Moving still underway; this time next week, I’ll be on a plane back to Canada. Overall, the prospect of leaving the UK has been less heartbreaking than I expected—but then again, it’s been increasingly apparent to me over the past year or so that this is not a country that… (keep reading)

My move back to Canada is well underway; so far it’s consisted largely of calling up various utility and service providers and informing them that no, they cannot persuade me to stay, not even if they give me a special discount, as their service is not available at my new… (keep reading)

Ever since Sir Keir Starmer personally told me to go fuck myself, it’s been looking more and more likely I’ll be returning to Canada. Which is just as well, since the UK is getting weirder. One example: the Online Safety Act, a law passed under the premise that only internet… (keep reading)

So Steam has banned games featuring “adult content” from its storefront, with itch.io following suit a few days later. Both cite pressure from their payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, etc.) as the primary reason for the bans. itch.io specifically points out this pressure was induced by anti-porn activist group… (keep reading)

By a plurality of reports, I have been released from the Gmail dungeon. Big thanks to all of you who let me know whether your copy of the newsletter came through. I still have no idea why that one email was marked as spam, and I suspect I’ll never find… (keep reading)

Well, it looks like Gmail sent last week’s newsletter to the spam folder. Possible reasons for this include: Google (like most tech companies), doesn’t employ humans to deal with issues like this anymore, so it’s basically impossible to know which of the above is the case. Hopefully this week’s newsletter… (keep reading)

Despite the fact that I’m mostly writing episodic shorts in an ongoing series, I try to make sure each individual story has a definitive ending. Most stories in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty could, in the event of my untimely demise, serve as a conclusion to the series. This makes… (keep reading)

This video on Women and the Men Who Write Them discusses, among other things, the way The Last of Us Part II ends up arguing against itself on the subject of revenge because it tries to apply a narrative about “breaking the cycle of violence” to a character whose experience… (keep reading)

A few years ago, the company I worked for at the time hired a speaker to come and do a talk about “growth mindset.” Attendance was not optional. The speaker listed, among his qualifications, that he was quite good at table tennis. In one part of his presentation, he talked… (keep reading)

Book publisher Unbound went into administration (functionally, bankruptcy proceedings) last month. They’ve been behind on royalty payments to authors for a while (and openly intend to keep not paying them for the foreseeable future). It also looks like, in at least one case, they were deliberately under-reporting sales of books… (keep reading)