In Bergen kids dress up on New Year’s Eve and go carolling from house to house. My daughter was a vampyre bat. She and her friends collected outrageous amounts of sweets and stayed up till midnight. A happy night was had by […]

In an hour’s time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, a woman in the crowd on the bank of the Yarra will lean to her lover to kiss him. His lips will brush her cheek not lips and […]

Tee hee. Thankfully, “The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, ‘the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities.’” April Fools Day just isn’t going to be as funny this year… (I saw this at Eirik’s but it’s […]

I started reading Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names because it’s arguably one of the earliest cyberpunk stories, though it’s written before cyberpunk was an acknowledged genre. It turns out the protagonist is not only a “warlock” in the computer network but […]

A new surge of spam hit my comment fields in the last few days, so I updated my blogging software and the anti-spam plugin and the blacklists and, as suggested, my personal blacklist is now automatically published as I add things. It’s […]

I took the kids to the woods and they sailed to New Zealand in a boat the uninitiated might have thought a fallen tree. There were pirate islands, sharks, ghosts, storms and stick-swords on the way and by the time we came […]

The living web is fluid. Accept that things may be different tomorrow. I’m happy for individual bloggers to edit or delete posts from their blogs, or for journalists to update an article in a newspaper throughout the day as new information or […]

My family’s pretending that tomorrow is Christmas Day so that we can gather the absolute maximum of family for our Christmas dinner. So today people are arriving and tomorrow there’ll be children ripping open presents at dawn and turkey for dinner and […]

Next time I enter the United States of America my face will be biometrically measured and my fingerprints scanned and stored by American intelligence. Think about that: that’s information my own government doesn’t have about me. It’s information I don’t have about […]

Last week Steven Johnson wondered why there are no videogames that simulate the 2004 US presidential campaigns. The idea must have been floating around the zeitgeist, because Howard Dean’s campaign has actually commissioned a game, just released today I think, where you […]