I’m currently throwing ideas about for a potential MASI project involving costuming, embodiment, and affect. I wish I could say this was a perceptive new research direction of mine but, in reality, I made a terrible pun about seven weeks ago, while pitching MS-219 to the current first year, about Super Furries and super furries, and I couldn’t quite let go of the latter. So far no-one’s quite persuaded me that basing potentially two years’ work on some poor wordplay is not, perhaps, the genius move I might think it is.

It’s not about members of the furry fandom though – at least, not just about them. I hope we’ll be able to derive some more universal observations and, in particular, some evidence around the culture and science of wearing what theme parks call ‘rubber-head’ costumes: ones which encapsulate the wearer’s entire head, rendering their identity completely unknown to the observer.

Wearing a rubber-head costume in public is probably quite a niche thing for an adult to do: sports and theme park mascots, particular cosplays (specific Star Wars characters, in particular), outsider artists (think Frank Sidebottom, a character fully embodied by Chris Sievey but never seen without his oversized head, initially of papier-mâché but, later, fibreglass), and… oh hang on…

…see, I’d completely forgotten that for a quarter of an hour in Swansea about 18 years ago, I became an animal, and what’s more I blogged about it soon after. So I dug out the piece from Nine Days’ Wonder, the blog recounting my inglorious time with Sweyn’s Ey Morris. Another piece from the blog made it to print and consequently got me ever-so-tangentially mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement, of all things. Truly the digital past was a different country.

Anyway, here’s the entry in question. For full comprehension it’s useful, but not essential, to know roughly what a mummers’ play is, but if you’ve reached this far you might as well carry on anyway. Enjoy your correspondent’s not-exactly-secret gothic-anthropomorphic past.

5th December 2004

It’s far too early on a Saturday morning, far too close to Christmas, and there are far too few parking spaces to be found anywhere in Mumbles. At least part of your parking problem is due to the large Christmas fair that’s held in the village today, and the reason you’re trying to get there is that you’re going to be taking part in your first mummers’ play.

You’ve been given the part of Slasher Jack, a largely dispensable role containing the challenging sum of one line. To wit:

SLASHER JACK enters.

SLASHER JACK: In come I, bold Slasher Jack, bold Slasher is my name; with sword and pistol by my side I’ll surely win this game.

SLASHER JACK exits.

You don’t think this will be a problem. It’s a part not even you could forget. You might not have a pistol, but you have a prop wooden sword. You have the promise of a sack-cloth as some sort of costume. All told, you think you’ll enjoy this.

Slightly unusually, your mummers’ play will be sharing the bill with a horse. To be precise, a dead horse. There’s a peculiarly Welsh tradition, common around the turning of the year, that involves putting a horse’s skull on a stick, wrapping a skirt of material around it, and putting the whole thing on a pole. Called Y Fari Lwyd (the Grey Mare), it was paraded from house to house around Christmas, to the delight of local youths and the despair of pretty much everyone else.

The Mumbles horse isn’t exactly a Mari Lwyd – but it’s close enough. And five minutes before you’re due to start your play, the skull and skirt are wheeled out by its keeper.

Then there’s silence. Something’s wrong.

“Where’s your son?” asks the head of your side.
“He can’t make it,” says the dead horse’s keeper. “He tried really hard, and he’s really sorry, but there’s no way he could get the time off work.”
“Oh. That’s a shame.”
“I know. But if one of you lot wants to wear it…”

And then, inevitably, every eye starts looking at you.

Slasher Jack is obviously more dispensable than even you thought. So today, Matthew, you’re going to be the remains of a 140-year-old horse. Clambering under the ribbons and material, you clumsily put on your new head. It’s heavy and cumbersome. It’s been attached to what could be the pole from a rotary clothes line. You spend two minutes trying to get everything in the right place, without the pole showing or the head falling off. You fail. And now you’re due to perform.

As dead horses go, you’re not the most convincing. You stand on the sidelines while the others perform the mummers’ play. Saint George is killed and revived, the dark knight seen off, and you peer at the world from between the folds of a yellowing sheet. You turn Sharper’s head to look at the action.

Sharper – yes, he has a name, or at least he did in the 1860s, when the rest of the horse belonged to a mobile grocer from the Gower. Sharper died, but he was buried in a lime kiln. The local boys, Victorian Arthur Daleys all no doubt, heard about the Fari Lwyd tradition, took Sharper’s head, decorated it, and took it from house to house asking for money. The local vicar helped them get a song to sing, so you suspect they can’t have been that bad.

140 years later, they’re singing the song again, and you bow down in the right bits so that Sharper can be seen to die. You’re getting the hang of this now.

It’s time to meet and greet, so one of the other mummers takes you by the mane and drags you around the market. The timing’s perfect, because you’ve discovered a rope which, excellently, pulls apart Sharper’s jaws when you tug it. You spend the next five minutes perfecting the timing, and seeing just how far you can make unsuspecting members of the public jump into the air when they see a dead horse’s jaws spring open. You admit that this probably makes you quite a bad person.

All too soon the market winds down. The carols are sung. Still under the skull, you pose for photos with a variety of small children, safe in the knowledge that their resulting phobias will keep any psychiatrists in clover for decades to come.

And then you go walkabout, dodging the Mumbles’ bus shelters, pedestrian crossings and Christmas shoppers. The local pub has asked the mummers to do their play there. So you go with them, still half-man, half-horse, leading yourself to water, or something a little more potent.

Later, you look up Sharper on the web. You’re not too surprised to find a comprehensive page that tells you all you already knew about him, and quite a bit more. You read the article that tells you about the attempt to revive the tradition of taking him from door to door, at the turn of the millennium. Your eye comes to rest on this paragraph:

You can sing, but don’t expect to go under the Horse. “Nobody does that but me,” says [the horse skull’s owner]. “It’s 134 years old now – and if anybody breaks it, it’s going to be me.”

Emerging from a spare room full of your half-repaired electronics, your wife finds this highly amusing.

Wasn’t everyone, at some point in upper primary or lower secondary school, tasked with writing an essay about Life In The Future? Today’s one day when some of those predictions come true (and most don’t), so here’s my contribution to that particular homework genre. Written in Welsh (here’s that original), but translated below with my ten-year-old’s grammar cleaned up somewhat.

Come with me now, then, back through the mists of time, to an age when fast fashion was unheard of, there was only one Severn crossing, and Pluto was still a planet…

Life in 2020
Sunday-29-1-1984

7.00. “Hello Rhys. Tea or coffee today?” asks my robot. “Tea” I say. This happens every morning at seven. After I drink the tea, I go into the floor mover. I press the button “Living room.” The floor mover is similar to lifts from the old days. Anyway, the doors open to a fairly small room with a panel of buttons in its middle. I sit on a chair and press the buttons: “Breakfast,” “Grapefruit,” “Egg,” “Sausage,” “Bacon,” and “End.” A few odd sounds and a small paper comes out of the panel. This is what’s on the paper:

BREAKFAST.
Grapefruit – Ready in 15 seconds.
Egg, Sausage and Bacon – Ready in 2 minutes.
Tea or Coffee?

I press “Tea” and a cup of tea and a grapefruit come to my chair. Press “Table”, and a table emerges from a hole in the floor. Before leaving, my robot reminds me to choose my lunch now. I press more buttons and the robot tells me to be here at one o’clock promptly. This is the procedure every meal time. I press “End” and the table goes down to be cleaned before lunch.

I press the “Computer” button. The machine emerges from the hole in the floor. This computer doesn’t have any buttons. It can speak and understand your voice. I say, “News.” The machine starts. “These are the headlines. One thousand robots go on strike in a rocket factory in Manchester. Dyfed’s schoolchildren go on a trip to the planet Pluto today. The Senate meets today to discuss a tunnel for mobiles under the River Severn.” I press the button, “End.” Down goes the computer, back into the hole.

I press “Videophone.” The gadget comes up from the floor. I lift the receiver and put the camera in the right place. I type my cousin’s number on the special panel. I wait a second. Then I see his picture in his house in London, he too is on holiday. I have a friendly little chat and arrange to go and see him after lunch.

About 12.00. My leisure is interrupted by the deafening noise of the videophone. A call for me. I’m supposed to go to the Dyfed Robots work centre, where I’m employed. A bug in the work program has made the robots run wild. I rush to the mobile. I press the buttons, “Factory” and “500 kilometres an hour.” I hold tight – and within seconds I’ve completed the journey of ten kilometres. After three quarters of an hour of pressing buttons, everything’s back in its place in the centre.

1.00. Back home for lunch.

1.30. Back into the mobile. I press the buttons “London” and “400 kilometres an hour.” I sit back comfortably and read a book. Reaching London at last, I see my cousin. A day’s holiday for us both. An afternoon in a special exhibition called “Life in the eighties.” I see wonders. Only one robot and that a very awkward and clumsy one. (Oh dear, think about making a meal without the help of one of these!) I see the ZX81. This is terribly old-fashioned, row after row of silly buttons and only 16k of memory – this was really only a toy for small children. But still, a million people bought it – something hard to believe.

But the greatest wonder was a gadget called a car. A huge box on wheels using something called petrol and belching dirty smoke sometimes too. An expensive gadget swallowing costly liquid. Clothes! People washed and ironed clothes in those days. Thank goodness for cheap clothes you can throw away after a week of wearing them.

An interesting afternoon, but all good things must come to an end and I go home over the second Severn bridge. Call at the doctor. Stand in front of the large screen which tells me that I am well. After a tasty meal, I play chess against the computer. The game carries on for hours but in the end the same thing happens time after time – the computer wins.

I chat to my robot about the day’s events. The robot in its turn will put a summary of all the events into a special book called a “diary.” After a year the robot will give me this book to keep, and maybe I’ll give it to my children – who knows. I close my eyes and go to sleep after a very busy day. Good night!

Three-and-a-half years and an elephantine amount of effort in the making, Routledge have just published their Companion to Global Internet Histories. Congratulations to Gerard, Mark, Emily and the rest of the editorial team. It looks like a much-needed corrective to the US-dominated field of internet history, and contains some contributions from familiar names (to name but a few: Niels Brügger, Larissa Hjorth, Charles Ess, Goggin and McLelland themselves), other contributions from authors who deserve to become more well-known, and also, a chapter from me.

Mine’s called, in none-more-clickbaity style, ‘Porn Shock for Dons’, taking its name from a memorable Western Mail front page article about an incident that happened at my current employer the year before I became a student there. It mostly looks at the way that the Western Mail, Golwg and Y Cymro conceptualised new media in the early-to-mid 1990s, and the hopes and fears evident in their coverage of the internet and related digital platforms. It was excellent fun to research, and in getting the material together I wheeled my way through thousands of feet of microfilm (the early 90s being the pre-CD-ROM Dark Age), and hundreds of fascinating articles about the information superhighway, at least one of which genuinely and unironically used the term ‘interweb’. I’m not entirely sure I did complete justice to all the material, but the result is now there for you – or, let’s face it at that price, your library – to buy.

Goggin and McLelland’s introduction, available online for free, gives an idea of the scope and ambition of the volume. Hopefully it’ll be the first of many similar projects.

There are comparatively few reasons to remember Saturday, February 6th, 1982. No world-changing events, no particularly memorable births or deaths. In the Five Nations, Wales scored a notable victory in Cardiff against France (a fact I didn’t have to look up), beating them 22-12 (a scoreline I did have to check).

Far more significant for me, though, was the object my parents brought back from their day trip to Cardiff: freshly bought from WH Smith on Queen Street, a Sinclair ZX81. It was my first computer, and it’s fair to say it had quite a drastic influence on my life.

The microcomputer, a category into which we can definitely place the ZX81, has undergone a mini-revival in media studies over the past year, thanks to Tom Lean’s encyclopaedic one-volume account of the period, Electronic Dreams, currently at pocket-money price on Kindle, and the first truly British platform studies book, Alison Gazzard’s Now the Chips are Down, about the BBC Micro. Both are excellent and heartily recommended. Today I’m forced to reflect on the fact that, at least by the Biblical definition of threescore years and ten, my interest in computers is now exactly middle-aged, as I suppose, by extension, am I.

It’s too lazy to categorise the recent resurgence in writing about the micro as simply being the product of academics reaching a certain age (and inaccurate too; Gazzard’s book has been five years in the making, and Lean has been researching the field for over ten). Rather, it’s the fruit of a growing realisation that the early-to-mid-80s UK micro boom was a hugely culturally significant event, a definably geographical one – no other country took the micro to their heart in the same numbers – and one which still reverberates today, in kids’ coding initiatives and tiny single board computers.

So what of the ZX81, my introduction to computing? I’d longed for one for the best part of a year, my interest being piqued by an article in my dad’s Which? magazine the previous July, talking all about these new-fangled home computers and what people did with them. That, I think, was the first time I saw any computer code in print, and I felt mesmerised by it – a portal into a new age, and something I instinctively knew I could Do Something With.

The following month, Which? conducted a group test of about a dozen micros, from manufacturers as diverse as Acorn, Apple and Tandy, but the one that stood out for me was the ‘very cheap’ Sinclair ZX81, at a price of £73 including postage, though with a warning to budget an additional £50 for the extra memory. Turning the page from a mediocre review of the Apple II Europlus at an eye-watering £799 (an early data point in the ‘Jobs tax’ graph), the value-for-money of the ZX81 seemed like a revelation.

In many ways, it was. I wasn’t to know at the time, but the ZX81 was 1981’s successor to Sinclair’s ZX80, its name being taken from the cheap Z80 processor at its heart and its year of launch with, it seems, an X for extra mystique. The ZX80 was sold by mail order for £100, and is a very early example of what Lean calls an ‘appliance’ computer. Before this, micros were the preserve of the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker, the person generally handy with a multimeter and not afraid to get their oscilloscope dirty. As names like the Compukit UK-101 would suggest, they’d usually be built from parts, with components soldered onto the board (or, in the case of one particularly hapless Acorn Atom builder, glued instead). The ZX80, though, was different – designed to be plugged in, attached to your TV, tuned to a spare channel, and to then be ready to use. Slightly less complex than plumbing in a washing machine, and as ready-to-go as a toaster.

What I did find out over the coming months, thanks to Sinclair Research’s blanket advertising campaign, with double-page spreads appearing regularly in my parents’ Sunday Times magazine, was that somehow the ZX81 was cheaper than the ZX80 at a time of high inflation, and contained less than a fifth of the main parts – just four chips, as opposed to its forerunner’s 21. This, I later learned, was due to Sinclair commissioning Ferranti, the UK electronics manufacturer, to combine the majority of its functions into a single chip. Manufactured at volume, it was a significant saving for Sinclair once the design costs had been covered, it meant less to go wrong, and it meant the parent-pleasing ‘very cheap’ price point of £69.95.

I asked for a ZX81 for Christmas. Instead I got some Plastercasters, which I think I enjoyed making, but which were no match for Sinclair’s machine. My parents, realising that their son’s computer obsession was likely to be slightly more than a passing fad, eventually capitulated six weeks later.

I spent some of that time writing variations on the program I’d seen in Which? six months previously: I didn’t fully grasp its algorithm, but could work out the basics, and knew that I could, by tweaking a line here and a line there, make the code my own, a process, I’m sure, replicated in bedrooms up and down the country. It may have been a new world, but to the legions of teens and pre-teens looking in, it felt like theirs to own.

The ZX81 box arrived from Cardiff under strict instructions not to play with it until after school on the Monday. I obeyed, and two long days later plugged the computer into what was then our second TV set, an elderly black and white ITT model, newly usurped by our colour one. I plugged the computer in, moved the tuning button up and down the dial and… nothing. Not the slightest flicker of anything on screen, other than analogue static. Puzzled, my parents phoned our television repairer (an occupation I have intense difficulty in explaining to most of my students: they used to repair televisions?) He’d seen it all before, and said he could come out and modify the set so the computer could be used. Tactically, my parents timed his visit for two weeks later, in the middle of half-term holidays, perhaps anticipating the new computer’s capacity to suck up all my time. After all, early 1982 was still at the tail-end of three channel television, with daytime TV a good four years away, our first expensively rented Granada VCR more than three years in the future, and multichannel simply a pipedream. As far as home entertainment went, a computer attached to your telly was one of the few games in town.

We repeated the process of two weeks previous. Plug in, computer cable to the TV aerial socket, fiddle with the spare button until, miraculously and, to me, entirely unexpectedly, it worked, and a slightly fuzzy white-on-black K appeared in the bottom left of the screen. This was my Rubicon. I wasn’t going back.

[to be continued]

Marking a clutch of (genuinely very good) student essays on the interrelationship between social media and journalism reminds me of something that happened a couple of years ago.

At the time of the possible Grexit crisis, one of our journalism lecturers, the very-soon-to-be Dr Savyasaachi Jain, saw me in the corridor and suggested, given my interest in Twitter, that he and I collaborate on a paper about Yanis Varoufakis’ use of that social network, because he was harnessing it in a very direct way to talk about policies in a radically open manner.

Don’t be silly, I said, surely this is a one-off. The political animal’s still a cagey, on-message creature. Varofakis is entertaining, sure, but he’s an outlier when it comes to politicians’ future use of Twitter.

I’m big enough to admit that I may have been wrong on that one.