I spent the day building out some wood framing, ready for plasterboard with my Dad. It’s always good, learning skills that are so different to everything I do just sat on a computer. I also got to learn about the difference between joinery, and cabinetry.

I have a project, codenamed Ox currently, that has been consuming me for the past seven years.

Many, many years ago I was an avid reader and writer of various fiction writing websites. There’s still links to them on this site, which shows a. how long they’ve been around and b. how out of date this site is. Recently I’ve been on a bit of binge, revisiting my past and re-reading these old stories. Which led me to a quest.

Something happened in February that I didn’t give enough attention to at the time. This site, HybridLogic, turned 15. A lot has changed in that time. Both on-line, and off.

There was a lot to like in 2016, and also a lot to dislike.

Likes: Hiking Scotland. Meeting new people. The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet. Writing 250K words. Arrival. London. London Calling & Dirt. Dishonored 2. Bliss n Eso. Arabic Abjad. Puffins. Gravity waves at TEDxBrum. Seeing Chris Hadfield. Victoria auf Deutsch. New swimming PBs. Knowing Birmingham, roughly. Family, all of them. Shipping code to millions. Rebel Rounders. Stranger Things. Trying things.

Dislikes: Surgery. Recovery from surgery. Trump. Cancelling Bali. Build tools. No running PBs. Brexit. Nationalism.

I don’t do resolutions. The best time to start something was yesterday. The next best time is today. I lost a kilo while lying in bed 18 hours a day. I can read the Arabic alphabet and simple words. 2017 I will travel, make more friends and learn more trivia because I already am.

Happy New Year.

When I was eight, I wrote some words on an aging RM laptop using Word 97. They were terrible words and they ran together to form an even more terrible sentence. But it was the first ‘thing’ I had created with a plot, characters and a purpose and I have continued ever since; through terrible fanfics, introspective ramblings and enough robots and aliens to thoroughly exhaust the subject, I’m still putting words on digital paper. So far, five months into 2016 I’ve written a few sentences shy of 100,000 words.

And last week I received my first payment for it. Continue reading »

It happened again. It got towards the end of the financial year and I had a large chunk of remaindered holiday to take. Last year I was in San Francisco but this year I just wanted to do nothing. Continue reading »

Ten years ago I decided to take a domain I had registered the year before and put it to good use. I replaced my homebrew CMS (the second version) and replaced it with the freshly released WordPress 2.0 along with a new design. Continue reading »