11 January 2026

Futurama Relationship-O-Meter

Doing it... in the future!

Futurama's Dating Advice

When you think of Futurama's long, broken run, it was only when the show reached Hulu that one cast member was with another cast member long enough to spawn children. Amy Wong, of the Mars Wongs, somehow managed to get "reptilicus" (the spineless, cowering, weak, floppy, green, annoying alien aide to the magnificent Zapp Brannigan) to get her pregnant.

Of all the creatures Amy could have dated... and there were many... Amy chose the most annoying, the most clueless and the most terrified gelatinous blob, by far the least useful of any character, including washbucket. So ignoring the unsightly mess that Hulu made (a celebration of trends that died 1000 years earlier), which of the characters was the most prolific at banging the other characters? Gotta be Bender, right?

You'll notice that Kif is the least popular one here, even the Professor has more luck with the women. Still, Kif joins Amy's other workplace lovers for a total of 7... good enough for third place. Joint first place is Fry and Bender with 10 lovers each, but only Amy has slept with everyone at Planet Express.

Leela bring up the rear with a disappointing 5 lovers, of which two are too brief to count, one is with a girl and the other two will sleep with anything that doesn't say no. Even worse, Zapp's paltry 3 lovers comes dangerously close to Kif's two, but at least he slept with Amy!

The lesson to learn here is this: sleep with as many people outside your work as you can, then sleep with as many people at work as you can. That's a lot of sleeping but fortunately sleeping at work is fine.

08 December 2025

What no-one tells you about making an ebook

Making kindle / ebooks from Word documents

From 2020-2025 I wrote 3 novels, a trilogy, with some unusual formatting. Text boxes, images with captions, big text, you know, standard book fare, I thought.

Turning those docx files into .azw3 (kf8) or .epub was an absolute nightmare. In the end I had to reformat all 3 books. Here are the shortcuts I learned, that has NO online source, not even Reddit.

If you’re having conversion hassles, these points may soothe your journey.

So, first off, the word doc is in fact a website. You can view the website by choosing ‘Web view’

Amazon format, kf8, azw3 etc… is also a website. And epub is a website, too. Rename any epub to .zip and extract to see the site’s files: html, xml, css and jpegs.

Problem 1: Tables and floating boxes are not supported. No tables, no boxes of any kind, everything must be inline.

Problem 2: Tabs are ignored and multiple line returns are rendered as a single line return.

To create a one line gap, sometimes you have to put a white character on that line, like a period.

Problem 3: Reflow

To get a chapter to start on a fresh page, the previous chapter needs a page break. However, do not have that break as the last line on the page, it needs a gap after it.

Red- bad. Green-good.

Despite this, you’ll still get the odd blank page at the end of a chapter, but if you resize the window, that goes away.

Problem 4: LOTS of blank pages inserted randomly. I encountered this when viewing on an actual Kindle; removing all boxes and tables etc. solved this issue.

Problem 5: Amazon Kindle Create is garbage.

You’re a lot better off making all changes in Word then converting.

Problem 6: Weird hidden shit

Word is riddled with issues regarding tracking changes, hiding things etc. Use the ‘web view’ view to iron out those foibles.

Problem 7: Styles

Everything in your Word doc needs to have a style. Ebooks love styles because everything becomes CSS. For example,don't just make some text bold but rather set it as a quick style, i.e. normal+bold, then apply the style. Styles are exerything.

Problem 8: Fonts

Th newer Kindles can read html5 but the older ones battle along without support for colour images, tables, webfonts, online libraries, local libraries, video or even a zoom function on images. Ebooks are the same, just lower resolution and elastic aspect ratio. For a consistent layout you may wish to keep with the base fonts (Arial, sans serif, Times, serif, monospace, Georgia, Tahoma, Verdana) or at least not use any weird fonts downloaded from some random site.

All said and done, if you have some html skills then getting the final ebook to look the way you want is fairly easy. Editing in Calibre is exactly the same as coding a very basic site.

Bonus 1: Animated gifs play in the ebook, which means animation in the book… awesome.

Bonus 2: Muck about in html with outdated tags like <marquee> and get animation styles to display, mouseover events to display hidden text and all the fun stuff you don’t see in ebooks.

09 November 2025

Haight Ashbury - The Epicentre of Hippie Counterculture

One Wall to Rule Them All

On the wall at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic is a mural, a sort of collage, cut ‘n pasted there by the hippies who hung out there between 1967 and 1969. It is old now, faded, marred with graffiti and other grime manifest over the last 60 years but it is still there (and, coincidentally, at my place albeit ‘like new’) and it has an interesting story to tell, one you won’t find anywhere else.

It was my task to recreate this mural for a TV show about serial killers – in this instance, Charles Manson. Working with very little reference, I set about making the enormous artwork in precisely the same manner as the hippies did back in 1967 – by using the free posters Bill Graham would deposit there.

Bill Graham & LSD

Bill Graham was the name on every poster which he used partly for promotion but principally to market direct to users of LSD. Bill’s formula was to host benefit events, which skirt a good deal of the bylaws, and so offered to hold benefit gigs for the clinic, where LSD and his market intersected. The Summer of Love emerged amongst all this and the rest is history, but know that here, in this room, under this artwork, was the epicentre of Haight Ashbury and the principal role it played in the emergence of the hippie counterculture.

Bill Graham’s story you’ll find on Wikipedia, but that’s the ‘official’ story. The wealthy black man who owned the Fillmore auditorium had conservative values; Graham’s first few gigs, being benefits, made the cut but it was unlikely he would be fine with back-to-back shows from Friday noon to Monday noon, a for-profit venture which hinged on the supply of LSD and the engineering of the first large-scale counterculture in US history. Graham took the lease and then, mysteriously, the wealthy black guy was murdered! How unbelievably fortunate for Graham, and lucky too that he had the support of the LSD supply chain, which would naturally remove any hinderances to moving product in volume.

Graham gave out free posters at the gigs and naturally dropped off a stack of the things at the clinic, a marketing move. It served to attract an audience and also inform the supply chain of the sorts of numbers involved. A popular show would need a good 30,000 tabs of fresh blotter, or some 250 sheets be made available, and the clinic was the only place of central exchange.

The Clinic

The Clinic naturally didn’t describe itself as a LSD hub but as a social welfare place, something of a do-good rehab, a medical support service. However, people like Manson, who was permanently high, hung out there pretty much because you got free acid and would meet a number of runaways, drawn to the legend of the district. He could conscript girls and have them do pretty much whatever he said; the acid was free, the concerts were free and there was no chance of getting in trouble with the law.

So the Clinic was the hub, no big whoop. Our posters on the wall tell us that Jan 1967 to Dec 1968 – those two years – were the height of the fad and the concerts outgrew the hall. Haight Ashbury became a magnet for every part-time criminal, chancer, vagrant and addict to descend in great numbers. The Clinic had to start to distance itself from the drug trade as the district started turning into slum, with all the unwanted attention this brings, so in 1969 the LSD transactions took place off premises. This marked the end of the poster series and the start of the whole thing winding down. The hippies trekked off to Woodstock and Haight Ashbury started cleaning up.

The Posters

These aren’t just any posters, they are works of art and core to the psychedelic movement in how it came to be defined. They epitomize, and illustrate, legendary artists in a unique age and gave young people a voice.

06 September 2025

The Pitch: Animated Pilot, sound vs light

The importance of sound

One of my back projects is an animated series and the one key aspect which tripped me up was the theme. Unlike any other aspect of the production, the pilot bears the theme which remains with the show; it sets the tone, provides backstory, has a memorable hook, has noises reflecting the genre or style, has broad appeal, is unique, is short, is exciting, builds anticipation and above all, wows the execs at the network – or at least, doesn’t clash with their values and might have promise.
So, no pressure then.
I am of the opinion that 75% of any presentation has the power of delivery in sound. Sound is the most important aspect when communicating emotion, it has greater power to move than the visuals do. So sound is really important, and I have experience with sound and could probably do it, but I don’t think I’d do a very good job.
So far the writing (for 3 seasons, to circumvent any major character changes), the visual character development, animation components and scenic back plates are all made by me. The animation, and the voices, can be AI for the pilot. Those can, and do, change.
However…
The theme tune, there’s a stumbling block.
Then…
On Youtube, in the shorts, a Canadian musician mucking about with mini-synths - lo-fi, experimental, wide-range, all-mood demos - and there, in the midst of this lot, not one but two short compositions which could easily be the theme. I haven’t thought of the project in 3 years yet from the first chord, these found that je ne sais quoi which instantly managed, somehow, to tick all the boxes.

The unimportance of video

In the 90’s, Turner bought Cartoon Network and created Adult Swim. The idea was to have a 24-hour cartoon channel, meaning anything running between 10pm and 5am needn’t be mainstream, adult-oriented toons, really, MTV style. One excellent show was Space Ghost, a 1968 character recycled from the Hanna-Barbera archives, which Turner also owned. Space Ghost aired on Adult Swim at midnight on a Sunday - hence a budget of almost zero.
But the show needed a sound guy! Because Zorak, the arch-enemy, was now the band and the hero Space Ghost was now a talk show host (the idea of a talk show is genius, because it requires virtually no animation). Aside from the theme and outro, you need stabs or stings which are the fanfare preceding the guest, or accompanying a joke. So Williams Street, the production company, get their friend Sonny Rollins, who plays guitar, in to do all that, and his band riffs the theme and a few stings and there’s the sound.
The result is the poorly-animated mantis, scaled poorly, in low resolution, whose mouth moves randomly and whose arms move randomly over a keyboard, to imitate drums and guitars. The animation is so bad, it practically doesn’t relate to the sound at all, and the sound is nothing more than strangled noise.
And yet it airs because none of those things matter.
What is important:
1.   Zorak is now the band
2.   Zorak hates Space Ghost
3.   Some sort of musical sting announces the guest
4.   The sting relates to the theme
Visually, the scene does not need to be congruent with the sound and for this reason, I set the sound down first and use that to guide the visuals. It's always sound-first.

Why pitch a pilot?

Does it make sense for a show to generate 1.5M views on release while a clip from that show generates 15M views on Youtube? Surely vertical shorts, which require no music or theme and get auto-dubbed, at sub 30-second inserts, are a LOT easier to make?
A pitch can always be cut up for Youtube, so that’s the go-to (all vertical format).

However, if successful, the pilot (and costings) lead to an order for 1 or 2 seasons. Conservatively the budget per episode would be under $200K. All of that will wind up on Youtube, eventually, sliced to shorts, but a network or streaming service will pay for it and afterwards, you still get paid every time it syndicates. There are many advantages without ruling anything else out.

The downside is the first season analytics, projected, factored against the cost analysis, is the metric which determines if the show will be renewed, and if so, for how long. The projections simply predict when the metric falls below threshold and simply does not order that season be produced. Those thresholds are fluid, leading to shows being cancelled, then rebooted then cancelled again, then rebooted by a different network with lower thresholds, then cancelled. Then everyone goes back to what they were doing before.

The AKAI MPK Mini Mk.3 Limited Edition

I haven’t used it in like 2 years and it deserves more than that! Maybe I should give it to the Canadian musician and see if I can't bribe him into helping with the theme. I'd feel better knowing it was being useful.

23 August 2025

Hollywood and the Bigger Bust Vol. 1

Hollywood gone Bust

A distinct trend is emerging as actresses give consideration to the more generous bust, noting the improvements in confidence and popularity. The keen observer will have noted these public displays of the now enhanced upper torso in this summary of the emergent movement.