Recent Articles
Of endings and arcs …
As an author, what makes a good, indifferent, or terrible story is always a subject of interest to me. It’s something I’ve been pondering having watched the – possibly – final Star Wars movie of the first nine… Rise of Skywalker. I think one of the main failures for me, story-wise, is that the last […]
Ve’ll be back?
I just returned from seeing Terminator Dark Fate at the cinema with one of the junior members of the clan who has never seen any of the previous films in the series. I don’t think it’s as bad as a lot of critics have been saying, but then it did use the old ‘but this […]
More questions than answers.
One of the more interesting things about being an established author is that you often get hit up by friends-of-friends wanting to mine your mind for tips and tricks on becoming a pro writer (because, hey, it’s so easy). It’s such a wide-N-deep topic that it would take days to just begin to scratch the […]
Never rub another supervillain’s rhubarb.
So, two words of advice from me, this week. First, never rub another supervillain’s rhubarb; and second, The Joker movie, is, upon reflection, probably not the best choice for Date Night with your partner. When we departed the cinema, her indoors stared wistfully at a poster for an upcoming movie – Zombieland Double Tap – […]
The Man Who Watched Netflix and then Amazon Prime.
Just started watching the movie ‘The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then BigFoot‘ which has finally ended up on Netflix (currently sitting high in their trending films charts, too). In plot terms, the film does pretty much what it says on the tin, indeed following an old codger who killed Hitler and then goes on […]
To The Stars?
I caught the movie ‘Ad Astra’ this weekend at the newly refurbished Leicester Square Odeon Luxe … upgraded sound systems and every seat an expensive LZ-Boy-style armchair with electronic footrests and reclining spine system. In the movie, U.S. Space Command scientist and astronaut Clifford McBride (played by Tommy Lee Jones) heads off on a deep […]
I is real. But is you?
I was walking back home on Friday from the supermarket with heavy bags, my mind wandering, when I managed to get myself worked up into an existential lather about the slipshod output of various recent streaming films and series. Studios go to all the trouble of paying actors, building sets, laying on post-production and SFX, […]
Got game?
Well, I finally managed to reach the end of the ‘Another Life’ science fiction series streaming on Netflix. It picked up a little towards the end, I think. The beast was weighted on the way, though by a lot of wheel-spinning, as well as a strange backstory that made little sense and ended up making […]
Many-Me?
There have been a few funny side-effects of the indie book revolution enabled by Amazon – that’s the thang where the masses get to bypass the legacy gatekeepers inside the big four publishers and publish directly to the world (either as e-books, or print-on-demand for dead tree books). First off, and most obviously, there’s been […]
Terribly Technical: that Sinking Feeling when you realise your readers are far better server engineers than your web host, 1&1 Ionos.
It is going to be a functional rather than philosophical blog update for you, this month. Ever since Google strong-armed SFcrowsnest into getting an SSL secure certificate for every web page just to stay in their stupid search engine index many months back, we’ve been playing this weird frustrating game where a small but not […]
