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...
Why My Tesla Is The Best, And Worse, Car I Have Ever Owned
I love my Tesla Model 3. It's a dream to drive, has a bigger battery than our previous car (a Nissan Leaf), and the Supercharger network makes longer...
He Ain't A Third-Level Fighter/Rogue, He's My Brother
My roleplaying group have just started a new Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5th Edition campaign with Tom(1) doing the GMing(2). Notes:If you're looking for...
What Everyone Misunderstands About The UK Citizenship Test
It's possibly a failing in me, but hypocrisy angers me more than malevolence. If you're going to be evil, at least have the decency to be honest. Don't try...
The Day I Won A Free Trip On Concorde... The Day Before I Took A Free Trip On Concorde
We never win anything. That's always been the mantra in my family, and while mostly true it does ignore two things: we're in possession of most of the forms...
Why Wanting-To-Be-A-Writer Is A More Popular Hobby Than Playing Dungeons and Dragons
Back in the largely pre-Internet 1980s and 1990s, the British roleplaying community had one big dream: a professional, monthly roleplaying magazine available...
Who Killed Humour SF/F? Why The Genre of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett is Now Dead
A decade or so ago, I attended an Eastercon event where a panel of writers, agents, and publishers advised would-be-writers on the subject of how to get...
Why Writers (But Also Everyone) Should Avoid Stereotyping
According to many Northerners, this man doesn't exist Last week I was back home in London, and one morning I accompanied my mother to the chemist (pharmacy)...
Why A Failed Camouflage Pattern Is Going To Get This Build-A-Bear Killed
A bear (rabbit?) who won't survive five minutes once he hits an active war zone Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as...
The Saddest Story I Ever Heard
I need to start by saying that this isn't my story; hell it wasn't even the story of the bloke who told it to me. I can't even credit the teller of the...
Vision: The Stuff I Didn't Say In My Previous Post
When I was a teenager, I played a lot of RPGs with my friends*, although calling them "friends" is perhaps stretching it a bit, given that of the four of...
What A Huge Indoor Waterpark Can Teach Us About Vision
My view sitting in a cafe at Tropical Islands resort, imagining I'm in a domed Martian or Lunar city When I was younger, my teachers taught me something I...
Apologies
About half an hour ago, I sent off a post on this newsletter (the first proper once in its new Nazi-free, Buttondown incarnation). And then immediately after...
I Don't Get Lunar Starship (SpaceX's Starship HLS)
For those who don't know, nearly three years ago NASA selected a lunar-landing variant of SpaceX's Starship as the craft to land humans on the Moon as part...
Testing, Testing, One Two Three...
<tap> <tap> Can everyone hear me at the back? Okay, so this is basically a test email to try and figure out how Buttondown works. From my initial experience...
The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back
I will be moving...
A Recap
The story so far (a.k.a. "My God! It's full of links!")
Confessions of A Hapless Monoglot
On how the Swedish for "vegan" took me down a linguistic and grammatical rabbit-hole...
Is Die Hard A Christmas Movie?
...And what this question can tell us about the meaning of art
Nuts & Bolts: Richard Osman
A structural analysis of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club Books
