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MUSIC!

So, I've been making music on YouTube! The lyrics, rhythm and all relevant creative decisions are my own, but (fairly obviously) the performance is AI. Becase, y'know, when I try to sing myself, birds fall dead from the sky, windows shatter and ghosts shit themselves. The point is, I've basically invented a fictional record label called 'The Nuclear Jukebox' with a wide variety of bands under it, acting as a love letter to all the many and multiferious genres of music that have influenced my thinking and tastes over the years, from 70s-esque British punk to Rockabilly to Heavy Metal.

Now, I know some of y'all are dead-set against AI, but I think this is a fine example of the technology being used to supplement rather than replace human creativity. After all, I'm still the lyricist and driving creative force and whatnot... I just can't perform music because I'm a tone-deaf menace to soundwaves. So give it a listen. You might enjoy it. If you do, Subscribing over on Youtube would really help me out, so please do that as well.

The completely invented band you can hear above is 'Tragic Eight Ball' (headed by the inimitable Vance Rancid, about whom I'm writing a novel) and I thought they'd be a good gateway for my musical efforts, because they're funny. That being said, not all the songs are like this or about anything similar. Some of them are sincere peons to the joys of hedonism; others are 60s-inflected surrealist experiments in emotional evocation over concrete narrative; yet others are show tunes about the occult. I could go on, but I won't. Go discover this stuff for yourself! Here's the link to my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PVTimsCreator

Enjoy!

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Ooh, this is fun! And also weirdly difficult, because I've travelled around the UK a great deal and my voice has a lot of weird features that don't fit neatly into any particular regional accent. Here goes, though: at the most basic level, it's a strange blend of weirdly melifluous Received Pronounciation and brassy South London twang. You remember that time David Tennant played Hamlet, but kinda did it as though he was still the Tenth Doctor? It sounds a bit like that. Then, however, I currently live Oop North and originally lived on the Devonshire coast as a kid, so certain words or phrases can either go very 'bluff northerner' or very 'pasty-eater' and I occasionally called people 'pet' or 'chuck' or some variation thereof in an accent that may or may not approximate my normal speaking voice. Oh, and my family are from Ireland, so the more annoyed I get, the more Irish I often sound. The other day the microwave was refusing to work properly and I called it a "cuboidal cunt" in the exact voice of Jerry Adams berating the Dahl. Oh, and some phrases just get a fake American accent because they sound funnier that way. So... yeah. Good luck unpacking that one.

wait wait wait mutuals rb this with a description of ur voice

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Yeah, the whole "ask the autistic kid a pointed question to get a funny answer with which to demean them" thing was a real motif for me too, back when I was growing up. Actually, I think it's part of a wider trend with bullies. They're not clever, but they possess the low, animal cunning of rat, or maybe a ferret. They'll find the thing that seems trivial to the authority figures in your life but which matters SO SO MUCH to you, and that's what they'll use to get at you. I do think being the kid on the receiving end of that has one thing to be said for it: it gives you a really good sense of what humans are. I went through a lot of bullying - most of it baiting me to see how long it would take me to blow my top and go beserk, but quite a bit of physical abuse, too. I don't consider myself traumatised as per the original post, but I think I have a very fucking clear idea of what the human animal is when you peel off its mask of civility and sophistication. When people see you as a victim- as someone who can't defend themselves- they get very comfortable showing you who they really are. And more often than not, who they really are is a mean-spirited scumbag with the IQ of pond-slime. The good news? They're mean-spirited scumbags with the IQ of pond-slime, so sooner or later your life is going to be much richer, more interesting and more fulfilling than theirs, just because you're capable of joys and sorrows and passions that their invertebrate minds could never aspire to. Consider this the inspirational part of the blog post: you will love more fully than they will. You will live with less compromise. You will not be defined, as they are, by the miserable cycle of work, consumption and recouperation that capitalism has made of human existence, because you will have a developed and complex inner life denied to those insensitive blocks who seek to torment you. And, because you have seen what humans are really like, you will have an easier time identifying the people who aren't like that. One day, you will find your tribe in a way that they cannot, and belive me: you are mighty with your tribe. Yes, while you're going through bullying, it feels like they're predators and you're prey, but here's the thing: being predators is all they have. It's the only thing in their pointless, empty little lives and if they ever experience happiness, it's only because they're too dumb to realise how miserable they ought to be.

Now for the less inspirational bit. Yes, things do get better, but you've still got to get through the bullshit first. My advice? I don't have any, but I know what worked for me: violence. I think a lot of the reason I'm not wholly traumatised by my childhood and why I'm so much less bitter than I might otherwise be is that I defended myself in the most literal and primal sense at the time. That counts for more than we're willing to admit to in this neutred fucking age. Not every time (I was smart enough, even then, to realise that getting a reputation as a violent person could be a serious problem), but often enough that I can look back fondly on those rare, wonderful occasions when I just stopped taking it and lamped a cunt with the nearest blunt object instead. I can look myself in the eye (well, if there's a mirror handy, anyway) and say "I gave as good as I got and acquitted myself well". Doesn't do jack-shit in the short-term, because bullies are usually too fucking dumb to fear physical reprisal, but years later it helps keep the wolf from the door. I know that violence can backfire. I know that it can get folk institutionalised and that I was, in some ways, very lucky to grow up with a family who understood its uses and value on some level. I know that it can lead to escalation. But I also know that I've never regretted throwing a punch at someone who earned it and do regretted quite a few missed opportunities to throw one.

So yeah. Take that or leave it.

the thing that always gets me ESPECIALLY about autistic representation in media is that we are universally portrayed as happy-go-lucky, whimsical children, completely oblivious to the fact that the world constantly judges and scorns and HATES us.

We notice. I noticed. The reason I am as messed up as I am today is because i spent 20 LONG years in an environment where every day i was subjected to that. To noticing.

what an absolutely neurotypical view of us. Coddling themselves, getting to act like the way they treat us is fine because we don't understand that our peers dont respect us. Why would we? We're so subhuman to them, it's like asking if your cat notices you playfully insulting it.

Every autistic person I've ever met is on some level bitter and angry and TRAUMATIZED at their upbringing. Of having to go through school as the laughing stock, as the weirdo with no friends who no one wants to talk to, as the animal in the corner you can make do cheap tricks so they can experience some Simulacra of what genuine human connection is.

Now tell me, does it sound like I didn't notice?

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I Just Realised...

... that I have literally written an 18-book mega-series spanning over a hundred years and countless planets, incorporating elements of 60s spy fiction, Lovecraftian horror, geopolitical drama and traditional adventure, along with some of the spiciest interpersonal drama ever committed to the page and lashings of, if I'm brutally honest, offensively blatant fat fetishism... and the only person who has ever read it besides me is my wife. Like, technically, a few people have read the first entry in the series, because it's a published thing that you can go on the internet and buy it, but the rest of it... Nope! Only two people on Earth have any clue what the contents of these books are because my dumb arse has started writing Number 19 instead of publishing ANY of the others.

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Ooh, what a suspiciously perfect opportunity to plug my own books! It's almost like the Tumblr algorithm is monitoring me in the pervasive and slightly sinister style of late-stage Surveillance Capitalism! Handy!

Anyhow, anyone looking for books with well-developed fat characters - especially fantasy and sci-fi books - should check out Small Infinities and Short Eternities, my two recently-released collections, available at https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pvtims/

Small Infinities has stories about street magicians arranged into warring factions like medieval guilds, scientists accidentally unlocking the secrets of infinite energy and destroying the global economy, living chess pieces solving film noir murder mysteries and 20,000-year intergenerational quests for Enlightment. Short Eternities skews much darker, with stories about literal world-trees dying with the coming of cosmic winter, drugs that judge their users, sadistic dystopias based on pinball games, and infinite hotels that occasionally eat their guests. What they both have in common is a relative abundance of plus-size characters with a variety of different backgrounds and properly-developed personalities. Cards on the table, most of them are love interests or fill other romantic roles, because, y'know, fat admirer. I didn't set out to 'do representation', I'm just a dude with a fetish. But I'm also a good writer, so it's kind of impossible for me to write a character whose solely there to be objectified: I end up elevating them whether I intend to or not. Arr, 'tis a curse to be this good at my job, truly it is!

Anyway, I've already given the link, so knock yerselves out. Or don't, and I'll just keep beavering away in obscurity. Whatevs.

whenever i read a book i run a little quiz and the only questions are 1. is there a fat character? and if so 2. is that fat character written respectfully (not treated as comedic relief, not described in clearly disgust-inflected ways)?

few books clear the first bar, and very very few of those even come close to clearing the second.

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Remember, folks, get your cars neutered and spayed or this is what happens.

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I Have a New Book Out!

Attention, humans of the internet! Your humble narrator here has a new book out. Short Eternities, my second collection of short stories, is a massive Verb Sandwich stuffed full of creamy sci-fi, fantasy and horror filling! Learn to fear fractals in Mandelbrot Blues and explore a universe-consuming Tree of Worlds in White Hole Garden. For a change of pace, run the gauntlet of a giant, murderous pinball machine in High Score or stay at an infinite hotel in Checking into the Hilbert.

Not only is Short Eternities the fastest way to fill your flinty little heart with cosmic wonder and existential dread, it also has a plethora of other handy household uses, from propping up the short leg of the couch to starting a free-wheeling hippy death-cult! Why waste another minute reading ordinary books and suffering through the drudgery of work, rest, sleep when you could read Short Eternities and start a new life as anything from a jet-setting international hobo to a serial killer with a balloon fetish?

You can buy Short Eternities (and any of my other books that tickle your literary pickle) at https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pvtims

Good luck, brave explorer of the infinite wordspace!

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End of Year Awards, 2024 (Sorry It's Late)

Trigger Warning: Nuclear War, Sex Crimes, That Twat Donald Trump, Smartarse Dune References, The Ruination of Perfectly Good Cakes with Human Faeces.

So, here we are again. 2024 is hurtling towards the end of the track at break-neck speed and the ol’ girl ain’t got no brakes. At this point, a collision with 2025 seems inevitable and experts are advising the citizenry to remain indoors and read this blog. In other words, it’s time to dish out some profoundly uninspiring awards to people who’ve never heard of either of us and wouldn’t care if they had. Because what End of Year would be complete without an End of Year Awards Show? (Please note that the ‘show’ is entirely in your head and this is just words on page. As such, Secret-Diary cannot be held responsible for any injury sustained from falling spotlights and irate hosts.) Anyhoo, you all know the drill by now, and if you don’t I can’t be arsed to introduce you. You can look up the drill on MySpace or whatever the cool kids are affecting not to use nowadays. Let’s dive right the fuck in.

The Boy Who Cried ‘Nukes’ Award… ...Goes to Vladimir Putin, who’s now threatened to escalate the war in the Ukraine to nuclear proportions so many times he’s starting to look like a histrionic spouse threatening to top himself if his wife sleeps with JUST ONE MORE OTHER DUDE! Whether he actually would is somewhat besides the point at this stage, since nobody who matters believes the bald cunt. Thus, from an international diplomacy perspective the fangs he’s bearing do look a lot like novelty Halloween dentures. That’s worrying, of course, because if it turns out he really is capable of starting a thermonuclear conflict just to prove a point, nobody will really have any contingency for what do after he drops the first bomb and then asks us, as a planet, to call his bluff. The good news is that he probably won’t do that, because the international response might just be the most concerted effort at assassination since Baron Harkonen and Emperor Shadam IV decided that Duke Leto was too much of a goody two-shoes and was making them look bad. Sorry, that’s the closest thing I can muster to a joke when talking about the spectre of nuclear annihilation, especially since I live just over the border from Scotland and can therefore see exactly what that would look like just by facing north on a clear day. (I jest, of course: I actually love Scotland. It’s just very empty).

The Special ‘Speaking of Which…’ Award… Goes to Dune Part II, for being a really excellent film whose universe I was literally just alluding to. It’s almost like I plan these blog entries out with meticulous care! (I don’t.)

The ‘Standing Under a Grand Piano and Refusing to Move’ Award for Thudding Inevitability… … Goes, sadly, to the re-election of America’s foremost spite-Savaloy, Donald Trump: a man with the social attitudes of an early-modern Robber Baron, the political ethos of Ayn Rand and the haircut of a particularly whippy cat turd. Obviously, this man shouldn’t be in charge of a country, but – as I keep trying to explain to people – elections aren’t rational events where everyone in a nation sits down and has a good hard think about who should actually run things. Rather, they’re emotional events in which the public gets together to tell the elites whose brand of bullshit they’re most sick of this time around. Since the Democrats are, kinda-sorta, more closely associated with the current circus of virtue-signalling L.A. quasi-liberalism than the Republicans, the Republicans won. And no, it’s not fair that the basically competent and not-awful human beings in the Democratic Party got punished for a phenomenon that owes more to media billionaires doing brand-management than anything actually political. And no again, it’s really not fair that ordinary American citizens will suffer under the tyrannical rule of a man whose second name is literally synonymous with butt-wind because of an ill-advised decision driven by a weird combination of emotionality and cynicism, but this is where western civilisation is at now, and somebody should have seen this coming way, way sooner. Luckily, I live in England, and not even one of the shit bits, so I don’t have to care! Moving on!

The ‘Brian Cox Bursting Naked from a Cake’ Award for Nicest Surprise… … Goes to the film The Substance, which people kept praising relentlessly at me but which I seriously doubted would be good. It looked a bit… how can I put this? It looked a bit like the kind of film someone would make if their previous experience with film-making was shouting their opinions through a megaphone while wearing the hollow shell of an analogue TV on their head. But then I actually got round to watching it and it turned out to be an absolute banger of a movie! Aside from embodying the mature, sometimes-ambivalent and reliably-thoughtful kind of feminism that most flicks in its political category eschew in favour of tawdry right-on whooping, it’s also just a gloriously surreal body-horror epic with fantastic visual design and a surprising sense of humour. More of this please, Hollywood!

The Best Song I’ve Discovered This Year Award… … Goes to Hey, I Don’t Work Here, by Tom Cardy, which actually came out two years ago but whose existence I was blithely unaware of until yesterday. I was listening to music on Youtube with my sister and it auto-played after another song and took me completely by surprise. To all intents and purposes, it’s just an Australian man in a grubby vest telling us how pissed off he is by people mistaking him for a shop assistant, life-guard and (ultimately) an ambassador to the stars for planet Earth. Somehow, it’s even more surreal than that description makes it sound. It’s a really bizarre song and, because it caught me off guard, it had me laughing like a fucking a lunatic. Of course, it wasn’t the only contender for this award and honourable mentions should also be made to helloworld.java by Nanowar of Steel, I am the Motherfucker by Rob U. Blind and Creepshow by Avantasia. None of them nearly made me pee myself laughing however, so Hey, I Don’t Work Here still takes the gold.

The ‘Bald Men Fighting Over a Comb’ Award for Stupidest Debate… … Still goes to the idiotic argument around AI-generated images and videos, since both sides manage to be complete fucking idiots in their own special ways. On the one hand, you’ve got a bunch of hooting tech bros who seem to think that you can replace the innate spark of human creativity with algorithms. These are the same clueless arseholes, incidentally, who keep proclaiming they’re within a few years of creating a genuinely sentient super-intelligent AI because they can’t tell the difference between simulated language proficiency and consciousness. On the other hand, you’ve got some of the whiniest motherfuckers on the planet who seem to think that AI art will make them – self-proclaimed artists that they are – obsolete. They also like to bang on about how it’s copyright infringement, because apparently the fact that an AI has to be trained on text and images that already exist is taking something away from them (spoiler warning: it isn’t, or, if it is, so is the learning process of every human writer and artist since the year dot). Well, gather round dipshits, because Uncle Diary’s gon’ drop some knowledge on y’all! First, AI can’t produce ‘art’, in any meaningful sense of the term. That’s partly because it recombinative, meaning it can only iterate on and blend what already exists, not conceive of genuinely new ideas, even when assisted with some very specific prompts, and its partly because AI has no desire to create art. It only does what you tell it, acting completely without a creative drive of its own. Since a key component of art is that genuine creative drive and, without it, all you have is ‘content’, the phrase ‘AI art’ is itself paradoxical and meaningless. So no, tech bros: your pet robots aren’t going to disrupt the creative sector and revolutionise the artworld. Second, nobody draws or writes or creates art the old-fashioned way because it’s convenient: the desire to master those skills to produce something uniquely your own is intrinsic and not reliant on if there’s a better option available. Case in point, I still draw by hand sometimes, even though I’m not even an artist and despite having image rendering tools at my disposal, simply because it’s a joy to bring something into being in that way. So no, ‘artists’ (and I’m so, so dubious that you are), your entire vocation isn’t going to be wiped from the surface of existence by the latest mod-con. Films didn’t magically replace books; television didn’t magically replace films; videogames didn’t magically replace television. Nor did pens replace pencils; nor did computer screens replace paper. And AI isn’t replacing shit either: it’s just another medium/tool for the box. Look, I use AI. Not to write with, because that would be cheating. I write to tell a story that’s uniquely my own and it wouldn’t be if I was dicking about inserting paragraphs shat out by a computer. But I do use it to help me design the front covers: I get it spit out individual assets based on my rubbish sketches, then collage them into something professional and coherent-looking by hand. The difference is that the covers aren’t ‘art’: they’re packaging, designed to catch the eye and grab your attention. I’m not a very good artist (and can’t afford to pay one), but I can do basic graphic design if a computer gives me the components. Here, AI is filling in a simple gap in my skillset so I can focus on the aspect of my work that actually matters. And that’s it. That’s what it’s good for: filling in gaps. Now stop acting like it’s a fucking paradigm shift, you dopey bloody ding-dongs. Anyway, speaking of AI…

The Skynet Award for Most Spookily Overpowered AI Tool... … This years goes to Pixverse, an AI video generator that I find genuinely a little scary. There’s a free tier that lets you generate a couple of videos a day, and it’s an absolute trip. I’ve been mucking about with this stuff for fun for a couple of years now, and this thing honestly caught me off guard: it can maintain consistent characters and art styles, work from still images instead of just text without sacrificing movement, and whatever LLM it’s using to interpret prompts is freakishly good at working out what I want compared to earlier generators. It can even extend the video-clips it spits out into longer, more detailed mini-videos, though the detail and graphical fidelity do suffer after a couple of extensions. Now, can you do anything useful with it? Fuck no. It would be insane to try making a movie or something using this, unless (once again) you’re just filling in some gaps that would otherwise be plugged with traditional CGI. It’s not about to revolutionise anything is the point. But is it a really fun toy to play around with? Yes. Yes it is. Plus, I guess I can use it to cobble together a short video advertising my next book…

The Half-Price LSD Award For Best Use of Your Money… … Goes to Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, which was well worth the price of a cinema ticket. Actually, that’s really selling it short, so let me try again: this was probably the most fun I’ve had at the pictures this year. It reminded me what going to the movies used to feel like, before every fucking thing to slop out of Hollywood started taking itself too seriously, replacing wit with ‘irony’, or pitching its tent on one side of the other of the culture war (fuck off, I’m not capitalising something that idiotic). It was just a really fun movie made by people who clearly know a lot about making movies and were basically given the kind of budget the original flick would have killed for. Sorry, there’s not many jokes here: it’s just a good movie and deserved a shout-out.

The ‘Going for a Shit and Laying a Quail’s Egg Instead’ Award for Most Confusing Disappointment… … Goes to the new Labour Government that my country recently voted in. They’re clearly, clearly a vast improvement over the Tories, simply by dint of the fact they kinda know what they’re doing and a full-sized human turd in a party-hat would be a vast improvement over the Tories. That said, they haven’t exactly been looking out for people the way a Labour Government is supposed to: they’ve cut fuel credits to the elderly and have farted about refusing to cancel other benefit cuts threatened by the previous administration. It’s all a bit sad and disappointing. Still, at least they’ve put up the minimum wage. A bit. So yay?

The ‘Mahatma Gandhi Molesting a Pie’ Award for Most WTF Sex Allegation… … Goes to Neil Gaiman, or possibly to the allegations made about him by assorted fans and ex-partners. According to those allegations, he engaged in the sexual abuse of various women in the more recent years of his career and, at one point, tried to straight-up rape his baby-sitter (EDIT: I’ve just read that sentence back, and should explain that I mean his son’s babysitter. 64 year old Neil Gaiman doesn’t, at this stage, still require babysitting). He also made a lot of people call him ‘Master’, but that isn’t actually a crime: that’s just insisting on the acknowledgement of your academic credentials, much as Doctor Evil didn’t spend six years at Evil Medical School to be called ‘Mister’. Gaiman’s defence against the allegations is interesting: while he outright denies some of them, others he says did happen but were fully consensual, which would mean absolutely nothing, except that he apparently has the text-messages to prove it archived on his phone. Text messages between two consenting adults looking forward to doing it all again. Except, of course, he doesn’t have text messages or alibis for all the accusations. So… did Neil molest some people but not others, leading to a situation where jurors will one day have to sift through reams of allegations to sort out the genuine from the exaggerated, distorted or falsified? Did he do all of it and somehow contrive to trick some of his victims into sexting him as protection from future legal proceedings? Is he actually completely innocent – a victim of his own renown so that, once the bandwagon got rolling, a lot of people wanted to jump on it? That’s really beyond the scope of this blog to answer. The real point of this ‘award’ (is that even the right word at this point?) is to take a moment to appreciate how bizarre and unlikely the current state of affairs is. I mean, it’s Neil fucking Gaiman, the most milquetoast, overly-polite, liberal opinion-haver on the internet! Neil fucking Gaiman, who wrote The Sandman, which is probably the greatest graphic novel series of all time. Neil fucking Gaiman, who spends half his time on Tumblr encouraging people to ‘make good art’. Whether he Did The Thing or not, the mere fact he’s been accused is monumentally surreal. It’s like waking up one morning to find out that Keanu Reeves has been accused of shitting in pensioners’ birthday cakes for fun and profit (although, to be clear, Keanu Reeves definitely hasn’t done that).

The Arriving Late and Being Shunned by Civilised Society Award… ...Goes to this blog entry, which I honestly did start writing in 2024. It’s now 2025. And that’s embarrassing.

Until next time I can be bothered to write something, go forth into the world and be yourselves. Do whatever makes you happy. Unless it involves shitting in cakes or sexual misconduct. Don’t do those things. Neil, I’m looking at you: I REPEAT, DON’T DO THOSE THINGS.

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Announcing Small Infinities: The Physical Edition

As some of you may know, about a year ago, Culture Matters released my first collection of short stories, Small Infinities as a downloadable eBook. It attracted praise from everyone from T.S. Eliot Award short-lister and internationally acclaimed poet Fran Lock to Royal Literary Fellow Charlie Hill. Lock even wrote the book's CM introduction, which was a massive boon to its promotion. However, CM don't always have the resources to put out physical editions of their books. Thus, they were kind enough to let me do it myself. It's a little unusual for a book that already has a publisher to get a self-published version, but I am in all things an innovator and here we are, speeding towards Xmas 2024, and you can now buy Small Infinities as a lovely paper-and-ink brick instead of just a stream of conveniently-arranged 1s and 0s in the aether.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY ONLINE BOOKSTORE THINGY!

OR COPY-PASTE THIS WEB ADDRESS: https://www.lulu.com/shop/paul-victor-tims/small-infinities/paperback/product-p67djmm.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Whether you've read Small Infinities before and want a version you can cram on your book shelf or your new to the polymorphous infinity of my fictive cosmology, there's never been a better time waste your hard-earned time and money on a copy. The new edition features an improved cover design, all twelve original stories and an in-depth Notes and Commentaries section explaining how each one came to be. For more information, here's the blurb:

Small Infinities isn’t just the book that reinvented science fiction, fantasy and horror for a broken and confused generation: it’s also the gateway to the lifestyle YOU deserve! With just three weeks of regular reading, Small Infinities will help you alienate your friends, gain weight and destroy your career, all without leaving the comfort of your own home. But don’t take our word for it! Check out these testimonials from some of our most surviving readers!

“I used to be a high-flying businessman with the world at my feet. Now I’m sitting in the toilets at Clapham Common eating ramen out of a shoe. Thanks, Small Infinities!” - Sebastian Fimblewicket, Central London.

“Drugs don’t usually effect me, but I smoked one page of this book and now I can taste colours!” - Baz ‘Hoopy’ Plucker, Stoke-on-Trent.

“Ever since reading Small Infinities, I’ve become irresistible to members of the opposite sex. They’re hunting me even as we speak, scenting me out across the deserts of Dungeness and the ruins of Canterbury. I’ve been forced to abandon my old life and move to [REDACTED], surrounded by miles of wilderness just to stay alive. And it’s all thanks to this amazing book!” - Quentin Quivers, Undisclosed Location.

This incredible, easy-to-eat volume contains everything from the secrets of enlightenment to sarcastic ghosts; from screaming alien horrors trying to be your friend to magician gangsters having violent sex in dirty flats... And it WILL change your life!* Don’t miss out, get your copy today, while the ink’s still wet and slightly poisonous!

*Not necessarily for the better.

Once again, if it sounds like your sort of thing (or you just need a book that's heavy enough to use as a murder weapon, you can find the answer to all your hopes and dreams right here:

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Okay, I don't really buy into these things, cute though they are. But hey, it can't hurt and even if it does diddly-squat, I've still got a cute dog on my dashboard, so I'd only be a fool to myself not to go for it.

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WARNING: IT LOOKS LIKE ELEVENLABS ARE TRYING TO SCAM THEIR FREE USERS

LEGAL BIT: Obviously, I can't make the claim that a large company like Elevenlabs are running an actual, legally-definable con without some clarification. I SUSPECT they're up to some shady shit, but you should read the assertions in the main article as forceful supposition not fact. I do not know them to be fact for certain and cannot claim otherwise. That said, you're not stupid and you can draw your own conclusions. Right, that's my arse covered. Now for the main article.

A lot of small creators nowadays use text-to-voice software to create narration for videos and other projects. I know, because I’m one of them. If you’re not well-off and live in a noisy or hectic environment, these newfangled text-to-voice thingies are an absolute lifesaver. Audio equipment broke down and you can’t afford to replace it? Text-to-voice is the best alternative you’re going to find at short notice. Trying to create content on a noisy council estate, in a busy local cafe or in your car between running errands? Text-to-voice means you don’t have to worry about background sounds. Just too tired to get your words out without turning them into verbal salad? Text-to-motherfucking-voice will see you reet, dawg. And, if you’re looking for TtV software to start a project, you’ll probably come across, and be very tempted by, Elevenlabs. They look great. They use cutting-edge AI to infer emotional tone, so when they read out the script you wrote, it sounds like an actual human is doing it. They have a solid selection of voices to choose from. And best of all, they offer a free plan with 10,000 characters per month, which isn’t a lot but is a real gift for creators who can’t afford to paid subscriptions. Sounds cushty, right? WRONG. Don’t make my mistakes. Don’t have anything to do with these fucking scamlords.

See, the problem is that creators on the ‘free’ subscription tier keep getting locked out of voice generation with a message that tells them ‘unusual activity has been detected’ and ‘the only way to regain access to voice generation is to upgrade to a paid subscription’. Now, Elevenlabs claim they’re trying to block people from using multiple accounts and that this is a necessary security measure. It isn’t. It can happen to anyone at any time, including first-time users who have never been near the site before, people who did have another free account but haven’t used it months because they lost the password (yo) and people who are just trying to create an account on the same computer as their friends or family. It doesn’t often trigger when a new account is created either, but often waits and springs the message and lockout on users who have been logging in and using the site a few times a day for awhile, essentially ambushing people mid-project. I know, because it’s exactly what happened to me. It basically means that, if you’re partway through a project that needs multiple narration files, you can either pay up or be forced to start over. And no, you can’t just create a new account, because the invasive bastards trace your IP address.

Let me spell it out for you: ELEVENLABS IS HOLDING THEIR FREE USERS PROJECTS TO RANSOM. IF YOU DON’T PAY THEM, YOUR WORK GETS LEFT UNFINISHED. THIS IS A SCAM. THEY ARE DELIBERATELY CREATING A SITUATION WHERE PEOPLE ON THE FREE SUBSCRIPTION TIER WILL BE FORCED TO PAY TO FINISH WORK THEY’VE STARTED.

At first, I thought it was just me being luckless with technology, but a quick google revealed dozens of similar stories littering Reddit and teh messageboards.

Now, it’s one thing for a software-as-a-service company not to offer a free tier. That’s their prerogative and, if you know you can’t afford a paid subscription, you just don’t sign up with those companies. It’s a completely different thing for a company to lure in users with a free subscription tier, then lock them out of their own work in the hope of extorting funds from them.

If you’re a creator and you’re thinking of signing up with Elevenlabs: don’t. They will rip you off.

If you’re a creator and you already have a free account with Elevenlabs: finish what you’re working on and then delete it. Or you will get ripped off.

If you’re a creator and you have a paid account with Elevenlabs: finish what you’re working on and then delete it. If they’re fucking over the free users now, it’s only a matter of time before they start fucking over their paying customers. That’s how companies work: if they think they can get away with something and it’ll yield a quick buck, they’ll fucking do it. Don’t be standing near them when the shit hits the fan.

If you’re not a creator, or you just don’t use TtV software, spread the word anyway. Because if you can’t benefit from a heads up, maybe your friends or their friends can. And also because fuck Elevenlabs for getting greedy and trying to scam their own users.

EDIT: I've somehow gotten back onto the site without any login credentials due to what appears to be a glitch. It looks like their knobby little "fuck you pay us" message actually triggered some sort of system error that allowed me to sneak back on unsuspected. Gotta hand it to corpo types. When they shoot themselves in the foot, they use a giant fuck-off space laser.

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I felt impelled to reblog because I'm a sci-fi and fantasy writer at the start of my career. I've had a collection of short stories out with Culture Matters and I've got a proper novel coming out with X Press later this year. I'm reading at a literary festival in Birmingham later this year. I'm flashing my credentials here so you know that I know what I'm talking about. Ahem. MODERN WRITING ADVICE IS ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS. People love beautiful language. They love well-crafted, fully-realised lore. They love worlds that feel distinct and alien compared to our own. Nobody minds an info-dump if the info you're dumping is interesting. Nobody minds a character with five different names if it makes sense in context and adds to the texture of your world. Nobody gives a shit if you want to spend three pages describing a mountain range if your prose fucking sings. Want to add little extras at the end of your book so people can dive deeper into the parts of the world that aren't directly touched by the plot? Freakin' go for it, bro (and/or broette). The readers who don't care will skip it and not mind that it's there and the ones who do care will be overjoyed to have bonus material. Look, a lot of modern writing advice is about making stories as marketable as possible; about making them as aggressively readable and unchallenging as possible for a mass audience. But that's not how great literature gets written. At some point, as a writer, you need to make a decision: do you want to be read and forgotten by as many people as possible, or do you want to be read and remembered by a small, loyal readership who actually connect to what you're saying. There's nothing wrong with disposable entertainment, but it's not all that there is, regardless of what the logics of late-stage capitalism might claim to the contrary.

Modern Writing Advice: don't load your readers down with a bunch of different names! Keep things simple so they can remember what you're talking about.

JR²T Himself: And here are these three mountains. Now listen to Gimli wax poetic about them and their names and histories in three different languages, then refer to the Extra Educational Material at the end of your volume to see what he's talking about.

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The Tories Are Out of Power At Last! Thank Fuck For That!

Good news has been pretty thin on the ground lately. Climate change, the wanton destruction of the arable land we need to survive, slow-motion population collapse and the continuing not-good-enoughness of Doctor Who have all contrived to make it feel like we’re living at the end of the world. We’re not. We’ll come within a hair’s breadth of total systemic failure and then finally think to ourselves “oh yeah! We have technological solutions for all of this shit just gathering dust! Maybe we should implement them” and pull our arses out of the fire with literal seconds to spare, like we always do. Because we’re fucking idiots and it’s amazing we ever got as far as inventing fire. The point is, though, that we could all use a win right now, and my country just got one, in the form of the General Election. That’s right! Yesterday, Britain went to the polls and finally said “Okay, enough of this bullshit!” and voted out the monsters who have been making life progressively worse for everyone for a decade and a half.

For those of you who don’t live in Britain and weren’t paying attention, what I mean is that the Conservative Party got booted out of power and replaced with New Labour (in the person of new Prime Minister Keir Starmer). Now, it’s very hard to get excited about Keir being in charge, because he’s basically an unflavoured block of budget margarine sculpted into a vague man-shape by an unskilled and uncaring wizard. He’s essentially inoffensive in the grand scheme of things. However, he’s also a marked improvement on any Tory and particularly Rishi Sunak, a psychopathic urinary condition in a suit. The whole Conservative Party is a basically just a cavalcade of murderous, unrepentant torturers and serial killers whose policies are geared entirely towards short-term personal profit at the cost of countless human lives. We’re talking about a group of irredeemable maniacs who have spent nearly fifteen years defunding the NHS (the social healthcare system that keeps us all alive), turning away leaky rafts full of desperate asylum seekers (and thereby condemning the, directly, to death), trying to replace the disability benefits on which the most vulnerable depend with fucking vouchers and drafting legislation to let them spy on the bank accounts of people surviving on social securities (while taking the word of multi-billionaires that they don’t owe any tax, honest). The nature of evil is a hotly debated topic among philosophers and psychologists, but nobody who’s lived in Britain for the past few electoral cycles and possesses both a heart and a brain needs to debate it: we’ve fucking lived under it. So yes, I am overjoyed to see the back of the pricks. My hatred of the Conservatives runs deep and I’d cheer for pretty much anyone scoring a victory over those inbred, fatuous, vacuous, toffee-nosed, vile, slithering, subhuman reptiles and the system of callous profiteering they represent. When I heard, this morning, that Britain was finally free of the monsters and the constant threat they posed to the lives of the poor, I felt as though a literal weight had been lifted. I’m not being hyperbolic: I actually felt a physical change, as though some part of me had been under pressure, struggling against the crushing mass of governmental incompetence and malice that hung, eternally, over my head.

Of course, none of this is to say I think Britain is about to magically become a better place. The same people who just voted the Tories out also voted them in in the first, and they’re not giving them the bum’s rush now because they’ve suddenly become better people and realised that electing sociopaths is wrong. They’ve just noticed that their groceries are costing more and drawn the inescapable conclusion that voting for morons with no economic management skills was a mistake. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s Labour is not the same animal as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. If Labour had been voted into power with Corbyn at its head, we might actually have seen some repairs made to the country I… well, I was about to say ‘country I love’, but ‘country I have to live in and slightly prefer to America on the notional level’. But Keir’s not really in the political game to make the world a better place. I don’t actually know what he wants. Functionally, he’s just a placeholder: the Westminster equivalent of a paper plate with a face drawn on it and a developer’s sticky note saying “ACTUAL PRIME MINISTER GOES HERE”. I’m happy he’s in charge instead of any member of the Conservative party, but not because he’ll make things better. I’m just pleased he won’t make things worse. For the next five years, my country will stay exactly as shit as it already is instead of sliding into greater depths of rudderless villainy. I’m also ecstatic because the evil cunts who have been trying to kill me and the people I care about for a 1.5 decades have just been told, roundly, to fuck off, and because they’re such overprivileged wankers, I have to assume that came as a terrible shock to them. So that’s something to celebrate.

Look, if all this seems a little dour for a ‘celebration’ blog post… it is. The people of Britain were offered something better than the current administration and took it, and that’s a cause for joy. However, the thing they were offered, while infinitely preferable to the Cuntservatives, still wasn’t that great, so our joy has to be tempered a little.

Here’s to at least five years of basically acceptable and mercifully ineffectual government.

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I Saw the TV Glow Review (Weirdly, It Works Better Without Subtext)

SPOILER ALERT

ALSO TRIGGER WARNING: Gender Dysphoria, Depression, 90s Television, Kid’s Parties, Rishi Sunak, Skittles (and the repackaging thereof), Unaliving Oneself onstage with a Prop, Ontological Dread and Birds Flying Into Windows.

So, there’s a bit of a buzz about I Saw the TV Glow in cult cinephile circles, and I’m a bit glad about that because it’s a genuinely interesting film and we don’t see genuinely interesting films get the attention they deserve very often. Note, however, that I said “attention” not “praise”. That’ll be important later. So… why is everyone talking about this film (and by ‘everyone’, I mean ‘like, maybe, me and eight other snooty movie weirdos’)? Well, we’ll get there, but first let me lay out the plot for you: protagonist Owen is a socially-awkward, doesn’t-fit-in-anywhere boy right out of the mumblecore ‘90s Indie Cinema Playbook and, during his middle-school years, he befriends a lass called Maddy (though ‘befriends’ might be wrong word for the weird codependence they strike up) and she introduces him to a show called The Pink Opaque: a dark, disturbing, supernaturally-inflected TV show about two psychic friends who fight ‘Mr. Melancholy’ (a sinister occult psychopath with a moon for a face- just go with it). Ostensibly, The Pink Opaque is meant to be for kids, but from the beginning, there’s something very obviously not quite right about it. Weirder still, when Maddy disappears in a doomed bid to find herself, the show gets cancelled, almost as if it was a part of her. Fast-forward, via a few narrative leaps and bounds, to Owen’s adulthood and Maddy reappears, claiming to have been inside the show, which is actually reality. She and Owen, she asserts, are the main characters from the programme and Mr. Melancholy has sent their minds to the ‘Midnight Realm’ of their present, false reality. In order to escape, they need to bury themselves alive, because that’s what’s happening to their real bodies and it’ll reestablish the connection (I’m adding the technobabble, by the way: the phrasing in the movie is nowhere near that logical or concise). Spoiler alert: Maddy does this and then vanishes from the plot, Owen doesn’t and we see him grow old, trapped in his own personal suburban nightmare… right up until the end of the film, where we see him leaving his place of work in a manner very open to interpretation. Is he finally about to wise up and go bury himself in order to emerge renewed, or is he just going home for a cuppa, a biscuit and a long overdue review of his mental health medication?

Now, clearly, all that sounds like a real fucking trip of a movie, but that’s not why it’s generating buzz. See, Maddy believes that she and Owen are the two main characters from The Pink Opaque, but both of those characters are female. Owen, as you can tell from the fact he’s called Owen, is not. Thus, the flick has been interpreted as a metaphor for gender dysphoria and the process of transitioning/ the decision not to. There’s a lot of allusions to Owen feeling like there’s something wrong with him (on one level reality) and feeling like he’s being buried alive and is dying while, er, that’s literally what’s happening to his meta-self on the Pink Opaque level of reality. There’s a bit where he has a break-down at a kid’s party and screams “HELP ME! I’M LITERALLY DYING RIGHT NOW!” Although, in fairness, kids’ parties make me feel like that too and I’m not even remotely trans. The point is, it’s a film with a big, fat, capital-I Issue at its centre, which has given people a license to enjoy it despite the fact it’s weird, schlocky, neon-doused pulp of the highest order. And, fair play to people suffering with gender dysphoria, if this film really speaks to you, you go right the fuck ahead and enjoy it on that level. But (and here I’m about to piss off the entire internet), I actually think it works a lot better if you just take it completely fucking literally. Like, forget the metaphorical nonsense and focus on the actual plot and it instantly becomes one of the best and most upsetting horror films of the last five years. Try and draw real-life parallels, however, and it starts to seem a bit overwrought and melodramatic.

Right. Time to try and explain what I mean without upsetting anyone more than I already have (please don’t send me hate-mail: I don’t read it and you’ll just give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome, which, trust me, is a bitch). It’s pretty obvious that there’s something wrong with the world Owen and Maddy inhabit from the get-go. The school they go to as sprogs is called Void High School, which (aside from having the initials VHS) is also just NOT A REAL NAME FOR A PLACE, and it has really creepy, weird text on its message boards in place of the usual papers and kids drawings (one strip that caught my eye, rendered in stark black-on-yellow font, simply reads ‘PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY’). There’s a supermarket that just seems like a giant, sprawling liminal space devoid of people. Characters from The Pink Opaque show-within-a-film get referenced in places that have nothing to do with the show. Daytime, though it never vanishes altogether, seems to become less and less frequent as though the characters are sinking into the deepening night of impending death. Characters who should be key to the protagonists formative years have no dialogue at all, as though they’re just set dressing in a shared delusion. The lore of The Pink Opaque shifts, so that the characters memories cease to align with the show itself, just (it seems) to fuck with them. And, creepiest of all, Owen has to continually narrate his own life straight to camera, like he might forget who and what he is and come unmoored from reality if he doesn’t constantly tell the story. As the clues stack up and the evidence becomes more and more incontrovertible, the realisation slowly dawns: this is not madness. This is not too mixed-up kids bonding over a crappy horror show on TV. This is the story of a person condemned to a slow, humiliating false life by a vengeful cosmic entity while their real body dies in a freshly-dug grave on another level of reality. In that context, the existence of the show The Pink Opaque, is their oxygen-deprived brain trying to warn them to get up! GET UP NOW! YOU ARE DYING! GET UP! And that’s genuinely terrifying. “What if reality isn’t reality?” is already one of the most disturbing questions you can ask yourself. Add to that the questions of “Who is perpetrating reality against you?”, “Why are they doing?” and “What if the real me is dying while this happens?” and you’ve got some pure, solipsistic, philosophical nightmare fuel to keep you up at night!

The gender dysphoria interpretation, in contrast, is probably the intended interpretation, but if you focus too much on that, it makes the whole thing feel a bit, well… silly. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure gender dysphoria is very, very unpleasant. I’m sure being trapped in the wrong body and not knowing how to express the all-pervading feeling of wrongness is one of the most traumatic things a human being can go through. However, none of the trans people I know in real life have ever collapsed onto the floor in their place of work to scream “I’M LITERALLY DYING RIGHT NOW!” (although my sort-of-adopted trans daughter did once call me after a night of heavy drinking to claim “I’m sober now! I’m just putting these skittles back in their packet!” like it was the dexterity-challenge of the century and somehow proved something. That has nothing to do with this review, I just thought it was funny and that you’d like to know it happened). Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has burying oneself alive and popping back up out of the dirt like a jack-in-the-box ever been considered a useful, therapeutic part of the gender reassignment process. Meanwhile, Owen’s life isn’t just a bit constricting and mediocre, it’s downright oppressive, devoid of even the most fleeting moments of joy, and his only meaningful emotional connection is with someone who fucks off for a decade at a time and reappears claiming to have been living inside a TV show. Nobody could be that miserable all the time, even if they tried. Think about how long human beings live: the number of years and the number of days in each year and the number of hours in each day and the number of minutes in each hour. At the very least, at some point in all that, you’d accidentally catch a Monty Python rerun or see a bird fly into a window and then try and strut off like nothing happened and then… Whoops! You’re laughing like a fucking idiot and your perfect record of being resolutely unhappy is completely fucking ruined, you loser. My point is that, as a metaphor, I Saw the TV Glow feels a little hammy: like an actor beating his chest and wailing to express grief, possibly before committing fake-sepuku with a very obviously cardboard knife. But if you forget it’s a metaphor and remember that Owen’s life is so unremittingly miserable because it was created to be unremittingly miserable by a cosmic entity of terrifying malevolence and power, suddenly it all makes sense… and scares you badly enough to keep you up all night worrying that maybe we’re all trapped by Mr. Melancholy… or Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as we call him here in the dystopian wasteland that used to be Great Britain.

Anyway, I recommend I Saw the TV Glow. It’s stylish, weird, quite clever (though not as clever as it clearly thinks it is) and, frankly, some of the visuals have to be seen to be believed (the monster of the week made of melting ice-cream, for example, is the kind of thing that you’d normally have to neck quite a lot of absinth to see, but the film-makers have brought it to life here so that you don’t have to and, consequently, your liver won’t start to hate you like an abused spouse).

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I'm... not convinced Red Dwarf's early and ongoing homoeroticism is 'accidental'.

love the inherent homoeroticism accidentally created by cramming two actors in a tiny ass set bc the show's budget is five cents and a used bottle cap. So many scenes in early dwarf are just rimmer and lister piled on top of each other so they're both neatly in frame.

It's so funny... Like you are on a ship the size of a country. Why are you still sharing a room the size of a shoebox?? Brushing shoulders so much?? Constantly inches from each others faces??

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So... Ahem... This is Embarrassing...

So, y'all may recall I made a big production of having lost my password last night and that I might have replace Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer with a new blog as a result. Well, I'd gotten as far as filling out the little 'I lost my Password please help form' that the staff use to decide if they can give you access to your account again. I'd even created Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer 2 as a backup. And then I remembered my fucking password. Or rather, I realised that the Tumblr password protection thing shows all passwords as being ten characters long even if they're not and so started trying passwords that aren't ten characters long. I guessed what yester-me was thinking on the second try. So... unless the staff get the wrong end of the stick and boot me out, this blog is NOT going anyway.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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The Last Blog (Possibly)

Well, bugger me. My password is irretrievably lost and I no longer have the email address where Tumblr would send the reset code. Bollocks, bollocks, bollock, a thousand times bollocks. Now, this hasn't been a problem until this point, because I've just stayed logged in on the same computer for years. The issue is that this computer is on its way out, so I need my login credentials to access my account on future devices. The only chance I have of getting said login credentials is to fill in an account recovery form on the Tumblr help page. And in order to do that, I first need to bite the bullet and log out. There's a chance it won't work and I'll simply never be able to post anything to Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer again. If that happens, keep yer eyes peeled for Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer 2. And yes, I am going to call it that, like it's the sequel to a movie nobody liked or some shit. However, there's a very real possibility that this will be goodbye, so long, farewell for this blog. I'd therefore like to leave you with the greatest piece of advice I've ever heard or read: something to send you on your way with a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts. Unfortunately, I've forgotten what it was, so you'll just have to sod off. Bye-bye. Don't let the door hit you in the arse on your way out.