I've been watching a very interesting series of YouTube videos- it's Derren Brown being interviewed by Richard Dawkins about how mediums work- cold-reading, essentially, and the art of making lucky guesses.

It's very interesting, and comes recommended to all- Dawkins even manages to avoid mentioning religion until the very end of Part 6.

Part One
Part ( Read more... )

A poster is available of Neil Gaiman's narrative poem, The Day The Saucers Came.

It's pretty cool.

Neil Gaiman discusses the right to free speech and why he believes in its applicability to porny comics on his blog. It's an interesting little rant.

( Read more... )

I've been watching more Little Dorrit.

( In which I discuss a television adaptation of a Dickens novel )

HBO and the team behind Rome are making a TV pilot of A Song of Ice and Fire, my current top fantasy series. There'll be one series per book, slightly worrying for a 7-book series of which only 4 have been published (though the 5th should hopefully be out next year). It ought to be fun anyway; for a fantasy series it's fairly light on the Big ( Read more... )

So this was the view from my parents' bedroom window this morning:

( Click for a possible sign of the apocalypse )

Apparently, there's been an election, and people are allowed to be American again.

That should be a relief.

I finished The Graveyard Book the other day, Neil Gaiman's latest. For those of you who don't know, it's a riff on The Jungle Book, about a baby who narrowly escapes being murdered and finds his way to a graveyard, where he's brought up by the ( Read more... )

Today, I had the most pointless lunch break in the world. I spent its entirety queuing at Waterloo to buy a season ticket for my journeys to Guildford next week, only to be told that I couldn't have one as they have to be booked no earlier than 12 o'clock the day before travel. These season tickets can't be booked online, either. Gah.

Looking on the ( Read more... )

You know when, in the course of a day or two, you see several unrelated things that all put the same thought in your head?

That's happened to me, and the thought is "advertising and its unintentional contributions to culture".

Exhibit A is this xkcd cartoon. It's one of those cartoons that is not just only funny if you get the reference, but where ( Read more... )

The film wasn't very good at all.

( Cut for whinging )