Introductory postscript

Hi!

If you're reading this, welcome to the now-concluded Magpie Moth blog (2010-2019). I'm leaving it online as an archive of nine years of writing, journaling, art and photos.

Going forward, future writing can be found at www.magpiemoth.com.  

Why the change? Partly the chance to upgrade my online presence, partly the chance to create a more focussed home for my writing rather than the 'anything goes' fanzine approach here.

While I decided in the end not to compile a 'best of the blog' I'll be moving the odd piece over to the new site from time to time if it fits. 

So, do have a look around, see if anything takes your fancy. :)

Update

Yes, I'm still here.

While I'm still going to add things as and when I have a sense that this blog may have run its course in its present incarnation.

At the moment, my main priority rather than writing any new material is to compile a 'best of' as suggested last year and cap off eight years of the blog.

Longer term it's a choice between either 

- going back through and sorting some HTML formatting issues in older posts to make the blog fit for purpose and then continuing to use it for whatever purposes I see fit. 

- or making a new start on a new platform because the thought of wrestling with HMTL makes my teeth hurt. Maybe doing something different or a little more focussed.

I suspect the act of compiling the A-Z of Magpie Moth or whatever it ends up being will perhaps make my mind up for me.

Anyhow, for now, I'm still here.

Greatest hits, or indulging my archival tendencies

By Moumou82 [CC BY-SA 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Somewhat to my surprise - this blog has been going for eight years and over 600 posts. 

Despite occasional protestations to the contrary, it's has remained as it started - a personal space for me to write about whatever felt like a good idea at the time. It's always been a zone of freedom rather than something I had to do for this, that or the other reason. 

Ultimately, that accounts for both its persistence and its lack of (a single) focus.

For a while now, I've toyed with the idea of going back through the blog, picking out a representative set of posts and editing them into a small compendium for an probably imaginary audience.

This seems like as good a moment as any to look back and see what stands out.

Reviews (mainly books and music with a side order of cinema) have tended to dominate, in as far as anything has. Its a form I feel at ease with going right back to my dabblings in student journalism and lends itself well to short updates. But they can - and for me often are - a way of approaching the personal from a flanking position too.

Alongside these reviews you'd find over the years a whole kitchen sink of thoughts on the above plus politics, activism, organising and even the odd (in both senses) attempt at poetry.                

Taken together - who knows - they might even amount to a coherent position?

2010

This is where it all started and it's a bit tentative. There's really only three contenders for inclusion in any compilation and they'd all need a bit of work.

- A rather nice, if short on full sentences, exploration of how magic might work in an eighteenth century fantasy.

- A rough transcript of a talk I gave at Lewisham Unitarians about the need to go beyond 'mere tolerance' of others' beliefs and work towards a positive appreciation of difference. 

- An overly florid review of Inception, which either needs half the adjectives and adverbs removing or extending to twice its current length. Either way, it needs to be much less dense.  

2011

Ah! Now it starts to get more interesting.

The book reviews start to pick up, with takes on China Mieville's Kraken, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and Stephen Donaldson's Covenant Chronicles (the last an expansive take in four parts over a particular quiet December)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

I really, really, really didn't like fantasy parody Your Highness (but then it only scores 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, so this may be shooting fish in a barrel). I preferred Thor, or at least my alternative mumblecore reading of Dave Thunder's adventures.

It's short, but I remain taken with a piece of Hercules And Love Affair and the politics of dancing.

Also - the blog exhbits first signs of a recurring annoyance with nostalgia (heavily indebted to Simon Reynolds Retromania) in a review of Plush's album Fed. 

2012

We're now getting up to 60-odd posts a year. Granted, a lot of these are photos, quotes and Christmas doggerel, but still - 60 posts!

2012 was when my interest in metal really flared up (I blame living in Birmingham) and I wrote a series of posts trying to justify account for this of which these are the best. 

How I learned to stop worrying and love metal. Sort of.
On volume
On sincerity

Token anti-nostalgia post - being grumpy about the Heartbeat tourist industry in the North Yorkshire Moors

Of course in no way contradicted by posts on teenage favourites David Eddings, Julian May
and Sheri Tepper. 

A review of early Tanith Lee is also interesting for being a first crack at praising the strangeness inherent in much of the best fantasy, despite how much Eddings and his imitators try so squeeze it out. It's also a reminder of how often I misspell 'weird'.

I'm still rather pleased with my idea of 'thresholds' - curated augmented reality spaces - even though I've yet to do much anything with it.

2013

The first of two prolific years.

As an outsider exploring the margins of metal I continued to turn up gems - it's this year that the love affairs with Alcest (AKA the black metal Nick Drake) and Ulver started. 

In a more polemical mode though I suggested that Terrorizer magazine might want to take a stronger stand on racism (which in turn prompted further thought on how far an artist's politics could be separated from their art)

Lovecraft and his buddy Clark Ashton Smith, as well as Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius, all get a look in on the weird fiction front. 

Other genre fiction reviews of note included Spider Robinson's Callaghan's Crosstime Saloon, Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle and Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear.

I didn't often write about non-fiction but this piece on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level is pretty good.

I also managed to review both The Hobbit and the first of the Jacksonian cinema trilogy, as well as getting a surprising amount of material out of the morality of force while reviewing Olympus Has Fallen, Iron Man 3 and Prisoners. 

Still true: too much Twitter outrage makes me want to look at cat pictures on the internet (there was a follow-up post in 2014 about tweeting in a trolling paradise)

Token anti-nostalgia post: dismay at the NME's top 10 albums of all time (and postscript)

This year's ideas I didn't do anything much with: mapping a cartography of hope and festivals as neartopian spaces.

Top 10 posts of 2017

It's not been the noisiest year on the blog, but here are the top 10 posts of 2017 by page views.

I've decided to leave out the link round-up posts (the Health-Geekery series, mainly) as they don't involve any proper writing and it seems a little like cheating to include them.

1. Paul, the Liverpool South Parkway Cat
2. Notes from a divided kingdom, Part 1
3. The Fisher King of hitmen is back: John Wick, Chapter 2
4. The versatility of Chim Chim Cheree 
5. Sulk: Associates' intense little jewel 
6. 8 short notes on the poo emoji cushion
7. Cliff Richard led astray by sorcery! 
8. Was pop in crisis in 1976?
9. Wonder Woman: a sense of the superhuman 
10. Too good to leave to the critics: Can and I Want More

By category, that's:

Music - 5
Film - 2
Cats - 1
Horror (poo emoji cushions) - 1
Politics - 1

Most read posts so far this year

The blog has been gently bubbling away in 2017, sustained by a series of posts on the charts of 1976 and its use as a bit of link library / memory palace for work. 

I'm never sure what posts are going to get the most traction, but here are the most viewed so far this year: 

1. Paul, The Liverpool South Parkway Station Cat 
2. Health-geekery March 2017
3. Scaramouching Its Way To The Top - Bohemian Rhapsody
4. Was Pop In Crisis In 1976?
5. Introducing The 1976 Project 
6. 1976 Was Peak Abba
7. 2017 Hugo Nominations - A Much More Open Field
8. Michael Fabricant Is Right 
9. Finding Your Feet Again: Alcest's Kodama 
10. Thoughts From Oatcake Country

That breaks down to:
 
Music (1976) - 4
Politics - 3
Cats - 1  
Music (other) - 1
Science-fiction - 1

Datalude - top 10 posts of 2016 so far

As it's interesting (to me, at any rate) to see which posts go somewhere and which ones languish unread.

1. Science-fiction as mind bomb
2. Science-fiction needs you - join me as a Hugo Awards voter
3. If Meta Filter were filk fixated - File 770
4. Trouble at the business end of democracy - the #usepens affair
5. Cute title, sad book - Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
6. Noblesse oblige
7. Town and city names in song titles - a non-definitive list
8. YA goes gothic - Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree
9. In the Lovecraftian mode, but not the Lovecraftian mood - Stephen King's Revival
10. Space is the worst frontier - Andy Weir's The Martian

Or, by topic:

Book reviews - 4
Politics - 2 
Lit criticism (after a fashion) - 2
Website reviews - 1
Random music geekery - 1

Notes from the policy rabbit hole and other January news

Eagle-eyed readers will note that it's been three weeks since any blogging occured here. And after all my good intentions at the start of the year! However, it's not that I've not been writing. 
  
My big work projects at the moment at the Motor Neurone Disease Association are the upcoming Assembly elections in Wales and Northern Ireland. To that end, I've been part-writing, part-curating policy briefings for Assembly members, together with adapting an MP's pocket guide to serve for AM's and MLA's. Oh, and arranging for all the Welsh material to be translated into Welsh!

It's been good fun rediscovering my inner policy wonk - although also a good reminder of why I stopped doing pure policy roles 10 years ago. Writing reports - like undergraduate essays - tends to bring out the completer-finisher / mildly obsessive traits in me to a point that I find slighly uncomfortable. And that means recently my writing energies have been almost entirely diverted to this end.

Nevertheless, I am profoundly grateful for my apprenticeship with the Electoral Commission back in the mists of time for giving me the skills and toolkit to do it when needed. And happily, the reports are now with the designer, having been proof-read and audited to within an inch of their lives. 

You can read previews of both election campaigns here:

Every Breath Counts (Northern Ireland)
MND Won't Wait (Wales) 

And last - but my no means least - did I mention that I'd passed my driving test at the second attempt? :)

That's pretty awesome, actually.

My closing reflection is that sometimes we choose our field of action, sometimes it's chosen for us. January seems to have been one of the latter times. 

But I have got a truck load of stuff done, and that I can be quietly chuffed about. 

Can I level up in writing in 2016?

As of now, this blog has been running for around five and a half years. I've clocked up over 500 posts or, to put it another way, a post every four days or so.

Not a bad innings at all. :)

The blog serves a number of functions for me. 

- A scrapbook of thoughts, images and reflections. 
- An exercise in writing practice 
- A space where I can express some of my own ideas and opinions in long-form 

I could (and did) do all of those things in a written journal when I was younger, but what a blog brings to the table is interactivity: it's a place where people can read what you've written and tell you what they make of it.

It's a way of taking a risk and putting part of yourself in the public domain - even if only a small part. And I've really enjoyed doing it.

The blog also is a fair reflection of my various interests - artistic and political - although I imagine that it lacks some coherency as a result. I haven't really pursued a single theme, and it follows that I've not really chased a specific audience either. That inconsistency has probably contributed to the fact that I've seen at best a modest growth in page-views over the years. 

Now, that doesn't take anything away from the blog - everything I've done has been worth doing for it's own sake. And thank you to everyone who has read any of my posts - it's very much appreciated.

But it does bring me on to the question of where I go from here, at this time of resolutions. Can I level up in writing in 2016? Can I write more ambitiously, in a way which gives the blog more focus and brings in readers and new opportunities?

I think I can, and there are three areas I'd like to focus on this year.

1. Fiction: this is the year I want to start regularly writing short fiction/spoken word/poetry to really build that creative muscle. I'm confident enough in the fragments I've left on the blog to feel that here is something worth developing, but I won't know unless I try. 

And I had a lightbulb moment towards the end of last year when I realised who and what I was writing for, which I think will help a great deal. :)

2. 'Decadent environmentalism': [UNDOUBTEDLY SELF INDULGENT KLAXON] at the risk of coming over like a pseud, I've been trying to work out my relationship with the environmental movement through a humanties/arts-based dialogue and I think I'm going to need to put it in long form if I'm going to get any answers. This post back in November points the way.

3. Narrowing down the reviews and criticism: the two good runs of reviews and critical reflection I've had over the past year have been around science-fiction, fantasy and especially the Hugo Award controversies and the ongoing culture clash of being a right-on ageing indie kid and learning to appreciate metal. Both good stories to tell, over and above the joys of reviewing for its own sake.

None of this means that I won't continue to use this blog as a convenient location for personal pieces or other things that don't fit the above description. But it will help providea direction of travel for my writing which will allow me to plan ahead, promote my work a little more beyond my friendship circle and hopefully connect with other like minds.

And like getting ready to run 5K - another ambition for this year - it will mean getting more organised. About what I write and when I write it.

What it could also lead to - if these strands become too disparate - is setting up another site to cover one or more of them. But we'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it.

Top ten posts from 2015

Lairich Rig [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It's not been the most prolific year on the blog for me - but I've maintained a steady flow of updates and articles that I'm pleased with and in some cases downright proud of.  

Here are the top 10 most viewed pieces this year. It's no surprise that those posts written with an audience in mind - be it environmental activists or SF fandom - tend to do the best.

1. Hard Science, Hot Mess: Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem

"Liu mixes astrophysics, the politics of science, the history of the Cultural Revolution, virtual reality and Pynchonesque conspiracy theories to create, well, the hottest mess this side of Philip K Dick."

2. Ten reasons to get involved in a Friends of the Earth local group 

"While I was travelling home last week I challenged myself to come up with ten compelling reasons to join a Friends of the Earth local group. Here they are, collected in tweet form." 

3. Kevin J Anderson's The Dark Between The Stars: control, not mastery

"Dark is more of what Anderson does - space opera on an epic scale [...]. And what an elaborate, detailed, techno-baroque sandbox it is too, taking in psychic empires, gas giant mining, insectoid robot, gestalt forests, plague collectors and colours from out of spaaaaaaaaaace."

4. Now That's What I Call Kinda Okay: Reading the Hugo short fiction nominees

"And the Hugo's are not awards for the merely alright. What would be the point in that?"

5. A big hug from the golden age of high fantasy: Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor

"The Goblin Emperor is a Bildungsroman, high fantasy style, and goodness knows we've had a lot of those. But there's no Eddings-style chosen one wish-fulfilment trip for our protagonist here." 

6. Introducing the libertarian dismount  

"I think we're going to see more of the dismount here in the UK in the years to come. Not only is the boundary between the market and the state once again becoming contested territory, but there is a worrying backlash against the politics of diversity on the breeze too." 

7. Black metal ecology: Agalloch's Marrow Of The Spirit

"It's also sometimes hard to locate the human element in Agalloch's work, or to escape the feeling that they have nothing to say about the present other than the need to transcend or transform it. Listening to them is occasionally a visceral joy, but more often an austere, intellectual pleasure, especially given the length of the songs."

8. Quick review of Ancillary Sword, plus my best novel vote 

"What I will say is that I enjoyed it a great deal, although it lacked the shock of the sorta new that it's prequel Ancillary Justice had, as well as its driving heartbreak-n-revenge narrative."

9. Last Day Working For Friends of the Earth

"After seven years and a little more, yesterday was my last day working for Friends of the Earth. It's been an amazing experience in ways I have yet to fully reflect on, and I've been deeply touched by the response I've had from colleagues in the staff body and comrades in local groups as I've been heading out the door."

10. What we don't talk about when we don't talk about The Big Ask

"When we leave out The Big Ask from our conversation as a movement, we don't just leave out an occasion for nostalgia, we omit an opportunity to remind ourselves what it is to be successful."

Top Ten Posts of 2014

Despite the bots, views are still the only objective means I have of working out which blog posts have reach beyond my regular readers (hello - if you're out there).

So, for the record, here's the top ten most read posts of 2014 from the blog. 

There's not much of a common denominator. But its worth noting that the first two posts combined have more views than the other eight, largely because they got linked elsewhere on the internet. The rest relied directly on my own networks on social media and e-mail for transmission.

1. Dear Conservative Science-Fiction Writers of America...

If you want to talk (and listen), come away from the walls and into the centre of the room. If you don't want only the loudest and angriest voices to be heard, speak up.

2. Feels Like I'm Fixin' To Die., Captain: John Scalzi's Redshirts

Why does much bad science-fiction (and its kissing cousin, bad fantasy) considers the mass death of unnamed characters to be an essential part of the drama?

3. Black metal facepalm - why won't Terrorizer tell us Varg Vikernes is racist?

Varg's racist ideology is so inherent to his music that you can't write an article about 'why he matters' and fudge the issue by not mentioning it at all , and then expect to be taken seriously.

4. Applying Wheaton's Law To Campaigning

Every time people fall out over ways of working, don't welcome someone properly at a meeting, don't listen to each other, or fail to establish relationships of trust, Wheaton's Law isn't being followed. We're too busy, too focused, perhaps, to be good sports.

5. Introduction to Climate Change Campaigning

Pssst? Wanna try a new training workshop? 

Here's one we made earlier.

6. Social science-fiction - how story-telling games can help us dream our green future

Science-fiction is a literature of ideas – even if some of it is in the business of recycling old tropes – so gamifying science-fiction story-building makes a lot of sense. 

7. The Soft Pink Truth - how to deal with unsavory politics in black metal

"The Soft Pink Truth hereby abjures black metal homophobes, racists, and Nazis categorically and absolutely: MAY THIS CURSE BIND! Remember Magne Andreassen!"

8. Not arrogance but belief - celebrating Echobelly's On (guest post by Mark Stratton)

At the time, I wanted to do great things, I didn’t want to compromise, I wanted to know what life is and I wanted to know everything. Readers, I have no progress to report whatsoever; I still aspire to these things but perhaps a little less blatantly and a little less forcibly than when I first adopted it as my personal mantra. On will live with me forever.

9. From German to Welsh in one album - Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's Tatay (guest post by Jim Kennedy)

This new, potentially mind-bending experience accompanied me not to a dusty cottage with friends armed with handfuls of mushrooms, or an altering experience in woodlands waiting for the LSD to kick in, but to a Walkman whilst in my room on holiday with my mum and dad.

10.  Britpop and the Shine compilations - as broad a church as your indie disco requires

To call Shine and its offspring the definitive artefact of the Britpop years is on the face of it laughable. But the fact that they were compiled with no regard for anything other than what would make the best Halls of Residence party makes them much better at managing the continuity and contradiction of the music than your average journalistic or historical narrative.

2014 cultural roll-call

Not a best of list, as such, but a taste of what I've most enjoyed in art and culture in 2014

Art

Max Klee at the Tate Modern

Books

This is a year when I've returned to my roots and mainly been reading SF. 

John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar
Thomas M Disch - Camp Concentration
Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross - The Rapture Of The Nerds
Kameron Hurley - Infidel
Anne Leckie - Ancillary Justice
Kim Newman - Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron
John Scalzi - Redshirts
Olaf Stapledon - Last And First Men

Live

Caitlin Moran on her reading tour of How To Build A Girl at The Alex, Birmingham

Dead Dog In a Suitcase by Kneehigh at the Old Vic, Bristol

Frank Turner at the Capital FM Arena in Nottingham
Josh Record at Brighton Library for The Great Escape, and then again at Rochdale Library
Kaiser Chiefs at The Great Escape Festival
Once the Musical at the Phoenix, London
Pet Shop Boys at Bingley Festival (the first band I saw when I was 16)

Music

Arctic Monkeys - AM
Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore - Sunset Mission
Crooked Necks - Alright Is Exactly What It Isn't 
Joni Mitchell - Blue
Panopticon - Kentucky
Ulver - Kveldsanger

Film & TV

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (eventually, once it got going)
Birdman
Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes
Don't Tell The Bride (what?)
Guardians Of The Galaxy
Sonic Highways
Sound City
Pride
Sleepy Hollow season 1
Turtle Power - The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (yes indeed)

Open mike time - have you got something to say and nowhere to say it?

By ChrisEngelsma (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

While I'm merrily writing away for NaNoWriMo (7,000 words and counting last time I checked) - for the rest of the month I want to turn this blog over to anyone who wants to promote or ponder activism and campaigning.

So, tell us what you're up to. Or use this space as a sandbox to explore ideas. Whether you want to write a lot or a little, these next few weeks are for you.

I'll happily tweet and Facebook anything that I add - so what you write will be read.

Blasts from the past

Alright, this isn't the most read blog in the known universe, but sometimes I'm surprised what still gets a trickle of views month in, month out.

Things like:

Music reviews of Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die and Negativland's Helter Stupid 

A couple of grumps about manufactured history - the Towcester Clock Company and the time-warped world of Aidenfield Goathland on the Yorkshire moors

A triumph for niche writing?

What does Tim write about?

In the last calendar year, I have produced the suspiciously round number of 140 blog posts. 

Subtracting the 39 or so photo-blogging interludes, that gives us just over 100 actual posts with substantial writing of some sort in them.

Of those, what I write about, in order of frequency is:

1. Grassroots organising, training and facilitating - it's my job, innit, so the blog is where I share and reflect.
2. Books, mainly reviews of SF/fantasy, with a few opinion pieces on the side
3. Music, everything from the problems with the NME's top 100 albums of all time to my ongoing tentative engagement with metal.
4. Political analysis and opinion, for fairly broad values of politics and opinion
5. Everything else - film reviews, creative writing, more personal reflections and things happening in my area.

This isn't according to any conscious plan on my part - I write about what I feel called and inspired to write, as I topple down the hillside of momentum and routine. 

But it does mean that the habit must be pretty well embedded in me if I'm producing something an average of one day in three. 

The question is now - is that enough? Can I do more with this urge to write? Is the blog the right place to do it all?