I recently gave an email interview, the answers to which were included in a feature on arts funding in Ireland. The article, ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ was published in the January 26th edition of The College Tribune (not yet online), a University College Dublin publication. Perhaps like everyone who’s ever been interviewed, I feel the quotes chosen for the piece slightly misrepresented my answers. This is first time I’ve written at length about my involvement in Exchange Dublin, Exchange Words and ‘the arts’ in Ireland generally, so I’m pasting the …

I’m posting this because I want you to recommend me some movies. Little gems I haven’t seen, but would enjoy. Check out my list (and watch the movies!) and tell me what I’m missing. The mini reviews are from my facebook flixster app ratings.

Whit Stilman Trilogy
Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Not one film, but three, Whit Stilman’s charmingly barbed portraits of a group of archetypal upper class Manhattan neurotics, rival anything Woody Allen has produced. Stilman manages to effectively satirise his characters, while whilst drawing them …

Prelude – One Hipster’s Story

In my final year at college I helped start a music magazine that briefly went nationwide. For a little while we covered a brutally hip range of ‘indie’ and electronica acts: Interviewing, smooching, listening to a lot of great new music and occasionally finding time to publish some decent writing.
Then, about a year ago, exactly twelve months after we’d started the magazine, and just before the release of our sixth issue and third nationwide release, trouble hit paradise like a leaky tanker with a drunken …

My dear friend Mark seems to being having success upon success with his Wired FM show ‘Cult Friction‘, a “new programme charting the wonderful surreal world of Science Fiction, Horror and all things cult from Movies to Comic Books, TV shows”. Using his nordie wiles, Mark has succeeded in conning his way into some notable award ceremonies, winning brief interviews with impresarios like Jonathan Ross, Rory Bremnar, Robert Webb and Charlie Brooker.

Mark recently posed the shows wonderful jingle (embedded above), which reminded me of the jingle I lovingly crafted many …

At P Con last week they ran a fun little contest. The idea was to produce a complete short story (SF, horror or fantasy) in just 100 words.
In the end my efforts didn’t place, though I’m egotistical enough to suspect the judge didn’t grok them what-so-ever. Perhaps he just preferred the story about the farting dragon…
In any case, it was a fun little writing excercise. Here are two brief tales I entered. Interestingly enough, I think this is one contest that might be significantly easier in “mainstream” fiction, …

Lawrence Lessig has consistently been one of the most important figures in the debate over copyright reform, ‘piracy’, and remix culture over the last decade. He’s recently switched his energies to battling the corrupting effect of PACs, lobbyists and outright bribery in the US political system, so it’s rare these days to hear him talk about how the law is prohibiting the development of culture, criminalising creativity and creating and extremism on both sides of the debate. A development that Lessig argues, has led to the social normalisation of copyright …

Display of ‘vintage’ science fiction titles in Chapters window
Arthur C. Clark once called science fiction “The only genuinely mind expanding drug”, proof positive that he hadn’t tried any of the others. And yet, there’s something to this flippant quote. SF is the literary genre, next to the romantic novel, most often demeaned; despite this, it is perhaps the genre which has most influenced our recent history – inspiring technological and social change as varied as mass transit systems, space travel, and urban promiscuity.
Science Fiction is a kind of architecture of …