May 2013
2 posts
Memories →
The Hideous Face With Flaming Eyes Still slightly disturbing, even today
I have no idea what this means
April 2013
4 posts
An Occasional Plug...
I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan chronicles a slice of adolescent life from late 1979 to late 1986 and recalls the experience of being a pop music fan in the early eighties, evoking the feelings of a very different time before the internet, mobile phones or multi-channel TV put media at our fingertips.
It’s available on Kindle for just 80p, but of course you don’t have to have a Kindle to...
The Third Rail
In last night’s dream I “remembered” that there had been a third rail network - aside from the Underground and British Rail - serving London during my childhood.
As I explored the rusty carriage I had discovered in an abandoned siding somewhere in North London it all came back to me; the way the maps used to look, the logo, the fabric used on the seats, the decor inside the...
The Augmented World
With the advent of Google Goggles and their imitators and as the accelerated internet years went by, Augmented Reality became ever more popular. Eventually the AR versions of places became quite distinct from their real world counterparts and people started to consider them separate.
To distinguish between the Real and the Augmented version of a location, the prefix AR- was used. Thus...
March 2013
2 posts
Happy Birthday To Twitter
Apparently Twitter has been going for 7 years now.
Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?
Although to be honest I didn’t start using it until February 2007. Interesting thing I find about it is how many of the features we now take for granted (including @ usernames and retweeting) were invented by the users rather than built into the thing at the beginning.
Of...
February 2013
3 posts
God or Robots?
If we are the sum of our physical parts and that there is no separate “soul” - something which I think most rationalists now agree on - then by definition true artificial intelligences are possible as consciousness and intelligence must be an emergent property of a complex enough system.
So either there is life after death or there will be sentient robots.
Brain Share
If our consciousness is simply an artifact of a complex system, a pattern, an emergent property of a living brain, then who is to say that other patterns and awarenesses might not also arise, riding in the same brain but forever locked away from us by the thick walls of incomprehension and difference?
January 2013
5 posts
You'll Never Believe A Man Can Fly by Lee Barnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A set of colliding circumstances conspire to cause an accident, an accident which results in the transformation of Ian Davies, an ordinary man with an office job, into… into… The world’s first genuine super-hero? However outside the realm of the comic book, life for a superhero isn’t quite as Ian expects. Newspaper misprints and paranoid...
One Year On...
A year ago today the Kindle edition of my book “I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan” went live on Amazon. Since then it has continued to sell steadily, but if you haven’t yet got a copy, why not buy one now? You don’t need a Kindle - you can read it on your iPad, iPhone or any other handheld device with a Kindle app.
Unsure? You can download the first chapter free and give it a...
Closing Down
There’s a shop in Western Road, Brighton called Classical Lighting which as far as I am aware has been advertising a Closing Down sale for maybe the last ten years? Perhaps I’m exaggerating but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s definitely been like that for more than five years.
After a while I thought that this was just a “thing”, a silly gimmick which somehow...
December 2012
6 posts
November 2012
6 posts
October 2012
2 posts
Nelson by Rob Davis (editor)
Nelson by Rob Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For people of a certain age this is a graphic novel that will resonate. Growing up in the seventies and eighties, struggling with what passes for adulthood in the nineties and beyond, Nel has been there too. The story of her life in yearly snapshots is an engrossing one and one which will make you ask questions about your own time and how wisely you...
I Know My Name
I’m sure I have written this down before, but can’t for the life of me find it. It’s too long for Twitter, don’t appear in any blog I can find and Tumblr comes up empty.
My full first name is Christopher but no-one calls me that except for my immediate family. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way it’s turned out. To all intents and purposes...
September 2012
2 posts
Dark narrative
Often the story is too long and you have to edit it down - but that’s not a bad thing. The backstory you cut out is still there, a shadow tale, Dark Narrative which we can no longer see but the effects of which are definitely perceivable.
August 2012
5 posts
Power
Whenever you see a politician spouting bullshit on TV consider this - what is going through their mind is far more likely to be closer to the following than what is coming out of their mouth:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure...
Hangover
Uncovers a greater capacity for ephemeral despair than you had previously thought yourself capable of.
July 2012
5 posts
Metropolitan Sepulchre →
On Drinking
“I’m still struck by disbelief when I see someone [leave] a restaurant with a half-finished glass of wine near at hand. I want to get up, go over, and yell ‘Finish that! Why don’t you finish that?’ into his or her face.”
Stephen King, On Writing
cloudhead: A Declaration of Internet Freedom →
cloudhead:
At the foot of the end wall of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written, there lay a ladder broken in two pieces, a lantern, a paint-brush, and an overturned pot of white paint.
No one shall censor the internet without cause. No one shall block innovation to excess. No one…
The Reality Ocean
The sea isn’t the surface of the sea even though that might be what we think of when someone says the word.
Likewise the Earth isn’t its surface. What lies beneath is far greater and more voluminous.
If we think of the sea or the Earth as metaphors for reality itself then perhaps that will give us a sense of the true nature of the multiverse.
June 2012
3 posts
Bradbury's Defence
One dreadful boy ran up to me and said:
“That book of yours, The Martian Chronicles?”
“Yes,” I said.
“On page 92, where you have the moons of Mars rising in the east?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Nah,” he said.
So I hit him.
as quoted by Arthur C Clarke in the acknowledgements to Imperial Earth, 1976 edition.
May 2012
12 posts
