#Spooktober 15: The Dark Power

October 15, 2022

At the end of September, we have taken a look at the monster as a basic plot device: the existence of great evil is revealed to us (and to the hero), and the hero sets off to vanquish it.

Following that trope, we take a look at circular vs. linear patterns and at the different kinds of “Dark Figures”, since we’re in the middle of the Spooky Season, and let’s see what happens when we step out of the metaphor and we don’t have a literal Big Bad Wolf, a literal Witch or a literal Troll to spell it out for us.

books and literature

Lolly Willowes

Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of the most interesting literary figures of the 21st century, and Lolly Willowes is one of her finest works, even more stunning if you think it was her debut novel. Self-supporting, intellectually independent, and consistently sceptical of social and religious

April 26, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

Fugitive Telemetry

This is book #6 in the Murderbot series (yes, I accidentally skipped #5, I’m circling back to that), and I’m afraid I didn’t like this as much as the others. The whole investigation felt a bit rushed and, though the final twist is interesting in

April 24, 2026 8:00 am

architecture, engineering and construction

The Discipline of Inspiration: Valéry and the Algorithmic Mind

Paul Valéry rejected inspiration as miracle, seeing creativity as the discipline of thought in motion. This week, we parallel his notion of mental “operations” with computational procedures in design: iteration, optimisation, constraint, and recombination, and challenge the dichotomy between intuition and automation. Drawing on contemporary

April 22, 2026 9:00 am