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An Unbearable Likeness
Please note your nearest exit
In a song from the 1979 Talking Heads album Fear of Music, the singer idealises heaven as a bar where ‘nothing ever happens’. It’s an interesting metaphor, a place where the band play your favourite song all night long. Not only is everybody perfectly synchronised, but the party repeats in perpetuity. However, there is something slightly disconcerting about this idyllic portrayal.
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Lives Out of Balance
The streets of Philadelphia
Music has a profound capacity to amplify the emotional impact of visual recordings. Happening upon a video on Reddit portraying the horrors of fentanyl addiction in Kensington, Philadelphia, I was struck by the use of the soundtrack from Koyaanisqatsi. This experimental non-narrative film was released in 1982 and beautifully portrays humanity’s relationship with the environment.
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Serve Yerself
House call for Dr Jekyll
Static sites based on Jekyll that are hosted on GitHub Pages offer advantages over mainstream blogging platforms. There is no cumbersome update regime and once the initial set-up is complete, posts may be conveniently written in Markdown and uploaded. However, proofreading in the live environment can cause an unnecessary number of commits.
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Shoplifting Your Day
Interrupted
The way we communicate with email has hardly changed since my working life began in the 1990s. Personal computers were by then ubiquitous and increasingly connected to the nascent internet. E-mail was heralded as an efficiency booster beyond compare, however some argue that it has instead made us miserable.
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Time Out of Mind
AI Okay
Artificial intelligence has been portrayed in various fictional forms, from the scampish Mechanical Turk to the murderous HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. These embodiments are couched in moralistic tales of deceit and control. Cautionary stories of this kind have been around since the mythological Pandora’s Box and accounts of Aladdin’s genie in the lamp.
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Jungle Books
Amazon UK orders to Ireland
Import charges applicable to Amazon UK customers in Ireland from 1 January 2021 are outlined below. The information is taken (mostly) from Money Guide Ireland. A prior issue whereby some book customers had been charged 13.5% VAT on orders over €22 has been resolved by Amazon.
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Poles Apart
A new ending
Overdubbed onto the start of Roger Water’s The Last Refugee is a series of excerpts in clipped English accents taken from BBC News and shipping forecasts. The track comes from his 2017 record Is This the Life We Really Want? which is infused with snippets of audio nostalgia. One of the announcements used in the song proclaims the last day of the year, Thursday 31 December, 1970.
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Everyone's a Critic
A ∩ BIf you write primarily for the web you are probably aware of markup languages that preclude the need to draft in HTML. This permits writers and editors to add emphasis to text without code tags which impair readability. In a Venn diagram of writers who track changes in documents and those that have a preference for plaintext markup solutions, the intersection is admittedly small. However, if you review documents in different formats you’ll appreciate that flexibility is key to a frictionless workflow.
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Algebra in the Clouds
Nature springs
In Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, Thomasina, a curious 13 year old, asks her tutor Septimus how come it is not possible to ‘unstir’ the jam in her rice pudding. No matter which direction it is stirred it becomes pinker. A metaphysical conversation ensues followed later in the play by a discussion about mathematics and nature, on the seed patterns in a sunflower.
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Supersense
A trained nose
I’ve been interested in olfaction for some time but I really got hooked when I started doing character research for a project I am working on, a novel with the working title Broken Ladder. I was looking for a way to differentiate a group of characters, one of whom plays a large part in the book. I wanted to attribute to him extraordinary abilities, but I didn’t want to give him super powers in the traditional sense.
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The Pen of Eric Arthur Blair
Review and revise
Writing is an effective way of getting one’s message across. It offers clear advantages over speaking. By revising our words we can insert ideas at first forgotten, reframe an argument and rectify venomous polemics. The quality of our written communications is surely dependent on this potential to change our minds.
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