I have talked about this sort of thing before. But the industry – THE GAMING-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX – is taking the piss once more. This time it’s Ubisoft, and not for the first time.
All posts by Thom Willis
Harry Potter then and now.
There follows my contemporaneous review of
harry potter
and the philosopher’s stone
My thoughts on the finale are here. Compare and contrast.
A Moment in a Riot
On Walthamstow Marsh
London breathes in
Brackish pools
Yellowed-straw grass
Swathed and rippling
In flattened heat.
A Night Walk
He’d been out across the Thames a couple of times, at night in his bare feet. Padding near-silently over the erratic wavelets, just to see if he could still do it. It came to him the second time that it might just be a dream; it was probably a dream, it was a dream when he was a child and he played out there, running under the bridges to hide, and wandering past the moored ships, touching their massive sides with his fingertips, wondering how they stayed afloat.
Cold War Diplomacy
It had been cold for as long as any of us could remember, but memory is short when you’re a child. Four months of bitter winter felt like four years; imprisoned in duffle coats and bobble hats, playgrounds icy, gloomy battlegrounds where we fought with the very concept of fun.
It was 1986 and we were ten. Well, Martin and I were ten – Peter and his twin sister Dawn were both nine, and the distinction was powerful. They would be ten in the summer, but the summer was a lifetime away. Dawn was, as these things go, taller than all of us already so we grudgingly let her play in our gang. That, and Peter’s Mum said we had to.
Light work
Snarling, savage
Scream and leap on your desk
Thrash blindly at the cord
To the mouse that keeps you
Tethered,
Bought, brought close,
A wild thing
Dolled in toil.
Continue reading Light work
Twelfth Night
I miss
the pine smell
on the edge of sense
in the dark mornings, stumbling
to catch the plug stuffed behind the bulk
of a tree
whose fate it was to stand
mute in gaiety
in our living room.
Of this fate
it did not know.
It is a tree, and it knows little
but the endless grip of roots in the soil
and the catch
of endless winds through evergreen,
whistling
knife-cut needles.
Blip
Another ambulance
Off to save
Another life
A low bar
Gary Barlow is now a national treasure. Apparently. According to the BBC. I’d like to take that* claim and subject it to a little scrutiny.