Rune Soup
Magic
Are You Solving Wicked Problems With Magic?
Steam billows from my mouth as the pealing of the bells from the fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England reverberates around the Georgian architecture of the square. The vibration makes it through my coat and gently rattles my ribcage -like speakers at a really polite concert. Sunday morning. It’s a ghost town. [...]
Use Nested Divinations To Improve Accuracy
Blame the wonderful Balthazar and the addictiveness of Amazon Prime in equal measure. There’s a Lovecraftian Tarot deck that’s actually good and I don’t own it?! (Already have and like this one.) Plus it’s a Lo Scarabeo production whose aesthetic I adore? Well, this won’t do! So I promptly bought and calibrated the Dark Grimoire [...]
Feast of Saint Martin: Patron of Not Being A Dick
That’s Halloween done for another year. And this weekend in the UK we have Guy Fawkes Night to look forward. After that… well… pretty soon after that is November 11. 2011. If you are playing along at home, that’s 11/11/11. What? You didn’t have anything planned? Neither did I. Conveniently for us both we can [...]
Superheroism Begins In The Home
There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that comes from an exclusively psychological vision of how magic works. It’s not that it loses its explanatory efficacy when it comes to understanding gross physical results of enchantment, it doesn’t. It’s just that the efficacy becomes a litte inelegant. We are forced into saying that “the [...]
Volume Is The Best Magical Strategy
In August I came within a single day of being fired. If the CEO hadn’t been on holiday in Tuscany at the time I probably would have been out the door. (His first question to my boss when he came back to Hamburg was “why is Gordon still working for the company?”) And part of [...]
Sherlock Holmes And The Unicorn: How Ideas Migrate
It’s wonderful when you can build relationships with places that aren’t your home. Since leaving Bristol, we try to get back to it several times a year, not to see specific people but just to be in Bristol… just really soak in it like a hot tub. In New Zealand we had Queenstown and Wellington [...]
The Hamburg Conjecture: A 98:2 Magical Ratio
When my father came to visit recently for my birthday, the topic of his AIDS hospice work in the 1980s came up in conversation somehow. (To be clear, this wasn’t actually at the party because, you know… downer.) This was the terrifying dark ages of a genuinely horrible disease. A lot of medical professionals wouldn’t [...]
In Defense Of City Spirits
Brother Chris is right, of course. Urban animism has been discussed before. To my mind at least, it feels like a really nineties thing to talk about. His post is nothing of the sort. It’s a thoughtful analysis of urban animism that covers what are probably the two most important notions to consider when discussing [...]
The Edges Of Your World Are Closer Than You Think
“Rules change in The Reaches” -A Wizard of Earthsea Today was a day of catching up with some old friends I used to live with in Sydney almost a decade ago. They’re big shot lawyer-y, finance-y people living in Hong Kong now. And they’re engaged. I know precisely nothing about any of these things. Getting [...]
Magic Secrets As Taught By Robot Fish
Want to see what shoaling looks like? Proper shoaling, that is… the thing fish do. In this case, sticklebacks. Go and watch this video of scientists testing out whether a shoal of wild fish would follow an artificial leader. Of particular interest in the companion article is: Robofish moved faster than the real fish, which [...]
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