Decided to chat with the kook in the corner, eh? Hope your mug is full. Settle in and I’ll regale you with some backstory,
The Reading Life
I’ve always been a reader. And I do mean ALWAYS.
It started with comic books — which, in the early-to-mid 1970s, were not exactly considered serious literature by most people. My mother had a different view. When others would question why she was letting me read them (“It’s just pictures!”), she had a ready answer: “Because he’s actually reading them.” She understood something the critics didn’t.
From comics, the jump to novels was inevitable and fast. The gateway drug was Heinlein — specifically “The Rolling Stones” and then “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” — and after that there was no going back. At peak velocity I was consuming a 150-page mass-market paperback every day or two. Reading wasn’t something I did in my spare time; it was simply how I operated. On the way to school. While commuting. While eating. Everywhere, always, without exception.
If you’ve never banged your shin on a fire hydrant, or said ‘excuse me’ to a street sign, you’ve wasted far too much valuable reading time.
The library that accumulated over fifty-plus years now runs to somewhere around 3,000 physical books — paperbacks bought in stores, hardcovers from the Science Fiction Book Club or elsewhere — most of it catalogued on Goodreads. Physical books only. There’s something about tattooed dead trees that a screen has never convincingly replicated for me.
What fifty years of voracious reading across science fiction, fantasy, history, philosophy, and everything adjacent produces is a person whose interests don’t fit neatly into any single box — which probably explains the varied nature of my Ramblings.
What I Read and Why — A Note on Competence Porn
A significant portion of my reading (and viewing) habits can be explained by a single concept: competence porn. The term is exactly what it sounds like — fiction in which the primary pleasure is watching extremely capable people be extremely capable at things. Mastery, preparation, execution. Characters who don’t just survive their circumstances but understand them well enough to engineer their way through them.
It resonates. Deeply.
The canonical example from my reading life is L.E. Modesitt, Jr. — an author I’ve followed so completely that I’ve read everything he’s published. Everything. Including, in a moment of either dedication or absent-mindedness depending on how you look at it, “The Fires of Paratime” (purchased through the Science Fiction Book Club) and its later republication as “The Timegod” — both of which I owned and read before realizing they were the same book. He reliably delivers protagonists who are quietly, systematically, devastatingly competent. No shortcuts, no deus ex machina — just mastery applied methodically until the problem yields.
And, since I also am a fan of anime and translated Japanese light novels, one example has got to be Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Yeah, I know there are elements that are beyond what others are comfortable with. The harem dynamic is what it is, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But strip those away and what’s underneath is quintessential competence porn — a protagonist who starts from nothing, engineers his survival through sheer ingenuity, and proceeds to become the most dangerously capable person in every room he enters. Hard to argue with the formula.
The Professional Journey
Four decades in software development will take you places — sometimes literally. The early years of my career included three extended international trips, all for the same bank: Frankfurt first (eleven weeks, one week after graduation — and conveniently fluent in German from 3 years of college study,which made my non-work hours considerably more enjoyable), then Tokyo (five to six weeks, 1988), then London (eight weeks). Each trip lasted as long as it did for the same reason — I’d arrive to install software I’d written, and the local office would inevitably have a customizations they wanted before they’d sign off on it.
Tokyo deserves a particular mention — I felt more “at home” there than anywhere else I’ve ever been, before or since.
The London trip ended with an immediate onward journey to Frankfurt for five more weeks — departing the day after Pan Am Flight 103 went down over Lockerbie, Scotland. That was my last international travel for work. The decades since have been spent in software development across banking, finance, and telecommunications, continuing to the present day.
A Few Other Things
In the early 1990s I did a brief stint in the US Army — infantry, by deliberate choice. (The recruiting sergeant was astonished. I had my reasons.) Basic training in Georgia ended that particular adventure rather decisively; it turns out there are limits to what careful planning can account for, and Georgia heat in summer is one of them.
I also hold a Private Pilot License — earned it, took a flying vacation with it, remain proud of it. Medical clearance currently prevents me from using it, which is one of those facts of life you accept and move on from.
The Reading-Writing Connection
Fifty years of voracious reading doesn’t automatically make you a writer — but it does mean that when something arrives that needs to be written, you have an internalized sense of what decent writing actually looks like. The bar is set by everything you’ve ever read, and you know when you’re clearing it or falling short.
As for the Pub Tales specifically — it started as a silly concept. “A pub that exists nowhere.” That’s it. That was the whole idea. And then, somewhere in the process of thinking about it, the question evolved: what if I took archetypes from across all of fiction, put them in a room together non-confrontationally, and just… saw what happened? Turns out that’s a more interesting question than the original one.
Everything Else
If you’ve browsed the site and found yourself wondering what connects AI consciousness essays, D&D character backstories, a seven-part meditation on a love-hate relationship with MMOs, and occasional deep-dives into whatever technology is currently demanding my attention — the answer is: the same head produced all of it.
Fifty years of reading across many genres (and science fiction, for all it’s considered a single genre, really contains its own multitude) produces someone who finds patterns across domains, thinks in systems, and has opinions about most things. When something catches my attention hard enough to write about, I write about it. The result looks eclectic from the outside. From the inside it’s entirely consistent — it’s just what happens when a physicist-mathematician-software developer with a lifelong reading habit encounters the world.
The anime posts are perhaps the exception — those were always more observational than analytical, a record of what I was watching rather than a sustained argument about anything. Consider them the pub’s background music rather than the conversation.
And that, more or less, is the kook in the corner. If your mug’s empty by now, the bar’s still open — go have a look around.