I put this site back up in March '25 after salvaging it from The Wayback Machine, initially just to take back ownership, but after seeing all the cool websites up here on Neocities I've decided to expand it a bit - as a way to reminisce about the good old days, and to be a part of the new-school renaissance of ye-oldy-web! It's been fun - PC's and gaming have been a continuous hobby of mine since i was a kid, so they're kinda tied into many of my fondest memories.

I first started using computers in the late 80s, but my first forays with HTML weren't until the turn of the millennium. For a short while I worked at an I.T drop-in centre in a small town called Church Stretton. It was an outreach centre run by the University of Wolverhampton called Rural Broadnet, it was set up to get bums-on-seats at the University (short courses, remote access etc), but ended up as a place for the locals to learn HTML. That's where I first dabbled in web design, then became competent enough to show others, I wouldn't say teach, more like assist...

Fast foward a quarter of a century, aaand... whoosh... I've done a lot of other stuff during that time! some of it weird and wonderful, some of it solely to pay the bills, and some of it downright dangerous!

Ultimately, this site is for me to scrapbook my life in a way that resonates with me - my memory for past events has never been great, so I'm going to latch onto these old memories to hopefully jog other ones, then use this website as a kind of interactive "mind map" to piece it all together! Some of what I "dig up" should be
quite entertaining, at least to me anyway! If hardly anyone reads it, so what,
that's really not the point of it - I'm having fun fiddling with the code, adding new sections here and there, remembering things I haven't thought about in years -
it's good for my brain!

My Stats!

I am an ungracious acceptor of praise

I have a dry sense of humour, but sometimes it's wet

I swear too much, I have a temper, but I do not smoke

I try to help my friends and family, sometimes I succeed

They try to help me, sometimes I accept

I enjoy my own company, even though I'm a bit of an asshole

I am a teflon skinflint, marketing does not work on me

I can think outside the box, because the box is a lie

I have smooth skin, but a calloused mind

Definitely diverse, but in what way I couldn't say

I've frequented a number of different jobs, some interesting, some tedious

The only person I want to be the boss of is me

Favourite Pastimes

I like visiting random woods, streams, and hills in my home county of Shropshire. I used to disparage the place for being boring and parochial, which it is, but the countryside is very nice

Favourite Music

I often find myself listening to Groove Salad on Soma FM

It has a nice selection of chillout, and Soma FM is cool - it works on Winamp!

Favourite Movie:

It was a coin-flip between James Cameron's Aliens, and John Carpenter's The Thing -
I love practical effects, to the modern eye they may not quite hold up, but Aliens and The Thing were incredible at the time - Rob Bottin nearly worked himself to a heart attack making the props for Carpenter's magnum opus! I have watched both of them many times over the decades; I am always drawn back again by the great ensemble casting, the compelling protagonists, the riveting plot and amazing action; they have cosmic horror, fearsome antagonists, wry social commentry - they are sci-fi master-pieces that have never been topped in my opinion - I've even read the books!

Favourite Superhero:

TANK MAN!!

He once single-handedly stopped an entire convoy of T-59 Tanks armed with nothing but two bags of groceries!! No laser eyes, no jumping over tall buildings, just the all-encompassing rage of a middle-aged guy who's absolutely fucking sick of it all!!

I must say that I dislike the using the word "Manifesto" - I'm not here to espouse Marxist doctrine - I mean some of it might be a bit socially-minded, and I certainly have nothing against Karl Marx, but this is more a personal rant than a political handbook! I mean why not, it's nice to have a rant, but I'm not gonna pretend it's anything other than me having a good old moan... So here goes! Like most people on Neocities I'm here for the nostalgia, and to escape the miserable

Corporate-Horrornet!!!

I remember when the internet was a 🌈mystical and finite resource; access was fleeting🦄, and only possible at certain times and at great expense🪙. Going online was something you DID, it was an adventure⛺, the potential for discovery seemed limitless and profound - I remember feeling my heartrate rise when I logged on back in the 90s - It's been over 30 years since I first "surfed the internet", and the web somehow seems smaller now than it did then, even though it's almost infinitely more vast than it was at the time.

Social media has managed to shrink what we perceive as the internet into toxic enclaves of corporate interest. What most people interact with today is no more the World Wide Web than AOL was back in the day - they are gated communities, corporate intranets, designed to keep you hemmed in and dependent on their personal brand of content dispersal. I like to call it the "FartWeb", because its purpose
is to disperse 20 word text-farts, that others then inhale to see how they compare to their own text-farts. Unsurprisingly, they all mostly smell like the contents of the
lower intestine...

It's a vast clique of basic internet interaction that can be done from work, or on the train, with no real creative input - your thoughts go in a little box, you add a photo, then you press send - it does the job, but it's no-frills and uniform. A little bit of flair is permitted, but nothing that truly deviates far from every other account on the platform. It is limiting, and bad for us, it needs to be replaced.