little bits of everything

View this post on Instagram A post shared by A.Y. Chao 🇨🇦🇹🇼🇬🇧 (@ay_chao) Last night I visited the Birmingham SF Group . Due to a problem with the meeting venue we decamped to a cosy room in a nearby pub. The guest was A. Y. Chao, author of Shanghai Immortal. As well as talking about that she read some of her new book Paris Celestial  to us, and answered questions. It's due to be released on the 26th March 2026. This was the first time I've been to this group, and I found them to be a friendly bunch. It's been going since 1971 and there was a couple there who'd been there since the beginning. Although I hadn't been before, The Organisation APA  which I wrote about a while back, was originally APA-B, set up by the Brum SF Group. So I have some common history with the group. Would I go again? Definitely.

Five years ago Colin Ross did something extraordinary. He had a couple of successful books set in his Jewel Galaxy universe. The first book had been made into a film, and there were clearly plenty of story lines to come. Then he gave it all away. He announced that he was giving up the copyright on the texts. He wasn't claming IP rights over the characters. He welcomed people writing their own stories, creating their own merchandise, making their own films. When asked about loss of income he said that he had enough money from the books and the film to keep him going for a while. Fan fiction and cosplay isn't something new, but with an endorsement like that, there was an explosion of creativity. The difference with what emerged from that compared with fan fiction is that there was very little canonical storyline. We were only just being introduced to the characters, and there were quite a few. So the new fiction went in all different directions. Even if you're not a fan, you...

Last night I went to the cosy little bookshop Books on the Heath in King's Heath, Birmingham . Marc Burrows was speaking about his new book Mistletoe and Vinyl - The story of the Christmas No. 1 . I've been getting Marc's newsletter since 2019. The Twitter algorithm served up a tweet in which he said he was writing a book about Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors, and of course I subscribed. He's been touring various bookshops, libraries etc. talking about this new book. He spoke for almost an hour, off the cuff, entertaining and engaging. The importance of being a number one at Christmas for an artist is a uniquely British phenomenon. He took us back to when Jesus' birth celebration was moved to the 25 December in 336, during the reign of Emperor Constantine. This was so that it was the same time as the cultures around were celebrating some sort of festival in the depths of winter. Singing and drinking are a part of all these celebrations. Fast forward to...

Existing brand Our client's brand was summarised in the sentence "Failing to build my personal brand". This brand statement spoke of authenticity in a world of image and AI. Recommendations for strategy We were engaged when our client was kicked off X/Twitter for no apparent reason . The brief was to come up with ways that our client could engage in social media in the light of the decline of Twitter/X and the fragmentation of platforms. Our client tells us that since their first serious use of computers they have filed things as "work" and "play", for example, in their subscriptions of their RSS reader. This concept gives us as a steer for how our client can present themselves in the social media sphere. So we recommend they spread their time between two platforms - Mastodon for work and BlueSky for play. This follows the pattern they use in their blogging - manypies.paulmorriss.com  for technical/work related blogging and  little-bits.paulmorriss.c...

 I've been tagged by Keith (aka adactio) , not personally, but figuratively. Only by answering these questions can I close the browser tab with his post on it. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Because I enjoyed reading other blogs and I wanted to join in. I love the idea of publishing to the world. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before? I use Google's Blogger. It's a bit of a backwater, and doesn't get much love from their developers, inasmuch as they're not developing the platform. But it's free though, and I can use my own domain name. Before that I used Dave Winer's editthispage.com. More on my 20 years of blogging post , which I wrote 6 years ago. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? The latter. When do you feel most inspired to write? If you look at the list of articles you'll s...

I've come across a couple of things recently that have blown my mathematical mind. The first is the Infinitely Large Napkin , a 1000+ page PDF of all sorts of maths. It's just at the level I'm at at the moment. I don't want to see proofs of stuff, I just want to furnish my mind with mathematical constructs. It has the right level of explanation and examples, with a few questions in case I want to dig a bit further. And it's free. 🤯 Secondly I was trying out ChatGPT with some maths questions. My experience of Google search results AI, which is the only AI I regularly use, is that it's unhelpful and sometimes completely wrong. ChatGPT has been useful on the odd occasion. I tried out its maths knowlege. When I asked it a factual question it seemed to get (according to my comparison with the §1.6 of Napkin) the right answer. I guess because the internet is full of concise and true statements about maths it's highly likely to get the answer right. Here's wha...