Category: Personal
If you’re looking for my samples folder, it’s here.
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Why I understand the fears of British jews.
The papers are reporting that Britain is more antisemitic than it’s been for a long time. They’re also reporting that both Jewish celebrities and everyday folk are thinking about leaving Britain. As a Jew, I understand their fear. As a bad, atheist, secular Jew, I understand why they want to move to Israel but think…
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My FrankenGame of the Year
I liked a lot of games this year, and played far more games than I usually do. Yet, save for review, I didn’t find myself playing a single game a whole lot (blame buying a flat / moving flat / having a baby) and only finished a handful – perhaps only The Banner Saga, Transistor, and Shadows…
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Why our child won't have my name.
So, we’re having a child. In less than a month. And it won’t have my name. There are many rational reasons why this is, but the main one, to get out of the way, is that the presumption a child should take the father’s name is nonsense on stilts. Tradition is never a good argument. On…
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In Flight: London, 5 a.m.
Streets bare of anything but the orange glow of emergency lighting. Stretched black shadows of key workers (coffee shops, fast food joints) waiting thin and angular at bus-stops. Miles of normally pounded pavement getting a brief respite save for the endlessly-walking homeless and solitary drunks, wearing spirals and curlicues into its surface. London at 5…
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Le Pied Du Infant
It’s been a while. Back at university, we were the scourge of the common room – by which I mean that we were good for beating people and not much else. And even that only at table football. There was a core of around eight in our year. The socially-awkward, those tempted by easy victories…
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Rose-Tinted Eyes
“Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips” – Laurence Olivier. (Quote taken from a wonderful New Yorker piece by Roger Angell.) My eyesight’s never been good, but it was never bad either. When I was a kid, I guessed it might be bad (my dad was four-eyed all through my childhood, until the 90s when he started…
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Charlie Was My Darling
Charlie. Maria named everything we owned. I’d have to see the objects again to recall their specific pet names, but the one that mattered to me was when she named my car Charlie. I’d started learning to drive when I was 21 and looking for a job as a journalist. I thought it would give…
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Crusader Kings II: wilful obscurantism as a design ethos
Another ancient article recovered from the corpse of Edge Online. It would have been sad for the Khazars to disappear again… There’s a scene in Groundhog Day where Phil Connors endlessly attempts to save the life of a homeless old duffer. In my games of Crusader Kings II, Isaac of the Khazars has a similarly deterministic…
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Embrace The Bounce
Another ancient article recovered from the permafrost atop the flame-raddled corpse of Edge Online. It’s 2002. The Thing, the game of one of my favourite films, is about to come out and I’ve just started working on a games magazine. I get the game code, load it and enter the world. It’s great! I’m in…
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In Flight: Cloud Palaces
And a puff of cloud beneath, and the world is gone. London, rigid in its rows of suburban houses, grey and brown like a tired corpse, vanishes with a sigh. I look down at the passing clouds and I imagine them opening again, to reveal: flocks of dragons drifting beneath, mammalian muscles rippling beneath scaled…