I made these a while ago when playing with Sculptris, and thought I might as well post them. They’re basically experiments in painting with matcaps as brushes: it turns out those can look quite painterly when blended together.

I recently got the editorial board’s comments on a textbook chapter. It seems somebody named James Petrik had fun with the draft:

It happens to a lot of people: the pleasant, affectionate person you were friends with gradually becomes distant, changed, someone else. A while back I was friends with someone who, I later learnt, was being kept aloft with antidepressants when we met. There is evidence that such drugs can cause personality change.

In theory, having a topic linked to my research background hit the limelight should be a Good Thing and a source of Career Opportunities. In practice, what I find is at best that cultural appropriation sold out when it went mainstream.

At some point e-mail stopped being passed to my Gmail account. I’d been using my registrar’s nameservers, which seem not to accept AAAA record entries, so IPv6 was enabled on the server but not associated with the domain. Hence there was no IPv6 rDNS either. At some point Gmail started rejecting e-mails on these grounds: lateish …

Did you know DCMS is running an open consultation on its proposed Cultural Protection Fund? Gov.uk’s consultation search doesn’t.

Consider for example the difference between their opening video and ours. Theirs focuses on the contribution Britain makes to the EU budget but fails to reference the benefits our membership brings [...]. It’s fundamentally dishonest. [...] Our opening video, by contrast, features a range of people speaking from experience about the benefits of being in Europe. …

One of the opening quotations in a Quilliam counter-extremism report:

The fear of piracy has forced many publishers into using unfriendly DRM systems that halts the sharing of stories. With OpenBooks.com readers are free to make copies to send to friends and continue spreading great literature from our rapidly growing indie author community. There are no restrictions on making copies and sharing them with others. In …

Note to those seeking to shift debate through changing language: the time to try to replace a term is not after your own government has sponsored legislation using and defining that term.

...Euroscepticism hardly needs enemies.

Heritage gets everywhere. The story of Pillars of Eternity begins when trespass near an ancient and sanctified site arouses a violent reaction from the local population, who have appointed themselves the ruins’ guardians in place of their long-vanished builders; and now the game’s had me wondering what to do about an artefact taken from such ruins, …

An article (login possibly required) has been doing the rounds that tries to anticipate the significance of an altered sky:

What on Earth is Liberal Democrat Artwork?

Normally I’m wary of importing market-esque thinking into non-commercial policy spheres, but in the case of the interminable ‘Why aren’t younger people more inclined to vote?’ debate I wish more thought were given to the simple economic possibility that if you want people to buy, you have to be selling things they want. (Even an ‘entrepreneur’ …