June 2011
4 posts
The Bonfire Dog Tumblr Archive
Welcome to the Bonfire Dog Archive. The temptation to dub it “The Bonfire Blog” is almost irresistible, but I shall weather and persevere. The main Bonfire Dog website can be found here. I can also be contacted by email above, and you will also find the link to my Twitter page there. Rummage, please.
4 tags
Out Of This World
I had the recent pleasure of attending the opening day of the British Library’s new exhibition, Out Of This World: Science Fiction Not As We Know It.
As one would expect from the constantly elegant and self-affirming institution, the exhibition, despite being incredibly busy (and at times laid out with strange chokepoints where no-one could get past and one was confronted with the...
The Dacian
Yes that is a draconic and corvan double headstock. It can occur, verily.
An Old-Fashioned Wood Amnesty
I need boxes.
Long ones, short ones, tall ones, thin ones. I’m in the luthier’s version of rutting season; I just want to build and build and build. Email me using the link at the top of any page if you have any spare wooden (or reinforced cardboard boxes), and we can work something out. I might even name it after you.
My next project, as I stated on my Twitter, is a custom...
May 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Dharma Days
A short story from a while ago, posted at the request of a dear friend. I have changed a single comma. Photo credits to the Mochowski Gallery.
My feet swung on the Atlantic coast unwillingly. The cliff edge ran in straight lines on both sides of me, gnawed by unseen, gigantic teeth. Birds lived in slippery alcoves ringed with their own shit. I heard surreptitious cracks as the leaden rain...
The Protoplasmic, Oozing Council Of Delicious
The ten people that actually read this blog will not care about this post.
This post is in the poor taste of autarkic selfishness that penetrates the Internet daily. Even those of you with gardens and vegetable plots of your own will gaze at my offerings like I was some Aztec shaman, newly ascended to the ziggurat to offer you the heart of a wheezing, syphilitic midden cleaner, or some sort of...
April 2011
4 posts
The Couple In The Window
Dr. Morgan would take the cow’s legs out, first. It would be quick, not slaughter-quick, but not slough-slow, either. We’d already made a divot in the field-earth for her to lie in, and she will fit into like luggage; that way it would be easier to cut into her. She was nearly as tall as a supermarket shelf when on her side, a big girl who had still-born eighteen times in four bad...
The Scratches Of Dead Farmers At The Fireplace
I include this post with the caveat that it is really for my own connected memory, so that I do not forget that such a wonderful, truly obsessive collection such as this exists.
The British Library, further proving that it takes a remarkably un-bureaucratic and open-source approach to its research, have released almost a complete collection of George Ewart Evans recordings, for free and without...
Namazu-e, Earthquake Catfish
Courtesy of Pink Tentacle comes this rather wonderful woodblock of namazu-e, literally “catfish pictures”. A whole fashion arose for these depictions after the 1855 Ansei Earthquake in Edo, arising from an old folk tale that blamed seismic events on the thrashing of giant, troglodyte catfish usually kept in check by the god Kashima.
Apart from being utterly delightful, and entirely...
Here Is What Saw Me Today, When I Was Not Walking
I smelt frying beef through the filtered leaves of a power station garden.
I saw my cat playing with its dapples in the aging sun.
I strode through empty glass citadels, their interiors dark, the guard napping.
I saw smiling men and women pour from a church that clung to its surroundings like something suppurating. They bore flowers.
I sat in a living room with a breeze invented by traffic...
March 2011
5 posts
2 tags
My First Short Story In Months
This is the first thing I have written in quite a while. I am away from home, so maybe that has helped. It is taken almost ad onieratim from a dream. It is called “Unguentaria”, the Latin for “perfume bottle.” I hope you like it. The photograph above was taken in the Eildon Hills in Scotland.
And he had tied to his waist a little furnace, that was not burning, but...
2 tags
A Penchant For Esoteric Cursive
This is a photograph of myself and my two very dear friends, Rob Gordon and Paddy Johnston. I am smiling because the numerous straighteners, chemical effervescence enhancers and industrial soap flakes that comprise a high percentage of modern commercial lager production are eating their way into my lower duodendum and I am tearily thinking of the Battle of Britain, and the translucent pilots,...
2 tags
Friend Good
My friend Hannah, a consummate film-maker (and Very Ambitious Person indeed) is putting the finishing touches to her film “Friend Good”, a body horror/comedy/tragedy that is both genuinely funny (helped by the excellent main actor) and very well-made. Seriously, I speak of professional standard here, a standard often misrepresented but also misunderstood. She cannot show the whole...
4 tags
As promised below, here is a short demo of myself...
6 tags
Ceebeegeebee
I am a cybernetic swiftlet that fell from the pram.
Despite having an automated dream abode where dense, Damoclean coffee flows through the walls to specially installed faucets, where I can send lolcats from 1998 to my mother like chrononaut ghosts through sheer walls, I still think that house made from my own sputum are a funky idea.
I have a very nice guitar. A Takamine G460SC, a Japanese...
February 2011
2 posts
D&D&D&M
The picture above is of myself as a DM, and was produced by my talented D&D
companion, Grace. All copyright to her.
2 tags
Kirei Desu Yo
My first post in rather a while, and a short one to boot.
My girlfriend and I visited the London Graphic Centre last week, an expensive stationery shop staffed by very accomodating supermodels whose environs probably last rang to the last sounds of the fading bleats of slaughtered livestock. I tried out a label maker.
In the bargain bin, for a pound each, we picked up an intriguing little set...
January 2011
1 post
1 tag
December 2010
2 posts
So...
The story that I posted below, “Merry Christmas All You Gods”, is being published by Philistine Press as a sort of Christmas charity single. Except that it is a story, and as no one would ever buy the thing it can’t really be for charity. However, it is about Christmas is a roundabout way and it will be up on the site until January. If you would like a copy then download below....
6 tags
Did You See My Play About The Argumentative...
Didn’t you? You should have. I was quite pleased with it. It was only one for two nights, both at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter, and consisted of two of the above, rather uterine gentlemen waiting to be chosen for a transplant. It went down quite well, the audience brushed by the gentle sounds of suplhur and bowel gas.
I have been told, more than once, that it (and much of my other...
November 2010
9 posts
What Do Unemployed People Do?
We do things like this. Specifically, the tunes.
I have started taken apart my Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color. Whether I will create some Chiptune or they’ll go into some art project, I cannot say. I’m just figuring out how they work, currently.
My new little recording desk. I had tried installing it in my wardrobe, but unfortunately there is now no space for clothing, and...
1 tag
Our Eaves, Our Eaves, Oh Amphora Of Crap
My parents are collectors. They collect things, art, toys, past hobbies, and a standard ton of shit. I say this with no quality judgement. If you have read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, you will understand my statement; in the ruined apartment blocks of an arid Earth, junk piles up like organic waste. Even though we have moved house three times, these things dig in hooks and join us. My...
Commiserations To Darn
I have started modding for Fallout: New Vegas. The beautiful thing about Gamebryo games, Oblivion in particular, is that they are broken as holy bejesus, and yet there exists an exquisite panopoly of tools with which to fix them. And many people, working for no money and at times little recognition, change these games into something that is entirely their own, and give it to other people. I was...
New Notebooks, Still Dull
Apparently it is National Novel Writing Month (in the US, I assume), and though I am not writing a novel in any sense, nor, I am sure, will I ever, I recently gave two notebooks a facelift, ready for the impending Changeover Day like some single parent who has never had chickenpox.
The above is for neat notes and sketches for the play I am working on; it is just a spiral-bound mother from...
Helmet
I can hear gulls, or rocks, or one or five machine-guns, or the breathing of twelve men, or one hundred.
I am souped, a bowl for this idiot’s head. There is a last clutch of aftershave about his hair, and the hooting noise of sweat. It irritates me, awfully, when his hair grows. It seems to grow in fits, at night when he is asleep so as not to distress him. What about me? Why won’t...
Asylum
She broke eye contact to look past the horse onto the lawn, where her partner Shelly was having a convulsive fit.
“BRAIN FREEZE!”, she giggled as she banged her leg continually against the old water pump, the pocked metal percussing with throbs. How she managed to oscillate her body like that, every time, Karen would never know. That was something that required a complete lack of muscle control,...
Dubrovnik And My Aching Head
Walking down the Stradun two days before I thought I heard a puff of courtly Latin. That florid language was last spoken in Venice six hundred years ago, and I excitedly dipped through the columns of an old palazzo to find the incumbent time-traveller. All that I was greeted with was an old woman, dusting fish on a stall, who greeted me in goatish Croatian. I wandered home, dejected.
Now,...
Merry Christmas, All You Gods
Below I have reproduced (without edit) one of my final pieces for another Creative Writing module. It recieved a 54, or a low 2:2. This is not a good mark. Please let me know what you think. The image above is from excellent Japanese image resource Pink Tentacle.
Merry Christmas, all you gods,
From your mountains and your logs.
The towns are warm, come sit down
Merry Christmas, all you...
The following is an exercise I did for a Creative Writing Class, and I thought I would share it here. I set myself the task of constructing a story where every sentence had to have five words exactly, with one sentence allowed more than five words. The picture above is from a trip I took to Bennachie in Scotland.
The moor sucked us dry. Irritable, dependent, we drank juice. Mine balanced on the...
October 2010
3 posts
Final Demos
I’m having a bit of a spring clean of my music, and I have put up all the good demos and live recordings that the band and I have done over the last year for free download on Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for all their help and support.
Palladium Boots And Their Explorations
Advertising can be a fireless, grasping thing. But sometimes, even if it is an excuse, or a facade, it can create something informative and entertaining.
Anyone interested in urban exploration, a rising trend in popular media, should watch the Palladium Explorations. Commissioned by venerable American footwear manufacturers Palladium, each film follows a different young model/DJ/events...
Minecraft, Minecraft, Minecraft.
So, I have been playing lots of Minecraft. It’s a little block-based first-person survival craft-em-up, of all things. I have as yet to garner even the measly six pounds for the Alpha version, and so must make do with the pleasant little sandbox that is Minecraft Classic. You get a cheery, procedurally generated world, an infinite supply of different types of blocks, and a lilting...
August 2010
5 posts
To accompany my dissertation post below here is...
Loss - Or The Little Town That Couldn't
And now, for my next trick, I will pull my head from the box and reveal myself as a key drain on this country’s economy; I will admit that it was me all along. I have been PURPOSEFULLY REDIRECTING money that could otherwise have been used to thoughtfully inject into an bullied oil company, or spend on things that Jo Whiley likes, to fund a Masters degree in Creative Writing. It is, of...
He Will Come Cloth'd All In Green
So this is a post that I put up on Destructoid, and people seemed to really like it and so I will reproduce it here. The link to the original is here.
I was young. I was foolish. I ran around in an inflexible little uterus, not caring for the outside world or its troubles. But after a while the outside world started to care about me, and I had to grow up. I had to face my responsibilities. I...
This is a forty second sample of an untitled song...
My friend and flatmate Paddy Johnston has done a...
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
5 posts
May 2010
4 posts
April 2010
36 posts
This is the very, very rough audio of a new song...
