THE HIGH-PITCHED WHINE OF DAN O’BANNON’S COFFIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Yes, that high-pitched whine you hear is Dan O’Bannon’s coffin spinning out of the grave and into low orbit. I watched the second half of the ALIEN: EARTH TV show. (From episode five on, I wrote escape capsule hit-pieces as episodes aired, just so you know.)
   In my earlier blog post on the first four episodes, I wrote that the key feature of any story featuring the ALIEN franchise is this: at some point, smart people in space must do dumb things for the story to move forward.
   Damn it. Episode five acknowledges this in the script itself. Proof of how stupid smart people can be. It’s built into the story. Too close to the alien bone?
   Now…I glossed over a whole bunch of things from the first four episodes. Take episode four, for example. In which Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling becomes an alien snake-charmer. Or something. She can talk to the animals.
   But it is time to return to those earlier episodes in talking about smart people in space doing dumb things. In episode one, you get the idea that something goes horribly wrong on the spaceship that looks awfully like Ridley Scott’s idea of a spaceship on the inside.
   But we aren’t shown that story.
   We see glimpses of the set.
   A load of viewers believed…if you build a whole set and don’t show the story in full, then there’ll be a flashback episode later. Explaining all of that nasty stuff in gory detail. As sure as chest-bursting follows a meal, that’s what we got in episode five. Must use the set. Built it for something. Use it.
   There were hints in earlier episodes of what went down. But we really must see the whole thing. And this is the point at which Dan O’Bannon’s coffin achieves escape velocity.
   Here’s the flashback set-up. Two aliens escape their containment pods. They hug faces. One member of the crew dies in an ill-advised surgical procedure. Acid, baby. The other is placed in a cryogenic suspension pod.
   Oopsie.
   The alien bursts out of that chest and flees the pod. Glass breaks when the plot demands. Hiding in the vast ship, somewhere, the alien creates the perfect set-up for an alien jailbreak. This li’l alien can sneak through vents and ignore holes in the plot or some shit, and reaches the other aliens in their safe glass containers. Mm.
   That would be okay. Believable, if you squint hard enough. One alien slithers in, fucks shit up, and slithers out again. I’d buy that. But I’m not purchasing what actually happens. The aliens in the lab stage a jailbreak by opening their prisons from the inside.
   They’re smarter than the average bear, see.
   This is dumber than a box of moon rocks. Use the alien that already fucking escaped. Let it wreak havoc in the lab. It’s the alien, for fuck’s sake. But…no. When these other aliens aren’t solving the Times crossword or Mr Rubik’s fiendish cube, they are staging a jailbreak. By…
   Now this bit is the worst bit in the episode. Breaks all the rules. It is drummed into anyone who ever sat in a science class. And it applies to the lab. NO FOOD AND DRINK IN THE LAB. Ever. True, this is an ALIEN gig…so smart people must do dumb things in space for the story to move forward over a cliff.
   There’s a lot in earlier episodes set up to pay off in this flashback, and then advance the story by switching to the here and now. But the golden opporchancity was there, and they blew it. Let the alien, from ALIEN, do its alien thing in fucking shit up. Then the new aliens can cut loose and do their alien thing. Don’t keep sidelining the original monster.
   Instead, we see the Skullfucker Octoball try to take on the adult alien. But there aren’t any eyes to pluck out. As fucking expected. At the end of the episode, we dip back into BLADE RUNNER territory with the appearance of Lady Yutani…and, for once, she isn’t on the phone to Mr Morrow the cyborg. She’s there, in person, with a bunch of mad-looking corporate samurai dudes. Send in the clones. Don’t worry. They’re here.
   The ALIEN movie gave us an alien horror with a dose of corporate evil thrown in. Here, the corporate comedy hijinks take the main BLADE RUNNER stage. In flashback land, there’s a saboteur on board, ooh, blasting bits of the spaceship into the cosmos.
   I’m surprised the alien didn’t just turn to the camera and ask the audience what the fuck it was doing here. In Michael Caine’s accent.
   You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
   It’s one of those TV shows. If you can’t work out which of these characters we are meant to care for, root for the alien.
   Am I meant to care for Mark Musk Elon Zuckerberg and his obsession with Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling? I’d have preferred a woman in the role of the trillionaire. Blonde. With a roll-neck sweater and a fixation over Steve Jobs.
   Her company, being in the ALIEN universe, has to be called Theranos Thanatos. I still wouldn’t care about the character, but there’d be far more scope for comedy. Yes, it’s true. I’ve watched these episodes, and…I only care about the original alien. Neglected. Ignored. Forgotten. Sliced up. Missing in action. And then lit brightly in a fucking fish tank.
   When we reach episode five and a flashback containing some xenomorph action, we are treated to microwaved leftovers from an earlier cinematic experience. A flurry of half-hearted positive reviews out there in the dark all mutter out of the side of the mouth when declaring…
   You know, we’ve had worse out of this franchise.
   And so on. This is, at heartless heart, The Emperor’s New Skinsuit. The only thing connecting ALIEN to BLADE RUNNER is the director who used similar production techniques and items in both films.
   So why turn this ALIEN TV show into BLADE RUNNER by another name? Yes, it has been strangely watchable. I could be at the top of a skyscraper, on the corner, looking down on a police chase on Fucked Up Street…while a petrol tanker’s brakes fail over on Beyond All Recognition Avenue.
   Strangely watchable. And there’s nothing I can do about it except look away. But I look. Would this show reach physical media? Disney releases are patchy and unpredictable, that way. Would I buy a 4K set? No. This is one…and very done.
   There are loads of ALIEN and PREDATOR films out there that I didn’t buy. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even watch a bunch of the PREDATOR ones. ALIEN should never have been a franchise. Luckily, HIGHLANDER was never a franchise. Fortunately, THE MATRIX was a one-off. And INDIANA JONES. A trilogy, thank fuck.
   BACK TO THE FUTURE stuck to the plan. No more movies after the third one. Sadly, over my dead body might apply here once Zemeckis hangs up his director’s hat for the very last time. No one is going to remake that story with the main character as Marsha McFly. The crush sub-plot was icky enough with Marty.
   (Also, technically, the main character in BACK TO THE FUTURE is the most important time traveller – the dog.)
   What of ALIEN: THE WILDERNESS YEARS as a franchise? Battle Angel Wendy. FAUX RUNNER. Do Androids Dream of Monsters Under the Bed? I should go on, but you get the point. Oh, very well. ASLAN VERSUS ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS CALVIN AND HOBBES: MA’AM, THIS IS A WENDY’S. Now I’m done.
   We have Wendy the snake-charmer or The Alien Whisperer. I suspect a lot of the show is going nowhere. And no more is this evident than in episode six. The Fluff. It’s an episode about padding and nothing much going on. If that.
   Once more, we question basic lab techniques. No one should be alone in the lab. And the aliens should all really have a lab each. Think the show missed a trick, there. Each alien needs its own unique lab.
   Yes, give each lab a sense of character and an alien in it. At least then the show would have some character. But no, we’ll keep these lions in one room and in glass cases. Yes, if you were paying attention in the previous episodes that didn’t lull you to sleep, then you’d know there’s this other alien. Awaiting a slow tease of an appearance.
   And we get to the goods in this episode. Not worth the wait. The central plank of creating your superhero team, those lost boys and girls, is giving the audience synthetic characters who aren’t affected by the aliens. Creating synthetic characters. There’s an idea that’s a hostage to fortune.
   Superheroes aren’t affected by the aliens. Except…this is an ALIEN franchise offshoot, and so we’ll be fucking around with that expectation more than once. Battle Angel Wendy got into a tussle with an alien and lived to tell the tale. She’s all better now.
   In this episode, we see feeding time at the zoo go horribly wrong for a synthetic character we don’t have energy to care for. Dolly the sheep just sheeps in, fucks shit up, and sheeps some more.
   The Skullfucker Octoball in charge of the sheep is biding its time, playing tenth-dimensional chess, and shit. Oh no. The CGI fly eats wobots for bweakfast. For a top secret research facility, I notice the cameras on Fantasy Island become quite useless and unwatched when the plot demands this.
   Characters stumble around in and out of various situations. The Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character was damaged but she’s all better now. They gave her a mind-wipe, but didn’t warn anyone else on the island about not telling her that. So now she knows she had a mind-wipe after being told. Would have been better off with a facecloth and some mild soap.
   Inevitably, after much padding, and more fan service out of focus in the background, we reach the hugging of a face. And when this face was hugged, I found it hard not to laugh out loud. I half-expected the actor to start moonwalking, and I just couldn’t take it seriously.
   What’s that? The guy who was fired in this episode didn’t make it off the island? Instead he was dragged into one of those standard air vents large enough to fit several plot holes through? Explain why the secure lab needs a massive ALIEN AIR VENT™ at floor level. Or, indeed, at any level. Explain. Show your working.
   There were so many other ways to build up to SOME CHARACTER WE DON’T CARE ABOUT™ being hugged in the face by an alien. I say we take off and nuke the entire show from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
   Damn.
   It’s sad seeing the alien in a well-lit glass cage doing sweet fuck-all. Not an ALIEN moment. The same is true of the actress playing Lady Yutani. She finally gets her teeth into a scene. Regrettably, it’s a scene from a BLADE RUNNER show no one asked for.
   All the padding, all the waffle, questioning what it is to be human…the fluff belongs in another type of story. Is there a place for it here? There is. In small doses. But not as padding. So much for episode six, which, in the closing seconds, attempts to make the Skullfucker Octoball the star of this show.
   IT ISN’T.
   What stays with me in this episode? Pointlessness. There’s a talk about what Wendy will do. She could be family to her brother. But there are loftier goals. She should develop travel faster than the speed of light, and explore the universe. Wendy must make the right choice.
   Except…there’s nothing to stop her eternal self being family to her brother until he dies of old age. Then she can explore the universe after. She can have it all. It isn’t EITHER/OR. The show flounders arse-deep in too many moments like that.
   And then there was episode seven.
   Two of the Very Lost Boys lead their pal the scientist dude into the jungle. Basically, Lennie is being taken to see the rabbits. (Spoiler for another story.) The Peter Pan framework should have been referenced with a light touch. Too late for that. The whole show lumbers along, top-heavy with enforced symbolism.
   You’d be better off watching The Lost Boys. That’s a movie about rebellious Kiefer Sutherland being all rebellious and shit.
   The different spaghetti strands of storytelling veer off and converge just about as messily as you’d expect. Those behind the show have certainly seen the movie Predator. So it is time to throw in a bit of that in the jungle. But not too much, lest the show be accused of turning into Predator.
   Normally I’d say Wendy’s plan comes across as one of the worst plans in the history of science fiction television. But I can’t stop there. Wendy’s plan is one of the worst plans in the history of plans.
   I’ll release my tame alien as a distraction, so we can escape Fantasy Island.
   Again, we come back to this thing of the alien in a glass cage, sidelined by the shenanigans elsewhere. Characters queue up in slow motion, waiting for death. When death comes, it arrives with CGI rapidity.
   They know, making this show, that scenes of the alien escaping and killing lab techs in bright light…well, those scenes are just not going to cut it. So we’ll switch to the security cameras, for a more obscured look at the CGI tomfoolery.
   And so it goes, again, when in the jungle. An instant problem arrives. Soldiers. An instant fix arrives. Predator. The alien. This time the fight is in broad daylight, so we have to obscure our alien by using the bushes.
   Perhaps more than any other episode, this episode feels like it is about to (chest) burst into being a musical. Soldiers with bad timing turn up to miss the main event. Characters with no planning flit in and out of sight.
   It takes a very long forty minutes for Wendy, Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright, and Communist Manifesto Guy from ANDOR to reach the boat, the boat, and we don’t even have Mr Roarke or Tattoo standing by to wave them farewell.
   There’s one episode to watch. Before it airs, I wonder what it sets up. This whole show is about a mission to bring alien samples back for study. But even that mission was off the back of an earlier unseen sequence in which a whole bunch of people died. We were told this.
   So we may yet see another prequel. Where are we, by episode seven? Number of deaths so far? Don’t care. Number of characters worth caring about? Don’t care. Trillionaire-ism is bad. Corporations are bad. People are no better. Just bet on the alien for the win.
   What else didn’t I care about on the show? Screens. They flashed up with information on the aliens. We live in a TV age of visuals that are clear enough. You can pause the data dumps and read snippets of what the aliens are all about.
   And I just didn’t care. We’re told about the Skullfucker Octoball. And we’re told about the really fucking boring plant thing. I’m waiting on the base being overrun by plants when the inevitable fire/explosion sequence kicks in. And then the killer plant can really go to work. Presuming it crawls into a handy ventilation shaft where it can survive the fire/explosion.
   No, I didn’t care about the text screens. They could have flashed Surprised in the Butt by Ripley’s Xenomorph Lover: a Chuck Tingle Dinosaur Romance on one of those screens for all the difference those screens made.
   And so. To episode ate eight. The scenewy’s pwetty. Be vewy vewy quiet. I’m hunting humans wabbits humans wabbits for a story. We go a li’l bit Predator, a li’l bit country, a li’l bit rock ’n’ roll, and a bit Terminator 2.
   Two Terminator machines go at it in a lab, in a rather inconsequential fight…in an inconsequential episode. This is the last episode in the show, and I expected the deaths to mount up. Instead, we had a whole lot of nothing.
   Okay. There were deaths. Soldiers, on the island, dying under the alien’s teeth and claws. Don’t forget the tail. There’s a good story here, stumbling through the ruins of other stories. I can see what they were trying to go for. Alas…
   The entire episode does, indeed, act as set-up for the next series. I expected a whole bunch of characters to die. You have practically the whole bunch in a room. One bomb and it is done. But no.
   Yutani doesn’t even get to phone in her performance here. She’s flashed up on the screen as a reminder of her existence. There was so much noodling around, too much padding, for the late arrival of her army to make a difference.
   That army should have arrived earlier in the story, full force, with chaos the result. Chaos in which the monsters get to feed. Here’s an idea. In the future, just have jail cells that are locked the old-fashioned way. With a physical key. Don’t operate the cages by electricity.
   It’s the dumbest thing. All the creatures, and the other prisoners in this narrative, are locked in electrically-powered jails. What if the power goes? There’s a back-up. What if the back-up goes? NOTHING. The fucking doors stay locked, you cunts!
   Wait. Let me tell you how I really feel.
   Welcome to Fantasy Island. What’s the plot? THE BLACK HOLE. That’s the hole the story fell into. At least the robots on that Disney production were amusing. Welcome to Fantasy Island. But, hey. The scenewy is pwetty.
   Everyone is in a rush to be the next model, rendering the last model obsolete. That notion does a few handstands and backflips as characters manoeuvre around each other…to no great effect.
   The Peter Pan stuff sputtered out episodes ago. Boy Genius isn’t Peter Pan. He’s a symbolic coded fictional watercolour painting of Elon Musk refusing to accept an autistic trans daughter. Misunderstood. He’s misunderstood. And irritating. We don’t even get his plan out of his lips.
   He sends the minds of children into artificial bodies. They’ll have access to the whole of human learning. And they can then improve the process so that adult minds can transfer into human bodies. That’s when Elon Zuckerberg makes his move. But that isn’t even a plot here.
   There’s a movie worth watching to reach a conclusion about the handling of the Boy Genius in this show…
   The Dirty Dozen. In that film, one of the dozen is the character you love to hate. You cannot wait for Archer Maggott to die. When’s he getting shot? That’s Archer Maggot’s story right there.
   And so it should be with the Boy Genius. He serves no purpose beyond being set up as an evil doll-figure who is bitch-slapped by an alien at just the right time. Boy Genius deserves to be on the way out by episode three.
   Even that Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character, who appeared to die in episode seven, made it back for episode eight. The two mad scientists assisting the Boy Genius are still in play by the end of this show. And, spoiler, one of them is dead.
   Adrian Edmondson, as some sort of cybernetic Odd Job henchman, minus the bowler hat, is still ticking along merrily by the end as well.
   Yes, the killer plant finally makes its move, and this is as underwhelming as you’d expect. That played out like a random encounter with a Dungeons & Dragons monster in a killer dungeon.
   All dungeons are killer dungeons, whether science fiction or fantasy. In this killer dungeon, though, the usual suspects make it through. It’s almost as though there’s some evil hidden agenda. An evil corporate agenda. To produce another series.
   You had one job, television. One job. To make sure the alien would kill a whole lotta people (and synthetics) in a show that sidelined the alien in favour of letting a whole lotta people (and synthetics) live. The final episode could’ve done with being a bit more final.
   This TV show sounds a bit like an earlier spin-off. ALIEN: EARTH isn’t a comic book series. ALIENS: EARTH WAR is. I enjoyed the raw energy of those comic book stories. This TV blip has a hard task, true…
   There shouldn’t be a franchise, yet there is. So what’s the problem? Trade on the original story. Add something new. Avoid fan service. Remember when? We fucking do. Stop reminding us.
   We want the familiar, but it must be different. Advance on it. But not too different. So you won’t satisfy any audience. There are people out there in deep space, declaring there is only one ALIEN movie. There certainly shouldn’t be two television shows.
   We don’t need to see Ian Holm’s acting dug up from the vaults in some nonsensical scene. (I know I’ve seen that travesty, but I refused to believe it.) If you must give us something, give us something of substance. Evil Trillionaire Boy Genius could have experimented on the alien and realised that – if you solve the acid problem – then the alien blood might cure cancer.
   That would be a better twist than anything, everything, on this show. Was there a scrap of merit? Discovering the lost boys and girls had their own graveyard on Fantasy Island. Aaaaaand…that was about it.
   Imagine watching a TV show and then turning to Mark Verhieden’s comic books for something bright, fiery, and with its own peculiar atmosphere. Those comics had the same hard task. Give us more of the same, but not too samey. Verhieden was allowed to use the characters of Newt and Hicks…
   Until a shitty movie sequel came along and killed them off. Then the names were changed to protect the indifferent. They were changed back for the collected editions.
   So, yes, there was a bit of fan service in the comic books. But Verhieden tried to give us the atmosphere of an ALIEN story. Not a BLADE RUNNER one or a TERMINATOR one. Or Peter Pan with robots thrown in.
   The television show feels sterile. Airless. Unloved. It feels unwatched even as you watch it, and that’s no good. My view, after watching? I turned to the comic books for a better experience.
   What surprised me? That I watched every episode. Please. For fuck’s sake. Don’t make a second show.

THEY SHOOT COMPUTERS, DON'T THEY? A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Not for the first time, I had a computer shot out from under me. Your average think-box dies foaming at the mouth on the slopes of a gravel pit. Luckily, I once retired a computer. This saved me much trouble…

   For the computer itself is the blessèd item I use to order up a new computer. And I can’t very well haul myself out of the gravel pit if my shopping lifeline is sparking itself to death by my side, staring down my unresponsive keyboard and indifferent mouse as the lights go out, two by two.

   I made the call.

   There’s a problem. We want you back. You remember the old set-up? We’ll concoct adjustments. Been a few changes since you were last in, checking the files.

   I had to deconstruct and reconstruct the office just to admit this Cold Warrior of a computer to the table. Have spares for everything. That cable, the one I’ll never need again? It’s the one I kept anyway. Just in case.

   A power cord extender. There wasn’t room in the office for two computers at the desk. I couldn’t run the old machine from the hallway. No screen, that way. A major wiring problem. It was easier to extend this extra cable and bypass everything.

   I created a new office space in the shadow of my video recording studio, on the floor, underneath the TARDIS console, with boxes of spare cables scattered around me. And I checked every single box for cables.

   Specifically, I looked for a cable I knew I’d need when the new computer materialised. That’s getting ahead of the story. No new computer here, no, not as I type this out.

   But there will be when this tale hits the internet.

   All writing is time travel.

   My old slow retired machine worked, connected to the internet, and allowed me to conjure its successor into existence. At a price. And the price goes beyond the monetary cost. Time. It’ll be with you by Tuesday. But not the very next Tuesday.

   I faced two weeks on the slow boat, pottering down the information country lane. This is a place with a maximum speed of not very fast. I still read e-mail, though it’s not in one handy place – the application was unfortunately disabled a million years ago.

   A disabled application on a machine no longer used, why, that’s hardly a problem, is it, unless you plan to use that ancient computer again. Oh.

   I still answer e-mail.

   But the main problem with the old machine is that everything moves through treacle. It’s irritating to open up a file and start typing. The slight lag of the creaky arthritic device annoys the hell out of me. Rapid-fire entry to, and exit from, many files in short succession. That’s all gone.

   Some software packages refuse to work at all. I’m an update or ten thousand away from reasonable use. Skype is rubbish at the best of times. The old machine has old Skype, which is only capable of recommending a move to new Skype.

   I followed the digital signposts until I reached a beleaguered stretch of the internet. A woodland fire spread across the country lane and roasted the signposts away. I may not update new Skype automatically. The gap is too vast to bridge. So I’m told.

   Instead, I am allowed to go in search of the update manually. This proved an internet workout too far, and I ended with the weights still at my feet and no sense of progress achieved. I may not update to new Skype manually, automatically, or even supernaturally.

   It rained, then. Smoke from the woodland fire disappeared. Zoom bounded across the puddles in the poorly-maintained digital lane and invited me to a meeting. I have absolutely no fucking problem installing Zoom. Meanwhile, Skype gurgles and trembles in the gutter. Cause of death? Blah, blah, blah, something, something, Dark Side.

   My dead computer remains dead. I removed the hard drive and slapped it into a cradle, connecting to my ancient machine. Surprisingly, the cradle genuinely connected. My data, backed up on an external hard drive and also on cloud storage, is still inside.

   So there’s that.

   My dead computer, still dead, is still dead. I bought it to make video editing and processing easier. The old slow machine just wouldn’t cut it. And so here I am, engaged in a spot of time travel. I can write scripts for videos here, on the machine of the past.

   And I can even run a boardgame online, relayed from the table through Zoom. But don’t ask me to process any of the material filmed. This will go out as a video talk on technical difficulties. It’ll be filmed with the aid of the brand-spanking new computer, in the far-flung future of fortnightia…a non-dystopian future. Doesn’t make it a utopian one.

   As long as my resolution of technical difficulties doesn’t fall foul of new technical difficulties, that means I’ll record a video around mid-July 2020. At the end of July I’ll have been making videos for two years, and I’m still on track to average one video per week over that period.

   It’s not a requirement to put a video out there every single week, come rain, come shine. Computers fall over and never stand up again. A virus strikes, and complicates routines. Bastards hoard toilet roll. The bastards.

   I make no apologies for delays in producing material. Life stands in the way, as ever. After a million years of computing, I haven’t lost any data yet. I still want the one fabled button that does everything.

   Yes, it has an UNDO function. And COFFEE ability.

   What of computers, and content creation? Unless a computer is shotgunned and I tumble from the saddle, I don’t generally upgrade. I’m in the business of buying a machine that will last for years. Then I’ll buy a new one, making another interstellar leap forward.

   That’s not for everyone. There are the tinkerers who add a thing after a few months and another gadget a few months after that. As I sit here using this clockwork computer from 1892, I ask myself what I’d upgrade?

   Nothing. You need a new one, hell, buy a new one. I never upgraded my dead one, or the retired one, or the machine that died before that retired one came into the house all shiny and new. My computing demands increased gradually. Machines coped without upgrades.

And now, an upgrade. Or, more precisely, an update. The tired old clockwork computer accepted a message on the end of a y-shaped stick, brought in by a gasping mechanic. Thank you, gasping mechanic.

   Windows provided an update, bridging the gap. I thought it worth a shot to see if I could, after all, fix Skype. Skype accepted the party invitation and is now back to respectable levels of being generally shitty.

   The one-stop-shop for e-mail lies, sadly, beyond reach. Not to worry. Every hour shortens the distance between the fading of the clockwork saviour and the arrival of a new dawn in computing. I will have my video processing powers restored. Just draw sword from stone. Plug socket in. Flip switch. Save the clock tower during a storm. And we’ll be back to the future of electronic tomfoolery.

   Buy spares for everything. Keep all the spare things you bought. When a piece of equipment becomes obsolete, think long and hard before throwing that item away. If a computer doesn’t explode while in use, that computer retires. It’s there for you, slow, quirky, and semi-useful.

   But it is there for you, and it connects to the internet. And it’s all good. That’s not true. It’s mostly averagely bad. As long as the vital bit works, an old clockwork computer sparks and steams along with a sense of purpose.

   Not with a sense of urgency. That’s too much to ask of it.

   Going back one computer is a grim trip down fossilised memory lane. I stared at shortcut icons for software bypassed by better applications several computer lifetimes ago. If I had to, I’d go back two computers to an emergency laptop. That’s if I could find it. I know the laptop is around here somewhere.

   If the computer I am typing on now is a clockwork machine straight out of Verne or Welles, then the laptop is steeped in deeper, more arcane, science – the sort that fits right in when described by Mary Shelley.

   I write under the hammer of the virus, of course, and if you can limit human contact then you should limit human contact. My computer lifeline, allowing me to order a better computer, is the internet. Without a back-up machine, and a back-up of a back-up for use in direst emergencies, I’d be forced to make use of a friend’s computer.

   Out come the masks, the wipes, the spray, the soap, the wire brush, the industrial-strength tinfoil hat. You must wear a tinfoil hat to protect you from computer viruses while typing. And that…is a computing fact.

   Technical difficulties shouldn’t affect you beyond the street in which you live. Will my new computer work straight out of the box? I’ll duplicate this text as a blog post and as a video. We’ll see how quickly I can set up both. Same day production would be a miracle.

   I’ll have to scour for video production images to nudge the narrative along. Thematically, I feel I must settle on footage from a CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE boardgame. That video caught a dose of sub-standard audio, and had to be abandoned for technical difficulties. Gremlins. Never get them wet. Don’t involve them in a land war in Asia.

REVISITING THE CORNER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Rediscovering the corner is more apt.

   That office corner to my left is gone. Can’t reach in there any longer. And that office corner to my right is something I rediscovered on an expedition to…

   Well, an expedition to the far corners of the office.

   I took a non-machete to nothing in particular. Instead of hacking and slashing at an item, I secured and fixed a thing instead.

   The upshot of buying a new computer is still with me. (To the extent that I had to ferret around in Micromanaged Word for settings I was forced to wrestle with, not two minutes before penning this blog.)

   (Yes, the pen settings.)

*

Bringing my printer to life and booting it out of the room gave me space. But did that give me space? I went all sumo on a shaky piece of storage and slapped it into that new space. But I wasn’t happy with it. So I went in and looked at it again.

   It suffered under another task. This storage unit groaned under a pile of books in another location. The books stayed where they were, and only the storage staggered along to its latest home. I decided that the unit wouldn’t face the same load as before…

   There appeared to be warping that the construction would never recover from. In this, I was mistaken. When I took a second look at the joints, I saw one wasn’t in there properly. And that led to the shaky look and the warping that wasn’t warping at all.

*

And so. I fixed that. In fixing that, I realised I could tighten everything up and slide the shelving about a hand’s-width to the left. Structural integrity renewed, I’d make better use of the shelving. With the piece shoved left, I buttressed it against ALL THE THINGS THERE. And…

   The chain-reaction swept in. I moved the next shelf unit left and I moved the final shelf unit left…rediscovering the far corner of the room. Out came the measure. Could I fit equipment in there? Answer. Just barely.

   Curiously, uncovering the corner only to stuff it with material almost immediately…didn’t cover the corner up again. I can see it, still. It’s clearly over there. What sorcery is this?

*

It is the sorcery of buying a new machine and knowing that there’s no such thing as instant change. You don’t use this routine or that function for a week at a time, and suddenly it is very important and broken thanks to awkward settings.

   The same applies to physically moving items around in the wake of a new tech upgrade. You gain space, but don’t want to use the shelf there. It is a bit off. Until you realise the bloody obvious and fix the problem. And then, you gain the span of a hand in free space on top of the free space you rescued from obscurity.

   I am done moving this office around.

   Which means I know that I am far from done moving this office around. There’s more to do. I will wave farewell to the far corner I’ve uncovered. It must vanish behind camouflage, into the darkness once more. But not today.

   First, I’ll move the printer/scanner that’s now just a scanner. I wish it had wireless connections. Then I’d shove it into another room. I COULD shove it into another room by drilling a hole in the wall and extending two wires a few inches, for the scanner is WAAAAAAAAAAY over there anyway.

   But I like to see what I am scanning and I like to correct the scanned item’s position without having to walk all the way to Africa and back. It feels like a long walk to the printer, already elsewhere.

*

Surprisingly, this time around, I’m not moving stuff that’s terribly heavy. Oh, a few items gathered in one place add up to a hefty pile or two. But normally, abnormally, I unload an entire bookcase teetering under the force of its own gravitational field, move the piles of books out of the bookcase’s path, haul the case to a new home, and then hire a fleet of starships to pick scattered piles of books out of the floor.

   Not off the floor. Out of the floor.

   And this time around, well. It’s different. Usually I feel this is the last time I am arranging or refitting part of the office, and I move MOUNTAINS to get that done. That’s standard routine, every bloody time.

   Here, though, I know I’ll move stuff again. I am certain of that. But I’m barely moving a thing worthy of strain.

   Could that be thanks to the moving I did before? Sweeping a whole load of bookshelves and cases straight out of here? That was the last time I’d ever do that, naturally.

   I’m curious. Now that I believe I am going to move things again, will I ever move things again? Is this the secret I’ve overlooked, these many times? Tell yourself this is the last time, lie to yourself, and move an elephant’s weight in books.

   But accept that you’ll move stuff again soon, and. You lift all the light stuff? Perhaps never to move anything again? I think it unlikely. We’ll see. I haven’t reduced my chances of being killed by a falling bookcase. No. Instead, I merely redistributed the chances around different rooms.

*

Different rooms with the same old books in them. As I’ve noted somewhere in a dusty blog, a few of those books are very old indeed. Older than me, older than you, far older than this house. I think we’re playing at Back to the Future here and imagining swamp then where houses stand now, when a few of those books came into print.

   Given that a few of them are by Dickens, they are books still in print today. Will the shelves themselves stand up to the test of time?

   I had to gut a small bookcase recently. Not a design I like. And I went at it with hammer and nail, trying hard not to batter my thumbs to shit. I didn’t batter my thumbs to shit. But I found that in moving this particular bookcase one last time…

   It really was one last time. The top shelf cascaded down onto the middle shelf, and it barely stood the impact. I was forced to brace the shelves with metal brackets. Wear, tear, too much movement from one place to another, wounded the shelves.

   I toyed with leaving them as they were. Books piled on the bottom of the unit, shelf just sitting directly on top of the books, and then the same arrangement again higher up. It would work. But physics tells me that the whole arrangement could only topple out from behind the doors, cascading to the floor in a solid crump sounding like a lorry hitting the house.

   Hence…the bracing, and a use for those brackets.

*

Raises a point. Bookcases themselves have character. (That case was a character in need of reform.) There’s the one that looks like the other one, but the top strut comes away freely in your hand if you forget it’s that one and not the other one.

   No, I don’t move either of those cases very often.

   Here’s one to the left of me, with exposed brackets, like the smile of someone who shows off silver teeth. Perhaps, one day, I will move that case again and fix the doors back on.

   Now I am staring ahead at three narrow bookcases. I count up three shelves, and all three shelves are level. If we go up one more, the shelves accommodate different heights of books and the shelves resemble stairs climbing to the right.

   I go up another level and it’s the bookshelf to the left that’s a little lower, while the other two are now level. And there are more exposed silver teeth, too.

   Bookcases have character. They hold hardbacks the whole length, or take a break to house a wad of magazines from a million years ago. Comics, trade paperbacks, and graphic novels live downstairs from hardbacks, and misfit paperbacks occupy the loft-space of the bookcase’s structure, living where no other books could squeeze in.

   A case to my right matches some of the levels of bookcases to the left. But we veer into random turf here, as one shelf holds electrical equipment – and computer gear, at that.

   When I bought the new computer, I cleared out the bottom shelf on the right and made room for a multi-socket extension that lets me see at a glance that all the right things are switched on. Though, being this crowded place, the glance has to be stolen from over the keyboard in front of me.

   Typing here, as I’ve typed for a long while now, I feel settled in the office. But I always feel settled, whichever way I decide to face. I think about it. Yes…I’ve faced all four points of the compass when running the office. There isn’t a direction that alienated me.

   I wonder if that’s the case for other writers. You can’t face this way or that. I find the best way to face is a way that limits the chance of being crushed by a collapsing bookcase. Now, I’ve reduced…no, redistributed…the danger to the lowest threat-level since records began. But I don’t really feel any more or less safe.

   The office continues being the office, no matter the layout. I have the umpteenth chair, the umpteenth keyboard and mouse, and way beyond the umpteenth empty coffee cup not too far from my elbow. How far from my elbow? Far enough that it won’t be knocked over by my elbow. There’s a precise mathematical formula for that, and it involves making all your coffee mistakes early.