August 20, 2014
When the lighthouse disappears locals say you have ten minutes before the town is lashed with rain. Sure enough, Godrevy was silhouetted against blue-grey vagueness while the bay shone, claustrophobically, with light reflected back onto the water by the clouds. Then outcrop and headland were deleted by mist. We heard it before we felt it: a shimmer in hedgerows and trees like […]
August 8, 2014
My son and I took it upon ourselves to play Minecraft the old fashioned way: with wooden blocks. I put the Minecraft Beta soundtrack on the gramophone and the room took on a new aspect, that of a subterranean domain perchance akin to Plato’s fabled cave. I immediately embarked upon an ambitious scale replica of The Tyn in Prague. My son, […]
August 7, 2014
The most ordinary locations in computer games often take on a life of their own. I’m thinking of the empty school in Silent Hill, rain on the windows in Gone Home, a back alley in The Secret of Monkey Island. There’s an insignificant window in the mansion of the first Resident Evil where text appeared to tell you that a dog could be heard […]
August 1, 2014
Weather here breezes in suddenly, opens the fridge and vanishes again much like a teenager. Rain greyed out the bay in minutes. The headlands disappeared one by one and then, impressive though it is, there was really nothing to look at but a blank wall of water. Even so, my cat has been keeping a watchful eye […]
July 30, 2014
LUKE What’s in there? YODA Only what you take with you. It occurred to me that entering the haunted cave on planet Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back is like shikantaza meditation, which translates literally as ‘just sitting.’ They both seem to be situations in which you cannot avoid facing yourself. The challenge is to bring your […]