little bits of everything

  Gen X were born from 1965 to 1980. Although it’s possible to retire from 55, that’s pretty rare. Some of us are over 60 already though, and starting to retire, or at least start making plans for what to do with our lives. So in 2026 what are Gen X doing with their partial or full retirement? Gaming Pong appeared when the oldest of us were 10. The earliest home computers (ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum, Commodore 64) arrived when we were teenagers. Only the nerds amongst us got those. We had to load games off tapes, which could take up to 5 minutes. Proper games consoles came along, like those from Atari, Nintendo, and Sega, soon after that. As they got better we started to get jobs, and so while we had the money, we didn’t have the time. Now though, we have the money, the spare room and the time. It’s not just the nerds amongst us that are creating the games cave, complete with multiple monitors, surround sound and ergonomic chairs. Our eyesight may be beginning to go, but if we sit clos...

It must have been in my early teenage years that I first read Gerald Durrell's book My Family and Other Animals . I loved it, and I'm pretty sure I read it more than once. I decided recently to re-read it. I don't have a good history with revisiting things from my childhood. I had a bad experience rewatching Blake's 7 . Even one of my favourite TV Series, Heroes , wasn't that interesting when I rewatched the first episode. To put the summary at the start - it was a good move. In case you're not familiar with it, My Family etc. tells the story of how Gerry, his widowed mother, and older sister and two brothers moved to Corfu when he was ten years old. Gerry was fascinated by the wildlife around him and the book, and the following two books in what is sometimes sold as the Corfu Trilogy, is a mixture of descriptions of his nature explorations and the things his family gets up to. To give you an idea of the latter, here's a sample: “Les, muttering wrathfully, ...

  This is part 2 of the series, " Me? I'm just listening to the music ". Before I start though, I need to tell you why the US version of this album is called "No Answer". An executive from the United Artists Records executive rang someone on the ELO side to find out the name of the album. When they didn't get through they wrote down, "no answer" and so that became the album title. I had ELO1  on tape in my teenage years, but never the whole album, so some tracks are very familiar and I heard some for the first time when I listened to it recently. 10538 overture is prehistoric ELO. I love that it's firmly rooted in the sixties in its sound. It's like an old uncle that you don't want to change. It introduces the heavy string sound that we're going to get familiar with on this album. Look at me  is sung by Roy Wood, not Jeff Lynne and it doesn't age well. Nellie takes her bow  is lovely and dramatic. It's a long song - nearly 6...

  On the occasion of my 60th birthday, I, like so many before me, created a 16 page zine printed newspaper style by newspaperclub.com . The subject is mostly me, so modesty forbids I publish the whole thing online. However there are some things which are about the year of my birth. So here are three pages from Threescore , lightly edited to avoid controversy (maybe you can guess the edit).

This was my third visit to the BSFG , the second IRL, as the previous one was on Zoom with an author in the US. Antony Johnston  writes in several genres and media: SF (of course), murder mystery, espionage, video games, graphic novels and non-fiction. He was interviewed and in answering the questions gave fascinating insights into how those different media work. He said that for graphic novels there's no set way that writers deliver their words to the artists, but he chose to do it in a screenplay format. That was handy when one of his works, Atomic Blonde, became a film. The process from start to finish was 5 years, which was, he found out, actually quite quick for the industry.  The process of writing for videogames has similarly no set format and varies between studios and even different games with the same set of people. That process is a lot more iterative than others. I learnt a new term - vertical slice. That describes how when a game is being prototyped the creators c...

  It seems a contradiction if I say I listened to an old album by one of my favourite artists recently. The truth is, I'm not a very good music fan.  I did think of talking about music that I liked, and then I realised I'd reinvented radio. I could do a reaction video on YouTube, "old man listens to old music", but I'm really a text person at the moment so I'm going to write about it. Here's an aside: a young adult asked me what my favourite music was. I reeled off a list of old artists: Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush. Then I mentioned a modern one, expecting that he'd heard of them: Elbow. He hadn't. Then I realised that they'd won the Mercury music prize when he was probably two. Not so modern really. So here's the start of a new series: Listening to Us by Peter Gabriel for the first time I listened to Peter Gabriel 2 (aka Scratch ), a while back. 1 and 3 (known as Car and Melt ) even though that's not written on them) ...

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...

I know, so click-baity - right? But true. I got this text out of the blue one day: I braced myself for what came next. Here goes... Phew! I mean, I could have given him a list if he was struggling to think of some ways I'd failed. I had to respond though.  He replied: Hehe indeed. Since that day I've been thinking about how parents can not fail their children in similar ways. What are the essential albums that it would be good to force children to listen to? I didn't come up with many ideas. Then recently I came across this post by Jon Hicks, about Apple's 100 best albums . "According to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden , the criteria were albums that: represented a cultural moment for the artist or genre. were complete thoughts, not just collections of hit songs. thoroughly represent culture in production and lyrics. inspired a generation to want to create more music. represent the BEST in storytelling, musicianship, recording and production. are timeless and reached far...

 A couple of years ago I wrote about a record shop which had the Profil font on the front. Well, I wrote about music, but mentioned that record shop (Yates and Greenhough if I remember). I recently came across That mysterious font is festive  and discovered that it could have been one of a number of Egyptian italic fonts. What I didn't say about that font (because I was talking about music) was that I had a Letraset sheet of one of those fonts. There are people who can sing the praises of Letraset in better ways than me, perhaps you could point out an article you've come across? I don't remember just where I put those letters, but I do remember the excitement of being able to create your own professional quality typesetting on, say, an exercise book. Update: 28 May 2024. If you tag Ray Newman (who wrote that article about Festive) he'll help you identify which Egyptian italic font is which: Flattish O, little serif at the top of the A... Reckon that's Festive. — R...

Here's my pitch so I get booked for One Track Minds . Sometimes I think about the greatest artists of the various decades. So you've got Elvis for the 50s, The Beatles for the 60s, and for the 70s (and maybe the 80s) David Bowie. Then I think "but he's just a pop start who writes and sings great songs". Then I think "some songs aren't just great songs". There's no just about it, great songs are, well, so much more than just songs. This is where words fail me, so let's talk about Heroes. Some of you may know it as "the tunnel song". This comes from the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which was originally a book. I've read the book and it's different to the film; in ways which I annoyingly didn't write down. So I'll have to read and watch again, no great hardship. One of my children remarked when I said I liked the film, but it's a teenage film. I didn't have an answer then. I do now. I was a teenager onc...

 I saw this tweet from Rhianna Pratchett (Terry's daughter) today: Okay do I go and introduce myself to the lady on the train who was talking very enthusiastically about my dad and his work? — Rhianna Pratchett 🧙🏻‍♀️ (@rhipratchett) January 17, 2024 It made me think what Terry Pratchett did so well in his writing. The thing I remember from my early days of reading his books was a scene where someone was sweeping a stable. They were working out that by the time they'd done this bit here and that bit there they were almost halfway, by which point the worst was over. I've done that same thing myself. For someone who writes about trolls and goblins his depiction of humanity is the best I've seen from any writer. When it comes to those non-human characters, there's something so right about how they're depicted. I've never seen a troll talk to a goblin but those conversations they have are just how I think they would be. His plots are also watertight and the Di...

Sometimes I publish on here and put it to Medium. I just published a post there first. I haven't got a system. New fiction writing:  The Song Doctor - let me diagnose your problem.

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash I'm in my fifties now and all my children are grown up. I think it's time to tell you kids what the adults (particularly parents) aren't telling you. I don't expect many kids will come across this, so if you don't have young kids of your own you could share it with them. You don't have to go to school (This applies to the UK, and probably many other countries.) When our kids said, "we don't want to go to school", we would say, "the law says you have to be educated". Notice we didn't mention school. That's because you could get your parents to home educate you. So you could suggest home education to them and see what they say. Or, depending on what your parents are like, it may be a worse thought than school, in which case, yes, you're going to have to go to school. Elbows on the table isn't so bad In some cultures it's OK to put your elbows on the table. So you could point that out th...

Hild  by Nicola Griffith  was my favourite book of recent years, so I was very pleased to hear there was a sequel - Menewood - and then very pleased to get an eARC of it a couple of months ago. Hild was about the early years of the girl who would become St Hilda, up to age 18, and this book covers the next few years of her life. She is cousin to a king, and influences the world around her in many different ways. Menewood is a wooded valley that she owns, and it's the place in this book that she goes back to. She has a certain amount of power because of her family connections, but also has a lot of other skills which she brings to bear to affect what's going on around her. Reading it is like travelling back in time to the seventh century. It's really immersive - sights and smells are so well described. There's no Tardis to translate for you, but there's a glossary at the back as there are a few words that have no modern equivalent. What is now England was a number o...

When I was a teenager I heard a song where a sung note seamlessly blended into a saxophone, and then into a saxophone solo. That was The Gunner's Dream by Pink Floyd on album The Final Cut. Around the same time I heard another song that did a similar thing, into a violin, but I didn't remember what it was. Recently I heard that second song again on Pick of the Pops on Radio 2, and thanks to the magic of Shazam I was able to identify it as Music by John Miles. If you just want to hear that blend, go to 2:40. The Gunner's Dream was my favourite Pink Floyd song for a while, I would play it over and over again and picture what the video would look like. Until I'd found that video to embed it above I'd never seen the actual video. It's different to my headvideo. Today I've just come across Roger Water's Lockdown Sessions version of it. I won't comment on on his recent remarks in interviews, but this is an interesting version, with no saxophone solo, but...