A la mode du jour

Aphorism du jour (hot off the press)

One good thing about blogging: you can present nearly any proposition you like, and nowhere is it written you must provide hard evidence to support it. 

So I’ll let the following rip just because I’m in the mood and because I don’t have to please academic supervisors or my mother or anybody.

A few weeks ago we saw how our preferred books, movies, music and choices of underwear, rather than being determined by … Read more

Pandemic books, pandemic reviews

Barbara Smaller, https://lithub.com/six-cartoonists-on-critical-failure-one-panel-at-a-time/

I’m posting a new Kicking Dogs chapter every Tuesday, and an independent item every Thursday.

Let’s kick off this week’s SIDECAR post with a seven-year-old item from Jack Shackaway, my collaborator and, incidentally, the hero of my novel Kicking Dogs.

Selling novels: What it takes
I’m probably over-reacting, but it’s already getting harder these days to take pride in thinking of yourself as a writer, since so can anybody with the price of a computer and

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Invasion of the black boxes

Hans-Georges Arp painted this image long before Big Data came to invade every human space, private and public.

Now amorphous entities like digital amoebae suck our minds and souls dry of predictive nutrients. Obscenely intimate, these ethereal blobs snuggle up to absorb and commodify the digital detritus of our progress through the age of surveillance capitalism.

If you look hard, you can discern the inputs and outputs, but the algorithmic machinations at the centre of this process are often compared … Read more