Tag Archives: writing

Health, Writing

Six Years, Six Months On

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The more I write these status updates, the more and the less ridiculous it gets. More ridiculous because they amount to “I’m still here” messages sent out to the very small audience of people who read this blog and are not in regular contact with me, and there’s only so many times you can do that without feeling at least a little self conscious. I suppose I can manage one more time, at least: still here, still writing. At the very least, I’ve managed to post a few other times over the last 13 months, so that this hopefully doesn’t come across as an entirely self-absorbed exercise.

It’s less ridiculous, of course, because I’ve now hit six and a half years. When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, way back in December 2019, the doctors were, reasonably enough, not keen on talking about survivability, but everything I read suggested that I’d be lucky to reach 50 (I’d just turned 44 a couple of months before). Well, I turned 50 nine months ago, and so far my semi-whimsical strategy of sticking around long enough for medical science to figure out how to cure me is working surprisingly well. Stick around a few more years and it might prove even more successful. In the meantime, Lorlatinib serves me well, as it has for the last three years-plus.

As for happenings over the past 13 months, while the medical side of things has remained blissfully routine (given my regime of regular scans and doctor’s visits, uneventful is hardly accurate), there have been a few changes. Work, for one thing. Halfway through 2025, I took voluntary redundancy from what had been at the start a dream job in the games industry. It was absolutely an experience worth doing, and I’m not ruling out working in games again, but for the moment that seems a dream on hold: the games industry is in turmoil, spinning through a series of massive layoffs, and there’s a huge field of people with more experience than me looking for the same kinds of jobs I would be up for. Still, I’ve managed to get myself employed again, and in the current climate, I’m happy enough to be so.

In terms of travel, I had planned to take another long trip around my 50th birthday in September 2025, but being unemployed at the time (I let my redundancy package bankroll me for a few months), I decided that would be a bit extravagant. So I stuck closer to home for the most part, though I did venture to the Baltic nations in March 2026, touring from Finland south through Estonia and Latvia to Lithuania. Ticking off a few more countries on my European list and enjoying more rail travel in the hopes of longer trips to come. Up next is Bulgaria (visiting my cousin there) and the southern Balkans (ticking off a few more blank boxes) this September. Hopefully without any untoward political events intruding—some of the countries I’d most like to visit seem to be either currently or permanently embroiled in the kind of troubles that lead governments to advise avoiding them.

I do get sent abroad for work sometimes, which isn’t something I’ve run across too often in the past. Writers are not commonly required to be on the spot for content retrieval. No complaints though. I’m even hoping to get out for a run or two on my next trip. As mentioned here recently, I’ve gotten back into running, and I do feel like it’s slowly getting easier, though it’s not getting any easier to persuade myself on any given evening or morning to put on the shoes and go out into the fresh air. If the life of a hermit is one that has a perilous appeal for me, then hermits are not people who venture out from their caves (or huts, or poles) readily. I am making a serious effort not to let my social circles dwindle into nothing, but motivation, as so often, is the issue.

That question of motivation has been much on my mind lately. How do people persuade themselves to do the things they do, to make it from one day to the next in the face of a world that can vary from discouraging to actively hostile? What impetus do I use to get myself up from my chair to go for a run, or to sit down and write these words? I’m not getting paid for either, which wipes out a large chunk of the ambient motivation floating around the modern world, and while running may be good for my health and writing good for my mental health, those are pretty slender reeds to rest most of an evening on. Especially when a side effect of my medication is that I tend to sweat a lot when I’m hot or exert myself, and this evening counted for both, meaning that I was stuck in a towelling robe for an hour after my run, gently dripping into the fabric.

Having dropped that edifying image into your brain, let me pursue this thread. It would be cheaper for me to stay home, to do only enough exercise needed to keep healthy, to eat as frugally as possible. Avoid the stress of meeting new people and potentially suffering embarrassment (introvert here, most definitely). A hermit’s life, in other words. An uncomplicated life; so why do I feel the urge to mix that up? To socialise where possible, to travel now and then, to buy books I’ll only read once and games I probably won’t finish? To hook myself into the information services of the world (news, social media, podcasts, etc.) simply to learn a bit more about subjects that interest me and subjects I might not have thought about except by following a thread that started somewhere distantly connected.

All those activities are ones that bring me pleasure, in various forms. Does pursuing pleasure make me selfish? Probably a little. Is it a bad thing? Epicurus would disagree. Taking care of your own happiness is an important part of creating a life worth living. Which isn’t to say that others’ happiness should be neglected. When young, we look to our parents and try to make them happy too, a desire that never really fades away. When older, we might think of the happiness of our children and the social circle we build up, in addition to our own. There’s god too, for some, or whatever groups we sign up to. The point being that our own happiness is always involved in the happiness of others, or ought to be. If we end up serving someone else’s drives at a cost to our own happiness, that’s far from healthy.

So my main motivation in dragging myself off the couch and into the day (or night, as the case may be), is to make my life better, through indulging my own desires and engaging with the society I’ve chosen, as well as seeking out sheer novelty and education. Pleasure is a spark to make us move, and Epicurus knew that a life engaged in pleasures both simple and simple to obtain was one of the best to be had.

Which is, to take this meander to its point, one of the main reasons I remain suspicious of the current hype around “AI”. (It goes in quotation marks because while it may be artificial, it’s in no way intelligent.) Its boosters are engaged in a full-throated effort to persuade us that the various iterations of “AI” are capable of doing all sorts of things for us. Not the tedious and repetitive tasks that we’ve always been promised would one day be handed over to robotic assistants, but the creative and problem-solving tasks that make up a large part of both work and non-work life. Travel planning, e-mail composition, prototyping, etc. The idea seems to be that we should let the “AI” companies provide a rough draft of our tasks and relegate ourselves to tidying up the draft’s rough edges.

To which, two responses: first, I have no interest in further training a plagiarism machine already replete with stolen information. Second, the act of creation, whether of a work of art or a solution to a problem, is part of the experience. It’s how we express ourselves and how we learn. If I felt that “AI” was a good solution to all the ills of the world, I’d have little impetus to leave my couch, much less my apartment. The underlying technology is interesting enough, and I expect it will find its niche eventually, though it looks set to do a huge amount of damage to the economy in the process. Until then, it remains a hydra that needs to be decapitated regularly (and we need to learn how to cauterise the stumps).

As long as I’m still around, I want to keep experiencing new things, and to keep exercising this brain of mine both creatively and technically. Having been required to use “AI” via work, I don’t find much in the way of experience or expression in tweaking the parameters of a mimicry machine or smoothing the rough edges of its output, which never quite seems to get things just right. I don’t know what that implies for my long-term employment prospects, but if it’s not that good, then maybe it’s time to re-train.

So there you have it. Not only an assurance of my continued existence, but a quick peek into the issues tickling my brainstem at the moment. The odd thing is that despite (or maybe because of?) the intrusion of “AI” into every part of our lives, I’ve been more creative recently than I have in a while. Maintaining enough focus to make something more than scribbled notes of these ideas can be a bit tricky, given some of the mild side effects of my cancer medication, but I might get over that hump too. Something to look forward to over the next 13 months.

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Apropos of Nothing

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This is not an important post. It doesn’t speak to the the great things swirling in the world, the clashes and concerns that buffet us all. I keep trying to write about those, but I find I have so much to say that the fear of saying it poorly gets in the way of saying anything at all. So this is just an effort to write something, ad hoc. Nothing more.

I’m in Denmark at the moment. It’s a country I like, with people who are as welcoming as any I’ve met. Like most of the countries I’ve been to, I haven’t seen enough of it, but on this trip and my last, I’ve been driving across its islands and bridges, and sometimes walking under them too. So maybe I’m getting to see a little more of Denmark than I would otherwise.

It’s a work trip, which is unusual. Writers don’t generally get sent on work travel, but for this job it turns out that the things they want me to write about are in Denmark. So I go, I get a car, and hotel rooms of varying sizes. The last one was big enough to have a bath, which I was happy to make use of. For all the slow pace of my life, soaking in the heat isn’t something I’ve enjoyed since maybe Andorra?

Many wet rugby players.

No travels this year yet. Other than work trips. But having missed out on a big trip when I turned 50 (instead of travelling, I foolishly had a party, where my friends were nice to me and gave me wonderful, thoughtful presents), I think I’ll make up for it this year. Even avoiding those parts of the world being ruined by belligerent idiocy (can’t ignore those events entirely) there are still plenty of places to see and share.

For the moment though, travel means work and family. Last weekend, I did something that I haven’t done in a few years and travelled to Belfast to watch the Ulster rugby team play a European game. Met up with my brothers and braved the pouring rain, getting finely soaked, as they tussled their way past ROG’s La Rochelle. A certain poignancy to the occasion: the last time I was there was with my dad. It’s good to be with family, especially when the rain is pouring.

So that’s the writing effort revealed: a few thoughts and a few recent memories shared. The ingredients of much of human interaction. Something that I’m doing my best to get more of. Might be easier as the hours of daylight grow longer, but we’ll see.

Games, Writing

Long Walks on Strange Planets

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I don’t know where I am. This is a strange world to me, and unkind. I have no memory of how I came to be here, but in exchange for this amnesia, I have been given technology that shields me from the harsh surroundings. It is greedy for fuel, but it suffices. I can explore.

Way back in the long ago of 2016, a game called No Man’s Sky was released. Its launch was accompanied with a huge amount of hype and an equal amount of disappointment. The promise of multiple galaxies worth of exploration was undermined by a lack of things to do and procedurally generated worlds that were unique in their details but repetitive in sum. Add to that a lack of functioning multiplayer gameplay and No Man’s Sky was, at launch, a vast expanse of loneliness.

Near where I came to consciousness, I found a crashed ship. Half wrecked and unfit for the skies, it seemed an omen of a past better forgotten. I chose to leave it behind and struck out instead in search of habitation. From local plants and rocks I can keep the technology that preserves me fuelled. This world is severe, but it sustains me.

Over the next few years, Hello Games, the developer of No Man’s Sky, released a stream of patches and updates for the game that expanded the things a player could do and added variety to the countless worlds. (Thus making No Man’s Sky one of the few things on this benighted planet to have improved continuously since 2016.) And somewhere along the way, I jumped on board. I woke on a strange planet and set out to explore the worlds beyond.

This world is not untouched. I came across an abandoned facility, built who knows how many years ago. Buried in its technology, I came across a signal. Somewhere across the hills and valleys of this world, a distress signal still calls out. My existence has been graced with a direction.

Since then, it’s become one of my more-played games. I’ve explored through many updates, constructing an array of bases across many worlds, and managing a fleet of fully upgraded ships from my capital ship. I have, in other words, done pretty much everything the game has to offer. For the past year or so, I was only dipping back in whenever something new was released.

There are techniques for survival that this world has taught me. Carbon and Sodium will serve to maintain life support and power, but it is more efficient to craft fuel cells and life pods for these purposes. To do so requires delving into caves in search of rarer minerals, which also offers the benefit of temporary protection from the harsh environment of the surface. However, the caves extend for many miles and not all paths lead back to the harsh light of day.

This is the problem of procedurally generated content. After a while, you’re just going to be seeing variations on what you’ve seen before. A new gameplay loop, such as the corrupted sentinels and sentinel ships introduced in the last update, “Interceptor,” can be woven into the setting, but any narrative essentially sits on top of the game world. My bases and ships may be all my own work, but the story I’ve experienced is the same as anyone else’s.

My efforts to survive on this world are not unopposed. There are sentinels here that object violently to my plundering; robotic guardians that float in peace across the surface but gather in wrath when I transgress. I have learned to avoid their gaze and so endure. The few other aliens I have encountered have been isolated traders or scientists. I lack a language they would understand, but I have been able to trade with them for credits and equipment that might serve me later.

An answer to this dilemma recently presented itself. Watching a YouTuber’s public play session, I saw a new option for a new game: ignore the starter ship. Rather than accept the nearby crashed ship that the game directs you towards, head out into the wilderness and look for other options: follow a distress signal to a crashed ship, come across a crashed ship by chance, or find a trading post and buy one of the ships that lands there.

The distress signal that I follow is far distant, but my journey grows swifter. Scavenged technology has improved both my survival suit and my mining tool. My jet pack now carries me across narrow valleys and cushions my descent from great heights. My scanner can now detect buildings at a greater distance. Still, I must not be careless. Even with these improvements, I could easily die from a fall or neglecting my protection or sustenance.

The first time I tried this, I got lucky. A distress signal pointed me to a crashed ship only an hour’s travel away. Quite quickly, I was spacebound, trading in my scavenged ship for a pristine model and prospering across several systems. However, the sense of immersion in the world for that first few hours was so impressive, that I decided to up the difficulty. I started again in Survival mode (in which several basic technologies are unavailable at the start) and Iron Man (one life only, with the save game deleted on death). The result was interesting…

I wish I could convey to you the feeling of skimming millimetres over a ridge line, then landing soft-footed on the next peak. To clamber to the top of a mesa in order to survey the land for miles around, then cast yourself to the winds and direct your fall wherever you wish to go. To play hide and seek with implacable robotic guardians, like some scavenging imp. This world is harsh, yes, but there is joy here. Still, I have travelled for many hours and my quarry feels as far distant as ever.

This time, I started on a desert world. I quickly located another distress signal … 18 hours travel away. No problem, I figured, I’ll head that way and find another signal or a crashed ship along the way. Several game sessions later, and every distress signal pointed the same way. I’d enhanced my suit and mining tool with the technology I’d found along the way, but it looked like I was in this for the long haul.

In the shadow of a wrecked freighter, I came across a trading post. I’d gathered credits and hoped to bargain for one of the ships that landed there, but it seemed that what I owned was insufficient. Until I remembered one other thing I possessed: knowledge of the location of the ship I had abandoned. A trader in a small scientific vessel was willing to accept the prospect of salvage in addition to everything else I offered. I was no longer bound to the surface of this world.

About halfway through my trek, I picked up the signal of a crashed freighter. It was a bit of a detour but not too far away. So I ventured that way and picked over the gigantic ruin. On the way back to my route, I stumbled across a trading post. In No Man’s Sky, this is one of two kinds of places (the other being the space port that most systems have) where you can be guaranteed to encounter landing ships. I initially scavenged in the area for valuable goods to increase my credit count, but when I realised the trade-in value of the starter ship, the skies belonged to me.

I do not know where I will go now. I do not know if I have a past to discover. I do not know how far this universe I inhabit extends. But I will never forget the world on which this life of mine began.

Ultimately, once you’ve made it into space, the game’s story reintegrates with the rest of the NMS experience as crafted by Hello Games. But that first world? The struggle to survive and find a way off the surface forced me to actually engage with the starter world, to write a little story of perseverance in my own head. And that story is unique and solely mine. It’s opened my eyes, and the next time I go back to a game I feel I’ve played out, I’ll first ask myself how changing just one rule might change the narrative.

Books, Humour, Reviews, Writing

Terry Pratchett – An Appreciation

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So much enjoyment in so little space.
A Pratchett bookshelf – and this isnt all of it.


Certain authors and novels, if you come across them at the right age, will change your life. Terry Pratchett was one of those authors for me, and while his recent death was long anticipated, due to the cruelty of early-onset Alzheimer’s, the news, when it came, proved just as gut-wrenching as the original announcement of his illness had been.

Already, there have been plenty of appreciations of the man and his work. It’s a mark of both the nature of the man and the talent of the author that someone who primarily wrote comedic fantasy touched as many people across as many fields as he did.

I never met Terry Pratchett—the closest I came was during one of his visits to Dublin, when I spotted him walking in College Green, heading from Trinity College to (presumably) a pub, surrounded by a gaggle of students and admirers. It would have been nice to have the chance to talk to him, but at that stage he’d been talking to me through his work for years.

Books like Good Omens, Small Gods and Pyramids reduced me to helpless giggling more than any since Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Another author and decent human being taken too soon.) Across the 40 books of the Discworld series, Pratchett mixed the deftest wordplay with humour both low and cutting and serious thoughts that stole upon you in the midst of the laughter and stuck around long after the jokes were done.

As a kid growing up in a Northern Ireland still caught up in the lunacy of the Troubles, Pratchett provided constant reassurance that there was a better humanity out there. That being decent to other human beings mattered most of all, that you ought to be suspicious of anyone or any organisation that would tell you what to think, that being curious, patient, and argumentative were all good things. Thoughts that I found it hard to express, even as I was working them out in my own head, I found reflected in his prose.

As an aspiring writer, the most important thing I learned from him was that it was possible to underlay fantasy and science fiction writing with serious topics without preaching to your audience. I learned as well that language was a game, one that you won if you brought a smile to your audience’s face, or just made them pause and consider for a moment.

As a human being, he was, like his collaborator Neil Gaiman, like Douglas Adams and Charles Darwin, one of those people it was possible to admire without having to look up to them. Possessed of immense talent that never overwhelmed his innately decent humanity, yet driven by an inner anger that allowed him to churn out books of breathtaking quality and wit year after year.

That same anger helped him to deal with the unfairness of his diagnosis. Deeming it “an embuggerance,” he continued to live his life even more fully than before, fighting on behalf of those suffering from Alzheimer’s and those who believed that they had a right to end a life that had become unbearable. His eloquent arguments in favour of the right to die in the manner of his own choosing revived a debate that is still going on.

Reading Pratchett and authors like him and growing up where I did and among my family and friends has led me to the belief that if we have a purpose in life, it’s to increase the amount of happiness in the world, both your own and that of those around you. Far more than the number of books he sold, the joy that his work and personality brought to so many is a marker of his success in life.

If I ever have any kids, I’ll enjoy sharing his books with them. And whether or not they turn out to be fans like me, I hope that some of the lessons that I’ve learned in reading his books will be the same lessons I share with them.

Travel

Everything Echoes

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Dawn over Meteora.

Twenty years ago, I was preparing to start college and live away from home for the first time. Sixteen years ago, I was about to interview for a job that, counting promotions, would keep me employed for the next dozen years. Three years ago, I watched the sun rise over Japan during a journey that was a reaction to losing several of the props of the life I’d built for myself and trying to figure out something new. Two years ago, I was beginning a Masters course that was a bigger challenge than anything I’d taken on in years, and one year ago I was completing it successfully. This year, I woke to see sunrise over the pinnacles of Meteora and will go to sleep in Delphi, the centre of the ancient Greek world, in time for sunset.
Draw any straight line through a life and you’re likely to find a similar degree of drama. This particular history sticks in my mind because my birthday and that of two thirds of my family fall within the space of a month at this time of the year. Late September and early October has always been, for me, a time of change and new beginnings. (That school years in Ireland, north and south, also begin at this time of year probably also helped to set this association in stone.)
For today though, I’m not so much starting something new as passing from one thing to another. Walking among other the monasteries of Meteora this morning (as the image above depicts) has been followed by much travelling by bus. Lamia, amid the mountains of central Greece, was my resting place for the past few hours. Unable to make my way to Thermopylae, only twenty kilometres away (sorry dad), I avoided being stuck in the bus station for four hours by heading into town for a stroll and a frappé (a Greek habit that’s proved worth picking up), returning to the station a safe hour before the bus to Delphi left.
Sunset was lost behind the mountains south of Lamia as we followed a road that Xerxes would have given a king’s ransom for. The closest I got to Thermopylae was passing around the wrong side of a mountain, though perhaps not far from the goatherd’s path that betrayed Leonidas and the 300 Spartans (minus two injured “tremblers” but plus their normally ignored helot slaves and allies). From there it was switchback corners up and down mountainsides into the gathering gloom, changing in Amfissa to take on even narrower mountain paths in the dark, heading towards a site of pilgrimage for a thousand years and more.
In Ancient Greece, travellers to Delphi went there seeking answers to what the future might bring. It was a dangerous business though, seeking out prophetic wisdom. Even if they heard what they wanted to, there was no guarantee that their interpretation was the correct one. Not for nothing has the word “Delphic” come to mean “enigmatic to the point of deliberate ambiguity.” (Look up Croesus for an example of the trouble misinterpreting prophecy can get you into.)
The Pythia’s not been in business for centuries though, and I’m not inclined to look for answers from inspired sources. For me, these blog entries have provided answer enough to something that’s been bothering me for a while. I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of writing for a few months but unable to break through a barrier of self-consciousness. What Greece has provided is a chance to get away from habitual surroundings and strip back my tools to the basics. (I have with me a pen and notepad for writing and an iPhone for posting notes and photos.) With less to worry about, I feel more relaxed, and I hope that shows in my writing. Unlike the ancient Greeks, I’ll be arriving in Delphi with no question in dire need of answering.

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The Maliakos Gulf. Down there, Xerxes’ army once camped. I wasn’t quite so held up.

College, Politics, Reviews, Travel, Writing

A New Beginning

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It’s been way too long since I wrote in this blog. My writings have rarely been regular, but recent developments workwise have suppressed the writing impulse to the point where nothing has been appearing for several months. This is clearly unacceptable. So consider this a manifesto for getting back on track.

When I first set up this blog, it was as a receptacle for stray thoughts as I made my way eastwards around the world. (You can go all the way back and check it out if you like.) I also adorned it with some earlier blogging efforts and sprinkled a few of my more favoured attempts at fiction across the top. Further down the line, I began to throw a series of reviews at it, mostly books, cinema and games. Well, I’m still enjoying all of those, but the reviews have dwindled to nothing.

Along the way, there have also been moments of whimsy, political opinions and reflections on the current course of my life. All of this should provide plenty of material to keep the blog mill spinning. Which makes it all the more disappointing that it hasn’t. I still enjoy writing, it’s just that the moments where it previously fitted into my schedule have been shuffled around, and an attempt needs to be made to nail them down again.

There’s plenty to be said for commenting on the state of the world. Politics and the media are in no less surreal a state than they have been for the past few years. The Ferguson affair in the U.S. and the ISIS rearrangement of borders and peoples in the Middle East are raising hackles and some of the weirder excesses of both participants and commentators.

On a more personal level, my reading habit is finally getting back in gear after a few months (hell, call it a year and a bit) where it was hard to find time to fit reading into the rest of my life. Right now I’m rereading Julian May’s “Galactic Milieu” trilogy, having already raced through her “Saga of the Exiles.” May’s one of the best science fiction writers I’ve ever read, and the Saga of the Exiles would make a great TV miniseries in the mode of Game of Thrones. So add that to biweekly cinema excursions courtesy of a Meetup.com group and some PC and iOS game experiments (both good and bad), and there should be plenty of reviews emerging in the near future too.

Lastly, and most excitingly (for me at least), I’m finally planning to head off on a holiday lasting longer than a week. It’s been over two years at this stage, and it’s more than long overdue. The destination is Greece, as longstanding a travel goal as I have, and the itinerary is intended to take in as much beautiful scenery and sites of historical interest as the cradle of western civilisation has to offer.

So look for some brand new travel diaries coming towards the end of September. In the interim, I’ll try and keep the home fires burning by dropping the odd opinion, review and unusual fact into the hopper for general distribution. Possibly not tomorrow’s cinematic outing though. I’m not sure how much I’ll have to say about The Expendables 3.

Writing

A Taste of the Future

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One of the great things about reading science fiction is receiving a glimpse into the future. It’s not true of every science fiction writer, but a great many of them are well read in the social and scientific trends of their day and weave that knowledge into their writing, extrapolating out to take a guess at where we all might be in a few decades, centuries, or millennia. Of course, predicting the future is a hard business, and it’s a truism that nothing dates so quickly as science fiction. Still, Verne had men travelling to the moon, Clarke foresaw the communications satellite, and Gibson gave us cyberpunk and the kind of brain-computer interfaces that are even now emerging into the light.

I’m even guilty of it myself, in the short stories that I’ve written that veer into the science fiction arena. I’m not claiming any great foresight, but I do enjoy finding here and there among the materials that I read an idea or two that sparks a story. In some cases, the original inspiration gets forgotten. So I don’t really know where I got the idea for “Life and Death on the Edge of Unreason“. I suspect I just liked the idea of an observation station orbiting a star about to go supernova. As settings for a detective story go, it’s pretty evocative.

It’s not the best story I’ve ever written – the fact is that a detective story in a panopticon society with instant access to information is never going to work well. Still, I was reminded pleasantly of it when I read this article, all about  one of the main elements in the story – a charred planet surviving in a star’s outer layers. Pleased enough to be inspired to tidy it up and offer it here as some Christmas reading material. I hope you enjoy it.