Feb. 15, 2015
I set myself the task of writing about a fictional character for this blog post, so this post is about Jackson X. His surname isn’t really X, it’s just one of the details about him that I haven’t fleshed out yet. This is because Jackson X is the one of the protagonists of the novel I’m (not) writing. The name of the novel is “The Summer of the Giant Space Whale”.
Tags: Writing, Blogging, Fifteen, Short Story, Ideas
Feb. 4, 2015
We hear a lot about our rights but these are given to us in return for fulfilling our responsibilities. One of these is engagement in the democratic process, and in particular voting. You should register to vote, that’s a no brainer. You should take an interest in what politics means for you locally, nationally, and internationally. On the day you to get to the polling station and cast your vote. Then you need to hold you representative accountable afterwards, even if he or she isn’t the person you voted for.
Jan. 31, 2015
Album Digest January 2015 rounds up a few albums from the tail end of 2014 that I didn’t get much time to write about. The only one of these six to be released this month is the excellent “No Cities To Love” by Sleater-Kinney. Sleater-Kinney “No Cities To Love” I had heard of Sleater-Kinney before their boxed set “Start Together” was released in 2014. I was quite impressed that they curated their own Spotify playlist with the contents of the box.
Tags: Album Digest, January, Music, Sleater-Kinney, Azealia Banks, Museum of Love, Parquet Courts, Flying Lotus, Royksopp, Fifteen
Jan. 18, 2015
One of the first lines of “The House That Guilt Built”, the soft cricket-laden lament that opens The Meadowlands by The Wrens, is “I’m nowhere near where I thought I’d be”. The last line of the whole album is “this is not what you had planned”. These bookending lines set the tone for this shimmering, ramshackle masterpiece - a fatigue and careworn pride in failing to meet impossible standards writ large over its first and last eighty or so seconds.
Tags: Understated Classics, The Wrens, Music, Fifteen, Rock
Jan. 3, 2015
Feersum Endjinn is one of Iain Banks’ few non-Culture sci-fi novels. Like the Culture novels, an existential crisis drives the plot: in this case the action takes place on Earth in the far future and the sun has aged to a point where it will grow and swallow the earth. This is referred to as the Encroachment. The characters are divided between the good guys who seek to find a solution for the greater good and bad guys who use the Encroachment to consolidate their power and influence.
Tags: Iain M. Banks, Books, Science Fiction, Fifteen
Jan. 1, 2015
Just a brief message to wish everyone a happy new year. Getting my flat connected to the internet continues to be a trial so it’s still not as easy to post as I would like. However, I have some workarounds now and I hope to write (and post) more often from now on. Like everyone I make resolutions at this time of year, though as the years pass I realise that the best resolutions are to apopt a new way of being rather than a new way of doing.
Tags: Happy New Year, Fifteen, Life Experiences, Time Passing
Dec. 30, 2014
Overlong reflection upon the past is one sure way to make yourself unhappy so I try to avoid it. Nevertheless it becomes unavoidable at this time of year, especially if, like me, you are somewhat prone to reflection. At this time last year I was, as detailed in the most recent report of my South American adventure, in La Paz, Bolivia. I think I felt as lost then as I do now, though back then I had the novelty of new places and good friends to steer me through.
Tags: Writing, Blogging, South America, Fourteen
Nov. 14, 2014
I recently started a new job and moved in to a new flat. This means I’m too busy to write any long blog posts at the moment. Also I’m still not quite at home there, so I tend to spend my evenings tidying up or setting up new things. It’s a shame because I have plenty of things to write about (even without observations on moving, starting a new job, etc) but I guess the writing will happen eventually…
Tags: Writing, Blogging, Fourteen, Self Improvement, Life Experiences
Oct. 24, 2014
This is a longer form post about artificial intelligence inspired by reading a little bit of “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace and putting a picture of a “ghost” up on Instagram. This might be the last of these that I’m able to write for a while. On Not Reading “The Pale King” “The Pale King” is the third and final novel by American author David Foster Wallace. He was working on it when he committed suicide in 2008.
Tags: Ideas, AI, Fourteen, Programming, Internet
Sep. 30, 2014
Album Digest September 2014 contains four amazing albums, including the long-awaited return from the Aphex Twin, and an album from Cymbals Eat Guitars released about a week after I wondered what had happened to them. Spooky. Rounding out the selection this month are a cool punky-disco album by The Juan Maclean and a truly remarkable offering by Vessel. Aphex Twin SYRO SYRO is the sixth album by Aphex Twin and his first official Aphex Twin release since Drukqs in 2001.
Tags: Album Digest, September, Music, Aphex Twin, The Juan Mclean, Vessel, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Fourteen
Sep. 25, 2014
This post deals with how to generate random numbers in R. It is good to know how to generate random numbers with a particular language or software package for at least one of the following three reasons: You want to test something that depends on a particular distribution. You’re running a stochastic process of some kind (Branching process, random walk etc) and you need random numbers for deciding whether an event occurs.
Sep. 2, 2014
I recently finished reading All The Birds, Singing, the second novel by Evie Wyld. It’s about a woman called Jake who lives alone on a farm with a dog called Dog on an island somewhere off the coast of Britain. She has sheep to look after but something keeps coming in the middle of the night to kill them. Meanwhile, as the narrative on the island moves forward in the present, a second narrative peels off backwards to explain her past.