Snapchat, Permanence, and Forgetting on the Internet

The internet has always maintained an uneasy balance between the forces of permanence and ephemerality. The pair act out a sort of fabular never-ending struggle as theorists, pundits, and general opinion shifts our favour back and forth…

The Magnificent Erection

So there’s this tower that’s big and tall. It sits on top of a university library — which was coincidentally the university where I had use for a library. So it was my library at my university. But, frequent visitor though I was, I have never been in its tower. No one has. Because…

Flying Pigs and Tiny Tree Men: A First-Timer’s Thoughts on Hayao Miyazaki

It has taken me twenty-three years to get round to watching a single Miyazaki film, and I ended up watching three of them in one night. The first time I became aware of what has turned out to be my…

The Thing Is…

In Patrick Sykes’ recent Inkling article about the artist John Sergeant, he draws attention to a series of images showing two friendship rings.

Patrick writes, ‘when abstracted to still lives the images echo one another without any setting to illustrate the circumstances.’ It…

Guns Don’t Kill People, People Do

A new year promises change and fresh hope, and yet, less than two weeks into 2013, there has been another school shooting in America.

Thankfully, the student gunman who entered Taft Union High School in California on Friday was dissuaded — after…

Food Porn

Stop. Put the iphone down. Eat your crayfish linguine before it gets cold. As beautiful, shiny and wholesome as the plate of organic, free range, deep-fried-in-locally-sourced-vegan-beer-battered chicken looks — it is not a sculpture. Just eat it. It is a meal for one, or two, but not a whole nation. Jesus…

Keep Off the Grass: Getting Away From Lawn Enforcement

Humans evolved on the African savannah. We were safer there than we had been in the jungle, where beasts lurked in the undergrowth. In the savannah we could scan the horizon for predators by standing upon our hind legs. This is why…

Unemployed. Again.

I am unemployed. Again. And the fact that it has snowed this week did not miraculously create an occupation in itself, of ‘playing with and wondering at the snow.’ I wish that was a job. I have been unemployed before. But the first time it felt like a holiday casual job search. Now all of the…

‘The Other’ — Is it all just the same?

I’m not so much referring to ‘The Others’ as fabricated on addictive, HBO’s Lost — though the example is prevalent to the upcoming discussion — but more to the academic construction of ‘The Other’ as a continental philosophical concept. The term ‘Other’ has been…