It's hard to know what to write today, and part of me is thinking I should keep my trap shut. On the other hand I feel I should at least do something about the sudden hairpin turn that my country has taken in the past week. To be honest it feels as if the UK has suddenly become a lot nastier, a lot darker and less tolerant. It's as if the anger that has built up over the years, in many cases quite legitimately as successive governments have let the country go to the dogs, has been unleashed in the nastiest way possible. Racist abuse is on the rise and there's been at least one arson attack, as a halal butchers was petrol bombed . The horror I feel that this was a local incident to me is something I cannot express. Add to that the racist and homophobic chants reported in the Pink News, and the fact that Attitude is reporting that a Daily Mail columnist blames same sex marriage for the Brexit vote and I find myself wondering if the world has gone mad, or if the accep...
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Just a heads up today about Andromeda 2, a convention that's happening September, here in Birmingham. I'll be there hosting a couple of panels (one on Steampunk and one on comics, and possibly doing a talk about Gothic). http://ac2.greatbritishhorror.com/ So, yeah, check it out and come down for a chat.
Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player’s...luck. Read more at http://quotes.yourdictionary.com/author/tim-powers/182232#lPsZ2q6SY3gExzLw.99
Chapter One: Faces of Magic, looks at what makes a Mage, focusing on the Paths and Orders and as a result starting to lay out the building blocks of Mage society. For me there's an important distinction between first and second editions here, one of the things I didn't grasp with first ed is that the Paths represent different kinds of magic user, something that in Ascension was nested into the Order equivalent, the Traditions. As a result Awakening felt rather bland. So it's refreshing to see the game breaking the different Paths down to show how they represent different mages, and actively pin different labels on them. (I have an uneasy feeling that this was always there if you looked hard enough but that first ed simply didn't sell the idea to me in anyway that was memorable). Before we head down the path... there's the next piece of fiction to consider. This, the second part of The Door, leads the reader into discovering more about the accused woman's p...
This is a tricky one, especially as it can be argued that there's enough for children to learn as it is. But, I look at the education system and wonder what the hell it's for. The basic answer is, of course, that it's supposed to educate children, and to act as a force of socialisation, but to what end? Is it supposed to make them think, to reason out what they want from life, or is it just Pink Floydesque factory to churn out more tools for the factories and call centres? We must decide because it has huge consequences for our nation and our economy. Received wisdom is that knowledge progresses from telling children what to believe, to letting them question things, and finally to undertaking research to find their own truths. Somewhere that has broken down, possibly in the obsession with league tables and the scramble to get people into universities. The problem there is that we're now in a one size fits all education system, which makes no regard for the differen...
The Referendum result is in, and sadly the Leave campaign won on a 4% lead. A campaign has already started to seek a second referendum because, in terms of the UK's population, the majority was only a slim one. The Out camp seem to have won because the elderly voted that way, and because of a mixture of outright lies, deliberate distortions, and scaremongering from the big beasts on that side of the spectrum. The Remain campaign never really got started, and frankly, in hindsight, it would have been much better if Number 10 had stayed out of it. The Remain arguments were too technocratic, they did nothing to appeal to a sense of unity or even to point out the real implications of leaving. While Project Fear seems to have been on the money, given a 2 Trillion Pound cost of Brexiting on the economy so far, it's with a mixture of sorrow and vindictive humour that I look at Cornwall, for instance, which having voted out now worries about funding. Reality is sinking in, and I suspec...