Creations
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
The Foldover Game
Blind communal prose.
The Surrealist Link
You are the cheekiest gnu.
Back on the Orion Express
Interactive fiction.
Two-Word Guestbook
Sign it.
Bookpile
Chaos
James Gleick
Unknown Lewes
John Houghton
Incidental Music
Frankly, Mr Shankly
The Smiths
Gamepile
DocNomic Warlocks Mornington Crescent System Shock 2 Crawl Garden Nomic II Legislative Nomic
Other Blogs
AngryBlog The Blast Blue Ruin Bullet Through the Brain Digital Trickery EpiBlogue Found Groke HumanLint Interconnected Life as it Happens LinkMachineGo Minor 9th Orbyn Qwertyuiop RavenBlog Tired Lil' Brit Girl Venusberg The View from Here Wherever You Are Yao's DOT.Home

[Updated UK Blogs]

Supporting Cast
Alice Chrissy Dan Dave Dunx Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Tyrethali Yao
Weeks Beginning
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12 18.12 25.12 01.01 08.01 15.01 22.01 29.01 05.02 12.02 19.02 26.02 05.03 12.03 19.03 26.03 02.04 09.04 16.04 23.04 30.04 07.05 14.05 21.05 28.05
Archive Search
10.06.01
As Above now has a Two-Word Guestbook, should anyone feel like leaving their mark.
Johnny Vegas is at once scintillating and terrifying, a shirtless stage drunkard veering between poetic calls to arms, fag-ash bathos and dark, raging audience participation. A man in the front row is picked out and berated at length for being Vegas's long-lost twin brother, another suffers a painful fifteen minutes mistaken for a mislaid baby son, and the whole routine pinwheels around random audience members - with the house-lights up throughout, nobody feels very safe. See him if he's touring, but choose your seat carefully.
07.06.01
A sterling attack on the Harry Potter books, underlining some of their terribly right-wing aspects. Social respect and power and the superior Quidditch position, but only because your parents (your real parents, not the lower-class ones that adopted you) enjoyed the same privileges. I can half-see the final book in the series being a furious demolition of the conceits and society that have been built up in earlier books, legions of children having grown to absorb every word... Arrange Kevin's Fridge Magnets at whim. Trivial and transient, but these things satisfy some hungry corner of my soul. [from Raven]
Hm, the Political Compass test, with its insightful divergence into two-dimensional "wings", says I'm a bit left-wing (-2.45) and largely libertarian (-7.23). Which sounds about right. Little hesitation in casting my votes, in an unnervingly empty polling station this morning.
06.06.01
Further revelations; willself.org.uk has links to plenty of interviews (written and MP3'd), book reviews, bits of writing and places to buy his books from. Capital.
"I am a bit of a sesquipedalian, but the only means by which I augment my word lode is to note the definitions either side of the one I'm looking for."
Unexpected Will Self interview in the increasingly tabloidy Independent today (he actually writes for them, which I hadn't realised - wake up, Byliner).

How the Dead Live is out in paperback tomorrow, apparently.

ITV's Ratrap is, I think, one of the most determinedly pointless and self-defeating exercises in broadcasting I've ever half-watched. Besides the dull teach-yourself-shoplifting footage ("Oh, so that's the best way to steal bottles of champagne from an off-licence"), there were lengthy sequences where they set up some tempting thief-bait and kept filming until someone went for it. At which point previously-hidden crew members leapt out and effected a citizen's arrest. Oh, no, I'm sorry; at which point nothing happened and the presenter asked us the viewer to phone in if we recognised the criminals. Absurd.
05.06.01
"How are you right honourable gentlemen!" All your vote are... yes, yes.
Amusing bit of spam for Infidelity Today - not, as one might think, a lifestyle magazine for adulterers, but a simple five-minute chemical test to see if your partner's underclothes harbour any suspicious trace enzymes. It shoots itself in the foot quite a lot (excuses men can make, ways women can sidestep it), but I suppose if you're suspicious enough to try it once, you're suspicious enough to keep buying and testing until you're proven right. $49.95 plus postage. Assumes lesbians do not exist.
I enjoy the way other parties refer to the Conversatives as William Hague's Conservatives, in their election leaflets. It's all you need to say, really, isn't it?
04.06.01
I dreamt that I was a NetHack "@" symbol, last night. I and a few others were being led through ruined prisoner-of-war camps on Dungeon Level Nine, a part of some morbid, torchlit guided tour, long after the area's adventuring heyday and the hazily-remembered Gnomish genocide. My universe was one of two-dimensional ASCII characters and total silence, encompassing cities and societies and oceans, ten levels up. Half an hour in another reality. Offline brains are amazing.
"And Ivor the Engine could be returning to our screens updated for the new millennium, with storylines which will see [...] the CEO of the Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company blaming lack of government investment for a disaster which costs the lives of seventeen passengers and Idris the dragon."
Untitled Document is back.
Trafalgar Square's empty plinth is due to be topped by a statue of itself, cast in clear resin and set upside-down. Sounds like quite a nice reflective sort of weirdness. New Nomic alert. Legislative Nomic is an intriguingly parliamentary affair, leaning towards (appropriately enough) the British political system. One Player is the King, one roleplays Public Opinion, and the rest are MPs, tinkering earnestly with the nation's Statutes. Will they strive for a better world, rig the votes for selfish motives, or just machine-gun each other? Time will tell.
More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com