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Tumbling Less Than Gracefully Into Middle Age

  • Odyssey, Pt. 2

    Endless Shit Jobs I’d moved to Southampton. I had a place to live, I did not have a job, but I was confident that was just a matter of days from being resolved. I turned up at Manpower Southampton and reminded them of their commitment to get me set up at BT. There was (surprised…

  • Odyssey, Pt 1.

    Southampton I left England on December 22nd 2011. My day would start in Millbrook Rd East, Southampton, and by evening would finish at College Avenue Pittsburgh, USA. I can’t tell that story without telling the story of my time in Southampton. This is the move from the North of England, and some of the reasons…

  • The Tool As The Work

    I’ve been using Linux in some capacity since tinkering with it in a lab at my old job in 2005. That’s not a long time by enthusiast standards, but it’s not nothing, either. I saw this post on Reddit and the sentiment stuck in my throat a little bit. I started out with Lindows (now…

  • I’m Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today

    Kevin Smith, without me noticing, made a third Clerks film, released Summer 2022. I’m not a Smith superfan by any means, but I would be lying if his films did not sit somewhere between guilty pleasure and cinematic comfort food. We’re not far apart in age, and his 90s output (I originally wrote oeuvre but…

  • Flashbacks Of A Fool

    This review contains spoilers. Daniel Craig was peak Bond in 2008. Still warm on the success of Casino Royale (which is a fucking banger of a film) he did the slightly shit Quantum of Solace, and around the same time, this got released. I’ve only just seen it, having wanted to watch it for a…

  • Dream Time

    The North of England. It’s a Sunday. My trip is over, and it’s time for me to go. There is a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach – some call this butterflies – and I can feel the minutes tumbling away, as a veteran procrastinator can. Somehow, It’s now the afternoon. I have…

  • Tim Bisley Is Wrong About Babylon 5

    Spaced S02E02 is a playful tale about the pitfalls of fandom. I have to say up front that I am at great risk of doing exactly what Bilbo Bagshot (Bill Bailey) cautions against: “…Defending the genre with terminal intensity” Yeah yeah, I know. In the episode Tim (Simon Pegg) gets himself sacked by Bilbo for…

  • Death and all his friends

    February 16th, 2005 I’d got the call I was waiting for, from my older sister. “You’d better come”. It was time. My mum had been fighting terminal cancer since the previous August, over the new year we were waiting for the other shoe to drop. She’d become increasingly frail and had lost a shocking amount…

  • 45 pt. 2

    Eyes By March my vision had continued to deteriorate to the extent I was becoming quite afraid. I made an emergency appointment to try and figure out what the hell was going on. I got a visit with an ophthalmologist that just happened to be a retinal specialist. She is French, had only been in…

  • 45

    December 27th, 2018 On the morning of my 45th birthday, I stood before the bathroom mirror’s harsh, yellow light, looking at a lump where my armpit should be. I’d felt something under my arm in the shower, a bulge where the hollow of my armpit is, the ‘axilla’ as I would learn to refer to…