OK, so they’re only cameraphone jobs, but I actually took some photos this week. Here’s the nearly-complete oval tower thingy at Gunwharf, which I rather suspect the current economic climate will prevent from filling up as rapidly as the developers had hoped.

It’s unusually po-mo for Velcro City architecture (supposed to look like a ship’s funnel; see what they did there?). I miss the big crane that used to be stood next to it; I’ve always had a weird thing about cranes. Not a fascination, as such, just… I dunno, they make me think in odd ways. *shrug*

Writing about music

Still in the stages of getting the flywheel spinning at TDP; regular output restarts next week. As a result, there’s no album of the week, but the single I reviewed by History of Guns suggests they might be worth looking into if you like a bit of nasty industrial with goth overtones^[1].

Writing about books

No concrete output on the book reviews side of things, but I finished David Marusek’s Mind Over Ship last night, so I have plenty to be getting on with. The problem is it’s such a complex novel that I have no idea where to start… but it’s a fabulous read, so there’s plenty to say. The challenge will be to make the review coherent, methinks.

Freelance

After Monday’s announcement, you can imagine it’s pretty much all go in this department, and you’d be about right. The Pretty Big Project is still on hold while the client finishes their side of things, but that means t’Other Pending Project is very near to completion indeed, and should see the light of day within the week.

Meanwhile, other enquiries and requests for work are coming in, and the day-job have announced that they’re still keen to have me build their website as a contractor once I’ve worked off my notice. This is all very good news indeed. Thanks to everyone for all the well-wishing, be it here, on Facebook and Twitter or even in meatspace. Your confidence in me is scary and inspiring at once.

Futurismic

Not such great news on the Futurismic front, sadly. Oh, there’s been nothing wrong with the site content – Mark Ward’s “Roots” is our first story of the year, Jonathan delivered what I’d happily describe as his best Blasphemous Geometries column so far, and I’ve been knocking out quite a bit of bloggage this week – but the dreaded spectre of hosting problems reared its ugly head once again.

[ Non-geeks - skip this next bit. SRSLY. ]

An email from my hosting provider yesterday afternoon told me that Futurismic was spiking the CPU usage on its shared server up to 80% peaks with a single PHP script. Now, I know Wordpress is a notorious CPU hog, but this just doesn’t compute: Futurismic currently gets less than 1,000 uniques a day, and the 1,800-odd RSS readers all collect through Feedburner, which means there’s no PHP load from there.

I’ve now removed one spam-trapper and installed a caching plugin, but the latter is supposed to help sites with 10k daily uniques survive a Digg rush without falling over, not sites an order of magnitude smaller from simply handling normal search engine traffic. It’s not like there’s even that heavy a load of plugins calling the database… sheesh, I dunno.

Anyway, trimmed loads of stuff back, and they’ve reinstated the site to its normal server, so hopefully that’ll be the end of the matter for a good long while. That said, I’m looking around for other alternatives so I’m prepared for the worst… I may just have to bite the bullet and go VPS or dedicated for Futurismic, as uptime there is mission-critical. Selah – the fun begins! That was four hours of my life I’ll never get back.

[ OK, you can look again. ]

Books and magazines seen

I got all excited about a big box of stuff from Orbit, but it all turned out to be Stuff I’m Not Into (as is so often the way of things). However, a rather spiffy non-fiction number has appeared – Ehsan Masood’s Science and Islam: A History.

It’s the book that accompanies the BBC series of the same name, apparently, and looks to be very interesting indeed. The best thing about the day-job has been the interest in history it rekindled in me, and the confluence of science and religion with history is always a winning combination – one of the reasons I enjoy histories of philosophy, despite struggling with a lot of the works of the philosophers themselves. The chain of human thought is much easier understood as a narrative rather than discreet snapshots… or it is for me, at any rate.

Coda

So there we go; first full week of the new year, and it’s been as hectic as all hell. It’s also featured a head-cold which is now mostly shifted, but which added a layer of challenge to the first half of the week.

Still, proud to say I’ve been free of booze’n'fags since New Years, and with the exception of yesterday’s webhosting debacle (stressful events beyond my control are always the worst, for some reason) I’ve not really missed ‘em either – this is a good sign. Sadly, the money I might have saved in the process has been spent on Sudafed, Lockets, fluorescent tubes and a new light-switch for my kitchen; at least frugality gives one the flexibility to respond to disasters, eh?

Still, it’s flippin’ Friday, and I’m almost done. I’m seeing an old friend and popping out for a meal this evening, so I’m a mere hour or so from the uncanny experience of relaxing for a while… I hope you all find a similar segment of calm over the weekend. Take care!

[ ¹ - Anyone who creates a song entitled "Vernon Kaye Must Die" deserves some sort of award, IMHO. Though it's a bit of crap tune by comparison to the more recent stuff. ]

I pass this building every day on my ride to work, and over the past eight months I’ve watched it slowly grow a smooth skin over the concrete and steel skeleton beneath. As the weather was conducive, I managed to get a few shots this afternoon.

I think it’s supposed to look like a ship’s funnel. One thing is for certain, no matter how cutting edge it may be at the moment, within twenty-five years it’ll look horribly dated.

[Architecture never seems to learn from the mistakes of the past in that respect - which was always my argument for keeping the much-missed Tricorn. And yes, I know this is a nautical town, but is there really no other theme that ever leaps to mind? But that's enough local politics for now.]

Anyway – from that angle, it looks almost like some chunk of space-station in orbit over the Earth. Which is pretty cool as far as I’m concerned.

Writing about music

For an assortment of reasons, most of which are of little interest, this week has been a busy yet unremarkable one that involved chasing a lot of deadlines, which I have just about clambered on top of, giving me a clear start next week.

The moral of this story is that running up against one set of deadlines means it’ll be that much harder to meet the next ones. Yeah, I know – obvious in hindsight, but then what isn’t?

As another installment in my ongoing campaign to convince everyone that they’re the greatest band in Britain right now, I will direct your attention to my interview with Oceansize, which was published earlier this week (and which I’m rather chuffed with).

Writing about books

For the same reasons as those mentioned above, the Brasyl piece still isn’t finished, but is much closer to being so than it was this time last week; a concerted final push this weekend should clear that off the to-do list.

The problem has been one of communication on my part, in that I know what I want to say about the book, but have really struggled with saying it in a coherent manner … nearly sorted, though.

I’ve also been taking notes on Human Is? – A Philip K Dick Reader, which has been quite an enlightening read for someone who came to sf very late and largely missed out on the short story scene. And as is so often the case, thoughts I’ve had about this book have actually helped me clarify my thinking about Brasyl.

[Which probably says something about post-structuralism, or something like that ... but jargon will have to take second place to me actually being able to explain what I mean. As far as I can tell, post-structuralism is defined as being essentially indefinable, which makes things rather confusing from my perspective. Selah.]

Writing about other things

Hey, that lengthy piece I did on Second Life has finally been published! You can see it in the free-to-download third issue of D+PAD Magazine [PDF], starting on page 10.

Don’t ask me about the curious choice of layout design – even my sub-editor couldn’t explain the reasoning behind it. Still, it looks OK, and my actual writing is largely intact, so I’m a happy bunny – especially as they seem to want me to do some more in the future.

Freelance malarkey

I’m not going to tempt fate by announcing anything before it’s definitely in the bag, but I may have managed to land myself a pretty decent freelance contract. So wish me luck, if you’re so inclined.

Books and magazines seen

I had hopes that the latest Interzone might turn up this week, but as the Velcro City arm of the Post Office seem to still be recovering from the strike-induced back-log, I think I was chasing rainbows in that respect – suffice to say, it isn’t here yet.

However, Obsessed With Pipework has made an appearance, which is my fresh poetry fix for the next week or two sorted out.

The promo machine at Orbit continues to gather speed, sending me yet more fantasy doorsteps and some YA-looking mil-sf whose covers have probably set teeth to grinding impotently over at the Games Workshop offices …

… and also more Manga from their Yen Press side-line, which I may spare some time to leaf through over the weekend. I love the way that the plot premises seem so ridiculous in translation, but that the stories (once you start them) actually maintain a curious form of internal logic that puts most soap-operas to shame.

And, of course, the book titles themselves. For example:

Zombie Loan! Can’t argue with that … nor with a writer with the pen-name "Peach-Pit".

Coda

An even less interesting week than usual, at least from the perspective of the three of you who actually still read FPB*. But I’m beginning to form the opinion that me telling people how boring my week has been is marginally less boring than me saying nothing at all.

The logic of that last statement is quite plainly spurious, but I’m so confident that no one will actually read it that – should someone point it out in the comments – I will reward their sharp-eyed pedantry with a thousand-word post on a subject of their choosing to be published next week …

And with that out of the way, it’s time to collate the Friday Free Fiction post for Futurismic and quest forth for The Friday Curry Of Justice, Legend And Forthrightness. Have a good weekend, ladies and gents.

[* I admire your persistence, really - everyone else just looks at the picture!]