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Archives for July, 2016
Last Words by Jackson Lear [Book Review]
Last Words by Jackson Lear My rating: 5 of 5 stars I really enjoyed this. It starts off as a holiday diary of a 23 year old British back-packer making his way around Europe. The tension builds gradually from inconvenience and annoyance into the full blown horror of a zombie apocalypse. It felt much more real and plausible to me than most of the zombie books I've read, with one exception. Last Words Mark spends most of his time running away and trying vainly to get home. He travels with a small group of friends, who gradually get split up for one reason or another. He travels through Spain, over to Morocco, into a civil war torn Algeria and then to Tunisia. Through this he relies on others to speak or translate or help. Mark is just a normal guy…
Narrative and Social Media
I had a bit of a lightbulb moment the other day about social media and the driving of narrative. It was when I was doing my analysis on the recent coup attempt in Turkey. Narrative Power Terry Pratchett - master of narrative (Photo credit: Wikipedia) As any reader of Terry Pratchett knows, narrative has a power of its own. Humans are storyphiles. We just love stories, and where we have a narrative in play we will ignore inconvenient facts so that the narrative can continue. Some of what appears to constitute shock might simply be the disruption of narrative. Social media and the filter bubble Social media is well known for creating a filter bubble effect. This isn't a new phenomenon, but the effects are becoming more obvious. See Guido Fawkes on the Brexit filter bubble. Humans are social animals, and maintaining group cohesion requires…
Themself free offer until 19 July
As the title says, you can get a kindle version of Themself for free until the 19th of July (actually about 0700 GMT on the 20th). Here's a link You don't need a kindle to read it though. Amazon do apps for iPhone and Android as well as other types of smartphones. There is also a cloud reader that lets you read from anything that supports a web browser. So if you can read this blog post then you can read the ; Reviews, however short, are always very welcome. I like it if you can share what you liked, or didn't like, but I'm just as happy if you react by giving it a rating. Any rating is better than no rating. If you hated it, that's fine. No book is for everyone and the purpose of reviewing is…
500 Posts on Themself – milestone
Themself passed the 500 posts milestone earlier this week. I've been specifically writing for Themself since 5th July 2006, so it has taken me a decade to write 500 posts. That said, the earliest posts date from 1995, but they were originally written for the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group newsletter Milmud. Of the posts I've written, 15 were slotted in before the real start of the blog. All of those come from other things I'd written for publication elsewhere. Part of the nature of the very early blog posts was that I didn't have a topic in mind, so they're pretty short and random. These days they'd probably turn up as facebook status updates. Back then there wasn't a facebook (or at least I didn't have an account). What really turned up the heat was doing the creative writing course…
Civil Service Live 2016
Yesterday I attended some sessions at Civil Service Live 2016 in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in central London. The QEIICC is next door to my office, so I didn't spend the whole day there. Some meetings were arranged at the last moment and I missed a couple of sessions. Civil Service Live Civil Service Live is a two day affair in London. There are a number of talks and workshops on a range of themes around sharing best practice across the civil service. There are also display stands for the L&D sides and some key ; In theory I could go back in today and catch what I missed. However my diary for today is pretty full. So I'll just need to hope that some of my colleagues found those interesting and can share the key messages with…