this place
What makes a place, a place? Can somewhere be a place if it doesn't have a name?…
•modern times•
vaccination reflections
One year ago, I couldn’t think about anything but the pandemic. By the time the UK started to take it seriously, I had been worrying about it for more than two months: I had a Chinese coworker who had…
oh no, not all this again
Watching the rise of transphobia in the media through 2020 has filled me with a sense of déjà vu. The arguments are all the same as homophobes used in the 1980s.…
online social networking in the 1980s
Last week the Ironic Sans blog published an article about joining an online social network in 1998 with the passing comment that “many consider [sixdegrees.com] the first online social network”. Also this week, while googling for something else, I…
adventures in social media
Today I travelled to Newcastle to start on my MA in Creative Writing. I don't really remember what it felt like to come here 29 years ago, to start my PhD.…
LGBT+ for beginners
The language around sexual orientation has changed quite a lot over my lifetime. I regularly hear people around me, and in the media, use terms around gender and sexuality carelessly or wrongly…
the quotation problem
Finding the source of a quotation has always been a problem. Before the internet, if a quotation wasn't in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, you had little chance of tracking it down unless you were a journalist or an academic…
anti-Fabianism
If you search the web to find out about the Fabian Society, among the factual websites you will find a number of web sites aimed at alerting the world about the dangers of socialism, and especially about Fabianism…
virtual worlds
Virtual worlds have come a long way since I first got access to computer networks in the second half of the 1980s. MUDs were like the text adventure games I enjoyed (and had written a couple of on my BBC…
valentines day
Single people have traditionally hated St. Valentine's Day (in our modern, secular world now just called Valentines Day) because it supposedly celebrated coupledom - though personally it was always the crass commercialism of greetings-card makers that I found repugnant. Greetings…
concerning self-driving cars
Google has been running self-driving cars in San Francisco's Bay Area for some time now, and big car manufacturers are starting to make noises about self-driving cars too; which seems to be leading some people to assume they're coming in…
the High Line
Manhattan's “High Line” - a disused elevated railway line that has now been repurposed as a public footpath - wasn't open yet on my last visit to New York, in 2011. I went to visit it this year. It's brilliant.…