Ethics Outsourcing: A Further AI Danger
“Generative AI doesn’t lie; it outputs incorrect information. It was you, the human being, who lied, when you then passed that information off as truth.”...
ArmadaCon 2025, Sir Terry Pratchett, And Me
In 1988, four hundred years after Sir Francis Drake set out from Plymouth to defeat the Spanish Armada, a science-fiction and fantasy convention was held in...
Most Money Is Created By Banks, Not Governments
If you think money is created by governments or their central banks then think again, because most money is created by commercial banks when they make loans....
How True Does A Memoir Have To Be?
How true did The Salt Path have to be to qualify as a memoir, and where does James Herriot fit into this discussion? A memoir is any nonfiction narrative...
An Authorial Tool: Watsonian And Doylist Perspectives
Or how defining plot elements in terms of both their Watsonian and Doylist needs can help define and develop your plot The concept of Watsonian and Doylist...
Stretching The Narrative Elastic
Or when the square peg of a formula meets a round hole of a subject. Roland White is one of my favourite non-fiction authors. Writing in the field of...
The United States Constitution: Created Flawed Due To American Exceptionalism?
“To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.” — Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of...
There Is No Legal Way For Trump To Invade Canada
Why American Exceptionalism causes even good Americans to completely miss the point when it comes to an invasion of Canada (or Greenland, or Panama, or...
I Will Be A Guest Of Honour At ArmadaCon 2025
ArmadaCon is a multimedia SF/F convention that’s been held annually in Plymouth (UK) since 1988 (which was the 400th anniversary of an English fleet sailing...
A De Facto Protectorate: The True Trumpian Threat To Canada
Donald Trump sprouts a lot of bluster about invading Canada. And don’t get me wrong. This is deeply insulting talk, it would be a war crime, and any American...
Leopards Eating People's Faces: The Birth Of A Saying
A pastime of mine is Googling the etymology of words, sayings, and phrases. But there’s one that I don’t have to do, because I was (virtually) there when it...
How Six Year Old British Me Learned About American Healthcare
When I was a kid I didn’t know about the United States of America. I just knew about a place on the TV where the cars and houses were bigger, and everything...
When The BBC "Both Sided" War Crimes
I’m broadly a fan of the BBC, but one criticism often aimed at them is of taking such an overly pedantic point of neutrality that they’ll treat both sides of...
The Middle English Creole Hypothesis
Or how those bloody Normans screwed up our language Are you an English-speaking monoglot like me? Feel faintly ashamed that you can only speak the one...
How Do You Tell If Someone's A Vegan?
So the other day I had an electrician, Luke, round to move some plug sockets (🇺🇸power outlets). We’ve met a few times to get quotes, and he spent a couple of...
Phoenix From Hacked Ashes: My New Author's Website
Yesterday, I hit my various social media accounts (Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Facebook) with the news that I had a new author’s website, which can be...
What Is A Barbecue?
“Words have meanings” is a hackneyed phrase oft deployed by those who would like the world to be simple and neat, and while they’re correct in believing that...
Why Atheists And Theists Are Doomed To Talk Past Each Other
I recently came across a post on Threads that stated the following: Someone said today, "Atheism is also a religion. It is the belief that God does not...
Bluesky vs Threads: A Tale of Two Posts
A while ago, I came across an interesting distinction between the two types of social media network, that being connection-based and interest-based. Put...
On Social Anxiety (SF Convention Version)
A couple of weeks ago, having a made a somewhat fleeting one-day visit to Levitation, the 2024 Eastercon at Telford, I made the following observation: A...