A brief conversation the other day on Facebook led me to refer to the Dunning-Kruger effect: briefly, the tendency for stupid or incompetent people not to realise how stupid or incompetent they are, and therefore believe themselves to be highly intelligent and highly incompetent. Basically, the more sure you are about something, the more likely […]

Of late I’ve started reading both The Vision of Piers Plowman and Harry W. Robbins’ verse translation of The Romance of the Rose. I’ve read parts of both books before, but this time I’m aiming to get through both of them. What’s become clear so far, reading them together instead of apart: allegory is actually a […]

Another post from me today at Black Gate. After being pretty ill last week, I got last week’s post up Saturday, then today’s post should have been up yesterday. However, I’m all caught up now, which is good. The post itself is about Zenna Henderson, and her collection The Anything Box. It’s 1950s sf that […]

Just a note to say that I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate, looking at Alan Moore’s novel Voice of the Fire. It’s a bit of an experiment; I’ve enjoyed critical pieces by Adam Roberts in which he emulates the style of the work he discusses, so figured I’d give it a go […]

Just a note to say that I had some fun a few evenings ago playing a game called Sentinels of the Multiverse. It’s a co-operative card-based super-hero game. A ‘villain’ card automatically takes an action each round that has certain game effects that will help in the fulfillment of an evil plan, and each player […]