Alastair Somerville

Witness History - The release of DOOM - BBC Sounds In 1993, a controversial sci-fi video game called DOOM was released

History of Doom www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... - 9 min BBC documentary

Watching interactions of differing regional groups from national volunteer organisation.

How the larger groups use complication to manage complexity. With people acting in roles, using motions at meetings to be responsible by distancing themselves from themselves. All the politicking.

Stop motion from Zine Workshop at #Camp100

View thru kitchen tents - preparation and cooking areas

About to help make breakfast for 100+ people

What is the appropriate amount of coffee for this. It is Now!

UK has got ‘fat’ on decades of free labour by women, says MP Jess Phillips Minister points to ‘sexist’ practice of country relying on women to provide services so government did not have to

Always remember Adam Smith went back to his mum’s house to get her to cook and clean while he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Free labour www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The Invisible Hand of Economics is a woman’s.

Spent time showing iOS #AssistiveAccess to friend for their mum. Now wouldn’t mind keeping phone on it.

The weakness of AI is in what appears to be the service it provides. The more we lend it, the better it is. Yet it is the AI that is praised not the human.

This is what the Prompt tries to recover. The AI seeking context.

Asking to borrow human perspective, emotion, meaning/seeking. This is why AI is not sentient. It lacks what all humans possess.

Zine Make Kit booklets in table - showing the contents and how to make and write a zine

Serendipitous visit to Print Shop at #Camp100 and got involved in Zine Making Workshop. So I made a booklet from it. 30 copies made for workshop tomorrow.

Remember a BBC interview with newspaper people mentioned how they feared internet was killing the Pun Headline.

#ContentDesign for international audiences (not just where a physical paper was distributed) meant a flattened simplicity of language.

No wordplay, no puns, no fun

I’ll remain faintly rude for digital ethics reasons

Game made of choosing three cards as dessert (base, main, topping) and then picking happy or sad emojis as 3 judges. Current dessert is mud on cake with a sprinkle of gravel on top.

Just Desserts game for Woodcraft Folk camp.

Making odd puddings and letting the judges decide.

Someone explained that liberals need better stories now to fight the right.

What that failed to understand is the right don’t have better stories now, they are using past liberal stories as fuel along with ancient tropes of racism and sexism.

Abundance is fine but you need to work out how to shift people from much stronger narratives of promised futures made in the past and the regret and resentment they feel in the present.

The hauntology of past liberal bright futures exploited by the right now.

Explain, take responsibility

Am reminded that CV’s used to have a hobby section as having a life beyond your skills and work experience mattered and was supported

Criminals will behave criminally as reason for no regulations or laws 🤷🏼‍♂️

Careless People amzn.eu/d/gas5by5 for £1.99 on Kindle Daily Deal.

Not sure I could read it without too much seething and loathing.

I’m considering options for games but kids do keep querying whether there are ethical issues with me doing research as play

Last big Woodcraft Folk camp I did a Batman drawing game. 5, 10, 20, 40 seconds (randomly allocated) to draw the bat.

Reminded of pastiche of Sade’s Smooth Operator

Lathe operator
Fish imitator
Belgian ice skater
Fascist dictator
Football commentator

Zuckerberg says people without AI glasses will be at a disadvantage in the future | TechCrunch Mark Zuckerberg really believes AI glasses will be the ideal way to blend the physical and digital worlds together.

IMHO, it’s worth noticing how these dweebs are now more openly inserting their eugenicist talking points into the hype for their tech. In this instance saying people will be at a “cognitive disadvantage” if they don’t use his tech.

Dude what.

Four photos of process of using card stencil to make pages. 📄 me photo is a more complete version with words and pictures

Zine-making kit made from scrap this afternoon. Stencil to make base page consistently. Then fold and glue. People can do what they like after that. The structure is just to get rid past ‘blank page fear’

A3 sheet divided into sections - the map, the tool, the card, the gift, the frag-ment and the thanks

Paper prototyping workshop handout for #Papercamp in September. At Woodcraft Folk camp so pens and paper are easy to get.

It’s a talk about the meaning of paper artefacts in workshops.

The UK Gov Camp logo, which look like a fireball heading right. The top half is blue and rest is red. In the middle is a white line that looks like the river Thames.

UKGovCamp 2026 ( #ukgc26 ) will be in #Birmingham on Saturday 17 January 2026.

We need a venue:
1️⃣ for 250 people,
2️⃣ 8 breakout rooms,
3️⃣ wheelchair accessible.

@imhuyorks.bsky.social is leading the search.

Please share and reply with ideas 🙂

Wait till he finds out he can use a battery-powered mobile phone rather than trail a cable behind him all the time

The prompt is where the AI borrows perspective and humanity from people. The things it lacks.

I sketch badly but it’s to give me a sense of being in a place with a personal perspective. It’s a centring practice.

Sketch with some colour of camping area with many tents packed on one side of field, some larger marquees to left and trees in background

Woodcraft Folk Camp100 village 9 sketch

A living mask taken from a human, displayed next to a colour chart of human skin colours, from the 1930s

A collection of instruments used to take head and facial measurements in the 1930s

A display of the craniometric equipment & anthropological masks at the Museum of Anthropology in Florence. Some 350 out of over 600+ in the collection were taken from living humans in Africa & India during the fascist regime of the 1930s & were displayed in what was formerly known as ‘The Race Room’

Just as a side anecdote: was at French nuclear submarine museum in Cherbourg and there’s audio anecdote from captain that Walkman created social problems on long missions and so were either banned or just fell out of use. Wonder what new subs do.