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| Projects | |
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| Dvorak The improvised card game. |
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| The Foldover Game Blind communal prose. |
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| Back on the Orion Express Still coming soon. |
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| Bookpile | |
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| The Man With No Endorphins James Gorman |
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| Nymphomation Jeff Noon |
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| How the Dead Live Will Self |
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| Worldwar: In The Balance Harry Turtledove |
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| Incidental Music | |
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| Reinvent the Wheel DD&HSW | |
| Get Me To A Monastery The Divine Comedy | |
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| Gamepile | |
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| System Shock 2 Crawl Mornington Crescent Garden Nomic II Planescape : Torment WikiNomic | |
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| Other Blogs | |
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| AngryBlog Blast! Blue Ruin Bullet Through the Brain Digital Trickery Found Groke HumanLint Interconnected Life as it Happens MomBlog UK Off-Topic qwertyuiop Venusberg The View from Here Wherever You Are Yao's DOT.Home [UK Blogs] | |
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| Supporting Cast | |
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| Alice Chrissy Dan Dave Dunx Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Tyrethali Yao | |
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| Weeks Beginning | |
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| Archive Search | |
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12.04.01 |
| Excellent till-display truncation in Sainsbury's; "GOODBYE HOPE" (...to see you again soon, or somesuch drivel.) | Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's jaunt into orbit. But did Vladimir Ilyushin get there first, crash-landing in communist China a few days before, and having his mission covered up by an embarrassed Russian government? (Er, no, probably not.) | |
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11.04.01 |
| I always feel as if I'm glimpsing some lazily-satirical alternate-reality mockumentary, whenever I see George W. Bush on a television screen, that any newspaper article with his photograph must likely be Onion-style fakery. This is not comedic exaggeration. |
| The tiny, advert-squawking blurbflies of Nymphomation
crawl a chitinous step nearer to reality as American "ornithopter engineers" build an
insectoid
surveillance drone, which seems pretty impressive despite the
disappointingly massive wingspan. The team's ultimate dream is to "build something they can fly inside a building without bumping into walls". Or windows, presumably. |
| Dawn-of-universe theories all seem delightfully barmy when you barely understand the science of them; all the more so when they come from people called "Neil Turok". He and his team theorise that matter was created in our universe when we got hit by another universe. Superb. |
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10.04.01 |
| The Oxford Bee Company makes nesting boxes for increasingly endangered British bee species. Peter Cook would have been amused. | The texts of Charles Fort's Book of the Damned and New Lands available online - never a patch on bundles of paper, but nice to have around as a reference. | |
| It still amazes me how everything in this world can be more or less divided into
products of evolution, products of human intervention and
rocks. The millions of adaptive ancestors to any given tree
or goat or pigeon, the intentional design, assembly and placement of
any particular brick or postbox or aspirin. Stop to consider the existential history of any random object your eye falls upon - either the millennia of tooth-and-nail genetic warfare in a world alongside your own DNA, or the individual human beings responsible for designing every aspect of a thing, sketching the logo, assembling it, nailing it to a wall, deciding what colour to paint it, painting it, and whatever else. It's too easy to take our environment for granted. |
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09.04.01 |
| Why are rubber stamps so damnably expensive? I saw a magnificent one today with a line-drawing of a dour-faced Victorian gentleman above the legend "BORING", but the shopkeeper was asking seven or eight pounds for it. Interrogating the Internet, I only get a rubber-stamp manufacturer whining about his own ineptitude, of the hundreds of ruined stamps he had to throw away. What gives? Is there some huge and shadowy rubber-stamp cartel in operation? | For the benefit of evil search-engine terrorists and - mainly - my hazy future self looking for particular things I might have said, there's now an Atomz search box in the navigation bar. And a list of whatever game-related distractions my brain's currently partial to, for what it's worth. | |
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.