Independent ideas · Original video
Original videos and commentary by Kerry Plowright exploring artificial intelligence, energy, hazard intelligence, the Younger Dryas, human prehistory and the ideas behind Hammer.
Explore PageSlammer
Written features
Read Kerry Plowright’s articles, story-world notes and illustrated excerpts—published as durable pages that remain searchable after the social feed moves on.
Already published
0:51
Hammer: The Artifact and the Signal · Part 2
A polished metal rod survives across impossible distances and deep time. It is not merely an object: it is the physical key to an alien intelligence reaching into the human story.
4:59
Hammer: The Artifact and the Signal · Part 1
A burst of intelligence crosses a billion light-years, reaches Earth in 2023 and reveals a strange connection between the signal, repeated extinction events and an impossible metal rod.
0:42
Hammer: The Artifact and the Signal · Part 3
During the Second World War, German officers pursue something guarded by Pashtun chieftains—and are sent toward an empty ruin and an explosive dead end.
1:02
Hammer: The Artifact and the Signal · Part 4
A German Ju 52 vanishes in the mountains while carrying something Heinrich Himmler wanted recovered. More than fifty years later, Hammer reaches it first.
0:55
Hammer: The Artifact and the Signal · Part 5
High in a punishing mountain range, Hammer finds the wreck of a German Ju 52—and evidence that its most important cargo may have survived.
0:17
Hammer: The Artifact and the Signal · Part 6
A metal component in a travel bag and a set of ancient parchments may hold the same clue—the next link in Hammer's artifact mystery.
0:56
Hammer: The Modern Story · Part 1
An aircraft burns at Kandahar and a soldier makes the decision that defines him. A short character teaser from Kerry Plowright's Hammer.
0:56
Hammer: The Modern Story · Part 2
A reporter watches a wounded soldier return to Kandahar and asks the question at the heart of his legend: why do they call him Hammer?
1:39
Energy and environment
Renewable energy reduces greenhouse emissions, but wind farms, transmission corridors and associated construction can still impose real costs on wildlife and habitat. Kerry Plowright asks whether those costs receive enough scrutiny.
Collection
7:47
Younger Dryas and deep history
A long-form visual introduction to the abrupt climate reversal at the end of the last Ice Age and the upheaval it creates in the world of Hammer.
3:08
Younger Dryas and deep history
Across distant cultures and centuries, similar bag-like symbols and remarkable stonework invite a provocative question about memory after catastrophe.
0:36
Younger Dryas and deep history
A short visualisation of immense ice dams failing and meltwater reshaping the late-Ice-Age world.
1:01
Younger Dryas and deep history
The ice retreats, landscapes change and survivors enter a world that will never be the same.
0:45
Younger Dryas and deep history
Giant animals disappear at different times across different continents, leaving a mystery of climate, people and ecological change.
0:36
Younger Dryas and deep history
A small group flees the devastation surrounding Toba and begins a journey through islands, danger and deep time.
0:36
Younger Dryas and deep history
Could the small-bodied people remembered as the 'Hobbit' have travelled farther than orthodox history allows?
0:30
Younger Dryas and deep history
Ancient tracks become a thread between survival, movement and the stories later cultures leave behind.
0:45
Younger Dryas and deep history
A foreign shore, unfamiliar survivors and the first uncertain moments of contact after catastrophe.
0:54
Younger Dryas and deep history
Timor has become a dead land. Survivors look south across dangerous water toward the possibility of Sahul.
0:27
Younger Dryas and deep history
Water turns without warning from a path to an unstoppable wall, forcing an ancient people to run.
0:27
Younger Dryas and deep history
The sky darkens as Toba erupts and the familiar world collapses into ash, fear and flight.
0:45
Younger Dryas and deep history
Jarrungu confronts a violent landscape in ancient Sahul as survival and spiritual meaning collide.
0:45
Younger Dryas and deep history
Before people, before memory, a young planet churns with heat—and the long prehistory of the signal begins.
2:06
Younger Dryas and deep history
Ruins, dust and impossible traces suggest that Mars may hold a history far stranger than the one humanity expects.
Collection
3:46
Hammer and speculative fiction
The alien intelligence behind the signal did not appear fully formed. Long before humanity, it too had an origin.
0:55
Hammer and speculative fiction
High in a lethal mountain landscape, Hammer is tested by cold, wreckage and the recurring mystery that refuses to stay buried.
3:35
Hammer and speculative fiction
Armour, aircraft and soldiers surge forward in a visual meditation on the machinery, momentum and human cost of war.
Collection
1:03
Ideas, energy and environment
Artificial intelligence is usually discussed as software, but its hardest limit may be the power systems required to run it.
1:19
Ideas, energy and environment
A provocative challenge to a widely repeated claim about modern warming rates and rice production.
2:07
Ideas, energy and environment
Earth has always produced extreme weather. What can the distant past tell us—and what can it not tell us—about risk today?
0:49
Ideas, energy and environment
An extraordinary material formed when a nuclear test fused tower, equipment and desert into something new.
2:11
Ideas, energy and environment
Nature, movement and music offer a quiet interval between the arguments and mysteries.
Collection
1:15
Meanwhile in Australia
Australia's wildlife gets the starring role in a playful collection of local absurdity.
0:17
Meanwhile in Australia
Two crocodiles, one phone and a distinctly Australian approach to sophisticated conversation.
0:15
Meanwhile in Australia
A dingo discovers the phone feature every Australian workplace desperately needs.
0:45
Meanwhile in Australia
When the call comes, Australia's unlikely bushfire brigade puts words into action.
1:38
Meanwhile in Australia
A straight-faced list of smoking's supposed advantages reaches the only conclusion worth keeping.
3:24
Meanwhile in Australia
A pointed Australian political satire built in the tradition of taking the piss out of power.