Blogsday

I used to do a Bloomsday blog post every year until last year, which was the first time I forgot to commemorate the day in any way for as long as I could remember, and I almost forgot this year as well. Maybe the pandemic shook something loose. It's not …

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Metaphysical Animals

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

London: Chatto and Windus, 2022

Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

I bought this as soon as I saw it, after having read a review of it in the LRB - it follows the lives and careers of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth …

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Language games

I've been reading a bunch of books this year about the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the linguistic / analytical turn it took in England under the influence of Wittgenstein and A J Ayer, most recently Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals …

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Not Wallaby

I'd had goat, I'd had rabbit and duck, I'd had quails,
I'd had clams, I'd had squid, I'd had fungus and snails.
Oh, so many odd foods I was willing to try,
But I couldn't do wallaby! No, not I!

I thought I'd try it all—from a cook whom …

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Matmos

I know it's bad that Epic have bought Bandcamp, and when that was announced I made sure to download a copy of everything I'd bought there, but I still rely on their emails to not just let me know what's new but also what's old. It seems that I should …

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In Search of the Third Bird

In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER) London: Strange Attractor Press, 2021

D Graham Burnett, Catherine L Hansen and Justin E H Smith (eds.)

It is said that Zeuxis went back to work on that painting, in the hopes of improving the child …

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Thursdays

I'm now on campus three out of five days, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the first two of these seem more normal, it's the start of the week and more of the rest of the team are around, but Thursdays it's a bit emptier. And it's semester break now, so …

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It's still the web

One of the frustrating things about web3 is that people who talk about it seem to be lumping together a bunch of things - intrinsic decentralisation, crypto, disillusionment with corporate social media, virtual reality - which don't really have much in common. The term 'web3' is obviously meant to make this iteration …

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