So I was in a Los Angeles university building the other day, looking for a particular office and not even sure that I was in the correct building. On the wall there was a nice big map with a key of all the buildings. Cool. I traced my finger down the list, looking for the ...
The IMDb is currently running a banner ad for Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow which consists of an image of the Statue of Liberty being engulfed, and the huge tagline, ‘Watch Lady Liberty Get Wiped Out’. And that’s entirely as it should be. The Day After Tomorrow is a much older film than it ...
I’ve dabbled somewhat with depression during the past few years. Well, I think what I’ve done is realise/accept/learn/whatever that I’ve had a tendency towards depression for most of my life. It’s just had a chance to take hold a little more during the past few years. So I was reading this piece in ...
So I’m on a train — one of the 225s that run between London and the north-east, or up to Edinburgh. It’s shooting along, smooth and sleek. But then, for some reason — it doesn’t matter what — the brakes engage, with their characteristic smell of burning rubber. It takes miles for the beast to ...
Whatever happened to reality? It seems to be deeply unfashionable these days. For that matter, whatever happened to fiction? The zeitgeist seems to be something that might be referred to as ‘Reality’. It’s a wonder that it doesn’t come with a trademark attached. Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol, ...
You can take a user to a ‘net protocol, but you can’t make them use it. Protocols are being blurred like crazy at the moment, and it’s not clear what’s going to be left when the dust settles and the metaphors are unmixed. Google’s new gmail service is basically web-based (i.e. HTML across HTTP) ...
I think it might have been idly browsing through some of the photos that I’ve loaded here, not sure. Maybe it was thinking about buying a digital camera. Whatever, I was randomly musing this afternoon about the effects of digital video and photography on culture, history, myth. Our closeness still to the beginnings of ...
As one of the more radical atheists you’d be likely to find, I probably ought to think the idea of a virtual church is very silly, but the approach taken by Church of Fools strikes me as oddly sweet, in a naive-but-I-hope-it-works way. Technically it seems very nicely put together. I particularly like that, because ...
Twenty years ago this coming summer, my dad bought me my first computer. It was a BBC Model B, and it couldn’t have been a better place to start with geekery. I’d been messing around for a while with a similar one that my mother would bring home from her school sometimes at weekends for safe keeping. ...
A nice piece by Jacob Weisberg in Slate, which addresses a question that I think will resonate long after there’s no Shrubbery anywhere near the White House: exactly what kind of a fool is Bush? Weisberg and Molly Ivins are two of the people who’ve mused more thoughtfully than most, and both seem to come ...