About

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy which I blog about here or on goodreads. I’ve been pretty bad at this in recent years, but I’m trying to get better at sharing the stuff I find interesting or worthy with as many people as possible.

While I understand that there are many who don’t like to link the two, I often write about politics. My politics would be considered pretty left wing, I was once a member of Ireland’s Labour Party, but quit when they entered government with Ireland’s Tory Party. The title of this site comes from that, after all, what better home for a socialist than a Red Planet.

I’m a strong believer in the Open Web, the process of owning your own content and, most importantly, your online identity. I’ve been on a journey of discovery regarding this, and have written about the process here on occasion.

I rediscovered the Indieweb in early 2017, and have spent the time since remaking this site to make use of indieweb technologies. I now publish all articles using micropub, accept all comments via webmention (and only webmention). I’ve written my own micropub server and released it on github in the hope of encouraging others to follow the same process.

I’m not a programmer, I’ve no particular training beyond what I’ve taken up myself in spare time and as a hobby.

Incidentally, while the twitter link below is to my personal twitter account, there is a separate twitter account, @AscraeusOrg which tweets every time I write a new post.