I finally got around to uploading an avatar for this newsletter. It’s a photo of the brick I keep on my desk at work: It is perhaps worth noting that the brick was not a decision I, personally, made. A colleague bought it for me (and commissioned an Etsy artist… (keep reading)

Still working on the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story, which involves an art gallery heist. The thing about writing crime fiction is that you are constantly figuring out: At least one of those things needs to be something your characters haven’t handled before, and ideally all three of them… (keep reading)

I went to the beach with some friends last Friday night in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the Perseid meteor shower. Unfortunately I live in a country forsaken by the sun with near-100% cloud cover most of the time, so that didn’t exactly work out. There was also… (keep reading)

My mum has been asking me about ways to promote my dad’s work online, and TikTok came up as a possibility. So I decided to sign up for a TikTok account and see what it was like from the creator side. My findings were as follows: Thus ends my experiment… (keep reading)

Thanks to the shortest and least effective real estate deal in the world, I recently moved to the town of North Shields. It’s out on the coast — roughly 20 minutes away from Newcastle by car, a little longer than that by transit. By Canadian standards, this is a pleasantly… (keep reading)

Usually when I write about absurd technological fuckups, I’m exaggerating; the point is to show what happens when you push current tech policy and practice to its furthest extent. And then something just as dumb as a thing I sarcastically made up hits the news. Case in point: Crowdstrike. One… (keep reading)

My dad reads my writing. Well, some of it. He can handle the gay stuff okay, but the parts of my work which involve graphic werewolf maulings are a bit much for him. Anyway, he just got to the point in “Jay Moriarty Ruins Everybody’s Childhood” where a device called… (keep reading)

I’ve got a book out today, which means it’s time to make myself utterly insufferable on those few social media platforms I actively use. Fortunately I have a day job, which means — for the moment, at least — I can forego signing up for a TikTok account and attempting… (keep reading)

I helped a friend move this weekend, which is one of those social rituals that has remained oddly unchanged throughout my lifetime. So much of what we once considered the building blocks of society have been paywalled and offshored and app-ified, and yet the most effective way to get your… (keep reading)

I’ve moved into the new flat, which lacked a stopper for the kitchen sink. So I had to go buy one. Do you know how hard it is to just walk into a store and buy a sink stopper? Regular retail stores don’t have them, even the ones that ostensibly… (keep reading)