alaric 
My holiday readings are scattered about, and it’s hard not to be distracted with the goings on in GENIUSVILLE (which stupidity threatens to engulf us all), but one of the more gentle amusements has been cruising thru the pages of Kris Hemensley’s blog ‘Collected works‘ namesake of the precious bookshop/hive/dive at Melbourne’s core, which I … Read more
My reasons for releasing all my poetry into the public domain, without retaining any copyright, have been posted on this site for a while. I’ve always thought that society would need to change if creative people are to make a living with or without the protection of copyright, and so I’ve been watching the emergence … Read more
Here are some songs I have been working on over the last year or so. This is an unfinished song I am working on with a strange time signature; bars of 5, 5, 5 & 6 beats add up to 21, so it also makes three bars of 7, which is the rhythm of the ‘john’ … Read more
When we (inevitably) discover intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, I predict that they will have teapots. My line of reasoning is that just as the evolution of body plans inevitably stumbles across useful things like mouths and body armour, so too the evolution of tools will inevitably stumble across useful forms like teapots. This … Read more
Imagine going about your daily life and never being sure if the people you meet around you are real humans. Some of them, no one knows quite how many, are AI powered robots that churn out the propaganda of their creators. They seem real at first but when they are engaged, it is clear that … Read more
I have made a garage recording of Accidentals with accompaniment from local wildlife. The poems, which I wrote in 2008, are all on this website. I still have some of the paper copies left. This is me in my garage studio. I actually was testing out a new microphone reading the poems and thought the … Read more
A meritocracy is a kind of evolution, a social evolution. Like biological evolution, its business is to reward the survivors, and winnow out the weak. It is a hard game but the rules are set by Nature herself. For all its advantages over less obviously fair systems of resource allocation, like systems based on dynastic … Read more
For quite some time I have wished that Twitter had a native visualization tool that let you see what was trending in real time. There are lists of course, but I’m a visual person and there is so much potential for information in a good network visualization. I already knew what it should look like, … Read more
Freedom is a very basic personal instinct. I think all creatures want to be free, free from fear and desire, free from hunger and pain. The protection of key personal freedoms has been central to the rise of civilisation, and this has continued in modern societies through activities like the abolition of slavery and the … Read more
new poems.. like new leaves on trees soon to be felled. the darkness the darkness.. what is the simplest path now? the straightest path leads into emptiness .. the vast gasp of new verbiage heaping onto blogs, spilling from pages into vacant minds, pictures pouring into eyes. the heart like a tickertape machine, printing painful … Read more
I am an idealist. So for me, metaphors are not just literary phenomena, they actually have a reality of their own. They have a physicality too, and can encapsulate a truth just as well as any logical structure of language. Early Sanskrit poets understood this. For instance, a space with negative curvature is best described … Read more