Joe Hart's Blog

Seattle in Five Bookshops

2026-05-12T00:00:00Z

Recently after a company offsite in Washington State I managed to steal a day or two to see an old friend and have an explore of Seattle. I don’t really think Seattle was gonna be super high on my list of cities to visit in the world, but I’m very glad I got some time there.

As well as: all the standard tourist attractions, some Last of Us related sightseeing to later show my boyfriend on my return and a lot of good coffee; I managed to peruse a few of the cities bookshops while I was around.

There is an alternate version of this blog which is Seattle in five coffee shops.

Bookshops are where, as Lemony Snicket said of libraries, the world is quiet. They have a thrumming hum to them of potential energy. This resonance is how I rate bookshops. It’s hard to describe but the best bookshops I’ve ever been to feel full of polite people who would desperately love to tell you about their greatest passion but will suffice with a small “excuse me” to reach the section you’re blocking.

Barnes and Noble

This was my first trip to the states so you will forgive me for patronising the conglomerate. It was a very dissonant experience for a Brit in a Barnes & Noble, it’s like a Waterstones with the serial numbers shaved off. That is of course because they’re owned by the same guy.

This was a perfectly fine shop with books, though I did end up buying Simon Armitage’s new verse translation of Gilgamesh here. For some reason this released in the US in April but isn’t being released in the UK until October. So while I’m ahead of the curve having bought it early and smuggled it bank into the country, I do feel distinctly wasteful and not very eco friendly of me to buy Simon’s book almost 5000 miles away from home, despite him being from the town my Family live in.

Lamplight Books

Second hand stores have a particular timbre to their resonant vibrations. Perhaps a sadness to them, the collection of Thomas Roethke Poems I bought from this bookshop was awarded to a young girl for an “Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing” in 1969.

I wonder where they are now and if they loved or deeply loathed this collection of poems.

In second hand bookshops I waddle particularly quickly to the sci-fi section since there is a particular edition of Isaac Asimov books I am trying to collect. The ones from the 90s, where the Foundation series all have covers that connect into one giant piece of art by Fred Gambino. They alas did not have any of that particular editions but still some cool finds.

These two are absolutely not the editions I'm collecting, but they're gorgeous.

This bookshop was nestled between a bakery and a pickle bar, what more could the human soul need?

Pine Books

This is an odd one that has the feel of a premium chain, but I believe is fully independent. They had some wonderful collections of hardcover special editions of some sci-fi classic, if my luggage was not already full I would’ve taken some home.

They also featured this classics collection, similar to the Penguin clothbound, but called the Drop Letter collection. Where on the front of the book is an ornate capital letter denoting the title of the book. If I weren’t already an Odyssey and a Metamorphoses deep into the Clothbounds I may have strayed into starting a collection there and then.

An example of the drop letter collection.

Also it was fascinating to see a full collection of Folger’s Shakespeare, in our household the Arden copies reign supreme, but it’s lovely seeing how the Bard is presented over the pond.

Folger’s Shakespeare in full — the American equivalent of my household’s beloved Ardens.

Left Bank Books

Back in London my favourite of favourite-est bookshops is Gay’s the Word. Not only is it in a lovely neighbourhood, near some great coffee and a stones throw from St Pancras, but it has some seriously cool and groovy history to it. It’s where Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners coordinated. Last time I was there was for London Pride and, despite being on temporary premises while renovations occur on their historical site, it was positively vibrating with bookish Pride. I picked up a biography of James Baldwin that if dropped from even a medium height could kill a man. I still haven’t quite worked up the courage to start it.

I say all that because Left Bank Books is in harmony with Gays the Word but with the groovy punky nature dialled up a few notches. There’s local zines for free on the shelf, paid zines at the back, queer sections, trans rights sections. I picked up this gorgeous edition of Larry Mitchells fable come manifesto, which has been on my “oh I should definitely read that at some point” list for longer than I’d like to admit. And a collection of Ursula K Le Guins late poetry.

Elliot Bay Books

Like a Cathedral but for books.

The aforementioned friend I was visiting in Seattle had to head home at the sensible hour of 8pm so I was left with some time to kill. Thankfully a just round the corner from the vegan, cocktail music bar we were in was a bookshop open until 10pm. In the heart of Capital Hill, that in this uncultured Englishman’s eye was the Soho of Seattle, lies Elliot Bay Book Shop. Adorned with an enchanting stain glass window above the door, it seems deceptively small from the outside.

More handwritten staff recommendations than I’ve ever seen in one shop.

However as you enter it unfolds before you. Rows upon rows of books, with the most hand written staff recommendations than I’ve seen compared to any bookshop.

I was here till close.

It took all my energy not to throw all my clothes away and bring stuff back. I found stuff in here I hadn’t heard of but was desperate for. I ended up choosing a sensible level of one Le Guin book I’d never heard of, and I almost bought a t-shirt.

By bookshop is one of my favourite ways to view a city, and if I’m ever in Seattle again for some reason I can’t wait to pop back to these gems. Though I’ll make sure to leave a bit more space in my luggage for the return journey.

Book Thoughts: Pandora's Star & Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton

2026-03-09T00:00:00Z

One of my core comfort genres is schlocky, boring and needlessly verbose science fiction. And Mr Hamilton delivers that in abundance in this two part series.

The books have a good hook, two distant stars are instantaneously surrounded by Dyson Spheres locking out all light and access.

This is the inciting incident that begins to wake up the slumbering human race. The future here is not one of spaceships but one of wormholes. People sauntering from planet to planet like stepping in and out of buildings. Massive train networks connect worlds across the commonwealth.

People live for many life times and rejuvenate themselves. Broadly life’s pretty groovy in the commonwealth. There’s no big alien war or conflict. There’s no real loss of life or struggle for the humans.

At least, not at first.

The book is really about how this culture of luxurious and lazy humans have to grapple with the crisis of exploration and war in space. Think the folks from Wall-E suddenly have fend off an invasion force of Jem’Hadar.

Many people will find these books slow. Many people will find these books boring. And these people are not incorrect. What some writers can tell in a sentence, Hamilton will tell in several chapters. And while this really kills any kind of plot rhythm in the books, it does a great job at immersing you in this world. The commonwealth feels like a real place, you understand the daily struggles of the people in it. So when it’s way of life is threatened it hits that much harder.

The real standout from this series is a chapter in the first book, that is entirely told from an alien’s perspective of their first contact with humans. It is unique. Thought provoking. And blood curdlingly horrific. 10/10 would Morning-Light-Mountain again.

To be honest I am struggling to remember a lot of the characters now being a few months out from reading it. Like any good space spanning saga there’s lots of flabby needless stuff in here, but its all interesting. The whole subplot of the second richest man in the universe going looking for space fairies doesn’t impact the plot much, but its cool man.

There is alas, like a lot of scifi, needless weird sex stuff. The kind of stuff that doesn’t really add anything, just takes me out of the experience and feels like I’m just humouring the authors personal fantasies. And if I wanted that, there’s plenty of places to find better written equivalents.

The series is also a sort of detective story. There’s a rumour and an identity thats kept a secret through most of the story. And there are a few twists and turns with it, or at least theres one too few. For a lot of the second book I was like “Oh answer A is the obvious one, clearly there’s gonna be some clever rug pull that its acutally answer X or something” but alas, it was just answer A.

One quirk of the early 2000s ness of the whole afair is how no one has personal computers or personal phones but instead “E-butlers”. Its very quaint.

Overall, if you are a scifi nerd who has an appreciation for dull epic space operas that are honestly a bit of a slog then you’ll eat well here.

Book Thoughts: Straight Acting by Will Tosh

2026-02-15T00:00:00Z

Shakespeare being some shade of queer is an idea that you really only have two responses for. One being “duh, of course” and the other being “What? I’ve never heard about that?”. Regardless of if you are the former or the later, this book is well worth a read.

My partner bought this book from Toppings Bookshop on a weekend away in Bath almost 2 years ago now. And it sat on his bedside table ever since, but at the beginning of the year we decided to listen to it in tandem. Both being absolute dweebs about the theatre and Shakespeare and of course being practicing homosexuals; the book seemed tailor made for us.

I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone with a latent interest in the Bard however. There must be some obscure German word for “the comfort gained for hearing the relatable human experiences of those who lived hundreds of years ago” and if it exists then this book is emphatically that.

Shakespeare was clearly a millennial, living in Shoreditch in his twenties and visiting the “village” of Islington. The book was most interesting when talking about Shakespeare’s early life and journey to becoming the famous playwright. His school days reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, days in London being inspired by Marlowe and other contemporaries. It’s lovely to hear references to those who Shakespeare built upon when in modern life he is often presented as spontaneous genius.

Shakespeare generally is one of those figures whose general persona in the popular consciousness is wildly different from his actual bent. I mostly blame the Victorians for this. If your only interaction with the Bard was in the form of school you may think of it as snooty, needlessly verbose and pompous. However in reality only the verbosity is true. Shakespeare’s plays are boardy, funny and most of all common. They were popular performances, they were the schlocky blockbusters of his day.

People reference Henry V St Crispins day speech, but often forget the whole “let’s have a scene all about a welsh man having a fight over a leek lol”. People quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” without remembering that the line is from a letter tricking a guy into wearing ugly trousers and flirting with his boss.

This book illuminates Shakespeare into a figure I more easily recognise in the creatives and performers I have met in my own life. Passionate and gifted certainly, but also revellers and lovers. It also does well to contextualise how people thought of Shakespeare in his own time; before he was Shakespeare the playwright he was Shakespeare the poet.

To be more specific, he was Shakespeare the erotic poet. There exists no original copies of the pamphlets of “Venus & Adonis” because they were so worn out. It wasn’t just the base eroticism in the poem it is the queerness of it. In contrast to the standards of the time the pursuer is flipped to be Venus rather than Adonis.

Will Tosh does a great job of revealing the queer influences and explicit content in both Shakespeare Poems and Plays. It’s a tricky balance to strike in a book like this, for the gay theatre folks among us much of it is known but to people who’ve never engaged much with Shakespeares queerness it can all feel a bit new. For example The Sonnets; the first 126 of which are addressed to a young man (yes including the one everyone reads at their very heterosexual weddings) is something that feels pedestrian to some, but to others a revelation.

There are large chunks of this book not about Shakespeare too. We learn a lot about Marlowe and a poet Richard Barnfield. It sometimes feels like Tosh really wanted to write a book about them, but made the shrewd financial decision to market it about Shakespeare.

Overall this book was a real delight, both in its base contents and also in the rabbit holes its sent me down. I’d never really noticed Barnfield much but in a couple of collections of queer poetry I have, there he is. I don’t think I’d ever have read or heard of “Venus and Adonis” without this book. I am also now a proud owner of the cloth bound classics edition of Metamorpheses that I’m slowly working my way through.

Not to mention we’ve watched Twelfth Night on Globe Player, two separate recordings of Othello and have booked perhaps a few too many tickets for the year ahead to see the Bard’s work. So I guess this is more of a warning than a recommendation: Reader beware, this may lead to bouts of bardic inspiration.

Final Fantasy IX in React

2025-11-28T00:00:00Z

This is a sort of sequel to the talk I did at Frontend North earlier in the year. Looking at trying to recreate the classic PS1 fantasy RPG in React. It looks at how to use React Three Fiber to render 3d scenes and how to get a logic loop working. A semi sequel to my Age of Empires 2 in React talk.

Watch it on the GitNation Website here

The Search For The Eink Holy Grail

2025-03-22T00:00:00Z

For the better part of a year now I’ve been on a quest, a fruitless adventure with many dead ends, false hopes and almosts. I’ve been trying to find one, or perhaps multiple, eink devices to replace my iPhone and my iPad. Looking for something that fits the perfect venn diagram of my desires so I can cast off my glowing slates of chaos energy and embrace a ploddier and slower pace of digital life.

Display Technology

If you, dear reader, have not also fallen down the eink rabbit hole there are a few things to set up as the background to our adventure. Firstly “eink” is both a technology, referring to the screens that move physical particles of pigment around to display things, and a company that invented the technology and up until 2018 had an exclusive patent on the tech.

A fancy diagram I copied from wikipedia about eink.

In my grossly unqualified opinion, this feels like a reason why eink tech isn’t that great or that cheap. No one has a monopoly on LCD, IPS, OLED or Whatever-The-Hell-Next-We-Do-With-LED technology. There’s a distribution between all the big, and small players, and they all patent share between them. Meaning displays are bountiful, relatively cheap and relatively quickly advancing. However Eink have a near monopoly on e-paper technology patents and even a core part of the manufacturing. If they just patent held and licensed that would be one thing, but they also tightly control manufacture of one of the core components(the films with pigment inside) that then other manufacturers have to use as a base for their products.

To be fair to them, eink haven’t been resting on their laurels entirely and have been creating new types of displays spread slowly across the last two decades. The initial eink launched in 2004 with Sony’s first e-reader is a very different beast from the displays in the latest Kindle Paperwhites. Higher contrast, higher DPI and faster refresh rates have all inched eink further forward as a piece of technology.

The truly elusive advancement however has been colour eink displays. The dream of having a digital device perfectly replicate colour printed paper has been ever alluring. And so far it’s all just been a bit naff.

Forgive me, reader, as we dive into some jargon. The first colour version was the Advanced Colour ePaper(ACeP) where instead of just one pigment, it could do multiple. Full colour at last! However the refresh rate was incredibly slow, please see the image below of a little train time dashboard i put together on an ACeP, I ended up canning the project because the refresh was so distracting even for a passive information display.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

For images, perfectly fine. For train times, utterly frustrating.

So to course correct in the other direction Kaleido displays were developed, a display combining colours and a the refresh rate of standard eink? Thus the monkey paw curled and Kaleido was born. This technology is the same used in the recently controversial Kindle Colorsoft. It’s one that looks pretty good while backlit on a video recording, however when you get it in person you immediately see the dump stats used to achieve the refresh rate. The “white” base colour of the screens are actually grey, and if you are looking at the device from arms length, say for reading, you notice a kind of lattice over the display.

This is because that’s exactly how the tech works. It has a base layer of traditional eink ePaper and then has a layer above it that is coloured, to essentially filter the white light into colour. It’s kinda similar to those briefly lived 3D glasses for films and TV, it achieved the goal but sacrificed brightness and clarity for it.

For a really good look at the differences with some great pictures check out this blog post from Nico Verbruggen: Comparing Carta and Kaleido E Ink tech

Finally the most promising in a purchasable device is Gallery displays. The first few devices of these were pretty rough, being quite non responsive, however the Remarkable Paper Pro from all the reviews I’ve seen is pretty good. Responsive, the same kind of colour replication you might get from a newspaper.

So we’ve got the display tech, or at least a good enough display tech. Let’s look at the vast and expansive list of devices that use the latest Gallery 3 display we can currently purchase:

Remarkable Paper Pro

Oh. Oh no. That’s quite a short list. It appears that for what are probably very sensible cost or faff reasons the Gallery 3 displays were basically dropped as soon as they were released. We seem to have found the saviour our kingdom needed in our adventure, but it appears when they were needed the most: they vanished.

What can I read on the device?

Ok lets put a pin displays for second and talk about the true villain of our tale, and please forgive this horrible word: content.

This whole journey of trying to find a perfect eink device started for me as for the three thousand four hundred and seventy fourth time in my life I tried to start using my Kindle more. The Kindle is by far the most affordable and ubiquitous e-reader on the market today. I literally have never met anyone who owns anything other than a kindle when it comes to e-readers.

My issue with building a good habit with them however is that they just have books on the kindle store. If you want to read books and only books it’s a great place to be. However, most of my reading is: Newsletters, RSS Feeds, magazines like Clarkesworld and whatever newspaper I’m into at the time(Currently the FT, specifically their weekend culture stuff is surprisingly good).

Don’t get me wrong, I also read books. However I don’t just read books, and I don’t think only books are worthy of a lovely reading experience in eink.

Well Joe, why don’t you just get a Remarkable Paper Pro? It’s got the screen and it’s not a kindle, surely that’s the perfect thing to pick up? Alas, no. The Remarkable Paper Pro seems to be a fantastic device for what it’s meant to be: A document reader and note taker. It’s a device that wants to be in a briefcase and loaded up with quarterly reports. Getting actual stuff on it is tricky. Also the vast majority of methods people advise to getting content on it are slightly less than legal to be putting it nicely.

Maybe I’m adding too many hoops to jump through, but I want to pay writers for the things I read. Be that a book, a newspaper or anything worth a bit of cash. Now, of course, Amazon is not kind friend to authors and has a bunch of shit to work out, but whatever thin slice gets to authors through amazon is definitely more than the zero that would through piracy.

The best devices content wise I’ve found have been the Boox series of devices. I bought and then resold a Boox Tab Mini C(doesn’t that just roll off the tongue?) since it had the aforementioned Kaleido colour display that looked pretty good in YouTube videos but pretty naff in person. But content wise it was great! It ran android that meant anything Android phones/tablets can do this little e-reader could too. I could read comics on Marvel Unlimited, I could read the FT, I could read newsletters and RSS Feeds on Readwise Reader. I could download my obsidian vault and read my notes, it was great! Except the display had to have the backlight cranked to nearly full most times of the day and at that point I could just be using my iPad.

I am sat here hawkishly waiting for a Gallery 3, or similar tech, android tablet to arrive.

Where can I use the device?

The other thing that pushed me away from Kindles was their size; or should I say form-factor. I say “pushed away”, I still have one on my bedside table the natural environment for a kindle. However these are the days of lockdown no more, I desire to go into the world and read. On a park bench, on a crowded tube and at my most pretentious in a café. And for that the Kindle, at least the kindle I own when compared to the trousers and jackets I own, just isn’t pocketable.

This is where the dashing young hero of the internet e-reader world entered my life. If you hang out in the same dumb phone e-reader obsessed corners of the internet I do, you will have definitely seen this about: The Boox Palma. It’s a lovely little phone sized e-reader, but without any 4G just WiFi. It runs android, has a black and white screen and it’s fucking brilliant. It’s expensive for an e-reader but cheap for a phone.

It slips into my pocket easily, I open it in the morning before i leave the house to refresh my RSS feeds and download offline copies of the newspaper and off I pop out into the world.

If they brought out one of these with cellular support I would probably swap my iPhone for it. It feels like a wonderfully human piece of design. Additionally, in a very naive aesthetic sense it looks like the future. The kind of future that would be in a sci-fi show where someone time jumps into the future and everyone has forgotten about the existence of any visual influence other than Dieter Rahms.

How dodgy is the device?

Now there are of course eink phones out there, but they exist in two different corners of the wheeler dealer “oh its definitely safe” part of the internet.

On the one hand you have the Hisense A9 that you can get off various AliExpress listings emblazoned with large word-art esque declarations of “NO ROOTING REQUIRED ACTUAL PLAY STORE” that when ordered does a lot of suspicious phoning home if you inspect the network traffic. (Which to be fair, Boox seem to do to).

And then you’ve got the kickstarter and gofundme phones. The phones that are perhaps real and are perhaps lovely, but that include that risk of dropping a few hundred pounds on something that never materialises.

Also many of these devices, many Boox ones included, run outdated versions of Android. Which just sets off my security heebeejeebees.

What do I really want

So for now the Boox Palma and a rarely used Kindle is my current set up of e-readers, but every time I use either of them I am aware of how oh so close to good they are. I have no skills in hardware development, no wealth to swing around to get something made or even really the drive to do such a thing.

But I shall, in the laziest way possible list out my particular laundry list of my ideal phone + tablet eink setup.

The Phone

Can use WhatsApp
Black and white eink display
Can use the “smartphone basics” of:
- Maps
- Calendar
- Email
- Note taking
- Podcasts
- Music
- Weather

The Tablet

A colour display that is as good as a printed newspaper
Screen size anywhere around 10ish inches.
Can read comicbooks
Cool keyboard case would be a dream for writing on it.

Both of them

Can read RSS Feeds
Has a way to easily buy books on device that support authors
Note taking app that syncs between them
Can read at least one decent UK Newspaper
Runs an updated and secure operating system
Can easily be bought in the UK

The Quest Continues

To be fair looking at this list if Boox brought out a “Palma but we put cellular in it” then the phone part would be pretty much met. The real elusive one is the tablet, which I am less optimistic about getting. Tablet e-readers all focus on note taking with a pen as their number one feature and that simply isn’t something I do much. Not just for my horrendous handwriting, but also that I still like a physical notebook for those things. I want a little thing to read on and tip tap on when I get some time. For now, that’s my iPad. But hopefully not for too much longer.

Thoughts on Pillars of Eternity

2025-01-22T00:00:00Z

I’ve had Pillars of Eternity(PoE) in my steam library for a long time. It’s one of those games I’ve begun half a dozen times but never really managed to get past the first few hours. It first happened when it came out, then during the pandemic and more recently just after I finished Baldur’s Gate 3.

The first two I bounced off mainly because I just probably wasn’t in a mood for reading a bunch of text, but the third time it was because I was in the “hangover” period you get just after finishing a fantastic game. Where you wander around your games collections, looking for something, anything, that’ll give you a similar rush to what you just completed.

However I bounced right off it because PoE just wasn’t BG3. Finally, late last year, while my partner dove into BG3 for the first time, I decided to give PoE another chance (partly out of jealousy).

There’s been a lot said about PoE vs BG3, the creator bemoaning it was just a difference in budget, other players of the former bemoaning it’s more sophisticated and plenty of other hot takes across the world wide web. So allow me to add my n + 1 opinion to the pile.

There’s a lot to like about PoE, the world is genuinely really well fleshed out, with some lovable characters, interesting quests and genuinely grey moral decisions. However it gets in its way a lot. Early in the game you get a lot of the classic Fantasy Proper Noun fatigue, constantly asking “What the hell is that? Who is this?”, that only really wears off for me in the latter parts of the game after some heavy wiki searching to remember things.

Not the most beautiful tree decorations.

It’s also just a real bummer in terms of tone, the first thing you come across story wise is “all the new born children have no souls” as you stand next to a tree decorated with the corpses of locals. Look, I like grimdark stuff as much as the next nerd who grew up in the 90s but even I find this a bit much. The only real “fun” comes from some of the characters you meet across the way, Kana being my absolute favourite. PoE is a serious game, and it wants you to know it.

The other obstacle I found with the game is that Real Time With Pause is just not for me, at least not in an RPG. In Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis I’m very happy with it but in RPGs its frustrating. It is a relic of compromise from a by-gone era. From a time when people were trying to make systems like DnD more action-ey and exciting but still respecting the ruleset. Well these days if we want action-ey and exciting we have plenty of amazing modern games that do that well, have a look at The Witcher 3. Whereas for me true tactical depth needs to come from a turn based game, it lets you consider your actions and learn in the moment what would be a good move. Real Time With Pause is the worst of both worlds: Its not exciting and it’s hard to learn information from it about what is working and what isn’t working.

All of this though isn’t the big reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 is much more popular than Pillars of Eternity. It’s that Pillars treats combat and story role playing as two entirely separate parts of the game. At no point do your abilities, spells or any physical interaction with the game world impact the story. The story happens all within that small text box at the bottom centre of the screen. Yes, your skills can impact what your dialog options are, but the game is rigid in its story telling. Whereas Baldur’s gives you all manner of freedom to do things. You can cast darkness to allow you to sneak to an area and loot an object that you can’t normally. Or cast charm on a character to get more information. Or cast speak to animals on a rat to hear nearby gossip about the story.

The entirety of the story happens in this small box

None of that is present in Pillars, and its a real shame. How cool would it be to have Kana start a chant and distract guards while another member of the party sneaks past. I worry that the reflections from the creator amount to “we didn’t have as much money” because I think even if you gave Pillars of Eternity the same budget as Baldur’s Gate 3, it still wouldn’t enchant people in the same way.

Graphic Novel Thoughts: DMZ Compendium 1

2024-07-21T00:00:00Z

I’ve been in a big nostalgia hole for the first half of this year, delving back into games, comics and movies I loved as a teenager. Re-experiencing them and re-evaluating my relationship with them.
The prompt to revisit the 2005 comic was the 2024 movie “Civil War” popping up across my various digital timelines. A fractious USA devolving into civil war told through the eyes of a photo journalist dealing with themes of objectivity and intervention, haven’t I seen this before?

My main memory of DMZ was its cut and paste rough art style. I was so enamored with that particular style of grunge artwork in my teens I remember using panels from DMZ in my GCSE Graphics coursework “inspiration” section. It was a particularly 2000s aesthetic, lots of templates, rough -, and imagery enabled by the explosion of software like Photoshop at the time.

Story wise I vaguely remembered it being about a journalist dropped into New York city, the titular De-Militarised Zone, finding a life and a vocation in the war torn city. As a teenager living in a sleepy English town I was mostly enamoured by the idea of a big city and that a person could spend their life taking photographs, the “war-ness” of it was a peripheral part of my memory.

As a kid I only ever had the first 2 or 3 trade paperbacks of the series, covering maybe 10-15 issues. So picking up this compendium covering a whopping 36 issues felt very indulgent.

The most dated part of the comic is really the technology. Matty Roth is stranded in New York City after being just a lowly intern on a journalist expedition with a famed reporter. He is the only survivor of an immediate ambush, meaning he’s the last employee they have in the city, however it’s the fact he has a “full broadcast suite” which is why they keep him employed, despite having no professional experience.

These days everyone in Manhattan would have a smartphone, but in 2005 the DSLR and the satellite transmitter held a far greater power over the average citizen.

The motivation of him staying in the war zone and reporting is a little thinly baked and comes across as very “I’m doing this because if I don’t there isn’t a story” kinda vibes. And in general the central character is the weakest part of this whole experience. He fits into the same vein of “wow what a cool kick ass dude with no training that the audience of blokes can just project themselves into” characters as Yorrick in Y the Last Man. It’s very much a trope of the 2000s in non-super hero comics.

The comic is at its best when it’s fleshing out the best character of the series; the City. Going into the details of how New York is surviving through the war. The friendly fire storyline is the best for this. It digs into what the beginnings of the war were like, how people took sides, how human different individuals in the conflict are. All generally digging into how horrible war is.

The anti-establishment themes of the series have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but I enjoy them none-the-less. There is era typical sexism and racism aplenty with a dash of homophobia on top.

I can’t really recommend this to anyone since my main joy of reading it came from rediscovering an influence on my teenage self. There’s a second volume compendium that I will get round to reading at some point in the future completeness, but for now I’ve dropped it to the back of my to read pile.

Thoughts from FFConf 2023

2023-11-13T00:00:00Z

I am sat on an early morning train back from Brighton to the big smoke, with a mild headache from a few too many ciders at the FFConf afterparty.

If you’ve not been to FFConf before, I implore you to in the future. I’ve been in 2016, 2017, 2022 and this year and it is consistently the most thought provoking, friendly and all round fun conference I go to.

This year was an typical mix for FFConf of the kind of talks that make you go “fuck yea, lets go build stuff, tech is awesome” and then some that invoke “oh god we’re all doomed”. Existential whiplash keeps you awake in the surprisingly comfy seats of the Duke of Yorks cinema chairs here.

The videos will eventually be online, I’ll update this post with links to them when they’re online, but for now I thought I’d try and jot down the things that stayed with me from the day.

The talk that got into my brain the most was Maggie Appleton’s The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI. In an age of hot takes and hype Maggie has a brilliant ability to cut through all of that to offer nuanced and insightful thoughts on where the internet as a whole is going.

The idea of the web being “a place to genuinely connect with sincere people” resonates with me a lot. I’ve been enjoying my time on Mastodon and BeReal a lot more than Twitter or Instagram recently. They are quieter places where I mostly just follow people I know in real life, or folks from across the internet who I deeply respect.

A small part of me always wonders if this is actually better, or if this is just tickling my nostalgia neurons that miss the PHPbb forum era of the internet where communities were small and more insular that the “public square” approach of most of the big apps today.

Maggie’s talk captured the sliding doors moment feeling around the state of AI at the moment, we can all understand we are at the beginning of something. Exactly what we’re at the start of is the thing we don’t know. Maggie painted pictures of various paths ahead, some worrying, some downright dystopian and some with just the right amount of hope to get me excited.

Both State of the Browser and FFConf had the “it me” talk in the line up this year. State of the Browser was burnout, FFConf had Amber Shane’s wonderful talk about Imposter Syndrome. I’ve seen a lot of talks and had a lot of conversations about imposter syndrome in my career, but Amber’s talk was the first to offer tangible steps forward to try and combat it.

Ire Aderinokun and Angela “Ge” Ricci’s talks were a double bill of the good vibes of use-the-damn-platform talks. Ricci’s line of “just use the damn selector” when talking about CSS styles was my favourite of the whole day. Ire’s talk gave a lot of good technical examples of html and CSS and how to keep it accessible.

This genre of talk pops up a lot at web conferencing and I always find them a mix of empowering and disabling. I totally agree with everything they’re saying, but I feel like we could do more to enable devs in companies and teams to make baby steps towards a better web. For a junior developer in a team of 20 devs building a React SPA the advice of “use the platform” is too nebulous and impossible for them. Small steps, like using actual <tooltip> elements rather than rolling your own, keeping to the principles of not adding content with CSS, building accessible HTML within a react app would be more actionable steps for devs.

When we as a community wax philosophical about accessibility, the platform and JavaScript frameworks I often remember these Werner Herzog quotes about Wrestlemania:

Why do I watch Wrestlemania? My answer is the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world. In order to understand what’s going on, you have to face it.

You must not avert your eyes. This is what is coming at us. This is what a collective anonymous body of majority wants to see on television. A majority of people

The web developer must not avert their eyes from what’s going on with JavaScript Frameworks. These things do not come from no where, they appear from circumstances and pressures as solutions. The dissonance we feel when looking at them is that they are solving problems than the one’s we believe to be important. The misalignment of the modern web is not a technical problem, it is a cultural and economic one.

The post lunch slots were from Steven Goodwin and Jonathan Fielding. Steven did a gloriously clever talk that, to be perfectly honest, confused the hell out of me. He was explaining and building Ada Lovelace’s first compute program in JavaScript. It had maths, it had history and it was highly entertaining. It’s exactly the kind of talk I love. I am excited to find some time to sit down and figure out exactly what was happening mathematically.

Jon’s talk was a very practical look at neurodivergence in the workplace and should rightly end up on a lot of “talks new managers should watch” since it gave great insight and advice about how to understand and enable neurodivergent reports and colleagues.

The final two talks were are classic FFConf uplifting fun just before the afterparty. Ana Rodrigues’s talk about building a Karaoke web app using web speech API ended in my favourite kind of call to action: to go out into the world and build silly useless things. Salma Alam-Naylors talk was a great look at all the silly fun things the web can bring to streaming live on twitch.

Overall it was another great year of FFConf. Remy, Julie and all their helpers have consistently put together the best conference of any given year. The programming is diverse, exciting and thought provoking. The people there are open, warm and welcoming. If only the weather was as sunny as the feeling the conference gives me every year.

See ya’ll in 2024!

New Game @ Brighton Ruby

2023-06-30T00:00:00Z

This was a talk that was half comedy show and half tech talk and half call to action to go and make useless stuff.

Ever wanted to see a few hundred people play Pac-man? But only after some stressful live debugging? Then watch through the link below!

Watch it on the Brighton Ruby Website here

Building Age Of Empires 2 with React

2023-03-02T00:00:00Z

In February I gave a talk at JSWORLD Conference in Amsterdam. It was a bit of fun using a tool like react for something it shouldn’t really be used for. Below is the recording, I hope you enjoy it!

I will hopefully write up some of this stuff into a few more in depth blog posts soon.

Books I Read In 2022

2023-01-22T00:00:00Z

Through the combined powers of Audible and “buying physical books so I can’t forget I have them” I managed to make a larger dent in reading in 2022 than many years previous. This is a loosely categorised and entirely unordered list of what I read with some thoughts attached to them.

The thoughts aren’t reviews, more reflections, or vibes I guess.

I’ve loosely organised them into some categories, some straddle between a few of them so I’ve plopped them where it feels right.

🚀 Sci-Fi Fantasy

Sci-fi is my bread and butter when it comes to reading. I think literature can do great sci-fi better than any other medium out there, which is why I keep finding myself being drawn to the genre.

After reading a whole bunch of Asimov and Dan Simmons in 2021 I wanted to branch out from just “western bloke” sci-fi and to other places. And wow did it pay off in what I picked up this year.

Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987) by Octavia Butler

What if when humanity was actively wiping itself out with nuclear weapons an alien race was passing by and tried to save humanity?

Like an endangered species the Oankali take humans from their natural habitat and attempt to domesticate and improve them by their own standards.

The best trilogy I’ve read in a long time and the freshest sci-fi I have read in a very long time. It feels like it could have been written yesterday, there’s just so much humanity poured into such a slim volume. Butler explores imperialism, consent, agency and fundamentally human nature.

Even if you aren’t into sci-fi the first book, Dawn, is a book I’d recommend to anyone. It would have been my book of the year if I hadn’t read Piranesi.

Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler

This was recommended to me by a friend whose book club recently read it, and coming hot off the heels of Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy I was more than on board to read it.

A significantly more grounded sci-fi tale than the adventures of Lillith’s Brood, it again feels like it could have been written today. Paired with reading Dawn this book gives us a clear look at how Butler viewed humanity, its fundamental flaws and its perseverance at times.

By introducing each chapter with quotes from the future religion of Earthseed this story about pure human survival is painted on a grand canvas. There are times when you’re nodding along to Lauren, the author of Earthseed’s first text, agreeing with her worldview and then becoming a tad anxious about where this could all lead.

There is a sequel I’m keen to read, though the trilogy was left unfinished. I am also worried about storming ahead too quickly and running out of Butler to read.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy (2014) by Cixin Liu

It’s capital “H” Hard Sci-Fi, but so good. Such a wonderful read, try to know as little as possible going in for the best experience. Devoured it in two days and immediately ordered the other two in the trilogy.

I know a lot of people though who couldn’t stand it, so your mileage may vary.

Like a lot of trilogies, it gets flabbier and generally less compelling as the series continues.

There are some really weird tangents about masculinity in the second book that come out of nowhere. This is absolutely “China’s Foundation Trilogy” in terms of both the scope of the series and also the underwritten women in the books.

The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet (2014) by Becky Chambers

This has featured in a lot of “sci-fi you should read” lists over the last few years and is often framed as “softer sci-fi”, or more “character-focused sci-fi”. These caveats are always said with a slight chip on their shoulder as if by having a cast of lovable and empathetic characters it somehow doesn’t have the tantalising “what if” magic of sci-fi.

This is rubbish, this book is a great space sci-fi novel with exciting ideas about space travel, alien species, trade and war and is also full of characters whom you’ll learn to love.

The only caveat I have is it is on the “slice of life” side of fiction, so if that isn’t your jam you might find the narrative unsatisfying. However, I loved it. I can’t wait to sink myself into the rest of this charming series.

The Algebraist (2004) by Iain M Banks

This is a book I tried to read as a kid and just couldn’t push through it. Primarily this is a book of really cool ideas, about ancient life in gas giants, about interstellar society. I know it’s common wisdom to rave about Banks’ Culture novels, but I think this is a lovely fully formed whole meal of a book.

If you’re looking for a heady hard sci-fi book that is a one-off, then this is for you.

🏳️‍🌈 Queer Fiction

The Henna Wars (2020) by Adiba Jaigirdar

This was just very wholesome, two girls set up rival Henna businesses and fall in love. Solid, heart warming, YA romance.

She Who Became The Sun (2021) by Shelley Parker-Chan

Good fantasy fun with a queer angle. Think “Mulan but more magic, lesbianism and gender bending”. Very enjoyable, didn’t know it was a series before going into it and am now impatiently waiting for the next one.

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

This was the first book I got in my subscription from Common Press, a wonderful queer bookshop in East London. This book made me feel a lot, it follows the life of a young woman discovering her queerness under the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War.

It was a wonderful read, but be ready to feel quite a lot of despair throughout it. There’s as close to a resolution as the writer could morally conjure for the ending of the book’s characters. Though you are then hit with the sobering summary of the current state of queer rights in Nigeria.

The Greatest Thing (2022) by Sarah Winifred Searle

Whenever I’m browsing through the monthly comics/graphic novel previews on Forbidden Planet, I’ll see a book with a cover and a vague description where it doesn’t explicitly say it’s a queer comic but it has that vibe.

Sometimes when the comic arrives months later I am disappointed to read a perfectly compelling but alas no-queer story (I’m looking at you This One Summer). This however was the complete opposite, it’s so fucking queer and it’s great. My absolute weakness in book buying is charming, friendly and queer comics.

Our Colors (2022) by Gengoroh Tagame

My Brother’s Husband (2017) completely ruined me, which was the award-winning first-ever safe-for-work creation of Gengoroh Tagame.

So when I saw a new manga from him in the previews I immediately ordered it. This time around it doesn’t have that same kind of guttural punch and isn’t such an in-depth exploration of Japan’s cultural attitudes to homosexuality.

However, it is very charming. Nothing too amazing, or too extreme happens it’s just very lovely. The visual metaphors used throughout for being in the closet and pretending to be straight are as funny as they are saddening.

If you haven’t read My Brother’s Husband, pick that up first but if you have this is a lovely chilled-out follow-up.

💥 Graphic Novels/Comics

Superman (2016) by Peter J Tomasi and Patrick Gleason

This is the good shit. If you’re curious to see what “making the big blue boy scout work for modern audiences” looks like, it’s this run. I read the omnibus version, but you can read it on the DC app or pick up the trade paperbacks.

This sees classic Superman enter a new phase of life, raising a son and coming back out into the world after some time in hiding.

It’s got time-travelling dinosaurs, it’s got Lex Luthor, it’s got feel-good lines about truth and justice.

What a vibe.

Something Is Killing the Children (2020) by James Tynion IV, Werther Dell’edera and Miquel Muerto

What if Stranger Things were darker, more people died and there was a secret society of monster hunters?

Oh - also - to join the society of monster hunters you trap the monster under your bed in a teddy bear for threatening paranormal advice.

James Tynion IV is now one of those comic authors where I’ll pick up pretty much anything he writes by default now.

Batman (2013) by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

I’ve not really ever been a Batman person, but these two omnibuses made me into one. After only really consuming the Nolan-esque dark and gritty batman, this run sees a grumpy batman paired with his classic comic-book-ey elements.

There’s a bat-blimp at one point, what more could you ask for?!

Fantastic Four (2010) by Jonathan Hickman, Sean Chen, Dale Eaglesham, Steve Epting, Nick Dragotta, Neil Edwards

The above comic books are very much accessible enough for really anyone to pick up and enjoy, and I recommend you do! This however is layered in comic-book weirdness and continuity treats.

Jonathan Hickman wrote my favourite ever comic, East of West, and since I read that I’ve been delving back into his older Marvel back catalogue.

This run builds up to the mega-event Secret Wars and does a lot of the things only long-term serialized storytelling can do. There are payoffs set up here that only come to fruition deep into his Avengers run (which is also great).

Similar to Scott Snyder’s Batman, this has made me into a Fantastic Four person despite never being one before.

✍️ Biography

This Much is True (2021) by Miriam Margolyes

Miriam Margolyes is a marmite kinda person, if you like her get the audiobook and you’ll have a whale of a time.

💡 Non-Fiction

Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey

Because I’m stupid, my response to reading about risks of nuclear war in the news was to try and read as much as possible about it.

This is one of those books that has such visceral imagery and is so horrific on its own and then you remember it’s non-fiction and your stomach turns.

I feel like it’s an important book to read since most I’ve ever read about the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were about the scientists who made them, the generals who ordered them to be dropped and the political fall-out after the fact.

This is about the people on the ground on the day, a few of them survivors and the culture and communities that span out from those events.

Sorry I’m Late I Didn’t Want To Come (2019) by Jessica Pan

This was pretty light and harmless, more biography than self-help. It was nice hearing about the author’s journey to a better understanding of what she enjoyed and what she didn’t.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book, but I wouldn’t not recommend it either.

Stolen Focus (2022) by Johann Hari

Ironically I saw a plug for this while scrolling Twitter. It is a timely look at exactly why we feel we can’t do any deep focus anymore with some good stories and anecdotes thrown in.

It is a deeply realistic take on the state of the attention economy, and because of that a fairly depressing take. There is no solution here for the individual, this is a descriptive account of how bad things are written with lovely prose.

Now for most people, I’d probably say it’s not necessarily worth reading. Though for those of us working in tech, I’d say it’s essential. Books like this are key to making sure we understand the impact of the work we do.

Lost Connections (2018) by Johann Hari

This is a book I’m conflicted about a great deal. On the one hand, I spent a lot of it nodding along to the author. Yes, our sense of community has diminished, meaningful connections are harder than ever to create and maintain, and we probably are over-prescribing medication for mental illness. However, I dislike the effect this book can have sometimes.

It can result in a wholesale dismissal of any and all medical interventions for mental health issues that could be a little dangerous.

Like a lot of things, the uncomfortable reality is a murky grey area.

Ultimately a compelling read with a lot to chew over and I think worth reading even though I don’t agree with a lot of stuff in there.

⛔️ DNFs

This year I only had two books that I did not finish(DNF), both for completely different reasons.

Effortless (2021) by Greg McKeown

Overly short, barely anything to say, regurgitating ideas from other people in shorter and less compelling ways. A complete waste of money and time. If only he’d put a little more effort into Effortless.

For me to DNF a 7-hour-long self-help audio book is pretty rare for me, that’s how bad it is.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) by Marlon James

This was the complete opposite issue, I enjoyed this. The setting was compelling, and the queer elements of the characters and the language was so well put together. However, it was written in such a clever style I wished it would get out of its own way and just let the characters and setting flourish. This is absolutely what happens when a Booker Prize winner writes a fantasy novel. For some people, that’s a dream. However, for my fickle brain, it was just a bit too uphill to get finished.

❤️ Favourite Book of the Year

Piranesi (2021) by Susanna Clarke

I am going to tell you absolutely nothing about this book because that’s how I picked it up and I think it’s the best way to go into it.

It’s not very long, it’s a wonderful little puzzle of a book. Also, the audiobook narrated by Chiwetel Ejiofor is sublime.

Games Games Games

2020-05-22T00:00:00Z

In the middle of lockdown Halfstack did an online conference and this was my contribution to the day, talking about making fun games and why people should make fun stuff.

Dev Diary - Adding Coins

2020-02-17T22:33:17Z

Over the past year or so I’ve been on and off helping out a teacher friend in my spare time. We’ve been building educational VR applications together. We’ve taken our stuff to the National Space Academy, he’s written about it in his Master’s thesis and even at the institute of Physics!

This is a blog series where I’m just going to record little by little some of the things we’re doing.

Today we added in a little feature to our main app, but one that we think will streamline the process a lot. The app itself is to teach people about projectile motion.

The scene is set by a lake, you are given control of a low poly person to point around where you will with a laser pointer. It’s like having a less cute cat.

The idea is that you get your low poly person over to one of the jump pads and they go hurtling across the river in a perfect parabola, landing safely upon the other side.

You perform this a couple more times, however on the third jump the application freezes time. Stranding your less cute cat equivalent at the peak of the parabola and poses you a question.

Where is the force acting on them?

You can then select where you think it’s acting and the simulation shall continue with whatever direction you picked being applied to the universe.

If you picked down, the correct answer, then then your low poly compatriot shall drop to the ground perfectly. The other options create more comical results, however they also are a great example of showing you why those answers are incorrect.

Now the micro problem we were facing is without tuition the user doesn’t necessarily know that the aim of the application is to hurtle the low poly explorer to the other side. After user testing this was starting to become quite obvious.

So we’ve turned to the oldest of gaming symbology to encourage the player to get to the other side: the Coin. Specifically this one from SketchFab.

We wanted to find a way to show the player what to do without tutorial, since text in VR is generally trash and voice over is annoying if you already know the solution.

By using a piece of game language that is as universal as a spinning lit up coin it means that those who are unaware of what to do have a clue to figure it out, and those who were quick on the ball get to enjoy the shiny new coin anyway just for it’s shininess!

The more I develop for VR the more I’m realising how much is has in common with film.

Show don’t tell.

The builder’s guide to the world wide web [External]

2018-05-29T00:00:00Z

HTML, CSS and Javascript; essential tools our designers and engineers use to build compelling, functional BBC online services.

Opening Silos in Big Brilliant Corporations

2017-12-07T00:00:00Z

This was the first tech talk I did for the BBC while I was there. Talking about the BBC Reith font project, which I had the pleasure of working on while I was there.

My domain was mostly around how are we going to distribute this font across the BBC’s many many websites and many many tech stacks. As much a talk about organisational challenges as it is about technical ones.

Alpha, Beta, Gamer: Dev Mode

2017-11-09T00:00:00Z

The first ever conference talk I gave, which was actually an adapated version of my 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Show of the same name.

It’s a fun interactive show looking at some classic video games. Also I alas owe a correction to this talk. The story about Gandhi and Civilisation is alas completely false, still very funny though.