't aware of it. It's very much a novel of now, though probably set slightly into the future -- five minutes or so, probably.

Our hero, Mae Holland, is a young woman, not long out of college, who is just starting a job at the Circle. The Circle is GooTwitBook, essentially: a massive internet company that has gobbled up all the previous incumbents (it owns 90% of search, for example) and redefined interaction on the net via its TrueYou identity technology. Real names are not just encouraged; they are required.

Internet trolling disappeared overnight, it seems.Unbelievable enough. Perhaps more so: no-one (almost no-one) seems to be in the least bit bothered by the reductions in privacy, the spread of The Circle into every aspect of life (putting chips in kids to prevent kidnapping; nobody complains; is kidnapping that much of a problem in the US?)

I thoroughly enjoyed it, I should say, before I tear into it too much. Eggers keeps the pages turning, which is always a plus. On the other hand, it takes a long time before anything significant happens. Mae starts her job, learns the ropes, meets people, gets more and more involved in the social-networking aspects of the circle… we know things are going to take a turn for the dramatic, because the blurb tells us so ("… the closer she comes to discovering a sinister truth…")

But it must be 200-odd pages in (of nearly 500) before we get much more than scene-setting.

And ultimately, while I can see how someone like Mae could be drawn further and further in after starting out with the best intentions, I find it very hard to believe that the entire rest of the world would go along with the extremities of the Circle’s plans. It’s set in essentially our world: where are the EFF? Where are the ACLU? Where are the voices from other countries that aren’t keen on an American corporation’s hegemony?

Where, even, are the corporations that stand up for privacy? I’ve just got a new iPhone 6 as I write this, and I can’t help but think that Apple’s pro-privacy stance – their assertion that no-one can get at our data stored in iCloud – not even them, not even if there’s a court order – is antithetical to everything that the Circle represents.

Which is one of the reasons why the Circle looks most like Google (it has three guys at the top, known as “the Three Wise Men”).

Of course, these criticisms might be just symptomatic of what can happen when you approach a “mainstream”, “literary” book with a science-fiction head: you question the worldbuilding, of course.

Ultimately it’s a shame: the Circle the organisation is completely believable and convincing in itself. It’s just hard to believe that it could expand in quite as unchecked a fashion as it does. And I found Mae to be partly endearing, partly annoying, which could be a realistic portrayal, and a good example of characterisation. In truth, though, she has no character. And possibly less believable than the growth of the Circle is the extent to which Mae gives herself to it, to its beliefs; even when they break her best friend, Annie, who got her the job in the first place.

So all in all, something of a wasted opportunity.

An elective monarchy, again

Sat, 13 Dec 2014 12:26:42 +0000

I was reminded of my recent post when I watched Thursday night’s The Big Bang Theory. It was the episode where they try to recreate a high-school prom — at their originals of which, all of them but Penny had bad experiences, of course.

Sheldon refers to the possibility of him being “elected Prom King,” and goes on to say that he’ll point out that kings aren’t elected.

He’s smart, but not that smart. Prom Kings and Queens, by definition, are elected, and in that context, that’s what the words mean.¹

And words mean what we make them mean, and meanings change all the time.

People often say that parliamentary elections “shouldn’t become a popularity contest.” But that, of course, is exactly what prom ones are. ↩︎

Sir Gawain and the Green Night translated by Bernard O'Donoghue (Books 2014, 15)

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 20:12:43 +0000

This is an unusual choice. It was a present; I do like poetry, but I probably wouldn’t have chosen it for myself.

But it’s great. I really enjoyed it. It’s a strange story. Set in King Arthur’s round table, of course — at least at the start. The titular hero (Gawain, I mean) is said to be the noblest, bravest, most humble, etc, knight.

A mysterious, supernatural, green figure interrupts the New Year feast at Camelot and issues a challenge. Gawain takes it up, and has a year to complete his side of the deal.

He’s clearly the top procrastinator of the round table, too, because he leaves it till after the following Christmas before he sets off to find the Green Knight.

The noble hero is tested and tempted, and (spoilers) wins through. It’s short, and fun. Oddly (or not) I remember the story, but nothing of the poetry. I could go and get the book and quote you some, but I think I’ll just leave it at that.

Oh, except to say, of course, this is an ancient work, and Tolkien also did a cover version of it. But I expect you knew that.

How to fix the UK constitution

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:28 +0000

There is a solution to one of the great constitutional questions of our age, and I have it.

Not, I might add, the question of making parliament more representative (that’s actually quite an easy one, and we even had a referendum on making it a bit better in this parliament, but we voted the wrong way). Nor indeed the one triggered by the Scottish referendum. It’s not even the most basic problem of our constitution, though I’ll answer that in passing: write it down.

No, I’m speaking of the problem of the head of state. Now it seems to me to be uncontentious to say that we need to move from a hereditary system to an elected one. The existence of a hereditary element to the government of a democracy is anathema; this is plain.

But if you suggest this to many (perhaps still most) British citizens,¹ they will speak of a great affection for the Queen; maybe for the monarchy as an institution; and for the pageantry, and how great it is for tourism. Plus they’d point to recent less-than-impressive examples of US presidents, and say something like, “I wouldn’t want President Tony Blair." Well, I could argue against any or all of those. But there’s no need to. Here’s the thing: as soon as we want to, we could switch to having an elected head of state, without losing any of the positives there, or introducing the negatives.

Well, we’d have to lose the Queen; the actual, current one, Elizabeth II. But that’s no problem: there won’t be any serious talk of change in her lifetime anyway. And probably not in Charlie’s for that matter. But at some point in the future we could have an elected head of state, and still keep the monarchy, the pageantry, and the palaces.

How? We just redefine the words “monarch”, “king”, and “queen”.

We redefine them to be the title of the elected head of state in the UK. We elect one every few years — four, six, eight, it doesn’t really matter — and we keep everything else exactly the same.

Because of course, we’re a constitutional monarchy. The monarch has no real power, officially,² except to ask the leader of the party with most seats at a general election to form a government.

The rest is window-dressing: pageantry and symbolism. The individual doing the job could as easily be one chosen by the electorate as one assigned the task by chance of birth.³

Sure, such a person would be a president — a powerless president — in all but name. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the name is — to a lot of people, at least — what matters. Or at least that the concept referred to by the name does matter to many.

We would let the Windsors live on in reasonable splendour, in some of the Royal Palaces. We would only require one — and realistically it should probably be Buckingham Palace — to be the official residence of the new monarch. The others would still be owned by the state, of course, but the descendants of the last hereditary monarch would be allowed to live in them for a few generations at least.

Now, what sort of person would stand for election to a position with a fair amount of responsibility (state visits, and so on) and very little power? I don’t know, but that would work out over time. The principle works well enough in countries like Germany, where the president — yes, Germany has a president; who knew? — has a similar status to that of our elected monarch — and gets to live in a state-owned palace.

Furthermore, one power that the monarch does have is being the entity to whom members of the armed forces, the police, and indeed, MPs, take an oath. But even that wouldn’t be a problem. Those oaths are worded something like, “to Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors.” The new, elected monarch would indeed be the “successor” of the last hereditary one.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that this idea has been thought of before. There don’t appear to have been many examples of it, and slightly disturbingly, one of the few examples of one that’s currently in use is the Vatican. But in that case the Pope is head of state, head of government, and sole executive power; an elected dictator-for-life, in fact (and by a tiny, restricted electorate). My version would be much more limited in what they could do. And they wouldn’t think they had a direct line to anything more supernatural than the prime minister’s office.

When looking into the matter, I also found this forum discussion wherein people keep saying things like, “It’s a contradiction in terms: monarch means hereditary ruler…” Do they forget that English is a changing language, always growing, expanding, shifting meanings? If we want to redefine a monarch as being an elected person, we can.

Oh, and hey — there’ll be nothing to stop a Windsor standing for election. You never know, they’d probably win. But at least then they’d have a mandate.

Which we are, despite what confused people think; just look at your passport. ↩︎
Charles’s “black spider” letters notwithstanding. ↩︎
They could be assigned it by lottery, by random choice, as with juries; but that’s a whole different thought. ↩︎

Netflix: because your DVDS are allll the way over there

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 13:14:38 +0000

So true.

“Netflix: because your DVDS are allll the way over there”.

Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: the Final Chapter by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook (Books 2014, 14)

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 01:21:39 +0000

I read the original version this a few years back, when my sister bought it for my son. It was good, very interesting and informative. And I wanted to read this expanded edition when it first came out. Although it’s called “The Final Chapter”, as if it were purely an additional piece, it contains both the original book and the new work — which is a lot more than just a “chapter”. But it was always just ferociously expensive.

Like, old-school hardback price for a large-format paperback. And it never seemed to come down, or come to in a smaller-size, mass-market paperback edition. So it always just felt too daunting.

Then eventually I saw it was on Kindle for what seemed like a more reasonable price, so I grabbed it.

It’s nothing more or less than an edited, long, email conversation between Davies and Cook. Sometimes several emails a day, in which Cook asks Davies questions about the latter’s writing process and other aspects of making Doctor Who (and to a lesser extent Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures).

And it’s absolutely fascinating read, especially if you’re at all interested in the creative process, in how writers write, and so on. It also feels a bit like you’re eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation at times, Somehow that’s not a problem, though. After all, it’s an interesting conversation, and we’ve been invited to listen in.

It’s clear that Davies enjoys sharing his thoughts on his process in this way, and it sort of makes you wonder why he doesn’t blog. But then, if he had been writing these emails as blog posts at the time, he couldn’t possibly have shared as much as he did with Cook, and with us several years after the events.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Books 2014, 13)

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:32:38 +0000

This is the one that's won them all: BSFA (jointly), Clarke, Nebula, and more recently, the Hugo Award. Never before has a single book had such a sweeping effect on the world of SF awards.

And does it deserve them all? Does it live up to the effusive reaction of the community?

Err, well… no, not really.

Which is not to say it’s bad. In a sense, nothing could live up that level of praise.

However, my personal problem with it – at least at first – was this: I like my super-intelligent spaceship minds to be the good guys. To be part of, and defending, Utopia. In short, I want The Culture. And I guess I hoped that Ann Leckie might sort of take Banksie’s place.

Obviously there wasn’t much chance of that, and it isn’t fair to judge the book on those terms.

So, back to its own terms. In any case, these super-intelligent spaceship minds aren’t necessarily bad guys; but they’re in the service of a pretty unpleasant empire. Though things get ambiguous. And interesting. And of course, there’s the gender-blindness of the viewpoint character, which is great. So yeah, it was fun, I enjoyed it, it goes to some interesting places, and it sets things up nicely for a series.

Oh, god, a series. Does nobody write books in ones any more? I was just looking at the current crop of so-called “Black Friday” deals on Kindle. There were quite a lot of books for crazy-cheap prices. Except… there weren’t really that many if you count a series as one.

C’mon, folks, write a book that doesn’t have a sequel, hey?

But I digress. Go read about Ancillary Justice: you’ll find reviews of it all over the place. Then go and read it. It’s great.

Thin

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 17:18:57 +0000

We used to call this “thin clients”; or just a terminal logged on to a server or mainframe. Jason Snell writes of something newish that Adobe and Google are doing with Chromebooks:

This week I got a demo of Photoshop running inside Chrome, and while it was really interesting, some of my assumptions were faulty. It turns out that when Adobe says Photoshop is a “streaming app,” they mean it—it’s much more like screen sharing than native software. Photoshop runs remotely on a Windows-based server, and video of the app’s interface streams to the Chrome browser.

via Six Colors: Adobe streams Photoshop to Chromebooks.

Hijacked

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 07:13:38 +0000

Can anyone explain to me why this is resignation-worthy?

Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, ... told the Mail Online it was “like the Labour party has been hijacked by the north London liberal elite, and it’s comments like that which reinforce that view”.

The comment was, “Image from #Rochdale.” It was a picture of a white van outside a house covered in English flags. And that can drive a shadow cabinet member to resign. What?!?

Dotter of her Father's Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Books 2014, 12)

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 08:11:09 +0000

Excellent graphic novel; part Mary’s autobiography, part the biography of Lucia Joyce, who was James Joyce’s daughter. Mary’s father, who was distant and borderline abusive, was a noted Joyce scholar.

Well worth a look if you enjoy comics. The “graphic biography,” if you will, is a little-used form.

EU 'benefit tourism' court ruling is common sense, says Cameron

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:18:24 +0000

I’m assuming the UK government won’t be bound by this European court ruling. After all, UKIP don’t like European court rulings, and government policy these days is all about keeping the Kippers sweet, isn’t it?

EU ‘benefit tourism’ court ruling is common sense, says Cameron

On Writing by AL Kennedy (Books 2014, 11)

Sat, 08 Nov 2014 12:43:32 +0000

Unlike Stephen King’s book of the same title, this isn’t exactly “a manual of the craft.” You won’t find much about the writing side of writing here; nothing about crafting sentences, forming paragraphs, developing characters or plots.

It’s less about the craft of writing than about the life of a writer; and it shares with King’s eponym the part-memoir approach. Kennedy spends a lot of time describing how writing has been bad for her health in various ways, and how in turn her pathological fear of flying has made the writing life more difficult, (travelling to North America by ship for a signing tour) for example.

The largest and most entertaining part of it was originally published as blog entries on The Guardian’s site.

It’s very good. And not from the book, but with Doctor Who back (and nearly finished) you should read her meditation on it and on the state of Britain.

MPs to escape expenses investigations after paperwork destroyed by Parliament - Telegraph

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 14:24:31 +0000

You are fucking kidding me!

MPs accused of abusing the unreformed expenses system will escape official investigation after the House of Commons authorities destroyed all record of their claims.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (books, 2014, 10)

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:24:31 +0000

Always good to get a new JK Rowling, of course, whatever name she's using. I sometimes wonder if she's got loads of other things out there, under other as-yet-undisclosed pseudonyms; probably not, though.

Anyway, in the second Cormoran Strike book, we have more of the same sort of thing we had in the first. This time it’s set in the world of publishing, with all sorts of rivalries between more and less successful authors, agents, editors and publishers. “Write what you know”, Jo.

But can such rivalries drive someone to murder? It seems so.

My main, and very minor, complaint about this was that there wasn’t enough of sidekick Robin in it, I felt.

I don’t know how many of these she’s planning to write, but sooner or later Cormoran has to meet – and presumably solve a crime for, or concerning – his estranged rock-star father. who is a recurring offstage character.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (Books 2014, 9)

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 00:36:52 +0000

In the interest of trying to catch up, I’m not going to say much about this. You probably know all about this already.

Also, it’s been quite a while since I read it, and although I enjoyed it, it hasn’t really stuck around in my head in a way that leaves me much to say. It’s clever in giving us some idea of what it might be like to live with autism. That might be its greatest strength.

Suzi Q, where are you?

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:26:18 +0000

I got a card in the post the other day, from my friends Di and Johnny. Regular readers will know Di as one of the most frequent commenters here (ie, she has commented). We disagreed over The Great Gatsby.

Anyway, the card had a post-it stuck inside, with some writing on it that I couldn’t quite make out. Di wrote, “Been trying to get this for you for ages… can you guess who it is?”

I was slow to realise that the “who” referred to the writing on the post-it. But she also said there was a clue on the back of the card.

On the back she’d written “devilgate.org”.

The post-it looks like this:

And I read it to say, “To Martin. Suzi Quatro.”

I mean, if it says that it makes sense considering my origin story; otherwise, not so much.

Thanks Di and Johnny. It’s a lovely thought.

BBC Music Greatest Covers

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 23:03:12 +0000

This BBC Music "Greatest Covers" poll has some quite good -- and interesting -- choices. It has the right answer, of course, but also Hüsker Dü and The Fall (and not even The Fall's best cover -- that would be "Xanadu").

The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell (Books 2014, 8)

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 19:31:50 +0000

I'm now so far behind in posting these that I'm just going to put very brief notes up for most of them.

As a sequel to the excellent London Falling this suffers slightly from what feels a bit like middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome; though I believe Cornell intends this to be an ongoing series, rather than a trilogy.

That said, there is an overarching mystery, which we must hope will be resolved over the course of several books. And at that point, maybe he’ll stop. But the actual story here is perhaps slight compared to the origin stories of the first one, and the horror that Quill and his wife, in particular, experienced.

A mysterious ghostly figure – invisible to all who don’t have The Sight, of course – is killing people in London. There appears to be little to connect them at first, but graffiti at some of the scenes suggests there might be a link to Jack the Ripper. Has his ghost come back and this time gone after rich white men? Or is it something else entirely?

It’s a fun read, despite my reservations above, with some amusing reference to fandom, and the terrible, terrible abuse of a giant of the fantasy genre.

The tragedy of the Liberal Democrats

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 23:07:26 +0000

It seems like a curious choice for the Liberal Democrats to have their national conference in Glasgow this year, what with everything else that’s been going on in Scotland. I don’t think they’re very popular there.

Then again, they’re not very popular anywhere.

Back before the the coalition, when the Lib Dems were the third party, they always spoke in favour of coalition government. They always said that they would work with anyone if it they ever held the balance of power.

Then when it looked there was going to be a hung parliament, and when there actually was, they still said that they would work with either Labour or the Tories in order to bring a government into being.

The trouble is, no-one really believed them.

OK, I can only really speak for myself; but I’m probably not that unusual. The Lib Dems were always seen as being closer to Labour than to the Tories. There was the Lib-Lab pact back in the seventies. And all through the New Labour years, they were generally seen as being further left than Labour.

So when they held the balance of power in 2010, it was obvious — so we all thought, I say — that they would work with Labour, rather than the Tories.

Alas, it was not to be. Imagine how different the country might be now if Clegg had swung the right way back then. The country wouldn’t have been half-destroyed by Osbourne’s “austerity” measures. (I mean, really: haven’t they learned by now that you don’t cut public spending in a recession?)

Of course, there have been some good things during the coalition: marriage equality; the Scottish referendum (irrespective of how it turned out, Cameron agreed to it). There was even — if you recall — a referendum on electoral reform. Remember that?

No, me neither. It was a fix (since it got voted down), but I don’t recall how. Oh, yes wait: the anti-reform camp made a big thing of how much more complex than first-past-the-post the alternative vote (AV) system would be. When in fact it’s quite simple. And I guess they got the friendly media working against it.

Anyway, now they’ve been all but wiped out in yesterday’s by election. The worst thing about that is that UKIP seem to be in danger of replacing them as the third party.

Scary but interesting times.

Space bat angel dragons hatch in their own way

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 17:51:25 +0000

Sometimes you're thinking about writing a blog post and then you write a long comment on someone else's post that contains most of what you were planning on saying. So I wrote this as a comment on The Reinvigorated Programmer, and thought I should repeat it here.

The background: Mike, the Programmer and Doctor Who fan, if that’s not too tautologous, was complaining about the latest episode, “Kill the Moon”. Now, I didn’t think it was all that bad, as these things go, but I knew that other people, on Facebook and elsewhere, have both complained about it and praised it. Which seems to be par for the course this series (and maybe every series). Anyway, I had some thoughts on the matter, and put them like this.

I was disappointed that they didn’t put in at least a handwavy explanation of the extra mass (which they could have done: posit highly-effecient energy-to-mass conversion, and the sun). But as people have said in other places, you’re accepting a time-travelling, dimensionally-transcendental blue box, and a regenerating Time Lord, so…?

As to the biology of the creature… well, it’s alien. Possibly one of a kind. Why wouldn’t it lay an egg as soon as it hatched? Remembering that “egg” and “hatch” are only our Terracentrist words for something entirely other.

Indeed, that could be exactly why the creature’s mass spikes in the last few years or months of its dormant cycle: it’s forming the new “egg” so it itself will be ready to “hatch”.

And by default it would be in the same orbit, unless something displaced it.

But yes, while you can argue all that, the story would have been improved if it had included at least a nod to those points. And they should have got their sums right.

But I think there’s something bigger going on across this whole series. It’s the development of Clara’s character, and Danny’s secret, and everything. It’s more: I just have a feeling that there’s something else behind it all. Maybe I’ve just been trained to expect a season arc since the Bad Wolf, but… there’s definitely something going on.

And Missy and the promised land, of course.

Someone somewhere suggested that maybe the whole series is taking place in a miniscope, since the Doc mentioned them in episode 3. I hope it’s more than that.

The morning after

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 09:12:44 +0000

I wake to disappointment. I had vacillated away from a “Yes” position to some extent in the days since I wrote that I favoured it, but I can’t help but be saddened by the result. Mainly I feel let down that my countryfolk didn’t grab hold of an opportunity when they were offered it.

On the other hand, I can’t help being a little bit pleased that we’re all going to stay part of one country.

The Westminster politicians this morning are promising more devolution for Scotland, and for all the countries of the UK. Now we have to get hold of some of the energy, the political engagement that Scotland showed, and hold them to it.

To use a favourite quote from a great Scot¹, it’s time for all of us to “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”

Though according to that article, he attributes it to a Canadian author called Dennis Lee ↩︎

Andy's unpunctuated ambiguity

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:51:23 +0000

“Andy Murray finally reveals views on Scottish independence“, says the headline in the Telegraph. It goes on to say he “appeared to declare his support for Scottish independence”. That “appeared” is key, because the lack of punctuation and capitalisation in Andy’s tweet actually allows at least a couple of interpretations:

Huge day for Scotland today! no campaign negativity last few days totally swayed my view on it. excited to see the outcome. lets do this!

The Telegraph is clearly reading that as “‘No’-Campaign negativity…” The negativity from the “No” campaign, in other words.

But you could read it simply as “[there has been] no campaign negativity…” In other words, the absence of negativity in the campaigning (by either side or both) has left him with a positive view of the referendum.

I’d guess that the Telegraph‘s opinion is correct. But it just goes to show… if he could place a quote character like he can place a tennis ball, it would all be perfectly clear.

Awra Best, Scotland

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:49:58 +0000

I’d just like to wish the people of my homeland well on this most momentous of days.

Waving

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 22:32:27 +0000

Despite my positive-seeming thoughts and comments over the last few days, I can't help but feeling today that -- to paraphrase, if not exactly quote, Hunter S Thompson -- the wave has begun to break, if not roll back.

And it’s all going to be so close that, whatever way the people of Scotland finally vote, they clearly are not of one mind on the matter. You begin to see why some votes require things like a two-thirds majority; or even why the 1979 referendum included the “40% rule”.

(Though again, that was not vote on independence, but on Scotland having an assembly. Who could vote against that, you’d have to wonder?¹)

What has brought on this change, you’re almost certainly asking? More polls, more fearmongering headlines, and just a sense that the impetus has been lost. The yes campaign peaked too soon, you could say.

But, there’s still another week to go. Anything could happen.

Perhaps the kind of person who would vote against having an elected mayor in their city, though it’s not exactly comparable. I voted in favour of having a London Mayor, but then against having an elected mayor in Hackney; it just seemed like a layer to far – though in the end it’s just a slightly-higher-profile Leader of the Council. But I can see how some people might not want what could be seen as an extra layer of administration. ↩︎

Panic in Westminster

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:40:06 +0000

A guy could get an over-inflated sense of his own importance, you know.

For months the polls have been suggesting that the Scottish referendum was going to go to the “No” side. Then I post a broadly-in-favour piece, and everything changes.

I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? There must be a connection.

And then this panicky stunt by the Westminster party leaders. You can’t just abandon Prime Minister’s Questions! That’s ridiculous!

Exciting days ahead.

Chatsworth Road Festival, September 2014

Sun, 07 Sep 2014 01:10:25 +0000

We went to our local street festival today. Here are some pictures. [gallery ids="1887,1888,1889,1890,1891,1892,1893,1894,1895,1896,1897,1898"]

Click for a bigger view on Flickr.

Hackney's latest piece of gentrification: comics

Sat, 06 Sep 2014 17:58:12 +0000

The latest in Hackney's gentrification: we have a comics shop

The latest step in Hackney’s gentrification. Dreyfus café has been open for a while, but just a few weeks ago we got a new arrival next to it: a comics shop, by the delightful name of Raygun.

Oncoming independence?

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 21:29:35 +0000

A Scot abroad

For at least a couple of years people have been asking me what I think about the Scottish independence question. At least since the Edinburgh Agreement, I suppose. People down here in London, that is.

I, of course, don’t have a vote, as I don’t live in Scotland – indeed, I’ve lived in London for more than half my life. But we don’t stop being from the place we come from, and we don’t stop caring about it; so it’s reasonable to suppose I’d have an opinion.

And I do. In fact, I have a whole range of them, at different times. Sometimes I have more than one at the same time. Which is partly why I haven’t written about the independence referendum here before now.

I have been scathing in the past about people who give their political opinion as “don’t know” or “undecided”.¹

But that’s exactly what I am, what I have been for the last several years: “undecided”.

Back in the 70s, when there was the original referendum, I would have voted “Yes” at the drop of a thistle, had I been old enough – indeed, I did, in the mock version we had at school. My reasoning in those days was purely based on emotion, and tied in to football and being the underdog.

In the years, the decades since then, if you had asked me whether I thought Scotland should be independent, I would probably have said yes. Most likely, most of the time. And though I stopped caring about football (and let’s face it, Scotland stopped being anything like a force in football), it was still an emotional reaction, still about national identity, about the fact that we as a country felt overwhelmed, repressed by the relative behemoth to the south.

At some point, of course, I moved there. London called and I answered yes. It didn’t change who I was, how I felt about Scotland. But it did, perhaps, give me a new way to think about how I felt about England.

Going back to the football/underdog business, it was always an us-and-them thing: we Scots always saw ourselves as different from, in opposition to, the English. And yet, when I met English people, they were perfectly fine – or a mixture of fine and not, of good and bad, of interesting and boring: the same as people in Scotland, or anywhere.

Plus, we were all British, linked by citizenship, by the NHS, by the BBC; by our shared history of literature, music, art.

(Though it was and remains (and always will be) annoying when people say “England” or “English” when they mean “Britain” or “British”. It’s not hard; the difference is quite clear.)

Constitutional matters

There’s something I left out of that list of linkages above, of course. Scotland and England were joined by two unions. The Acts of Union, in which both parliaments legislated to become one parliament, is the more important one, and the one that may be overturned on the 18th of September. But before that there was the Union of the Crowns, in which Scotland very kindly agreed that England could share its monarch.

Now, if they were going to dissolve that one (and I had a vote) I’d vote yes in a heartbeat – as long, of course, that separating the crowns meant Scotland moving to a democratically-elected head of state (or none; they’re not strictly necessary).

Yes, I would happily be a citizen of the Republic of Scotland.

But that was never on the table, of course. I don’t know whether Alex Salmond or any of the other SNP luminaries are republicans – some of them must be – but they had to keep the bluenoses on side. That’s Rangers fans, in case you don’t know; protestants; loyalists, unionists.

It must be one of the strangest states, actually: to be a Scottish person who believes in independence (and so is against the Union); but who also looks to the Scottish protestant/Rangers-supporting tradition, and is in favour of the Union of Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Do such people exist? They must, really. Indeed, I saw a video a few months back of a Rangers fan who was so pro-Union, so anti-independence that he was wearing an England football shirt (yet he was undeniably Scottish), and saying that if the vote went yes, he’d move to England.

That’s an unusual reaction, that. Here we go. “You can stick your independence up your arse,” apparently.

But on constitutional changes: I frequently find myself frustratedly wondering, how can we be asking people to vote on such matters without this kind of thing being decided first? Shouldn’t a new constitution have been drafted, the discussions on currency and European unions held, decisions made in advance? So that people would go to the polls knowing exactly what they were voting for or against.

Wouldn’t that make more sense?

I did hear someone on the radio saying essentially that my thinking was foolish, because there are some things that can only be decided after a yes vote. But I don’t think he really made the point.

The original referendum, Labour, and Thatcher

In reading up on various things Scottish for this piece,² I discovered that part of the fallout from the seventies referendum that I linked to above was the Thatcher government. The “40% Rule”, which caused the referendum to fail (the majority had to comprise 40% of the electorate) was brought in by a Labour MP’s amendment; and when it fell, according to the Wikipedia article:

the government's decision to abandon devolution for Scotland led the Scottish National Party to withdraw its support for the government. A subsequent vote of no confidence led to the resignation of the Callaghan government, and an election was called.

That election was the one that got Thatcher elected.

Maybe she’d have been elected at the next election whenever it happened; but maybe not. And I can’t help but think that the Labour party has a disturbing sideline in betraying the people it should be serving, and this – and the current Labour party’s staunchly pro-union stance – is an example of it. Labour should support democratic freedom and the right of small countries to govern themselves. Trouble is, so many Labour MPs are Scottish, and they can see power at Westminster slipping further and further from their grasp if they don’t have the effect of all those Scottish seats.

I can understand that, though. that aspect of potential independence worries me, too: selfishly, I want to keep Scotland as part of the UK because I fear the effect of it leaving and us losing the balancing power of its more left-wing nature. Without Scotland, the rest of the UK could be doomed to near-permanent Tory governments. Or worse; UKIP along with the extremely anti-EU rump of the Tories when they split (it will happen, the only questions are when, and how many MPs will go).

Being stuck in an RoUK that votes to leave the EU? That is distinctly unappealing

Just as a minor aside, something I had totally forgotten was that the 1979 referendum wasn’t for independence: it was only to have an assembly, which sounds a lot like the Scottish Parliament of today.

The Rest?

I used the term “RoUK” above. That’s the way people have been referring to the “rest of the UK”, meaning what’s left of the UK after Scotland leaves. But I’m not so sure that there should really be any such thing.

See, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland came into existence when the Republic of Ireland got its independence from Britain, leaving Northern Ireland still connected. But the “Great Britain” part (as a political entity, as opposed to the island): that came into existence with the Acts of Union.

Repeal those Acts and arguably Great Britain ceases to exist as a political entity; so how can the UK exist after that happens?

So rather than debating whether an independent Scotland will be able to remain in the EU will have to rejoin it from outside, we should be discussing what, exactly, will be left if Scotland leaves the union.

Salmond and the anti-personality cult

It disturbs me how many Scots seem to be basing their decision around personality. “Salmond’s a wanker”, and all that kind of thing. If the vote goes yes, Salmond can retire (arguably the SNP will no longer have a reason to exist, in fact). But anyway, governments change, they can be voted out; people die. It’s not like you’re voting to make Salmond president for life. Rather, you’re voting for the type of country that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren will inherit.

Other voices

Before I end, some other pieces that I’ve been reading on the matter. As Irvine Welsh has said, this is a great time for political engagement in Scotland.³ And Billy Bragg adds that it might be good politically for England too.

And here’s a blog by an English guy who favours Scottish independence. He also favours English and Welsh independence, it seems: the complete breakup of the UK; just look at his masthead. His blog has the slightly disturbing title of “Upholding English Honour”, but he doesn’t seem to be the little Englander that name might imply.

Mark Millar is undecided, but calls for better behaviour all round in the debate. And Jack Deighton considers the effect that the referendum might have on Scottish literature.

In conclusion

In the end, of course, my opinion means nothing. But here it is anyway. If I were living in Scotland, I’m now fairly sure that I’d be voting yes. And speaking as an attached outsider, I’m coming round to hoping that the vote goes that way; if only to see what happens next.

After all, it could be the beginning of a great adventure.

That post is actually about floating voters; not quite the same thing, but not unrelated. ↩︎
Weirdly, when I searched Amazon for Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the second hit was My Scotland, Our Britain: A Future Worth Sharing, by Gordon Brown. ↩︎
That link is showing “Service unavailable” at the time of writing. But then, it’s the Evening Standard: I wish it was permanently unavailable. ↩︎

The Rum Diary by Hunter S Thompson (Books 2014, 7)

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 15:08:16 +0000

I’ve read pretty much everything by HST that’s been published in book form, but I hadn’t read this, his sole novel, until now.

He wrote it before he started to get successful as a journalist, as I understand it, so it’s interesting that it’s a story about a journalist, or several. And they’re hard-drinking ones at that. But that kind of goes without saying.

As the novel starts it is 1959 and the first-person narrator is wanderer, unsure of what he wants to do with his life. He is leaving New York for Puerto Rico, to take up a post on the English-language paper there.

The story charts the ups and downs of his life over the next few months, along with various other people, mainly involved with the paper. It’s an entertaining enough read, but largely inconsequential as a story. You couldn’t really say that the character has grown or developed much by the end, and while we get some insight into the way the US was interacting with Puerto Rico at the time (unspoilt beaches being sold to developers to build luxury hotel complexes, that kind of thing), I wouldn’t say you get a great sense of Puerto Rico itself.

It’s mainly interesting for showing some early flashes of the writing style that Thompson would develop over the subsequent years into his signature gonzo style. For example:

They ran the whole gamut from genuine talents and honest men, to degenerates and hopeless losers who could barely write a postcard–loons and fugitives and dangerous drunks

Not up there with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, obviously, but you can see the beginnings of that style.

Pavane by Keith Roberts (Books, 2014, 6)

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:57:10 +0000

This is considered to be one of the seminal works of alternative history; often mentioned alongside The Man in the High Castle

Instead of the Axis forces winning the Second World War, as in Dick’s classic, the break point is Queen Elizabeth I being assassinated, which leads to the Spanish invading England (Scotland’s situation is never mentioned) via the Armada, and so the Catholic church becomes the dominant force in the world (at least Europe and the Americas) for centuries.

Most of which is told in a short prologue. The body of the novel (which a I believe is a fix-up, and certainly feels like it) consists of four short stories with some overlapping characters, which tell the tale of how rebellion against the Church comes to England.

I quite enjoyed it, but was put off at the start, because frankly the nuances of the workings of a traction engine running the freight across the country through a frozen winter night, were not all that interesting. In fact, it was downright boring. Would it have been less so if it were about a spaceship, instead of a traction engine? Obviously; anything is more fun with spaceships in it. But that’s not the point.

In fact, the point is largely our old friend “show, don’t tell.” I don’t automatically hold with that myself; there are plenty of examples of good stories working by “telling.” The problem is that if you rely entirely or mainly on telling, it’s easy to lose either or both of the characters and the action. Certainly you can tell us what’s happening; but it’ll have a much stronger impact if you make us feel it.

The second section, for example, starts with a young man bleeding to death in the snow, and then jumps back to his training as a signaller. A much more gripping way to handle things.

The time period appears to be from around the sixties through to the eighties, but the Church’s dead hand has so stifled technological progress that semaphore and steam remain the height of technology.

And there are fairies; old English magic that the Church hasn’t quite managed to wipe out. But they are kind of abandoned after the second (maybe third) story.

Anyway, after that initial hump it was enjoyable enough, but it’s a pleasingly slim book. If it had been the size of a modern novel, I’m not sure it would have held my interest.

Not-Exactly-Books, 2014, 5: What Has Gone Wrong With Short Stories?

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 23:14:12 +0000

Preamble

(Is there such a thing as a “postamble”, I wonder?)

After reading the previous novel I decided it was high time I caught up on some short-story reading. I had several months of Interzone backlogged, for example.

Trouble is, it seems that short stories have lost their way.

I know, that’s ridiculously sweeping. Obviously any such perceived change is far more likely to be in me, than in all recent short stories. And yet, I feel sure that short stories used to be more interesting. So could it be an age thing? Perhaps, but let me first describe what I think it is that’s wrong with them.

In short: nothing happens.

In slightly longer: too many of what people are presenting (and selling) as stories are in fact not really stories at all. They are little more then scenes, vignettes at best. There’s nothing wrong with such pieces of writing per se, of course. They can be powerful, evocative, enjoyable… but they’re not stories, it seems to me.

In a story, something has to happen; something or someone has to change. And too often in my recent reading, they don’t. Or if they do, it’s in a way or to a degree that just doesn’t compel, enthuse, excite.

The BSFA Awards 2013 Booklet

I should discuss some specifics, and with the recent¹ announcement of the BSFA Awards, what better stories to pick than the four that were nominated? The BSFA very helpfully curates and distributes a booklet containing all the nominated fiction (also reproductions of the nominated artworks, and this year for the first time, extracts from the non-fiction nominees). Conveniently, this booklet arrived during my short-story-reading period, and I read it straight away, to give me the chance to actually vote, for a change.

How disappointing it was.

By now we know that the lead story in the booklet, “Spin”, by Nina Allan, won the short fiction award. So I’ll deal with it last.

"Selkie Stories are for Losers", by Sofia Samatar.

Our unnamed first-person narrator hates stories of selkies, and swears she’ll never tell one. Why this might be something that she is called upon or tempted to do seems to be related to her forebears: American, her family background is Norwegian. She grew up with selkie stories. As time goes on there is the suggestion that her mother is one of the changeling creatures.

However, the story is good because of the characterisation. It’s the shortest of the four, but has the strongest, most interesting characters. Well, character: our selkie-story-hating narrator. As the story starts she is working as a waitress and falling in love with a co-worker, Mona. And from there it’s a love story with a slightly-weird background, and always the sense that something related to the selkie myths is going to happen.

There’s a good review of it on Martin Petto’s blog, actually. I pretty much agree with that.

"Saga's Children", by EJ Swift

This is an odd story about a solar-system-famous astronaut, Saga, who has had three children by three different fathers in different places. She took no part nor much interest in their upbringing; and none of them knew the others existed until they were adults.

Saga summons them to meet her at a station in orbit around Ceres, and something happens.

But not much, as I was complaining above. The telling is unusual: throughout, the children refer to themselves as “we”, but when they discuss their various careers, for example, they list all three of their names; none of them refers to themselves as “I”. In other words, it is first-person plural.

But this has a distancing effect; we don’t really get to know any of the three. And a mystery happens and is not resolved, and we’re left none the wiser as to Saga’s motivations, or what the children will do.

I should just let Martin Petto do this for me, because his take on this story. too, is very accurate.

"Boat in Shadows, Crossing", by Tori Truslow

Maybe I should just let Martin deal with this one, too. On the other hand, he is annoyed by it in ways that didn’t bother me. It was, in fact, my favourite of the four, and the one I voted for first in the BSFA Awards (“Selkie Stories are for Losers” second, and no others).

Why was this the best? An intriguing, mysterious environment, an immediately-compelling narrator, a problem to solve, a world – or at least a city – to change.

"Spin", by Nina Allan

“A retelling of the Arachne myth”, we are told. It turns out that I didn’t know the Arachne myth, and that makes a difference.

We are in something like modern-day Greece – people use iPads, for example – but time is out of joint: the currency is the Drachma, and there are suggestions that ancient events actually happened within living memory. And the protagonist’s father is a dyer, and all mentions of his trade imply that modern chemistry is all but unknown.

We start with the protagonist leaving the family home – running away, it feels like, though she is an adult – and making a new life for herself in another town. She gets a job, and practises her art of weaving in her spare time.

A mysterious old woman speaks to her enigmatically.

Her art soon earns her success and some recognition.

But some people – one woman in particular, with a sick son – think that she has a power, that her images can influence the future, if not cause it. It emerges that her mother was executed (or murdered) because she was believed to be some kind of witch.

She strikes up a relationship of sorts with the sick son (who may not be very sick at all), and we think we begin to see how things are going.

But then the old mystery woman is back and our hero is looking at some spiders on a bush and feeling weird and it’s all over.

What? What the hell just happened?

It turns out that Arachne was a weaver who claimed to be (or was) better than Athena, and got turned into a spider as a punishment. So there you are.

I’ve liked several of Nina Allan’s stories before this, but this one just doesn’t cut it for me; and I find it hard to believe that in all the science fiction (and fantasy) in all the world, there wasn’t a better short story published in 2013.

(My namesake Petto didn’t review this one, but instead posted a link to a review of it that no longer exists.)

Maybe I’m just grumpy cos on the rare occasion I’ve get round to submitting my own stuff, it’s been rejected.

Anyway, there we go. Back to novels.

Recent when I first drafted this, maybe… ↩︎

Aye, (Head)Phones

Thu, 29 May 2014 17:49:48 +0000

I’m not in the market for a new pair of headphones. My venerable Sennheiser HD450s are still doing fine for over-the-head use, and the same brand have provided me with a series of earbuds for mobile use. But I tried a pair of Beats by Dre phones in an HMV the other day, just to see what all the fuss was about.

They looked pretty good, felt comfortable, and sounded great. But the price!

Apparently Apple bought Beats more for the streaming service than the phones. That makes sense: if they’d wanted a headphone company they’d have gone for Sennheiser, obviously (and if they cared about earphones in general they wouldn’t have made horrible ones for years).

But you’d think that if they wanted a streaming service, they’d have gone for Spotify, which is surely more established.

So I suspect the truth may include a combination of the two, plus a degree of cool cachet, in what is perhaps a demographic that they don’t currently reach.

Either way, if the next iPhone or Mac comes with a cool pair of phones (unlikely though that may be) I won’t be unhappy.

Kippers for Tea

Tue, 27 May 2014 13:28:28 +0000

I usually post before elections. This time I didn’t get round to it.

The results of the European parliament elections were horrendous, of course. But one slightly good thing may come out of it all.

IMHO the single biggest contribution to UKIP’s success is the fact that Nigel Farage was never off the BBC in the last few months. More appearances on Question Time than anyone else, for example. Constantly consulted on the radio about anything even vaguely connected to Europe or immigration (or anything else, it seemed).

In short, it’s the fact that the BBC treated them like a mainstream party that has caused — or at least helped — them to almost become one.

I see a close parallel with the way they give climate-change deniers equal time with climatologists whenever there’s an environment story; the intent being balance, but the effect being to give undue weight to the views of a tiny minority.

Here, though, they went far beyond that point, to where I feel they were guilty of violating their mandated requirement to show balance.

So the potential good outcome: at least people of the right can no longer say that the BBC has a left-wing, pro-Europe bias.¹

Not that that was ever a very fair point; you just have to look at the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, for a counterexample. ↩︎

Religion, Faith Schools, and 'The Great Pumpkin'

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 23:00:42 +0000

Another from the "never posted" series. Again, I don't know why I didn't post it. It seems pretty finished. It's also wildly out of date, stemming is it does from 2006. 2006! That's eight years ago now! Where the hell does the time go?

Anyway, the original piece follows.

Religion is much in discussion at the moment, it seems, and atheism even more so.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that

the ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen — no crosses around necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils — is a politically dangerous one

But no-one has been trying to do that. True, there have recently been two cases in which employers have restricted what their staff can wear, with regard to items related to religions. Now, whether employers should be able to insist on such restrictions is one question, and a valid one to be asked; but it’s not something new, nor unique to religious clothes.

And it’s not as if anyone other than British Airways has done anything to restrict the display of Christian symbols. The woman in question there was in a uniformed occupation, and the cross violated the uniform code. Case closed. Do you think it would have been any different for a police officer or ambulance driver? If you want to get the uniform rules in your job changed, speak to your employer, go through your union, or whatever: but keep the courts out of it. Similarly if you are in a non-uniformed job with a dress code.

All of which is different from – almost orthogonal to – the case of Jack Straw asking Muslim women to remove their veils during a conversation (note: asking, not insisting; during a conversation, not forever).

I got the impression from the radio news this morning that the ArchieCant was trying to play the “persecuted Christian” card, railing against the overwhelming forces of our secular society. But having scanned his actual article, I see that that is not quite so. Rather, he is warning of the dangers of a society which only allows state-sanctioned religions to exist. Fair point, but again, not something that anyone is suggesting in Britain.

There’s no excuse for a Christian leader to complain about his (and it is always “his”) religion’s place in modern Britain (or, even more so, America). The various Christian churches, and the church of England in particular, hold a remarkably privileged position in British public life, from the head of state being also the head of the church, through the tax-free status of religions, right up to the exclusively-religious nature of Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ (and that’s not even mentioning the ‘Daily Worship’ or the complete takeover from 8 on Sunday mornings).

Then the Education Minister Alan Johnson has changed the former intent of the government regarding allowing non-believers (or different-believers) into new “faith” schools. Now don’t get me wrong: I am utterly opposed to “faith” schools: one great thing that America gets right, in my opinion, is it’s implementation of the separation of church and state that bans states from enforcing religious observation in schools, and I would happily see it removed from schools here. But we are where we are, and if there are going to be new, state-funded schools that base part of their teaching on a religion, then I think that the worst thing possible would be for them to be exclusively pupilled by kids from families who are followers of that religion.

And remember I went exclusively to state Catholic schools in Scotland.

The State of Me, by Nasim Marie Jafry (Books 2014, 4)

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 22:21:33 +0000

Well this is an interesting one. Nasim is an old friend. Or it might be more accurate to say she was the big sister of an old friend. She lived two doors down the road when I was growing up. Her younger brothers were both close friends of mine. A few weeks ago I came across some old email, and it made me think of them. I knew that Nasim had had a story or two published, so I googled her. Found her blog, discovered she’d had a novel published, ordered it from Amazon, and here we are.

In doing all this I got back in touch with her and with her brother, Yusuf, who I haven’t see in I don’t know how many years. So it’s all good.

But what about the book, I hear you ask?

Well, it’s not the kind of thing I’d normally choose to read — or not without a serious recommendation from a friend, for example. But it’s really, really good.

It’s a fictionalised autobiography, in that the protagonist goes through the same experience with contracting ME (Myalgic Encephalopathy) that Nasim herself did. And it’s set partly in Balloch, where we grew up.

Far more importantly, though, it’s a really good book. The characters are believable, especially the protagonist, Helen. That might be just as you’d expect, as they’re drawn from life; but I strongly suspect that it’s no easier to write a convincing character based on a real person – even yourself – than to write one who is completely imaginary.¹ We are drawn in to her inner life, her loves and her problems, and we are glad to be.

When she is laid low by the hateful condition, we feel her every twinge and ache. When she falls in love we fall right with her. And that’s an important point: this isn’t a misery memoir; it’s by no means all about the illness, or even about Helen’s responses to the illness. ME affects and influences everything in her life, but she still manages to have a life, and Nasim makes it an interesting one, one we’re happy to share for a while.

Yet at the same time she manages to educate us about ME, through Helen’s own learning about it. It is still a little-understood condition, with underfunded research and mistaken guidelines from NICE.

All in all, it’s a fine debut, and I look forward to reading more from Nasim.

And of course, consciously or not, writers always draw on the real people they’ve met when constructing their characters. What else is there, after all? ↩︎

Secret Diaries

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 08:39:51 +0000

Sad to hear of the death of Sue Townsend. I didn’t keep up with the Adrian Mole books after the first couple, but I was always happy to see her byline in the paper or hear her on the radio. And I did enjoy those early books and the TV series.

Interesting to learn from this Guardian piece that the first one was published at around the same time as The Smiths’ first gig. Adrian would probably have approved.

Why Devilgate?

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:27:47 +0000

I always expect people to ask me about my use of the handle devilgate, but they almost never do. But an old friend did recently, and I wrote him the answer, and I think it belongs here.

So sit back and relax, and I’ll fill you in on the whole story.

You’re familiar with the origin story of the comics character Daredevil, I assume? Well it’s almost exactly like that, except with less radioactive material/eye interaction, blindness and skintight costumes. But with added rock ‘n’ roll.

So, back around the time I was in primary 4 or 5 (age 9-10), Suzi Quatro, as I’m sure you know, had a song called ‘Devilgate Drive’ (or so I thought for decades; I was telling a colleague at work this story a few years back and we looked for it on Spotify, and couldn’t find it; until we split it into two words: ‘Devil Gate Drive'; somehow much less satisfying). I didn’t actually know the song back then, but some of my classmates did, and started calling me ‘Devilgate’, precisely because I was decidedly non-devilish (or so I assume). I was seen as a bit of a goody-goody, because a) my Mum was a teacher, and b) I was a bit of a goody-goody.

As nicknames go, it was a lot better than it could have been. I remember once another kid asking me what it meant, and I said, “Devilgate: the gate full of the devil.” Which is kind of embarrassing, but considering how goody-goody I actually was (altar boy, and all that), it’s surprising that I wasn’t more bothered by the diabolical nature. Perhaps further evidence that all children are naturally without belief, until and unless they’re indoctrinated into having some: I probably didn’t really believe in the devil.

Anyway, spin forward a few years and I got online and was looking for a handle somewhere – Slashdot might have been where I first used it, and I was just trying to find out whether you can find the creation date of your Slashdot user ID, but it seems you can’t. I have a vague feeling, actually, that I used it somewhere else first, but I can’t imagine where that might be.

Anyway, having established it, it became my go-to handle. Wherever there’s a web service, if there’s a devilgate (or Devilgate: I see that I capitalised it back in the Slashdot days), it’ll almost certainly be me. Except for eBay, where I’m devilgate_real, because some bampot had nicked my name by the time I got there.

And so when I finally got round to registering my own domain, it was obvious what I’d choose.

The First Three Books of the Year

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 23:33:45 +0000

The first three books of 2014 were:

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman’s fantasy inspired by his own childhood experiences is fun. It is short, however, and strangely unmemorable after just a couple of months.

It by Stephen King

I read some King when I was younger, but hadn’t in several years apart from On Writing, until a couple of years ago when my beloved gave me 11.22.63, his time-travel fantasy about going back to save JFK. I throughly enjoyed that, and was reminded that he had a vast back-catalogue that I could catch up on.

A significant portion of that catalogue is contained in the single volume of It. It is a monolith, a vast behemoth of a book, at around 1300 pages.

It’s good, though, and I shouldn’t fixate on its size. King uses the space to let his characters breathe and grow. They have the strange limitation as adults that they have almost totally forgotten their childhoods, as a direct result of their encounter with the titular creature. Though not, as you might suppose, because they were traumatised. Rather it seems to be a feature of interacting with the supernatural entity that haunts the town of Derry, Maine, in the primary guise of a scary clown, that, if you face it and live (few do) you forget the encounter.

I had met Derry before: in 11.22.63 the protagonist spends some time in this strange town, and the effect in the book was so jarring – it felt obvious that here was a place with a history – that I looked it up. Turns out he’s used the fictional town as the setting for several stories (and presumably couldn’t resist routing his time-traveller through it).

Anyway, getting back to the book at hand: I spent weeks embroiled in King’s small-town America, its characters and its horrors. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but am in no hurry to go back there soon.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Wow. Just wow. This is an awesome book. Atkinson manages to tell the same woman’s life story again and again and keep it interesting and gripping every time (well, there’s a slight longueur during a German period in one iteration, but the undercurrent of terror – she is living in the Führer’s holiday home – keeps it from being a problem).

As you probably know, it’s the tale of a woman who was born in 1910 and died – at various times, and in various ways. We are told the story of her life as she repeats it, again and again – or through multiple parallel timestreams. As the iterations go on, she starts to have some awareness of her past lives. She doesn’t understand what they are at first, of course, especially as a child. At first she’ll just have a sense of dread as she nears an event that killed her before. Later they are clearer memories of the future.

It is utterly fascinating and a joy. And not SF, though if I had read it soon enough I’d have nominated it for the BSFA Award.

I read Kate Atkinson’s first, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, years ago, and likened it to Iain Banks’s The Crow Road (hard to to think of higher praise). I read one other, but wasn’t so impressed, and rather lost track of her, apart from watching the TV adaptations of her detective stories. I think maybe I need to go back and catch up on her work.

Link: The One Correct Way to do Dependency Injection | Schauderhaft

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:33:30 +0000

The One Correct Way to do Dependency Injection | Schauderhaft In the end, "Dependency Injection" just means "passing parameters"; which was always the right way to do things anyway. From my Pinboard

Tony Benn

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 09:17:01 +0000

This blog raises a fist and a glass and a helping hand in memory of Tony Benn. A true socialist and all-round good guy.

Some People Left for Heaven Without Warning...

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 23:59:49 +0000

Too many people died in 2013. So many, it seems, that when Philip Chevron of The Pogues died, I didn't get round to finishing my post. Here's what I wrote in October:

... Except there ain't no fucking heaven, and too damn many people have left for it this year. I hate 2013.
If there’s one slightly positive thing about Philip Chevron dying two days ago for me, it’s that I was reminded that the box set Just Look Them Straight In The Eye And Say… Pogue Mahone! exists; and also that it is now available in an inexpensive format for about £14. I ordered it on Tuesday night, and it arrived today.

I’ve been listening to it all afternoon. It’s a combination of outtakes, demos, live tracks and radio sessions, and it’s very good.

One thing that stands out at the moment, though, is that their music is steeped in the imagery of death. “Some people left for heaven without warning” is a line from “Sally Maclennane”, of course.

Weirdest Customer Request?

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:55 +0000

This is one of those unpublished posts I told you about. I don't know why it wasn't published (well, except that I hadn't written the last couple of sentences).

A while back I heard the strangest ever request from a customer.

As you might know, I work for a software house.¹ We write financial software for banks. As a thing to talk about it tends to be boring, but it can have interesting challenges.

Anyway, one of our product’s problems, as a web-based app, is that it was written to specifically target the Internet Explorer browser.

I know that seems at best charmingly retro, and at worst appallingly non-standards-compliant, but there are a couple of good-ish reasons. Principally the fact that the original version of the web app was written by contractors who both only knew IE, and were told that our clients only cared about IE. The latter was probably true at the time, and as for the former, well: let’s just say that sometimes people in companies make some stupid decisions, and leave it at that.

Inevitably, and especially as the browser landscape has matured and Apple and Google have come to rule the world, there have been calls to fix things. But there have always been higher-priorities. Getting new features done takes priority over making things work better, sadly.

One of these years we’ll fix it – personally I don’t think it’ll be as difficult as people always think (that fear is another reason why we have resisted doing it).

But what it would really take to force us to sort it out would be if a client demanded it.

If it were going to make or break a sale, we’d be all hands on deck.

So it’s interesting that we got a query a while back wherein a client was concerned about the fact that the app doesn’t work properly in Firefox. This was causing some of their users distress, as FF is their chosen browser. Was this it? Was this the opportunity, at last, driven by customer demand, to bring our app into the late twentieth century?

No.

No, the client had a better idea. They wanted us to to change our app such that it would detect that the user was running something other than IE…

… and prompt them to use IE instead.

Oh dear.

(We didn’t agree to their request.)

Incidentally, why “house”, I wonder? By association with “publishing house”, obviously, but why are those “houses”? I’m reminded of a discussion I had on a software mailing list in the nineties regarding the American tendency (then, if not now) for referring to a “shop”, meaning a programming entity, including an old-school IT department within a company. ↩︎

Another Lost Month, and Unpublished Posts

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 23:50:59 +0000

OK, so not content with the last post celebrating the fact that I missed a whole month, I then went on and missed February, too. These months just go by so fast.

Anyway, a couple of things. I noticed that I have a few posts sitting in draft form but that are more-or-less complete, so you may shortly see some slightly-non-timely things.

And I’m thinking I might have another go at blogging about the books I read. I appear not to have done that regularly since 2009 (these years go by so fast…) I might not give every book its own post, but put a few into a summary. As I’ve only read three so far this year (one of them was Stephen King’s 1300-page behemoth It, so I don’t feel too bad about the count) I’ll start with those.

This might just encourage me to post regularly, if not frequently.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Arthur’s Seat to keep things visual.

Missing Months

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 01:02:13 +0000

I missed all of December. On this blog, that is. No posts at all. V bad. And nearly missed January as well.

But not quite. Here’s a photo to remind us what January’s weather has been like.

And I’ve just done my tax return.

Welcome to the end of the first month of 2014.

2001: The aliens that almost were

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 12:51:33 +0000

[W]e could summarize the whole ordeal by saying that Kubrick tried to the last minute not to follow Sagan's advice!.

An interesting piece on Kubrick, Clarke and collaborators trying to design the aliens for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Via Daring Fireball.

The Summer of Rereading, 3: More Culture

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 20:14:31 +0000

I stayed with the Culture books, skipping over the non-Culture SF ones, Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn. That brought me to Excession, in many ways Banksie’s Culture masterwork. Certainly it’s the first in which the ships take such central, starring roles, which makes it the defining one for me.

I remembered much more of this (I’ve definitely read it more than once before), but there were still bits that were only fuzzy at best. It is galaxy-spanning, “widescreen baroque” space opera at its best.

I hadn’t finished it by the time we went on holiday, so I had to take it with me with only a hundred or so pages to go. That was mildly annoying, but it didn’t take us over our weight limit.

The next Culture novel to be published is Inversions, but I didn’t quite feel like reading it, because I was keen to get to Look to Windward. I feel as if I’ve been wanting to reread that almost since I first read it. So I took it with me, and with only a brief interruption to finish The Magus in the appropriate country, as I’ve already discussed, I stormed into it.

And, err, it was a bit disappointing, actually.

Here’s the thing about not remembering books though: I remembered almost nothing about this. I thought I remembered it, but really I only had the setup (the business of waiting for the light from the stars destroyed in the Culture-Idiran War to arrive) and one brief scene near the end. This had the great positive that it was almost like reading a new Culture novel.

The trouble with it is that the plot is quite thin, and mostly happening off stage. And a lot of the events that happen in between are only really there to show off some of the fantasicness of living on a Culture orbital. In a sense it tries to do exactly what Banksie himself said you can’t really do, which is to set a story in a utopia. This is why the Culture novels general focus on someone working for Special Circumstances or at least Contact; they happen at the edges of the utopia, or just outside its fringes, where things are a lot more dangerous.

There is an ongoing threat to at least one of the main characters, but it doesn’t really engage us all that much. We don’t, perhaps, care all that much about what happens to them.

That said, there are still some great moments. But I wonder whether my expectations, set by my memory of really enjoying it, were too high. It’s often best to approach artistic works with lowered expectations.

The Summer of Rereading, 2: A Culture of Marvel and Miracles

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:57:55 +0000

After Iain Banks died I decided it was long past time for a big reread of all his books. Most of the older ones were in the attic, though, so it was a while before I got started.

The books in the attic aren’t terribly well ordered, since they’re just in boxes, and have been moved in and out of them over the years. Also it’s very dusty up there. Not that that affects the order or accessibility of the books; I just say it to try to evoke some sympathy. Poor, poor, pitiful me, sneezing in old clothes while looking through lots and lots of lovely books.

I digress. Sometimes I think its what I do best, actually. One of the non-Banksie things I found was the box containing my copies of MarvelMiracleman, which I hadn’t read for a long, long while. To my shock, an issue was missing. Luckily it was an early one (4, I think), and I also found my Warriors, where it was originally published, so I had all the material. I still prefer it in black & white with the bigger pages, incidentally.

On a theme that will become common, I was surprised at how much I didn’t remember. The whole “Olympus” thing, for example. I thought that was just a passing page or two at the end, but it’s actually woven through the second half of the work. To be honest, I didn’t remember much after the part that was in Warrior apart from Johnny Bates’s carnage in London.

Anyway, it’s still pretty good, but not as good as I remembered. It doesn’t hold up the way Watchmen still does, in my opinion. Also Thatcher appears in it briefly, which is just weird.

To return to my digression, I found various things in the attic that I haven’t read in a long time, so there will doubtless be more rereading ahead. Which is kind of a shame, because as always there are so many new (and old but unread) books to read.

But back to Banksie. I thought of just starting at the beginning and working through them all in order of publication. But I found I didn’t really feel like reading The Wasp Factory at the time, while I did feel like reading some of the SF. So I started with the Culture novels. I thoroughly enjoyed all that I’ve got through so far, and had the mostly-pleasant (but slightly worrying) sense of not being totally familiar with them.

Consider Phlebas: I still find it striking that here in the first Culture novel, if you don’t have any prompting about the Culture, it’s not totally obvious that they’re the good guys. Horza is so well-written, so sympathetic as a viewpoint character, that it’s hard not to support his anti-Culture beliefs. That those beliefs are not really examined (in the time period of the novel, at least) is probably a realistic picture of how most of us go through most of our lives.

The Player of Games: I had remembered this as one I hadn’t liked so much, with its gloomy, spoiled protagonist. Gurgeh is both of those things, but he is also manipulated quite thoroughly by Special Circumstances¹, and in the end his life is improved because of it. Which wasn’t their intention (probably); or not their main one, at least. But it does tell us that no matter how good your life is in the Culture, it can still get better. Damn.

Use of Weapons: There’s a game you can play when you’re reading most Culture novels: it is, “What Are Special Circumstances Trying to Achieve This Time?” This is the book with the largest number of distinct chances to play, as we work backwards through Zakalwe’s timeline. A series of grim fragments of conflicts on different worlds, with Zakalwe always there as some kind of general or military advisor. We see him at the end of his engagement each time, and usually at the end of his tether if not the end of a rope.

And the forward-running chapters also have an unresolved special circumstance. But we don’t really care about it, or any of the others. We care about Zakalwe. And about Sma, and the wonderfully-named drone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw; but mainly about Zakalwe. Which is impressive work by Banksie, considering.

But more later.

That’s what they do, after all. ↩︎

He's really a guitar player but he uses a camera

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:58:50 +0000

"He's really a guitar player but he uses a camera": Interview at The Quietus with Lou Reed and Mick Rock, the photographer who took, among many other things, the Transformer cover shot.

The Summer of Rereading 1: The Magus, by John Fowles

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 17:25:58 +0000

A summer of rereading, that's what this one has been for me. Let me tell you about it.

Note: contains spoilers

Early on – maybe it was still spring – when we booked our holiday to Greece, I decided it was time to reread The Magus. I read it something like thirty years ago, when I was at university. I remember enjoying it, but being annoyed by the ending.

So I was expecting that annoyance to still be there. On occasions between then and this rereading, I have looked at the last couple of pages. I did so again before starting it this time; it was no clearer for doing so. Fowles himself recognised problems with the ending. In his foreword to the revised edition, he acknowledges that the novel has flaws, not least that it is a novel of adolescence, both his and that of his protagonist. (I found Nicholas to be annoyingly adolescent and spoilt, especially at the start, on this reading.) He goes on to say:

The other change is in the ending. Though its general intent has never seemed to me as obscure as some readers have evidently found it -- perhaps because they have not given due weight to the two lines from the Pervigilium Veneris that close the book -- I accept that I might have declared a preferred aftermath less ambiguously… and have now done so.

(Ellipsis the author’s, incidentally.) The thing is, he hasn’t done so. Not really. Not if you want to know whether or not Nicholas and Alison get back together, which seems to have been what his correspondents regarding the original edition were concerned about.

But that’s not what bothered me, either then or now. I don’t mind an ambiguous ending. And I actually kind of like the way you can think of it as a freeze-frame, like the ending of a film (Bonnie and Clyde ends like that, if I remember correctly – though in a more dramatic event).¹

No, what annoys me is that we never really learn what Conchis and the others were up to. They called their project “The Godgame” (it was also Fowles’s proposed title for the novel at one point); but what was the point of it? What were they trying to achieve?

Ultimately I suppose that can be answered in part by Fowles’s argument regarding people asking about the “meaning” of the novel:

If The Magus has any "real significance", it is no more than that of the Rorschach Test in psychology. Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader[.]

So the Godgame’s meaning or purpose may be simply the reaction it provokes in Nicholas; but that still leaves us wondering, as I said above, why did Conchis do it? Was it just the whim of a rich man? He did it because he could? And yet mere whim feels weak alongside all the discussion of freedom and what it means.

In the end the mild sense of frustration remains, because we never find that out.

Back when I first read it, there was no immediately obvious way to find discussions of it. No doubt there were some in academic journals and theses, but finding those would have been difficult. Now, of course, such discussions are easy to find. And the most interesting one I found recently was by Jo Walton on Tor.com: Twists of the Godgame: John Fowles’s The Magus. As Walton says, the ending “twists at just the wrong moment and sends it away from metaphysics into triviality and romance.”

She goes on to compare it to Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life”, which I haven’t read. But the argument that “Fowles doesn’t know what he’s doing, that the underlying reality that is never explained doesn’t make sense” rings true for me. And so when she says that “what Chiang’s ‘The Story of Your Life’ does is what Fowles may have wanted to do”, I’m inclined to suspect that she’ll be proved right when I come to read the Chiang.

I still loved the book, though: you can enjoy the journey even if you’re not entirely happy with the destination. Walton’s conclusion gives a hilarious suggestion for how it could have been improved, though:

It’s beautifully written. The characters are so real I’d recognise them if I saw them at the bus-stop. And there’s nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed by having them go off in an alien space ship at the end.

Now that would have been an ending.

Apparently there was a film of the book made. It’s considered to be so bad that (according to Wikipedia) Woody Allen said if he had his life to live again he’d do everything the same, except he wouldn’t see The Magus. ↩︎

Cultural Times

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 00:02:17 +0000

On Wednesday I went to The State of the Culture, a symposium on Iain M Banks's "Culture" novels, at Brunel University. Paul Kincaid's writeup suggests that his experience was very similar to mine. Including the journey. I thought it was a long hike from Hackney, but he came all the way from Folkestone. And I managed to find the main reception, where they gave me a map showing the way to the Antonin Artaud building. I was later than Paul, though.

I was surprised that it was so sparsely attended. There were only about thirty people there, including all the ones who were presenting papers. Given Banksie’s popularity, I thought it would be packed. A few years back when he was guest at the BSFA’s monthly London meeting, they had to have it in a lecture hall at Imperial College, instead of the usual room over or under a pub. I suppose that either the academic nature of it put people off, or just that it wasn’t very well publicised. Shame, really.

My assessment of the event generally is much the same as Paul’s so you can just read his comments. But of the papers that were presented, the one that I was most disappointed by was the one that I would probably have found most interesting, if I had been able to hear it. Martyn Colebrook’s “Playing Games with Gods: The Player of Games”, which compared the Banks work with John Fowles’s The Magus. By coincidence I’ve read both of those in the last couple of months (and more on them later), so it would have been interesting to hear what Dr Colebrook had to say. But unfortunately he was just speaking too quietly for the human ear, which is what I’m equipped with (I was at the back of the room, having arrived late).

I’ve sought his paper online, but it doesn’t seem to be around yet. Maybe sometime.

The most used word of the day, apart from “Culture”, was “transgressive”. Indeed, the same Dr Colebrook has edited a collection of essays called The Transgressive Iain Banks.

Forgot the Cry of Gulls

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:58:43 +0000

It's now a week -- more, by the time I finish and post this -- since we heard about the death of Iain Banks. Everyone has written about this. From Ken McLeod's reminder in The Guardian that he was an SF writer first and foremost, through personal tributes by some of my friends to Stuart Kelly's "final interview" in The Guardian (and not forgetting Kirsty Wark's "final interview", which should be around on iPlayer for a while).

Now it’s my turn. I didn’t know him personally at all, despite having friends who did. Of course I would echo all the comments to the effect that he was a friendly and entertaining speaker, having seen him at several conventions and readings.

But it’s the books, man, the books.

I’m not totally sure when I first heard of The Wasp Factory, but I’d be willing to bet it was from my friend Andrew. I think I remember him mentioning it, but maybe I had heard of it already. Either way, sometime around 86 or 87, I’d say, I started reading his books. I know that the first three at least were already out (and in paperback). Maybe Consider Phlebas, too. And I loved them, especially The Bridge and Espedair Street. It was clear – even before he started publishing explicit science fiction with the added initial – that he was one of us. The Bridge’s fantasy sequences, and those of Walking on Glass, can be read as the products of damaged minds; but they’re better if you read them as at being about what’s really happening to their protagonists.

The first three SF novels are fine and dandy, but it wasn’t them that really changed me. Changed me, that is, into a buyer of hardback books – and an on-release buyer of Banksie. But it was at a science-fiction convention that it happened. And all it took was a friend’s recommendation, and a single line.

It must have been 1992, so the convention would have been Illumination, the Eastercon in Blackpool. Though it could have been Novacon that year. Either way, I had seen the new one by Banksie in the book room, but decided to wait for the paperback, as was my wont in those days. Hardbacks seemed incredibly expensive, at maybe fifteen or sixteen pounds.

Luckily I prevaricated to my friend Steve. He said, “You should buy it, Martin.” I resisted still. He said, “Just read the first line and you’ll buy it.”

I did. It was, “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” I bought The Crow Road instantly, and have bought every subsequent Banksie in hardback on release. Except for Raw Spirit, which came out just before Christmas (and surprised me by appearing in WH Smith’s when I hadn’t even heard it existed). I didn’t buy it right away, but received it a few days later as a perfectly-targeted Secret Santa present from a work colleague.

So I just want to thank those friends, and thank Iain’s memory for a great, great body of work. I can’t express how sad I am that we won’t hear from him again.

Oh, and calling him “Banksie”? That has always been the way in the SF community, and he used it himself. Always with the “ie”; that guy with “y” ending is just some blow-in. I’m sure it comes from having been “Banks, I” at school; just as Daniel Weir of Espedair Street got his nickname “Weird” from being “Weir, D”.

We Are The Clash: The Last Stand of a Band That Mattered by Mark Andersen & Ralph Heibutzki — Kickstarter

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:04:55 +0000

A Kickstarter for a book on the last two years of The Clash. I should volunteer to be interviewed, as I saw them thrice on the busking tour.

The Third-Person Sanctimonious

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:15:43 +0000

With The Great Gatsby fever in full swing (to mix a metaphor), I've been thinking about the book a lot today. I tweeted yesterday that I had never really got what all the fuss was about.

Want to see the _Great Gatsby_ movie, yet despite re-reading the book last summer, I fail to see what people think is so good about it. #fb— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 19, 2013

I find it hard to explain what I find problematic about it. I wouldn't say it's bad, just that it's not as good as nearly everyone says it is. I see it as largely being about rich people having parties, and a couple of tragic deaths. And while I don't think that you have to like -- or even identify with -- all the characters for fiction to work, in this case none of them has any redeeming feature, as far as I can tell.

There’s a recent article in the Guardian by Sarah Churchwell about how wonderful it all is. It’s a well-written piece, but I find it just as hard to get to grips with, to understand the point of, as the novel itself.

So I did a search for “Gatsby overrated”, and found this piece by Kathryn Schulz which absolutely nails it.

One point she makes perhaps helps to explain why I find the characters so objectionable:

Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder.

And:

On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy.

My favourite part is her parenthetical assertion that:

In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.

Though I had to look up Edward St. Aubyn.

But her main argument concerns the shallowness of the characterisations, the emphasis on symbolism over emotion:

Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”
What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory.

For me, though, as I think on it some more, the problem with it all (and in contradiction to the last quote above) is the thinness of the plot. The prose is famously poetic in places, and that’s fine; but the real weakness is that there’s almost no story there.

And that famous last line¹? Poetic though it is, when you parse it, it means absolutely nothing at all.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”, as I’m sure you know. ↩︎

The Scented City

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 23:40:27 +0000

We spent a few days in Cologne over Easter. I took lots of photographs. Here are two that have had some tweaking in Lightroom. I'm especially pleased with the second one. The effect is almost like an impressionist painting to my eye.

Cologne by night; a funfair across the Rhine.

It didn’t actually look like this. The things you can do with software.

Understanding a Misunderstanding

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:36:40 +0000

Spotify has always behaved weirdly regarding how you queue tracks up. Today I think I realised why.

They think “Queue this track up” means “Cue this track up”. They’re thinking like DJs, but they are confused by homophones.

I’m thinking like a programmer, I admit: queues are first-in-first-out; but more importantly, like an ordinary person: you join a queue at the end, not just behind the person at the front.

See this discussion on their suggestions board which explains the weirdness, and is where (as I was adding a comment) I suddenly understood their thinking. Also definition 2 of “cue” is the appropriate one.

Edited: Queues are of course first-in-first-out, not last-in-first-out, as I wrote. That would be a stack, in programming terms. Whoops!

Hackney Sunset

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:29:37 +0000

This is the sky at sunset in Hackney just the other day. Kind of remarkable, don’t you think? Click on the the picture for a bigger version on Flickr.

Pulp Magazine Covers for All

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:13:49 +0000

The [Pulp-O-Mizer](http://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html) is a fun thing that lets you generate pulp-magazine-cover-style images, with your own text and good range of images, backgrounds, colours, etc. You can download web-size versions of your creations, or get them printed on cards, notebooks, mugs, etc, at [Zazzle](http://www.zazzle.com/); though I haven’t managed to work out how to get it to use the UK version of the Zazzle site while still keeping your generated image.

Here’s one that I made using the title of a story of mine. It remains unpublished so far, but it was the short story that was the seed for the [novel I finished in November](http://devilgate.org/blog/2012/12/02/november-spawned-some-words-but-not-that-many/).

Day Trip

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:27:21 +0000

We had a wee day trip to Cambridge yesterday (Monday). Lovely city. I took some photographs. They're so small and unlinked because, I think, I'm experimenting with a plugin for Lightroom that uploads them directly to the blog. But I have a few wrinkles to iron out, I think. There are bigger versions of them [at my Flickr account](http://www.flickr.com/photos/devilgate/), if you're interested.

First, some punters punting on the Cam:

Then the famous King’s College Chapel. More of a cathedral, really:

This wee guy looks decidedly unhappy:

There’s a pair of war memorials in a side chapel. A famous name at position 2 of the WWI one:

There’s plenty of stained glass, of course, but in another side chapel we see this interesting creature:

Then on to Trinity College Chapel, where Isaac Newton stands in marble:

Here’s a closeup of Newton. I can’t work out what he’s holding:

And above him there’s this rather attractive chandelier and dramatic ceiling:

Strange Blog Behaviour

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:56:48 +0000

For some reason WordPress decided to repost the two posts that currently appear immediately below this one. I have no idea why. They have in common that they are both of the “Link” format (“Format” here is a WordPress concept denoting types of post).

The mildly annoying thing is that I haven’t posted here yet this year, and now I seem to have started the year with two reposts. I could, of course, delete them, but then the above paragraph would be wrong.

Anyway, this is the true first post of the year, even if it was triggered by an aberration.

Hello. Happy New Year.

Instagram and Terms

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:19:23 +0000

I never really got Instagram. I mean, I got the app, I signed up, and I posted a few photos. But I never totally got what it was for. I mean, social photos? OK, I followed a few people I knew on Twitter, but it never really amounted to much. And you couldn't even see your pictures on the web at first. The filters were interesting, but only up to a point, and they got worse.

But somehow I could never totally see the point. Flickr I understood: it’s a site to store your photos. If you don’t have, or don’t want the bother of managing, your own web space, you can put your pictures there and show them to other people. And it’s got the social thing going on, too, with the ability to follow people and all that. It feels a bit bolted on, but it does no harm. And when I discover a site like 500px, as I did a few weeks ago, well, that’s obvious: a place to store your pictures and to find other people’s. Not for nothing is their tag line, “The best photos on the web” (or it was: today it says, “The world’s best photo sharing”, which is similar, but different). I just wish they’d learn how to keep me signed in.

But Instagram didn’t really grab me. And today they nearly ejected me.

Oddly for a net-based thing, I heard about the new terms of service on the radio. The story was that the terms were going to allow them to sell their users' pictures for advertising, without paying, asking, or even telling the users.

I tweeted:

Did I just hear on the radio that Instagram is committing suicide?— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) December 18, 2012

It turns out to be not as bad as we thought, at least according to this post from Instagram. Though I only found that because I clicked the "I'd like to delete my account" link. On the confirmation page there was a link to that post. It turns out there's an Instagram blog, and both the terms of service change and this update were posted there. But who knew about that?

So for now I haven’t deleted my account, and we’ll see how it goes.

I found out about the change from the radio, and the correction by requesting a deletion; my inbox remains unsullied. How about a wee email, Instagram? You’ve got my address.

Edited to add: According to this post, the new terms are actually better than the old ones.

November spawned some words (but not that many)

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:39:54 +0000

I'm not very good at this NaNoWriMo thing, it turns out (again). This year I declared myself a NaNo Rebel (basically anyone who aims to write 50,000 words, but not of a brand-new novel). I had originally hoped to finish my previous novel before November started, and leave November clear for taking a big run at the new one, the idea for which came knocking when I was about three-quarters of the way through the then-current one. But as it turned out I didn't manage to finish it until a few days into November. So I decided just to count the words of original fiction I wrote in November.

Which proved to be just as well, because after just a couple of days on the new novel, I was cycling home from work one day when a short story deposited itself in my head, unbidden, but complete. I took a few days off from the novel to work on that, thus further ensuring my rebellious state.

As an experiment for my own interest, I also tried to keep a note of how many words I wrote for other things, both at home and at work; just to get an idea of how many words I write normally. I kept that all in a Google Docs spreadsheet, so I could get to it wherever I was. I’m sure I wasn’t complete in recording everything, though.

In the end I wrote 16,600 words of fiction;¹ so comparable with last year. And oh, dear: reading over those old posts to get links makes me realise that this is the third NaNo during which I’ve been working on Accidental Upgrade.

But having said that, the thing that I’m underplaying in all this is that: I. Finished. My. Novel. 89,000 words of first draft, done and… well, left quite dusty, truth be told.

And a new short story drafted, and another novel reasonably well under way. I’m feeling quite positive about it all.

And around 9000 of other stuff. ↩︎

Warren Ellis on Writing Dialogue

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 09:41:06 +0000

When you have a character talking, have two things you know about their lives in your head as you let them talk. Two things that make them what they are. What was their childhood like? What was their first job? Do they spend a lot of time alone? Are they guarded around people? Because dialogue is about moving information around and expressing character. What you know about them affects the way they talk. Take a book you like — or, hell, even one you don’t — and select a passage of dialogue, and see what you can learn about those characters from the way they speak. (And, on top of that, see if the way they speak changes during the course of the book.)

Via Warren Ellis.

Scapple: new from Literature and Latte

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:46:26 +0000

New Mac app from the makers of Scrivener. Looks good. Mind mapping, but without the requirement to have a single central node. In beta at the moment.

New Camera; Also Reviewing Purchases

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 23:22:30 +0000

I finally have a dSLR. No longer do I have to hold my camera up in front of me in that quite silly-looking way; once again I can look through a viewfinder. Hurrah!

I say “once again” because I used to have — well, still do have, but almost never use — a film SLR, namely an Olympus OM-1.

With the new one I’ve gone over to Canon, though. It’s an EOS 600D; which rather oddly is known in America as the Rebel T3i and in Japan as the Kiss X5

Here’s a picture of Clapton Pond to show you what it can do. Click through for a better view on Flickr.

I bought it online for full £200 less than I’d’ve had to pay at Jessops; and by going to a site called DigitalRev I saved about £100 over Amazon’s prices. DigitalRev’s service was incredibly good: my camera arrived in London from Hong Kong in two days. It took a few more days for DHL to get it to me, but that’s not DigitalRev’s fault. Really astonishingly fast service, and for the cheapest price I could find anywhere.

The only slightly annoying thing is that I clicked a link in their email asking for comments (essentially to say the above); it took me to a site called Reseller Ratings, where I filled in a few boxes, and then hit “Submit”… whereupon it wanted me to create a profile before I could submit the review. And I just couldn’t face it. I’ll almost certainly never go to that site again, so even though it’s only a name and email (and password) I just thought, “No. I’d rather put a good review up on my own site.”

So think on that, people running review sites.

Generation: Inspired

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:38:02 +0000

So, it's all finally over, and we go back to normal. Or perhaps not. The slogan of London 2012 was "Inspire a Generation", and I think that has happened.

But the question is, what generation?

The tacit assumption was always that the slogan applied to the next generation: to teenagers and younger kids. Get them up off their arses, it implied, and away from their consoles, and down to their local sports hall, playing field, or pool.

Whether and to what extent that has worked will take a long time to see. But there’s another generation that is already visibly inspired, to my admittedly limited view.

Mine.

Where by “mine” I sort of mean “everyone who’s not still a child.” Because what I’m seeing as I cycle to and from work these days is that the streets are packed with cyclists. And people out running, too; there are definitely more than usual. But it’s us London cyclists who are really showing up.

I personally have taken public transport to work only once since before the Olympics started,¹ and I’ve been pushing myself to get that bit faster on my bike rides.

I’ve been thinking of it as something like, “Hoy! It’s the Pendleton-Trott-Kenny-Wiggins effect.” But that’s a bit unwieldy, and misses some names out.

It is clear to me, though, that the “generation” that is in their twenties, thirties and yes, forties – and probably older – are out there in bigger numbers than ever before.

We’ll see how it holds up as autumn and winter come in, of course. But vastly increased cycling in London? That would really be a worthwhile legacy.

Anyway, here’s my Flickr set from our second event at the Olympics, namely hockey. Click through to see the pictures bigger and with captions.

Admittedly I was on holiday for around three weeks of that time. ↩︎

Olympics: fencing and more Park views

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 11:27:47 +0000

A Flickr set from our first Olympic event: fencing at ExCeL. We went via Stratford, so we stopped off at the Westfield shopping centre on the way, to look at the view of the Park.

Olympics: some photos from the Park

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:26:32 +0000

Olympics 1, a set on Flickr; click to see the whole set.

This is a Flickr set of some sights around the Olympic Park the first day we were there (which was just a Park visit; no events).

(I lied about not posting photos, by the way.)

Olympian Achievements

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:12:57 +0000

Initial scepticism

Back in 2004, 2005 or so, when London was bidding to host the Olympics, I was against it. My concerns were the cost, the crowding, and the general disruption of it all. I was, I admit, cynical. I recall being annoyed by the fact that the people running the bid published a number to which you could text “yes”, to say you supported the bid; but there was no option to text “no” to say you opposed it.

Looking back to what I wrote at the time, I see that my biggest concern was the effect on the Lower Lee Valley. It turned out that the removal of wilderness didn’t stretch as far as my fears suggested; and of course much of the land that has been used was polluted, abandoned, brownfield industrial sites. Bob Stanley of St Etienne (the band) has an interesting piece in The Guardian about that.

Coming round

But then London won the bid, and I though, “OK, fine, it’ll be interesting at least.” I had enjoyed watching the previous ones, and there was the regeneration for East London that looked promising. And the fact that it would just be down the road for me added to the interest. After all, that would make it easier to get tickets, right? Obviously there would specific tickets made available to to locals.

Hindsight even makes me wonder whether the events of the very next day didn’t make me more supportive: blitz spirit, don’t let the bastards grind you down, “soft power”, and all that.

The intervening years

Worries

In the years since then I’ve gone through various thoughts about the whole thing. Obviously there were the concerns about how long we would be paying for it all. And more recently there were the worries about the security preparations and the expected madness of the precautions. Of course more recently we’ve had the G4S fiasco, and the drafting in of extra soldiers.

More bizarrely we’ve seen the growth of the Olympic “brand police”, the forbidding of certain words and combinations of words (including, ridiculously, things like “summer”, “bronze”, and “2012”).

Cycle-friendly or not?

But closer to home one of the things that has annoyed me is the way they’ve treated our towpath.

The main stadium sits between two branches of the River Lee (or Lea): the river itself, and the Lee Navigation or Cut, which is essentially a canal constructed as a tributary¹ of the main river. The towpath of the Navigation is a popular cycling and walking route for us local types. As we watched the construction site form and the massive buildings grow (and in my case moaned about the ugly fencing round it), we were able to keep a close eye on it all by going along the towpath. And indeed, a minor, but pleasing, instance of regeneration has been the resurfacing of the towpath, making it much more pleasant to cycle on.²

Above all, it seemed obvious that we would use the towpath to actually get to the Olympic Park. How else?

Until a few months ago when it became clear that the towpath was going to be closed for the duration of the games. The reason given – of course – was “security”. But what exactly is the security risk of providing access via the towpath?

In all honesty, I had my doubts about its use during the games; but I wasn’t concerned about terrorism. Rather I feared for people’s safety. It’s a towpath, after all: relatively narrow, unfenced, and unlit. And, critically, next to a polluted canal. If thousands – or even only hundreds – of people were trying to leave the park that way all at once – after the opening ceremony, say – then I could see that it would be problematic.

So I begin to wonder whether the “security” excuse was brought out to hide the more mundane, but always-criticised-by-the-tabloids truth: health and safety.

Then we heard that bikes would be among the banned items in the park; but also that there would be cycle parking: it sounded like mixed messages, but we would have to wait and see.

Those pesky tickets and the getting thereof

Ah, the joys of Olympic ticketing. Even as I write, on the third full day of the Games, they don’t seem to have really sorted it all out.

It’s a massively complex task, to allocate and sell tickets for hundreds of events over dozens of venues, all taking place in such a concentrated time period. But it’s not like they’ve never done it before; it’s not even like they haven’t done it in the Internet Age. It should largely be a solved problem, it seems to me.

We had decided to treat the Olympics as our family holiday: we would take a couple of weeks off, buy a load of tickets, and that would be our main summer break. After all, it would be just down the road, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, etc. So we signed up for the ballot, spent time listing events we might like to see, and so on. When the time came we hit the website and listed a summer holiday’s worth of tickets (hampered slightly by me having a MasterCard, which of course is the black sheep of Olympic ticket-buying).

In the end my beloved was allocated tickets to three events, and I got none (had they detected that invalid-card possession?)

However, that was just the initial ballot; and because I had been unsuccessful there, I was entitled to try to buy tickets in the conventional way in the second round.

On the day I woke up early and grabbed my laptop. The site, inevitably, crumpled. I went back to sleep for a bit. Tried again later.

I don’t recall how long it took, but in the end I managed to get a further three events.

And that was that. Remember when I said up there, “it would just be down the road … that would make it easier to get tickets”? Yeah. Somehow that didn’t happen. The Olympics is clearly not meant for the people who live near it. Or not particularly. I’m not suggesting it should be only for locals; but how hard would it have been to allocate a percentage of tickets to residents of host boroughs – or the whole of London – in a first pass? If they didn’t get bought they would be offered on, of course. The answer is “not very”; the Hackney Weekend festival did exactly that, after all. Glastonbury gives free tickets to residents of the nearby village, I seem to recall.

Anyway, that’s where we are. We later added a Paralympic athletics day, which will finally get us into the main stadium; and a set of Olympic Park passes, so we can go and have a wander round and soak up the atmosphere on Wednesday. But as I write there are still tickets available, even for swimming, even for the main stadium.

If you’re made of money, at least. Hell, you can still go to the closing ceremony if you’ve got £995 or £1500 to spare.

But still…

But I don’t mean to turn all negative. I’m actually really excited about it all, and thoroughly enjoying everything I’ve seen on telly; especially, of course, Danny Boyle’s masterpiece of an opening ceremony. Much has been said about that elsewhere, so I won’t say a lot. Just that it was far better, and a far truer representation of Britain than we could have imagined, or even hoped for. Part of the fun was following along on Twitter, of course (when it wasn’t too distracting to do so). And my favourite comment of all was one that Mitch Benn retweeted from Simon Evans:

It's not that I'm proud to be British. It's that I'm grateful.

So true.

And I’ve been enjoying seeing the first few days worth of events on telly. Some thoughts:

The tennis is just like Wimbledon, except with colour, and Omega timing instead of IBM. And "London 2012" logos, of course.
I normally go from one Wimbledon to the next without watching any sport; now, suddenly, I'm almost fanatical about everything (except boxing and anything with horses; and archery is much more boring than you might expect).
Seeing those cyclists in the road races made me want to get on my bike; not for those kind of distances, though.
Similarly, badminton & table tennis; maybe there will be a knock-on effect on people doing sport after all.

I should write about legacy (and sustainability³), but I’ve gone on long enough, and anyway, it’s another whole discussion. But I cycled down that way on Saturday; along the part of the towpath that’s still open, across Hackney Marshes (by a new, temporary path) and to the bridge across the river where there is access via Eton Manor Gate. There is a vast cycle park there, and from the gate it’s only supposed to be a few minutes walk to, for example, the Basketball Arena. So it’s all good.⁴

We visit the park on Wednesday, and start seeing actual events from Friday. I may report back.⁵

Or really an inverted tributary, as it forks off the main river in a downstream direction. ↩︎
There are still a few spots of cobblestones, but we can cope with those. ↩︎
Yes, that’s a Twenty Twelve reference; if you haven’t watched it, you should. ↩︎
Yes, so was that. ↩︎
But under no circumstances will I post photos, OK? ↩︎

Google is Buying Sparrow, but not Updating the Apps

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:39:59 +0000

Google buys Sparrow, current apps will not get any new features | The Verge.

This is annoying. The only thing that was stopping me from making Sparrow my default mail client on my iPhone was the fact that it doesn’t do rotation to landscape mode yet. Now it looks like it never will.

It’s rarely good in the long run when big software companies hoover up small ones, it seems to me.

A British Court Bans a TV Broadcast

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 14:44:19 +0000

BBC lawyers consider formal appeal over court ban on riots drama | Media | guardian.co.uk.

The most chilling thing about this is not so much banning the broadcast; there could conceivably be a legitimate reason for that, though it’s hard to imagine a good one. Rather it is this:

For legal reasons, the Guardian cannot name the judge who made the ruling, the court in which he is sitting or the case he is presiding over.

This meta-blocking smacks of the "superinjunctions" that we heard a lot about a few years back (but which strangely seem to have dropped out of sight recently).

Tip: using Pandoc to create truly standalone HTML files

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 23:25:55 +0000

If you’re using the excellent Pandoc to convert between different document formats, and you:

want your final output to be in HTML;
want the HTML to be styled with CSS;
and want the HTML document to be truly standalone;

then read on.

The most common approach with Pandoc is, I think, to write in Markdown, and then convert the output to RTF, PDF or HTML. There are all sorts of more advanced options too; but here we are only concerned with HTML.

The pandoc command has an option which allows you to style the resulting HTML with CSS. Example 3 in the User’s Guide shows how you do this, with the -c option. The example also uses the -s option, which means that we are creating a standalone HTML document, as distinct from a fragment that is to be embedded in another document. The full command is:

pandoc -s -S --toc -c pandoc.css -A footer.html README -o example3.html

If you inspect the generated HTML file after running this, you will see it contains a line like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="pandoc.css" type="text/css">

That links to the CSS stylesheet, keeping the formatting information separate from the content. Very good practice if you’re publishing a document on the web.

But what about that “standalone” idea that you expressed with the -s option? What that does is make sure that the HTML is a complete document, beginning with a DOCTYPE tag, an tag, and so on. But if, for example, you have to email the document you just created, or upload it to your company’s document store, then things fall apart. When your reader opens it, they’ll see what you wrote, all right; but it won’t be styled the way you wanted it. Because that pandoc.css file with the styling is back on your machine, in the same directory as the original Markdown file.

What you really want is to use embedded CSS; you want the content of pandoc.css to be included along with the prose you wrote in your HTML file.

Luckily HTML supports that, and Pandoc provides a way to make it all happen: the -H option, or using its long form, –include-in-header=FILE

First you’ll have to make sure that your pandoc.css file¹ starts and ends with HTML

Going to see Fucked Up and OFF! tonight. Not sure what to expect. Haven't been to a hardcore-type gig since... Napalm Death in 88 or so?Thu Aug 25 07:59:44 via EchofonMartin McCallion devilgate



Hmm.  Not seen a hardcore gig since Napalm Death?  That may well be true, but they’re British (and technically grindcore, according to Wikipedia).  I began to wonder whether I’d ever seen a US (or Canadian) hardcore band live.  The only one I could think of were Hüsker Dü, whom I saw in Edinburgh in – oh, 84 or 85.
I feel sure there must have been others, and yet the only such band that I was really, really a fan of was the Dead Kennedys, and if they ever played the UK it happened either without me knowing about it, or they only played far away from where I was, or both.
I needn’t have worried, though.  The venue was just the right size, and comfortably packed.  The crowd were gentle and lovely.  The moshpit was pretty wild, but I turned 47 yesterday, which is officially way past too old for the moshpit, and I was well able to stay clear of it.
And it was a totally brilliant night.  The first band, Cerebral Ballzy, were on when I arrived, so I heard three or four of their songs.  They sounded pretty good, and more to the point, the sound in the room was excellent.  Clear, and powerful, without being so loud as to be overwhelming.
OFF! were classic hardcore, in that if you didn’t like a song there’d be another along in way less than three minutes.  I thoroughly enjoyed them.
And Fucked Up just ruled.  I was thinking before they came on that I would leave happy as long as they played ‘Queen of Hearts’  And they duly opened with it!  They then proceeded to play edited highlights from David Comes to Life, interspersed with a few other tracks.  There was stage-diving, crowd-surfing, the singer diving topless into the audience and walking almost to the back of the venue while still singing (and using a wired mike, with a very long cable).
Anyway, if you’ve read to the end of this rambling thing, you should go and listen to some things.  Here’s the ‘Queen of Hearts’ video, and it’s the first time I’ve ever embedded a video.  Let’s hope it works.  Note that this version has the kids in the video singing on it, which is not how it is on the album, but is very cool nonetheless.

And the second video from the album, ‘The Other Shoe’, which they also did tonight.



Golden times of British TV comedy
Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:58:38 +0000
It has come to my attention that there are some of you who are not aware of two of the best British comedy programmes to come out over the last year or so.  Both have links to Green Wing¹, which was, of course, famously described (by me) as “the funniest thing since Absolutely“.
First we have Episodes (actually a British-American coproduction), starring Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, in which a married-couple writing team go to Hollywood to adapt their hit British comedy show for the American market.  It also stars Matt LeBlanc, playing himself.  Yes, it’s all very meta, and what’s wrong with that?
Then there’s Campus, which has some of the Green Wing writing team, and could lazily be described as “Green Wing, but set in a university instead of a hospital”².
If you are one such person, then I slightly envy you: you still have these joys ahead of you.  And with both of them, don’t worry if the first episode doesn’t overwhelm you; just watch the next, and you’ll be hooked.




Currently listed as “Watch now on 4oD” (sic).  I might just do that. ↩︎


And indeed has been, by me, ↩︎





Intrusive login options
Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:47:09 +0000
I’ve not really had many dealings with the Huffington Post, but I thought I’d drop a comment on this piece about a cover versions album of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The writer, Michael Vazquez, describes himself as being ‘part of the generation that just-missed Punk’, and goes on to say he’s 45.
Thing is, I’m just a year older, and I didn’t miss it. I lived right through it. Not, it’s true, at its bleeding, safety-pin-punctured heart.¹ But still, I was aware of it, was introduced to the music by friends, listened to Peelie. Formed bands, for god’s sake, which is what it was really all about.
I can only conclude that Vazquez was a late developer.
Anyway, my point wasn’t about that, it was about commenting at the Huffington Post. You have to be registered to comment; fair enough, that probably keeps the spam down a bit. There are a number of login options, as is common nowadays: Twitter, Facebook, a dropdown for others.
I tried the dropdown and chose to use my Google account. A popup pops up, saying, ‘This site wants to know your email address and your contacts.’ Email address, fair enough, that’s normal for registering at most places. But my Google contacts? I think not.
I cancelled, tried Twitter. ‘This site wants to see your contacts, add contacts, post tweets…’ Get, as we say in my part of the world, tae fuck!
Oddly, it asked less of Facebook; but I can’t be bothered going back to check exactly what.
In the end, not wanting to be thwarted, I registered with them by giving them a username and my email address, in the old-school way. Obviously I unchecked the ‘Please spam me’ box.
Is this normal behaviour nowadays? Certainly seems odd to me.




Copyright (c) Cliches-R-Us, 2011. ↩︎





Boycott News International for life? I already did.
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:24:20 +0000
There's a campaign on Facebook encouraging people to boycott News International papers for life.  I'm way ahead of them.  I don't touch anything from the Murdoch empire.[^fn1]
I haven’t ever since the days of the Tories.  Err, the old days of the Tories, I mean: the eighties; Thatcher; all that stuff we thought we’d done away with in 1997.
My reasons are much the same as those I wrote about in my fourth ever blog entry.  Then, I was talking about the Saatchis, and how their name was anathema to me, because of the fact that they had helped the Tories get in all through the Eighties.
I have long held a similar despite for the Murdoch papers; enhanced by the tabloid ones being such trivial pedlars of rubbish and prurience.¹
My kids occasionally complain about the fact that we don’t have Sky, but there are so many channels on Freeview (and Friends and My Name Is Earl are on E4 so often) that I don’t think they really mind.
And I must confess that, until the now-aborted bid to take 100% ownership of Sky, I thought Murdoch did own all of it.  Turns out we could have watched 60% of it for all those years.
No matter how negatively I feel towards the organisation and its organs, though, I would never have expected the degree of criminality that they were apparently practising; just as no matter how negatively I might sometimes have felt about the police, I wouldn’t have expected such casual corruption from them.  In the end I think we’ll understand that the police taking money from journalists is the worst thing about all this.
And yet on some level I can’t say I’m that surprised; disappointed, certainly, but not really surprised.
It’s all unravelling now, though, and we watch with joy and bated breath.





Though all tabloids are like that, to be fair. ↩︎





World of the Newspaper
Wed, 06 Jul 2011 01:20:24 +0000
I’m sure we all use the word “disgusted” too easily.  But I felt physically sick when I first heard about the News of the World (or someone working on its behalf) allegedly ‘hacking’ Milly Dowler’s phone.
It’s only a few days since her murderer was convicted, and now this comes down.  It’s hard to believe that anyone, in any occupation can sink so low.  But of course, it gets worse: they seem to have done it to the families of other murdered girls, too.
Oh, obviously they’re not as low as the bampots who actually did the murders.  But not by much.
I’m a profound believer in free speech, and know that a free press is essential to a functioning democracy.  But shit like this works against those noble ideals.  It’s not exercising our freedoms to ensure that we keep them; it’s abusing them, and so making it more likely that they’ll be curtailed.
Because the backlash is coming, News Corp; already advertisers are starting to withdraw from your spiteful rag.  (And I hope that some good can come of this: that the public will finally see what hideous, mean-spirited rags tabloid papers are, and start to boycott them.)  But bigger than that is that fact there is now bound to be an inquiry.
And it seems to me that there is a strong chance that such an inquiry will recommend introducing some kind of statutory regulation of newspapers.  And then we’d all suffer.



Rainy Day Music and SF at the BL
Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:31:07 +0000
The Saturday before last we went to the [London Feis Festival 2011](http://londonfeis.com/), in Finsbury Park.  The weather was looking to be quite bad as we set out: it had been oscillating between sun and rain all morning.  Would we be drenched or sunburned?  Or both?  Only time would tell.
I had been hitting the festival website to try to find out who was on when, exactly.  There was a page which said (and still does, a the time of writing), ‘Band and Stage Times: To be released on the day’.  I had taken that to mean, ‘… will be announced on the website on the day’.  I did wonder about how much use that would be, considering many people would be getting on their way early in the morning, or the night before, and wouldn’t have had the chance to look at the website.  Then again, everyone has a smartphone nowadays, right?
Anyway, it turned out that they meant, …. will be released at the festival.'  On the bus to Finsbury Park I searched Twitter for the expected #feis hashtag, wherein some nice person had tweeted pictures of the running order (I can’t find those pictures now, but no matter).  It appeared we were missing The Undertones, but we would get there in time for The Waterboys.
As indeed we did.  We set up base camp near the back and listened to ‘Be My Enemy’ (timely, as I recently read Christopher Brookmyre’s novel which borrows that title) ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, ‘… And a Bang on the Ear’, and of course, ‘The Whole of the Moon’.  It was great to see them again.  Well, hear them; we didn’t see much from the back, and there were no big screens like at most festivals these days.
A trip to the second stage saw us Nanci Griffith, closely followed by Shane McGowan.  Always good to see he’s still hanging in there, and he was in excellent voice.  I note that it’s an alarming four and half years since I last saw The Pogues.



Heard a bit of The Cranberries while queueing for toilet and bar.  They were OK.  Some Irish youngsters at the bar sang along with ‘Linger’ very sweetly.
Then back to the main stage for Christy Moore, food, and finally Dylan.



That’s him there in the white hat; can you tell?
It’s been a long wait for me.  I know he’s been over here in the last few years, but somehow I’ve never managed to hear about the dates until it was too late.  Here we were, then, finally in the distant presence of the great man himself.
And it was, as I expected, like listening to him doing cover versions of his own songs.  But there’s nothing wrong with that.  It was quite a ‘greatest hits’ kind of set, though, to my surprise.  I had gained the impression that he mainly did newer songs these days, but there was a strong focus on Blood on the Tracks and Highway 61 Revisited.  And you can’t go far wrong with those.  Here’s a full set list.
The only possible singalong moment was the ‘How does it feel?’ lines in ‘Like Rolling Stone’, and it made me wonder: maybe he started doing such changed versions of his songs because he doesn’t like people singing along.
I thought this stall would do roaring trade, but the rain mostly stayed off.



Then Sunday was Out of this World, the Science Fiction thing at the British Library.  ‘Science Fiction, but not as you know it’, was the tag line.  In fact, it was pretty much exactly as i know it, but I guess I’m part of some sort of rarefied elite, or something (or ‘fans’ as we’re known).
Anyway, it was very good, though perhaps it’s limiting, being a library: much of the exhibition was books behind glass.  Which is fine, but sometimes you’d like to pick them up and handle them.
There was a Tardis in a corner of the Time Travel section, and a robot that seemed to be modelled on HAL 9000.¹
All in all, a pure dead brilliant weekend.





I know it wasn’t a robot. ↩︎





[H]is baritone sax tugged at the bottom of the track like taffy on the sole of a sneaker.
Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:16:33 +0000
The quote is from this obituary of Clarence Clemons. Sadly, The Big Man died yesterday.
I saw him at a solo gig once, during the year I worked in Turin. He did a load of blues and rock standards, some of his own, and a couple of Springsteen songs. “Well what did you expect?” he said, “The Big Man wouldn’t be The Big Man without The Boss.”
And I saw the E-Street Band on the Born in the USA tour, where his sax, of course, tore the house down.  Always a neat trick at an outdoor gig.
Sad to see him go.


Father's Weekend
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 22:43:33 +0000
I’m thoroughly looking forward to this weekend.  Not only is it the London Feis festival tomorrow, with Bob Dylan headlining, but Sunday being Father’s Day, my treat is a visit to the SF exhibition at the British Library.
Let’s hope it all goes well; the weather forecast is rain, and at least three-quarters of the family are poorly.


Tell, and Maybe Show as Well
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:50:33 +0000
Prospective -- or actual -- writers are always given the advice, 'show, don't tell.'  It's considered to be more engaging as a storytelling technique to let your reader know what's happening by letting them experience it via the experiences of your characters, rather than merely informing them what happens to your characters.
Good enough advice, in general.  But there are always counterexamples.
This morning on the way to work I read a story on Tor’s website, which is almost entirely telling; and almost entirely wonderful.
‘Six Months, Three Days’, by Charlie Jane Anders.  Highly recommended.



Let's All Say "Yes"
Tue, 03 May 2011 14:28:12 +0000
This morning I heard John Humphrys haul the Prime Minister over the coals regarding the behaviour of the “No to AV” campaign.  Cameron tried to separate the “Conservative No” campaign from the rest of the No campaign, while failing to condemn the outright lies told by the broader campaign.  It was a remarkable piece of squirming, and decidedly unconvincing.
He then went on to use the “one person one vote” argument.  This asserts that under AV, some people’s votes are counted more than once.  It ignores the fact that every voter can specify a list of preferences, of course, but it also seems to take an over-literal interpretation of the word “count”.  True, if my first preference is eliminated (under AV), my second preference is counted, which means that in some sense my ballot paper (or the entries on it) must be counted again; but ultimately the preferences I state are only applied towards one candidate.  My paper only “counts” towards one person.
Alternatively, consider it a minor redefinition of what a “vote” is.  Instead of meaning a single “X” placed in a single box, it means a set of one or more preferences specified on a ballot paper.  “One person, one paper,” you could say.
And last night I heard a “Referendum Broadcast” by the No campaign.  It was incredibly stupid, too; and again by being over-literal.  It analogised an AV-based election as a horse race, in which horse A came first, but the victory was awarded to third-placed horse C.  Everyone was very confused.  Because AV is so complex that nobody can understand it.
Here’s a picture that shows the complexities of the two systems.
Come on, say “Yes” on Thursday.



Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
Thu, 28 Apr 2011 01:17:48 +0000
Lauren Beukes has just won the Clarke Award with her Zoo City.  Congratulations to her, and all.
I just finished reading her Moxyland, which I was given at last year’s Eastercon, and… I’m not so impressed.
Strange Horizons has a good dual review of it.  I kind of enjoyed it, especially towards the end.  But in many ways I found it annoying, and I’ve been trying to work out exactly why that is.
Part of it is the characters, I think.  I don’t mind unsympathetic — even unpleasant — characters.  But I think the main problem with these ones is that it’s hard to tell their voices apart, and since the story is told from multiple first-person viewpoints, that’s a problem.
But I think the biggest point of disconnection for me was technological: there is one particular item that made my disbelief-suspension system collapse in despair.
Because I can easily believe in a near future where your phone takes the place of both credit cards and cash, where it is the heart and soul of your identity, and to be disconnected would make you an unperson.  But even supposing that phones could be engineered to give their owners a taser-like shock at the command of any police officer (what if your battery is low?); even supposing that a society would not rise up in protest at the madness of a government requiring its citizens to possess such a thing; and even supposing that it all worked: I can’t believe that nobody would carry them in thick rubber pockets.
So in the end, in a novel containing much about political activism, it’s the political acquiescence of its imagined society that crashed me out of the story too often.
Still, it was her first novel, and shows much promise, so I expect that Zoo City will be a worthy winner.



Emusic Followup
Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:32:27 +0000
eMusic got back to me.  As I said, I emailed them to complain about the disappearance of re-downloading.
Randall, from eMusic Customer Support, said:

  It would be great if we could offer the privilege of re-downloading music for free to our members, but the truth of the matter is that our agreements with our labels prohibit us from doing so

which is not surprising.  But why the recent change?

  while we have not had the tracking systems in place to enforce it before, we do now.

I see.  He went on to say:

  we believe it is the best policy for everyone involved because ultimately it benefits the artists that we all love.

I’m not convinced.  It is in the sense that, if I want to get the albums I lost, I’ll have to buy them again, so the artists get paid again.  But I’d be surprised if many artists really want to get paid more because of something that could be seen as ripping off their fans.
Though I suppose the comparison would be that if I had broken or lost a CD (or scratched a record, for us old types) I wouldn’t get it replaced for free.
But digital files, being so ephemeral, just feel like they belong in a different category.



Emusic and Re-downloading
Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:30:41 +0000
OK, everyone knows about Emusic, right?  Good site for downloading mainly independent stuff.  You often find that you can only get recent stuff by bands and artists who used to be on major labels and have been dropped (or have split up and reformed).
Anyway, I am 98.763% convinced that they used to let you re-download tracks that you had downloaded before.  So imagine my dismay, when taking, I thought, the final few steps in recovering from my recent disk replacement.  Just download the recent Emusic tracks that I hadn’t backed up, right?
Oh, no.  Not any more.  Re-downloading is only for failed downloads.
I’ve emailed them about it, but I’m not expecting much.  Not happy, Emusic.  Not happy.



Come Gather Round, People
Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:21:55 +0000
If you're like me, you've never seen Bob Dylan live, and you'd like to, sometime before he dies.
So here’s your chance, if you’re in or near London, or can get here: The London Feis, which seems to be the modern version of the Fleadh.
And not just Dylan; The Waterboys, The Undertones, Nanci Griffith… £70 for adults, and children go free.  Booking fee is crazy, but, you know: Dylan!



Thoughts on Business Sectors
Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:01:36 +0000
It occurs to me that software companies, like the one I work for, are probably considered part of the 'service sector', in the kind of statistics that you hear on the news from time to time.  Like most such companies, we do provide services.  But at our core, we make and sell things -- computer programs.  The fact that the things are delivered by FTP rather than DHL does not make them any less things.
In short, we should be considered as part of the ‘manufacturing sector’; or at least as some sort of hybrid.  The national statistics are therefore skewed, and the UK probably has a far larger manufacturing sector than we are generally told.
(Incidentally, I seem to have posted a version of this at http://peg.gd/16Y, which just lets you do it, with no ‘About’ or any information.  Interesting.)



Link: Writers’ Bloc – a Literary Band
Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:21:41 +0000
Writers’ Bloc – a Literary Band « East Kent Live Lit.
Some nice thoughts on what my friends in Edinburgh get up to with their spoken-word performances and chapbook publishing.
I really must get up for one of their performances.


Republicans: good at theatre, dreadful at governing
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:34:21 +0000
I've often said that you can't trust right-wingers with the economy. But now Michael Tomasky, in The Guardian, gives more evidence for my assertion, regarding the US Republicans.
My favourite quote:

  But running the country? They've shown almost no aptitude for it for many years. The reason is simple and was imperishably expressed by the scholar Alan Wolfe in an essay he wrote four years ago: "Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: if you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well."



New Year Activities
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:07:53 +0000
The day after New Year's Day we decided to go to the British Museum, to see the mummies.  So did half of London, it seemed.  I've never seen it so crowded.  Still, the mummies are always interesting.  I must go back another time and see some other sections.
Home was via bookshop, Pizza Express, and Little Fockers at the cinema (ignore the critics: it’s loadsa fun; unless you didn’t like the first two, of course).
Oh, but before all that, we had tried to play basketball in Millfields Park.  But there was an annoying dog-owner who couldn’t control her Alsatian.  The latter proceeded to bite our basketball till it burst.  When we remonstrated with the owner, she ran off.
At least it was only the basketball that got bitten.
The next day brought an early start.  Neither London’s young skaters nor anybody else gets up very early on New Year’s Bank Holiday Monday, it seems.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen London streets so empty.  The drive in to the Aldwych area for the start of skating at Somerset House felt like driving through a Jerry Cornelius novel: “Martin tooled the big Duesenberg Skoda down Roseberry Avenue…”
I don’t skate any more.  I did it twice when I was a student, and I think once since I had kids.  From the student times, I remember enjoying it, but getting very wet and very bruised.  With kids I didn’t fall over so much, but only through caution, not because I had magically become able to skate.
Anyway, what with one thing and another, I didn’t do it through all those intervening years, and by the time my kids were old enough to be interested and able, I had broken my cruciate ligament in a freak gardening accident.  I probably could do it now, but I’m too scared of re-injuring my knee.
So I sat in the warmth of “Tom’s Skate Lounge” and had a Cappuccino and a Danish, and took photographs and notes, while our party slowly, but with increasing confidence, circled the ice.  I loved the fact that the staff members who were on the ice had hi-viz vests saying “Ice Marshall”.  There’s something very pleasing about that term.
After that we drove on out to South Kensington, and the Natural History Museum.  Ostensibly to see the dinosaurs.  But of course, the other half of London had decided to do the same.  After queueing for maybe twenty minutes to get inside, we found a 45-minute queue for the dinosaurs.  So we elected for the blue whale, via the other mammals, instead.
Which was of course, fabulous.  Wonderful place, the Natural History Museum.  Actually, London’s pretty wonderful.



New?
Sat, 01 Jan 2011 23:59:31 +0000
I’m desperately rushing to post this before midnight, just so I can have a post on the 1/1/11.  Happy New Year, everyone.



NoNo
Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:10:52 +0000
Well, this is my [NaNoFail](http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/658975) report.  I managed around 15,000 words.  Which isn't bad in its way, but is not only a lot less than the desired 50,000, it's also less than last time, when I at least made it to 20,000.
Oh well.  The plan now is not to stop, because then I’d most likely never finish it.  Instead, I’m going to carry on, with a much reduced target of, say, 500 words per day, and see where that takes me.
Edited to say: That’s 15,000, of course, not the meaningless “15,00”.



Tank-Tops and Dolls
Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:36:12 +0000
On our recent drive south from the Highlands there was a song that briefly seemed to be following us.  First at an emergency food stop in a McDonald’s in Carlisle, and then the next day on XFM, as we rolled back into London.
Its key feature was the the refrain, which seemed to say, repeatedly: “You own a tank-top.”
While I can see the logic of outing someone for that particular crime against fashion, I was fairly sure it was a mondegreen.
So when I was back at a computer, I searched for “you own a tank top” lyrics mondegreen.  No hits.
I removed the word “lyrics”, which gave me a single hit.  Some IRC log.  But it was enough.  The song is, apparently, ‘You Overdid it Doll‘ by The Courteeners.
It’s kind of disappointing to know the truth.  I’m listening to it as I type, and I can’t hear it saying “you own a tank-top” any more.  Still, it has entered family lore, and will always be known that way to us.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I once owned a tank-top.  In my defence, it was the seventies, and I was seven.



Also, my nephew, Paul, who is travelling around Australia and other far-off places, and blogging about it, once tried to introduce me to The Courteeners.  I wasn’t super-impressed, but I quite like this track.
On the same short drive Paul introduced me to Vampire Weekend, who I love, and you should listen to.  And either way, you should read his blog.



The Day After Hallowe'en
Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:27:27 +0000
Well, midnight on the 31st of October is fast rolling round.  We're not long back from a week in the Highlands of Scotland (very wet, but great, thanks).  It'll soon be the 1st of November, which means two things this year.

We'll be able to buy Mitch Benn's mighty 'I'm Proud of the BBC' in downloadable single format.  So head off and do that now, and help it to chart.  I'll wait.
Actually, it’s not yet midnight as I type, and I’ve just downloaded it.

NaNoWriMo is about to start.  I'm having a go this year.  Wish me luck.
I last tried it in 2004, which is much longer ago than I thought.  I sort of had a half-hearted poke at it last year, but soon stopped.  I’m hoping that expressing my intention in public like this will help to keep me going.
We’ll see, of course.
I see that the approaching start has brought the NaNoWriMo site to its knees.  Oh well.  Hopefully they'll get things back together.



Maccetty Mac
Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:23:47 +0000
So, I've had this here new MacBook for a couple of weeks, and I've yet to post anything from it.  I am, not surprisingly, loving it.
The initial weirdnesses (I’ve never used a Mac before, apart from once very briefly, before OS/X) include the absence of a hash-key (though you can get the character using Alt+3: #); the plethora of modifier keys: Ctrl and Alt, of course, but also Cmd and Fn.  Though actually, most laptops have Fn, so it’s really just one extra.  But they get a lot of use.
The nicest thing is probably the multitouch trackpad: scroll with two fingers, navigate with three, do some other weird navigation thing (Exposé, I think it’s called) with four.  Pure dead brilliant, in the vernacular of my homeland.
Most annoying thing is the American positioning of the @ and " keys.  I’d like to remap those back to where my muscle-memory says they should be, but haven’t worked out how to do that yet.
I’ve installed various pieces of software on trial or demo options.  I’m typing this entry using MarsEdit.  I’m gathering notes for the the thing I intend to write for NaNoWriMo using Scrivener.  And so on.
All in all, it’s the beginning of a big adventure.
And now, let’s see how this posts.



Link: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - Romeo to Rambo
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:00:36 +0000
How good scripts get turned into bad movies: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - Romeo to Rambo



Summer Reading 2010
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:14:08 +0000
I've got out of the habit of writing about everything I read, but I've had such a good run of books over the summer that I want to at least make some notes on them all.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I tweeted as follows, while I was reading this:
 
I don't go in for having a 'favourite' book, but if I did, right now, it would be Neal Stephenson's _Anathem_. It made my brain sparkle.Mon Aug 02 09:45:01  via Twitter for iPhoneMartin McCallion
devilgate

And making my brain sparkle is exactly the effect reading this had on me.  I absolutely loved every minute of it (except, perhaps, the long detour over the pole).  And the unusual thing about is this: it made me think, “Come on, get the action out of the way, and get back to the talking and philosophy.”
I won’t go in to any detail.  There are plenty of places you can read more about it.  A wonderful, wonderful book.
The Time-Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
As is this one.  There has been a lot written about this, too.  I, of course, approached it with genre in mind, and was amused from the start by the review-quotes on the cover; notably The Observer’s assertion that it is “startlingly original”.
It’s about someone who randomly travels in time along their own timeline.   I kept thinking, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”.  I kept thinking, “I know where I came from, but what about all you zombies?” (which quote I misremembered; it is actually “…but where did all you zombies come from?")
I even thought, “Spoilers,” and “Hello Sweetie.”, but a quick check of the publication date informs me that it actually pre-dates new Doctor Who, so maybe Moffat was influenced by this.
Anyway, all those touchpoints are largely irrelevant, as this is not a work of science fiction at all (it makes no attempt to explain the time-travel mechanism, though does assign it some genetic connection).  It is, rather, a love story with slightly unusual constraints.  And very well told, though I’m a tad unhappy with the ending.
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
As I am with the ending of this one.  It’s a fine story, though, set in a future Edinburgh where global warming has been partially turned back by technology, and there are space elevators and fully-conscious robots and other AIs.  It’s a crime story, with the main character being a cop.
Edinburgh’s SF writers seem to be trying to get a bit of Iain Rankine’s territory these days.
The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross
Charlie being the other of those I’m alluding to there.  Here, though, we’re back in his “Merchant Princes series.  I’ve reviewed the first and second volumes before.
I said before that it was hard to believe how successful Miriam Beckstein is, given the radical changes that have happened to her.  In this one she is much more circumscribed, by her odd family.
Relatively little happens here, really, but a lot is set in place for the following volumes.  The main thing is that her worlds are starting to collide.
Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre
Worlds colliding here, too.
I haven’t read a Brookmyre since his first, Quite Ugly One Morning, which I remember thoroughly enjoying.  Not enough, though, to read any intervening ones.
This one is very different.  It has soldiers, scientists, priests, demons, and schoolkids.  It’s great fun.
There is a wildly-glaring plot hole at the end.  My son read the book after me, and it was the first thing he said to me about it when he’d finished.  We both hope it’s deliberate, meaning that Brookmyre has a sequel planned.


Youssou N'Dour, Philip Glass, The Kronos Quartet, and Bela Lugosi
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:39:38 +0000
Most, but not all of them at one event.
Jamaica and Senegal Make Music
A couple of weeks ago we went to the Barbican to see Youssou N’Dour.  In support were an acoustic reggae band called Inna da Yard.  They were fabulous fun, and reminded me that I’ve been missing out on reggae since John Peel died.
Youssou and his band were amazing.  They had more percussionists on stage than most bands have members (five, counting the drummer), which amused me.
The total number of musicians on stage was about sixteen.  Plus they had a couple of amazing dancers.
And the professionals weren’t the only ones dancing on the stage.  Several times members of the audience got up and joined in.  Yes, a veritable stage invasion in the Barbican.  The security people looked vaguely worried; I didn’t know the Barbican even had security.
I won’t try to dance about architecture and describe the music, but let’s just say it was the rockingest gig I’ve been to at that venue.
The Glass Eye
A few days later it was off to the Hackney Empire, where we saw the original 1931 Dracula, with a live soundtrack.  Which was composed by Philip Glass, and performed by him, Michael Riesman, and The Kronos Quartet.  That’s a pretty stellar lineup from the modern classical world.
I had at first thought that the film was silent, but it isn’t (I think I was confusing it with Nosferatu).  Apparently it didn’t originally have a musical soundtrack, though.
While it’s clear that the film is the origin (or an origin) of many horror film clichés, and the story is of course very familiar, I don’t think I had ever seen it before – though I thought I had.
I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, though the film volume could have done with being louder, as the music drowned out the dialogue at times.  And on a related note, I’m not convinced that the music was always only there to serve the film, as a true soundtrack should be.
But all in all a fascinating night.



Moat Again
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:58:23 +0000
I spelled Raoul Moat's name wrongly in my last post.  Now corrected.
I have to say that my sympathy for Moat was increased by reading an interview with his brother in The Guardian.  A sad family story, there’s no doubt.  But even Angus, the brother, condemns the Facebook page (which has now been removed by its creator).
Sympathy, yes; but he’s still not a hero, or a “legend”.  Charlie Brooker talks sense on the matter, as you might expect.



Who Lays Flowers for a Murderer?
Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:19:44 +0000
When I sent this tweet:
 
Floral tributes for murderer just because he camped out for a while, apparently. Very strange.less than a minute ago via TweetDeckMartin McCallion
devilgate

I was thinking about the literal, physical flowers that some misguided people had laid on the river bank where Raoul Moat died. Misguided, or possibly, grieving family members. Just because someone is a murderer, it doesn’t mean that no-one grieves for their death.
But now, it seems, things have gone beyond that. Facebook tribute pages celebrating Moat’s life, and especially his last few days in hiding from the police.
Go on the run, camp out for a bit, become a kind of hero: all very well (though I can’t say I’d recommend it as a career path) if the  crime were minor, or victimless.
But this guy murdered a man, and shot two other people. One of them has been left blind. The other is still in hospital.
This guy wasn’t some Robin Hood figure. He was in no way a good guy. He was a grade ‘A’ bampot, a fuckpig of the first water. And I’m disgusted that anyone could think of celebrating his acts.


Con/Dem Nation?
Thu, 13 May 2010 01:42:20 +0000
Betrayed?
My initial reaction to the Liberal Democrats' decision to form a coalition with the Tories was a combination of disappointment and a sense of betrayal (with a side order of impending doom, of course).
I was, perhaps, naive.  I said that I was voting LibDem, and that I actively wanted Labour to lose (while stressing that I wanted the Tories to lose even more).  I was, I think, hoping for a hung parliament, which of course is what we got.  But I was labouring (heh!) under the delusion that the LibDems were ideologically relatively close to Labour, and far enough away from the Tories that siding with them would be unthinkable.
Clearly I was wrong.
I had convinced myself that the only reaction of the LibDems to a hung parliament would be to join with Labour; and that seemed like the best possible solution.
Wasted?
On election day my friend Tony Facebooked to the effect that he had wasted his vote (and it’s really annoying that, as far as I know, there’s no way to link to an update or a comment in Facebook).  I answered:

  I don't agree. The only way you can waste a vote is to not
  use it. For example I voted LibDem in a safe Labour seat,
  but that isn't "wasted". In fact, it would have been more of
  a waste to vote Labour.

My son made the same point when I told him about that discussion.  Diane Abbott got 54% of the vote in Hackney North and Stoke Newington.  (That’s a proper majority.)  My vote wouldn’t have made any difference, though, would it?
But in the days immediately after the election, as Clegg took his party into talks with the hated Tories, I began to regret my decision.  It really felt like I had “wasted” my vote; or maybe misused is the better word.
Things Can Maybe Get Better?
However the coalition document that they published today is remarkable.  If you’ve read any of my political posts over the years, you’ll know that the biggest thing going on for me for some time has been ID cards, and all the associated post-9/11 terror-panic fallout.  So to read this, from the wordprocessor of the Tories (and LibDems) is remarkable:

A Freedom or Great Repeal Bill.
The scrapping of ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database.
Outlawing the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission.
The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.
The restoration of rights to non-violent protest.
The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
Further regulation of CCTV.
Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

I mean, that's pretty much everything we could want on civil liberties, right there.
And a few other points are good.  As my friend Stuart said:
 
Most important line of the agreement? - We will end the detention of children for immigration purposes. #ge10Wed May 12 14:23:57  via TweetDeckStuart F Wallace
soapyfrogs

(Gotta keep  embedding those tweets, you know.)
Dismal Science?
On the other hand, I’m no economist; but as I said before, I don’t trust right-wingers to run the economy.  And right now, I have a gut feeling that cutting back on public spending during a recession is exactly the wrong thing to do (cutting back on most public spending is nearly always the wrong thing to do, of course).
Keep On Keeping On
In conclusion, I agree with Charlie, pretty much.  I don’t trust the Tories, but let’s see whether Clegg & co can keep this thing on track.  And let’s keep a close eye on them all, and keep that list above in mind.
You never know: maybe this really is “The New Politics”.


Election Tweets 'n' Stuff
Wed, 05 May 2010 22:06:24 +0000
Thirteen years ago we had champagne ready for the overall majority (though we opened it when Portillo's seat went).  This year might look more like what Warren Ellis says:
 
Shopping list for watching the election tomorrow night: beer, nuts, whisky, methadone, humane cow-killing bolt gunWed May 05 19:52:55  via webWarren Ellis
warrenellis
 
More sensibly, my friend Stuart says:
 I'm not voting for them but if Labour lose, its supporters should take heart from the fact that the UK is better than it was in 97 #ge10Wed May 05 19:24:56  via TweetDeckStuart F Wallace
soapyfrogs
 
which is a good point.  Britain’s not broken; it never was.  Just its electoral system.
Here’s something I said about that a while ago:
  Hey, the Tories: Society _isn't_ broken, and if it is, it's partly the fault of your witch-queen & her regime.Tue Sep 30 16:37:55 +0000 2008 via EchofonMartin McCallion
devilgate
 
I’m having fun with this tweet-embedding thing.


Embedding Tweets
Wed, 05 May 2010 13:22:23 +0000
There's a new way to embed tweets in blog posts.  Here's one of mine to try it out:
 
My nine-year-old daughter confuses 'Conservative' with 'sinister'. Out of the mouths of babes & little children...Mon May 03 19:36:25  via TweetieMartin McCallion
devilgate
 
Looks pretty cool, actually.  Go to Twitter’s “Blackbird Pie”, or get a bookmarklet.


The Big Disappointment
Wed, 05 May 2010 01:12:37 +0000
The Boundaries of Voting
I’ve been boundary-changed, and it’s made it harder to decide who to vote for.
At the last election (and until a couple of weeks ago) We were in Hackney South and Shoreditch, which was Meg Hillier’s constituency.  Meg wasn’t a bad constituency MP, at least inasmuch as she answered my emails the few times I got in touch with her.  Not always in ways I agreed with, but still.
But “ID Meg”, as I liked to think of her, was the government minister for ID Cards and the Database state; the biggest issue at all recent elections for me.  Amusing, really, that she got into that role, if you consider my correspondence with her in 2005
If we had lived on the other side of our street back then, we’d have been in Diane Abbott’s constituency.  She was opposed to the war, and to ID cards.  Plus I like her on the telly (though some, apparently, complain about her second job; at least it’s a political programme she’s on, even if it’s lightweight to the point of triviality).
Five years ago I’d have voted for Diane.  Today, with the boundary change, we’re in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, so I can.
And I’m not going to.
It’s all gone too far.  Our electoral system is too fucked up; our Labour party is too fucked up, too corrupt.  They have developed an alarming reflexive response, it seems, to always do exactly the wrong thing.  A hung parliament – or, hey: a Liberal Democrat majority – might be just the change we need.
At least that way there’s a chance we’d get some taste of electoral reform.
Houses.  Plagues.  You Know the Rest.
Diane’s leaflet came through the door today, and it tells me that she’s still against ID cards and the Iraq war.  Why, then, I have to ask, does she still retain the Labour whip?  It would be more honourable to resign.
And I can’t honourably vote for the former Labour party any more (not that I did last time, but remember, I was actively against the candidate then, too).  We’ve come a long way now: we’ve reached the stage where I want Labour to lose.  It’s a strange place to find myself.
Maybe, I’ve always been more of a natural LibDem voter anyway.  Any time I’ve done those “Political Compass”-type questionnaires, they tell me that the LibDems most closely match my answers.
But even more than wanting Labour to lose, I want the Tories to lose.  I remain profoundly mistrustful of them; I lived through the Thatcher years, you know?  And It’s clear that, no matter how shiny Cameron may be, lots of his members remain the same old bastards.  Witness this “I cure gays” bollocks from Phlippa Stroud.  And Cameron has now backed her, I see.  And she has denied it.
So much for that.  We know the Tories are the opposite of socially liberal; we know they take a reflexive antagonism to supporting public services; and we know we can’t trust them with the economy (you never can trust right wingers, because they believe the market is guided by an invisible hand; I mean, come on).
I Can't Do Both, Gordie
So now Brown is saying, ‘Vote for the kind of country you believe in; and come home to Labour.’  Sorry, mon: Labour no longer represents the kind of country I believe in.
Keith Angus will be getting my vote.


Link: How to Write a Story, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:00:21 +0000
"The first step is waking up."  Brilliant: How to Write a Story, by Robert Jackson Bennett



Link: "Long-standing party loyalties, even in a less tribal world, are not easily suspended"
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:45:40 +0000
"... But May 2010 offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape politics for the better. It must be seized."
Fascinating list of signatories to this letter in The Guardian: “Long-standing party loyalties, even in a less tribal world, are not easily suspended



From Easter to Volcano Days
Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:56:05 +0000
I don't get round to these things quickly, but this is, at least in part, a report on my family's visit to Eastercon.  This year the British National Science Fiction Convention was practically on our doorstep, just the other side of London, at Heathrow.
As with two years ago, my son wanted to come.  And since my daughter did as well, my beloved bit the bullet and came along too.  SF isn’t totally her thing, but I think she may have enjoyed the weekend more than any of us.
The telling detail was this: there are lots of things to do.
I tend to use cons as a way of seeing friends that I haven’t seen for a while – often not since the last con I was at.  So I mainly hang out in the bar.  Or that, at least, is the impression I gave – give – to people who don’t go to cons.
In fact, I have always gone to programme items.  I guess I just never made a big thing of them when I got home.
This con – Odyssey 2010 – had a particularly good set of programme items for kids.  There were hands-on science workshops, making Dalek cakes, and building string-propelled robots (my son won a prize for the best ramp-mounting attempt).  And not least, a thrilling battle between various knights of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).
The programme was full of fascinating and fun things, many of which I wanted to see, but didn’t manage to, as ever.
And of course, I saw a lot of old friends, and had a good time hanging out in the bar with them.
We only stayed for the Friday and Saturday nights, to keep costs down.  But after going home on the Sunday (and watching the new Doctor Who again), we went back on the Monday, and spent most of the day back at the Radisson Radisson.
Travelling all across London was a bit of drag, but it was a lot shorter than many people’s journeys.  And of course, there was absolutely no chance of [ash-induced delays] volcano.
Am I a bad person because I found all the volcanic disruption kind of amusing and quite fun, really?  The cloudless and contrail-free blue skies over London were gorgeous, and it was interesting to follow people’s tweets of how they were striving to get home.  And a world with a lot fewer flights is something we’re probably going to have to face in the future.
What annoyed me about it all were the idiots who blamed the government.  Marginally more sensible than blaming ‘god’, I suppose¹, but even if anything other than sending in the Navy had been the government’s decision, can you imagine the fuss if flights had been allowed to go ahead, and there had been a disaster?
Plus, the idea of getting a trip home on the Ark Royal is pretty cool.



As somebody said, if that's an act of god, then it's a pretty limited kind of omnipotent deity.
   ↩




Subway Calling
Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:22:09 +0000
I've worked in Paddington for nearly two years, and had no idea this was here until today. Edgware Road, just by Paddington Green Police Station.

 
 

 
  Subway Calling
  

  Originally uploaded by devilgate.
 




Easter Time is Here Again
Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:06:33 +0000
Easter rolls around on its mad-god-inspired schedule, and so too does Eastercon, the British National Science-Fiction Convention.
This year, as it was two years ago, it’s in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, near Heathrow.  Not the most pleasant or interesting of locations, but it does have the large advantage for me of being relatively close to home.  An hour and forty minutes by bus and tube, if TFL is to be believed.  And curiously, not much less time overall if you take the crazily-expensive Heathrow Express.
Anyway, the whole family are coming with me this time, which should be fun. We’re just staying for the Saturday and Sunday nights, though some of us may pop back on Monday.
I don’t have any particular plans to see anything on the programme, except the big ones: Iain Banks’s guest of honour speech, and Doctor Who.  Looking forward to that one a lot.  And it’s going to be interesting watching it with a few hundred other people.
Speaking of guests of honour, the other one is Alastair Reynolds, and i’ve never read any of his stuff (well, maybe a short story or two).  So I thought I should do some homework.  I’ve been meaning to check him out for a while anyway.
I’ve started Revelation Space, but I’m having a hard time getting into it.  It’s just a bit slow to get going.  I hope it’ll pick up soon.



Magnetism
Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:53:17 +0000
On Monday I took my son to the Barbican to see The Magnetic Fields.  It was his first proper gig.  And an experience quite unlike most gigs I've been to before.
For a start it was entirely seated, and I’ve not been to one of those in a long time - and not just the audience, the band too.  Secondly, it was in the Barbican Centre.  We’ve been there a few times in the last few months for classical concerts and a dance performance, but it’s a strange venue for rock ‘n’ roll.
But then, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t exactly what The Magnetic Fields play.
Their 69 Love Songs is, as I was tweeting recently, one of the finest albums ever.  It’s from 1999, it turns out, but I’ve only known it for a year or two.  The first half of Monday’s show contained a good number of songs from it, and also some from the recent Distortion.
The highlight for my boy wasn’t even a Magnetic Fields song at all, but rather one by The Gothic Archies, one of their several alter egos.  It also featured the only instance in the evening of singing along with the band; and that was just him, quietly singing ‘Shipwrecked’.
We were right up at the back of the balcony, but despite the distance and low volume, we could still hear everything perfectly.  Well, except when they spoke between songs.  The vocal mix wasn’t really designed for making that kind of thing audible at the back.
In fact Merritt’s vocals were at their best during the final song, when he took the mike off the stand and walked about.  That got him closer to the mike, which suits his croonerish voice.
So they sent us off into the night with a fabulous ‘Papa was a Rodeo’.



Next-Door to a Sequel
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:17:09 +0000
Last night I finished Living Next-Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson.  I enjoyed much of it, but found it kind of frustrating and annoying, in ways that were hard to define.  The main one, though, was that some things were insufficiently explained.
Now, as SF readers we are used to jumping into new worlds, not quite knowing what’s going on, and picking it up as we go along.  Indeed, that’s part of the toolkit for reading it (SF reading protocols at Tor.com).
But here, there was something just not quite right, I felt.  It was as if there was too much understanding assumed.  Had the writer spent too long with her world, I wondered?  So long that she could no longer tell what the reader would and wouldn’t know, since she knew it so intimately?
When I finished it I went looking for reviews, to see whether others had the same feeling as me.  And what I found proved that, in a sense, I was right about her assuming too much knowledge.
It turns out the book is a sequel.
Oh yes.  It’s the sequel to her previous book, Natural History.
Which is fine.  But nowhere on the book itself does it tell you that.  Nowhere.  I’ve checked again and again: it’s not in the blurb, it’s not on the title page, it’s not in the front matter.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have liked to have known this little detail before I started reading.  Sure, you can pick things up as you go along; and now that I know it, I realise that she gave us the necessary backstory very well.  But really, Pan MacMillan: next time, let us know, OK?



Link: An Awesome Interpretation of Avatar
Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:00:07 +0000
Brilliant analysis of what could have been "really" happening in Avatar.  Don't read if you haven't seen the film.: An Awesome Interpretation of Avatar



Decade's End
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:42:39 +0000
This is how we end the first decade of the twenty-first century, then: with Jools on the telly, and a netbook on my lap.  A fitting conclusion, I suppose, as the start of it was similarly low-key (I had a small kid at the time, and have two much bigger ones now); and I've spent much of the decade with a computer close at hand.
By some bizarre twist of fate, though, I seem to be out of whisky.  I sit in shame at such a state of affairs.  One or other form of whiskey will just have to do, though.
Happy New Year, everyone.



Link: A Self-Referential Story
Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:00:29 +0000
"Sentient sentences": an astonishing piece of work.: A Self-Referential Story



A quote from Amanda Palmer: asking for money for your art is not selling out
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:28:18 +0000

ASKING FOR MONEY FOR YOUR ART IS NOT SELLING OUT.
selling out is when you go against your own heart, ideals and authenticity to make money.
selling out is an action, a 180 from a stated position.
i don’t consider pop stars to be sell-outs.
the lady gagas, britneys and madonnas of the world are UNABASHED about why they got in this game: fame, money, über-success, chart-topping hits.
but if neil young were to suddenly hire the matrix to write him a thumpin' dance album and then appear on saturday night live snogging bob dylan, i’d have reservations about his integrity.

From Virtual Crowdsurfing


Link: Do I know where hell is?  Hell is in "Hello"
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:00:08 +0000
God save us from crazy religious nutters.
The title is taken from ‘Wandrin’ Star', by the way.: Do I know where hell is?  Hell is in “Hello”



Link: A report on FT.com: The man who invented exercise
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:00:31 +0000
Amazing story.  Hard to believe that the benefits of aerobic exercise were unknown as recently as the 1940s.: A report on FT.com: The man who invented exercise



Transitions in Real Life?
Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:11:22 +0000
The new Iain Banks book, Transition, is a science fiction novel. This is despite the fact that it is not published as by Iain M Banks.
And I don’t mean the slightly-ambiguous, could-be-a-dream-or-somebody’s-madness-if-you-don’t-want-to-suspend-your-disbelief sort of thing you get in The Bridge Or Walking On Glass, either.  This is out-and-out SF, no  queries or discussion.  It is a tale of parallel universes, of an infinity of alternative Earths, and of people who can move between them, using a combination of drugs and native ability.
And it’s that ability that holds both one of the novel’s unanswered moral questions, and its biggest flaw.
When adepts transition between the worlds, they do so in mind only.  That is, their mind occupies - possesses - the body of someone who already exists on the target parallel.
Ethically, this is a minefield, of course.  But that question is only vaguely touched on.
Other ethical issues are addressed, notably the use of torture by states.  There is passing character - just a walk-on, really - of a policeman who once tortured a terrorist suspect and had some success.  He was tortured in turn by his guilt for the rest of his life.
The big flaw, though, concerns the transition mechanism and its use, and to talk about it, I’ll have to include some minor spoilers.  So, you know: you have been warned.
As I said, flitting between the parallel universes involves the mind, the personality of the transitionary jumping into the body of someone already existing on the target parallel.  This applies even when someone takes a ‘passenger’ along, which some can do.  Each of them takes over a body in the new world.
But sometimes Banks has characters jumping to places where there really couldn’t be a body for them to take over (versions of the Earth that are uninhabited, for example).  Yet they seem to jump successfully.
I don’t mind there being a ‘bodiless’ and a ‘bodiful’ version of the ability, for example: but it does need to be explained, or at least mentioned.  I can hardly believe that nobody picked this up in the revision and editing process.
That aside, though, it’s damn fine, and probably his best ‘non-M’ for quite a few years.
With the secret cabal that is trying to run the world(s) behind the scenes, it is sort of The Business 2.0.  Or maybe 10.0.



Live Jello show
Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:35:01 +0000
Yeah, I know, that sounds like something kinky.  But I just got this from the Academy mailing list (that's "O2 Academy Brixton and O2 Academy Islington"; the former used to be called the Brixton Academy):

  O2 Academy Islington: Tue 8 Sep: Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine.
  A longtime leader in the punk and alternative rock scenes, Jello Biafra is back in the recording studio and in the live arena.

Which is surprising and interesting and stuff.  I never saw the Dead Kennedys when they were around; as far as I know they never came to Britain.  Certainly not to Scotland.
Apparently Jello (or Eric, I now know) is 50.  I feel old.


Michael Marshall Smith speaks wisely on opinions on the internet
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:16:34 +0000

  If you can't take the time and trouble to learn how to write a coherent sentence, then why on earth do you believe people should listen to what you have to say?

Oh, yes.


I really need to post more
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:51:57 +0000
But these days, if I try to write a post of more than 140 characters, I get a strange, compressed feeling.  Things start to slow... down...


Publication
Thu, 07 May 2009 22:35:40 +0000
Hi, I'm back.  Have you missed me?  I have some good news.
First Edition is a new magazine publishing new writing: fiction, poetry, and reviews.  It’s just reached issue 4.  That’s an important one to remember.  Issue 4.  That’s the one you should go and buy.
That’s the one that contains a poem by me.
Oh yes.  I am a published poet, as of - well, just about today, really.
Available now from some good magazine shops, allegedly.  But certainly from that there website.
Go on, check it out.  You know you want to.



Without Twitter, how will we know what's happening?
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:41:14 +0000
[Twitter](http://twitter.com/) seems to be down at the moment - or at least, it's not accepting tweets, and I can't log in at the website.  But how do we know what's happening without Twitter to tell us?
Edit: back to normal now.  I’m @devilgate, of course.



Masks of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2008, 21)
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:37:46 +0000
If you had asked me a few months ago whether I had read this I'd have said yes.  I thought that I had read most, if not all, of Wilson's books that are in linked to the Illuminatus trilogy.  But I'd have been wrong.
This one features James Joyce and Albert Einstein drinking in a bar in Zurich in 19??.  They meet one Sir John Babcock, who has been studying magick (though from a Christian perspective) under the guidance of the Society of the Rose Cross, or Rosicrucians.
Maybe.  Unless it’s something else.
Stuff happens.  Magic and monsters ensue, or people are made to believe that they do.
It’s not the best or most momentous of his works, but he makes the characters of Einstein and Joyce surprisingly compelling, and Babcock is an affecting innocent abroad, and it all keeps you reading.  Good stuff.



Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Books 2008, 20)
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:59:50 +0000
Above all, this took me a loooong time to finish.  Even when I was reading it steadily and thought I would just carry straight on through, it was slow going.
It’s not that hated it; or even that I didn’t like it.  Nor, indeed. was the prose hard or complex.  It just didn’t grab me; didn’t interest me that much.  I didn’t, in the end, care that much about the characters or what happened to them.  The character, really, since it’s mainly about the journalist and poet Ka.
In part, I think that’s because of the overall structure, and one or two narrative devices.  It’s a third-person limited-omniscient narrative, focalised on Ka.  Except it’s not: there’s a first-person narrator, a novelist called Pamuk, who is Ka’s friend, and is telling his story.  He only appears directly in the novel twice, though.
So it starts out as Ka’s story, and eventually becomes a fragment of ‘Pamuk’s’.  Along the way, though, while we are in the middle of the story of Ka’s few days in the Turkish border town of Kars, the end of his story is spoiled for us.  It is literally spoilered, with a chapter in which is four years later, and ‘Pamuk’ is in Frankfurt, going through Ka’s things after the latter has been murdered.
We’re also told he doesn’t get the girl.
And then it’s back to the main story.  And you expect me to care?
I’m not even sure you can call it a novel of character, for there, isn’t the character supposed to grow, develop, learn something?  He certainly goes through various experiences, and probably does change; but I’m not sure that we can tell whether he has developed or grown, not least because we are robbed of any final scene with him, of anything on how he leaves Kars, of anything on his life afterwards.  All that is only told to us as if second-hand, and in a very fragmentary, incomplete and unreliable form.
It’s partly a novel about Turkey, of course, about its stresses: the ‘headscarf girls’, who want to wear the Islamic garment to college, where it is banned; the epidemic of suicides of girls and young women which plagues Kars; the tension between the urges to democratic, religious and military rule.  I certainly know more about (one person’s vision of) contemporary Turkey now than I did before I started.
But I can’t help but wonder: what was the point of it, really?  Plot, character, great prose: two of them can sustain a novel; even any one of them, if it’s good enough.  But this didn’t really have much of any of them.
Yet this guy has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so he must be doing something right.
I just wish I knew what.



The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (books 2008, 19)
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:58:39 +0000
This has been the third year in which I have read a volume of The Baroque Cycle over the summer.  I loved the first, despite its dip after the first book.  The second was slower - in fact suffering from classic middle-volume longeurs.  I thoroughly enjoyed them both, though.
This third volume is the best of the three.  I enjoyed it so much that, towards the end (that is, in the last two-hundred-or-so pages) I found myself sometimes avoiding reading it, because I didn’t want it to be over.
The focus is very much back with Daniel Waterhouse, where it started, which is good from my point of view.  Jack Shaftoe and Eliza (Duchess of the preposterously named Qwghlm) are in there too, of course.
And, it’s too damn long for me to write much more about it.  If you’ve read the first two, you will, of course, want to read this.  If you haven’t read any of them, you should.



Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (Books 2008, 18)
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:47:36 +0000
Cayce Pollard has a strange kind of allergy: certain brands make her ill.
Or at least, their logos do; seeing the Michelin Man, for instance, sets her off in a particularly bad way. She has a corresponding - and possibly linked - talent, which is that she can reliably tell whether a new logo, for example, is going to work; and she can spot trends that are developing on the street. Using these abilities she is able to make a pretty good living by acting as a freelance consultant to marketing people, advertisers, and so on.
It sounds like a pretty shallow kind of life, but she’s an engaging character, and Gibson manages both to make her role seem interesting, and to enmesh her in an international plot that keeps the pages turning.
The main weakness, perhaps, is that you never get the sense that she’s in any real danger. And the mysteries that she ends up investigating find their solutions too easily.
I don’t think Gibson has written anything really startling since his debut, but this is a fun enough read.
I always tend to touch on genre here, but I make no apologies for it. The odd thing here is that, while is clearly not SF in terms of setting and content (it’s the very near future of the time it was written, which makes it our very near past, and has some already-surprising spots that feel like anachronisms, but aren’t: like connecting a new laptop to a new phone by wire, rather than Bluetooth; and the only speculative content is Cayce’s curious affliction/ability), it still feels like SF. And I’m not sure entirely why that is. Gibson’s style is no doubt part of it, and the rest must be theme: it does, after all, address the way the world is changing, and the effect those changes are having on the people that live through them.
The curious thing, really, is that such themes should trigger an SF response in the reader (or writer) What does it say about ‘mainstream’ literature if that genre doesn’t address the world today?



Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street, by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (Books 2008, 17)
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:44:36 +0000
Ellis's Spider Jerusalem is a journalist, based on Hunter S Thompson.  At the start he is living in seclusion in a cabin in the mountains, but contractual difficulties drive him back to the city for the first time in five years.  Shit happens, and he writes about it.
This volume comprises the first three issues of the comic, and it’s pretty good so far.  Interesting characterisation, great artwork; I’m keen to see where it goes.



A poem
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:03:06 +0000

So on my OU Creative Writing course, we're currently on the poetry module.  After reading the chapter on imagery last night, I formed the following in my head while cycling to work this morning.

Crossing at Islington
We swarm

Fluourescent honeybees on wheels

Waiting

For electric flower’s red stamen

to turn green.
Some go too soon

Red flashes out its warning.

Angry metal birds roar down

And pick them off.



Adverbs, by Daniel Handler (Books 2008, 16)
Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:03:37 +0000
Mr Handler operating under his own name, here, rather than his Snicket nom de plume.  As such, this is a novel for adults, rather than children.
Though in fact, is it even a novel at all?  It is in fact more of series of short stories, or even vignettes.  They are linked, or at least related to each other, but it’s not always obvious how.
The same characters recur throughout, though in different combinations.  Or at least, the same character names.  It’s not at all clear that, where a name recurs, it is meant to be the same person.  Indeed, the author says as much in his blurb.
The main link between them all is that they are all in some way or another about love.  In fact, a better title might be something like, ‘A Series of Tales About Love’, or even, ‘A Series of Loving Events’.  The title comes from Handler’s assertion that, essentially, “it’s not what we do, it’s how we do it”, and the fact that each of the stories (or chapters) has an adverbal title: ‘Particularly’, ‘Briefly’, ‘Not Particularly’, and so on.
It all gets a bit meta in the middle, where Handler breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly.
And it has a soundtrack album, in two senses: throughout the book, there are references to bands and songs, so you could construct a suitable playlist from that.  But given Handler’s alternative career as a musician and member of The Magnetic Fields, the album to play while reading it is undoubtedly their 69 Love Songs.  You’ll find many themes in common and overlap between book and album.
All in all it’s thoroughly enjoyable, but doesn’t really go anywhere - it doesn’t have a plot, after all - and is kind of inconclusive.



American Flagg episodes 1-30 (and special 1), by Howard Chaykin and others (Books 2008, 15)
Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:23:03 +0000
I came upon these when I was digging out some old comics for my son.  These are not for eleven-year-olds, but I realised I hadn't read them in years, and I thought I'd see how they had aged (plus, I remembered next to nothing about the story).
The story is not bad, but not that great.  In a post-collapse America, corruption and gang violence are rife, and the government (perhaps all the governments of the world) have left Earth, and are still ruling (or trying to) from Mars.  On Earth the law - and to some extent, the peace - is kept by the Plexus Rangers.  Or rather, as you eventually realise, the PlexUS Rangers, since there are also PlexUSSR Rangers.  The Plex is the overall world government.  Or something.
Reuben Flagg was a video star (ie TV or movie: there’s a lot about ‘video’ here, but it’s pretty much all broadcast stuff) on Mars.  He played the eponymous ‘Mark Thrust, Sexus Ranger’.  But new technology has made actors unnecessary, and he has volunteered as a Plexus Ranger and been sent to Earth, to Chicago.
He is the one (relatively) good man in a corrupt environment, and with the help of a clumsy android, a talking cat, and various women in their underwear, he tries to keep things under control.
Oh yes, the underwear thing: Chaykin is unable, it seems to draw women wearing anything other than basques, stockings and suspenders.  No matter what they’re doing, pretty much.  There’s nothing like wearing your fetishes on your sleeve, I suppose.  Or, you know, lower down.



Halting State, by Charles Stross (Books 2008, 13)
Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:58:22 +0000
Posted out of sequence, for reasons unknown even to me.
Writing about this novel is kind of embarassing for me, because I had the chance to make it better than it is, and I, er, blew it because I read too slowly.
See, I was on quite a large list of people who saw a draft version of this, a year or two ago.  I read most of it (or all of it, but it was incomplete, I can’t quite remember) and noted some mistakes and flaws.
But I didn’t get them all recorded properly and submitted to Charlie before the deadline.  And now, when I read the published version, I find they’re all still there.
There’s nothing  dramatic, nothing plot-shattering (although there are one or two places where things could be clearer, and where the cracks aren’t fully papered over: you can see where a section has been moved for dramatic purposes, but the knowledge of the protagonists hasn’t been adjusted to mark the events' new location in the overall plot, for example).  It’s mainly just niggles, misuses of terminology (school years called ‘primary third’, and ‘secondary two’, instead of ‘primary three’ and ‘second year’, respectively, for example).  So, just some minor distractions.  And the spelling of ‘dreich’ as ‘dreicht’ throughout is curious.
But no matter.  Much more interesting are the questions of how well the multiple-viewpoint second person narration works; and is the story any good?
On the first point, I had no trouble with the second-person narrative at all, and it being multiple-person is effectively no different from any other book that does that.  There is rarely any confusion, not least because each chapter includes the VP character’s name as part of its title.
The story is interesting, and it investigates an area - that of security in our increasingly-networked world - that is very important, and will only get more so in the near future.  But I’m not, in all honesty, sure that it really works.  The various parts don’t quite gel.
And yet, I enjoyed reading it.  I enjoyed being on the trip, I just look back at it and think, “It wasn’t that great."



Lazarus Churchyard: The Final Cut, by Warren Ellis and D'Israeli (Books 2008, 14)
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:35:39 +0000
Hmmm, once again I try a Warren Ellis, and find that it's not as good as I expected, or hoped.  'Good', that is, in the sense of 'exciting, dramatic, interesting'.  I didn't dislike it, and the story was OK; but it never really caught fire, you know?
Still, it was his debut, so maybe the thing is to try some of his later work (I should also add that, at the time of publishing, if not the time of reading or writing, I am regularly reading and enjoying FreakAngels).
I should probably mention the artwork, not least since I met the artist at Eastercon.  It’s similar, actually, in that, while it’s perfectly fine, I kind of hoped it would be better.  I couldn’t say that there’s anything wrong with it: you can always tell what’s going on, for example.  I think maybe it’s that the style is a bit too cartoonish for the material.
The eponymous Lazarus is four hundred years old, and as far as he knows, immortal and indestructible, by virtue of some large percentage of his body having been replaced with smart plastics.  He’s the only one in this condition, though, and he’s not happy about it.  The main driver of the plot is his desire to die; or at least, we are led to understand that this will be the main driver.  In fact it’s not, and each episode within the overall work has its own antagonism.
There’s a lot of extreme violence and brutality, some interesting ideas, but it’s sadly unmemorable.



Veniss Underground, by Jeff Vandermeer (Books 2008, 12)
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:24:55 +0000
I bought this in a second-hand bookshop, and tucked into the back there was a cutting from The Guardian of this review by Michael Moorcock.  So go and look there if you want a plot summary: he does it much better then I could.
It’s an interesting, dark story, and I’m not totally sure how I feel about it.  It straddles the SF/fantasy divide, at least in the sense that it is set in the far future, there are hints of spaceflight being common, and there is much genetic and somatic manipulation; but there are also talking animals.
Of course, the talking animals (mainly meerkats) are enabled by the genetic engineering, so really it’s unabashedly SF.  However, Shadrach’s descent into the literal underworld of the levels below the city are straight out of mythology.  And the description of the organ bank, while striking, are just fanciful to the point of unbelievability.
It’s the first thing I’ve read by Vandermeer, and while I enjoyed it, it doesn’t immediately make me want to go out and read more.  That said, his City of Saints and Madmen does attract me, if only because it’s such a great title.  I keep hearing (well, reading) people referring to him recently, so I don’t doubt that he’s got a lot to offer.



I'll stand before the Lord of Song
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:53:39 +0000
My friend Paul writes about the winner of The X-Factor's shot at the Christmas number one with a cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'.  Since the original is one of my favourite songs of all time, I have opinions on the matter.
Not least about the assertion that Paul quotes (without holding that opinion himself) that Jeff Buckley’s version is “often described as definitive”.
I don’t think I had heard Buckley’s version before today, but definitive?  Definitive?  How could anyone say that?  The definitive version is, by definition, Cohen’s.  And the only cover that matters is John Cale’s.
I had heard Rufus Wainright’s version.  In my opinion it is too respectful.  And too slow.  I like a cover version that does something new with a song, that grabs it by the throat and make’s it the coverer’s own.  Think of Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, or the Clash’s of  ‘Police and Thieves’  Or ‘I Fought the Law’, for that matter; there are those who don’t realise that’s a cover.  You could say that the Clashified version is - I don’t know: definitive, maybe.
I maybe be in danger of self-contradiction here, but I don’t think so: I fully accept that it’s possible for someone to improve on the original version of a song.  I just don’t think that anyone I’ve heard has done that for ‘Hallelujah’.  Except maybe John Cale.
Having done some research into the matter (Last FM and YouTube are really astonishingly cool things) Buckley’s currently stands at second-best cover version/third-best version I’ve heard.
I haven’t heard Alexandra Burke’s version, except for a fragment in a BBC quiz (7 out of 8, by the way), but I fully expect to cringe when I do.
Furthermore, when looking for Buckley’s version on Last FM, I saw a comment to the effect that the version in Shrek is Wainright.  Well, (I thought) either Rufus has become Welsh; or they redubbed the film for the UK market; or some people can’t tell the difference between two very different singers.  But it turns out (at least according to that same BBC quiz) that while the version in the film of Shrek is Cale’s as anyone with an ear can hear, the version on the soundtrack album is Wainwright.  Strange, but doubtless to do with licensing issues.
I wonder if they replaced that terrible version of ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have Fallen in Love With)?’ from the film with the proper version for the soundtrack album?



Too long gone
Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:52:08 +0000
Man, it's been a long time since I posted.  I blame Twitter.
You could always follow me there, if you don’t already.
Also my OU course.  Which, ironically or not, is on Creative Writing.
Incidentally, if brevity is the soul of wit, then Twitter ought to be hilarious.



Yes you can!
Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:11:09 +0000
Congratulations, America!  Great news.
Obama’s speech was fantastic, and McCain’s was very dignified.
Unfortunately, there is one piece of bad news: Stephen Fry tweets  that California’s Proposition 8 has passed.  It outlaws same-sex marriage, and is a nasty, bigoted piece of work.  I can’t find any official news on it at the moment, though, so let’s hope that the good Mr Fry is just misinformed, out there in Africa as he is.



Queues
Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:14:32 +0000
Long queues at polling places are a sign, surely, of a country recently freed from tyranny, of one that is experiencing the chance to vote for the first time (I'm thinking of South Africa in 1994, for example).  They are not something that you generally expect to see in a mature democracy like the USA.
Let’s hope, then, that the people streaming to the polling stations on America are those desperate to breathe free of Bush and the Neocon hegemony, and not tiny-minded racists trying to drag the country back to the dark ages.
And remember, America: the whole world is watching.



Worrier president
Mon, 03 Nov 2008 07:02:22 +0000
There's a Warren Zevon song called 'Worrier King'.  It contains the line, 'I've been up all night, worrying what November's gonna bring.'  Given that US elections are always In that month, there's little doubt what he was worrying about.
If Warren had lived he’d be worrying now, and I have a shrewd idea in which direction his concerns would be facing.  I’m not American, and I’m worrying.  Though I can’t deny that my worry is diluted with a lot of hope and excitement.
Tuesday night’s going to be a long one, and whenever I collapse, it won’t be over. But at some point on Wednesday, there’s going to be a new dawn for America, and maybe for the world.
Edited to add: It’s actually ‘wondering what November’s gonna bring’.



A quote from Warren Ellis
Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:07:15 +0000

  Bursts aren't contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn't be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn't be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in.
  —  Burst Culture



ThiGMOO, by Eugene Byrne (Books 2008, 11)
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:38:18 +0000
This is, in effect, a [Singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) story, though a rather gentle, slightly comic one.
The AIs that gain self-awareness and seek to achieve independence and change the world, start out as part of an educational project called the Museum of the Mind.  In this construct there are a number of simulations of figures from history (mostly fictional, like the  victorian prostitute).  School pupils, students, researchers and others can interrogate them about life in their time.
It’s interesting that Byrne has them start to gain self-awareness after their systems get infected with a religious program: a virus that tries to ‘convert’ them to Mormonism.  I don’t know whether Byrne is trying to tell us that religion is necessary for self-awareness, or if it just seems like a useful trigger to give the programs some extra input and start them asking questions.
Anyway, one of the erams, as they are called (electronic recreation of a mindstate) is based on an early-20th-century socialist activist.  Shocked at the apparent absence of socialism in the world he sees outside the computer networks, he organises his fellow erams, and sets out to change the world (and protect their very existence along the way).  The title stands for “This Great Movement Of Ours”, which was once a common phrase in speeches by Labour activists, apparently.
It’s good fun, if lightweight.  It was published in 1999; I wonder what’s happened to Eugene Byrne since then?



Corporal punishment: not on my watch
Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:57:18 +0000
There was an arse on the ??Today?? programme this morning, calling for the return of corporal punishment to schools.  One in five teachers, he says, want it 'as an option'.
Two points, then: a) that means four in five don’t want it, and b) why do you think it’s all right to use violence against children? (and as a corollary, how do you think doing so will make them less prone to using violence themselves?)



I phone, you phone
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:59:47 +0000
So, I've got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a £30-a-month contract.
The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.
iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.
Don’t get me wrong: it does its thing well, from playing music, through purchases, to synchronisation. But my god, it looks ugly.
And nor do I like the way it presents the music it knows about; but then, I’ve never seen an application that does that very well.
As to typing with the on-screen keyboard, well, it’s actually not that bad; it’s never going to. Be fast, bit there are some smart optimisations, like automatically switching back from the symbol keyboard to the letter one when you hit space after a comma, or immediately after you type an apostrophe.
And I almost cry with happiness every time I see the transition from one app to another.
ETA: As you can see from the typoes above, I wrote that on the shiny device.  I’ll leave them in for posterity.



Mad bampot on a rope
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:45:57 +0000
Went to see Man on Wire last night, the documentary about Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's a great film. I was a bit worried that it would be kind of dull, since we already knew the story. But it's paced like a thriller, complete with starting near the climax and then flashing back to fill in the back story.
I did have a few moments of gut-wrenching horror (I’m not good with ridiculous heights, even when it’s just images of other people experiencing them), but overall found it absolutely amazing, and touching. Great music, too.
There was a poignant moment when they showed documentary footage of the construction of the twin towers. Seeing pre-formed steel sections being lifted into place; sections that I last saw white-hot and crashing to the ground.



Exciting times
Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:34:34 +0000
These are exciting times in Hackney.  Not only has my son just started secondary school today (where did those eleven years go?) but it seems that we are getting a new bookshop near the top of our road.
This is big news indeed.  Our little corner of Lower Clapton is characterised more by chicken-based fast-food joints and kebab shops.  A children’s bookshop opened on nearby Chatsworth Road a year or two ago (my daughter was their first customer).  There was a brief, exciting moment last year when something that looked like a bookshop opened up on Lower Clapton Road, but it turned out to be a religious booksop, specialising the the Christian field.
But today I went up to get my hair cut, and I noticed a new sign up: Pages of Hackney.  A new bookshop on the Lower Clapton Road, opening on Saturday 13th September.  Excellent news.
Not so good is that Saf’s Barbers is “closed until further notice”.  I hope everything’s all right.  I still have shaggy hair, which never looks good when it’s receding.



Watermelon Sculpture
Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:41:51 +0000

 
 

 
  Watermelon Sculpture
  

  Originally uploaded by devilgate.
 

My son's first sculpture. Clearly Halloween can't come soon enough (though watermelon is a lot easier to carve than pumpkin)




A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket (Books, 2008, 10)
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:53:58 +0000
This is actually thirteen books, not just one.  I've been reading it with my son over a period of several months.  He, of course, had already read it, but we like reading together, and I was keen to know the rest of the story, after seeing the film (which is based on the events of the first three books).
Anyway, we finally got to the end, and, while I enjoyed it, I think that Mr Snicket has the not uncommon problem of difficulty with endings.
Or maybe not: he left lots (and lots, and lots) of loose ends flying.  But that might be deliberate, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But he seeds so many clues and events throughout the first twelve books that, starting the thirteenth, you wonder how he’s going to bring them all together, and then - he just doesn’t.
Part of the narrative concerns the fact that  stories don’t really have starts and finishes, and that a relatively inconsequential moment in your life could be the start or end of someone else’s story, and so on. All very well, but I get the sense that he rather tacked that on to excuse the lack of an ending.
That said, it’s a great story if you’re reading to kids who love language (or if you’re reading it yourself and do); though some, I’m sure, would get annoyed with his repeated “… which is a phrase which here means…” riff, or some of his other running gags.  Me, I loved it.
Most importantly, the three Baudelaire orphans are engaging characters: smart, kind, wise (and noble enough) children, caught up in a world of sadness and madness, where almost all the adults who aren’t out to get them are too stupid to help them.
Adults don’t come out of A Series of Unfortunate Events at all well, in fact.  Those that aren’t stupid are evil.  Those that are neither tend to end up  dead, or disappeared.  And everyone gets betrayed, and their hearts broken.
Am I telling too much, here?  Probably not: Lemony warns us, right from the blurb on The Bad Beginning: if you’re looking for a happy tale, there are plenty of others on the shelves.
While Mr Snicket tries to discourage reading these terrible books at every turn, though, they come highly recommended by me.



The London cabbie: good and bad
Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:08:13 +0000
We experienced the best and worst of the London cabbie last night: from not taking a fare because to do so would have been a rip-off, to attempted murder.
We were going to an exhibition opening, and had got off the bus wildly too early.  We were walking in the right direction, but weren’t quite sure where the gallery was, and we were running late.  So we flagged down a passing cab and asked for the street.  “It’s just over there,” he said, pointing,  “Don’t waste your money.”
It was, indeed, just over there.  Admirable behaviour, I thought, as he could easily have made a few quid taking us there.
After we left and were walking to the bus stop, there was an altercation between a cab driver and a cyclist.  I didn’t see how it started, but there was shouting and gesticulation, and the cabbie started to get out of his cab.
The cyclist headed off up the road, and suddenly the cabbie roared off after him.  It looked like nothing less than an attempt to run the cyclist down.
I guess the cabbie came to his senses, because I don’t think he actually hit the guy.  The cyclist very sensibly got off the road and cycled down the pavement in the opposite direction.  The cab zoomed off up the road, to fast and  too far away for me to get its number, unfortunately.  I had my phone out ready to call the cops.
The cyclist seemed to be OK, physically at least.  We saw him back on the road and heading in the direction he had been going.  It’s scary to think, though, that you could either be that cyclist, or get into that guy’s cab.



What's that stand for?
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:31:28 +0000
I remember several years ago when the right answer to this was given wrong on University Challenge; but you’d think that, after all this time, The Guardian’s Technology section would know what URL stands for.
Tip: it’s uniform, not universal.


FF3 on Linux
Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:34:42 +0000
Well, "that business with installing Firefox 3 on Linux":[devilgate.org/blog/2008...](http://devilgate.org/blog/2008/06/20/it-is-_immensely_-annoying-that-you-can/?)  Finally done on my Eee PC.  Took ages, but the instructions worked more-or-less perfectly.


The Gun Club
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:39:29 +0000
I just listened to The Gun Club's first album, Fire Of Love.  They're a band that I heard of all through my student years - at least one good friend was a fan - but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now.  It's a scorchingly good album, and I'd recommend anyone who likes either punk or blues (and let's face it, who doesn't?) to download it from Emusic forthwith.


A Dream of Wessex, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 9)
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:26:37 +0000
This is the motherlode of all brains-in-jars/life-is-a-computer-simulation-type stories.  Gibson's and the Wachowskis' Matrixes can both trace their origins back to here - or at least, they should be able to.  I'm not aware of anything older than this that quite deals with this idea.
At Maiden Castle in Dorchester in the near future (of the time the book was written; it’s now our near past) a scientific research project has been under way for several years.  It involves ‘projection’, in which the particpants, their bodies unconscious, enter into a shared, simulated fantasy world.  This consensus hallucination was intended to examine a possible future, with a view to suggesting answers to some of the problems of today.
But one of the participants has been stuck in the projection for two years (when the normal period is measured in weeks or a few months at the most); the trustees are getting worried about the costs; and a new participant is about to arrive and change everything.
It is excellent, and (of course) leaves you wondering how many levels of fantasy there are to reality - both the book’s, and ours.



Water on Mars
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:36:47 +0000
Phoenix has "found water on Mars":[phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/,](http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/,) by the way.


Fluidity
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:33:24 +0000
Why does no-one make themes that are fluid anymore?  By which I mean ones that re-flow the text when you resize your browser window, of course.


New theme
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:13:01 +0000
Have just activated a new theme for this site.  It's called "MNML":[themeshaper.com/mnml-a-tu...](http://themeshaper.com/mnml-a-tumblelog-style-wordpress-theme/,) and it's designed especially for quick posts.  As ever, I'm not quite sure about it yet, but we'll seee.


The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 8)
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:08:09 +0000
What a fine conceit.  Take the two great science fiction works by one of the genre's defining masters, mash them up together, and use the result to tell the 'inside' story of both of them.
It’s title is an obvious allusion to The Time Machine, but this is actually much more rooted in The War of the Worlds.  And why shouldn’t those two novels take place in the same fictive universe?  And why shouldn’t they be linked?  After all, Mr Wells wrote both the stories down, so he must have experienced some of the events of both, right?
Priest sustains the tone and style of a late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century novel admirably well, and there’s not much to fault in this novel.
Except, perhaps, for the ending.  The actual climax and conclusion of the story is well expected if you know The War of the Worlds.  It’s just the last page or two; the rationale for the behaviour of one of the characters (a Mr Wells, in fact) in particular is, to my mind, inexplicable.  Not that it matters, that late in the story, I suppose, but it does bother me.
I wish I had known about this novel a few years back, when I read both The Time Machine and Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships.  It would have sat very well in company with them.



42 referendums and and a resignation
Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:18:18 +0000
I can't decide on this David Davis thing. Is it just a stunt?  Is he genuinely concerned enough about civil liberties to take the chance (small though it is) of losing his seat?  Certainly he sounds sincere when he talks about his concerns about the growth of state power; and Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty counts him as a friend, it seems.
But as others have pointed out he has a bad reputation on some other rights votes.
Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’d be better than “Kelvin Mc-bloody-Kenzie”:… (as backed by Rupert Murdoch, of course).
The most concerning thing, though, is the talk to the effect that the public is in favour of 42-day detention without trial.  This member of the public most certainly is not, and I’m sure I’m by no means alone.  And honestly: would people who’ve really thought it through be in favour of this kind of thing?  I find it hard to believe.  What happened, if it’s true, to the great British sense of fair play, of support for the underdog, even of disrespect for authority?  Is this another facet of the grumbling about human rights that I wrote about before?
Maybe we need to re-educate people about what is good and right.  But how?
And then Ireland have voted ‘No’ to the EU treaty.  I can’t help but think that this is a bad thing.  The EU itself has been a net good for Europe and the world, as I’ve probably said here before.  Whether these reforms will really make it better and more democratic, or not, I can’t say: I haven’t studied it.
Thing is, though, I would probably have been in favour of the EU constitution; if only because we could do with one in the UK.  Admittedly, I’d want one that got rid of the monarchy and introduced an elected upper chamber in parliament, but one that further enshrined the European Convention on Human Rights would be a good start.
It would be quite difficult to amend it, mind you, since you’d need a Europe-wide referendum.
But I’m havering fancifully here: it was never meant to be that kind of constitution.
What now, then?  Who knows, really.  I expect they’ll either re-work it slightly and try again, or just apply various components of it without the treaty.



Newton's Wake: A Space Opera, by Ken MacLeod (books 2008, 7)
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:42:14 +0000
A scorching, searing cyberpunk space opera.  It has _everything_ in it: FTL starships, uploaded minds, nanotech, the Singularity, wormhole gateways...  Absolutely stunning stuff.
Though on the downside, I did find it bit hard to follow some of the plot twists and turns.  Specifically, it wasn’t always immediately obvious to me why some of the alliances and disputes between the various factions happened.  I expect a more careful reading, or retracing of my steps, would have resolved those difficulties.  But such was the pace of the plot that I didn’t want to.
I loved some of the terminology.  Travelling faster than light, for example, is called ‘fittling’ (from FTL).  The technological singularity  is called the ‘hard rapture’.  I especially like that Ken has grabbed the term ‘Rapture’ from the weirdo fundamentalists christians who believe Jesus is going to come back and sweep them all up to heaven.  The Googleplex (for example) becoming self-aware and sucking up everyone’s mindstate is far more likely, if you ask me.  Which is not saying a lot about its likelihood…
One of the groupings of humanity that have survived through the hard rapture, and remain players on galactic stage, are called the Carlyles.  They started out as a Glasgow gang, basically.  They were based in something called ‘The Castle on the Clyde’, which I’d like to hear more about.  Then there’s AO: America Offline.  They didn’t get uploaded because they weren’t connected to the net.
This means that the two main dialects of the language everyone speaks are called ‘American’ and ‘English’; but the ‘English’ is rendered partly in Scots.  Good fun.
I haven’t read any of Ken’s stuff for a while (aside from his blog, obviously). That’s a situation I need to put right forthwith.  But first I think I should go back to the start, and dig The Star Fraction out of the attic.



Trying out Drivel
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:52:55 +0000
I'm trying out an offline blogging client that runs on Linux (these things are not that easy to come by).  It's called Drivel, and it seems to work OK, as long as you tell it that your WordPress installation is actually Movable Type.
Oh, and it looks like it only supports one category per post, and no native tags.  Not very impressive, really.
Since I tend to draft in jEdit, I’ve often thought that what I need is a blogging plugin for that, and been surprised that it doesn’t exist.  One of these days I’ll have to write it…
(ETA: tags added later via the web interface.  Far from satisfactory, really.)
(E further TA: damn, it looks like this theme isn’t showing native WordPress tags, anyway.)



Novelist Joanna Kavenna points out that I was wrong
Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:38:56 +0000
Ok, I was wrong when I said that no other genres had disparaging abbreviations.

  "I don't understand what chick-lit means, and to a degree it's just used to dismiss quite a lot of writing by women," she says. "It's a blanket term that renders a wide variety of literature frivolous. It's used either to dismiss the writing or to avoid thinking about it."
  Stephen Moss interviews novelist Joanna Kavenna on her seven unpublishable novels, and eventual success | Special Reports | guardian.co.uk Books



Identity and letdown in The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall (books 2008, 6)
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:24:47 +0000
Eric Sanderson wakes without his memories.  In short order he starts receiving messages apparently sent by his former self, is told by his psychiatrist not to read any such messages, and starts reading them - in the wrong order, which leaves him unready for the trouble that is about to assail him.
He is attacked by a ‘conceptual shark’: a living, sentient creature that is composed of ideas, of thoughts, of words; and that swims in the sea of information that surrounds us.  This is the creature that took his memories.  It eats such information, and fixates on a victim, and will keep coming back to attack them again and again.
So the messages from “the first Eric Sanderson” tell him.  Fortunately they also give him some tools and techniques to protect himself, and information about someone who might be able to help him.
So eventually he sets out on a quest to find the mysterious Trey Fidorous.  That’s as far as I’m going to go with the plot summary (it covers probably a quarter of the book).
It’s an interesting idea, that creatures composed of pure information, of ideas, can exist and can do us harm.  We’re well into SF territory here, without wanting to hegemonise, and irrespective of the fact that it’s marketed as mainstream literary fiction (why, I’ve often wondered, don’t people talk about “li-fi”, or “cri-fi”, or even “hi-fi”?  Why is SF so special that it gets its own disparaging abbreviation?)  There was real justification for including this work in the Clarke Awards shortlist (sadly I haven’t read any of the others on the list).  We are plunged into a world of infinite strangeness and difference (even though it stands alongside the world we are familiar with).  We have to hang on for the ride and pick things up as we go along.  These are standard, recognised characteristics of much SF.
Which may be neither here nor there, really; unless how we classify a work affects how we approach it, how we read it.  And I think it’s true that it does: if you approach Iain Banks’s The Bridge, for example, as SF (it’s a ‘non-M’, so it was marketed as mainstream), then you’ll get quite a different effect from the scenes on the bridge, and with the barbarian; at least allowing for the possibility that those events actually happened in some sense, in some reality.  As opposed to the assumption that they were ‘only’ the deranged fantasy of a mind in a coma, which is of course the only ‘mainstream’ reading.
We are in a similar situation here.  Eric’s psychiatrist thinks that he might be going into a fugue state; and clearly something has happened to his mind.  But Eric has experienced the attack of the Ludovician (the name of the particular type of conceptual fish that attacked him) and he believes throughout that what is happening is real.  And all through the quest, and the love story and the fight scenes, he believes it.  And so does the author, apparently.
And so do we.
Except.
Except, except.
Right on the second last page, Hall undermines it all.  After the narrative has finished there are a couple of pages of extra material before the ‘undex’ (the point of which I’m not sure about).
The first of these pulls the rug out from under us, and dumps us more or less into “he woke up and it was all a dream” territory.  Or didn’t wake up.  It’s a bit like Sam Tyler at the  end of Life on Mars, except there it was more or less clearly stated all the way through that he was in a coma: you just didn’t want it to be so.
The present work is less honest, in a way, since there really is no suggestion that what Eric is experiencing might not be ‘real’.  Sure, it’s always there as a possibility, but I’d have to say,“What’s the point?”, really.  Why would you bother to write a story that, in the internal logic of that story, all took place in the head of its protagonist, and didn’t do anything to help the protagonist, or illuminate his life, or help him to come to terms with something?
As such, this is ultimately disappointing: it’s a great ride, spoiled by the ending.
Although, a further twist occurs to me, a couple of months after reading it.  If the rug-pulling element were not there, you could say, then we would have a fantasy-happy ending, like the fake ending in Brazil.  That’s never a good thing, of course, but the difference remains this: in Brazil, the false ending was tacked on (or it would have been if the ‘real’ ending hadn’t superseded it).  Here, the ending grows naturally out of all that has gone before.  If everything was in his imagination, then fine, so was the ending.  But if everything was ‘really’ happening to him, then the ending is legitimate in that context, and the additional material subverts it for no good reason.



The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R Delany (Books 2008, 5)
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:12:21 +0000
Or, 'A Fabulous, Formless Darkness', which was Delany's original preferred title, according to Neil Gaiman (him again?) in his introduction to this edition.
Delany writes twisty puzzle-stories, where it’s not always clear what’s going on, or why. I’m a big fan of his later masterpiece, Dhalgren, which matches that description, for example.
This one is more straightforward by comparison.  It is Earth’s far future.  Humans have gone, and the world is instead inhabited by an alien race.  They have taken over, not just the planet, but humanity’s identity, its myths, even its genetics.  And they are struggling to be human.
Or that, at least, is what we are told.  That is what our hero, Lo Lobey, believes, what the elders of his village have taught him.  But personally, I’m not convinced.
See, there’s nothing here that requires that the characters be aliens; they behave just as humans would, in most cases.  Far-future, post-fall humans, yes, but still they could be humans.  Sure, Lobey has prehensile toes, there are various other physical differences, and there is a neuter (or hermaphrodite, it’s not clear) ‘third sex’; but none of that is anything that a bit of genetic manipulation - deliberate, accidental, or a combination of the two - couldn’t cause.  And there are some psychic abilities, but that is well within humanity’s capabilities in thousands of stories, of course.
More importantly, they feel like humans.  As Gaiman says, “they are us.”
There is one element that is more alien, though.  That is the curious character of Kid Death, and his (and perhaps some other characters') apparent ability to bring back the dead at will.  The latter could be illusion, of course, and would then be in keeping with the psychic powers I mentioned above.
Why does this matter, you might ask?  Why do I care whether these people are aliens or advanced-and-fallen humans?  In one sense it doesn’t matter, of course.  You can enjoy the story while taking the explanation for its background at face value.  But there is, to me, something unsatisfying about the “aliens who have taken on the characteristics of humans” explanation.  It is too unexplained.
Not that we can or should expect everything to be explained in SF (or not at first, at least); and in Delany’s work this low expectation is perhaps lower than in most.  Certainly Dhalgren, for example, gives few clues as to what is going on, or how things have got to where they are (it occurs to me, in fact, that it could be set in the same world as the present story).
To have a story about such an alien race, with no examination of what they were like before they took on the role of humanity, or why they did it, seems a curious choice.  But I suppose we could see it as a demonstration of true alienness: there is no explanation of why they behave as they do because we simply could not understand their rationale.
And I think that’s the explanation I like best.



Floating
Sun, 25 May 2008 14:02:52 +0000
So the Tories took Crewe and Nantwich in the by-election.
I don’t understand (never have) the mentality, the mindset, the brains of floating voters.  I’m not saying that no-one should ever change their mind, in politics or anything else; nor do I think that people can’t be convinced by the arguments over issues - nor, for that matter, swayed by the force of a candidate’s personality.  Furthermore, I speak as one who has voted against Labour, my lifetime-favoured party, in recent years.
But floating voters - and in particular ones who’ll switch all the way between Labour and Tory - I just don’t understand them.
Of course it’s possible - even likely - that no-one actually describes themself as a floating voter.  They might all say, “I decide on the issues each time,” or even, “… by who I like…”  That would be OK, y’know?  I could get behind that, sort of.  I mean, it doesn’t sound very committed; but it could be.  On each occasion you could examine the candidates' and/or their parties' positions on human rights/the environment/tax cuts/hanging and flogging (or whatever your particular concerns may be).  Match them against your own position and preferences, and see who suits you best.
But I’m not convinced that’s what the bulk of these ‘floaters’ do.
See, I suspect that they mostly take little to no interest in politics (which is to say, little to no interest in the world) between elections.  Then when one does roll round they vote whatever way their stupid, dumbfuck tabloid paper tells them to.
Though I may be doing many people a great disservice there.  And at least they do get out and vote.
It’s just that sometimes the world might be a better place if they didn’t.
Jeremy Hardy obviously feels similarly to me: on The News Quiz the other night he said that floating voters who switched all the way from Labour to Tory (rather than voting, say, Green or LibDem) were like someone saying, “Well, I’ve always had my hair cut at the barbers in the High Street, but this time I’m just going to set my head on fire!"



Looking forward to hearing this
Tue, 13 May 2008 11:10:24 +0000
My favourite author and a favourite TV writer: together again for the first time!

Iain Banks has now taken a look at the recording script of my BBC Radio 4 adaptation of his novella ‘The State of the Art’ and pronounces himself pleased.

From Paul Cornell’s blog.


British Summer Time, by Paul Cornell (Books 2008, 4)
Mon, 05 May 2008 11:46:37 +0000
Paul Cornell wrote some of my favourite episodes of Doctor Who's recent years: 'Father's Day', and the 'Human Nature'/'Family of Blood' two-parter.  After the latter, I downloaded and read the ebook of his original novel (on which the episodes were based).  So I came to this with some knowledge of his writing.
But not with so much knowledge of his religious beliefs.  I had some sense – from reading his blog, presumably – that he was religious, at least in a vague, Church-of-Englandy sort of way; but I didn’t expect, on picking this up, that it would have such a religious heart (or maybe ‘soul’ would be more appropriate).
Though I’m not sure that the Archbishop of Canterbury would quite approve – and I’m absolutely sure the Pope would not – of the theology.
It’s a fine story of a woman who can read the patterns of the world around her, a space pilot from the future (but is it ‘our’ future?), a disembodied head, and four mysterious ‘golden men’, who might be angels, might be the biblical four horsemen of the apocalypse, or might be something else.  It’s an easy read, and I recommend it.
But does the religion get in the way of the story?  No, not really; though it was something of a distraction at times for this atheist.  It’s by no means preachy; indeed, you could argue that the religious interpretation of the events in the story is a misinterpretation.  Though since that interpretation is the author’s, that would depend on where you stand on the whole postmodern thing about the author being irrelevant, and the reader entering into a dialogue with the text.
The question for me on a personal note is, would I have approached it differently - or read it at all - if I had known about the religious content before I started it?
The answer is, I would have approached it differently.  And, if I hadn’t known the author’s work, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at all.
By saying that, I’m convicting myself of being likely to prejudge religiously-inspired fiction; well, yes, guilty as charged.  Just as I’m likely to prejudge romantic fiction, literary fiction, heroic fantasy, and so on.  We don’t approach anything in a vacuum, after all.  Our past experiences, our expectations, colour our understanding and appreciation of any art.  And we all have our preferences.
Still, if I had known, and rejected this, I’d have missed out on something worthwhile.  So that’s worth bearing in mind.



Time for writing crosses in booths, folks
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:24:32 +0000
You know what's coming.  It's nearly the 1st of May, and that means elections.  An all-too-infrequent chance to exercise our fundamental democratic right and duty.  Always important, even when you're quite happy with how things are.  Somebody else won't be, and you don't want them to change things.
Of course, that’s not what gets people out to vote: a desire for change is much more likely to bring crowds to the local schools, village halls, and other little nooks and crannies of public space that experience a kind of sovereignty for a day.
Either way, there’s no better or nobler duty that you can do in a few minutes in a small cubicle with a pencil and a piece of paper.
And if you live in London, and have a vote, please, please, please get out and use it against Boris Johnson.
I don’t really care who you vote for (well, the BNP are standing, but I’m sure anyone reading this is much too decent and right-thinking to go there).  Though it’s clear that only Ken has a serious chance of keeping the bumbling buffoon out.
I’m convinced, by the way, that the Tories put him up to it as a joke.  The thinking probably went something like, “Nobody’s going to beat Livingstone, so let’s put comedy candidate up, and make a mockery of the whole thing.”  Then somehow, thanks largely to the vile rag that is ??The Evening Standard??, and the lack of seriousness with which some people treat politics, Boris climbed up the polls, and now looks like a serious contender for the Mayorship.
It will be a disaster for London if he gets elected, of course.  We can only hope that it will backfire on the Tories: that he fails fast enough that it seriously harms them in the general election.
Putting your hopes for the country on disaster for your city is no position to be in, though.  So I can only reiterate: get out and vote, and stop Boris.  Give at least your second vote to Ken.  He has his faults, but he’s done a pretty good job of running the city this last eight years.
Vote!



That 'reporting back from Eastercon' business
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:12:23 +0000
I realise that I said I would report back from Eastercon.  It already seems like quite a long time ago.  I had a great time, though I missed out on the Saturday night and Sunday morning and early afternoon, as I went to collect my son from his grandparents'.
It was his first convention, and I think he quite enjoyed it; though the next time we’ll need to ensure that there are some other kids there who like Yu-Gi-Oh! (mental trading card game beloved of ten-year-old boys).
I saw some old friends and had a fine time.  I was very restrained in comparison with my old conventioneering days.  Early(ish) nights, the lot.  It was quite refreshing to come home on the Monday and not feel at all rough.
The guests of honour were great, those of them that I saw, at least.  I missed “Charlie Stross’s”:www.antipope.org/charlie/b… speech because of being away for a while, but he was by far the most visible of them all around  the con.   China Miéville gave a great speech about how it doesn’t spoil stories to read more into them than the author consciously intended; or than our interlocutor might say we should (you know, the kind who say, “You’re reading too much into it!  It’s just a story!").
And Neil Gaiman (the net’s no. 1 Neil) was lovely.  He read a short story, and talked for a bit, and then read the start of his new novel The Graveyard Book.  Later on, he did a kids-only reading of The Wolves in the Walls.  The best part of that was that parents and carers were allowed in too.  He really knows how to handle an audience; even one of the most demanding kind, such as this.
And my boy got his books signed without having to join the apparently-mad queues for the official signing sessions.
Then there was a performance of my friend Andrew’s play, The Terminal Zone, which I wrote about when I read the chapbook, It’s a fine work.  This particular performance could have done with more rehearsal, but of course, these are amateurs, fitting it all into the rest of their lives, and doing a damn fine job.
That was followed by a live set from Mitch Benn, who I’ve been a fan of for some time from his performances on Radio 4’s  The Now Show, and live, he was absolutely fantastic, especially, I think, since the audience got all his SF references (you don’t say) without any prompting.
All in all, a great weekend, in a fine hotel (pity it’s lost its swimming pool, though).



Old Man's War, by John Scalzi (Books 2008, 3)
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:47:03 +0000
I've been reading Scalzi's [blog (Whatever...)](http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/) on and off for  a few years, and he comes across as one of the good guys: certainly on the side of light, a good laugh, and someone you imagine would be fun to meet.  So I've been meaning to read his SF for a while.
My thanks to his publishers, Tor, then, for making his debut available via their free ebooks programme.  I read most of it on the Eee PC, with some bits on my phone (when I was standing up on the  tube).
In short, I loved it; though I have some doubts, or reservations.
It’s a curious universe (or at least, galaxy) that he describes: it is teeming with life, intelligent life; but nearly all of it is antithetical to nearly all of the rest of it.  Certainly, it is a book about war (the clue’s in the title); but it’s not one war between humanity and another alien race.  Instead it’s a series of small wars to defend human colonies from alien attackers, and to attack alien colonies and capture the planets for humans.  And once our hero joins up, he is constantly at war; there is no respite, at least that we hear of.
And only one, minor, character questions this state of affairs (though others do express their doubts).
I have a feeling, though, that these questions may be addressed in the sequels, which I’m keen to read (more proof, were it needed, that giving things away can be a good thing for authors and publishers alike).
The ‘old-man’s’ bit is that you can only join up when you reach 75 years of age.  You relinquish your Earth-nation’s citizenship and are legally considered dead.  Members of the Colonial Defense Force can never return to Earth.
But to make up for that, you get a new youthful body, and (if you make it through your tour of duty) the opportunity to have a new life on a colony planet.  The Colonial powers being technologically far in advance of Earth (which has become a bit of a backwater), there is not similar life-extension technology available to those on Earth.
So you can see the temptation.  Peaceful soul that I am, I can imagine that I might take up the offer.  Life is better than the alternative, you know?



Easter Weekend plans
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:52:40 +0000
Off to the exciting, glamorous Heathrow area tomorrow, for Orbital, the 2008 Eastercon.  It'll be the first convention I've been to for about ten years, so it should be quite fun.
When I was last at the hotel in question, it had a swimming pool.  That has since been filled in, sadly.  Then again, when I was last there, I don’t think that I actually used the pool, so perhaps it’s not a big deal.
It’ll be good to see some old friends and hopefully make some new ones.  And they’ve got a great lineup of guests: Neil Gaiman, Charlie Stross, and China Miéville are the official ones, but as always, there will be various other authors there.
I’ll report back here on how it was (unless, you know, I don’t). Actually, come to think of it, there’s said to be free wifi in the hotel, so I’ll probably report back from it.



The Hidden Family, by Charles Stross (Books 2008, 2)
Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:22:30 +0000
Volume 2 (or the second half of volume 1, depending on how you look at it) of Charlie's 'Merchant Princes' series.
It continues the story of Miriam Beckstein and her recently-discovered alternative-universe family of ‘world-walkers’.  In this one, Miriam discovers that (not surprisingly) there is more than one alternative Earth, and takes advantage of that fact.
Two things bother me about all this, though. One is that at no point, it seems, does she or anyone else do any investigation into the world-walking ability, or the designs of the talismans that make it work.  Though I have reason to believe that that point gets addressed in a later book.
The other problem I have is just how capable Miriam is.  She’s a can-do hero in the Heinlein – even in the Doc Smith – mold.  Which is all very well, and all kudos to Charlie for making such a figure a woman, rather than the ubiquitous men created by those illustrious earlier writers.  But those characters were never very believable, and we live in more sophisticated times now, do we not?  So it’s hard to believe in someone relatively ordinary who finds themself in another universe, and who just copes.  Indeed, not just copes, but prospers.
On the other hand, I’ve said elsewhere that we don’t read SF for the characters, but for the stories (and the ideas, of course).  And this is a great story that I sat up late to finish.  And you can’t argue with that.



On secondary school selection and the myth of choice
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:51:21 +0000
My son will be starting secondary school in September this year.  So towards the end of last year we spent a lot of time reading up on the policies of our and adjoining London boroughs, visiting schools, and finally applying.
The application works like this.  You can name up to six “preferences” (not “choices”, note).  A central (London-wide, but I’m not sure under what body – I don’t think the GLA handles education) body assesses your application against the entry conditions of your first preference.  If you meet those conditions, you get a place in that school; if not, they go on to your second preference; if you meet that school’s conditions, you get a place there, and so on.
It’s not quite as simple as that, of course, because schools' entry conditions don’t just apply to your child in isolation; they have to take account of how many people are applying, and how many of those fall into each of the entry conditions, and so on.  As well as that, not only do different boroughs have different conditions, but so do different schools within a borough.
The entry conditions of most state schools, including the new academies, depend primarily on distance from the school.  There are special conditions for children with special needs, but that’s a small minority.
Now, all of this raises a number of problems – or contributes to them, at least.
First is the fact that different schools have different entry conditions.  This applies in particular to the new academies.  Our closest, non-denominational, mixed-gender, state secondary, is Mossbourne, the much-cited flagship of the government’s new academies programme.  We live about 900 metres from it, according to Google Maps.  Close enough, you’d think.  But their admissions policy goes something like this:

 the first 10% if the year's intake goes to kids with special needs;
 next, you get priority if you have a sibling already at the school;
 about 60% of the remaining places go to the nearest kids within a 1km "inner zone";
 the rest go to kids outside the 1km zone, but not by simple  proximity; it now depends on how far away the  next-nearest non-denominational, mixed, state school is.

Confused?  Most parents who have kids going up were.  And it’s further complicated by the fact that there’s a test.  Not a pass -or-fail test, of course: this is still a comprehensive school, so there’s no selection by ability allowed.  Rather, this test is used to split the kids into ability bands.  The entry conditions then ensure that an equal proportion of kids from each band is offered a place.  This is to ensure that the school  has kids of a range of abilities; to ensure that it is truly comprehensive, if you will.
None of that is inherently bad: a school can’t take every kid, if more want in than it has places, so it has to have some conditions by which to decide which ones to take.  And ensuring that you take on kids with the full range of abilities is egalitarian and in keeping with the comprehensive principle.
The problem comes when the school is oversubscribed, and so is the next one in the area, and the next; and when they all have different entry criteria.
Such is the situation in our corner of Hackney.  Well, across Hackney as a whole, but we happen to be in one of the more problematic corners, since we’re right at the edge of the borough.  That wouldn’t matter if the Hackney schools gave priority to Hackney kids, but they don’t: their distance criteria are based on pure straight-line measurements, ignoring borough boundaries.
Again, that wouldn’t matter so much if all the other boroughs did the same.  But they don’t.  Our neighbours Tower Hamlets, for example, not only give priority to Tower Hamlets residents, they also have tied primary schools.  If your kid goes to one of these, then they are guaranteed a place in the associated secondary school, if they (you) want it.
But this is not intended to be a big bowl of sour grapes.  Our boy almost certainly won’t get into any of the Hackney schools, but he should get into the next-nearest one, which is just over the border into Waltham Forest.  And all of this may be moot, anyway.  But more of that later.
I referred in my title to “the myth of choice”, and I was careful to stress above that the application process allows parents and children to specify their preferences, rather than choices.  That’s because of what happens next, after the application process has come up with a school for your kid.
You get an offer.  One offer.  That’s it.  (Or maybe none, in which you have to run around frantically making further applications.)
It’s not like it was when I applied to university (and probably still is for university applications today).  There, you could apply to five (or was it six?) institutions using the UCCA (now UCAS) form.  They all assessed your application, and up to all of them made you an offer.  You could then choose among your offers and decide  which place would suit you best.
That was choice.  For secondary schools. despite what the government might tell you, there is no choice.  All you can do is state your preferences.
Our particular dilemma had another wrinkle, though.
See, he and some of his friends decided that they wanted to go to something called The Latymer School, in Edmonton.  I was surprised when I found out that this is a grammar school.  Now, some years ago I was surprised to discover that these things still exist in England.  I’m pretty sure that when the comprehensive system started in Scotland, it was done properly: we got rid of all the grammar schools and Secondary Moderns, as far as I understand it.  So as I say, it was a surprise when I realised they still had some in England.
But even then, I thought they were restricted to Kent and a few other places.  I had no idea there were any in London.
Still, there we were.  We weren’t about to forbid him to look at a particular school, despite our natural left-wing reaction to the idea of a selective school.  Perhaps of more concern is that he would be going out of the borough, with both a long journey to get there, and a less ethnically diverse mix than he’s used to from primary.
When it came time to stating our preferences, we let him have the final word.  Which is a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a ten-year-old, perhaps, but it’s better than pressuring him into going somewhere he’d rather not go, and driving him away from us.
One thing I can say: selection by ability is obviously better than selection by ability to pay.
And another: we’ll be incredibly proud of him wherever he goes.
He got through the first battery of tests, and took the second; and we’ve been waiting since then.  And tomorrow, we’ll know.



Matter, by Iain M Banks (Books 2008, 1)
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:24:22 +0000
So, the latest Banksie.  Always a treat, of course, and especially so when it's a novel of The Culture.  This one, though, is slightly disappointing.
It’s not actually bad – certainly not badly written (though he does overuse the phrases “appeared to be”, and “looked like”, when describing things; I was told off years ago (by Lisa Tuttle, no less) for  using “seemed” when describing something: “it either is, or it isn’t.”  I’ve been painfully aware of that word, and phrases that take its place, ever since).  It’s just not as good as we’ve come to expect, which is  a disappointment.
The main fault is that he describes too much of the scenery, to the point where it all starts to get a bit much.  He didn’t always do that, I don’t think.  Or maybe he did, but it was better executed, and so not so noticeable.
It’s the tale of some of the inhabitants of a level on a ShellWorld, and how they come into contact with The Culture, and why, and what follows.  All good stuff, with plenty of fabulous tech.
But you know what was the most annoying thing about it?  The cover.  It shows a human figure in silhouette, walking away from (or it could be toward) our PoV.  On the horizon a city is burning.  Overhead there are stars.  It’s not annoying because no scene remotely like it happens in the book (well, there is one scene a bit like it, but she isn’t on foot).
It’s annoying because of the shadows.
The figure’s shadow shoots out to its left, implying that there’s a strong light source to the right; a rising or setting star.  But the burning city is giving off  lot of light, too.  Enough, it seems to me, that she (if it is a she) should have a secondary shadow, also to her left, but coming towards our PoV.
It’s a small thing, I know, and I don’t usually comment on the covers of books, but I noticed it when I was about two-thirds of the way through, and it bugged me every time I looked at it thereafter.
Still, you know what they say about books and covers.



Eee!  PC.
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:33:36 +0000
My new Eee PC relaxes on the bed:

A photo of one of my recent technological acquisitions, as taken by the other.  It’s hard to take a photo of a new camera, unless you have another.  And since this Canon Powershot G9 is the first digital camera I’ve had…
Both of them are fabulous.  The Eee is finally an almost perfect replacement for the Psion 5 as mobile writing platform (much more powerful, but not as pocketable).  And I’m taking the camera everywhere and filling up hard drives with the results.  So expect to see more pictures appearing here.



Messing around with the blog
Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:58:30 +0000
I'm trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a  Wordpress Plugin called QuickPost .
Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr.  There are a number of flaws, though.  The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too simple.  I’m all for a clean, simple look, but this might have gone too far.
And the plugin doesn’t allow for a preview before posting (as well as not working properly with Flickr, though presumably that will be fixed in due course).
Edit: No, that won’t do at all.  One or other of them disabled comments and lost the title (even though “Allow Comments” is ticked, and the title appears, in the main editor.
I suppose the thinking is that, for something quick and dirty you don’t want comments or titles, but I do.  Even Tumblr has titles, if not comments.
Edit 2: Well, a bit of CSS hacking sorted that out.  But posting photos isn’t working at all as I would expect.  That may be to do with the fact that I’ve never really dealt with posting images before, though, rather than the plugin or theme.



Human rights and human gains
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:38:29 +0000
It is a tragedy that a member of the public, when interviewed on the radio, should say, when the phrase "human rights" comes up, "Oh, bloody hell, human rights, suffin fussin wussin mumble grumble," in a tone of disgust.
The subject being discussed was the call to ban this “Mosquito” device, which is intended to stop kids and teenagers from hanging around shops or elsewhere by emitting an annoying noise which is too high for older ears to hear.  But it could as easily have been the bugging of prisoner-lawyer conversations, or one of a dozen other triggers for what Dave Hill calls the seething classes.
Here’s the thing, people: human rights are a good thing.
I can’t quite believe I’m having to write that.  Again: human rights, and governments upholding them, are good.  An unequivocal good.  There’s no question here; we’re not in any kind of moral grey area.  Some things are as stark and as plain as the type and the paper on some of the entities I’m about to blame: treating people with equality before the law, with respect; acknowledging a basic set of rights to which every human being is entitled, and striving to make those rights available to everyone: these things are an unequivocal good.
Let me spell this out in words of one syllable:
That’s what our parents and grandparents fought the fucking war for!
OK, went a bit over my syllable count there.
It is just a few  years since the incoming Labour government passed the Human Rights Act, incorporating into UK law the European Convention on Human Rights; how has our country got to the position, since then, that “human rights” has become a swear word?
I blame the tabloids.  Specifically, I blame the right-wing, ranting, seething, whinging rags of the Daily Mail, and the Murdoch-owned scumsheets.  I blame big business and the CBI; I blame the petty little-Englander mentality of a disturbingly vocal minority of the citizens of our great, multicultural nation.
What is to be done about it?  How do we regain the natural state of the British psyche, where we stick up for the underdog, as well as have a respect for natural justice?  Or, if not  regain it (since it hasn’t really gone anywhere) at least make its voice audible again?  How are we to make the complainers tone down, or better, teach them, show them, that human rights are for  everybody (even the complainers), not just for the tiny minorities whose stories get wildly inflated in the tabloids; and that even those tiny minorities (where they actually exist) deserve the protection of those rights; and perhaps above all, that our society, our nation, is enriched and improved by our granting and acknowledging those rights?



McQualifications
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:44:24 +0000
I probably don't need anything more than the title for this one.  I mean, who the hell would ever think it was a good a idea to let McDonald's issue qualifications "equivalent to A-levels"?  I've nothing against on-the-job training, of course: that's a good thing.  And businesses sponsoring people to study for recognised qualifications, and so on: all good.
But letting businesses issue qualifications that have that equivalence?  I thought we were supposed to be worried about the devaluing of A-levels; it seems unlikely that allowing commercial interests to issue them (or their “equivalents”) will do anything other than further lower their value.
And I feel bound to say: would you like fries with your certificate, sir or madam?



A quote from Ken MacLeod with which to start the year
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:59:39 +0000

  Creation science is a purely destructive enterprise, like comment trolling or wiki vandalism. Its entire impact results from scrawling across the work of real scientists questions and cavils phrased in a manner just scientific-sounding enough to trouble anyone who knows nothing in detail about the field being traduced.

From the excellent Mr MacLeod.  Let’s start the year the way we mean to go on.


Nutters, "Emigration, Death, Regret and Substance Abuse"
Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:19:54 +0000
I see that Tony Blair has become a catholic.  No surprise there.  But as an ex-catholic atheist myself, I'm feeling down with Nick Clegg.
In other catholic-related news, there’s a fine analysis of ‘Fairytale of New York on the BBC website, after the Radio 1 farrago.  And I hadn’t realised that Shane McGowan’s birthday is Christmas Day.  So as well as Newtonmas, we can also celebrate McGowanmas on Tuesday.
Rationalism and excess: what a fine seasonal combination.



Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis (Books 2007, 7)
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:05:00 +0000
I hadn't read any Amis before (either of them), but I've wanted to try Kingsley for a while; mainly for his SF connections, but when I saw this in a second-hand bookshop I thought it might be a good place to start.
This one isn’t SF, of course.  Instead, it’s described as a “comic novel”.
I have to say that I found very little in it to laugh at.
Oh, the odd chortle, or wry grin, certainly; in particular there is a description of a hangover that has been quoted often enough that I recognised it in its entirety.
But our national sense of humour must have changed since 1954, or something.  Not to mention a great deal more about our society and the way we interact.  At times in this novel I found it harder to understand the motivations of the characters than of the  most alien of characters in SF (well, ok, not to the extent of ‘The Dance of the Changer and the Three’, say, but anything less than that).
That’s no bad thing, but since it wasn’t the intent of the author, that sense of confusion or dislocation can leave you feeling lost.  This is quite different from the effect you can get in good SF, where you’re thrown in at the deep end, not quite knowing what’s going on.  There, you just hang on and enjoy the ride, trusting in the knowledge that it’ll become clear in time.
In this case there’s no hope of an explanation, because Amis didn’t realise that the behaviour of his sexually stilted 1950s academics would be quite so opaque and mysterious to a reader in the zero-years of the 21st century (why didn’t they just go to bed, already?)
Still, as a gentle rom-com, it wasn’t too bad.



Cheerleader Saved, World Saved...
Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:19:11 +0000
... for now, at least
(What, you think that’s a spoiler?  You saw the future world when Sylar had healing powers: obviously that one wasn’t going to come true).
You know, some things shouldn’t have a second series.  They are perfect bite-sized little vignettes as they are (OK, pretty big bites, and not so much of the “ette”, in this case).  Their story is told, and while it may not have a tidy conclusion to every thread, it has at least reached a satisfying point at which to stop; there are no downright cliffhangers left.
And that’s like life: there are no beginnings, no endings; not really.  Only a continuing narrative that we pay more or less attention to; and that we eventually have to stop reading (or writing), and put away forever (which last fact is intensely annoying, and the sooner we can edit it out of our reality, the better).
I’m sad that Heroes is over; but in a way I’m sadder that it’s going to go on.  Because there will be inevitable deterioration – I read recently that Tim Kring has apologised about the quality of some Season 2 eps (oh, there are a few mild spoilers for Season 2 at that link; or not so mild, depending on how you feel about them) – there will be shark-jumping.  And eventually it may fall to the lowest common denominator of all serial drama: soap opera.
I’m looking at you, Desperate Housewives.
And things that should go on, that need to go on, don’t get to.  One of these days – and it must be soon, I think – Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip is going to finish, and then it’ll be gone forever, irrespective of what plot threads are dangling.  Bummer.
I fully support the WGA writers' strike, by the way.



Here's Tae Us
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:48:53 +0000
I just heard John Bell of the Iona Community on 'Thought for the Day'.  He was talking, since it's St Andrew's day, about the old Scottish saying, or toast, "Here's tae us, wha's like us?  Damn few, and they're a' deid."  That's, "Here's to us, who's like us?  Damn few, and they're all dead," in case you have trouble with Scots.
Thing is, Bell was bemoaning the attitude he thinks it represents.  He thinks it means, “The only people we can emulate are dead.”  He thinks it epitomises a ‘national inferiority complex.’
That’s not how I ever understood it.
Rather than looking back wistfully on past glories, to me it was triumphal, celebratory, even arrogant, if you need a negative adjective.  It said – it says – “We’re here, and we’re great; there’s no-one like us.”
So happy St Andrew’s day: we rock.



The Scar, by China Miéville (Books 2007, 6)
Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:23:15 +0000
.A mindfucking mindfuck of all mindfucks.  A great, big, sprawling book, and yet one which can have a curious sense of claustrophobia at times.
That’s because nearly all the action takes place on the floating city of Armada.  It’s a big floating city, but it is, nonetheless, essentially a big ship, in the middle of a great ocean, and there’s nowhere for the characters to go.
What they do while stuck there, is where the fun lies.
While I was reading this, my beloved got our son a copy of China’s first book “for younger readers”, Un Lun Dun.  He finished it over a long  weekend’s trip to Cornwall, and I read the review of it in that Saturday’s Guardian (yes, we buy our kids books in their week of release, why do you ask? Like much of the country, we did the same in July (though to be fair, that wasn’t just for the kids.))
The review ended with a statement of the old canard about SF&F having no characters, “and that’s why some readers like them”, to paraphrase.  And while that’s kind of insulting (and not even true for  Un Lun Dun), there is some truth in it.  But then, that’s not what we’re here for: you don’t come to a book like this to read about the inner turmoil of a North London writer (I can get that by not reading.  OK, East rather than North, and would-be, but still.)  You read books like this to take you somewhere else; to experience something other; to see something you can’t see down your street.
And you certainly get your money’s worth with this one.



What Exactly Does it Mean to Book a Train Ticket, Anyway?
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:59:35 +0000
I had a slightly weird experience with train bookings a while back.  Twice I've booked tickets via The Trainline between London and Glasgow (once on my own, once for the whole family).  On both cases the tickets arrived with the legend "No Seat" printed in the spaces for the seat details.  In both cases I phoned the company and was able to arrange seats (with greater or lesser difficulty and need to switch services)
But the weirdness to my mind is that on The Trainline’s website, you have to select specific trains when you’re booking (even if the ticket you are buying is flexible enough that you can travel on a different service in the end).  So you’re always “booking” a particular train; but not, automatically, booking a seat.  What, exactly, does it mean to do that?
I mean, let’s assume that all seats on the train are full when you get on, as they usually are on routes like London to Glasgow; is there a particular circle of floor space that is yours?  You have a booking on that service, after all: it must mean something.
I recall, years ago, when I used to travel up and down these lines a lot, that there were a lot of services, especially at weekend peak times, on which seat bookings were “mandatory”.  There were still people without bookings who got on and crammed in between the carriages, so I’m not entirely sure what that meant, either.  But at least it meant that when you booked a ticket (at a station or a travel agent: no web in those days), you also booked a seat.
And having booked it, you nearly always got it; British Rail had its problems, but incompatible systems between the booking agents and the different train operating companies wasn’t one of them, as it seems to be now.  The Trainline’s other strangeness was that, after phoning to add the seat bookings, I was sent the details for the outgoing service (on Virgin Trains), but not those for the return (on GNER).  When that happened on the first of those trips, I assumed it was a mistake, so I mentioned it when I phoned for the second one.  I was told that it was unavoidable because GNER use a different system, and they (The Trainline) were only able to book on paper (and then, what, post the details to GNER?)
I blame the Tories, of course: privatisation was always an appalling idea.



A New Low For Cattle Class
Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:02:16 +0000
I flew up to Scotland the other weekend, by RyanAir.  On the way back the plane was a 737-800.  It was the same kind of plane as on the flight up, but the inside was dramatically different.
Flying north we had standard velour-covered (or whatever you’d call it: fuzzy cloth) seats, and standard seat-back pockets  made of criss-crossed bungee cord.
But southbound we had nasty vinyl-covered seats.  Vinyl!  Who’d have thought you could still cover seats in such a thing?  It looked like the inside of a 1970s Vauxhall Viva!
Worse than that, though: there were no seat-back pockets at all!  None!
This arrangement means that the little bits and pieces you want to have to hand – bottle of water, MP3 player, book or magazine, notebook – all have to go on the floor under the seat in front when you’re not holding them.
As well as being inconvenient, those things on the floor all now constitute an added safety risk: if there was some kind of problem before takeoff or after landing, they’d all be sliding about, just perfect for people to trip over or slip on.
So, reduced comfort, convenience and safety.  Nice one, RyanAir.



A Bridge Not Far Enough
Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:51:27 +0000
Spoilers ahead.
I watched Bridge to Terabithia last weekend.  It is probably the saddest film I’ve ever seen, and despite all the plaudits it has received, it has at its core, I think, a heart of darkness.  It is not a bad film, but it has a dark soul.
I came to the film cold.  I’ve not read the book; indeed, I’d never even heard of it when the film came out.  The book is described in terms of being ‘much-loved’ and a ‘classic’.  It was published in 1977, when I was 12 or 13.  So I expect I missed it because I was ‘too old’ for children’s books, and not yet old enough again for them.  And I had other concerns in that year.
So all I knew about it was the ‘from the creators of Narnia’ tag line, a quick read of the blurb, and the fact that my daughter (6) was interested in it.
As the early scenes unfolded I realised that that I had read a review of it, though.  All that I recalled was a complaint to the effect that in the book, the girl was supposed to be plain, even boyish-looking, while in the film she was Hollywood-pretty (if dressed a little unconventionally compared to her schoolmates).
I think that review explains why my opinion of the film differs so significantly from that of most reviewers: they all seem to have read the book.  Inevitably they review the film in comparison to it, and fuelled by their knowledge of the plot.
So they can describe it as ‘bittersweet’, as having an ‘uplifting’ ending; even as ‘transcendent’ (I think that last came from one of the mini-documentaries on the DVD).  Because as they watched, they knew what was coming.
I’ve often thought that some films – the later Harry Potter ones are particular examples – must be all but incoherent to anyone who hasn’t first read the book on which they are based.  The Potters can get away with it, because so many have read the books first.  But in general a film – or any adaptation from one medium to another – must work on its own.  It is a separate, new creation, and has to stand or fall as such.
In one sense at least, Terabithia fails on this account.
The trouble is not lack of coherence; rather it is excess of impact, and lack of recovery time.  There is certainly some foreshadowing: it is plain that something bad is going to happen.  But the  tragedy when it comes – and make no mistake, the story is a tragedy – is too deep, too dark, too sudden.  Yes, true, that’s how it would be in real life; and I’m not suggesting that movie viewers, including children, should be completely protected from darkness, tragedy or loss.  But here, suddenly, shatteringly, we are no longer watching the film that we thought we were.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.  But the film’s fatal flaw – or at least the cause of its failure to achieve the uplift suggested by reviewers – comes after the plunge into darkness.
It is the lack of recovery time, and the content of what time there is.  Yes, a significant amount of time for the characters is compressed into a few swiftly-edited scenes.  Perhaps enough time is represented for the boy, Jess, to come to terms with his loss, or at least to begin to do so.  But it is not enough time for us to do so.
And perhaps because the fantasy elements were (rightly) understated earlier on, we have what feels like a tacked-on fantasy ending.  And it’s not even the tacked-on fantasy ending we might want.  Me, I’d have liked Jess, the talented artist, to to have ripped out the page of the film’s continuity, said, “No!” and sketched a new one.
That, of course, would have made for a saccharine ending, like the false ending in Brazil, or the original cut of Blade Runner.  It would have been deemed a mistake (not least because of differing from the book), or at least have been very hard to make work.  It would have betrayed the story.
But the ending that we do have betrays the story too, I think, in a different way.  The descent (ascent?) into fantasy may show that Jess had become closer to his little sister; but it writes Leslie out of his memories of Terabithia.  It ceases to be their magical place, and therefore fails to honour her memory.
Of course it is all to help him to come to terms with his loss; but as his Dad tells him, it’s by remembering what was special about her that he can keep her alive.
Above all, though, it all happens too quickly: maybe we, the viewers, could have had just a little more time?
I can only assume that the book does, in fact, provide a more gentle exit for its readers, for it to be so popular.  Though of course, you can take a book at your own pace.
Yet despite – or more likely, because of – all of the above, it’s a film that will stay with me for a long time; that I’ll probably watch again; and whose source-book I’ll certainly seek out.



The Return Of Some Futurists From The Past
Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:32:00 +0000
It seems that The Rezillos, mighty purveyors of sci-fi (I use the term deliberately, and very carefully) pop-punk reformed somewhere along the line.  And they're playing right here in London on Saturday.  At the Carling Academy in Islington, to be precise.
Seeing them live after all this time would be particularly fine, as I know them best through their second and final album, Mission Accomplished… But The Beat Goes On, which is a live album.
It was recorded at the Glasgow Apollo, which is now, sadly, long-demolished.  But before all that, it was where I went to my first couple of gigs.
I don’t really do all the recent wave of reforming bands (I didn’t even go to see the Velvet Underground when they reformed, which I regret (but I’d been burned by one of Lou’s solo performances)), but I think I might make an exception in this case.
That said, I’ve just remembered that we’re invited to a party that night, and there are two other gigs on that evening that I’d like to go to (Patti Smith and Richard Thompson).  Damn.
Still, the party is in Islington too, so maybe something can be arranged.



The Prestige, by Christopher Priest (Books 2007, 5)
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:16:33 +0000
The most annoying thing about The Prestige is the way it ends; though I can see that there was no real reason to continue it after that point.  The story is told, all that can reasonably  be revealed is revealed (without going into preposterous and unnecessary details).
The book is finished; the tale (which, as I’m sure you know, is about Victorian magicians, and Nikola Tesla) is told.
And yet I still thought, as I reached the last page, “Aw, I want more!”  like a kid that wants another bedtime story.
Which is no bad thing, it’s fair to say.  Better, as a writer (or almost anything else) to leave them wanting more than to outstay your welcome.
And with that thought in mind, I’ll just say: highly recommended.  I’m out.



The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks (Books 2007, 4)
Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:37:50 +0000
It's not The Crow Road, but then, what is?
In my opinion, the quality of Banksie’s non-SF work rose in shallow, slightly wiggly, climb from a high start, to a “can do no wrong” plateau that includes The Bridge, Espedair Street and Complicity, as well as the aforementioned.  Thereafter it dropped a bit (but who can blame him, after that lot?)  But it never got bad.  (His SF took a different trajectory, and as far as I can tell, it’s still climbing.)
So what of this book?  It’s a family drama, I suppose you’d say, with a mystery at its heart.  Not a “whodunit”, so much as “what got done?”
Slipping into Banksie’s world is like pulling on an old, comfy jumper; or maybe a favourite leather jacket would be more appropriate.  So we get recognisable characters, dialogue that you could hear in any pub or home in Scotland, and just a touch of mystery.
The main problem, perhaps, is that there’s no great threat over the characters (they might decide to sell the family games business to a big American company, and some of them are against that happening).  So we don’t have any real sense of potential doom.  Still, though, finding the answer to the mystery is fun enough, and it’s a compelling enough read that I got through it in a couple of days.
In a book like this, the pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.



Rock and No Roll
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:49:01 +0000
The people who are queuing outside branches of Northern Rock are fooling themselves, and if anything are likely to trigger the problem they fear.
I must admit that, if you had asked me a few days ago, I would probably have said that I thought that the Bank of England already backed the banks to the extent of protecting people’s deposits.  Naive of me, perhaps; but after the Bank extended its line of credit to Northern Rock, and particularly since last night’s guarantee by the Chancellor, that their money will be covered by the government, it’s clear to an uninvolved bystander that they’d be better off staying at home and waiting.  If the government can’t cover anything that might happen to NR, then we’ve got a much more serious problem than one wobbly bank on our hands.
Like the collapse of the pound.
And it would take the euro down with it; and probably the US dollar, and hence the world economy.
I’m not an economist, and you can call me complacent; but that’s not going to happen.
So leave the queues, people, and go on home (if you’ve got that much in savings, you obviously don’t have to go to work).  And next time, remember that proverb about eggs and baskets.



A quote from Charlie Brooker
Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:26:57 +0000
Charlie Brooker's screen burn | The Guide | Guardian Unlimited
'Spirituality' is what cretins have in place of imagination.


The only 'Transformer' I really like is an album by Lou Reed
Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:36:30 +0000
Took the kids to see the Transformers movie tonight.  It's not a franchise that I grew up with, of course, but my two older nephews were into them when they were kids, and so I was aware of them even before my son started watching the more recent cartoons a few years ago.
But I gather that there is a whole generation of twenty-somethings – maybe even thirty-somethings – who went to see the movie with a sense of worry, even trepidation, that it would stamp a great big metal foot all over their memories.  And I gather that, largely, for them, it did not.  I had heard quite good things about it (or I thought I had); and the trailer looked great.
So I was mostly disappointed.  I didn’t hate it all the way through; nothing as extreme as that.  I was just disappointed at how weak and overlong it was; and mainly by the American-military porn.  A great deal of it was showing the fantasticness and coolness of American military technology.  I’m not sure that’s really what I want to see in a film I take my kids to (though as it also revealed that all human technology came from reverse-engineering the frozen Megatron, they may have been sending mixed signals).
Also, since it starts with a US military base in the Middle East being attacked (by a giant alien fighting robot, and in Qatar, admittedly, but still), you might reasonably expect there to be some political point.  But there wasn’t.
Unless, perhaps, it was this.  The grunts (actually Special Forces, so I’m not sure we should call them grunts) were shown as cool, professional, skillful and competent.  The secret government agency in charge of crashed alien artifacts, and the FBI, were shown as feeble, useless and pathetic; easily outwitted by a couple of teenagers and, err, a group of giant alien fighting robots.  So, soldiers good, government bad, or something.
Also, one bit that really surprised me was when Megatron and Optimus Prime were fighting: Megatron turned into a plane, Optimus Prime grabbed him, and together they crashed into the side of a tower block and slo-mo’d all the way through it and out the other side.  9/11 can’t be as raw a wound in the American psyche as I had thought.
We could have done without the whole teen romance thing, but it’s an American summer blockbuster, so what can you expect?  And we could have done without at least half an hour of the start.
It’s also incredibly visually noisy, and the Transformers themselves, especially the Decepticons (the baddies) are so similar when they’re in robot mode that it was really hard to tell what was going on at times.
But then, what was going on didn’t really matter that much.
The kids enjoyed it though, and it was a nice treat to end the summer holidays with; but since we started them with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and middled them with The Simpsons, I don’t think it really stands up.
Still, it’s definitely been ‘The Summer of Film’, as they were calling it in the trailers a while back.



Ink, by Hal Duncan (Books 2007, 3)
Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:12:57 +0000
So, The Book of All Hours is finished. And fine, fine stuff it is, too. This volume seems somehow more polished than the first , but perhaps not as exciting, as startling.
The story is brought to a conclusion of sorts, but as you might expect, it’s ambiguous, open to interpretation. This is, of course, not a bad thing: in fact, I thoroughly approve.
I’m not, though, going to try to give any details of it, or to explain what it ls about; just read it: it’s great.



Twenty Years of Foolin' and They Put You in the Pub
Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:16:51 +0000
At the end of Potter Week we joined the queue in Borders in Islington at about twenty to eleven; we got served at about 1am (and bought a lot more than just two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I might say, thereby justifying notions of the reduced prices as loss-leaders).
On the Saturday there was a picnic-party for some friends who are leaving Hackney, as well as much packing of the car. Then at stupid o’clock on the Sunday morning we headed off to Dover for a ferry to France, and two weeks camping in Brittany. My son finished the book on the journey; about 37 hours after its release. I took a couple of days more, and then read it again straight away. Which is something that I don’t think I’ve ever done before. This is not necessarily because it was so great, but more because I read it so fast the first time. Rowling is a great plotter, so sometimes the pages turn too fast.
Also, I’ll be honest, I kind of didn’t want it all to be over.
The holiday was great. Mixed weather, of course, but no worse than here, I think
Then after a week back at work I find myself hitting an important anniversary: Today I’ve have been in this job for twenty years. Twenty years! It’s hard to credit. I feel like a poster boy for the phrase, “Where did the time go?”
Not only is it the same job, it’s my first job. The company name has changed several times due to takeovers, but it’s the same place, and quite a lot of the same people. It’s been good, on the whole, or I wouldn’t have stayed. But I’m beginning to wonder whether it might be time for a change.
Tonight, though, I’ll be in the pub. On the roof terrace, if the weather holds.



We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver (Books 2007, 2)
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:39:25 +0000
Wow. This is an amazing piece of work. The mother of a high-school killer writes letters to her husband, describing Kevin's life as she experienced it. I can't write a lot about it without getting heavy on the spoilers, but I will just say this.
When I was a few pages in I was getting a strong sense of this absence of a voice: the husband was not to be heard. But then I thought two things. First, all epistolary novels are like that to some extent; though it is possible for the letter-writer to refer to things their correspondent has written in return.
Second, it occurred to me that Shriver, by excluding the man’s voice, might have been making a point about the relative exclusion of women’s voices in literature. In other words, the way I was feeling might be akin to how Jean Rhys must have felt when she read Jane Eyre.
I don’t, now, think that she was particularly trying to do that, though the effect of the early chapters is still there.
I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers, except: highly recommended.



Potter Week
Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:54:13 +0000
OK, I declare this the start of Potter Week.  I'm just on my way to Stratford, where we'll eat at Pizza Express, before going to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Then this time next week we’ll be getting ready to head out to a bookshop for a midnight launch party for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
It is a time steeped in magic.



Son of a Preacher Man
Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:19:33 +0000
So, Tony has gone, and now Gordon is with us. How will things change? We don't know, of course; but we can hope.
And it’s only fair to pay tribute to Blair’s accomplishments; for they are many, and many of them are good. Unfortunately, there are many that are not.
Hmmm, have I said all this before? Yeah, well I guess I have.
Curiously (as you may think), it’s never been Iraq that really got to me. Iraq was a mistake: a big, very stupid one; but perhaps a genuine one. By which I mean that even Blair (as well as Parliament) may have been misled by the dodgy dossier; and certainly by the curious mystique or glamour that he seems to see around Bush.
But of course, it’s the assaults on civil liberties at home, and the support for the US’s torture regime, that really blew it for me.
Oh well, Northern Ireland turned out well, there’s still the Human Rights Act, the age of consent was equalised for gays (and Section 28 repealed), and so on.
Things got better; and worse as well. What’s next depends on the Son of a Preacher Man.



Redemption Song: the Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer, by Chris Salewicz (Books 2007, 1)
Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:36:47 +0000
Ah, Joe. I can hardly believe that it's already four years since we lost him. I started reading this on Christmas day, and finished at about two in the morning on the 14th of January: exactly three weeks later. If I read a book every three weeks that would be seventeen in a year, which isn't very many. Anyway, during that time I completely immersed myself in Strummeriana; as well as reading the book I listened to little music other than The Clash or Joe's solo stuff, and I also put my bit in on the various Wikipedia articles.
And none if it can make up for the fact that he’s gone.
In fact, reading the book only makes it worse: it reinforces the sense of what we’ve lost. He was on a great creative upswing when he died, as the the posthumous Streetcore album showed. Its opening track, ‘Coma Girl’ (which, we learn, is about his daughter Lola) was the single best song he wrote since ‘Trash City’, at least.
Alas, we’ll never hear anything new from him again.
Or at least, not truly new: it seems from reading the book that there might be quite a few unreleased recordings out there, and he worked on more film soundtracks than I knew about.
Most interestingly of all, perhaps, is this piece of information. Around the time that Joe and the Mescaleros were writing and recording Global A Go-Go, the second of the comeback albums after the wilderness years, he also sent a set of lyrics to Mick Jones. He seemed to be suggesting that he was considering an alternative to the Mescaleros album. Mick wrote tunes for them and sent them back, but heard no more about it. Some time later, after Global A Go-Go had been released, Mick asked what had happened to the songs. Joe said, “Those weren’t for Global A Go-Go; those were the next Clash album.”
There’s no suggestion that he ever recorded any of them; but you never know: one day Mick might, when he’s not too busy with Carbon/Silicon.
What of the book itself, though? Well, it’s certainly compelling reading (at least if you’re a fan like me). It is flawed in some ways, of course. It can be hard to follow the early sections about Joe’s family, without an actual family tree to clarify things, though that’s not a big problem.
Despite its size and comprehensive nature, there are parts that come across as too anecdotal and perhaps incomplete. Certainly there are places where I would have liked to have a lot more detail. But a book this size could be written about The Clash alone (several have, of course, but perhaps none quite the size of this one).
Still, it’s totally a must-have for any Clash fan, or solo Joe fan (can you be the latter but not the former?)
I wonder what it would have been like if The Clash had kept going and had become like U2 (who were heavily inspired by them)? In a good sense: I listened to an interview with Salewicz, where he pointed out that, though Joe didn’t like the distance from the audience at stadium gigs, he was very good at handling them. So imagine them doing something like the Zoo TV tour (indeed, when I saw footage of that, all the TVs as backdrop reminded me instantly of the Clash Mk II ‘Out of Control’ tour).



The Last of the 2006 "Book Notes" Posts
Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:53:07 +0000
Nearly halfway through the year and I haven't finished posting last year's Book Notes? Shocking. Oh well, here are the last few in one bunch.
26: The Terminal Zone, by Andrew J Wilson
My friend Andrew wrote this play back in 1993 or so, and produced it at the Edinburgh Fringe. It has now been published as a chapbook by Writers' Bloc, the spoken-word performance group that grew out of the East Coast SF Writers' group.
In it, Rod Serling, the writer and presenter of The Twilight Zone, appears; or rather, two sides of his personality appear, performed by two actors, and indulge in a dialogue. This is the story, you might say, of Rod Serling talking to himself.
27: Dicks and Deedees, by Jaime Hernandez
A collection of Love and Rockets stories by Jaime. I haven’t read any of these for years, but all our favourites are here: Maggie and Hopey, of course, and Penny Century, and HR Costigan, whose story reaches a conclusion of sorts.
His storytelling technique can make it hard sometimes, to tell where we are chronologically: he’ll tell the history of years in a character’s life in the space of half a dozen or a dozen panels, with nothing other than the pictures and dialogue to indicate that the time has changed. And yet somehow you can work out what is happening, and over what period.
The artwork is gorgeous in its simplicity, of course, and he always has moving stories to tell.
28: Tamara Drewe, by Posy Simmonds
This graphic novel was published in weekly installments in the Saturday issue of The Guardian over a year or so. Actually, most weeks there were two episodes.
I’m told that it’s based on, or at least strongly inspired by, Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy; he is one of my unfortunate missing authors, so I can’t comment on that myself. I can say, however, that it’s a great story, very moving, and a fine way of bringing graphic fiction to the mainstream reader (not that this is the first time The Guardian has done this: they published Posy’s Gemma Bovary a few years ago).
If you missed it, you can probably still read (at least some of) it on the website (though personally I find that unsatisfying because of the image quality). But I expect it’ll be out in paperback by now (in fact, I was surprised they didn’t get it out in time for Christmas).
29: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
This is an absolute stormer of a book. A family drama, of sorts, set across thirty years and three billion years simultaneously.
The time is about now, and one night (in North America, at least), the stars go out. And the planets and the moon. But not the sun.
The Earth has been enclosed, by an entity or entities unknown (or is it a natural phenomenon?) in a membrane that closes off the outside universe, while allowing enough sunlight through for the ecosystem to function normally. Inside the membrane, time is slowed down, so that outside it the universe appears to spin on at a vastly accelerated rate.
But it’s really all about relationships. Highly recommended.


Guardian: "Straw signals rethink on ID cards"
Fri, 11 May 2007 15:04:38 +0000
Well, well, well. Maybe things will get better after all:

Jack Straw, widely expected to replace John Reid as the home secretary, today clearly signalled that the future of the national identity card scheme would be in the melting pot when Gordon Brown becomes prime minister next month.
Mr Straw - who is Mr Brown’s leadership campaign manager and has a long record of cabinet opposition to a compulsory ID card system - indicated that the future of the £5.75bn project would be under review in the new government

The future’s bright; the future’s Brown, maybe?


New Dawn Fades
Fri, 11 May 2007 13:24:48 +0000
So there we have it: Tony will soon be gone. I had forgotten some of the good things: the minimum wage; civil partnerships (though why not for het couples?); the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly; the London Mayor and Assembly; Northern Ireland, of course. Even the hunting and smoking bans.
But Iraq; the dodgy dossier; detention without trial; ID cards; ASBOs; and so on and on.
“You’re a well-respected man, but bullshit! You could’ve been great,” as The Waterboys once put it. Actually I wouldn’t describe Blair as “well-respected”, so that doesn’t really work.
Should the government go to the country when the party leader steps down? Many think so, but actually, I largely don’t. In theory we live in a representative democracy. Citizens vote for a representative for their local area, and the party with the most seats forms a government. If the leader retires - or even is kicked out, though that does put a different complexion on things - that doesn’t change the position in parliament. And changing the leader does not necessarily mean a change of government.
On the other hand, calling an election wouldn’t be a bad thing for the country, except for one problem: we’d probably end up with a Tory government.
Though it shows how bad things have got when I find myself thinking that maybe a Tory government, if they would scrap ID cards, wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Now that’s a worrying thought.



Ten Years in an Open-necked Shirt
Tue, 01 May 2007 07:56:49 +0000
He could have been great, you know.
We could be sitting here now, raising a glass to the end of the reign of Britain’s greatest Prime Minister of the (loosely-bounded) century, if not ever.  It wouldn’t have been hard.  Look at the two before him: after they had finished their slash-and-burn attack on the economy and the welfare state, all he’d have had to do was put it back together, and things would have got better
And they did do some good; some things did get better.  I’ve spoken before about my approval of the Human Rights Act, and despite its current problems, the NHS is, on the whole, in a better state than it was.  And the economy has seen a kind and duration of stability that you just don’t get under the Tories (never trust a right-winger with your economy: they’re all about  “invisible hands”, and they just don’t know how to run it properly; just look at the way Bush threw away the trillions that Clinton left him).
And the Africa thing.  A real attempt at ending poverty in Africa.  Now that would have been a legacy worth having.
But here we are, now.  He’s squandered all the goodwill he had ten years ago, taken the country into an illegal war, and taken massively Orwellian steps towards the reduction of civil liberties.  In years to come, when you search the net for the phrase “power corrupts”, you’ll find a picture of Tony Blair.
Don’t bang the door on your way out, Tony, and goodbye.
[tags]politics, tony blair, legacy, irag illegal war, id cards, power corrupts, new labour, things can only get better, 1997[/tags]



Diplomacy 101, and Cash for Stories
Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:55:58 +0000
Sometimes I write these things and don’t post them immediately, and then they seem wildly out of date.  But it’s still worth putting them out there.  Blogging doesn’t have to be completely reactive.  Sometimes it should take the longer-term, contemplative view.  So I offer this.
It seems obvious to me that, if your navy personnel are captured by the forces of a foreign power, in peacetime, and accused of being in the foreign power’s waters, then what you should do is as follows:

You say, “Oops, sorry.  Didn’t mean to have them off station; didn’t think they were, actually, but if they were, we’re sorry.”  Even, and let me make this quite clear, if you know perfectly well that they weren’t in the other power’s territory.
That, it seems to me, would be the diplomatic thing to do
So why did they not do that?  My best guess is that they – the British government – were worried about losing face.
‘Losing face.’  It’s a strange thing for the government of what is still a fairly major world power to be worrying about, isn’t it?  After all, it’s not as if making such a guarded admission and apology would actually have done Britain any harm, would it?
And it might have got the captured service people home a few days earlier – and without being humiliated on TV – you never know.  Perhaps, even, the Iranian government would have apologised in their turn, and admitted that they might have made a mistake.
That last seems almost likely, given that they did appear to concede quite graciously in the end.  But what do I know?  I’m neither diplomat nor politician, and there might be some way in which doing what I suggested right from the start would have been political suicide.  And obviously things will have been going on in the background of which we know nothing.  But still…
And then they get home and tell their stories.  I seem to be the only person in the country who thinks like this, but I see no reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to profit from doing so.  Somebody is going to profit from the stories being told, so why shouldn’t it be the ones to whom they happened?
Sure, if it’s against the rules of the service, then that’s the deal they signed up for.  But since the Ministry of Defence authorised it, then at the very least, I  don’t see how you can blame the sailors.
I speak as someone who likes to write; so if I imagine myself into a situation like that, I know I would want to write my story once I had escaped.  And if I could go on to sell it for professional publication, then you’re damn right I would want to do so.  Why not?
The reported reactions of some of the families of service personnel who have died in Iraq is, to my mind, a red herring.  There’s no direct comparison.  As far as I know, there’s nothing to stop those families from writing, telling, or selling their own stories, or those of their lost ones.  If they choose not to, that’s fine.  But the two situations are quite different.



Book Notes 25: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross
Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:53:24 +0000
Charlie shows that he can write heroic fantasy as well as everything else.  Except, of course, it isn't really fantasy.  When your hero discovers she can switch at will (or "world walk") between the "real" world (present-day America) and an alternative world  (geographically similar, inhabited, but never had industrialisation) then what you are dealing with seems a lot more like SF to me.
Of course, the alternative world works on a feudal system, and weapons are mediaeval (apart from ones that have been carried over from “our” world).  So it has some of the tropes of fantasy, and more may develop.  But it looks like there won’t be any magic other than the world-walking ability.
The main fault with it is that it shows its history as the first part of a much longer book which the publishers decided should be split in two.  So just as it’s starting to get really interesting, it ends.
Oh well, I look forward to reading the second part, and its sequels.


Alias Doc and Martha
Sat, 31 Mar 2007 19:07:10 +0000
The new __Doctor Who__ episode was butt-kicking excellence!  And Martha is a worthy successor to Rose.
Just replacing the sonic screwdriver like that was a bit of a copout, mind: given that it got destroyed, I thought that they might try to make something of him _not_ having it.
Still, that’s a very minor nitpick; it was much better than the start of the previous series (also set in a hospital, curiously).
A really strong start.
Updated to say: I’m guessing that the “Vote Saxon” poster is the first reference to whatever this season’s “Bad Wolf” may be.
Unless it’s just a reference to a dodgy heavy metal band.
[tags]Doctor Who, tv, sf[/tags]



Straight to Elgin Avenue
Fri, 16 Mar 2007 13:17:05 +0000
So I ordered the new Banksie from Amazon, and to get free delivery, of course, I had to order one or two other things, to bring the price up to the threshold. I tend to have a number of things queued up to buy when the time is right, so I selected some things from that list.
All three items I chose are things that I meant to get at the time they came out, but didn’t, for one reason or another. The book was Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, which I’ve meant to get since I read the reviews when it came out. I’m not sure why I never bought it (actually I did buy it once, but that was to give to a friend who had a particular interest in stage magic).
Anyway, my interest was recently rekindled because of the film coming out, of course. I may want to watch it one day, and I’m not going to read or not read something on the reported say-so of some film director. I can’t find a reference for that: the director is supposed to have said, “Don’t read the book before you see the film.” Though I suppose that I will, in effect, be doing exactly that – in a contrary way – by insisting on reading the book before seeing the film. Whatever: books come first.
But I didn’t bring you here to talk about books, for a change. No, this time it’s music. Because I also got two CDs from Amazon.
Regular readers might not be surprised to hear that I’m a huge fan of the late, and sadly missed,Joe Strummer. As such, I want to get a hold of anything he released that I don’t yet have. Now, during his so-called “wilderness years”, Joe did a lot of soundtrack work. I’ve got most of that on record, but I never got round to getting the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell. I recall hearing a borrowed copy in ‘87 or so, and enjoying it, but not being overwhelmed by it. The one track I remembered was ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’, by The Pogues, more of which later.
In the intervening years, I mostly forgot about the album. Once in a while I might have poked around a second-hand record shop, but it was low on my list of priorities. Recently, though, I discovered that it had been reissued, revised and expanded. Into my “buy later” list it went, until the other day.
As well, I discovered it was possible to jump back to an earlier part of Joe’s career, namely his pre-Clash band, the 101ers. Elgin Avenue Breakdown was originally released back in 19-something-or-other. At the time I was mildly interested, but saw no need to rush out and buy it. I had the ‘Keys to your Heart’ single, and it was OK, but nowhere near as good as the heights of The Clash. And Joe was still around, and we could expect new music from him in the future.
We are in that future now, of course, and we don’t have Joe anymore. So buying the 101ers’ album is a way to hear him again.
And a damn fine album it is. Straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll, jam-packed with bounce, verve and excitement. What it doesn’t have is the political sensibilities of The Clash. Or actually, it does have the first vestiges of them; and indeed, the first vestiges of The Clash’s excellent ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ (the B-side of ‘Clash City Rockers¹'), in the form of ‘Lonely Mothers Son’. And I’m sure that title should have an apostrophe in it, but I’m not sure where.
And the Straight to Hell soundtrack? It’s great. It’s mostly film music, of course: largely instrumentals. There are selections by Elvis Costello and Pray for Rain, as well as by The Pogues and Joe. Among the proper songs are one by Joe called ‘Evil Darling’, which is OK, and the original version of ‘If I Should Fall from Grace With God’, which The Pogues wrote during filming, apparently. Then there’s a version of ‘Danny Boy’, by the cast, led by Cait O’Riordan, and the album ends with ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’.
It’s hard to express how good that song is. From the opening guitar riff, through Shane’s crazed-gunman-death-worshipper lyrics, to the shouldn’t-work-but-does device of the verse and chorus being exactly the same tune, it struts into your ears and rips your head apart. In a good way. I’ve hardly had it off repeat on my MP3 player since I got it.
Go and buy it. Now.





In googling to check that I had the right A-side (how crap is my memory?) I discovered an excellent project that Billy Bragg is involved in. Check it out ↩





Apologise, explain?
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:37:36 +0000
Totally not sure about this one.  Someone emails their MP and gets an accidentally-sent response (in the MP's name?  Not sure) calling the constituent's mother-in-law "snotty", and saying, effectively, "don't rush to answer this, since they don't like the government."
So far, so unsurprising (though your attitude towards the government should not affect the service you get from it).  But  the MP has just been on the radio refusing to apologise.
She was very good on defending her staff: they’re professional, but they’re human.  Fine, people make comments that shouldn’t become public, and mistakes get made.  But surely an apology for the mistake would be in order?
I suspect that more will come of this.



The Steep Approach to Literary Acceptance
Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:04:35 +0000
A couple of articles (Times, Indy) on Banksie's new novel refer to it being five years since his last one. Err, no: The Algebraist came out in 2004 (which is longer ago than I thought, but still less than three years).
Oh, wait, no, of course: that wasn’t a novel; that was just sci-fi.
Bah!



Not Before Time to the nth power
Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:28:56 +0000
Just heard on the radio that Wimbledon is going to pay women the same as men, at last. Though I see that some neanderthal called Tommy Haas is complaining about it. Welcome to the twenty-first century, mate.


Book Notes 24: Variable Star, by Robert A Heinlein and Spider Robinson
Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:41:21 +0000
These are still the 2006 Book Notes.  I'll finish them soon, honest.
Heinlein used to be my absolute favourite author.  Indeed, he is in large part responsible for me developing a lifelong love of science fiction.  And I’m also very fond of Spider Robinson.  So when I found out that this existed, obviously I had to buy it.
It seems that, sometime after the death of Heinlein’s widow Virginia, his literary executor discovered an outline that Heinlein wrote in 1955, but never expanded into a novel.  If remarks by Heinlein, that Spider refers to in his afterword, are true, then it was John W Campbell who talked him out of doing so.  Which seems strange, and rather sad.  Still, if Heinlein had written that novel, it’s possible that we wouldn’t have had one of his other ones; and of course, we wouldn’t have this one.
Would that be a good or bad thing, though?  That is what we are here to decide.
I became intensely irritated by the story early on.  The first-person narrator is supposed to be eighteen years old at the start, and he just doesn’t sound like an eighteen-year old.  I don’t mean the narrative voice: that would not be a problem, as we can assume that the narrator is supposed to be telling his story in later years.  I’m talking about his dialogue, and particularly his thought processes.
Tied to this is the fact that we are left largely in the dark about the society on Earth where the novel starts.   The only thing we learn is that sexual mores have gone backwards by several hundred years, in North America, at least.  Our narrator and his beloved can’t move in together, or even just spend the night together (despite living independently from any parents or guardians): they have to get married if they want to have sex.  That his how Spider gets round the fifties expectations of Heinlein’s outline, of course, but it doesn’t sound like any eighteen-year olds I’ve ever heard of.
Except, perhaps, those who subscribe to one of the world’s many anti-sex religions, which these two don’t.  In fact, the handling of religion in this work is quite interesting.
It is slotted into the timeline of Heinlein’s ‘Future History’ stories.  In that timeline, the name of Nehemia Scudder appears, but I don’t think there is a story in which he ever appears directly as a character.  Scudder is some kind of Christian fundamentalist leader, who becomes, I think, the World President.  In this novel we are after the time of the Prophets – Scudder and his successors – and the world is still recovering from the restrictions that were placed on life, on scientific research, by them: “We could have had immortality by now,” one character complains.
It’s a good story, but not as good as it could be.  Robinson has obviously worked hard at “channelling” RAH, but it seems to me that there are parts of the story where things just don’t quite fit together, or totally make sense.  Though this may in part due to the speed with which I read it.
It is, of course, a good thing when a book makes you read it quickly: it usually means that the plot is compelling and you are keen to find out how it will play out.  But if it causes you to skim, and miss – or at least, imperfectly absorb – important information, then that’s not so good.  Though I don’t think that can really be considered a criticism of a book.
It’s worth a read, and I suppose I might read it again at some point, to see whether I did just miss some bits; but I’d probably prefer to re-read, say Have Space Suit, Will Travel.