1. Squid are cephalopods of the order Teuthida, which comprises around 300 species. Like all other cephalopods, squid have a distinct head, bilateral symmetry, a mantle, and arms. Squid, like cuttlefish, have eight arms arranged in pairs and two, usually longer, tentacles. Squid are strong swimmers and certain species can ‘fly’ for short distances out […]
1. There’s a page in an old notebook of mine, written way back when I was young and stupid, where I put forward the closest thing I had to a creative philosophy at eighteen: I do not believe in silence. When I was eighteen I wanted to write stories that had weight. I wanted to […]
I’m going to be travelling a lot over the next three weeks. Mostly, this travelling takes place on the weekends. The weekends when I usually write my blog posts for the coming week. I’m sure you can see the conundrum that’s coming along, any moment now, to serve as the point for this blog post. The […]
I would be showing you a picture of my freshly-shorn scalp right now, but for the fact that instagram is being uncooperative. Instead I’ll have to link that shit and leave it up to you to be pro-active if you want to mock my new hair-do. Don’t be shy about that shit either – it’s […]
Has anyone attempted to send something to my post office via UPS in the last couple of months? I got a notification in the mail today saying they couldn’t deliver, and after phone calls we establish that they now wouldn’t deliver the package because it’d been over a week since they dropped off the notification […]
Here’s the thing about my weekend: it involved an extraordinary number of real-time conversations with people who live in far-flung corners of the world. Between gaming last night and meeting with my writing group on Saturday morning, I actually spent more time having conversations with people via Skype and Google Hangouts than I did having […]
I have nothing to say this morning, and yet I feel like talking. It’s early. Early-ish. For certain values of early that mean my flatmate is actually surprised to see me up and about before midday on a midday morning. I’m kicking it in my study, just killing time before some writer-peeps hit Skype for a conference […]
One of the interesting things about moving house is the ability to discover things you thought you’d loss. Which is not, in fact, a sneaky way of announcing that I’m moving again – twice in a six-months span is quite enough for me, thanks – but among the various errands that have been run over the […]
Of course, by technical difficulties, we mean “Peter discovered his flatmate’s cache of Eureka DVDs and started playing Masters of Orion 2 again.” In the meantime, I’ll give you my mother’s response to my post about what I looked like when I was 5. Sadly, I think that’s the neatest my hair has ever been.
This scene is fiction. Probably. A little fiction never hurt anyone. You know that. There are two of them seated at the table, and he’s having a better time than his date. That shouldn’t really surprise you. Most times when you see a couple, you know one of them is fighting above their weight class. […]
I assume I was a weird looking kid. I don’t remember for sure, but that would seem right. I should be the kind of person who looked weird as a kid, if only so it matched the way I generally felt around people. Weird looking avoids any undue and unbearable pressure that might seep up […]
So it turns out I’m in the throes of a throat infection. The good news is that it’s unlikely to get worse – I had my tonsils out when I was way younger, and the doctor seemed to think this was a remarkable stroke of good fortune rather than, you know, one of those things […]
