Ruminator X

A common refrain among politicians and media outlets who feel the need to remind us about the impending climate catastrophe or to make us feel guilty for our collective environmental fecklessness, is to fantasise about a future in which everyone drives electric cars, and carbon emissions are a thing of the past. Are these people being serious? Even when I was a teenager twenty-plus years ago, I and others had a simple question, which I never felt was satisfactorily answered: where do you think that electricity comes from? If the electricity that's charging the car's battery (a battery which contains all kinds of dubiously-acquired heavy metals and which was almost certainly produced using fossil fuel energy) was generated using fossil fuels, then it is actually much less efficient to use that energy, with all the inevitable losses incurred along the electricity grid, than it is to burn petrol directly in the car and transfer practically all of the energy from that burning direc...

I wrote this rather long review of the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution on PC (released in 2011, played in 2021), which turned out to be too long for either a Metacritic or Steam review. So here it is in all its glory.

[Prompts: "Getting bullied" + photo below] Being a photographer in the early twentieth century was a tough gig. You had to get your subjects to sit still for a long time, and because the subjects were the ones who were paying for the time, they could be terribly impatient and uncooperative about it - some of them just wouldn't accept that even state-of-the-art wet plate technology wasn't simply a point-and-click procedure. Harold was a photographer, but he wasn't a forceful fellow. He was easily cowed by more overbearing personalities, and he dreaded group photos, for it was in taking these that he was required to be the most forthright. Once, he had to take a photograph of the maidservants of a country house, and these were some very boisterous young ladies, used as they were to bossing around whoever was below them in the pecking order. Clara was the head maid of the house. She had the closest relationship to the lady of the house out of all of them, which gave ...

Ivor seldom slept. His sleep patterns were determined not by the rotation of the earth around the sun, but by the time taken for complex FTP requests or SQL commands to complete, bounced as they were across numerous servers around the world to conceal their origin. A mistake in a request, or even an error at any one of the terminals through which his request was routed, could cause the whole thing to fail, so he would only allow himself an hour or so of sleep at a time, to minimise lost time before the next request. For Ivor was a hacker, or 'independent data detective' as he preferred to call himself online, but this was not what he put on his CV. His day job was as a tech reporter for a leading online news outlet; when people asked him which one, he preferred to look at them over his glasses, pause, and say 'a major one'. If anyone replied with 'ahh, Tyler Durden' he would wink at them wryly - but still not say which one he worked for. Because that would give ...

1 [prompts: "a white lie" + picture of guy's head floating off, being held down by other people with guy ropes] I heard the door open. I could tell Andy had opened it slowly and carefully, hoping I might not hear it, not like normally. I waited a few seconds for a friendly greeting, but none came. A frown played across my brow briefly, but I checked it. I was already thinking the worst, as I sometimes do. "Hello?" I called, over the sound coming from the frying pan and from the pan of boiling water, where the potatoes were just a little softer than I would have liked. He came round the corner into the kitchen, sheepish looking. "Hi," he said, apologetic. "I know I said I'd be here at 7, sorry." "No bother." I replied. "You ready to eat?" "Umm, yeah. Yeah. I'm not all that hungry actually, but I can definitely eat." Again the brief frown. This time he saw it. "Mate, sorry. I know Thursdays are when we...

I picked Peter up from school just like normal. He was all happy to see me, laughing and singing some new song, waving goodbye loudly to his friends. We got to the car and I strapped him into the booster seat in the back, his legs kicking. Maybe I admonished him for making it harder for me than it needed to be. That's the kind of thing I do. We took off, and drove for a couple of miles, listening to his Peppa Pig songs on the car hi-fi, him singing along, sometimes replacing the lyrics with his own made up words. I sang along to the bits I knew, but I was concentrating on driving. We stopped at a traffic light not far from home. There was no traffic in front of us. As the lights changed to green, a woman walked out in front of the car, slowly and deliberately. From her posture she could have been lightly pregnant or a little overweight, aged anywhere between mid twenties and late thirties. She stopped in front of the car, glanced at me, then away to my left. As my eyes followed her...