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real life on the other hand traps us all with no prospect of ending so how do we escape a gamified world read more books take up the violin stick it to the man wherever you can this doesn t sound like much of a call to revolution to me and i m not sure nguyen s heart is in the fight individuals may recover their individual agency and this book will help them do so but it s hard to see why businesses governments and bureaucracies of all stripes would ever abandon their self empowering rhetoric of objective metrics early on nguyen says i had an entire theory about games in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play and i had an entire theory about metrics in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered this is well put but if i had a criticism of this otherwise trenchant and entertaining book it s that nguyen follows the rules of his genre so very closely like every popular thinker on the shelf he can t resist sharing with us his personal journey to enlightenment if you ve ever read the hungry caterpillar to children you ll know how much young readers delight in repetition nguyen to me is the eric carle of philosophy if you re even roughly up to speed with his topic his steady circumspection may prove exasperating but don t discard him a book too is a kind of game in which we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want it s about going the long way a particular way using a particular method if we truly want to understand our civic plight and not just tick off some talking points then we should read the score we ll find that nguyen has planned this particular long way round with skill posted in books reviews and opinion tagged conformity digital culture digital harms games metrics quantification quantified self lumpen corpses and lustful hyena women posted on november 13 2025 by simonings reading killing the dead by john blair for the telegraph 13 november 2025 st cuthbert lived on the island of lindisfarne on a diet of raw onions and died with what sense of relief we can only imagine in 687 ce four centuries later his coffin was opened and his revealed corpse looked for all the world like a living man some duly proclaimed a miracle but archaeologist and medievalist john blair can t help wondering might his lifelike corpse have raised concerns comprehensively surveying the world s undead was blair says a project he saved for his retirement killing the dead speaks to a lifetime s storing up of mischievous treasures also to blair s sheer enjoyment now that teeters often and who can blame him on unholy glee what s not to love about discussions of china s lumpen corpses and lustful hyena women or about a book with chapter titles like lying undead in a ditch england 700 1000 dullards will call cheat since the title mentions vampires while the book embraces all varieties of the undead but be patient blair s global history of the dangerous dead restless dead undead revenant shroud chewers call them what you will is structured to address this very point blair reckons that vampires commonly conceived are a literary invention and comparatively youthful our first true vampire novel is a pamphlet from 1600 now lost featuring the widely florid tale of johann kunze of bennisch everyone knows that vampires are slavic but says blair the intensity of a phenomenon at a late date does not prove that it existed from an early one also that historical discussions of the phenomenon have hugely over emphasized bloodsucking blair s history begins around the 8th century bce with the neo assyrians whose remarkably laid back attitudes towards the restless dead found their way to greece and from there to rome where they cross fertilised with some asian ideas veering between pathos and bawdy comedy about predatory female shape shifters these folkloric strains twisted and darkened as they head north giving rise to some magnificent icelandic monsters scandinavian colonisation cast these viking style revenants across northern europe where they shaped beliefs in northern germany poland and bohemia witness an intensive corpse killing epidemic which erupted during 1546 1553 in a series of small saxon towns this lore then intensified and spread south eastwards eventually linking up with more oriental flavoured balkan beliefs so while vampires are younger than we think there s no need for disappointment their ancestry is much richer and more various than we ever could have imagined some huge questions are being begged here and blair is assiduous in addressing them all blair s book s over 500 pages long and he wastes not a single one first and most important are the undead a story we tell each other or a real phenomenon for the phenomenon to be real granpa doesn t actually have to leap up from his bier and chase us around the parlour it would be enough that we shared some cognitive glitch that made us susceptible to belief in the undead perhaps we re all inclined to see signs of life in post animate matter and it is true that corpses do not say still they groan and fart stiffen and flex and when they finally decay do so at rates that are far from normative these days we consider death a singular event ironic really given how our medicine repeatedly brings us up against the processes of death earlier societies didn t have quite so much understanding of coma anoxia brain death and vegetative states but they steered much closer to reality and offered infinitely more comfort to the bereaved in viewing death as a process not an event the cessation of breath the laying out the liminal stage at the wake the burial and the ensuing physical decay are steps along a road that must be followed precisely blair observes of the rites that grow up in these societies the only wrinkle being if that journey is impeded the implications can be horrifying except when it wasn t after all the most memorable resurrected body of all belongs to a much loved and still revered religious visionary who got up and left his tomb after actually dying solid enough an animated corpse if ever there was one jesus christ nevertheless also managed in true vampiric style to pass through the stone stoppering his tomb no wonder some of the first christians found the bodily resurrection problematic blair is less interested in picking holes in what people saw he s more interested in how people interpreted what they saw and what this says about their ideas of life in general in shamanic societies fluid spirits flow promiscuously in and out of matter to be animated at all is to be possessed christians and muslims pack the souls of the dead off to various divine resorts so can only explain reanimation through the mischievous activities of unearthly presumably devilish agents generally though and with the notable and quite niggling exception of the resurrection myth the phenomenon proves too slippery for dogma to easily attach itself one event gives rise to multiple folkloric forms blair explains which when reformatted by the observer take on forms that we may not even recognize as the original event in other words whatever psychological universals underpin our experiences of the undead they re ever so quickly drowed out by all the inventive stories we spin around our experiences are the undead psychically real or are they just an old wives tale endlessly reglossed the answer frustrating as this is is yes a more productive question what summons the undead they get about a bit it s true but they re hardly an everyday occurrence in the book s single sophomoric moment blair says that their appearances are triggered by attitudes perceptions and fears that are not automatic but spring from social economic political religious and cultural variables don t anyone panic he s quick to put flesh on these modish bones wars plagues and religious controversies unsettle us enough that the walls between the living and the dead start to shiver there s also the well documented abuse and tyranny dished out by slavic matriarchs right up until the early 20th century to consider deliciously inconvenient politically speaking they have also generated the most recent outbreaks the latest undead mother in law killing a proper stake through the heart affair took place at vâlcea romania in 2019 most vampires are a public nuisance but undead babushkas are worse they come after their own ultimately and somewhat incredibly blair s history of the vampire provides inspiration and comfort digging up the dead and decapitating them with an iron spade is a gruesome business for sure but a sight less disgusting than treating a living human being the same way blair argues convincingly that corpse killings are prophylactic against the kind of mass hysterias otherwise burn witches or throw children into ovens like other extreme rituals it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards is blair s insouciant conclusion corpse killing is mainstream blair leads us through innumerable vales of terror and out again trembling yet unharmed and even enlightened with the elan of gene wilder s willy wonka who now i come to think of it was another pretend retiree no apologies if i don t deliver this crushingly obvious paean who will killing the dead is a book to die for posted in books reviews and opinion tagged funerary practices horror superstition uncanny undead vampires puffins have the kindest eyes posted on october 29 2025 by simonings watching ed sayers s super nature for new scientist 29 october 2025 ed sayers a director of commercials and music videos has a passion for super 8 a motion picture film format released in 1965 by eastman kodak he s not alone the dinky film cassettes depend for their continued production on the hue cry and advocacy of a small global community of filmmakers what marks sayers out is his organisational ability his first feature is assembled from super 8 footage dispatched from 25 countries by forty collaborators professional filmmakers and local enthusiasts alike have sent sayers footage of the natural world near where they live reading the premise of this movie i ll admit i was buckling in for 82 minutes of sparrows and house cats but boy was i mistaken though the distributor is making much of the film s green credentials a globe spanning documentary that racked up precisely zero air miles worthiness is not much of a sales pitch better i would have thought to emphasise how strange everything looks in this hand held lo fi and mostly silent format super 8 with sound of a sort arrived in 1973 but super nature s vivid and engaging soundscape is mostly the work of engineers david mcaulay and john cobban in voice over sayers says super 8 looks as though someone had painted your memories for you the literal truth of his assertion becomes apparent very early on as you settle into the medium s glare flare shakiness and shifts of hue and tone the world captured by super 8 is closer to the world our eyes actually capture it s not polished posed well lit or even perfectly focused but then neither is the world it is however often devastatingly beautiful and so is this film a few of the more ambitious shots sones featuring the smallest fastest most retiring creatures are hard to read but an animal isn t any less of an animal because we only glimpsed it the one sequence that didn t work for me though it was beautifully shot and edited was an aerial sequence featuring migrating geese the whole set up involving microlights and two cameras was altogether too ingenious too staged and not altogether green if we want to get persnickerty about it better by far to lie in a puddle in the rain with a plastic bag over your head filming a snail super nature is a film about the natural world as people actually experience it big budget nature filmmaking takes the diametrically opposite approach revealing the world as the eye cannot possibly see it either because it s physically impossible to see or because it doesn t even exist the impulse to reveal strange new worlds is admirable i maintain that walking with dinosaurs is a joy but i can t help but wonder why the viewer drunk on a surfeit of perfectly lit perfectly framed perfectly timed visual wonders wouldn t become permanently jaded super nature shakes us up wonderfully well structually it s one of those films that s constructed around the story of its own making accompanying every sequence flamingo worm coral white rhino weedy sea dragon kangeroo is a voice over from the filmmaker explaining what their footage means to them there are many charming moments one filmmaker describes the sound a puffin makes as it runs clownish as though it were wearing outsize slippers and tells us they have the kindest eyes some testaments are inspiring there are filmmakers here who took to super 8 because they needed a new way of looking at the world once disease or misfortune had shrunk their lives to a point some trot out ecological pieties others need to stick their heads under the cold tap in the ibex you can apparently see the wisdom of the mountains then there s the story ed sayers tells about himself a director who sets out with a grand ambition to record the natural world in the greenest manner possible equipping local filmmakers with vintage technology act one who loses all hope as he finds himself editing footage of floods fires ukrainian trenches and piled plastic garbage act two but who is ultimately cheered up and his film project redeemed in act three by the antics of a playful seal it s as good a narrative frame as any i suppose but perfectly predictable in a way the footage never is posted in reviews and opinion screen tagged natural history nature we were obliged to kill them all posted on october 24 2025 by simonings reading nick higham s mavericks empire oil revolution and the forgotten battle of world war one for the spectator 25 october 2025 december 1917 for years the ottoman turks have been trying to spark a worldwide jihad of the world s sunni muslims hoping that muslim subjects of the british empire in india will rise in revolt now that tsarist power in russia has collapsed the roads through central asia are open and the war weary british empire has virtually no resources left to prevent the turkish empire from expanding into india edward noel an aristocratic catholic political officer who is supposed to be in persia sends a telegram to his betters from baku an oil producing city perched on the western shore of the caspian sea he wants to plug the strategic gap in central asia by raising a force of local troops he deems it but an inconvenience that everyone around him is fighting everyone else to the point of pogrom single handedly reshaping the geopolitics of the caspian sea lands noel into a world of trouble captured by persian rebels he is falsely accused of organising a massacre of muslims is tied to a tree and faces a firing squad he won t co...