"Anniversary"

Read it here. There are spoilers below.

I dashed this off in a day for the Big Think SF short story competition on the theme of "future food". It didn't get anywhere, and if you read it you'll see why: it's a confused mess. It has far too much exposition and at the same time doesn't manage to get across clearly what it's trying to explain. It's a failure in world building. I was trying to build up the revulsion / horror of the main theme — that people routinely eat their own flesh, which is produced by the same machines and processes which create the tailored artificial organs which keep them alive and extend their lifespans — and then cap that with the introduction and breaking of a final taboo — the eating of other people's flesh (in this case as a gesture of commitment / devotion).

I may come back to this one day, just because I don't think the idea itself is too bad, and I'd like another shot at doing it right. I also kinda like the term "Geneva Chicken". That may be the future version's title.

"Tokyo Song"

Read it here.

Did I mention I went to Tokyo?

I'm not good at travelling. I've hardly been anywhere — opportunity and money never managed to coincide until just recently — and I've never really got the hang of holidays. Telling myself that I'd use these trips as research is my way of justifying the time and expense to myself.

I had the idea of writing something about Great Alex (the band who have been appearing as fragments — an oblique mention here, a sly reference there — in some of my writing for a while now) touring Tokyo even before I got on the plane and shared economy with a genuine touring group. Seeing them convinced me I was right. I do like it when fate gives me a clear sign like that. I also wanted to try out the voice of Matt, their drummer, in preparation for a longer story which I have planned (and which one day I may get to). Meanwhile, this gives me a chance to explore some of the themes which that will cover, while reusing my observations of the otherness of Japan — the surprisingly slight differences — pretty much all of which have been recorded elsewhere here in my travel notes. It also let me begin to flesh out the band's back catalogue of songs (or at least their titles), which is a part of the world building which I really enjoy.

Doing further research for this also gave me an excuse to trawl YouTube for 80s pop. The Graham Parker reference was added after I posted the first version of the story, after Brett Easton Ellis mentioned the song "Discovering Japan" in a tweet.

Mistake

I'll admit that I made a mistake leaving my last job. Not because of the pay — although I had got used to having a regular income and, yes, finding contract work seems to be far more of a chore than I had expected — but because of the people. I miss working with other people in general, and with the good friends I'd made there in particular. And while I try to keep in touch, it's proving hard — as hard as I've always found it to keep in touch with people, to stop them drifting away out of my life. And the thing is that I knew this would happen. It was the reason I always gave for not wanting to go contracting, no matter how good the money. I should have stuck with the job, no matter how soul-destroying the frustration became.

Hosting

Working on the principal that life is far too short to waste time administering a dedicated server, I've begun moving the couple of web sites I still run — Bounded by Infinity and Just About Managing — over to SquareSpace. While I'll lose a lot of the flexibility of the VPS I currently use, I won't have to worry about keeping the software stack up to date. I'll also get a few extras — like analytics, which I've never got round to setting up — into the bargin. It should even work out a little bit cheaper. Selling SimCap through the Mac App Store has meant that I no longer need to run my own system to dole out licence keys, which had been my mine reason for sticking with self-hosting. And if I ever find myself needing to do anything webapp-ish there's always Google App Engine.