May, 2018 - cushtie.com - Page 2

Month: May 2018

  • Deep State

    Deep State is the second Dagmar Shaw novel. It’s a sequel to This Is Not A Game, a feverish near-future novel by Walter Jon Williams that had a convincing, frantic first third through Jakarta. Deep State is set in Turkey, and perhaps because I’ve never been there, but I have been to Indonesia several times, […]

  • Now I am 16

    I couldn’t sleep last night, my brain buzzing with ideas, and my throat sticky with phlegm, so I lay on the sofa and read the rest of a Walter Jon Williams book and then passed out, to be woken by my children this morning. This didn’t bode well for this evening’s climbing session. Today I […]

  • The Talon Of Horus

    As is normal on Sundays, I got woke up by La Serpiente refusing to sleep in and had to take her out for pancakes to prevent the maelstrom that would ensue if she woke her sister up by banging around the apartment. And then when I got back, I read another Games Workshop novel about […]

  • Bad Dad (brought to you by Bad Dad)

    La Serpiente has begun to enjoy chapter books, mostly about a mouse called Sophie, but noticing this development a few months ago, I bought her a copy of Bad Dad by David Walliams. It drew my attention while we were in a bookshop in Fremantle: the cover is bright green, the illustrations are reminiscent of […]

  • A hard end to the week

    I had a climbing session today, off the back of three days of late nights, alcohol and bad diet, and unsurprisingly I struggled. My grip was weak and things I could normally do without struggling became hard work. Also, I’d left my hair tie behind and so hair kept flopping in my face.

  • A hard start or a hard finish

    Last night I was at Coq & Balls, a classy Australian bar in Tiong Bahru. In a good example of being hoist upon your own petard, I’d been out at a work do and told my wife I’d be home by 9, and then been persuaded to go for a drink after the meal and […]

  • A Shorterned History of Western Philosophy

    Today I had to give a five minute presentation on anything I held dear, so I did 300 seconds on Western Philosophy, with 15 accompanying PowerPoint slides. It’s hard to get everything in there, but I managed to include conceptions of God, Descartes’ cogito, blaming Friedrich Nietschze for hipster moustaches, blaming Dutch statisticians for hell, […]

  • Sweaty days and nights

    Today the kids were good at breakfast, and then yelled at me half the way to school, until I relented and let Destroyer carry her yoga mat. (It’s about the same height as her so I was unconvinced that she’d be able to carry it to school without dragging it through the dirt.) Happily, after […]

  • Climbing the walls for Mother’s Day

    This morning, after my wife had opened her mother’s day cards, I got the children out from under her feet by taking them down to the Tiong Bahru Bakery for bread-related shenanigans. That meant a quick detour to a public lavatory, where Destroyer first demanded and then denied the need for a toilet, and then […]

  • Soul Hunter

    Possibly in a long game to wind up my wife, or from nostalgia for my teenage years, I read another Games Workshop novel today, Soul Hunter, which is about some renegade Space Marines (the Night Lords) who used to be led by a bloke who was literally Batman In Spaaaaace (the scary Frank Miller-era Batman, […]