photos on Tales from the Bitface

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 11:01:48 +0000

November sky. Days like this are the real reason we have Christmas.

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:26:13 +0000

Well, damn. As the only one in my immediate family never to have had it, I really thought I was going to get away with it.

Positive

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?

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

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 18:19:54 +0000

On this date of many ‘2’s (but just wait till the 22nd), here’s a nice sunset for you.

Sunset over Hackney

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.

'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

'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

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. ↩︎

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 09:47:04 +0000

This is what Hackney Marshes looks like on a Monday morning in October

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 15:44:51 +0000

#WeStandWithRNLI

My parents taught me to always give to the RNLI when they’re collecting, because of how important and dangerous the sea is. Lifeboat crews deserve all our support.

Some idiots don’t think so. Instead they want our seaborne heroes to let people drown if they don’t have the right papers.

Fuck that shit, and fuck those people.

HOPE Not Hate’s We Stand With RNLI image

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

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.

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 11:47:05 +0000

Today’s weather report

Good morning (just).

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:23:00 +0000

These days I double-mask -- as well as using tape

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. ↩︎

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 22:50:24 +0000

Christmas cake cooling on a rack

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.

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 17:59:59 +0000

The sky over Hackney, this morning

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 21:02:20 +0000

Lava lamp, processed with Prisma

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.

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 14:16:04 +0000

Last night’s pizza: the wee tables in the box were triangular! I’ve never seen the like.

Takeaway pizza with triangular support 'tables'

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 11:46:31 +0000

This is the least rustic-looking bread I’ve ever baked.

Some surprisingly-professional-looking homemade bread

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 19:43:04 +0000

This street sign in Hackney today represents the times we live in.

Electronic street sign showing question marks

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:16:34 +0000

How I prepare to go out on days like these.

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”.

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.

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:07:15 +0000

Just been for a bike ride. I think I’ve forgotten how my legs work.

Lots of people out, mostly keeping their distance.

Down to the Olympic Park. Nice view of the Orbit.

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.

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. ↩

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 19:54:11 +0000

At the Red Lion in Leytonstone, where Glen Matlock is playing tonight. It’s… not busy.

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 08:57:52 +0000

FotoFebruary, as some on Micro.blog are calling the February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 1 theme: Open.

Why not join Micro.blog and take part?

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.

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 15:54:39 +0000

Hi-Five.

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:

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 11:21:17 +0000

Why is it two different temperatures at the same time in London?

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:56:54 +0000

Where, and in what direction, am I meant to slide? Because I can’t get past this screen in the iPhone camera app “Manual.”

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 21:46:12 +0000

Dan Baird & Crimes Against Typography.

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 18:14:01 +0000

I’ve been in Parliament Square more times in the last few months than previously in my life. Back again tonight.

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 19:01:30 +0000

Autumn approaching in South London.

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 15:11:40 +0000

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.

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 16:52:28 +0000

I’m musing on whether or not to keep the holiday beard. Two weeks in Greece almost over. Home tomorrow.

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.

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.

Sun, 19 May 2019 17:54:50 +0000

Five years ago I tweeted this:

Five fucking years. Back when the F-word national disgrace was just a bad joke.

Note that I’m deliberately avoiding using his name.

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 14:37:06 +0000

Congratulations to the Event Horizon Telescope team. The first ever picture of a black hole. In this case, the supermassive one at the centre of the M87 galaxy.

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.

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 21:56:19 +0000

New passport arrived. The proper, dignified burgundy colour.

That’s me set as an EU citizen till 2029.

That’s how it works, right?

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 09:10:38 +0000

Ah, Carrot. You make checking the weather a joy.

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.

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 10:07:38 +0000

Carrot Weather on the zeitgeist again.

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:

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Or way too many crowns:

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The art doesn’t stop taggers, though:

If your canvas is a wide stretch of concrete, sometimes your subject has to be sideways:

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And a few more:

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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:

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Back in Valparaíso proper the dogs are parked everywhere, as usual, and there are funiculars, because it’s very hilly:

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The Honest Graffitologist

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 13:37:21 +0000

Nothig to say.

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. ↩

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.

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 09:23:37 +0000

We’ve taken down the decorations, but we can’t put the Santas way until the cake is finished.

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:

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 13:28:40 +0000

I knew going In to the West End on the Saturday before Christmas was crazy. But first I couldn’t get on to the Piccadilly Line platform. And then, they’re queueing outside the Lego shop!

(Actually things aren’t too crowded so far.)

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 13:12:12 +0000

When did Windows get a case-sensitive filesystem?

Atmosphere

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 23:54:10 +0000

Hackney, this evening.

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 17:20:07 +0000

Installing Ubuntu on Windows 10 on a VM on a Mac. Because why not?

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:06:12 +0000

Leaves. (Despite that word, nothing to do with Brexit, for a change.)

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.” ↩

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.

[aesop_gallery id=“5134” revealfx=“off” overlay_revealfx=“off”]

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.

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 23:23:50 +0000

Preparing for Sunday.

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 08:23:15 +0000

Well that’s me told. Arrr.

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 18:13:13 +0000

Tonight! Hamilton! Just waiting for the family and friends to arrive.

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 23:53:03 +0000

Piano steps, Calle Beethoven, Valparaíso.

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.

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 21:01:13 +0000

Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock wins the 2018 Arthur C Clarke Award.

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.

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 10:51:08 +0000

In Clapham for the BSFA/SFF minicon and AGMs. Signal v poor. Are there no cell towers south of the river?

A ride in the sky at All Points East.

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 19:02:37 +0000

From Instagram

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 18:23:20 +0000

Brix & The Extricated at All Points East.

Mon, 07 May 2018 07:42:48 +0000

I’ve never seen this before: my iPhone’s dock is missing this morning. Everything else is working fine, though.

Spring

Sat, 05 May 2018 16:10:15 +0000

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Martin McCallion (@devilgate)

Marathon Barbers

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 10:50:34 +0000

The London Marathon playing in the barber’s shop.

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 19:56:27 +0000

My wee boy turned 21 today.

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.

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 10:59:20 +0000

Once again Carrot Weather shows how it’s tuned in to the Zeitgeist.

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:15:49 +0000

Croydon looking colourful and futuristic, yesterday

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%.

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 22:05:26 +0000

Look at that, I’ve crossed the line. I’m now above the NaNoWriMo average daily word count.

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 12:56:26 +0000

The trees are afire in Clapton Square. (OK, with a little bit of help from Photos.)

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 20:55:09 +0000

Start at the top: Billy opens with ‘Sexuality’.

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 07:57:47 +0000

Carrot Weather is hooked into the news today.

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 22:26:16 +0000

Walthamstow Wetlands: London’s newest Park. Just opened.

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 18:36:49 +0000

Reread the originals first, or dive straight in…?

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.

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 06:43:11 +0000

Citymapper has AR now. Not sure it’s as useful as the rest of the app, but fun.

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:00:48 +0000

I received one of the stranger pieces of spam or phishing I’ve ever seen. Not because of what it’s trying to do — obviously it wants me to click on a dodgy link — but because of the weird, almost surreal ineptness of the content. Take a look:

Isn’t that its own special thing? Almost poetry, in a disturbed, fractured way.

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:21:13 +0000

Gabi Garbutt & The Illuminations at the Monarch in Camden.

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.

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 18:47:07 +0000

This tree looked amazing as the sun caught it. This morning in Croydon.

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:43:59 +0000

Rainbow over Dalston tonight. Just visible to the left of the Hackney Peace Mural there.

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:02:26 +0000

The Rolling Donut, Dublin. Highly recommended. Good to remember how good donuts can be if you don’t get misspelled American ones.

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 11:20:09 +0000

A pint of ice-cold Guinness in a pub in Dublin

Ice-cold Guinness. I’m reminded of the late Bob Shaw…

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 05:37:07 +0000

At Holyhead, on the ferry for Dublin. It’s taking a while to get going, though.

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 22:39:47 +0000

I’m pretty sure that all of these are meant to be autumnal. Yet here it’s early August — high summer — and there they are, growing madly.

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 10:29:07 +0000

This is what Virgin Trains calls a window seat now.

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 17:58:43 +0000

Monster sky out my window. And time I tried some photos with this new phone.

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:26:33 +0000

The Skids in full flow, earlier tonight.

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 21:15:28 +0000

Jesus, but The Skids are good live.

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 20:41:06 +0000

Preparing the stage for The Skids.

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 13:18:35 +0000

In Chinatown tonight.

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.

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:27:21 +0000

The blossoms are out.

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 14:41:26 +0000

I painted a picture of the City. (OK, it’s #Prisma again).

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 23:44:40 +0000

This is what rhe trees in Hackney are looking like this spring.
#prisma with the “Thota Vaikuntam” effect. #thotavaikuntam

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. ↩︎

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.

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 05:40:26 +0000

New Year lanterns in Chinatown, London.

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.

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 14:30:43 +0000

So good. So fuckin good. #Rezillos

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 13:55:08 +0000

Finally, the Rezillos. “Can’t Stand My Baby” is the opener.

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 12:53:15 +0000

Still not the Rezillos. Everyone’s sharing kit tonight, which is very 77. Spizz Energi onstage.

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 12:08:16 +0000

Not actually the Rezillos, but the Tuts, my new favourite band.

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.

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. ↩︎

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.

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:58:51 +0000

Starry Comandante

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:22:35 +0000

Cubana. Service slow but food v nice.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 14:45:00 +0000

The Captain sings.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 13:15:29 +0000

The Damned on stage.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 12:25:47 +0000

More Penetration.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 12:24:09 +0000

That’s Penetration on stage at Brixton Academy, supporting the Damned.

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 03:56:52 +0000

Harry Potter play today! (Also mixing up the fandoms.)

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 01:50:50 +0000

From the fierce heat of the autumnal South of Spain, back to properly-autumnal London.

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 12:48:38 +0000

A Manhattan in Seville (no 2 in an unplanned series).

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 06:52:28 +0000

Rough time to be Samsung.

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 02:57:48 +0000

They don’t like appearing in photos.

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. ↩︎

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.

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:15:41 +0000

Blinding Larks in the back room of Biddle Bros last night.

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 01:13:34 +0000

Last day at work. My computer seems to know. It’s turned back to Windows 95.

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 14:18:22 +0000

PJ Harvey at Field Day was SO good. Straight into my top three ever gigs? Oh yes. Most definitely.

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 12:23:11 +0000

Polly Harvey speaks onstage!!! Dedicates song to Seamus Murphy.

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 11:31:51 +0000

Field Day. The stage awaits PJ Harvey.

PC

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:05:28 +0000

Panel 3 just nails the whole “SJW” nonsense.

Source: Brostitutional Rights - Scenes From A Multiverse

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 11:45:07 +0000

At the Hammersmith Apollo for Billy Connolly. Been a long time coming.

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 11:02:37 +0000

This is weird. Package from Amazon correctly arrived… with no address on it.

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 09:50:05 +0000

Old picture found of strange creature over London… #stackablesapp

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 12:03:05 +0000

Brooklyn is so hip.

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:24:39 +0000

A Manhattan in Manhattan.

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 10:37:55 +0000

Ad-screen BSOD, Westfield.

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 06:56:27 +0000

The main reason I won’t be getting an Apple Watch.

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 16:56:36 +0000

OK, if we’re guessing… What song does this picture represent?

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 09:33:00 +0000

Name the famous book. #VSCOcam

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

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 13:45:01 +0000

Sons of Bill, Hoxton.

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 11:49:11 +0000

Never really expected to get another new Iain Banks book. But here we are.

At Hackney Downs station.

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 16:29:43 +0000

via Instagram [ift.tt/1D1BfXa](http://ift.tt/1D1BfXa)

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 07:34:04 +0000

At Hackney Downs station. #stackablesapp

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 06:03:14 +0000

Some weirdly faded viaduct. #stackablesapp

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 11:57:13 +0000

Christmas has a slightly musical theme this year.

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 09:58:45 +0000

What’s the collective noun for Santas? #VSCOcam

Sat, 06 Dec 2014 03:53:46 +0000

Queuing out the door at the parcel depot.

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 11:57:52 +0000

#stackablesapp with the “Frozen Souls” formula. It’s amazing what you can do to a photo.

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 16:33:26 +0000

The Millennium Bridge with the Shard in the background. #stackablesapp with the “Fill the Sky” formula.

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:50:00 +0000

Clapton Square, again. #stackablesapp with the “Nirvana” formula.

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 10:39:57 +0000

Tree near Strathblane, messed around in #stackablesapp.

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 01:35:29 +0000

More autumn light in Clapton Square of a morning. Looking towards the old Police Station, and messed around in #vscocam.

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:20:50 +0000

Autumn green. #vscocam

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 05:04:12 +0000

Just got into a train. There’s a log lying on the floor. No sign of the Lady. The owls are not what they seem.

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 07:25:48 +0000

It’s here…

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.

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 23:35:47 +0000

Autumn flare. Straight out of #vscocam

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 09:50:32 +0000

The Blue Mask.

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:33:46 +0000

Autumn already? How did that happen, September? #vscocam

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 01:24:41 +0000

Lights…

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.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 06:31:26 +0000

Clear view all day then these bampots come along and stand in front of us.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 06:31:26 +0000

Clear view all day then these bampots come along and stand in front of us.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:13:17 +0000

Waiting for Lé Tour. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be too crowded here.

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:13:17 +0000

Waiting for Lé Tour. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be too crowded here.

Fri, 09 May 2014 14:16:04 +0000

Spring blossoms in Clapton Square. #vscocam

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.

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:38:04 +0000

Spring morning, low sun & shadows. #vscocam

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 13:10:17 +0000

This beer goes down too fast.

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 09:55:13 +0000

Pipes and gas meters, Hackney. #vscocam

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 01:58:31 +0000

A bit early in the year for these. #vscocam

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.

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 02:41:15 +0000

Me, by @fiona_fudge. :-)

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 13:18:39 +0000

The Christmas cake nears its end…

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 08:22:30 +0000

Eurostar departures at St Pancras.

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 00:26:53 +0000

Gatwick Lines.

Mon, 23 Dec 2013 15:41:13 +0000

Sunset. West Sussex.

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:14:59 +0000

That’s a lot of leaves. You’d think it was autumn.

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:29:19 +0000

Another one from my train journey last weekend, with the iOS7 “Noir” filter applied.

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 09:25:08 +0000

Cooling towers at sunset.

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 01:28:43 +0000

Shadows. New carpet on the landing at work, and the morning sun streaming in.

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 15:30:02 +0000

Hard Rock Calling. Bruce in 30.

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:49:02 +0000

First time I’ve ever been sad on getting the latest Iain Banks novel.

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:50:02 +0000

Twenty years of Meltdown and I’ve never been before. But tonight, Yoko Ono POB.

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:47:03 +0000

This one’s in memory of Banksie.

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:26:23 +0000

Sunsetting.

Sat, 25 May 2013 06:53:46 +0000

Onions & garlic sizzling.

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:57:40 +0000

Can you tell what it is?

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:45:25 +0000

The trees are looking lush now.

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:20:23 +0000

London in May. Looks like the church is on fire.

Wed, 22 May 2013 02:36:34 +0000

Waiting to give blood. Is this a healthy option?

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:53:41 +0000

Tulips outside my office in Paddington, yesterday.

Sun, 12 May 2013 06:19:13 +0000

Stoke Newington buggy jam. This is how the pubs are these days.

Sat, 11 May 2013 03:13:30 +0000

Hooray! @Savagesband album and EP.

Sat, 11 May 2013 02:54:37 +0000

This should be the Savages album.

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:12:14 +0000

Well-fired pain au chocolat. Still, they charged me less than usual.

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:46:25 +0000

The long hard winter made everything dormant, but now the bluebells are out in our garden.

Sun, 05 May 2013 08:57:06 +0000

Tidying.

Sat, 04 May 2013 09:28:13 +0000

What in all the bells is “Banana Ketchup”???

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:24:13 +0000

Spring springing in Hackney. This seems to happen every year. Eventually. #spring #hackney

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.

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:

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.)

Weekend Warblers

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:11:11 +0000

The Radio 1 Hackney Weekend festival was fabulously well organised, loads of fun, and passed off with only three arrests.¹ Booking the tickets a month or two ago had turned out to be easy (we sat with multiple browsers and phones as the SeeTickets site crumpled, but in fact it was no trouble at all after we left it for a while). Being local residents helped, as half the tickets were for Hackney households.

It was a free show, so there were restrictions; most notably that you could only book for one of the two days, and only two tickets per person. We were doing it for the kids; and the kids in this family (to say nothing of most of their friends) favoured the Sunday lineup; so that’s the one we went for.

The lineup leaned heavily to the various dance subgenres: (modern) R&B, dubstep, and so on. Not forgetting hip-hop, of course; not only did Jay-Z headline the first night, he guested with Rihanna on the second.

For me the highlight of the day was Jessie J; though I was mildly disappointed that she censored herself in my favourite of her songs, ‘Do it Like a Dude’.²

Tinie Tempah was also good, though since I’ve subsequently been listening to Enter Shikari, I’m slightly disappointed to have missed them as they clashed with Tinie.

There was great secrecy and much speculation over who the “Special Guest” was to be. They managed to keep it hidden until the day, which, while impressive in its way, had me worried. I thought that, depending on who it was, there could be a disaster. In particular, if it had been Justin Bieber, as some kids were speculating, there would have been a vast, simultaneous, two-way flow, from and to the stage (my kids would have been running away from the stage; there are no Beliebers at Devilgate Towers).

Not long before the guest’s time I heard on good authority that it was going to be Beyoncé. Believable, as her hubbie was there, and she was said to be “in the house”. But I doubted it: isn’t she a bigger name than Rihanna? And anyway, I get the sense that she’d be too much of a diva to go on second on the bill.

Anyway, in the end it was Dizzee Rascal, which with hindsight made total sense, what with him being a local boy and all.

As we wandered through the stages and the day, we heard snatches of Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ seven times (I started keeping count at the third) from various between-act DJs and stalls. So by the time it closed the night, I was thoroughly ready to hear it properly. And a damn fine ending it was, too (though the fireworks were a tad tame).

I was hugely impressed with the organisation of the thing. We got there nice and early, and there was hardly any queueing, despite the airport-style security. The staff were all lovely and friendly, and – get this – there was hardly ever a queue for the toilets!

I would strongly support any moves to make it a regular thing. Radio 1’s event moves around the country, so it couldn’t stay free, but I could easily see it working as a commercial festival in the future.

I have it on the authority of a Hackney police officer. ↩︎
Hint: “Dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty sucker” doesn’t rhyme with “D’you think I can get hurt by you, you [puts finger on lips]”. ↩︎

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:08:55 +0000

Cud at The Garage

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:02:47 +0000

Surely Cud approaching…

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 12:17:22 +0000

Echotape supporting Cud at The Garage.

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 12:13:57 +0000

The stage awaits Echotape. At The Garage.

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 11:31:18 +0000

Sheen supporting Cud at The Garage

Fri, 25 May 2012 05:51:40 +0000

Moving desks today

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:40:55 +0000

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:08:21 +0000

I don’t think they’re being ironic about the Jesus bit either.

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 14:17:10 +0000

The Felice Brothers

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:57:35 +0000

The Felice Brothers at the O2 ABC, Glasgow

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:10:25 +0000

Craig Finn at the O2 ABC in Glasgow. I don’t think this Jesus song is ironic.

Desperate sun-seekers

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:42:34 +0000

Via Instagram

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:31:00 +0000

Desperate sun-seekers

Eyelash car

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:13:46 +0000

via Instagram [instagr.am/p/ICqWnWl...](http://instagr.am/p/ICqWnWlpeH/)

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:06:45 +0000

Eyelash car

In an astounding example of metaness, this Instagram pic should generate a blog post, using ifttt.com

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:44:01 +0000

via Instagram

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:41:13 +0000

In an astounding example of metaness, this Instagram pic should generate a blog post, using ifttt.com

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:54:19 +0000

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:32:38 +0000

Your Friendly Olympic Park

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:44:24 +0000

This is the view from the banks of the Lea (or Lee) by the Olympic Park:

Let’s take a closer look at that attractive fence:

Lovely, eh?

I hope they take it all away and make it nice and open, but I suspect they won’t, at least until after the Games.

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:31:52 +0000

Flying Kids

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:37:50 +0000

Tree & Sky

Autumn Roses

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:14:04 +0000

[gallery link="file" columns="9"]

This warm autumn has done some weird things in our garden. The end of November in Hackney brought these new blooms out. They’re still there now, though they won’t be for long, now that it’s proper winter.

Those pictures above are supposed to come out side-by-side, not one above the other, but that doesn’t seem to be working. Oh well.

Hardcore Knows the Score

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 01:35:53 +0000

For the last two months or so, it seems, I've been listening almost exclusively to a single album.[^fn1] That album is David Comes to Life by a Toronto hardcore band called Fucked Up.

That’s hardcore in the punk sense, not rap, or anything else. All genres have a “hardcore” subgenre, it seems. I’m sure that somewhere there’s hardcore pop.

Anyway, this album causes me to put together three words that I never thought I’d see in the same sentence, never mind describing the same thing: punk rock opera.

I know, I know, rock operas are the bloated detritus of prog rock, and part of what we fought the punk wars against. Though truth be told, I’ve always been quite fond of Tommy. But in a sense it was always something that was going to happen eventually. When a genre or a medium has been around for a while, people will try to take it further than it has gone before, and that’s no bad thing.

And when you get right down to it, it’s all about storytelling, and who can complain about that?

So I was pointed in the direction of this album by a post on Mike Sizemore’s blog. Sizemore is a scriptwriter; I probably started reading his blog when someone like Warren Ellis pointed me at a teaser or “sizzle” video he and some other people made for a prospective science fiction series.

Anyway, he posted a link to the video for the second track off the album, ‘Queen of Hearts’, and spoke very highly of it, as you’ll have seen if you followed the link. If you haven’t, you should. Go on, I’ll wait. I watched it a couple of times, and though, “That’s OK, interesting premise, I wish I could make out the words.”

And then I forget about it for a while.

But one day something made me go back. I listened again. I downloaded the album. I fell in… not love, exactly, but fascination.

North American hardcore bands have a certain vocal style, which is certainly not to everyone’s taste. In that way, I realised, it’s not unlike actual opera. Sure, the vocal stylings are about as far apart as possible; but they are both very stylised. And my biggest two problems with opera are that it’s hard to make the words out (even when they’re singing in english), and that I don’t really like the vocal stylings.

Not to everyone’s taste, as I said.

Luckily, operas tend to have surtitles; and albums have lyric sheets. The lyrics for David Comes to Life are available on the web, as you might expect.

Anyway, I’m writing about this now because I haven’t got round to doing so before, but especially because I’ve just got back from seeing Fucked Up live. They were playing at a Shoreditch venue called XOYO in a “co-headliner” with a band called OFF!.

I tweeted a lot about it, and among other things, I expressed a degree of concern as to what it would be like going to a hardcore gig:

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.

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. ↩︎

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:50:13 +0000

Tortilla Mask

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:24:39 +0000

Spring springing in Clapton Square

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.

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:25:32 +0000

Veela in the Bey Blade arena

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:02:02 +0000

Autumn sky

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 01:21:56 +0000

Autumn in Clapton Square

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

The thief of time, or: Where the hell did those two years go?

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 00:30:00 +0000

It’s a truism that time appears to pass faster as we get older. Just how true this is was brought home to me anew when it crossed my mind that I had, a while ago, been thinking about writing a piece with a similar title to the above.

Then I realised that I had been thinking about it around last New Year. Yet it felt to me like it had been no more than a few weeks before.

Then on Radio 4′s Today program, before I left for work this morning, they were doing a piece on time-saving devices, and how some people think that they don’t save us time, but merely free us to waste it in new ways. And how we’ve lost the sense of process.

To paraphrase:

We travel only to be at our destination, not to experience the journey; we treat food as something to eat, not something to cook; we wash merely to have clean clothes or dishes, not to get them clean.

Which is all very well, but what exactly is the problem with that? Especially in the case of the last point: I’d say, “Damn right” to that one The single best household good we ever bought was the dishwasher.

As for travelling, well of course we do it to be at the other place. For example, I went to ‘s with Frances and the kids for New Year, and the purpose of the travelling was only so that we could be with our friends. If I could have stepped onto a transporter platform and beamed there in an instant I’d certainly have done so in preference to experiencing the dubious pleasures of the rain-drenched M11.

On the other hand, I do enjoy cooking, but what with work and kids and band there’s little enough time for home life. And at the same time, it’s slightly ironic that they should run that piece just a week after many if not most people in the country have spent a day cooking (or helping to cook) the biggest meal of the year.

Here’s a thought: if, on Christmas Day, you could press a button and instantly have a classic Christmas dinner ready, with no preparations and no cooking, would you? I think I probably wouldn’t. Because part of the whole Christmas experience is the preparation and cooking.

Though I would certainly use such a magic button at other times…

With the year-change bringing thoughts of time, the other time-related quote I was thinking of using as a title was, “Time takes a cigarette”, from Bowie’s
‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’. Then what do they go and use as part of the backing for the Radio 4 piece? Plagiarists!

It was an interesting piece, though, and I would have liked to listen to all of it; but I was already late leaving, and so (of course) I didn’t have time.

And last year’s piece? Inevitably I never found the time to write it.

In a nice touch of real-world LiveJournal linking, just after the year turned at Si’s, we got a phone call from . Which was nice.