I’m going mad. I get back from San Fran, tanned, fit and healthy, and the first thing Bath does to me is send a team of shitting pigeons. Now my tasty cord jacket, nostalgic battered rucksack and perma-borrowed laptop have been visited by the ghost of Jackson F*cking Pollock. And sitting at my desk, I…

I’m sure I was going to say something fundamentally important and meaningful, indicative of long term social change. Or it could have been a eulogy to Santa Monica, now up there in my favest cities ever! But I can’t remember. So, to allay my worries about lack of travel insurance, the terrors of intestacy (No…

Adventures in Alternate Realities. I was sat in my flat, having just reinstalled Planescape Torment (oh, how I hunger for it now with only World of Warcraft on my desktop) when my mate Toller phoned to say he’d been intending to pass through Bath, but the trains were fucked so could he please kip on…

“For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.” Fascinating example of alternate history; Richard Nixon’s draft speech informing the nation that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission has been lost with all hands. Oddly,…

Schneier on Security: Hacking the Papal Election: “What are the lessons here? First, open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections…