Blog Archive: November 2024

Top Secret Secret Revealed
Yesterday I finished off a Christmas Song what I have been recording for the Joyzine Advent Calendar, and while doing the "mini-interview" bit I mentioned that there's a "top secret project" that I'm planning to do in 2025.

As I pressed "send" I MUSED on the fact that I seem to be FOREVER mentioning "top secret projects", usually on this here blog, and loads of them never actually happen. I was looking at some ANCIENT blog posts the other day for ANOTHER thing I'm thinking about - which is to retweet (or reSKEET I guess) some blogs on the 20th Anniversary of their publication - and they're FULL of me saying "Ooh there's a secret thing I can't tell you about" and in most cases I have NO idea what I'm on about. For instance, this one is probably one of the songs that ended up on Christmas Selection Box but I have NO idea which one. Also, why was I saying "I can't tell you about this" when I could have just not mentioned it at all. And why, more to the point, am I still doing it now?

So, with that in mind I thought I'd reveal one of the SECRET things that I have been alluding to for years in blogs, newsletters and pub conversations - DINOSAUR PLANET: THE NOVEL.

Our story begins seven years ago, in the distant era known as 2017, when I self-released a book called "Storm House". I had a lovely time, as it turned out that the process was very similar to self-releasing a record but you got to swank about saying "Oh yes my novel" which was LOTS of fun. Around this time I ALSO sent a copy of it to various LITERARY AGENTS, and one such got in touch very keen to REP it i.e. try and sell it to Actual Book Publishers.

This was all very exciting and led to about A MILLION re-writes so that it ended up being VERY different (and much better) than my original version, but then we had an Actual Year of trying to get somebody to buy it without much - or indeed ANY - success. It was all a bit disappointing, as LOADS of work had gone into it and I'd even written up outlines for a whole SERIES of books to follow!

Undeterred - all right, maybe a bit deterred but still - I decided to have a go at something else and thought "Hang on, Dinosaur Planet was a really good idea, why don't I write THAT as a kids' book?" This led to AT LEAST a year of writing, re-writing, re-re-writing and so on through I think SEVENTEEN drafts (and multiple Minor Revisions) pinging between me and My Agent until it was SUPER SHINY and wonderful. The main plot of the album and the live show remained but there were a whole BUNCH of brand new characters and BIG changes to most of the original cast to make it more like a children's novel. Again, all of these changes made the whole thing a LOT better, and now it's weird to think that some of my FAVOURITE bits (e.g. the new extended PC Darren ARC) weren't in the original.

That then went out to publishers and... nothing much happened. A couple of publishers said they liked it, but not really enough to BUY it, and after three waves of submissions it all came to a gradual halt. I think this time it was even MORE disappointing, as the book was DEAD GOOD and I had high hopes of going around the country promoting it in SONG.

I'd like to think that at least PART of the reason we couldn't get anyone to buy it was because I am Insufficiently Famous - whenever I go and look at the Children's Books section in the book shop it always CRAMMED with books "written" by famous people, and there don't seem to be ANY written by, say, someone who had a viral hit song about twenty years ago. It all reminded me of THIS rather excellent gag from the also excellent 2025 Beano Annual (which we'll be talking about in a future episode of The Funny Comics Fan Club):



I mean, OBVIOUSLY it might also be because publishers just didn't LIKE it, but I prefer this version!

I still have VAGUE hopes that it might get UNLEASHED upon the world one day. Next year I'm going to try and do a lot more STAND-UP and PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT about Doctor Doom and I know that there are some Public Intellectuals who have become sufficiently Public to be asked to write THEIR own children's books. If that happens I will be able to say "Here you go, already written one!" I've also got a PITCH out for a non-fiction book about Doctor Doom's daftest stories which isn't exactly setting the publishing world on FIRE at the moment, but hopefully will get a bit more interest when the Robert Downey Jr on-set images start coming out!

In the meantime "Dinosaur Planet: THE NOVEL" must remain in the vaults, but if anyone happens to bump into a Publishing Executive with an interest in space dinosaurs, giant robots, or the destruction of Peterborough, do send them my way!

posted 28/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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Doom Ahoy!
This morning I received a message from Google Search Console to let me know that the Number One Search Term to this site has changed! EXCITING, right? I assume that the old top term was something like "International Rock Star" or "Unconventionally Handsome" or similar, but can you hazard a guess as to what the NEW top term is?

No, it's not "That Hey Hey 16K Guy" or "Mispelt Doctor From Off The Simpsons" (though I'm sure those are definitely in the top 7), it was in fact "DR DOOM"! HA! This fills me with DELIGHT as it has been an ongoing PROJECT of mine to make flipping well sure that MY name is associated with that of Doctor Doom as much as possible, so that when Robert Downey Jr starts appearing as him in FILMS it will be ME who the international media corporations call up to say WISE THINGS about it all, preferably at Glamorous Movie Premieres.

THUS I am doing my best to get onto podcasts or to WRITE things about him, and in that vein I have been toiling away for a while on doing a Doctor Doom LIVE show in which I will explain how he works, based on the RESEARCH in MY BOOK. Until recently I've seen this as a sort of Stand-up Comedy Affair, with me talking HUMOROUSLY (and simultaneously INCISIVELY) about it in front of some SLIDES, but since the sudden rush of SONGS that I mentioned a little while ago I have come to the SHUDDERING REALISTION that I should include some MUSIC in there too.

This may seem an entirely OBVIOUS idea, mostly because it IS entirely obvious. Whenever I've mentioned the fact that I'm planning to do a DOOM SHOW almost everyone has ASSUMED that it would be a MUSICAL of some sort, which I have stubbornly resisted, not least because I would be crushed beneath a deluge of LAWYERS if I tried to do something like that. However, once I had FINALLY written a song about Doctor Doom - explaining who he is in comparison to Batman - I realised that actually it would really WORK if I applied Musical Theatre SCIENCE i.e. in musical theatre the SONGS are meant to appear when the emotions get so strong that the characters can't do anything BUT sing.

So, using that methodology, I could use SONGS in my explanations when it all gets TOO EXCITING to do anything else. oR to put it another way, if I write SONGS which encapsulate the most important BITS then I can use those as TENTPOLES for the show as a whole, writing it as movements beteween the key points. That sounds like a good idea to me!

The CLINCHER for my thinking though came from a PROBLEM: if I'm doing a presentation with slides, how do I keep those slides working when I'm playing guitar and singing at the same time? As you may know, it usually takes TWO hands to operate a guitar, which is 100% of my total hand capacity, so I'd be unable to operate a MAGIC SLIDE CLICKER at the same time. "Hang on though," I thought, "What if there was a GUITAR PEDAL for slides? Surely, here in the futuristic space year 2024, such a thing exists?"

Friends, I am happy to report that IT TOTALLY DOES! On seeing this my BRANE immediately filled with GRATE IDEAS for how I could muck around with it and do LIVE VIDEOS and so on, and that was pretty much it. I have now written a grand total of TWO (2) songs, but I'm hoping to get a few more done before Christmas, and then in the new year I'll start looking out for places to go and DO the show, maybe in the spring. I will of course keep you INFORMED of this as I go along, but I am quite excited about it - MORE GADGETS for me!!

posted 26/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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Godot Returns
Yesterday I had the afternoon off in order to go to THE THEATRE, as I am dead sophisticated like that.

The play I was going to see was Waiting For Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and I was going to see it with my old pal Mr C Lawson, who was down in London especially for the occassion. The LAST time me and Chris went to see a play was ALSO Waiting For Godot, that time starring Captain Picard and GANDALF, and that had been BLOODY GRATE, so we had high hopes for this iteration.

When we got to the theatre we both said "Hang on, is this the same place where we saw it LAST time?" but it was only when we got to the BAR that we realised it TOTALLY WAS. This led to much discussion of coming to see this play EVERY 10-15 years or so in the same place, which to be honest would be fine by me.

It ALSO led to further comparisons with the Professor X/Magneto version, which I am afraid to say were not favourable for the current production, for LO! it was... sort of all right? As Chris said, it often felt like they were Saying The Words without hugely investing in what they actually MEANT. In places it was like one of those SHAKESPEARE productions where they've gone "This olde worlde speak doesn't make any sense, so let's say it loudly while making some extra noises and, if at all possible, miming something for LARFS". Also, they didn't seem to have decided whether it was meant to be PROFOUNDLY BLEAK or FUNNY or something else, so although there WERE laughs they were always slightly NERVOUS ones, as if the audience weren't sure whether they should or not.

The STAGING was dead good, I thought, as it looked like a PAINTING that had fallen slightly out of its FRAME, but there were some other aspects of The Production that seemed a bit daft. For instance, usually Vladmir and Estragon wear bowler hats but here they had WOOLLY hats on, which is FINE and looked good but then it meant that The Hat-Swapping Routine in the second half didn't work AT ALL. Also, Ben Whishaw's costume involved jogging pants, which is FINE similarly but then meant he had to MIME doing his flies up, which happens several times and made it feel a bit SCHOOL PLAY-ish.

There was quite a lot of that sort of thing, but then not really DIGGING the production did allow the ACTUAL PLAY to shine through A LOT. I have seen Waiting For Godot LOADS of times and INDEED have even DIRECTED it 300,000,000 years ago when I was a student (featuring Chris as Pozzo, in fact!) and so it was LOVELY to hear all the LINES and remember the different BITS as they happened. It really is BLOODY BRILLIANT, and it struck me that it would be AMAZING to do a version where you got Morecambe & Wise impersonators to do it AS Morecambe & Wise (Eric as Estragon, Ernie as Vladmir OBVS). I'm thinking about that again now and it is AMAZING!

It would have been nice if it had been BETTER but it was still FINE and we had a lovely time DISCUSSING it after, and also drinking BEER in various venues and also PIZZA - which, it turns out, is pretty much exactly what we did last time! Hopefully in another 10-15 years we can go back and see the Fassbender/McAvoy or Jackman/Reynolds versions!

posted 21/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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The Songs Are Flooding In
In yesterday's blog I mentioned that in Cambourne I had performed a BRAND NEW SONG what I had written, but that is not the ONLY new one on the go at the moment.

For LO! over the past few weeks I have written no less than FOUR new songs, with a couple of other ideas bubbling under also. This is more than I've written in the past few YEARS put together and has come about, as usual, because I'm supposed to be doing something else.

What happened was that I got talking to a PAL a little while ago and we agreed to have a go at doing a COLLABORATION. I won't go into any great detail about it here as we have still to hammer out the details, but the general GIST was to do some of my old songs together but in a different FORMAT to what I'd done them in before. I thus went home and thought "Right, the important thing to do now is to try out some of those old songs and see which ones might be suitable" and instead of that started writing a new song instead. Obviously.

That has since CONTINUED and I must say I am really really enjoying it. As regular listeners may have noticed, my lyrics have got quite DENSE over recent decades, largely because I LOVE trying to cram as many internal rhymes as I can into every single line. This takes a bit of EFFORT (and also means I need to stick to alcohol-free beer before a gig so as not to mess everything up!) but does feel GRATE when I'm doing it. It's also GRATE fun having a little BATCH of songs to ROCK through when I fancy a bit of SINGING, and that in itself is a lovely reminder of how much fun it is just to sit around with a guitar and BELLOW.

The HUGE advantage of coming back to this after so long in abeyance is that I have all sorts of THORTS lying around for songs. I usually like to PERCOLATE an idea in my BRANE for several years before turning it into a song - this may APPEAR to the uninitiated that I am sitting in pubs saying the same thing over and over again but NO, it is songwrting - so now have quite a few SEEDS to nurture into either ROCK EPICS or - to my great surprise after years of refusing to do so - songs about DOCTOR DOOM. Yes!

The only thing I'm lacking at the moment is GIGS. It was brilliant being able to try out a new song last week (and very helpful to THE PROCESS too, as it highlighted the fact that it wasn't really clear what I was on about!) but I've not go many opportunities lined up to do more of that sort of thing. Maybe I will have to get my CONTACTS BOOK out of storage too!

posted 15/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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A Whole Lot Of Hats
Last week I spent a DELIGHTFUL couple of days at the Figshare & Symplectic EMEA User Conference 2024.

To clarify, before we go any further, I'm not being sarcastic or anything here - I really did have a lovely time, spending two days with excellent colleagues talking about the two systems what I manage at work. HANG ON - no, I mean I AM being sarcastic, because obviously I am too cool and rock and roll to think it's really interesting to talk about the implications of the lack of REF guidelines for the future of academic impact data collection. THAT WOULD BE KRAZY.

Yes yes all right that was me and it was GRATE. As I have mentioned before, I am in the strange (for me) situation of really enjoying my job these days, and it turns out that that makes conferences a whole lot more fun to go to, especially when you're with WORK PALS who are similarly interested. The only downside of it all was that I was forced - FORCED, I tell you - to do a presentation about one of our projects. As regular readers will be aware I HATE showing off, as you can see for yourself in the video below:



The talk was about how we transferred an archive of The Piaggi Collection (a lot of HATS) from an old system and set up on Figshare. We did this earlier on in the year and, as you will see from the talk, there was a specific point in the data migration where I thought "OOH blimey, this will be AMAZING for a presentation" and took LOTS of screenshots. I won't spoil WHAT happened as it is a dead good bit in the presentation, and is worth seeing for yourself, honest! It's also worth having a look at The Piaggi Collection site itself as you can zip around looking at all sorts of aspects of the HATS for yourself. I have never been a hat fan before I must admit (having a GIGANTIC HEAD I have never really got on with them) but I must admit this experience has converted me. Maybe I don't need 800 of them though!

posted 14/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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Back To 2017
It's been a WEIRDLY EMOTIONAL morning for me today, all to do with the long prophesied MASS EXODUS from Twitter finally actually (probably) happening.

I mean, I know poeople have been leaving there for a while now, but it seems like this week a decision been made by Nice People Everywhere to go over to BLUESKY en masse. As far as I can see this has been caused by D Trump offering E Musk a place in his government as an Efficiency Tsar, and I must say I can very much see the reasoning. After all, if you have millions fewer uses of your system you need a lot fewer STAFF, which I'm pretty sure is SUPER EFFICIENT all round. If all goes to plan next year I expect him to change the name of the country to The UXA and sort out immigration immediately by having a third of the population up sticks and move to Canada immediately.

I got EMOTIOANL about it this particular morning because of STARTER PACKS. These are basically lists of people with Specific Interests that you can use to find accounts to follow, and the first one I saw was for BEATLES people, forwarded to me by International Rock Star Pete Green. I was very merrily following those when I noticed that my notifications had gone NUTS. "60+ Notificatuions?" I thought. "Surely that can't be right?"

Mr R Manuel had set up a B3ta Starter Pack what had my name on it, and suddenly a whole HEAP of familiar names were popping up. I went through and did a whole load of Folows Backs of people I knew, and then all of a sudden my entire feed was EXACTLY LIKE OLD TWITTER! Nice people! Saying amusing things! Without adverts or Nazis!

I had a quick look over on twitter to make sure I wasn't IMAGING the huge gulf of difference, and saw that "Bluesky" was trending. However, when I looked at what people were SAYING it was mostly snide remarks by people (often with blue ticks) claiming that they'd been for a look but Bluesky was "just like twitter in 2017" AS IF THAT WAS A BAD THING!! Twitter in 2017 is pretty much exactly what I wanted, and now it appears to be BACK! Just not on twitter!

Other dreary people were OPINING that all the nice people leaving twitter was a Bad Thing as it meant that we couldn't ENGAGE with each other. Personally speaking I never really WANTED to engage with arseholes and Nazis, and I certainly didn't want them FOISTED on me repeatedly along with weird adverts for AI Products, so that is entirely fine with me!

Anyway, all of this is mostly to say a) HOORAY for something GOOD happening on the interweb and b) if you want to find me over there I'm on https://bsky.app/profile/mjhibbett.bsky.social. Do come and say hello!

(PS and if anyone can set up a Starter Pack featuring People Who Used Go To Indietracks Who I Haven't Seen For Ages, that would be much appreciated!)

posted 13/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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Return To Cambourne
On Friday evening myself and The Flatness Of My Fen headed off to CAMBOURNE once again to play at an evening of Retro Gaming and SONG alongside the very excellent The British IBM.

When I played the same gig last year we had an horrendous time trying to get from Cambridge to Cambourne beforehand, so this time the aforementioned Stops On My Route suggested that we go via St Neots and get a taxi from THERE instead, which worked out MUCH better, enabling us to get to our hotel with LOADS of time.

It did not, however, stop me from getting LOST on the very short journey to The Hub where it was all taking place, although this did mean that I had the opportunity to see AN ACTUAL ROBOT! Cambourne has a PILOT SCHEME whereby you can get your shopping delivered by AN ACTUAL ROBOT, which people there seem to think is now entirely unremarkable but which I was AMAZED by. Dear Tech Bros: more of THIS sort of thing please, and less six-fingered art theft!

I got to the venue to find things in full swing, with BAR up and running and Aidy British IBM very excited to present me with a SURPRISE - bottles of HEY HEY 16K beer! This was FANTASTIC and, I can confirm, DELICIOUS!

There was chat and good times and then, just after 8pm, The British IBM went on and were FAB. They were a DUO this time but it still sounded ACE, helped along by a LOVELY amp which Aidy gave us a full purchase history for. It also helped that the songs were GRATE!

After that we had a short break and then I went on and done THIS:

The Peterborough All-Saints Wide Game Team (group B)

The Perfect Love Song

I'll Fetch Me Book

It's Hard To Be Hopeful

Cheer Up Love

I'm Doing The Ironing

Clubbing In The Week

20 Things To Do Before You're 30

Bad Back

It Only Works Because You're here

Hey Hey 16K

Looking at that list now it does seem like a slightly odd set - I was aware that it would be a very similar audience to last time so wanted to ensure they were hearing different songs, and that included a WHOLE NEW SONG what I'd written in the preceding fortnight. I made a few mistakes but it seemed to go OK, although I think I'm going to do a REJIG and swap the first and second verses around.

I also made a slight error at the end by saying that I was finishing with Hey Hey 16K rather than saving it for an encore - what I MEANT was that I was being dead classy and could do something ELSE for an encore, but everybody seemed to take it as me saying that was IT! Foolish Hibbett!

Afterwards there was much chat, some MERCH selling, and then further chat back at the hotel bar. It was a LOVELY evening, followed by a lovely next day when we had a bit of a wander around and saw MORE robots. I'm not sure if doing the same gig two years in a row at roughly the same time makes it an ANNUAL EVENT, but I do rather hope so!

posted 12/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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Topper and Sparky
Like some kind of remorseless juggernaut OF FUN, another episode of The Funny Comics Fan Club has rolled around, and is available wherever you like to find your podcasts (spotify, Apple etc), on our own website or indeed right HERE:



This time we're talking about The Topper and Sparky, which is one BIG comic with a smaller one included in the middle. It was, as ever, a DELIGHT to chat with Mr John Dredge about it, and this time we got ourselves unnecessarily worked up about all sorts of things, not least the appallingness of Mickey The Monkey. Ooh, we were furious!

If you want to read along with us you can find pretty much all of the strips that we talk about on our socials - that's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Bluesky - and if you enjoy it we'd be very grateful indeed if you could share it with other people, whether that's by modern TECHNICAL means or just by mentioning to somebody. We're having a LOVELY time banging on about these old comics, and we rather hope that other people might get something out of it too!

posted 11/11/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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