Mssv

My flatmate is moving out in a couple of months to go to new pastures, so it’s time for me to find another flatmate. I’m going to put an ad in various places shortly, but I figure it wouldn’t hurt to post something here as well - clearly anyone reading this blog will have good […]

I took the afternoon off today to attend a symposium on Science Fiction as a Literary Genre at Gresham College. However, the main reason I went was because Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Quicksilver, etc) was the keynote speaker. Aside from being one of my favourite science fiction authors, Neal is also an […]

I finished watching Life on Mars a few weeks ago, and have become mildly obsessed with it. This tends to happen with any good book, TV show or movie that I see - I end up wanting to use elements in games or other projects, until the next shiny thing comes along.
After a few beers […]

The vision: Eager teens, listening quietly and attentively as I led a discussion about alternate reality games.
The reality: Thirty seconds into my prepared spiel, there were four hands waving in the air and the kids at the back were already talking. “Oh boy,” I thought, hoping to make a quantum leap out of here, but […]

Naomi Alderman, Perplex City lead writer, author of Disobedience, etc, wrote an article in the Sunday Times about the future of books. I’ve talked to Naomi often about eBooks and was quoted in the article:
Imagine, for example, a novel designed to take advantage of the features of the new must-have geek hipster accessory: the […]

Six to Start’s first ARG, that’s what. We’ve been working on this for a while, and it’s looking good. I’m really pleased to have a new project announced after all this time, and without promising too much, it’s going to be fun. If you like stories, you’ll like this.

At my school, all students were entered into the English Literature GCSE. What this meant was that a couple of times a week, we would take out copies of ‘English Literature’ - things like The Crucible, A Passage To India, various Shakespeare plays, poems - and take turns reading them out.
There is nothing that kills […]

Schubert, I feel, would have no sympathy for procrastinators. Before he died at the age of 31 - the age at which Beethoven wrote his first symphony - he wrote over 1000 pieces. More than 600 of those were ‘just’ songs, but they also included major works such as operas and symphonies. A friend of […]

For the benefit of those who don’t subscribe to my Twitter feed, or don’t know what Twitter is (almost everyone), I heard a funny and mysterious message while on the plane from Toronto to London. We’d landed only minutes earlier and were taxiing to the terminal when a flight attendant said:
We have a message for […]

Over the course of history, scientists and philosophers (who, until recently, were essentially the same thing) tended to interpret the universe - and, interestingly, the human brain - through the lens of their era’s technology. During the Renaissance, the universe was thought to operate like a clock, mechanistically and predictably. Later, during the Victorian and […]