Latest Posts
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Burning Archive Podcast 52 Professions and Guilds in Games and History
This morning I released the latest Burning Archive podcast. In games, we see a different pre-modern world of work – of artisans, craft skills and guilds. Was this world ever real, and what does this fantasy world of work tell us of our collective memory of work and collective organisation? Join me on this fascinating tour of the history of work, guilds and unions, and the global transformations of ideas of work in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
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Republishing blogs as books
The focus of my writing attention over the last couple of weeks has been on editing a collection of my blog posts that I will publish as books.I don’t know how common it is to republish blogs as books, if in edited and curated form. It seems little different to me to the many collections of oped, short essays, book reviews and occasional pieces that do get published quite often.
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A relic of another time
The Russians with Attitude podcast released to their subscribers a feature this week on the Russian writer and mystic, Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov made his way from a medical student in Kiev through the Civil War in Russia and Ukraine to a difficult life as a writer for newspapers, theatre and novels in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote a great account of the Civil War in The White Guard, and of course the masterpiece for which he earned posthumous fame, The Master and Margarita. [Read more]….
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Chronicles of the Third World War?
There is a war across many states to shape the institutions of the multipolar world. The Atlantic elites have declared this war in the name of democracy, and with too little regard for the consequences for the citizens of the world. This conflict will last a long time, maybe five to ten years, unless, that is, there is a rapid collapse of political order in the United States of America. Currently this war is undertaken across all dimensions – military, economic, information/narrative and diplomacy. And the war is most intense on the economic front. But how long will the military proxy war and economic war continue, and will they broaden?
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The World Crisis, 2022, A Personal Record
“Everyone was dreaming, ruminating, full of foreboding, feeling his way.” (Nikolai Sukhanov on February 1917 Russian Revolution). Does this not feel a lot like us today? Do we all not feel the world is unfolding in surprising directions, and among our more difficult tasks is to feel our own way through these events?
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A New Direction for the Burning Archive
I am going to approach the blog with the advice of “document, don’t create” that I saw on popular vlogger on youtube, Ali Abdaal. For periods of the last ten years the blog has been my primary creative outlet. But that is now changing. I have my books in preparation, my podcast, my poems and my essays. And driving all of that my restless curiosity about how to save culture and history from the flames. So I am going to use the blog as the platform for all of those aspects of my author life.