Atlas Obscura has an odd article about 1850s photography of Egyptian archaeological sites, wherein capturing the ‘strange emptiness’ of scenes minus the contemporary population living nearby is characterised as some sort of ‘colonial agenda’ that ‘sidelined or erased indigenous residents of other countries’. Which is the kind of thing that would be easier to swallow if …

It’s not often that news of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales reaches my redoubt in England, but today I learn that the Commissioner is proposing scrappage of GCSEs. Which doesn’t seem quite what I thought was anticipated when the role was set up.

Apparently the latest controversial morsel on the FFVII remake is:

Apparently I stand to be blacklisted. I wrote a piece for Quillette once, before it became famous, that was actually a qualified defence of the concept of cultural appropriation.

I found a Usenet post from 2004 about a bug in Thief: Deadly Shadows. A player, trying to open a chest, instead got engulfed by it and ended up inside.

The Sarr-Savoy report to Emmanuel Macron on heritage restitution has an English translation, and I have read it. It’s very... French. That is, it reflects the stereotype of the continental intellectual whose writing can never merely be about a subject when it can bear witness to it, and whose language teems with temporalities and specificities and …

If your eye got caught by the waves of Mastodon-is-like-Twitter-but-much-nicer articles, you may find these notes marginally useful. I’m going to assume you’ve got as far as knowing Mastodon is not the whole network, but a microblogging platform integrated into the wider and older ‘Fediverse’. If that’s confusing already, see here for a primer (and maybe …

Every time I write on AR I find stuff I want to catch up with before the text has even made it through editorial.

What it’s like to hear voices: Sammee has been hearing voices for most of her life... Have you ever heard voices?

Reports are circulating (seemingly sourced from a paywalled Telegraph article) about the Oxford Philosophy Dept.’s attempts to bolster female confidence by manipulating reading lists, e.g. converting ‘G.E.M. Anscombe’ into ‘Elizabeth Anscombe’. Having once had a (female) tutee who thought Martha Nussbaum was a ‘he’, I’m not sure whether it’s optimism or pessimism Oxford has in excess.

I interviewed Tony Milligan (K.C.L.) about the ethics of space exploration for Pod Academy. It was his work on cultural value in space I built on/responded to in my piece for Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, and as things turned out we were co-contributors to that volume, so it was particularly interesting to have …

Out of 2077-inspired curiosity I picked up the Cyberpunk 2020 Bundle of Holding, which is why I find myself reading a sourcebook from 1994 called the Rough Guide to the U.K. Its ‘brief recent history’ begins thus: The United Kingdom has been going through some turbulent times recently.

Everyone’s a post-election haruspex, and the pundits have it that Corbyn drew the ‘youth vote’.

A new upgrade to the Hiawatha Web server from the PPA appears to be completely broken. Lighttpd is being used as a fallback to keep the site up while I investigate and decide what to do. If anything non-functional appears (most likely when attempting HTTPS connections), incomplete configuration of the new server daemon is the likely …

strangely shaped pieces of meta