It’s a Geeks Life… (Part Two)

The Golden Years – Geek Nirvana During My “Teens”

I recall many years ago, when reading a discussion on the topic “When Were The Golden Years of Science Fiction”, some bright wag – I’m pretty sure it was Isaac Asimov – stating “It’s when you’re twelve.” He was spot on, our Isaac. The beginning of our teens is the sweet spot for the vast majority of us, long enough ago that most of our memories are fond, rosy ones, but the first period of our lives from which we retain a decent amount of memories, unlike our earlier childhood, the memories of which are very vague and fragmented. And it is also the period before we reach adulthood, during which we have the most fun and freedom to do what we want (after we finish our homework, of course), before the bland banalities, responsibilties and worries of “grown-up” life start to descend upon us.

Twelve years old was certainly right at the beginning of a “golden” stretch for me, as well. Things may not have been rosy on the domestic and personal front, but my hobbies and obsessions certainly did kick into overdrive in a very big way, possibly to compensate for my miserable “Real Life”. By that age, I was now growing old enough to be much more sophisticated, systematic and discerning when it came to what I was “into”.

This was the age at which I became a totally obsessive Doctor Who fan. John Pertwee (the Third Doctor) had begun his tenure on the show when I was ten years old, continuing in the role up until I was fourteen. I’d already been watching the show for four or five years, but was previously too young to get too deep into it. But Pertwee was the first Doctor whom I really considered as “my Doctor”, the first one that I began to hero-worship as a distinct personality. And when he left the show, his place was taken by my absolute favourite Doctor of all time, Tom Baker, who reigned for another seven years. So this entire decade, from the age of ten up until twenty, was my own personal “Golden Age” of Doctor Who watching.

I had also become a huge fan of the original Star Trek at the start of the 1970′s, and by the time I was twelve (1972-73), Star Trek was running neck-and-neck with Doctor Who as “my favourite TV programme”. To this very day, it’s still by far my favourite incarnation of Trek, although Seasons 3-5 of TNG are also right up there with it. And it wasn’t just Doctor Who and Star Trek. By this stage in my life, I was watching almost anything that was sci-fi, although I did make a strong distinction between my “favourite” shows (Doctor Who, Star Trek, UFO) and those that would merely help pass an hour or two (most of the Irwin Allen shows, with the exception of The Time Tunnel, which was a favourite of mine).

I did like other things aside from sci-fi (westerns, war films, comedies, some sport), but it was always sci-fi that was my real obsession. All through my teens there was a steady procession of classic sci-fi TV shows – Doctor Who, Star Trek (TOS and animated), UFO, Space:1999, The Time Tunnel, The Invaders, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, the list goes on. I even enjoyed some of the Irwin Allen shows, particularly Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Land of the Giants, although, even then, I regarded most of them as tacky and cheap (compared to Trek), even if they were kinda fun.

I also absolutely loved re-runs of the old 1950′s and 1960′s classic sci-fi movies on television, and it was during this time that I fell in love with not only classics like Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds, This Island Earth, When Worlds Collide, The Thing, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even in the late-1970′s, when I was nearing the end of my “teens”, there was still a steady procession of great new sci-fi material, both on TV and in films – Logan’s Run, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Alien, Superman, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and many others.

The 1970′s was also a “golden” period for me as a fan of reading science fiction. All through the ’70′s I was reading lots of great SF, mostly unearthed at the local libraries. I’d gone from starting off at the beginning of the decade with Wells, Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and a few other greats, to becoming a hardcore SF fan, reading anything I could get my hands on, and rooting out the most obscure, long-buried SF & fantasy authors. As I moved into my teens (1972-73), I entered a five-year period during which I devoured every SF book that came my way, sometimes reading two or even three books per day when I was on a roll. This was the period in my life in which I read the largest volume of SF, before the intensely heavy periods of studying, beginning with my “A-Levels” (from age 16-18), and continuing on when I went to university (at age 18-22), began severely curtailing any other form of reading.

It was during this time, early-to-mid 1970′s, that I developed my love for short fiction, which later was to prove useful as the decade wore on and my studies became much heavier, taking up almost all of my time. Short fiction is much easier to read than large novels when you have little free time for reading, and, as the decade rolled along, I found that most of the books that I read were now SF anthologies and collections, rather than novels. That strong preference for reading short fiction has persisted to this day, and 95% of the material I read is still short fiction. I do still enjoy the occasional good novel, though.

In the early ’70′s, I started getting into comics in a very big way. I’d already been a big fan of several British comics since the mid-1960′s – The Lion, The Valiant, The Eagle, TV21, and a few others. But in 1972, Marvel UK launched several titles – The Mighty World of Marvel, Spider-Man Comics Weekly and The Mighty Avengers – and overnight I became a complete addict, starting a lifelong love of superhero comics. By the mid-1970′s, I wasn’t just reading the Marvel UK reprints, but had started hunting for US Marvel (and DC) imports. Aside from US superhero imports and reprints, I also had a number of favourite home-grown UK comics classics on my “regulars” list – in the early ’70′s it was Countdown, in the mid-’70′s it was Vulcan, and in the late-’70′s it was 2000AD and its short-lived companion comic Starlord, and Doctor Who Weekly and Starburst (both of which were actually more magazines than comics). Aside from a decade away from comics (1982-1993), I’ve been a huge fan of comics since the mid-1960′s, and still spend a considerable amount on them each month.

All through the 1970′s, up until around 1978-79, was a “Golden Age” for me, when I was in full swing reading comics, great SF literature, and watching lots of great sci-fi series and films on TV. I just couldn’t get enough, and it seemed like the good days would never end.

I was wrong.

To Be Continued…

It’s a Geeks Life… (Part One)

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

Early Days – Genesis of a Geek

I’m a geek. I’ve always been a geek, I’ve been one all my life, and simply can’t conceive of being any other way. I’m also extremely militant in my geekness, and not one of those shy, retiring types who tries to hide it out of view, for fear of ridicule. I’ve always been proud of my geek status. I don’t care who knows it or who doesn’t like it. They can all take a great running leap off the top of a high building, as far as I’m concerned.

The foundations of my future geekhood were laid down at a very early age, when I started to read my first “proper” books (books with lots of words, rather than mere “picture books”). These early books were full of dinosaurs, spaceships and stories of other worlds, all of which captivated my fertile young imagination. I think it all really started when my uncle (Liam MacGabhann, or Liam McGowan, for all you non Gaelic-speaking anglo plebs out there) started buying me those old “How And Why Wonder Books” from the local APCK Bookshop (never had a clue what APCK stood for) when I was about three or four years old. Planets and Interplanetary Travel, Dinosaurs, Robots and Electronic Brains, Prehistoric Mammals, Stars, the list goes on. I still have a few of these old books in storage, fading, falling apart at the spines, ancient relics of my earliest childhood.

So all the influences and obsessions of a future geek had already been laid down right from the start. But why did I choose that path, rather than follow the more mundane hobbies that the vast majority of other kids my age indulged in?

My childhood was not a happy one. To say that I did not have a proper childhood would be an accurate assessment. My family was poor, very poor, and we never had much in the line of material goods. For much of the time it was a struggle for our parents to even feed and clothe us. We also lived on a council estate in Northern Ireland during that infamous period in Irish history known as “The Troubles”, which overshadowed my entire earlier life, beginning when I was only eight years old, and lasting right up into my thirties. For everyone of my generation who lived through it, it was a dark time, full of tensions, fear, and unhappiness.

Things got even worse when I was eleven years old, when my parents separated, leaving my father to raise five kids on his own. He was forced to leave his job, and our descent into poverty became even more severe. To top it all off, my father’s health began to decline sharply after my mother left, and within a few short years he was a wheelchair-bound invalid. As the “oldest”, I was shoehorned into the role of “surrogate mother” from this very tender age, taking over the extremely heavy responsibilities of not only looking after my father, but also the other four kids, one of whom was also very severely disabled himself.

To be blunt, I was a very unhappy young boy, who sought refuge in a world of make-believe. Any kind of an escape from this dreary and depressing reality was a welcome one, and I immersed myself in a world of comics, watching sci-fi on television and in films, reading great SF literature, drawing and writing. To refer to these interests as mere “hobbies” would be a complete understatement. They were obsessions, a vital lifeline for me, and I depended on them utterly to keep me sane, when everything around me was so gloomy and depressing. Since childhood, and throughout my entire life, these “obsessions” have been entrenched as fundamental pillars of my personality and way of thinking, and I simply cannot imagine my life without them.

I took every chance I could to escape from “real life” into the realms of my incredibly active imagination. From a very early age, I showed a very strong preference for the fantastic rather than the mundane, for wild adventures into space and through time, dinosaurs, aliens, indeed anything “out of this world”. I started reading comics at about four or five years old, and was already developing a strong preference for the more SF-oriented strips over the less fantasy-oriented stories. Around the same time, I started paying attention to sci-fi and fantasy films and television programs on TV. Doctor Who, on British television started having its first influence on me about 1966-67, when I was about six years old, and at about roughly the same time my life was changed forever when I saw the classic George Pal movie adaption of The Time Machine on Irish television (RTE). I became totally obsessed with the concept of time travel, which remains my favourite SF theme even now. At the young age of six or seven, I was already a confirmed SF nut, at least as far as comics, films and television were concerned.

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

My father really hated all of this silly “sci-fi nonsense”, but tolerated it when I was very young. But he hoped desperately that I’d “grow out of it” as I got older. Some chance! Here I am, more than forty years later, and still a hardcore SF fan. Poor Dad! He must be turning in his grave!

To Be Continued…

The Prodigal Returns…

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

Man, it is hot, really hot. We’ve had several days of scorching sunshine and high temperatures that are definitely not the norm in this usually damp and miserable part of the world.

And I am suffering in this heat, like all overweight people tend to do in soaring temperatures. I’m sizzling like a large banger cooking under a grill. Every window and door in the house is wide open, and it’s still too freakin’ hot! I’m reminded of the old saying “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” – well, I’m nowhere near the kitchen, and the temperature hasn’t gone down any. Short of climbing into the freezer for a few days, there’s no escaping it.

So I’m sitting at my computer, cooking in my own juices, and blasting rock music loudly on the hi-fi – “Shadow Play” by the group of the same name (with ex-Foreigner vocalist Lou Gramm and ex-Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell). Not a bad album. It’s the weather for cold drinks, ice cream and music, with a computer thrown in for good luck. Whatta way to live!…

Might as well enjoy the sun while it lasts, which won’t be long. We’re lucky to get a couple of weeks of bright sunshine per year. Next time I post, it’ll probably be back to wet and miserable again… (moan, gripe, bitch…)

Hello from a Grumpy Old Git!

Hello there! Welcome to the GrumpyOldMan blog, where you’ll find me wibbling on about all and sundry.

Initially, my reason for setting up this blog was quite mercenary: get my API key and forget about it afterwards. I needed the key because I recently started up my first WordPress blog, a self-hosted one at SFreaders.com. But now that I’m here at WordPress.com I’m finding myself thinking “What the heck! I’ve got a blog, so I might as well use it!”

The reasons?

Well, number one, I feel that it’ll put me in closer contact with the great WordPress community, something that’s severely lacking at the moment with my self-hosted blog (have to give it time – it’s only been live about a month). Hopefully I’ll find out more about the community and learn a lot as I go along, and maybe down the line I’ll start making contributions of my own. I’m a “community” type of person, particularly of the free and “open” (unsullied by commercial greed and perversions) kind. I’ve long been (in spirit) a great fan of the Open Source philosophy – maybe some of these days I’ll gather up the courage to shift totally away from Windows XP to either Linux or FreeBSD.

Secondly, I’d really like to get into the nuts ‘n’ bolts of WordPress (what better way to become an artisan than know your tool well), and I reckon that the best way to learn something is to watch how others use it. Learn from more experienced users, and maybe help others out in turn as I become more experienced. As well as the general chit-chat, I’d like to use this blog to talk about the WordPress specific stuff, and maybe practice my (hopefully) growing skills.

Thirdly, I can rant on about any old thing. My self-hosted blog is a bit more specialized in nature, so I tend not to stray too far from the various subjects in the categories I’ve created. On here, I can be a bit less restrained and wibble on about any old thing that takes my fancy. Fire off a few rants – I love ranting when the blood gets up. Even when nobody’s listening. But I gotta watch the blood pressure.

Finally, and this is a purely selfish motive, I want to “put myself out there”. To use my blog on WordPress.com to let people know about me and my other blogs, maybe gaining a few visitors in the process. My main blog is a bit quiet as yet, and, although I’m not obsessed with stats and huge numbers of visitors, it would be nice to have a few.

None of my blogs are (or will ever be) money-making ventures, and SFreaders.com is aimed at fans of science fiction literature, sci-fi movies and TV series, comic books, music, general science, history and a few other things. It’s mostly the SF literature, sci-fi movie and comic book fans that I’m trying to attract. So if anyone reading this is of that particular grouping, please take note.

Well, enough from me for now. Hopefully some of you guys will take pity on me and leave a few comments.

Phil