A few years ago, during a night out, I was introduced to a man in his early twenties that was the school acquaintance of a friend. During the general polite conversation that followed I asked him what he did for a living, to which he replied, “I’m a photographer.” I immediately found the subject interesting (I love photography) and started asking him lots of questions – what his main points of interest were, who he worked for, how he got into it – and after a few minutes it became evident that he wasn’t a photographer at all. In truth, he was a barman with a good camera who liked taking photographs. I was a little confused (and slightly insulted) by the fact that this man had ‘bent the truth’ in an attempt to appear more successful or creative – I’ve done plenty of bar work over the years and…

Living in a society with the increasingly hectic, overstimulated and restless environment, have you ever wished to slow down time or at least the perception of it? A Germany student named Lorenz Potthast felt exactly this way. As a result, he created “the Decelerator Helmet”.

The Decelerator Helmet is a piece of avant-garde headgear that allows the wearer a perception of the world in slow motion.

Inside the helmet is a camera with video signal and a netbook. The netbook slows down information from the camera by way of a program Potthast wrote in vvvv. Outside the helmet hangs on a Head-Mounted Display. It receives the speed of the video stream regulated by the netbook and thus is capable of mirroring the images the user sees on the video glasses in the inside of the helmet for people on the outside to see. To actually determine the speed of the video stream, a remote control is necessary.  This…

Author bio

Gillian Felix has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil. She enjoys creating characters that could be your next-door neighbor, but would you want them as your neighbor is another story.

Originally from the island of Trinidad and Tobago, Miss Felix moved to the United States in 1998. Since then she has been involved in the entertainment industry for over fifteen years. Her experience ranges from script supervisor to production manager on many independent features. She is trained in the Meisner and Stanislavski technique of acting, which she credits as an asset to her character development and writing.

Miss Felix is an entrepreneur and advocate for children’s and women’s rights.

Q & A with Gillian Felix

How did you become a writer?

I have always written. As a kid creative writing was one of my favorite subjects. I got my highest marks in that…

This is what I enjoy most from reading fiction — reading or probing the minds of characters

Difference between popular and literary fiction
‘Popular fiction tends to be focused on plot, says , professor of psychology at The New School for Social Research in New York, and the characters are rather stereotypical. “You open a book of what we call popular fiction and you know from the get-go who is going to be the good guy and the bad guy.”

‘Literary fiction, in contrast, focuses on the psychology and inner life of the characters, he says. And importantly, characters in literary fiction are left somewhat incomplete. Readers have to watch what they do and infer what they are thinking and feeling…’
full story

The Shaping of Modern Culture During WWII
How the Unlikely WWII Friendship of a Scientist & a Philosopher Shaped Modern Culture
‘What makes a good life, a…

I read Rose Tremain’s “The Road Home” about a year ago and it’s one of those books that changed the way I think and feel about certain things. It’s a story about a man, Lev, whose wife has died and who moves to London from Eastern Europe to try and earn some money to send back home to his family. I can’t remember many of the details but the sadness, anger and fear Lev feels were so powerfully written that they’re still with me and surface whenever I meet or read about someone who’s moved here for economic reasons.

No newspaper article or TV documentary about economic migration has ever affected me like this but I never thought about it much until my daughter sent me a link to an article about some new research that found that reading literary fiction makes us better at understanding other people’s emotions. They talk about “writerly” fiction that leaves gaps for…

short-eared durham owl
meditating over the dale's edge,
shadows the fields and folds
in elegant diurnal flight.

on windside,careful sight
may swoop to prey
and away.

your yellow broad-eyed look,
at once both sharp and distant,
holds me.
oh,silence,
oh ,wind on green,
oh. earth,
sky.

immense your held vision,
sphere without centre,
pied geometer of flight,
sketch your descent and ascent.trees bunched by dry stone wall
call heart home.

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