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Rants

More Thoughts

This post is a sort of run-on from the last. I had a bit of a rant there about how “diverse” characters (and I’m not talking just about trans) shouldn’t be shoehorned into a creative work without justification. Welp, I wasn’t really expecting to have my point proved so quickly.

A Book Review (with diverse diversions)

Just finished John Scalzi’s Old Mans War. It’s now been out for 15 years and is one of those books that everyone who knows SF says you ought to read. So I finally did. Clearly a homage to Robert Heinlein, it’s not a bad read at all – I only skipped a few pages, near […]

Review: Under The Dome

I read Stephen King’s Under The Dome when it first came out a couple of years ago; for me, it really was one of those books that you don’t want to stop reading. So when the recent TV adaptation came out, I made sure to start watching. I nearly stopped watching after that first episode […]

Adventures In Sounds

So I’m having some eye trouble at the mo – I’m constantly getting dry eyes, so that I have to limit my time reading and at the computer; I’ve already got through three tubes of carbomer gel in the last week. So I thought I’d explore the possibility of text-to-speech (TTS) stuff, so that I […]

So, Saturday….

I got on the bus and went to Dumfries. The car is very poorly and will have to be replaced soon, hence the bus trip, to get some shopping. Having done the stuff I needed to, I found myself with an hour to while away until the return journey. It was a long way from […]

So Sweet…

So this morning, I got out of bed feeling like c**p – headachy, sinuses stuffed up, tired and aching. I’m waiting for an appointment to see an ENT specialist about my chronic sinusitis, but that will take weeks. So I needed some cheering up. And I think I’ve managed it. Going through my emails, I […]

Yes! Another new post…!

Well, I don’t know why, but yesterday’s post seem to have attracted unwelcome attention. The blog collected about five sp*m comments in the three months since my last post, but this morning I’ve had to blitz about 20 new bits of sp*m. Anyway, it’s encouraged me to post again; well, that and the fact that […]

Time For A Rant…

One of my Facebook friends recently posted a link to the following: “When he was still a young man, Beethoven decided to compose a few improvisations on a music by Pergolesi. He devoted months to this task and finally had the courage to publish it. A critic wrote a full page review in a German […]

Why Are Some People Content With Ugly?

Just had a look at the website of a local (minor) author – it’s one of the ugliest I’ve seen in a long while. It was produced by a supposedly professional design company. Going to their website and looking through their portfolio I found not only dozens of design-failure horrors – piss-poor in terms of […]

Down to business…

The last few weeks, I’ve been thinking quite hard about getting much more business-like with my web design work. The web has a lot of helpful advice for design freelancers who want to be more professional – John O’Nolan has a couple of good articles (it helps a lot that he’s British – US business […]