Author archives: lizeden

First up in my ‘let’s play all the old 360 titles sitting on my shelf, and then finally trade the whole lot in for cash’ project is Bioshock 2. I remember learning of the existence of the Bioshock Infinite thanks to an episode of the podcast Coverville which featured the oldey-timey version of Everybody Wants […]

I love buying up games 2nd hand. First, they are so frickin’ cheap! I picked up the Game of the Year edition of Skyrim for about £7, and must have got at least 100 hours of entertainment out of it. As value for money goes, that’s pretty damn good. Second, by the time the good […]

Courtesy of the British Computer Society, I attended a free lecture by Ethical Roboticist Professor Alan Winfield earlier this week. Here a few thoughts I jotted down during his excellent talk. Winfield started out discussing a couple of recent cases where the beta-testing of driverless cars has ended in tragedy. In the first case, a […]

I went to Open Data Camp at the weekend. Like all good modern events in the techy/data space, it had a code of conduct. In the introductory session this was mentioned explicitly, but briefly. Be nice to each other. Try to be aware of how much you are talking, and help enable others to speak. […]

I have just got back from a very cool weekend in Herefordshire, at #emfcamp. For posterity, here are a few thoughts: The Good For those unfamiliar, Electromagnetic Field Camp is basically Glasto for nerds. Like-minded people hang out in tents and caravans for a long weekend in a field. There are stages where scheduled talks […]

The following contains spoilers for several episodes of Black Mirror. Proceed at your own risk! In 2011 the world was first introduced to Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s dark fantasy TV series. Each episode forces the audience to confront some troubling aspect of society, technology, or person-hood. Mostly a combination of all three. Each instalment has […]

9) The Lego Batman Film The first Lego Movie came out in 2014, and received generally positive reviews, even if yes, it was basically a vector for selling merchandise. One of the best things about it was Will Arnett’s Dark Knight skewering performance as the self-important brooding caped crusader, so we had high hopes for […]

6) The Story of the Weeping Camel. Bridget Jones frequently laments the existence of the ‘smug marrieds’ who dominate dinner party conversation with unsolicited tales of their holidays, home improvement plans, experience with mortgage brokers and so on. I like to think we were never that boorish (which means we almost certainly were) but I […]

5) Star Wars IV-VI In 2005 I started a 3 year part-time Master’s degree through the Open University. This ran over the calendar year, so my long break between years was from Christmas to the start of February. Just before I started the 3rd and final year, Terry whisked me off to New York for […]

3) My Little Eye In comparison to some of the more lurid torture-porn offerings from the past couple of decades, this low budget claustrophobic horror probably seems pretty tame. However to my rather cosseted sensibilities, watching it was a grim and distressing experience. It didn’t help that we thought we were actually going to see […]