Most of you should be plumbers...

Really, you should.

There's no doubt in my mind that more than 70% of the students I see on a daily basis have been misled into pursuing a University Degree. For the most part, they're manifestly unable to take advantage of what's on offer and would be happier, more fulfilled and financially better off if they chose to purse some other career path.

This is no reflection on them - they are, for the most part, nice young people. But they are square pegs in a round hole - a hole that's getting tighter by the week. It's all very well the High-ups yawping on about 'widening participation' and 'inclusivity', but if that intention is not matched by a commitment to increasing the scope and variety of people involved in education, we're bollocksed.

I'm not that bothered by resources in the sense of computers and printers and so on - equipment is as cheap as chips (although my University seems to take fright at buying any). I am concerned that there are too few people involved in educating. There are lecturers obviously, but why are there also so many technical staff, administrators, support staff, Quality control people, line-managers and so on, who don't have anything to do with students?

If I ruled the world, if you worked in a University and didn't make a measurable contribution to the student experience - ie, face-to-face teach them, support them, counsel them, instruct them, I'd be looking to ax your job and replace you with someone that did.

Universities carry far too many people who could make a difference, but either can't because of the ridiculuous division of labour between Academic and non-Academic, or who choose not to. If we are to support wider particiaption, we should back it up with a wider consituency of people engaged in student support. Real support, I mean - actual face-to-face contact to rehumanise the educational experience.

I still think more people should be plumbers than Game Artists though.

I don't understand it, but it's beautiful. I think programmers and mathematicians are the engineers of the 21st Century... until we run out of oil and the power goes off anyway.

"I would rather teach drawing that my pupils would learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw"

The great Victorian critic John Ruskin possessed a remarkable power of visual concentration and acuity. We believe that his ability to see deeply, perhaps more than anything else, underpins his genius. In old age, Ruskin recalled an incident at Fontainebleau in 1842 which he invested with perception-changing significance:

"I found myself lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but a small aspen tree against a blue sky. Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it and as I drew; the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, without weariness. More and more the beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they 'composed' themselves, by finer laws than any known to man. At last the tree was there and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere."
John Ruskin

Awesome, just awesome



and pointless, but hey! At least they didn't steal tax payers money and buy plasma TVs or rob pension funds to feed their cocaine habit.

ho ho ho...

I've read some bullshit in my time, but this takes the biscuit...

My favourite bit is "In the past studios had a challenge to bring the film experience right into the game or the game experience right into the film – that created a lot of confusion for consumers"

Just how stupid do you have to be to be confused whether you're watching a film or playing a game or, frankly, give a fuck either way. Does "we’re frontloading experience and putting together a thin model with executive-level talent that is unencumbered by heavy process in order to be able to nurture and cultivate ideas that work efficiently and effectively." really mean we'll employ one or two vastly salaried executives and do the rest using cheap outsource labour?

boo hoo hoo

The Duke is dead...

I liked Wolfenstein, and I liked Doom but I loved Duke Nukem 3D. It was the cheesy humour, the crazy weapons and the whole fun thing. Remember fun? Before games had to replay WW2 endlessly, or save civilisations from bestial alien hordes (read: foreigners and non-christians).

I'm not sure the Duke would have made the transition to the current HDR pimped 3D engines, but it doesn't look like I'm ever going to find out. 'When it's done' has become 'It's done...'

Why I hate Twitter even more than I hate Facebook...

Seth Finkelstein in today's Guardian articulates much more lucidly than I ever could exactly why I hate Twitter.

And a nifty quote, just to give you a flavour of his argument...

'The word "conversation" is contorted in a now familiar way, to mean mutual pontification among a tiny elite.'

Beautifully put, Seth.

Farewell, JG...



Britain's greatest writer. Not so much for his prose style, which could be pedestrian at times, but for his prescience. No-one else - certainly not from these backward-looking, fake-nostalgic isles - forsaw the future as it would be...

Thrilling, frightening, sexy and horrible

His writing has completely shaped my world view, and my photography often tries to capture Ballardian vistas - airports, freeways, malls, suburbs... the cut n paste landscape of the future that we already inhabit.

I've not met any sexy female doctors who want to crash into my car yet, sadly.