Biography
I’m a dad, and I like science-fiction. So yeah, I have an unlimited supply of dad jokes that can make my teenager roll his eyes so hard he can see his own brain. How many dad jokes does it take to make a teenager groan? Just one, as long as it has aura.
My favourite scifi subgenres are typically positivist and optimistic, “fuck yeah humans!” rather than the eternally grimdark dystopias that seem to make up a large portion of this scene—although I do have a soft spot for 40K, and for all things Gibsonesquely cyberpunk. Give me Star Trek’s techno-communism over Black Mirror’s tech pessimism any day. Bank’s “Culture” series is my jam, although I’m still waiting for a ride on a Mind-controlled GSV … or frankly for anything intelligent to be in charge for a while.
By day, I write software, wrestling with (other people’s!) bugs that somehow only appear in production. By night, I’m a maker of questionable choices and idiosyncratic robots.
My latest project? A robot that tells dad jokes. It’s just like a regular robot, but thanks to high-quality optics and state-of-the-art image processing … it can see FATHER!!
When I’m not causing compiler errors or embarrassing my only offspring, I’m:
- Painting miniatures (mostly badly, but with great enthusiasm)
- Building retro-like computers (because modern problems require vintage solutions)
- Creating mechanical keyboards that sound like tiny typewriters from space
- Playing board games (and explaining why we can’t just “house rule” everything)
- Making my partner question their life choices when I bring home another Arduino project (I promise I’ll stop)
I live on Earth (because Mars colonisation is well behind schedule) in a city apartment with my partner and our teenage son. My fondest wish/hope is that I’m somehow granted functional immortality and get to see what our little species does with itself in the centuries to come. Imagine all the dad jokes I could accumulate over millennia!
In the meantime I’m falling through spacetime at the speed of causality like all the rest, occasionally stopping to debug code and life, and almost always remembering to git commit before any major changes.