Shores of Night

  For the past few years this has been the rallying cry of a lot of people on the Internet, usually people on the progressive side of things. I don't want to use the SJW term because I'm conscious that it's a red flag to a great many people. Mostly, I've seen it in writing circles, where there's rather more discussion of it, with questions being asked about whether it's appropriate for writers to set stories outside their own culture. I've also seen some truly bizarre claims out there on the Internet, which often seem intent on unpicking the lessons learned by my generation about racism. For example, the complaints about Iron Fist being white, which seems to me to double down on the "Asian people are all martial artists" cliché, and which equally seems unwilling or unable to actually deal with Asian people beyond a stereotype. I also know of a Thai reviewer and writer who's treatment of anyone who dares to write about her culture has led to at ...

Something I've noticed recently is that there's been a real switch away from dystopias among my roleplaying friends, and among the boards I lurk on. Common refrains about how people don't want to deal with dark subjects pop up frequently, usually with a comment about how the world's dark enough thank you very much, and there being a desire for escapism. This seems to extend into fiction, film, and other genres of media as well (though I will concede that there are a lot of people who are doubling down on the darkness). Personally, and I'm saying this now to get it out of the way, I don't find the argument and belief that fiction and stories are purely for escapism particularly believable. To me, they're about "how we live now, and how we might live in the future", to quote Jackie Gay my Fiction tutor from my MA in Creative Writing. As far as I'm concerned fiction is there to talk about the world, and explore truths that would probably b...

Social Media is, if you'll forgive the expression, like sticking your head inside an angry wasp hive and hoping you don't get stung. It sounds like it shouldn't be, but at this point in the proceedings I think we can probably all agree that though its useful (in a way that sticking your head in a wasp hive isn't), the Internet, and especially sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn, has enabled the worst aspects of our species. That's not to say that we're all unpleasant when we interact online, or that we aren't sometimes nasty in real life (though I do tend to err on the side of that being less likely than it being online). It's just that from Twitter mobs to cyber stalking to the growth of "red pill" culture, it feels like social media has enabled unpleasant views, and often disgusting behaviour. Now, I'm not actually going to say that we should wave a magic wand and get rid of this stuff: the genie's out of the bottle a...

One of the most contentious issues in the world today seems to be one of those matters, that on the face, of it appears simple: the question of returning art and artefacts to the native peoples from whom it was taken by the 19th Century European empires. By now, I imagine you're thinking that of course that's what should happen. It's barmy to think otherwise, isn't it? Those people have a right to their ancestors' works back and that should be the end of it. It's simple, an open and shut case. Any questions and queries can be referred to it literally being the heritage of that set of people and that's that. From the Elgin Marbles to the over 40,000 items held in the Victorian and Albert Art Gallery, all the way to the treasures looted from the Chinese Summer Palace by General Gordon, it should all be returned. It doesn't belong in Britain. It's hard to gainsay that claim, harder to find a decent justification for not simply saying that it's r...

I'm writing this because I am tired, world weary if you like. It's half seven on a Saturday morning, and though I don't feel physically tired, in my soul I feel like I'm a thousand years old and there's not enough tea in the universe to rejuvenate me. I'm tired of this world, of the way it doesn't seem to change, tired of the false promises of improvement that don't seem to filter through. Perhaps I'm missing a generational aspect, but it feels as if the opportunity for things to get better skips blithely through a meadow of fantasy, while in the real world we remain shackled to the Machine, the System, as surely as one of the poor souls chained to the Manometer in Metropolis . A friend has assured me that generally things are improving, quoting  Hans Rosling as an inspiration for this view, but warning that humans are woefully poor at staying kept up to date, often quoting statistisc that are decades out of date to justify their pessimism. ...

It pains me to say it but this year is continuing to suck. From a personal point of view, it's definitely had its highs and lows, but increasingly the lows seem lower and the highs less plentiful. My mental health has been doing a number on me since the start of the year, and I'm sick and tired of it. Working from home has really highlighted how much I hate the commute I was doing before lockdown and means that, between the two of them, I'm going to have start looking for a more local, and more satisfying job. Last week, my cat Jinx went missing and he's still absent. A black cat's body was found under a car and the people who found it put it over the fence by the railway embankment (to explain, we live on the other side of the road from a railway line). Consequently, we have no idea if Jinx is still in the land of the living, and its eating away at me, though I suspect he probably has gone to the City of Cats. I feel really sad about it and, even though I kno...

By now, anybody who reads this will know about the toppling of Bristol's statue of Edward Colston. Pulled down by four ropes, and rolled into the harbour. A fitting end, I suppose, though victory over a lump of stone seems like a pretty damn hollow one to me. I'm not going to say anything else about it, aside from to say Bristol must have been desperate to erect a statue to him in the first place, especially as the statue went up over a century after his death. What I am going to talk about is the very idea of statues, and our perspective of the past. Our tendency to divide people in to goodies and baddies, with no nuance, or context to their actions. We have a bad habit of airbrushing so called heroes  in order to forget any bad things they did. Churchill's entire life might as well be summed up by his actions as Prime Minister, with his myriad of failures and his racist attitudes conveniently forgotten. I can well imagine that our current Prime Minister (Boris J...

Yesterday is the day this fucking year broke me. I was okay with Covid-19 and okay with lockdown. I'm an introvert, and a loner, I like people but in small doses, hate small talk, and I've learned to love my own company. But this year just feels like its piling things on, throwing them onto the pile in some fucked up game of Jenga. Let's see how much topple if we do this. The situation in Minneapolis and the rest of the USA, the Hong Kong protests, the fact that we're still in the middle of the sixth extinction event, the corruption and mendacity of our politicians, and all the fucking rest of the shit show that is, apparently, the way things are just meant to be. I can't express how sick I am of all of it, especially when it feels like no matter how many protests there are, its just going to end up as sound and fury, signifying nothing. In a month's time the keyboard warriors will be venting about something else, there'll be something new to be angry a...

Lockdown started around mid March, and my partner and I have been working remotely since then. That's been a bit of a learning experience, not only in terms of having to learn how to use a VPN and getting all the technical stuff down, but also in the sense of adjusting back to not being around people all the time, being self motivated and all the little things that come with that. Personally, I much prefer working from home, I feel more productive, and not commuting for three hours everyday feels like a wonderful thing because I don't lose evenings to exhaustion. At present, given that my brain weasels have been not only playing up, but dancing a damn conga in my head recently (I'm hoping to start counselling soon), I really feel I need to find a job much closer to home if only for my own health. I imagine a lot of people feel the same way, if only because a lot of us who have been able to work remotely during this period must be feeling that all the time we were told tha...

Author: Gerard Way Artist: Gabriel Ba Publisher: Dark Horse Comics ISBN:  3959811640 Price: £16.99 It's funny the things you find by accident. I'd completely forgotten about buying this, the third volume in Gerard Way's odd dysfunctional superpowered family series. Boasting the reminder on the cover that there's now a TV series based on a mixture of the first two comics miniseries, its somewhat strange to be dipping into something that's been popular enough for that, and yet for which so little actually exists. Say what you like about other Netflix comics adaptations but they draw on rich legacies in both Locke and Key and Titans, though admittedly Happy only had one miniseries as far as  I know and that now has several TV seasons under its belt. I've always felt Umbrella Academy was meant to be the Doom Patrol before Way was ever likely to actually be given that to write, the misfit characters, the cold repressive leader, and the way the series increas...