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A Christmas Gift for Ebenezer Scrooge: Ninety Day No Rights and the End of Fair Pay AgreementsThe New Zealand Labour Party no longer treats the working class as anything more than a source of votes. But now and again certain...
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Lost in the Desert: AcceptedAs noted, November was an exceptionally good writing month for me. Well, in an additional bit of good news for December, one of those...
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Let Them Eat Sausage Rolls: Hipkins Tries to Kill Labour AgainSometimes you despair. You really do. Fresh off leading Labour to its ugliest election result since 1990,* Chris Hipkins has...
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New Zealand’s Witchcraft Laws: 1840/1858-1961/1962Sometimes one gets morbidly curious about the oddities of one’s own legal system. Sometimes one writes entire essays on New Zealand’s...
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Of Parliamentary Oaths and Clive BoonhamAs a heads-up, I am not one of those people who stay awake at night thinking about weird Culture War nonsense. At least so far as the current...
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The Song of Saqua: Volume IIITime to revisit something I haven’t covered in a while: the D&D campaign, with Saqua the aquatic half-vampire. Last seen in July:...
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2023 More Reading: November (+ Writing Update)Completed reads for November: A Modern Utopia, by H.G. Wells The Vampire (poem), by Heinrich August Ossenfelder The Corpus...
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The New Government: 2023 EditionSo New Zealand has a brand-spanking new right-wing government. Not just any new government either. A formal majority coalition, of the sort last...
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Of Local Shops and a Wee Lesson on Attracting StaffNo, I haven’t vanished off the face of the earth. I’ve just been doing what I’m supposed to be doing: writing original fiction....
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Labour Pains: The Dunedin and Taieri EditionAs of today, we have learned that Chris Hipkins will stay on as leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. This is an absolute indictment on the...
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Immortalised in PaintA very good friend of mine is a painter. As in, an actual artistic painter. He has an upcoming exhibition at the Dunedin Railway Station, and...
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2023 More Reading: October (+ Writing Update)Completed reads for October: Erewhon; or Over the Range, by Samuel Butler Erewhon Revisited, by Samuel Butler How the Mail...
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Blackberry Picking: AcceptedI definitely think the short story markets for speculative fiction are tougher these days. More people writing stories in the aftermath of Covid,...
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More Election Post-Mortem: It Wasn’t the Workers, Mr TrotterAs the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Chris Trotter has decided that an embrace of Maori...
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King Stork Defeats King Log: First Impressions of the 2023 ElectionWell, that was a surprise. Not so much the result – I had made my peace with a National victory some time ago. But rather the...
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Old School Kiwi Speculative Fiction: Samuel Butler and Julius VogelNew Zealand literature traditionally leans towards the Realist, rather than the Speculative. The likes of Yours Truly are trying to change that,...
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A Tale of Two New Zealands: Progressive Provinces and Conservative CitiesThis Saturday is New Zealand’s general election. The media has long-since called it as a National Party victory, but as it...
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Good News At Last: The Revival of German Language at OtagoI have followed the axing of German language teaching at the University of Otago with a good deal of gloom. It felt like nothing so much as...
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Old Phuul: AcceptedNow for the news you have all been waiting for… Old Phuul has been formally accepted by my current publisher, Inspired Quill (...
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2023 More Reading: September (+ Old Phuul update)Completed reads for September: The Lost Continent, by C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne Flatland, by Edwin Abbott All Quiet on the Western...
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Further Adventures with Martin the Chess BotEarlier this month, I had a bit of fun with Chess.com’s worst AI, the one and only Martin Bot:...
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Of Golf Balls and War Spoils: The One Ring and Property Law SquabblesIt has been a while since I engaged in meaty Tolkien analysis, so I deem it time to delve into one of the most pressing issues of our age. Namely,...
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Decline and Foundation: Asimov vs. SpenglerSome time ago, I took a look at potential Spenglerian influences in Tolkien:...
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Miraka Kirimi: First Block of Maori Language ChocolateSometimes chocolate is worth writing a blog post over. I’ve been refusing to buy Cadbury’s these past six years, ever since the...
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‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’: Of Shakespeare Authorships and Legal AppealsBack in 2019, I went on a bit of a Shakespeare Binge, one so extensive I wound up looking at the Shakespeare Apocrypha:...
