This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius

I dunno whether you noticed, friends, but 2023 was a bit of a turbulent year for me. I’ve been pretty circumspect about it, kept myself to myself, you know? Felt my feelings quietly. I certainly didn’t frame almost a year’s worth of blog posts around my experiences, no Sir. No frenzied self-indulgence for me. Thank…

Star Wars Ep 2 | Attack of The Clones

I feel like something of an interloper as I write this month’s post because Star Wars is not my field of expertise by any measure. I am a sci-fi afficionado (it must be true because it says so in my bio), but the great battle between the Jedi and the Sith is an area I’ve…

Medieval Tomes & Digital Souls

Last month I guested on the amazing Jack of All Graves podcast with the joyous Marko and Corri and if you haven’t already, you can check it out in the link above. Naturally I got lots of things wrong (including when the medieval period actually was, smooth effort K-Dog) but it’s definitely worth your time…

The Eleventh Tome of Klavek

November has brought, along with the fireworks, a recognition that I am going to need to dig in deep this winter, and give myself as much love as I can muster. The experience of grief is not linear. The days where I am full of joy at the autumn leaves and the sense of the…

It’s Always Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls

In my eternal quest to explain my academic research to my friends, “but seriously, what is it you actually do?” I like to transplant the ideas I have about digitisation, and manuscripts, into more familiar contexts. And so, the materiality of absence becomes a Pink Floyd song, and the cultural significance of a physical manuscript…

Wish You Were Here & the materiality of absence

When I was a teenager (many thousands of years ago) Pink Floyd were almost exclusively listened to by the boys in my life – most particularly, the ones who took a lot of drugs and used that down/up time to reflect upon life’s big questions (such as, who’s skinning up next? Why can’t I feel…

Star Trek & bodily resurrection

I want to talk about the last two episodes of Star Trek: Picard. Just, oh my goodness. I’ve got so many feelings right now. WARNING: there are spoilers in this post for all three seasons of Star Trek: Picard. I’ve spoken before about how I used to sit in my Nan’s living room in South…

Sentient Sex Mist: or, how do you solve a problem like the patriarchy?

last Saturday I presented at the Gender & Subversive Morality in Fanwork conference at Glasgow University and discussed feminism and cybertheory in Star Trek: Next Generation

Wales & the World | Cynefin, Welsh Manuscripts & Digital Colonialism

So, way back in June I attended two conferences – one at the University of Wales, Trinity St David, and one at the National Library of Wales – and at both conferences I presented similar papers. I’ve included my presentation here from the NLW conference, as it gives a broad view of both talks. I…

Resurrections: Digitisation & the Death of the Real

Cyberpunk epic The Matrix is resurrected in the cinema, and it reminds me of my deep and abiding love for Baudrillard.