It’s a Geek\’s Life… (Part Two)

The Golden Years – Geek Nirvana During the Seventies

[T]he start of our teenage years is the sweet spot for the vast majority of us, particularly geeks, the beginning of what is probably the most fondly remembered period of our lives.

It\’s long enough ago that most of our memories are fond, rosy ones, but it\’s also the first time in our lives from which we retain reasonably accurate and continuous recollections of events (unlike our earlier childhood – most memories from our first decade are pretty vague and fragmented). And it is also during these years that many of us have the most fun and freedom to do what we want (after we finish our homework, of course), before adulthood arrives and the bland banalities, responsibilities and worries of “grown-up” life start to descend upon us.

I mentioned in my previous posting that my childhood was a far from happy one. Things got even worse when I was eleven years old, when my parents separated, leaving my father to raise five kids on his own. He was forced to leave his job, and our descent into poverty became even more severe. To top it all off, my father\’s health began to decline sharply after my mother left, and, as the \”oldest\”, I was shoehorned into the role of \”surrogate mother\” from this very tender age, taking over the extremely heavy responsibilities of not only looking after my father, but also the other four kids, one of whom was also very severely disabled.

To be blunt, I was a very unhappy young boy as a teenager, one who sought refuge in a world of make-believe. Any kind of an escape from this dreary and depressing reality was a welcome one, and I immersed myself in an alternate world of comics, sci-fi worlds on television, in films, and in great SF literature. I also became very preoccupied with drawing and writing.

To refer to these interests as mere “hobbies” would be a complete understatement. They were obsessions, a vital lifeline for me, and I depended on them utterly to keep me sane, when everything around me was so gloomy and depressing. Since childhood, and throughout my entire life, these “obsessions” have been entrenched as fundamental pillars of my personality and way of thinking, and I simply cannot imagine my life without them.

I may already have been a proto-geek from a much earlier period in my life, but the beginning of my teens marks the time from which I can seriously start referring to myself as a true, hardcore geek. Things may not have been rosy on the domestic and personal front, but my hobbies and obsessions certainly first started to kick into overdrive in a very big way at this age, almost certainly to compensate for my miserable \”Real Life\”. I was also now growing old enough to be much more sophisticated, systematic and discerning when it came to what I was “into”. And what I was into, and I mean REALLY into, was the Holy Trinity of SF literature, Sci-Fi on television and in films, and Comics.

All through the 1970\’s, up until around 1977-78, was a “Golden Age” for me, from a geek perspective anyway, the completely opposing mirror image of my crappy \”real life\”. All during my teens there was a steady procession of classic sci-fi TV shows and films on local television, and although I had my favourites – Doctor Who, Star Trek, UFO, The Time Tunnel – I loved them all to a lesser or greater extent.

By this stage of my life I was also a totally obsessive reader of both comics (particularly the Marvel UK reprint comics) and SF literature. I\’d started off initially in my pre-teens with Wells and Verne, then moving onto Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, and anything else that I could read. By my early teens, the whole world of SF literature was my oyster. I was discovering great new (to me, anyway) authors like H. Beam Piper, Cordwainer Smith, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, John W. Campbell, Alfred Bester, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith and many, many others.

By my mid-teens, I was neck-deep in my alternate geek world, spending every available second on my hobbies. I just couldn’t get enough of the whole Sci-Fi/Comics/SF Literature thing, and it seemed like the good days would never end.

But I was wrong.

To Be Continued…

It\’s a Geek\’s Life… (Part One)

[H]ere\’s the first part (of three) in the story of my rise to geekhood.

Early Days in the Sixties – Genesis of a Geek

I’m a card-carrying geek. I’ve always been a geek. I\’ve been one all my life, right from when I was a very young child, and I simply can’t conceive of being any other way. It\’s as natural for me as breathing.

I’m also not one of those shy, retiring types who tries to hide the fact that I\’m a geek out of view, for fear of ridicule. I’ve always been very proud of my geek status. I don’t give a damn who knows it or who doesn’t like it. They can all take a great running leap off the top of a high building, as far as I’m concerned.

My early childhood was not a particularly happy one, what little of it I can recall. My family was poor, very poor, and we never had much in the line of material goods. For much of the time it was a struggle for our parents to even feed and clothe us. We also lived on a council estate in Northern Ireland during that infamous period in Irish history known as \”The Troubles\”, which began in 1968 (I was only seven years old at the time), and was to last right up into my thirties. It overshadowed my entire earlier life, and for everyone of my generation who lived through it, it was a dark time, full of tensions, fear, and unhappiness.

Any kind of an escape from the dreary and depressing reality of life in a poverty-stricken, 1960\’s Northern Ireland council estate was a welcome one, and so I took every chance I could to escape from \”real life\” into the realms of my incredibly active imagination. But WHEN did I actually become a geek, and, more importantly, HOW and WHY? Why did I choose that path, rather than follow the more mundane hobbies that the vast majority of other kids my age indulged in?

I suppose it all began at a very early age, before I\’d even started school, back when I started to read my first “proper” books (books with lots of words, rather than mere “picture books”). By the time I first went to school (aged four and a half years), I was already a voracious reader, very advanced for my age, and my parents and other relatives encouraged me as much as possible by continually giving me new books to read. My uncle started buying me books on a regular basis, and these were invariably based around science, nature and technology. They were full of dinosaurs, spaceships, and stories of other worlds and solar systems, all of which captivated my fertile young imagination. My preferences were already being shaped around science-oriented themes even at that early age.

Even this early in life, I showed a very strong preference for the fantastic rather than the mundane, for wild adventures into space and through time, dinosaurs, aliens, indeed anything “out of this world”. I took every chance I could to escape from boring “real life” into the realms of my incredibly active imagination. So all the influences and obsessions of a future geek had already been laid down right from the start. It was almost like I was pre-ordained to become a geek, although we all know that couldn\’t be true, could it?

Soon afterwards, at about four or five years old, I started reading comics and quickly developed a strong preference for the more SF-oriented strips over the less fantasy-oriented stories, particularly the war and sport strips which were more dominant in British comics at that time. And around the same time, I also started paying attention to sci-fi and fantasy films and sci-fi television series on UK TV.

Doctor Who, on UK television, started having its first really strong influence on me about 1966-67, when I was about six years old, and at about roughly the same time, my life was changed forever when I saw the classic George Pal movie adaption of The Time Machine (1960) for the first time on Irish television (RTE). I became totally obsessed with the concept of time travel, which remains my favourite SF theme even now. At the young age of six or seven, I was already a confirmed SF nut, at least as far as comics, films and television were concerned.

As a direct result of this obsession with The Time Machine (1960) movie and Doctor Who, I was also to start reading SF. About a year or two after I’d seen the movie, I found the original H. G. Wells\’ novel The Time Machine in a local library, and I just had to read it. I was hooked, despite the drastic differences between the novel and the film, and moved from there on to reading anything else I could find by Wells, then on to Verne, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and the greater world of SF authors at large. I\’ve never looked back, and remain a hardcore SF literature fan to this day.

As I got older, I immersed myself ever further into the fascinating world of comics, watching sci-fi TV and films, reading great SF books, and also drawing and writing, almost always something connected with the aforementioned comics, books, TV series and films.

I drove my poor parents mad. They just didn\’t \”get\” sci-fi at all, but humoured their crazy kid. My father really hated all of this \”silly sci-fi nonsense”, and Doctor Who in particular, but tolerated it when I was very young. He hoped desperately that I’d “grow out of it” as I got older, but there was absolutely no chance of that happening! Here I am, more than forty years later, and still a hardcore SF fan.

Poor Dad! He must be turning in his grave!

To Be Continued…

Welcome to SF Universe!

[I]\’d like to welcome anyone who is reading this to SF Universe. The SF Universe blog is, as the name would suggest, a geek blog, and very heavily oriented towards all things science fiction, although there are also many other things that I\’m interested in. Here are some of the things which will be featuring in the blog:

SF in books, the Real Deal, proper science fiction in literary form, from the Scientific Romances of the Nineteenth Century to the most modern SF novels and short fiction.

Sci-fi on television, otherwise known as telefantasy. The best in television sci-fi series from the end of the 1940s (Captain Video and His Video Rangers) to the newest TV sci-fi of the Twenty-First Century.

Sci-fi at the cinema, the best SF, fantasy and horror films on the Big Screen and DVD, spanning more than a century from the very first sci-fi film (Georges Méliès\’ Le Voyage dans la Lune) in 1902 to the present.

Comics and Graphic Novels, another big interest of mine. Sci-fi comics, superhero comics, manga and more, original comics, hardback/trade paperback collections and OGNs (original graphic novels), I\’ll be discussing all of those in upcoming posts.

Science, particularly Palaeontology, Geology, Evolution, Biology, and Bioengineering, Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Exploration and Cosmology. I\’ve always been fascinated by science, particularly those branches mentioned here.

History of all kinds, both modern and ancient. It doesn\’t matter to me how far we go back, as I\’ve never paid any attention to the history/prehistory division. It\’s all \”the past\” to me. I\’ll also lump anything to do with Archaeology and Anthropology in this section, as they are closely related topics. Take things right back to the beginnings of civilization and beyond, right back to the earliest developments of the human race, our first appearance as a species on Planet Earth.

Computers, desktop publishing, computer graphics, computer animation, the internet, blogging and web design, all of these are (relatively, compared to those above, all of which I\’ve followed since childhood) more recent interests of mine, computers since the mid-1980\’s and the internet since 1995. But they still manage to eat up about 90% of my leisure time these days.

The bulk of the posts will obviously be on the subjects of SF literature, sci-fi television and cinema, and comics, but there\’ll be occasional posts on the other topics mentioned above as well. All the above, and much more, are fair game for various posts and articles, and most of these topics have categories of their own. Indeed virtually anything that tickles my fancy is ripe for discussion, and anything that doesn’t fit into the regular categories can be found under General.

It\’s a Geek\’s Life… (Part Three)

The Barren Years – The Near-Death of Geekery During the Eighties

All throughout the first half of the 1970\’s, I was in geek heaven, having seemingly unlimited time to spend on my obsessions with comics, sf literature, telefantasy and sci-fi films. But by 1977-78, things began to change considerably.

I began my A-Levels at college in September 1977, two years of brutal, non-stop studying, followed immediately by another four years of more of the same as I pursued an Honours degree at university. This intensive studying at college and university during the 1977-83 timeframe drastically curtailed my free time. Except for a few short weeks over the summer breaks, I had no free time at all.

Added to this, there was the rapidly declining health of my father and the ever-growing responsibilities that I had looking after both him and my disabled brother. My father was being increasingly crippled by severe rheumatoid arthritis and other debilitating health problems, and within a few short years, by the time I was in my first year at university, he was a wheelchair-bound invalid. I was now responsible not only for looking after two disabled adults, but for also somehow trying to miraculously find the time to study for an Honours degree as well.

The result of all this was that my geek hobbies pretty much died in the early Eighties, or were put on life support for quite a few years, at the very least. This prolonged period of sheer, relentless drudgery totally broke two out of three of my longest-standing geek hobbies – reading comics and SF literature. Only the sci-fi television and film obsession escaped relatively unscathed, and my sci-fi TV and film watching habit has remained relatively constant over the years.

It took me a long time to recover from those years, particularly when it came to reading SF. Sure, I still read a fair bit of SF today, but, even now, my SF reading habit hasn\’t quite recovered to its former frequency, and is certainly nowhere near the obsessive marathon levels it had been at during my teens. Unlike back then, I rarely read novels at all these days, although I still read short fiction regularly.

As for comics, I actually gave up reading them altogether for a full decade, from 1982-1991. I came back to them sporadically from 1991-1997, but I only really became a serious comics collector again from about late-1997 onwards. However, the good news is that my comics reading habit has actually grown again in recent years to a level that surpasses even what it was back in my teens.

I\’m still a hardcore geek, and always will be. But those dark years back at the end of the 1970\’s and during most of the 1980\’s almost totally ruined it for me on a permanent basis. Luckily I\’ve now pretty much fully recovered most of my geek cred and activities. Mostly.

But as much fun as being a geek still is today, the one thing that I can regretfully never rediscover is that wide-eyed innocence, enthusiasm and sense of sheer joy that I experienced way back in my early teens, when I first became a serious geek. It\’s like being a virgin. Once it\’s gone, it\’s gone for good. 🙂

It\’s all just not quite as wondrous and pure any more when you\’re a middle-aged cynic. 🙂

It’s a Geek\’s Life… (Part Two)

The Golden Years – Geek Nirvana During the Seventies

The start of our teenage years is the sweet spot for the vast majority of us, particularly geeks, the beginning of what is probably the most fondly remembered period of our lives.

It\’s long enough ago that most of our memories are fond, rosy ones, but it\’s also the first time in our lives from which we retain reasonably accurate and continuous recollections of events (unlike our earlier childhood – most memories from our first decade are pretty vague and fragmented). And it is also during these years that many of us have the most fun and freedom to do what we want (after we finish our homework, of course), before adulthood arrives and the bland banalities, responsibilities and worries of “grown-up” life start to descend upon us.

I mentioned in my previous posting that my childhood was a far from happy one. Things got even worse when I was eleven years old, when my parents separated, leaving my father to raise five kids on his own. He was forced to leave his job, and our descent into poverty became even more severe. To top it all off, my father\’s health began to decline sharply after my mother left, and, as the \”oldest\”, I was shoehorned into the role of \”surrogate mother\” from this very tender age, taking over the extremely heavy responsibilities of not only looking after my father, but also the other four kids, one of whom was also very severely disabled.

To be blunt, I was a very unhappy young boy as a teenager, one who sought refuge in a world of make-believe. Any kind of an escape from this dreary and depressing reality was a welcome one, and I immersed myself in an alternate world of comics, sci-fi worlds on television, in films, and in great SF literature. I also became very preoccupied with drawing and writing.

To refer to these interests as mere “hobbies” would be a complete understatement. They were obsessions, a vital lifeline for me, and I depended on them utterly to keep me sane, when everything around me was so gloomy and depressing. Since childhood, and throughout my entire life, these “obsessions” have been entrenched as fundamental pillars of my personality and way of thinking, and I simply cannot imagine my life without them.

I may already have been a proto-geek from a much earlier period in my life, but the beginning of my teens marks the time from which I can seriously start referring to myself as a true, hardcore geek. Things may not have been rosy on the domestic and personal front, but my hobbies and obsessions certainly first started to kick into overdrive in a very big way at this age, almost certainly to compensate for my miserable \”Real Life\”. I was also now growing old enough to be much more sophisticated, systematic and discerning when it came to what I was “into”. And what I was into, and I mean REALLY into, was the Holy Trinity of SF literature, Sci-Fi on television and in films, and Comics.

All through the 1970\’s, up until around 1977-78, was a “Golden Age” for me, from a geek perspective anyway, the completely opposing mirror image of my crappy \”real life\”. All during my teens there was a steady procession of classic sci-fi TV shows and films on local television, and although I had my favourites – Doctor Who, Star Trek, UFO, The Time Tunnel – I loved them all to a lesser or greater extent.

By this stage of my life I was also a totally obsessive reader of both comics (particularly the Marvel UK reprint comics) and SF literature. I\’d started off initially in my pre-teens with Wells and Verne, then moving onto Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, and anything else that I could read. By my early teens, the whole world of SF literature was my oyster. I was discovering great new (to me, anyway) authors like H. Beam Piper, Cordwainer Smith, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, John W. Campbell, Alfred Bester, Henry Huttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith and many, many others.

By my mid-teens, I was neck-deep in my alternate geek world, spending every available second on my hobbies. I just couldn’t get enough of the whole Sci-Fi/Comics/SF Literature thing, and it seemed like the good days would never end.

But I was wrong.

To Be Continued…

It\’s a Geek\’s Life… (Part One)

Here\’s the first part (of three) in the story of my rise to geekhood.

Early Days in the Sixties – Genesis of a Geek

I’m a card-carrying geek. I’ve always been a geek. I\’ve been one all my life, right from when I was a very young child, and I simply can’t conceive of being any other way. It\’s as natural for me as breathing.

I’m also not one of those shy, retiring types who tries to hide the fact that I\’m a geek out of view, for fear of ridicule. I’ve always been very proud of my geek status. I don’t give a damn who knows it or who doesn’t like it. They can all take a great running leap off the top of a high building, as far as I’m concerned.

My early childhood was not a particularly happy one, what little of it I can recall. My family was poor, very poor, and we never had much in the line of material goods. For much of the time it was a struggle for our parents to even feed and clothe us. We also lived on a council estate in Northern Ireland during that infamous period in Irish history known as \”The Troubles\”, which began in 1968 (I was only seven years old at the time), and was to last right up into my thirties. It overshadowed my entire earlier life, and for everyone of my generation who lived through it, it was a dark time, full of tensions, fear, and unhappiness.

Any kind of an escape from the dreary and depressing reality of life in a poverty-stricken, 1960\’s Northern Ireland council estate was a welcome one, and so I took every chance I could to escape from \”real life\” into the realms of my incredibly active imagination. But WHEN did I actually become a geek, and, more importantly, HOW and WHY? Why did I choose that path, rather than follow the more mundane hobbies that the vast majority of other kids my age indulged in?

I suppose it all began at a very early age, before I\’d even started school, back when I started to read my first “proper” books (books with lots of words, rather than mere “picture books”). By the time I first went to school (aged four and a half years), I was already a voracious reader, very advanced for my age, and my parents and other relatives encouraged me as much as possible by continually giving me new books to read. My uncle started buying me books on a regular basis, and these were invariably based around science, nature and technology. They were full of dinosaurs, spaceships, and stories of other worlds and solar systems, all of which captivated my fertile young imagination. My preferences were already being shaped around science-oriented themes even at that early age.

Even this early in life, I showed a very strong preference for the fantastic rather than the mundane, for wild adventures into space and through time, dinosaurs, aliens, indeed anything “out of this world”. I took every chance I could to escape from boring “real life” into the realms of my incredibly active imagination. So all the influences and obsessions of a future geek had already been laid down right from the start. It was almost like I was pre-ordained to become a geek, although we all know that couldn\’t be true, could it?

Soon afterwards, at about four or five years old, I started reading comics and quickly developed a strong preference for the more SF-oriented strips over the less fantasy-oriented stories, particularly the war and sport strips which were more dominant in British comics at that time. And around the same time, I also started paying attention to sci-fi and fantasy films and sci-fi television series on UK TV.

Doctor Who, on UK television, started having its first really strong influence on me about 1966-67, when I was about six years old, and at about roughly the same time, my life was changed forever when I saw the classic George Pal movie adaption of The Time Machine (1960) for the first time on Irish television (RTE). I became totally obsessed with the concept of time travel, which remains my favourite SF theme even now. At the young age of six or seven, I was already a confirmed SF nut, at least as far as comics, films and television were concerned.

As a direct result of this obsession with The Time Machine (1960) movie and Doctor Who, I was also to start reading SF. About a year or two after I’d seen the movie, I found the original H. G. Wells\’ novel The Time Machine in a local library, and I just had to read it. I was hooked, despite the drastic differences between the novel and the film, and moved from there on to reading anything else I could find by Wells, then on to Verne, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and the greater world of SF authors at large. I\’ve never looked back, and remain a hardcore SF literature fan to this day.

As I got older, I immersed myself ever further into the fascinating world of comics, watching sci-fi TV and films, reading great SF books, and also drawing and writing, almost always something connected with the aforementioned comics, books, TV series and films.

I drove my poor parents mad. They just didn\’t \”get\” sci-fi at all, but humoured their crazy kid. My father really hated all of this \”silly sci-fi nonsense”, and Doctor Who in particular, but tolerated it when I was very young. He hoped desperately that I’d “grow out of it” as I got older, but there was absolutely no chance of that happening! Here I am, more than forty years later, and still a hardcore SF fan.

Poor Dad! He must be turning in his grave!

To Be Continued…

The Prodigal Returns…

It\’s been a while, hasn\’t it?

My last post on this blog dates from more than two and a half years ago (June 2007). To be brutally honest, I\’d set up the account for the purely mercenary reason of obtaining an API Key for my self-hosted WordPress blog – the much missed (by me, anyway) SFreaders.com – which I\’d just installed on a newly purchased domain. That one was always going to be the main blog, a more specialized one, but I did state at that time my intention of keeping this one up and running for posts and rants of a much more general nature.

I did originally have the bright idea of having several separate blogs for my main interests, as I already had four blogs at my disposal – my self-hosted WordPress blog, this one on wordpress.com, and one each on livejournal.com and blogspot.com. However, that approach quickly proved to be a bit over-ambitious and not so great an idea in the longer term. So I made a couple of posts here, and then… nothing. I stopped using this blog altogether.

So what happened? Well, the honest truth is, I\’m more of a \”one blog person\”, not like all those other guys out there who seem to have blogs all over the place, and are making zillions of posts every day. I have enough trouble keeping one blog at a time running, without trying to juggle a whole bunch of them, and I don\’t have enough free time to post so much anyway.

Even on a single blog, I\’m not a prolific poster at the best of times, and I suffer badly from depression, going through spells when I post very little, and during which I have little interest in anything. Even during a good spell, a couple of posts per week is decent going for me. I like to make long posts, not little snippets or soundbites, and I like taking my time over two or three days to think about what I want to say. I also prefer breaks in between posting, taking a breather to marshal ideas for the next one. I also prefer to post when I feel the urge to, rather than give in to the constant pressure to churn out a lot of crap posts by the clock, just so I can boast that I\’ve made so many posts per week on my blog.

With my \”slow but steady\” approach, on a single blog, I could build up to a fairly healthy body of posts over time. But spread those posts out over a number of blogs, and it starts to look pretty lousy, resulting in several \”undernourished\” blogs rather than a single strong one. Those blogs tend to die off due to disinterest and lack of posts. I\’d rather focus on a single blog, which would receive my undivided attention, and which would be be much more likely to last the course in the long one.

So I concentrated on my main blog, and allowed this one and the others I have scattered over the \’net to lie idle. For a year and a half, things ran smoothly. Aside from a few fallow patches during which the depression kicked in (it seems to come and go in \”waves\”) and posts were very sparse, the total number of postings increased steadily over time, until it was by far my most sustained effort… ever… at maintaining an ongoing online presence. I\’m into a very wide range of topics, and the well was never going to run dry with regards to having material to post, at least during the periods when the depression didn\’t sap my will to post (or do anything in general). Things were building up, slowly but steadily, and overall I was well pleased with myself, and had great plans for the future direction of my blog.

Then disaster struck. One morning I switched on my computer, booted up Firefox, and clicked on my blog. It wasn\’t there anymore. There\’d been a couple of downtime glitches before, but I knew from the onscreen error messages that this time was different, and this wasn\’t a temporary problem. My ISP had suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, gone belly-up, taking my blog (and doubtless many, many others) with it. All that work, all those posts, a year and a half of serious effort, building that bloody blog up, with big ideas for even greater things down the line. Gone. All gone. I just sat there, staring at my monitor, totally sick to my stomach. I\’d made the fatal mistake of choosing my ISP unwisely.

The WordPress self-hosting experiment had died a sudden and painful death, and I gave up in disgust, not having the heart to start up again somewhere else (despite having saved everything from the old blog). I was so pissed off that I didn\’t even have the slightest interest in starting up from scratch again with another hosting service, so I decided to take a long time out to think about what I was going to do. Even at this present point in time, I still haven\’t really regained any enthusiasm for self-hosting a blog, and, for more than a year now, I\’ve been dithering and dithering, drifting about, undecided as to what approach I\’d take next. Did I even want to go down that same path again? What other options were there?

Well, at least the time out gave me a lot of time to reflect on the entire experience and to think about the overall positive -vs- negative aspects of self-hosting. As I see it, the \”plus\” things I liked about my self-hosted blog as opposed to the service here on wordpress.com were the sheer extra power, flexibility, and the ability to configure stuff, mainly themes, css and php code. Learn enough css and php, and you can do pretty much anything with a WordPress self-hosted blog.

The problem is, these \”plus\” things also turned out to be a liability, for me, at least. I\’m no expert – I\’m not a beginner, either, but I fall under the heading of \”knows enough to be dangerous\”. Combine that with my compulsive need to tinker, and it\’s an explosive mixture. In extreme cases this could result in a non-functioning blog – luckily enough I\’m not that stupid. But I did spend an unacceptable amount of time tinkering with css and php, messing with themes, etc, rather than actually posting. Maybe fewer options would\’ve been better for someone like me.

Another thing I found was that, yes, a self-hosted WordPress blog may be way more configurable and powerful than the more limited wordpress.com version, but it also takes a lot more work to maintain it. In general, I found that the administration of my blog, whilst not too difficult, took up a lot of my time. The constant stream of upgrades seemed to come far too quickly – it feels like you\’ve hardly installed an upgrade when there\’s another one landing down the pipe, and you have to go through the same thing all over again.

Despite the process becoming a bit more automated over time, it was still a pain, and I found a few niggling little problems each time I upgraded, which prevented my blog operating at full efficiency. It seemed that I was spending far more time on maintaining WordPress upgrades than I actually wanted to, rather than posting on my blog, which defeated the whole idea that running a blog should be easier than maintaining a static website. All in all, I\’d become royally fed up with the seemingly never-ending WordPress upgrade cycle, long before my ISP ever pulled the plug.

Sometimes I found myself yearning to go back to simpler times, doing a static website coded by hand, and giving up the whole blogging lark altogether. Looking with a clinical and dispassionate eye at the entire experience with my blog, I\’d never actually used a fraction of the capabilities of WordPress anyway, and probably never would have. It was simply too powerful and too complex. By comparison, the more limited nature of a blog on wordpress.com means that a lot of this complexity and the overall hassle with administration and upgrading is removed, whilst still seeming to keep just about enough of the power plus the familiar environment to satisfy me.

My needs are relatively simple – I\’m mainly a text-based person, a writer, so I don\’t ask for much. A handful of decent templates (I\’ve already settled on one that I like), a nice text editor (which we already have), a few nice \”dashboard\” options (ditto), and the ability to easily upload one or two pictures from time to time (ditto). That\’s about it. I have no need for lots of glitzy stuff, no excessive amounts of graphics, videos, flash, music, or any of that kind of thing. WordPress.com seems to have all the bases covered. The only thing I can foresee becoming a problem down the line is running out of hosting space. I\’m one of those weirdos who prefers to have \”unlimited\” webspace, or at least a paltry 20GB or so, \”just in case\”. Saying that I\’ve only got two or three gigabytes makes me nervous.

So I\’ve started for the first time to take very seriously the idea of having my main online presence here, on my long-abandoned wordpress.com blog, something I\’d never really considered doing before. I\’ve fallen badly out of the habit of blogging and posting in general, and grown very, very stale over the past year or so. It\’s so easy to turn into a lazy sod, but much harder to kick-start oneself again after a prolonged period away from blogging. Maybe concentrating on this blog, rather than going back down the more complex self-hosted route, will prove to be a more successful tactic for getting me back into regular posting again.

Despite some prolonged periods without regular posts, I was (in general) on a roll with my old blog before it disappeared, and I\’d really like to get back on that roll again. Whether or not I\’ll stay the pace, or fade away as I have so many times before, I dunno. But I\’ll never know unless I try. But the signs are good. Over the past few months, I\’ve been starting to get back the old urge to start posting again – I\’ve got lots of stuff to post about, and a need to get it \”out there\”.

Things might just be about to get a bit more interesting around here.

Christmas Comes Early – Santa\’s Bringing Me 19 Issues of Spaceship Away

I joined the Spaceship Away group over on John Freeman\’s excellent Down the Tubes forum a while back in preparation for my first subscription/purchase of Spaceship Away. I\’ve been following the magazine very closely since the early days (still have some of the fliers that they sent me) and have always intended to subscribe, but a seemingly endless parade of Real Life crap and tragedies over the past few years has always diverted me at crucial moments.

Well, this morning, I said, \”To hell with it\”, bit the bullet, and ponied up for the entire run of Spaceship Away. This was the fourth and final part of a humongous early Christmas present to myself (nobody else buys me any pressies, do they? Boo, hoo, hoo!), which started off with sending off for the entire run from #1 to the present (Vol 2 #4) of Dangerous Ink, catching up with the last couple of issues of Andersonic (I have an otherwise complete run), catching up with the six back issues of Crikey! that I was missing plus placing a sub for the next six issues, and, finally, that enormous run of Spaceship Away from #1 up to the yet-to-be-released #21.

My credit card/wallet is a lot emptier now, but what\’s money for, if not to spend on stuff like this, eh? I now have all this incredible reading material plus, lots of lovely food and booze to tide me over Christmas. And, on top of that, I\’ll have everything I need to take part in John\’s discussions over in the Spaceship Away group on Down the Tubes. I just can\’t wait for these goodies to arrive. At the moment, I\’m a real happy bunny. 🙂

Marvel Gets Their Man – The End of the Great Marvelman Rights Saga?

So Marvel Comics have bought the rights to the classic Marvelman character (known as Miracleman in the US) from original creator Mick Anglo? Interesting. Very interesting. Given the rather \”colourful\” legal history between Marvel and the folks who worked on Marvelman/Miracleman throughout the 1980\’s and early 1990\’s, if the situation wasn\’t so ironic, it would be hilarious. That Marvel would\’ve ended up the saviours of Marvelman? I can barely believe it myself.

The classic Alan Moore reinterpretation of the original 1950\’s Marvelman first appeared in the famous British monthly comic Warrior back in 1982, and was later reprinted and continued as Miracleman (I\’ve always greatly preferred the original name \”Marvelman\” over \”Miracleman\”) by Eclipse Comics. It is my all-time favourite superhero strip, by a huge margin. I also rate the Neil Gaiman version which continued on directly from Moore\’s version very highly, if, perhaps, not quite so highly as Moore\’s.

Coming at a time when the Bronze Age (which I had been a huge fan of) at Marvel and DC was starting to seriously run out of steam, Marvelman was the precursor to a new breed of superhero comic. It was the first of its kind, and started a storm which was to change the entire comics landscape during the \’80s, leading directly to classics such as the Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns. We didn\’t know that at the time, of course, although it all seems so obvious now, but everything is always 20/20 in hindsight. But after being raised since childhood on a diet of classic British comics and Silver and Bronze Age Marvel\’s and DC\’s, all I knew at the time was that Marvelman was absolutely mind-blowingly incredible, and I had never seen anything like it before.

I have all the issues of the original Warrior, and it didn\’t just contain Marvelman, but also a few other classic strips, including another all-time favourite written by Alan Moore, the original V for Vendetta. I liked V for Vendetta a lot, but Marvelman was by far my favourite. I distinctly recall my anger, rage and total disbelief when the strip was dropped from Warrior after about twenty issues, due to the legal wrangling with Marvel over the name. I was absolutely livid. The best superhero strip I had ever read, cut short due to petty legal squabbles.

When Warrior folded a half a dozen issues later, and I saw that mainstream comics had nothing left of quality to offer (or, rather, nothing to offer ME), I dropped out of comics in disgust for over a decade. I didn\’t find out until many years later that Eclipse Comics had reprinted and continued the Marvelman story, now rechristened Miracleman (due again to continued legal wrangling with Marvel), during my time away from comics.

I came back into comics full-time again around 1997 or so, and I\’ve spent the years since tracking down the Eclipse series, and now have the entire 24-issue run, with the exception of the classic Miracleman -vs- Kid Miracleman finale in Issue 15. I also have the 3-issue Apocrypha mini-series, and the Apocrypha trade paperback, plus two of the four collected trade paperbacks of the main series. The original collected editions haven\’t been available for years now, and collectors are paying exorbitant prices for them. The trade paperbacks frequently go for £70-£80 or higher on ebay.co.uk, where, at this very moment, a hardcover of Book 1, A Dream of Flying, is asking for a Buy It Now price of £175, and the hardcover of Book 2, The Red King Syndrome, an incredible Buy It Now price of £375. As much as I love Marvelman/Miracleman, I wouldn\’t pay these ridiculous prices for them, particularly since I already have the entire run (bar one) of the Eclipse series.

Eclipse went bust in 1994, and, since that time, Marvelman/Miracleman has remained in limbo, the focus of one of the longest running, most complicated, and bitter legal conflicts over character rights in the comics world. This dispute got even worse when Todd McFarlane acquired the rights to the bankrupt Eclipse properties in 1996, and it has dragged on, year after year. The issue of who owned the rights to which part of the character has always been a muddied minefield, with so many different individuals involved in the matter, each claiming to own a share – Quality Communications/Dez Skinn, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, Mark Buckingham, Todd McFarlane, and the original creator, Mick Anglo (dunno if I missed anyone – like I said, it\’s a really confusing mess). It got so bad that for years most of us were none the wiser as to who really owned what.

In recent years, the legal situation seems to have been resolved, with the courts settling in favour of original Marvelman creator, Mick Anglo. Despite the grumblings of Todd McFarlane, it\’s emerged that Quality Communications had never owned the rights to Marvelman in the first place, and that they still resided with Anglo, which make\’s all the other creators\’ claims to ownership of the character null and void. Considering the legal quagmire over rights that the character has been mired down in for years, now that they\’ve been bought up by Marvel, we might just see an end to the endless legal wrangling that has kept Marvelman in limbo for so long.

That is, unless Todd McFarlane somehow manages to kick up a legal fuss of some kind, if he has any legal legs left to stand on. I would assume that any trademark rights he may own, if any, relate only to the Eclipse character Miracleman, not the original Marvelman. But even with Marvel buying the rights to the character from Mick Anglo, the legal situation still isn\’t completely crystal-clear. They might have the rights to the 1950\’s/1960\’s version, but what about the 1980\’s Moore/Gaiman version, which is the real jewel in the crown? We do know that Marvel has been discussing plans for the character and its stories with Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Alan Davis and Mark Buckingham. I guess we\’ll just have to wait to find out exactly what they\’ve agreed on.

However Marvel may decide to revitalize Marvelman, I\’m just hoping that they do the character justice, and don\’t make a complete mess of it. I would dearly love to see Alan Moore revisit his best-ever (in my opinion) creation, but that seems highly unlikely. It would also be great to see Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham get to finish their original run on the comic, completing the trilogy of stories that they were in the thick of, and closing out the unfinished Silver Age, and the final Dark Age sequences that they were working on when Eclipse went to the wall. The fact that they had at least another full issue (or more) completed (but never published) before Eclipse went bust has kept hard-core fans chomping at the bit for years to see this unfinished work. And I\’m one of those hard-core fans. The hardest of the hard.

But if none of the above happens, and if they were to start from a completely clean slate, Marvel really would need to bring out their big guns for their new acquisition, given the importance of the character, and put together a massive creative team to give it their best shot. A writer of the caliber of Joe Straczynski, Warren Ellis, Kurt Busiek, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison (now THAT would be ironic, considering the slating he gave Moore over Marvelman back in the day), would be an absolute must. Absolutely no second stringers or hacks – this revival has the importance and potential to be one of the biggest events of the decade, so don\’t fumble the ball, Marvel, please. Pick a top-notch writer and pair him with an artist of equal standing, and make sure they stay on the strip. Avoid the instability of creative teams constantly chopping and changing, something which would surely guarantee the failure of the new title.

Whatever happens with Marvel, the current situation has to be better than the stalemate the character has been trapped in for fifteen years. Even if they make a total disaster of their new version (and fingers crossed that they don\’t), I\’m really hoping that we will, at last, be able to get regular reissues of the classic 1980\’s strips in trade paperback or hardcover. I\’d dearly love to see a huge hardcover omnibus edition with the entire Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman run, plus the Apocrypha mini-series and other bits \’n\’ pieces thrown in as extras. And, who knows, maybe, somewhere down the line, even reprints of the original Mick Anglo strips. Please, please, please. Here\’s hoping.

That is, unless Toddy or some other gremlin doesn\’t manage to throw yet another spanner in the works, re-starting the old legal merry-go-round and consigning our hero to limbo once again. For all fans of Marvelman, I really, really hope not. Let\’s have this fantastic, ground-breaking character back in circulation again. A generation of comic fans – all but the most determined collectors – have been deprived of one of the greatest superhero strips of all time. It\’s well beyond time for him to be back in the public eye again, receiving the recognition and adulation that he so richly deserves.

Marvelman deserves to be up there with The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns, and the other 1980\’s mega-classics of the comics medium. He\’s the equal of any of them, and, in my opinion, the best of the lot.

The Apollo 11 Moon Landings and After – The Space Adventure That Should Have Been

Today marks the 40th Anniversary of Man\’s first setting foot on another world, when Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface, There\’s the expected buzz on the internet, and a few television programs celebrating the event. At the moment, we\’re watching Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 on UK television (ITV1).

I\’ve always been a huge space exploration nut, so much so that my dad dragged me out of bed around 3.30am UK time on that long ago unforgettable day (I remember it vividly – I was only eight years old, and was a fan even then) to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their first momentous steps onto the lunar surface. Even today I feel great excitement and elation whenever I read or watch anything to do with that golden age of space exploration. But I also feel a great sense of loss, of regret, and of anger.

Because the truth is that we had the stars in our hands and let them slip through our fingers.

To the current XBox playing, goldfish-attention-span generation, the moon landings mean absolutely nothing. They\’re an irrelevancy, ancient history, something that happened way back when their parents were young. It shouldn\’t be this way. Space travel, real space travel (not just space shuttle earth-to-low-orbit), should be a part of their everyday lives.

It\’s a terrible shame that manned space exploration (outside of Earth\’s orbit) died when the Apollo missions ended, scuppered by the nasty mix of public apathy and political connivance. Politicians won\’t fund anything that doesn\’t get them votes, and the public had lost interest, so the politicians therefore refused to continue funding the big bucks needed for this kind of space exploration.

So we lost it all, because of the dumb, apathetic general public and greedy, corrupt politicians. Wouldn\’t ya know it. It makes me sick to even think about it. Ninety-nine percent of the general public can\’t see past their daily fix of reality TV and sport, and politicians aren\’t interested in anything that won\’t get them votes, money or power.

We should\’ve… would\’ve… been \”out there\” now, with a lunar colony and a permanent base on Mars, just waiting to stretch our hands out and grasp the rest of the solar system. We should already be taking our earliest steps as a proper, space-faring species, out there, traveling regularly between Earth and the moon and even Mars, and looking with eager envious eyes at the asteroid belt and beyond, like Dan Dare and his Space Fleet.

For a dreamer and sci-fi/space exploration fan such as myself (and there are many, many others like me out there), it really, really sticks in my gut, every time one of these anniversaries of this glorious first lunar landing event comes around, and I look at the reality of what did happen, and think of what should\’ve happened instead.

Think of it… we took our first steps on another world, and then just gave up and came home again, instead of keeping on going out there. So, so tragic, and absolutely pathetic.

There\’s one vital thing those selfish, greedy, narrow-minded politicians and the ignorant, self-serving bulk of the population don\’t seem to understand or care about. Space travel and exploration is not irrelevant or a waste of money. Our species simply has to move out into space to ensure its long-term survival. If we keep all our eggs in one basket (here on Earth), someday we\’ll live (or won\’t live) to regret it. We\’ll become extinct, either through natural catastrophe, or we\’ll destroy the environment, this world, ourselves, and we will have nowhere else to go.

Or else another stonking great rock will come at us from the depths of space, with Target Earth and RIP the Human Race written all over it. And it\’ll be all their fault if our species dies off totally, and I hope they (or their descendants) remember that when the big space rock comes at us with our number written on it. It has happened quite a few times before during Earth\’s history, and it\’ll inevitably happen again. Maybe in a thousand years time, or ten thousand. Or it could just as easily be next week, or tomorrow. We should always be prepared for that eventuality, just in case, and setting up colonies on the Moon or Mars would be first steps towards ensuring that our species would not be wiped out, should the unthinkable ever happen. As I\’ve already said, the old proverb about keeping all of our eggs in one basket is very apt here, and continuing to do so would be a very, VERY bad idea for humanity.

However, if we\’re thinking about starting all over again, getting back out into space, we\’d better get a move on. Our civilization only has a relatively small window of opportunity left, before the oil and other industrial resources are gone, and we no longer have the capability of launching space missions. After that, we really will be stuck here, with nowhere to go.

As I said at the beginning of the post, I\’m watching Moonshot, but with a lot of mixed feelings. A sense of excitement and nostalgia, but also of anger and regret. And in my alternate world of \”What Should Have Been\”, I\’ll be dreaming of those brave colonists striding across the surface of the Moon and Mars and conquering new frontiers for the human race.