Substantialreads: Augasms

I'd over-optimistically decided to work through Neal Stephenson's eight-volume Baroque Cycle this month, but I only made it an hour into the first audiobook when the prospect of sitting through another 113 interminable hours where that came from became too much to bear.

In need of a hasty replacement, I committed to the first August-based pun I could come up with and embarked on a perilous voyage through "classic" erotica. Enjoy. Not like that.

Damnant quod non intellegunt

Pretty devastated at my blog getting a bad review from Patrick K. Phillips of Patrick's Place.

Painstakingly planning pretend paperbacks for Sonic the Comic even though it's 2016, I'm 30, and these won't ever exist

Sonic the Comic was my favourite comic as a child. Some people had American superheroes, others had mischievous 1950s British children, I had the licensed adventures of a console mascot.

Sure, when I picked my first issue off the shelf at Dillons (#21, 5th March 1994), it was because I loved playing those Sega games where you hold down right and occasionally press a jump button to move the hedgehog sprite from one edge of a themed landscape to the other. But I stayed for Nigel Kitching's thrilling stories and Richard Elson's captivating art.

A few years ago, when I was spending a week by myself in a wooden hut overlooking the sea in a secluded corner of a Thaisland, I downloaded some STC scans for nostalgia kicks and ended up wasting the next few days puzzling over how these various overlapping yet diverse stories might be best represented in trade paperback collections, should that situation ever arise. After much redrafting and frustration I gave up and had to settle for going on boat trips and enjoying my time in paradise instead.

Fortunately, I've now managed to make my life so unexciting that the prospect of returning to this problem and finally nailing it doesn't even seem that much like a waste of my precious, dwindling time any more. So without futher ado, here's the unofficial, definitive guide to how you can fit every single story* from Sonic the Comic into 13 x 200-ish-page paperbacks that won't ever exist for multiple reasons.

Illegally download the digital hatchet jobs here to share the fruits of my pointless labour (or just download the original comics here like I did, occasional bad scans and all). It's not like the creators get any royalties when these are sold on eBay (you'll need a .cbr reader too).

Substantialreads: Insubstantialreads

At least I made it to the second half of the year before falling back on comics. And at least it's another comic writer being a smart-arse, weaving a dense interdimensional web that he apparently genuinely believes was dictated to him by beings from another realm during a magickal trance, so it shouldn't be so much light reading as perplexing and off-putting. We can only hope.

Penelope: A confessional memoir

The following is a true story that I have to get off my chest.

It's up to you whether you think it's an actual experience from my life or the authentic transcript of a dream I just had, fuelled by reading some messed-up horror stories, listening to a radio discussion about dreams and an undigested bit of beef fajita.

Substantialreads: Djune

Growing up, my brother was the household Dune fan, and you don't need two of those. I preferred the less time-intensive role of household Hitchhiker's fan, those books are much thinner.

I already know much of what happens in Dune - the top end of the saga at least - thanks to my brother's enthusiastic prattling, a famously inept film adaptation I never sat all the way through, a low-budget TV miniseries I did and a succinct musical synopsis by Iron Maiden, but maybe I'll get more out of it now that I'm no longer too young and pre-undergraduate to recognise the obvious allegories about them Catholics and them Muslims.

Ranking the Manowar albums, even though it's 2016 and I'm 30 years old

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things"

- 1 Corinthians 13:11

"May your sword stay wet, like a young girl in her prime"

- Manowar, 'Hail and Kill'

If it's not an arrogant assertion, I'm fairly sure I hit maturity this year. There weren't any physical signs, like there were for that other substantial transition (I didn't spontaneously sprout any hair this time), but there were more subtle indicators.

Settling down in a physical, literally concrete way rather than merely being anchored by flimsy concepts like "love" and "contracts." Deciding that I might actually be prepared to be 50% responsible for a human life after all (still, give it a couple of years). Looking at a multipack of Fudgee bars in the fridge and having no desire whatsoever to cram that sickly goop into my mouth. Noticing Manowar in my music library and realising I was never, ever in the mood for non-ironically self-aggrandising battle hymns any more.

Manowar are a hilarious band, especially when you read enough interviews to finally realise they're 100% serious about the whole metal warriors shtick and lack the self-awareness to realise that posing in their underwear for a greased-up album photoshoot might not be received as intended. Their terminally cocky anthems and moronic lyrics are fun to play for a laugh, but if you're enough of a classic metal snob to accidentally discover the genuine merits in their early work, and realise you're duty-bound to defend them as classics of the genre, it can get a bit embarrassing.

But I'm done with the lot of them now. These days I don't listen to much of anything with lyrics, cheesy or otherwise, and all that shouting and guitar soloing is much too energetic for an old man of 30. So before I triumphantly delete these album folders to make space for boring symphonies and non-ish ambience, let's give them the Viking funerals they deserve - join me as I blow my speakers to the rousing battle cries of the Metal Kings! (And stream the later stuff on YouTube because I don't have it. I may have shit taste, but I still have some standards).

Substantialreads: Silent Disco

Time for some non-fiction. But it's not like I was going to read anything useful. Bachelor of Arts here.

Substantialreads: Space Chicks

It's not like I haven't read sci-fi by women before. This isn't an apology or amends, it's just me clutching at a theme for the month that doesn't involve cracking open a dreary tetraology.

The further adventures of self-indulgence: All my British homes

We've finally secured a reasonably good internet connection, so before I'm inevitably thrown back to the dial-up ages I've been making the most of those advanced, high-bandwidth services that you lucky people in the developed world take for granted, like YouTube videos above 144p, non-HTML Gmail and Google Street View, which enables less fortunate people to imagine they're wandering the real streets of wealthier countries in 2009.

I've thought for a while that when I finally make it back to the UK and visit the family, I might also take a tour of my childhood homes and haunts in search of overwhelming primal nostalgia or crushing existential despair about the transience of our brief lives. Any emotion would be fine really.

But since we just built a house, and that rules out travel for this year at least, I settled for a synthetic virtual substitute and spent an hour or so clicking along familiar routes to schools, playgrounds and newsagents where the latest issue of Dinosaurs! magazine with another free bit of glow-in-the-dark Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton isn't waiting for me any more. I didn't feel much of anything.

If you're ever in South Cheshire, Lancaster or Edinburgh and you feel like paying tribute to my life, here's where to light those candles.