Thursday, February 27, 2025 • 1 min read
I Had an excellent evening of writing. It’s been about a week since I have managed to gather the focus required but I am starting to feel more like myself and generally returning to my usual Zen-like state. I will likely feel more equipped to return to usual activities in a few days. Also, drafted a blog about health, moods, and personal goals. I’ll proofread it tomorrow and post it. If I think its worthwhile once I go through it again
Saturday, February 22, 2025 • 7 min read
The ghost sat alone in his chair as it slowly spun in the ambient draft of the cold office. He was contemplating the wasted hours spent playing video games, making videos, and trying to build a community. The ghost was alone because the body he had once been attached to was currently out in the world. He didn’t care where—it could have been anywhere, really. The ghost gave no thought to where the body had gone, only that it was absent.
The ghost dragged the mouse around the desk like a caveman dragging a rock along the wall of a cave to make rudimentary artistic etchings. The ghost had far less lofty goals; he simply scrolled through Reddit for a bit and then checked in on some of the more problematic social networks. After a while, feeling ghastly, the ghost decided to check the comments on his ghost-ship of a YouTube channel. The ghost still cared about the channel—the remnants of things that could have been. He reflected on the fact that he had once been a quadruple-Z-list internet person of interest. He wanted to feel good about that, to reclaim some of the faded glory and paint it onto his ghostly form in hopes of using it to become a body of his own—maybe even become somebody.
Thursday, February 13, 2025 • 3 min read
When I was a kid, chess appeared to be a game of magic. The mere concept of it captivated me. However, I must admit that this fascination was partly because of my limited exposure to the game, as I had primarily learned about chess through cartoon magicians, old fantasy movies, and this one artefact in my home.
The artefact in question was a small table, far too short to be useful. It was crafted from dark brown wood and had ornate, wavey legs. The top was so shiny that it resembled glass to me—it was a glossy, polished wooden chessboard. I distinctly remember that it lifted up to reveal a green felt lining that held the delicate chess pieces safe.
I have since been assured by my mother that the chess table was an ugly old thing with a loose leg and plastic chess pieces. It wasn’t highly polished at all; it was just slightly shiny because it was plastic on the top.
My dad taught me the basics of the game, although I don’t recall him ever having any interest in it. From what I understand, the table was more of a common early eighties home decoration than a sign of enthusiasm for the game. I had a feeling it was more often used to hold wine glasses it was than used to play on.
I have no idea what happened to that old table. It might be somewhere in the spider-infested loft of my home, but I’m not brave enough to embark on that quest.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025 • 2 min read
LumaFusion is a video editing application, and in my experience, it’s pretty good. But what really blows me away is that it’s an example of a truly platform-agnostic app—at least within the Apple ecosystem. I purchased it on my iPad (a 13 inch M2 iPad Air) for around £30. My main use case is editing short animation clips and using a proper video editor to manage transitions and link them together.
Tuesday, January 28, 2025 • 4 min read
Humans make things. Whether this creative urge is unique to us or a common trait among all species that reach our level of social and technological development remains a mystery. It is also worth noting that the creative urge does not exist in all members of our species. Many people are perfectly content watching Netflix and eating cereal out of a box. Strangely, there has never been societal pressure to be creative. There is pressure to get a job and pay bills, get an education, and shower from time to time. But failing to find motivation to create does not cause any social issues at all.
Most of my friends create things. I know artists, coders, tinkerers, and writers. Most people in my life are working on a “project” or some other general creative task. I enjoy getting updates on their creations, even when I don’t entirely follow what they’re working on. There is something absolutely wonderful about listening to someone talk about what they are making. There’s an intimate passion that oozes from them when they speak of their “work.”
I have never thought of myself as creative—which is strange, considering my major pastime is writing fiction. I have published books, novellas, blogs, and even videos, and I have been doing so for years. I love storytelling. Writing has been the best way for me to do it.
Sunday, January 12, 2025 • 5 min read
As I’m sure many of you have noticed, I have recently been on something of a cleanse. Ejecting things from my life which I feel are no longer relevant. Trying my best to live intentionally and considering what adds value to my life, and what are things which I use as crouches for someone I used to be. Towards the end of this year, I am hoping to be in a financial position where I can buy a camper van and have little weekend excursions with my dog. I one day hope to retire into a mobile home of some kind and visit Europe, assuming there is a way to have my dog come with me, that is.
This pipe-dream about a small space, mobile future has been leaking into the decisions I make day to day. While I am a fair way away from having to think about the practical things, I have something of a clear thought pattern. I have likely mentioned it here before:
Tuesday, January 7, 2025 • 1 min read
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.
Monday, December 30, 2024 • 8 min read
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. This is a narrative on translation philosophy, not an attempt at critique. It is intended to be a research session in which I educate myself and share my findings. I believe they are all good translations for different purposes. However, I have preferences, which I will summarise at the end.
Thursday, December 26, 2024 • 11 min read
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.
Sunday, December 22, 2024 • 4 min read
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.
Thursday, December 12, 2024 • 2 min read
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.
Sunday, December 1, 2024 • 1 min read
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.
Friday, November 29, 2024 • 8 min read
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.
Thursday, November 28, 2024 • 10 min read
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.
Saturday, November 23, 2024 • 6 min read
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.
Thursday, November 7, 2024 • 5 min read
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.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024 • 2 min read
As I said in my last post, I have been using eBay recently for the first time in many years. I have even made a pretty reasonable amount of money in exchange for the things which were on my shelf gathering dust. On paper, it’s gone quite well. Let’s have a look at a sample here: I purchased a comic book collected volume about five years ago and thanks to the label on the front, I know I paid £8.
Sunday, November 3, 2024 • 7 min read
The things. It has recently come to my attention that a lot of the stuff in my office has dust on it. This isn’t because I fail to clean my house (I mean, in part it is. Who ‘dusts’?) but it is more that the things in my office are so infrequently used that dust builds up. The last time I sat down and read a physical comic may have been almost two years ago.