This journal is, by and large, friends-only, partly for privacy reasons, but mainly to protect the wider world's web from my inane and unfocused mutterings. Generally speaking, I tend usually to friend people whom I know, in at least some sense (typically people I've at least met in real life) but that's not really a strict policy, it's just how ( Read more... )

While chatting with a few friends on Saturday, we noticed a disconcerting similarity between a famous photograph of two notorious sociopaths, and one of the Kray twins.

( cut for those of a nervous disposition )

As I've mentioned recently, I'm trying to write an undergraduate abstract algebra textbook that's readable by humans,1 because I think that somebody should.

( more details )

Diana Wynne Jones, one of my favourite writers for over twenty-five years, died last week.

( goons, gods and ghosts )

It being the first Thursday after the Paschal full moon last week, I caught the train up to Bradford for a few days to attend LX 2009, this year's Eastercon - believed to be the sixtieth such event (modulo a semi-mythical convention which may or may not have taken place in Kettering in 1957).

( a flag flying free in a vacuum )

Late one evening about fifteen or sixteen years ago, while I was an undergraduate at York, I found myself sat at a terminal in Goodricke library. I don't remember exactly what I was doing - either emailing or reading Jorvick most likely, but I do remember that at some point the door slammed open and an orange-bearded, bespectacled, portly ( Read more... )

Over the past few months, johnaldis and I have been cataloguing the Warwick SF&F Society library. The library (which consisted of about 1500 books last time anyone counted) has a fairly diverse collection of books, ranging from modern classics of the genre, right through to utter drivel. Some of the latter is "of its time" - tat by today's standards, but ( Read more... )

( Orbital 2008 report )

This category macro will, I suspect, make no sense to any of you, but amused me tremendously - particularly the accompanying 'I can has cocheezburger?' comment.

Some say that he works part-time as a plasmavore's bodyguard. And that he's not subject to the Blinovitch limitation effect.

All we know is that he's called The Stig.