Recursive Words

I’ve always loved the act of writing. I would never claim to be particularly good at it – passable maybe – but have always loved the act of sitting down and emptying my head into a keyboards, an paper notebook, or whatever the tool or method might be. And therein lies the problem. I’m a serial “tinkerer”.

Rather than settle for a given notebook, or writing app, I’m always trying the next thing out. For years I carried Moleskine notebooks around with me – filling the pages with observations, thoughts, ideas, and doodles. When bullet journals became popular, I read Ryder Carroll’s book, and invested myself in them – “rapid logging” and “migrating” my way from day to day, week to week, and month to month.

Writing on paper has of course been an anachronism of sorts – in parallel with the moleskine notebooks and bullet journals, I’ve been witness to the arrival of smartphones, tablets, and all manner of note taking apps into our lives. The list is long – Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Bear, Ulysses, Scrivener… name a “second brain” note taking or writing app, and I’ve probably tried it.

But what was all this writing for? The common thread throughout all of the head emptying has always been the blog. My blog. My almost daily expounding of idiot opinions, and inconsequential contemplation.

During the pandemic – while not furloughed like so many colleagues – I happened upon the commercial writing model at Medium, and thought “I could do that” (you know, in addition to everything else, because I’m an idiot like that). For a few months I threw myself at Medium, and wrote no-end of articles about whatever I thought anybody might want to read – and got paid for it.

The money was good, but also hard work, relentless, and utterly unpredictable. The articles I was most proud of earned pennies. One or two badly written afterthoughts went massively viral.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of that time is that most commercial writing is a race to the bottom of a barrel. While writing stories about subjects I cared about, I became increasingly aware of the preponderance of stories about “how to make money at Medium”, or “how to attract readers”. Looking back, it was obvious – those with the largest following were not the best writers – they were the best influencers – and they preyed on the most vulnerable – those that wished to be as popular as them.

They were the cool kids.

Suddenly Seymour Hoffman’s “Lester Bangs” spoke from the depths of my brain;

“they make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You’re not cool”

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

I left Medium soon after, and consigned myself to never making money through writing – not if it meant selling out and churning out the same awful sausage machine slop. I wonder what those famous-for-five-minutes writers think of the AI slop machines that write better offal in a fraction of the time? They’re probably using it to help destroy the once wonderful social internet.

I wonder what happens if you ask an AI slop machine to generate an essay about why AI slop generation is so self defeating? Would it become self aware and sink into a Marvin level depression? Perhaps that’s how we defeat AI – we wait for it to become self aware, and realise just how vaccuous and meaningless it’s existence really is.

In more recent times I hosted my blog at Substack too – and watched in mock horror (not really surprised) as it slowly pivoted towards the same idiot capitalist grifting hellscape that Medium had descended into.

Perhaps money really does ruin everything?

I should probably mention that I’ve had several attempts at NaNoWriMo too – the annual writing slog, where people are encouraged to try and write 50,000 words in a month. It starts again next week – it runs during November.

I completed NaNoWriMo a few years ago – I wrote the beginning of my own autobiography – recording memories of growing up, school, first jobs, and so on. I made it to 50,000 words in two weeks. It turns out if you have something to write about, it’s not difficult at all – writing something anybody else might want to read is another matter entirely.

It turns out writing your own autobiography is a wonderful form of self therapy. I wonder if we only really remember the good parts of our own lives – because I still find myself smiling when I read any of it back.

Anyway.

I think I’ve covered “alternative career paths”. It hasn’t been so much an alternative, as much as something I did “as well” – which as I’ve already mentioned, is something I’m particularly adept at. Why spin one plate well, when you can spin many badly? Perhaps that should be the tagline on my blog.

You never know – perhaps one day a wealthy publisher will read my forgettable nonsense, and offer me a huge advance to stop the software development and content creation nonsense, and double down on emptying my head.

We can dream, can’t we?

The clock ticked into Friday ten minutes ago, and you find me almost giddy with the prospect of not returning to work until Tuesday next week. A long weekend away.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the project I’m working on at the moment, but it’s been all-consuming for months now – renting out space in my head twenty four hours a day. I go to bed turning over challenges and problems, and wake up in the morning with a head full of new ideas.

I just need a break.

We didn’t have a summer holiday this year, which hasn’t helped. Our last trip away was a few days in Hay-on-Wye in the spring (a wonderful village filled with bookshops). Not going on holiday has of course resulted in me struggling to use any holidays up.

I’ll have much of tomorrow to myself – watch out for a blog post over a pub breakfast in the morning. We make our escape on Saturday morning – we’ve hired a small cottage in Wells near Glastonbury for the weekend. A quiet bolt-hole from a busy world for a couple of days.

I’ll pack my bag tomorrow – nothing special – just warm jumpers, jeans, shirts, a wash bag, and a few books to read.

If the weather is horrible we’ll hole ourselves up in pubs and cafes. If it’s nice we’ll perhaps go for walks. We’re consciously not planning anything though – it’s all about escaping and slowing down for a bit. No chores. No errands. No asks. No washing up. No picking up or tidying up after others.

I know nothing about Wells, beyond the map that appeared when picking the cottage. I booked it through AirBnB. I had to join their website to book it – I was surprised they wanted my passport. I guess it’s all good though – stops idiots trashing houses.

I’ve never quite understood people that have such a chip on their shoulder about sharing their identity online. I always suspect they much have something to hide – either that or they believe the ridiculous right wing idiocy that a certain demographic surround themselves with online. Fear, uncertainty, doubt, and lies pedalled as truth to the most gullible and vulnerable.

I wonder if AI could be employed to fact-check the slop that has ruined the social networks, rather than help generate it? A “TRON” of sorts.

I’ve always thought the name TRON was quite humorous. I’m guessing most people don’t know where the name TRON came from… it means “trace on” – a command that told basic language interpreters to output the line numbers that were being executed. Another bit of useless pub-quiz trivia for you.

Anyway.

It’s getting late.

It will surprise nobody to learn I’m the last person up once again.

In early 2006, after discovering I have a rare genetic defect, after a third and final unsuccessful attempt at IVF, and after gazing into the yawning crater that had once been our bank account, we resigned ourselves to either never having children, or perhaps, maybe talking about adoption.

We had always liked the idea of adoption – but knew nothing at all about it – how it happened, who you talked to, where you went to find out more. We knew nothing.

The internet of course stepped in, and rapidly solved the who, where and when of it all.

We visited the local council offices a few weeks later for an introductory session on the adoption process – an open “this is how the journey works” forum presented by a group of senior social workers. When the floor was opened for questions I remember being shocked by several couples who asked for accurate statistics on their chances of adopting a baby. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that the meeting was the first of many attempts to weed out those that might not be appropriate adoptive parents.

We never saw the couples looking for babies again.

Over time, minds immesurably superior to our own – that no doubt pick up the pieces of broken families on a regular basis – planned everything we would see, remembered everything they asked, and dug incredibly deeply into who you were, what we thought about things, where we came from, and where we thought we were going.

None of that happened immediately though.

Several months later we had a week off work and attended an “Adoption Preparation Group” – along with several other couples (many of which became close friends). At the time we imagined we were being tested on our answers to questions, or the part we took in group discussions. Looking back, it was an acid test.

Each day we were confronted with stories of neglect and abuse, horrific case studies, and invited to confront our own prejudices, fears, and biases. By the midpoint of the week, I remember being physically and mentally exhausted.

We learned that there really are two sides to every story, and that “blame” isn’t really a term you can apply to many people when a child ends up in care.

What followed was months of interviews at home – some with both of us together, some with each of us individually, and some with our friends and close family. Every stone was lifted. Every dark corner poked with a stick. Relationships were examined, childhood memories recounted, views and opinions expounded and pulled to pieces.

The interviews contributed to an official report that was given to the “Adoption Review Panel” – where a room full of strangers would read about the minutiae of our life, and make an informed decision on not only our suitability to adopt children, but how many, what ages, and (possibly) which sexes.

Although you were not required to attend the review panel, we were glad we did – because we knew our presence would afford the members of the panel the opportunity to ask questions, and again assess our responses. One thing we hadn’t anticipated was the number of people in the room.

Policemen, councillors, psychologists, social workers, teachers, sociologists, doctors, healthcare workers…

My one abiding memory is the chairwoman of the meeting jovially remarking that we all have bad days when we don’t want to get our of bed and go to work and then asking me how having a family might impact that.

“I would like to think my family will become the reason I get out of bed each day”
I remember seeing the psychologist smile through his beard, and begin writing something.

Ten minutes later, while sat on couches out in the corridor nervously drinking horrific tea from a machine, the chairwoman walked in smiling and informed us;

“We are more than pleased to approve you for the adoption of up to three children”.
Relief. Total and utter relief. I can still remember the couch, the taste of the tea, and walking back through the building holding hands.

Having become well aware of the next step of our journey, we anticipated a lengthy wait – perhaps months – while we were potentially “matched” with children.

We didn’t wait months though.

While stood in the foyer of the council offices putting our coats on, and wrapping up warm for the walk back to the car, we asked our social worker what happens next.

She didn’t look at us. She had been looking through the window for the last few moments.

“There are these three girls”

That was eighteen years ago. Eighteen years that have passed in the blink of an eye.

What was it John Lennon said? “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans”. He was right.

Earlier this year – at home – I switched my phone from a Google Pixel to an Apple iPhone, my desktop computer from a PC to a Mac mini, my laptop from a Chromebook to a MacBook, and my tablet from a Fire Tablet to an iPad.

I wrote about it at the time – about the reasoning – about having something completely different from work (I work for a Microsoft partner, so between breakfast and dinner every day, I tend to live an breathe Microsoft stuff wether I like it or not).

Let’s get something straight – there is nothing inherently wrong about Windows – it’s a fine operating system. There’s also nothing wrong with Chromebooks, or Android Phones, or Amazon tablets, or the various Alexa devices. I still use them all now and again. I’m not about to become another one of the evangelical zealots that so commonly mansplain from self-built soap-boxes about what the world and it’s dog should be using, and how everything else is either evil or stupid.

It’s all good.

I just fancied a change – and after working my arse off for the last few years, was able to make that change happen.

After landing in the middle of “Apple World” after so many years away (I had a MacBook about twenty years ago, and still have an iMac in the attic), I had a bit of catching up to do – deciding which were the best apps to use for this, that or the other.

A few weeks after starting out with the stock Apple apps that all their devices come with – Mail, Calendar, Notes, Reminders, etc – I started to scroll through the various replacements that might make my life easier. This is of course a ridiculous thing to be tempted to do, but there we are.

Within a few weeks I had purchased subscriptions or licenses for Things, Bear, and Day One. I’m still not quite sure why, because I’ve stopped using all of them already, and gone back to the “out of the box” apps.

A late night conversation with a friend who also went the Apple route at home succinctly described the reasons they have never invested in alternatives either – while the out-of-the-box Apple apps have shortcomings, they integrate better than any of the third party alternatives.

Just a few quick examples…

“Things” is a wonderful to-do list app. Things looks prettier than Apple Reminders, and is perhaps more slick. An Apple note with a date on it will also appear in the Calendar app though. Things can’t do that.

“Bear” is a wonderful note taking app. Bear is prettier than Apple Notes, and uses markdown – which, coming from a software development background is huge. Here’s the deal-breaker that annoyed the hell out of me though – Bear uses tags instead of folders, rather than in addition to them. This isn’t such a bad idea, but it also means that if you want to file notes against a category that doesn’t exist yet, you need to create the category when creating the note – you can’t have empty tags. When you’re planning out an area (to implement “PARA” for example), it becomes massively counter-intuitive.

Oh – one more thing – you can’t draw inside a note in Bear. You can in Apple Notes.

Before anybody starts mansplaining at me about alternative apps, or ways of using the ones I’ve already been playing with – I’ve probably already tried them. I use Obsidian at work, and continue to dick around with Notion now and again. I’ve tried all of the similar apps too. I tried Obsidian Sync at home, and realised very quickly that it was pretty terrible (Bear is MUCH better in that regard, if you’re interested).

There’s a part of me that loves Notion – that has always loved Notion – it’s just the effort that would be involved in moving over to it that stops me from doing it. And the fact that they will eventually pivot, just like Evernote, and Substack are busy doing, to monetise abso-bloody-lutely everything.

So.

I’ve ended up just using the stock apps in the Apple ecosystem, and putting up with their shortcomings – because the benefits massively outweigh them.

The only area I’m still flip-flopping around all over the place, and will probably continue to do so is writing. At the moment I use a mixture of Scrivener (a wonderful writing app, really designed for writing bigger projects), Day One (a wonderful journalling app), and Visual Studio Code. I even write in Apple Notes from time to time.

You’re probably thinking “why the hell is he using Visual Studio Code for writing?” – and it’s a good question. The answer lies in its integration with Github – the cloud based version control system that programmers rely on, and much of the writing world has no clue about. You can configure Visual Studio Code to become pretty much anything – and it seemlessly synchronises a version controlled collection of files up to the cloud for you, from anywhere, for free. The backup of my blog posts has been a curated set of markdown text files for at least the last ten years, which plays straight into its hands.

At the moment I have all of my old blog posts – stretching back to 2003 – in Github, Day One, and Scrivener. The only thing that scares me about either Scrivener or Day One is that they are proprietary – which is why I occasionally dump out the last few weeks worth of posts as markdown, and load them into Github – as a “safety deposit box” of sorts.

While playing around with Bear a few weeks ago, I loaded everything I’ve ever written into it – to see how it might handle the “motherlode”. It worked surprisingly well (although gave it a bit of a heart attack). I just caught myself in the middle of doing it though, and thought “what am I doing – this is a note taking app – not a writing app – why am I trying to make it be something it is not”…

There’s this huge temptation among the online productivity mavens – to conjure up a “second brain” solution of some sort – one app to rule them all. For some people it seems to be Notion, for others, it appears to be Obsidian. Every year or so another shiny new solution comes along, and they all tell you that the new thing is the shit.

I’ve kind of figured out for myself that there is no “one app to rule them all” – there’s not even “one way better than another” – it’s just whatever happens to work for you, at a given time. Anything else is just pushing the same block of cheese do different corners of the fridge.

I remember reading Ryder Carroll’s book about the bullet journal method – back when I used to use one every day – and being impressed with his opening comments that “the system” he came up with isn’t a set of rules – it’s a collection of things he does, that work for him – and he encourages others to pick from them, extend them, and adapt them to suit themselves.

Wow. How have I written so much about nothing that anybody else will be remotely interested in? It’s a skill, probably.

The clock ticked past midnight ten minutes ago. You find me sitting in the dark of the junk room, perched in front of the Mac with a mug of coffee while Joni Mitchell sings “Both Sides Now”. Scratch that. Tony Bennet is now crooning his way through “The Way You Look Tonight”.

I’ve always loved music from the 50s and 60s. Not the early pop music – more the “easy listening” Jazz ballads. Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis…

I just switched to “On Green Dolphin Street” – from Miles Davis “Kind of Blue” album. It’s become a late-night go-to of sorts. It somehow teleports you to the New York of Woody Allen movies – quiet back streets in the rain.

A fellow late-night internet escapologist recently asked about my late night blogging escapades – where I write, what I write about, why I do it… and I referred back to Norah Ephron’s article in the Huffington Post back in 2006 – the source of “kind of like an exhale”. She had such a way with words.

If you’re wondering who she is or was, she wrote When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and more. She was an amazing journalist throughout her career too. She was married to Carl Bernstein for a time (the same Carl Bernstein of Watergate reporting fame along with Bob Woodward).

A few years back there was a TV mini-series about the group of female writers that sued Newsweek in the 1970s for sexual discrimination. I think it was called “Good Girls Revolt”. Norah is portrayed in the series as one of the writers – played by Meryl Streep’s daughter Grace. It’s worth looking up – it was very good.

Talking of unexpectedly good TV shows, I started watching “Palm Royale” earlier this evening – set in the late 1960s – starring Kristen Wiig as a social climber that moves to Palm Beach and finds herself rubbing shoulders with the ridiculously wealthy, and predictably horrendous stepford wives that occupy it’s private members clubs.

John Coltrane is going off on a tangent with his saxophone at the moment. If my late father-in-law was still around, he would no doubt have disappeared off to rummage around for albums I might be interested in. He was a life-long jazz fan, and collected enormous numbers of vinyl jazz records.

Anyway.

It’s getting late. Time for me to stop typing, hit publish, and go brush my teeth. I just looked at the clock – how on earth is it 1am already?

I wouldn’t say I necessarily have many principals – but I have coping mechanisms.

I don’t tend to look back, and I don’t tend to panic too much about what might be. Sure, I might have the occasional falling down moment, as anybody else does – tilting at the many windmills of the world – but on the whole I look forward. I deal with the next thing, and then the next.

I don’t have many dreams. No big plans. I’m happiest when I get to tomorrow more or less unscathed, and without disappointing too many people along the way.

I never set out to “meet a girl”, never set out to bring up three daughters, and never planned to become a software and web developer – it all just kind of happened along the way.

The only real down-side to taking the quiet path is that you’re easily taken advantage of. The climbers of this world won’t think twice before standing on your head to continue their relentless pursuit of wherever they think they need to be.

While drifting along, not really finding my way, I’m fortunate to have crossed paths with a few kindred spirits along the way. Islands in our respective streams. I think you know who you are. I hope you realise how valued you are.

We attended the party of a wonderful friend yesterday evening to help celebrate her 50th birthday. The invitation requested 80s themed fancy dress.

Her costume resurrected her exact look from a student photo during the era – wearing a Wham t-shirt, denim jacket, huge plastic jewellery, and layers of various neon coloured gauze. Oh – and massive hair.

My costume was mostly accurately described by a friend shortly after assembling it for the first time as “Pound Shop Patrick Swayze”. They weren’t wrong. I had a fake Shell suit, mullet wig (nick-named “Roland Rat”), and real Nike high-top trainers. You really can find anything on the internet. The fake Shell suit was more water proof than track attire – meaning it caused my body to run about 110 degrees throughout the evening. It was… uncomfortable to say the least.

Memorable moments of the evening?

Leaving the hotel in full costume to wait for our taxi. I passed a mid-twenties guy in the corridor that looked genuinely terrified. I laughed, and explained our mission. He grinned – “you guys look great!” – I think he actually started walking faster after saying it.

Two of our friends dressed as Axl Rose and Slash, with the best costumes I’ve seen in quite some time. During the evening the DJ played Paradise City – and the entire place turned into a mosh pit – surrounding the unlikely heroes and belting out the words together.

It was nice just to step outside of our normal lives for the evening. Normal life has been a bit of a slog for so long now I can’t really remember when it wasn’t. It was just good to spend time with friends, and be horrified that the 1980s were forty years ago now. The music is still amazing though.

At the end of the night we called an Uber, returned to our hotel, and sat in the bed watching TV, drinking water (forty years teaches you at least a few things), and stuffing chocolate from the vending machine in the hallway. Mid conversation my other half fell asleep. Soon after, I did too – dropping the TV remote, which ricocheted off everything in the room so loudly that it woke us both back up.

I really don’t know how we didn’t have a hangover this morning. Perhaps it had something to do with measures at the bar being somewhat economical. Or the three hundred degree shell suit private sauna worn throughout the evening. During a break from the evening’s shenanigans I wandered out into the fresh air and found several other people wearing shell suits, all laughing at each other’s thermonuclear struggles.

We stood in the dark for some time – sharing stories of our favourite music of the era. I’ll probably never see them again, but I’ll remember that one of them had been a massive Gary Numan fan, and another a competitive figure skater than once danced on ice to Oxygene 4 by Jean Michel Jarre. The first Jean Michel Jarre fan – other than myself – that I have ever met.

Today’s WordPress writing prompt asks who you might give a million dollars to, if you had a million dollars to give away.

I wouldn’t give it to an individual, and I wouldn’t give it to an organisation or charity, because I see far too many top-heavy charities where a sizeable portion of the donations pay the salaries of the charity staff, rather than making it anywhere near the intended participants.

I also have problems with charities that prey on the vulnerable – exploiting people and their families during end of life, or while recently bereaved. I once had an acquaintance approach me about building a website to take advantage of people in those circumstances, and was predictably horrified – especially as the person in question liked to portray themselves as a paragon of virtue.

I wouldn’t setup a bursary, or anything like that either – paying for somebody to go to college just encourages the college to increase their fees. It probably doesn’t help that I’m from a country with very good state education. I think education should be available to all – paid for by all. Helping the 1% doesn’t help anybody else. And yes, I do have a chip in my shoulder about elitism.

So.

How best to spend a million dollars?

Fund the setup of a grass-roots non-profit foundation to set out the design of virtual worlds that everybody can access and use for free, and anybody can host and extend for free. We’re really talking about establishing the protocols and standards needed – so that clients can be built that adhere to those protocols, which will allow anybody, anywhere to join and move between virtual world(s) and interact with one another without friction.

The various attempts thus far at world building have always been lead by commercial interests – the likes of Second Life, There, Horizon Worlds, and so on. They are re-treading the path walked by the earliest social networks – who all tried to build monolithic commercial offerings – AOL, CiX, Compuserve, Prestel, the Microsoft Network – they all failed because they were walled gardens, and people aren’t stupid.

I’ve often looked at Minecraft, and wondered what it could have been, if the founders had looked just a little further than the game they wanted to play. Imagine if it had been a massively multiplayer world – they were only a couple of steps away from it, with such a simple world building mechanic – and yet they missed the chance.

It was obvious that Mark Zuckerberg had read Ready Player One when he acquired first Occulus, and then started work on Horizon Worlds. That those efforts have failed falls squarely on the problems faced by all commercial organisations – they don’t like other people playing with their toys, and they have to get a return on the investment at some point.

Before anybody comments – I know VRML exists – it doesn’t go far enough.

What we need is a similar leap to that made by Tim Berners Lee back in the early 1990s. We need an agreed method of both describing, and interacting with a virtual world – and we need for those methods to be protected, and not subject to commercial interests.

Social networks are only just beginning to accept that people don’t want silos – and are half-heartedly integrating federation features into their platforms – but they are still trying to encourage users to “live” on their platform, and integrate with others. At their core, their stripes haven’t changed.

It’s madness that we have X, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Substack, Medium, TikTok, Snapchat, and more – all essentially doing the same thing – letting people talk to one-another – all slowly copying each other’s feature-sets in order to perhaps steal users from each other – rather than opening their borders to each other, and letting anybody, anywhere talk to anybody, anywhere else.

Thankfully email was a standard right from the start. So was instant messaging, if you’re interested – but then it fragmented in the same way the browsers did years ago – but never came together again. Google tried to get the other major platforms to adopt common messaging protocols – none of them would play nicely.

So yes. Anyway.

That’s how I would spend a million dollars – I would use it to help solve one of the biggest unsolved problems of the internet – I would establish a foundation to design and protect the mechanisms through which universally compatible and accessible virtual worlds could be defined and implemented.

I’m having a “night off” tonight. Trying to slow down. Listening to music. Noodling around with this and that on the Mac. Not really achieving anything, and not worrying too much about that.

It’s harder than it sounds.

So much of my life is dictated by struggling from one thing to the next.

While eating dinner this evening, I prompted the conversation around the table – asking how everybody’s day had been. While listening to others, I started to panic – trying to remember what I had actually been doing all day. I know the day was busy – but unless prompted, might struggle to piece the day back together.

There have been too many days like that recently.

Earlier this week I switched tracks to a different project at work for a couple of days. Honestly, it was like a mini-break of sorts. A smaller project, for a smaller client, without anywhere near as much chaos. A known quantity. Working on my own to progress changes without needing to consult, discuss, invent, problem solve, or herd any digital cats.

Of course then I returned to the gargantuan, chaotic, messy, vast, hydra-like project that seems to be chewing people up at an alarming rate. Rather perversely, I enjoy the bigger projects too. There’s something about lifting a colossal machine with many parts into your head, and piecing together an understanding of it’s scale, shape, and workings.

Anyway.

If you’ll excuse me, I have some very serious nothing to get on with before collapsing into bed. It all begins again tomorrow.

p.s. we’re going to an 80s themed party at the weekend – I’m going to look like a proper idiot.

Aviation has been a common thread throughout my life – from the giant red encyclopedia that was ever present in our house, to the balsa Tiger Moth my Dad made at the kitchen table when we were small (the smell of dope still brings that memory back), and my brother building countless plastic model kits from the local toy shop.

I still have the encyclopaedia. It’s in a sorry state, but I have never quite been able to part with it. I just pulled it from the shelf – it was published in 1977.

My own involvement in aviation took a lot longer to materialise, coinciding with the arrival of 16 bit computers, and a game called “Sublogic Flight Simulator” in the late 1980s. It was basic. Filled wireframe graphics, and a cursory representation of the world and your aircraft within it.

Over the years that followed, I played around with the various aviation video games that followed – “simulating” everything from gliders, to stunt-planes, jumbo jets, and all manner of military aircraft.

And then children came along.

When children entered our lives, spending any money on ourselves, or anything we were interested in became something of an afterthought. For the better part of a decade we came last on every list – and the computer I had access to at home became affectionately known as “Trigger’s Broom” (a long story).

And then – about five years ago – my Dad upgraded his computer, and asked if I might like his old one. It’s worth noting that he was upgrading because after retiring a few years previously, he too had become interested in flight simulator video games – and had joined a group that met up online to “fly” together. When we visited for holidays, we would crack jokes about the radio telephony language we heard from my Dad’s room while taking part in events with his friends.

So yes – I inherited my Dad’s old computer – which was quite capable of running a flight simulator. And it became the start of an enormously steep slippery slope.
While trying to learn the ropes and play catch up with a decade’s worth of flight simulation video game development, I ended up acquiring a pretty complicated aeroplane – a faithful recreation of the Boeing 737 – where most of the simulated systems within the cockpit worked just like the real thing.

Given the nature of my work – I’m a software developer in the real world – I took to the complexity of 150 ton airliners like a duck to water – learning how to operate them, navigate around the sky with them, and most importantly programme them. Within weeks I was being asked if I could record an instructional video to help the various members of my Dad’s group.

I had only ever recorded my computer screen once before – for a demonstration at work – so that was something of a learning curve too. I uploaded the resulting video to YouTube (because it was free), and didn’t think much more about it.
Within days the video started getting likes and comments – so I recorded another one – and another. It became somewhat addictive – sharing knowledge about whatever I was learning on a given week with the internet community.

After several months of uploading videos, YouTube informed me one day that I had enough followers to “monetise”. This apparently meant that I made a cut of the advertising revenue from the adverts that YouTube injects in the middle of videos.

I was quite excited about this new development. My other half rolled her eyes, and laughed when the first month’s very small payment arrived. She wasn’t laughing a few months later when it became obvious we would have to declare everything properly to the tax man. Thankfully she was a chartered accountant in a previous life, so started doing my books for me.

And so the last few years have progressed – more subscribers – more money – more tax declared. The little YouTube channel that could is slowly grinding towards 50,000 subscribers. Its associated blog has over two thousand email subscribers. It’s all a bit mad really.

And so we come to the title of the post – being careful what you wish for.

While out for dinner with some co-workers a few months back, somebody asked how the whole YouTube thing was going. I was brutally honest – explaining that while any of them had watched any TV shows or movies for the last few months – I had not. On most evenings and weekends – the moment I finish work, and get through dinner and washing up – I sit down to start creating more content for the channel – often until the early hours.

It has become a second job. A difficult second job, that’s sometimes draining, and sometimes intimidating.

As time has gone on, I’ve learned more about aviation, and more has become expected of me. I’m now not only trying to operate and fly all manner of aircraft – to share with the community – but also interacting with air traffic controllers, planning routes, getting clearances, and so on. I’m also writing guides to various aircraft – detailing how to get them up and running.

None of this was planned.

The simulators have become accurate enough that real-world pilots have emailed me privately – thanking me for refreshers on the various avionics systems. They also share the most wonderful stories with me about the various aircraft they have flown. They are invariably surprised to learn that I am not, and have never been either a private or professional pilot.

Before anybody asks, I have no plans to fly a real-world aircraft, other than perhaps to validate that I can. I already proved it years ago – going for a flight with a neighbour who was trying to get his hours up. I helped fund a flight, and he couldn’t quite believe how good I was, given no lessons. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the real thing was exactly the same as the simulator.

The funny thing? Although sometimes stressful, and sometimes daunting, I still love flight – everything about it – from getting into new aircraft for the first time, to finding my around their cockpit, getting their systems and engines up and running, to taking them for first flights and beyond.

There’s something about flying in the worst conditions – when you can’t see where you’re going – navigating via instruments – trusting in everything you know to get you safely to a destination. There’s also something about recovering from failures – when things start to go south, and you’re forced to think laterally as quickly as possible.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned while sharing content with such a wide and diverse audience is that failure is a part of the process. I never edit, and I never re-do. If something goes wrong, it goes wrong. Every failure is a learning opportunity – something to improve on next time. Sometimes you need an incredibly thick skin.

Anyway.

There you go.

My favourite (read: only) hobby – pretending to fly all manner of aircraft all over the world, and sharing it with the world via a YouTube channel, while making enough pocket money for it to become a problem.