Failing Better
I wrote Universal Constants, the first story in this new Lovecraftian anthology from Ghostwoods Books. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” At the time of his death in 1937, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was virtually unknown. The power of his stories was too great to …
I was round my parents house the other day, and we needed to put a hot pan on the table for dinner. It went onto a tablemat, so the wooden table wouldn’t get burned. I said to Dad “I wonder what the generic word is for that thing you put hot things on so they …
So Man of Steel was a huge success then. There was a lot of chatter when it was first released about some of the choices the writers made in the film. Admittedly this was usually expressed in a howl of “THAT’S NOT MY SUPERMAN YOU’VE BETRAYED MY CHILDHOOD!” nerdrage, but whatever. It also seems to …
If you’re in the UK, odds are it’s been snowing near you for the last day or two. So yesterday, the lovely Mr James Moran challenged you to make stuff with snow. A short film. Some photography. Whatevs. Because it’s going to make whatever you do look much more expensive and lovelier. I’m at my …
So you might have noticed that I use Twitter a lot. For those of you who don’t, it’s a way of staying in touch while on the move. Bite-sized chunks of content, 140 characters per tweet. Originally, there was no way to “call out” to another user, and your messages would just be broadcast to …
Some people (possibly the same as those that argue that Doctor Who isn’t Doctor Who’s Name or that “they” isn’t a perfectly good singular pronoun that’s been in use for centuries) have occasionally been known to argue that it’s not possible to give 110%. Of course it is. Let’s take a look at George Osborne, …
You’ve seen them already, but you may not know what they’re called. When a movie has the credit as “A Film By” followed by a name (and it’s almost always the director’s name), that credit is known as a possessory credit. The director is saying that the film is theirs.You can find a quick history of …
I said goodbye to my Nanna this evening. For a significant part of the evening she thought I was called Bill, but that’s neither here nor there. Bill, I told her, was a perfectly good name, and would be just fine for tonight. Mostly, though, we just sat companionably watching the Christmas television. She was …
OkCupid is a dating site. It organises matches based around self-selecting data. So you’re given a bunch of questions to answer. What do I think of such-and-such? How important is the answer a potential partner gives to that question to whether I might date them? And so on and so forth. I know one couple …
So, there’s this TV show, right? About a character called Doctor Who. You can tell it’s about a character called “Doctor Who” because the show is called “Doctor Who” and in the credits for the first eighteen years or so, the character is called “Doctor Who”. (Or sometimes Dr. Who. But I think we can …