Hugh Barnard

Just noticed that the links are to Amazon (ugh). I’ll correct this in a little while but meanwhile buy from Hive or Bookshop.org etc. I seem to have deleted my first version of this so:

Lem:
The Futurological Congress
Stanislaw Lem, a hidden gem

Sladek:
Tik-Tok
Tik-Tok a psychopathic robot

Keep the Giraffe Burning
I love the story with the 300 word Ladybird vocabulary

The Complete Roderick
probably related to Voltaire’s Candide, funny and finally sad

Bester:
The Demolished Man
First cyberpunk novel, in my opinion

The Stars My Destination
very famous but I like this less

Philip K Dick:
A hero for my generation 20 years before Blade Runner:
The Ganymede Takeover
wow, this is collectable now, not many people know about it. It would make a great film too. With him is Ray Nelson
who wrote the story that became: They Live

Roger Zelazny:
Lord of Light probably one of my all-time favourites

Walter M Miller:
A Canticle for Leibowitz
again this is forgotten now

Kurt Vonnegut:
Player Piano this book is becoming more and more relevant, I love this as well:
Cat’s Cradle

Frederick Pohl:
The Space Merchants
another set of accurate predictions
Gladiator at Law
more stuff that’s true now

Ursula LeGuin
The Left Hand of Darkness another all time favourite

Here’s a short talk I gave to the Birkbeck Philosophy Society last year. I’m very happy to see the NRA thing going so well and believe that boycott is one of our remaining tools, but, possibly a very potent one. Anyway, enough already, share and enjoy! Here’s the pdf:  boycott

This is the second draft of a talk I gave on 25th November 2017 to the Anarchist Research Group in London. Currently, I’m thinking about it as a ‘living document’, so it will probably get updated in a month or two as a response to criticisms and areas of discussion that have opened up.

Thanks to everyone that has contributed, so far. I think you all know who you are.  See below for the download link to the pdf.

platform-cooperatism-and-anarchism

Note that, as of January 2020, I’m working on Cclite2 (bits and pieces on sourceforge but unusable at present) which is based on the Mojolicious framework, Postgres and oriented more towards phones (SMS and SMS embedded in a simple ‘app’, ugh). I’ve frozen anything on github because Microsoft owns it. Please freeze or leave as well.

New version of Cclite 0.9.0. ready as of 1st May 2012, a good day for it..It’s all on sourceforge. and the development Ubuntu style tree is on github
Continue reading “Version 0.9.0 Cclite now available”

Down to my last couple of days in Tokyo, a great visit. I spent some of today before the rain on a minor suburban adventure to visit Shimo-kitazawa: a sort-of nicer Camden, now menaced, as usual by development.

Had lunch in a cafe set to the Stone’s music at about the time of Altamont, Gimme Shelter, I know it’s not real but pleasant to bathe in some of those previous days. Kids cycling around with solid guitar cases strapped on their backs too.

Back to London on Wednesday, just my fairly minimal Japanese is beginning to function too.

Here’s the little talk about the current state and the future of the Global Ideas Bank, given at Okcon in 2010.

Please contact me if you read this and would like to help.
Continue reading “Global Ideas Bank: OKcon Talk”

I’ve written to the electoral commission twice in the past couple of weeks about alleged irregularities in the petition for directly elected mayor in Tower Hamlets

Actually, these claims were not made by myself (a member of the disempowered and counts-for-nothing citizenry) but by Channel 4 (big media, counts for something, therefore) during a Dispatches documentary.

On both occasions, they haven’t deigned to reply. So like all the other oversight-theatre-garbage (LGO, FSA, Fair Trading, the Audit Commission) we can assume that their core comptence is hand-sitting in anticipation of hugely inflated public sector pensions.

They are active however in that they have aboutmyvote, something inhabited by diseased and rotting PR people (those that couldn’t get a private sector job, the bar is pretty low) who tell us how important it will be to legitimise the array of polluted and dying brands called ‘parties’.

Postal vote fraudsters, to your marks, no-one is awake or watching!

Continue reading “The Unbearable Indolence of the Electoral Commission”

Well I really, really enjoyed this, a delightful pocket festival and a big thank you to the organisers and everyone I met. Managed to make a certain amount of noise, probably too much.

Also ate a lot of cake, that does happen if one is unsupervised. I am hoping for some action from the government this year to stop this and the accompanying sugar rush. Secondary legislation of some kind will probably be fine, if clearly drafted, community health is an ideal starting point, hint, hint. People must be PROTECTED and we must THINK OF THE CHILDREN, mustn’t we?

Here below is the notes I used for alternative money talk. Contact me if you’d like further reading etc. I’ll probably upgrade this real-soon-now (that is, sometime next year).

Continue reading “Clacton Festival, big thanks, some info on my talk”