Welcome

Attempt no. 4 at restarting blogging, acknowledging the march of time and turning 40. Ten years ago I said here’s to the next, so I guess… I’m still here(-ish)! Bit Stories is the reboot to my personal site that I’ve been carrying with me for years. The file which has the logo was dated 2008, for cryin’ out loud. I just didn’t do it for so many years. This is completely different - I’m off Wordpress, I’m getting used to the idea of blogging in a completely different framework, I’m getting onto modernisation of my pipeline by going backwards to a non-CMS setup. It will be interesting to see if the lower weight of the setup helps or hinders. ...

It’s going to take time to flex those writing muscles again. I need to figure out what to do with this space. I’ve not touched it in so long, it’s almost imposing to have to think about where to take it and where I want to go with it. The era of personal blogs is over; there’s no one out there publishing personal pieces without some motivation to be an influencer or an ulterior angle on what a web-exposed ‘diary’ of sorts would be. ...

How time flies. You’d think if you’re counting the weeks, and you’re counting up 38 of them, you’ve got so much time. That’s 38 x 7 days, which is… (mental maths) 266…ish days? That’s a decent number of days! The secret you learn after finding out is that these dates are approximations. No-one can quite pinpoint the starting or ending date, so there’s a rule-of-thumb that is applied, and it only lands on the actual date about 5% of the time. Now, if you’re clueless like I was 38 or so weeks ago, what I’m talking about here is pregnancy. I’m about to be a father. Indeed, any day now, it would seem. As of this week, from a medical standpoint, the baby is good to go. No one asks the parents-to-be if they’re good to go, because frankly speaking, I’m not sure we are. There’s no textbook, no accredited course, no licence, no piece of paper they’ll hand you to say it’s ok, you can probably handle what is coming. We’ve done our best, we’re doing the classes, we’re working through everything we think we need, we have all the advice we could hope for & then some, but how do you actually know you’re ready to be a first-time parent? I’d posit that you just don’t. It happens and then you figure it out. Kinda like life, only even more so, because now you’re doing it for yourself as well as for another life that’s entirely dependent on you. ...

The movies are back! And who better to bring it back than Christopher Nolan. But how does one describe a movie like Tenet? It’s like Christopher Nolan made a Bond movie, except with a more diverse cast. It’s like Inception met Interstellar at a really loud party hosted by The Dark Knight Rises. It’s worth seeing it once in the cinema, but you’re going to want to watch it a second time at home some time later so you can (a) pause it to figure out what the heck is going on, and (b) turn on closed captions so you can figure out what the heck the characters are saying I’m going to go spoileriffic from here. Read on if you’ve watched it - if you haven’t, come back when you have! ...

Hey so remember when 2020 started and the nation was on fire and we’d just had 2 years of severe drought and we thought, how screwed are we? None so screwed. Only then, February rolled around, and so did some ex-tropical storms bringing half a decade’s worth of rain to be the saviour, and whilst it was wet, lo, it was also good. Only then, we kinda realised all this time we’d been thinking about our petty little problems in this country, and China had given a heads up about some bad stuff going down with some people who were getting sick in new and novel ways. And so it was that we learned of coronaviruses, and this how this one was to be called SARS-CoV-2, and the thing it caused was COVID-19, and oh heck we just called it coronavirus and stopped drinking that beer. ...