All the vampires walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard

• Tom Petty

The wind whips down the alley, driving the rain’s wild horses before it. That’s something I notice about this city; the lack of debris. The sidewalk stirs ahead, a confusing mix of emotions. The unhoused, huddled under discarded U-Haul moving blankets, feet sticking out over the underground steam grate.

The sun’s fading light mixes with today’s faux neon and I chuckle to myself. As a kid reading Gibson and watching Tron I always expected the world to be broken, drenched in neon, teetering on the edge of a quiet anarchy or a loud autocracy. The fact that we got diffused LED panels and a society that increasingly feels like it wants to be collectivist, if only each person individually gets what they want, feels like worst of the options.

I try to walk faster against the cold and my hips and my...

Unfortunately for my not-so-nerdy friends, this weekend the writing I had time to do was writing a PKGBUILD file for my Brother printer.

Quick aside: Brother has fantastic support for Linux, providing both Red Hat .rpm and Debian .deb packages however, I’m using Manjaro/KDE Plasma, so neither of those options would directly work for me. This isn’t Brother’s fault - RPM and DEB packages will work on most of the common desktop Linux distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, and of course, Fedora and Debian themselves. Arch is a truly independent distro with its own package manager and its own repositories.

That being said, I don’t have the time and energy to make a formal submission to the AUR, but in the extremely niche chance that somebody needs this exact printer to work on Arch-based Linux systems, I wanted to throw the script out onto the internet. In the even more niche chance...

Remember how important the most trivial things were as a kid? The friendships that burned so brightly at 13, 14; most of them we probably haven’t spoken to in 20 years, if at all. The hobbies that seemed like life; beating the video game at the expense of doing homework, watching cartoons because they were a fun distraction, reading because the book’s big fantasy world was so much more interesting than the small real world around us.

As we grew, those things began to seem silly in context. But there was a point in our 20s, as the vast expanse of adulthood stretched to the horizon and we could still look back into our childhood, where we understood that the childish things of 1 Corinthians 13:11 weren’t the video games, the books, the friendships, but the way we approached them.

As with many parts of a power dynamic, the sentiment our parents conveyed - do your homework, grades are...

[CW: meditation on loss, grief, anger, childhood]

“Why are you making stupid noises?! Is it because you’re stupid?”

It’s the most British way to insult somebody. She didn’t call me stupid, my mum, she just said I was if I kept making those noises. There’s agency, choice, within the insult.

Now to be fair to her, the noise I’m getting yelled at for making is somewhere between a goat with bronchitis and a donkey doing an impersonation of an angry bull with cold. At a volume that would piss anyone off, complete with hormonal voice cracks. So perhaps, justified, then.

This, of course, is easy to rationalize as an adult and - perhaps partially because she’s no longer with us - to look back on fondly and laugh about. But it’s also the least egregious echo through time of a concept I’ve struggled to explain: that perfectionism isn’t always about ego.

I don’t even think of myself as a...

CW: themes of loss and places from the past

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford were engineers, building British road, bridge, tunnel and rail infrastructure that is still in active use today. I used to drive over one of Telford’s bridges every day, back when I lived and worked in the UK.

I thought about it the other day and accidentally ended up looking up the place I used to work on Google Maps. It turns out that, two years after I left the UK for the USA, they merged with other companies in the area and built a state-of-the-art facility on the other side of town.

The original complex I worked in is still standing, eerily time capsuled, exactly as I remembered it. The inexplicably overengineered brown metal safety shutter covering our ground floor office window, which we used to roll up every morning. The green square tubing gate closing off the small parking lot, which...

I need a better, snappier name for this, which will come if the idea sticks, but, I keep trying to figure out how to write - I mean, really write - not in the way I do here, but with a consistent voice about a consistent topic.

They say everyone has one good book in them, and I feel like that’s one of those quotes that has a corollary forgotten over time… like “I before E, except after C” goes on to say “or when sounding like ‘ay’ as in neighbor or weigh” but we’ve forgotten that part over time. And yes, it still doesn’t cover every word borrowed from Greek, Latin, Nordic, Celtic German, Brittonic and runic languages and so forth, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.

As “I before E…” is more than the first stanza, so too does it feel that “but you have to wade through the awful ones first” is the missing corollary to having one good book. And it’s not that I don’t want to...

I took a flash fiction writing short course recently, coincidentally the teacher used to be my Breathwork Coach in another life, and I’ve always loved their writing. Part of the course was creating a piece of flash fiction of our very own, using the techniques we learned in the course. Presented here is that piece.

CW: Mentions of death.

Summer heat took my breath in a great sigh as I rolled out of the car to pump gas, the smell of petroleum mixing with the sound of sirens as an ambulance tore by.

Across the street, the open lot I’d remarked on to my wife so many times: “Some developer will buy that up and build a high-rise one day.”

Two years ago, the familiar chain link fence decorated in woven nylon that every construction company across America and around the world uses, sprung up around the plot of land. Today the building has a name and people live there.

I look up into the...

CW: there is a mention of loss of loved ones, which is integral to the story.

The titular metaphorical (or, perhaps, emotional) fever has broken. This time of year, really from mid-March up until now, is something of a void portal for me, and I think that concept is something that is important to talk about in a realistic and hopefully ultimately positive and grounded way.

For the backstory, my wife (we’d known each other 17 years and been married 12 of those) passed away three years ago this past April. On top of that, and almost a decade ago now, my mother passed away in early July.

The void begins to open in mid-March; that peculiar creeping sensation like liquid metal in some sci-fi horror movie, drawing all the heat and life out of my body as it climbs up from the pit of my stomach until it swallows me whole. She went into hospital at the end of March. The first two weeks of...

Early morning mist hung low between the buildings, draping everything with a thin layer of nature’s ambience. Tendrils hung over the sides of the Crossline as she moved effortlessly along it. The city had extended it several times over the years as new developments swallowed up the ground below. True ground level in much of the city was reserved for transportation and utilities these days, outside of the zone protected by the Act, with some parts accessible only by permit or a healthy disregard for your bureaucratic future.

Amy’s building sat not too far from the natural center, where the ‘Line and the Cross met. She’d already walked a couple of miles, gently sweating into her casual workout gear. The trick over the next few miles was knowing the right people, and by people, she really meant AIs.

The public Cross descended up ahead into a station for the W. Sure, you could take the...