Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

Caverns

August 27, 2016

We started recording this at the very end of 2008. It was inspired by Silent Hill, Jimmy Eat World, and And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead’s song Source Tags and Codes, which has the lyric: You picked me up and we went for a drive into the stained glass cavern of […]

categories: music

Playdead’s Inside: what was THAT about?

July 28, 2016

My friend Matt and I were discussing the meaning of Inside, Playdead’s atmospheric puzzle game. Like its predecessor, Limbo, Inside is a masterclass of subtle storytelling in games. There’s no dialogue or narration: the story progresses via ambience, stunning design, and menace. The player is trusted to form their own narrative interpretation. For example, initially, I thought the boy in red was running to […]

categories: reflections

The Chalk Path – poetry PDF

July 24, 2016

My latest poetry pamphlet is now available as a free PDF. In The Chalk Path, Joe, Hugh, and myself turn our attention landward from the coast. The poems are drawn from walks over chalk downs, train rides beside white horses etched into hillsides and, in contrast, the bright red sandstone of my Mercian homelands. Read it online […]

categories: journeys, poems

Failure

July 20, 2016

The ship’s design pictured is the Titanic. The cross-section is drawn at full scale and the length at quarter scale. I visited the Titanic exhibition in Belfast recently. The timing couldn’t have been better as I’ve been reading Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking, about how we learn from failures both catastrophic and small. The ‘unsinkable’ […]

categories: essays, reflections

Dharma Dudes: Bubble

July 11, 2016

categories: comics