Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Writing

  • Touring the carbon ruins: toward an ethics of speculative methods

    In case you didn’t catch me trumpeting about in on the birdsite: I have a new paper (co-written with Johannes Stripple) at the journal Global Discourse. For those who don’t want to go for the full scholarly fandango, the GD people had me do a wee blog post for them on the topic of the…

  • subjective and iterative magratheanism / the whys and wherefores of worldbuilding

    It’s always nice to get an insight into the creative process from an expert, and this short bit on worldbuilding by Paul McAuley is exactly that. Worldbuilding as a concept is having a bit of a moment, or so it feels, having jumped out of genre fiction theory and metastasised more widely, following in the…

  • always primed with its own conditions of dissolution and abolishment

    Interesting little essay here from one Duncan Stuart, a new name at Blue Labyrinths, which I will cite at length: [Sylvain] Lazarus takes seriously the work of French historian Marc Bloch, who argues in his 1949 book The Historians Craft, that the past is given and the future contingent. Lazarus demonstrates that for Bloch the…

  • gastric culture / mundane noise horror

    There are lots of reminiscent reflections (and some predictable bafflement) in this MeFi FPP-thread responding to the recent un-deletion of the KLF’s back-catalogue, almost thirty years after the event… but this one was an interesting enough image that I wanted to clip it for posterity (if only my own): I sometimes wonder whether pop isn’t…

  • the practice

    I think I would have first heard about the practice of the morning pages during my Masters, if not before then. I further think that I was put off the idea by the name; mornings were not a thing with which I was well acquainted for many, many years, and the idea of actually getting…