Saturday, November 16, 2024
This week I had a very minor problem with the monitor at my desk, it has developed, suddenly, a small light bleed, or bright spot, across the right edge. I could almost ignore it. Then last night my dock started failing to process USB input, something it has done in the past. These two minor problems coupled with my love of trying new things made me think, screw it, lets see how streamlined we can make the desk… and this happened…
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
You can skip this entire article and just click here, if I’m totally honest. If you would like to know, slightly more, keep reading… Micro.Blog has come up on my radar a lot over the last few years, mostly by being supported a supported publishing target by a bunch of writing software I have used. This includes Ulysses, Ia writer and a bunch of tools for content pushing. Micro.blog doesn’t do the best job at explaining its self, in part at least, because it’s flexible by design.
Thursday, November 7, 2024
No matter how productive I can become, and no matter how skilled I become, I still have twenty-four hours in a day. Much like nothing exceeds the speed of light, no productivity pipeline will break the time barrier. This has never been more evident to me than when I started drawing. I have been in the habit of writing for a few hours every day for a few years. While I don’t manage to actually accomplish this every day, the habit is formed.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
As I said in my last post, I have been using eBay recently for the first time in many years. I have even made a pretty reasonable amount of money in exchange for the things which were on my shelf gathering dust. On paper, it’s gone quite well. Let’s have a look at a sample here: I purchased a comic book collected volume about five years ago and thanks to the label on the front, I know I paid £8.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Starting a little after the events of ‘In Her we trust’ (Denouement 2) this story, for the first time gives us a look at the adventure from other characters. This novella is split into five parts, each part a different day of the week. We get to experience the world though the mind of Libby, a digital lifeform for whom bilocation is normal. We see the impact of recent events on Lea, the no mayhem loving pilot and the deep friendship that she is forming with Kay Michaels.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
The things. It has recently come to my attention that a lot of the stuff in my office has dust on it. This isn't because I fail to clean my house (I mean, in part it is. Who 'dusts'?) but it is more that the things in my office are so infrequently used that dust builds up. The last time I sat down and read a physical comic may have been almost two years ago.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
The things. It has recently come to my attention that a lot of the stuff in my office has dust on it. This isn’t because I fail to clean my house (I mean, in part it is. Who ‘dusts’?) but it is more that the things in my office are so infrequently used that dust builds up. The last time I sat down and read a physical comic may have been almost two years ago.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
This is the second book in the Denouement series Still reeling from the events of the first Denouement adventure, Jon and his unwilling group of friends slowly get pulled into a war for control of reality itself. Can the charming cult that their old associate controls really be trusted? does the mysterious warrior race of ‘Blades’ really still exist and is Earth an ally or enemy of the goddess? Our hero Jon, the champion of the all powerful Aygah must use his knowledge of the universes new history and his endless capacity for making connections to beat back the nefarious ‘Thinker’ race.
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Aliens, robots, non-organic life forms, space ships and neon skies are the backdrop to a mystery about reality, family, time, love and the memories that define us. What would you do if you woke up with no memory of your life, but you had everything you wanted? All you have to do to keep it, is not look behind the curtain. Denouement is the first part of an original science fiction saga, by HexDSL
Thursday, October 31, 2024
When Nancy first meets the detective who lives in her head, she assumed he was a symptom of her drinking, trauma of her parents’ death or just a homeless ghost. Then the first corpse turns up on the beach outside of her flat. That, coupled with the monster hunters, news reports and the sea monster stalking the town, makes her think it may be time to listen to her brain lodger.
Thursday, October 31, 2024
This is the first short story in the Chronicles of Ned. Ned is like you and me, but his friends are far stupider, and he somehow attracts a lot of oddness to his life. Ned occasionally gets abducted by aliens, meets bug people and rides in a camper van… through space. This tongue in cheek adventure is sure to have you at the very least smirking, and wondering what the heck is going to happen to Ned next!
Thursday, October 24, 2024
A few weeks ago, I tried the Nebula streaming service. I even wrote a blog about it. At the end of writing that post I noted that my thoughts on Nebula were complicated. Once my week long Guest Pass was expired I was again thrust back into the arms of YouTube, a service that I have many gripes with but find myself using, a lot, because like most of you, I expect, I don’t have a good alternative.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
People get annoyed with me. They get annoyed with me a lot. When I think about time spent doing things, I think in terms of a productivity enthusiast. I think in terms of ‘value.’ This is the thing which annoys people. They get annoyed because they don’t think that hanging out with your pals should be a considered as a value proposition. They don’t think there is anything wrong with ‘just playing a game’ and there isn’t.
Sunday, October 13, 2024
For those who are not aware, Nebula is a pretty interesting streaming service which, according to Wikipedia, has been around for five years (this sounds wrong to me though, as I literarily heard about it last year! – but that maybe a ‘me’ problem.) Nebula has been on my periphery for a little while as something I wanted to one day find the time to check out. Recently, a friend passed me a ‘guest pass’ for a week of access to the platform and wow, do I have thoughts!
Monday, October 7, 2024
Those who follow me on various places such as Discord, or Bluesky, or Void will know that I have a great time making a silly little comic called Niceferatu about a nice Vampire fella and his friend 'Stalk,' and cat 'Goblin.' The comic features them doing all sorts of generic, normal, not-very-exciting things. At the time of writing, there are only six pages, but I installed a WordPress plugin to allow me to quickly post new pages with almost no fiddling on my part.
Saturday, October 5, 2024
I didn't like how Quartz looked on mobile, one thing led to another and BOOM we're on WordPress now.... I'll put content back on here over the next few days (weeks) ❤️ The main issue with Quartz was the way mobile navigation worked. Then, while doing a video the other day, I realised that there were some issues with the RSS. Once I realised that it would only cost me a fiver a month to host WordPress on a Hetzner VPS, I shrugged and made the jump.
Monday, September 23, 2024
Art more like... no I got nothing. Long-time readers likely know that I have had a not so secret desire for a long time to draw my own comic. I have a few ideas for things like plot, visuals and tone. I read comics as, basically, my primary pass-time when I was going through some rough times a few years ago. While I don't read so much now, I have been left with a secret desire to make my own.
Tuesday, August 20, 2024
The revolution will not be on desktop. A tale of of two iPads, which ends in revolutionary musings. For a long time, I owned a terrible XPS13 (1250U CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB Storage) which had major cooling issues. It throttled to the point of unusable and even general Windows navigation was a chore. I have spoken in great length about what a turkey it was. When finally gathered together the spare scratch to buy my MacBook Air (M2, 16GB Unified Memory, 1TB storage) I was instantly sated.
Friday, June 21, 2024
DEVONthink, the final form? I made a video, I'll link it at the bottom of this post, but the main thing to take away here is that DEVONthink is great. It's Scrivener for notes. While I still need to deep dive into it, as I'm still at the 'import stuff' phase, I am blown away by it. At this time, there is literally nothing about it which makes me go 'ugh!
Saturday, June 1, 2024
Over the past few years my desk has changed. Here, i chronicle it. I lost the dates when i left my last web platform, but i kept the pictures.