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5 Tools to Be Safe on the Internet

November 4, 2024

It’s not just that technology is changing at a fast pace; it’s changing at an accelerating pace. Heck, even the pace of acceleration is accelerating, too. Put simply, it’s really hard to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to computers, the internet, and IT security. Sadly, IT security is not considered a crucial skill, though it is. Just imagine how much of our daily life revolves around computers. So here are 5 tools to help you be safe on the internet.

These are all things I use myself on a daily basis. I can’t imagine using a computer (especially online) without them. I’m paranoid when it comes to IT security – read my post on Home for Fiction changes to see why – so I want to absolutely minimize the risk.

To be 100% clear, in case it’s not immediately apparent: This post isn’t sponsored; none of these tools’ authors paid me to do this. I’m only doing this because I genuinely think these tools are useful to the average user. Nay, these tools are critical for a safe internet and computing experience.

tools for safe internet. Image of a screen showing computer code
The internet and computers come across as so complicated to most people that a stock image such as this (depicting some simple code) connotes ideas of a hacker penetrating a secret database or something…
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A Less Disturbing Form of Reality: Short Story Collection

October 28, 2024

A Less Disturbing Form of Reality is a short story collection themed around the uncanny and the unexplained. However, there’s something you need to know: It’s not new.

In fact, it’s anything but new. The stories were written between 2008 and 2014, though a handful of them are adaptations of even older stuff I’ve written.

In other words, these are really, really raw. They’re also very unlike my usual literary-fiction style, and even different from my recent short fiction, such as A Summer Evening in Another World and Tell Me, Mariner.

So, why now?

A Less Disturbing Form of Reality: book cover

The cover art of A Less Disturbing Form of Reality is something that won’t win any awards. It’s made with Canva and an AI-slapped image…

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Death in A Christmas Carol: The Impossible Representation

October 21, 2024

It’s been a while since I shared something from my academic vault of uselessness… Well, alright; knowledge and thought are never useless; academia (the way it’s run nowadays) might be. But I digress. The following post on death in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 148-149) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press.

Also take a look at my posts on religion in A Christmas Carol and, especially, Gothic Immortality in Dickens’s work – the present post forms a nice pair with the latter.

death in A Christmas Carol. Ai render of Scrooge facing the third ghost
Here’s an AI render of how an impressionist painting of the scene would’ve perhaps looked like
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