I have spent some time reading the Cal newport book ‘Digital Minimalism.’ I’m not that far in, but I picked it up because I was feeling a ‘thing,’ the book, so far, has made me double feel that ‘thing.’ I need to write a full post about the ‘thing.’ The ‘thing,’ if anyone is wondering, is the realisation that I am unhappy with the amount of time I spend attached to the internet, and to my screens. Continue reading →

Recently I was reading the translation notes in my NLT bible and there were a few lines which made me raise an eyebrow. This led me to go on a bit of a deep dive into all the translations which I read. I am not an expert and all information provided can be found online with ease. All I did was read and collate it with some thoughts.  To be clear, despite this information, I believe all the listed translations are reliable enough to be inspired. Continue reading →

The end of the year is looming, and we approach the dark, melancholic week which sets its home between Christmas and the new year. Like a troll on a bridge, the week of limbo must be defeated to pass into the glorious bastion of twenty twenty-five. Which, is an overly dramatic way of saying that it’s the time of year when I reflect on where I am and how I got here. Continue reading →

Recently I tried the dark mode on my Kindle for the first time since I have had it. It’s strange that I ever tried it at all, give that in the decade or more I have been using Kindles, it has never before occurred to me that dark mode maybe a viable option. My verdict after an hour was this: Dark mode is awful. It’s a horrible way to read. The light text on the black backdrop makes the words lack definition and the whole thing feels oppressive. Continue reading →

I wrote a thing. For Christmas. It is not ‘Christmasy.’ When I say that I write it for Christmas, that’s not entirely true, it just happens that it’s basically finished, and it also happens to be mid-December. ‘Of Gods and Vampires’ is a short novel following the adventures of two characters from Denouement (the first one.) It’s a pop-SCIFI adventure novel which is episodic and at times high action. If you have never read a Denouement story, then you may not ‘get’ the setting but hey, give it a go, you may like it. Continue reading →

I wanted to take a moment to than explain something which I have only recently realised maybe confusing. Both Dandelion-Utilitarian.com and Dandelion-Utilitarian.net exist. The dot com, is my main public facing WordPress site. It is where you will find my curated articles and my Niceferatu comic posts. And, of course, my more long-form writing releases. The dot net however, is a Micro.Blog powered feed. It contains all the main page posts from the dot com, as well as anything which you may consider ‘a stream of ideas. Continue reading →

We all move on from things, and it often feels like a good move, it feels liberating and enchiching. I have had a lot of that feeling of liberty recently has I have been doing a very utilitarian decluttering of my home. Moving on from an online persona, however, feels like a death, more than a purge. I have been known socially as ‘Hex’ since college, when the movie Hackers was the greatest thing my friends and I had ever seen and we were all very edgy witchcraft obsessed teens. Continue reading →

The Outer Limits opening contains the now legendary words, “we will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical.” Like many kids, watching the scary black and white episodes through a half broken television, on a raining evening, the words were seared into my mind, along with pregnant tonal whistle which accompanied it. This struck me as something magical as child, in the same way that the opening line of Neuromancer  hit me as an adult, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel. Continue reading →

I’ve used a Kindle as my main book-window since the Kindle Voyage was launched in 2014 and since that time I’ve read many a controversy about the way Amazon manage the platform. Most of the reports are actually about copyright law, not Amazon, not directly. I thing which most anti-eBook/anti-Kindle crusaders point at is the time that everyone had their copy of 1984 taken away, one morning in 2009. Rarely does anyone bother asking why Amazon did this, they usually just point and yell. Continue reading →

No matter how productive I can become, and no matter how skilled I become, I still have twenty-four hours in a day. Much like nothing exceeds the speed of light, no productivity pipeline will break the time barrier. This has never been more evident to me than when I started drawing. I have been in the habit of writing for a few hours every day for a few years. While I don’t manage to actually accomplish this every day, the habit is formed. Continue reading →