Blog Canteens and Communal Dining These marvellous pictures of the communal dining spaces in Singaporean public housing reminded me of one of my favourite pieces of writing, I Dream Of Canteens by Rebecca May Johnson: There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and
Blog At The End Of Everything, Hold On To Anything Nothing is going to save us forever, but a lot of things can save us today.
Blog We Feed The Machines That Will One Day Consume Us I don't want to sell a pre-packaged life of the mind to people who write Javascript to track people's web browsing for a living.
Blog the hills, the valleys, the trees, the streams and the gasworks Not very long ago, in the top left hand corner of Wales, there was a railway.
Blog Joy Cometh With The Morning I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Blog Volks Rail Avenger That was when I caught the attention of a police officer. He looked at the katana in my right hand. He said: “Excuse me sir, what’s that?” I said: “It’s a sword.” It was a sword. I offered it to him After a long pause he asked: “Why do you have a sword?”
Blog Daddy Dom Redux At the beginning of last year there was a minor kerfuffle about my favourite character in politics, Dominic Cummings. At the time, I wrote something about his project to hire a bunch of teenagers to do... something and break employment law (which ended up going about as well as you&
Blog Are We The Goodies? 2019 saw a lot of people—friends, acquaintances, people I was trying to hand leaflets to in the street—asking me a question. That question was: why are the Labour Party running against Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion? Two pieces of context before I continue: 1. I was the constituency
Blog The Bullet Does Not Announce Its Trajectory The most powerful feeling that extremely middle-class people have isn't revulsion, snobbery or insecurity. It's a curious sensation that can best be boiled down to "why wasn't I consulted?"
Blog Neural Numbskulls Tobias Revell linked to this Verge article from 2019 about how 40% of EU startups classified as "AI companies" are either not at all meaningfully using artificial intelligence, or are using it in a peripheral capacity[1], but aren't correcting the record because investors are into
Blog What Can Change The Nature Of A Man Those of you who are of roughly the same age and demographic/interest profile as me might remember Zero Punctuation. It was a videogame review series where a British man employed compound swearwords, crude cartoon visuals and transparently affected rage for (what was at the time) hilarious comic effect. It
Blog Priority I've been learining to play Europa Universalis IV, which is a cool game with a dizzying array of menus and levels ticking up and down. I'm starting to get the hang of it now, but the thing I've realised after a while as a
Blog Old stone I was talking to my housemate about the Warren and he observed that its temporary nature (only there for the month!) also gives it more vitality—people are more likely to go in the knowledge that it won't be around for too long. Conversely, I've spent
Blog Changing spaces Brighton Festival and Fringe season is upon us once again, though I've only had a chance to go to a few things so far: a production of Anthony and Cleopatra at the Rialto (felt like a bit of a student production), a jazz thing called Played Twice where
Blog Monoliths This is a repost of something I wrote several years ago now which I mentioned (will mention?) on the latest (next?) episode of the podcast and therefore thought I should make available. It’s something I noticed first reading (of course) Lawrence Miles, and it was odd: the idea that
Blog Julius Caesar "This would be a good wrestling venue" was my first thought when entering the performance space of the Bridge Theatre, though I at least had the grace to be suitably ashamed about it. Seating on all sides and a central performance space—it's like the Cockpit
Blog Trust Our Institutions So, this sort of thing. I get a similar feeling about this that I get about the Everything You Do Online Will Be Online Forever stuff. Roughly speaking: even leaving aside the (broadly correct) stuff that people like Jeremy Keith bring up about it not even being that true most
Blog Riptide Quite a long time ago Kat and I talked about starting a wrestling promotion, since Brighton didn't have one. It was going to be heavily intergender, have an emphasis on storylines and have the ring announcer come out to Too Many Man by Skepta. Inevitably, we didn'
Blog Help Me Ronda So, the Rumble was last night—pretty great, imo, the most I've enjoyed a WWE show in absolutely ages. All the matches were some kind of great fun, and the surprise appearance of Ronda Rousey at the end was really exciting. But why? What is it exactly about
