a kind of history?

I thought I'd try a more historical take for the next novel. It'll be set in World War II, but be reflective of now, with some modern tweaks to the story-telling. I'm setting it to use a Lancaster named Pearl, so I guess that's the working title.  I'll be twisting the narrative and taking deliberate liberties with some of the storytelling, but there will be a point.

Ed Adams: Some of this is real

A Thrilling New Novel Weaves Romance, AI, and Global Espionage in the Streets of Geneva

Ed Adam’s new science fiction thriller, Some of this is real, launches readers into a taut and stylish world of hidden agendas, advanced artificial intelligence, and the quiet danger of falling in love.

Set against the sleek, café-lined boulevards of Geneva, the novel follows Oliver, a systems engineer drawn into the creation of Cyclone—a neural interface project capable of augmenting cognition… or rewriting it entirely. As whispers of the technology’s true power reach Chinese and Russian intelligence circles, Oliver finds himself at the centre of an international race for control.

Enter Cara, a sharp, self-contained journalist with questions that cut deeper than expected. What begins as mutual intrigue soon threatens to become something riskier: connection. But in a world where every relationship is under surveillance, trust is the most dangerous choice of all.

Blending the emotional sharpness of literary fiction with the stakes and speed of a technothriller, Some of this is Real asks urgent questions about power, privacy, and what it means to be human in the age of AI. With tones reminiscent of William Gibson, Rachel Kushner, and Sally Rooney, this is a novel for readers who love their science fiction with heart—and their romance with consequences.

“A cerebral and cinematic novel that dares to ask how much of ourselves we’re willing to give up—in the name of progress, or love.”

Some of this is real is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats at all major retailers.

For media inquiries, interviews, or review copies, please contact:

Daisy Cox

daisy.cox@firstelement.co.uk

Tracking a moron

 

Moron.

Imbecile

It will hurt everyone. $2.5 Trillion wipeout. Need stuff? Got a pension? Savings?

Pah.

chaos premium

My recent time in the US highlighted America as a Schrödinger’s box of newsfeeds—some real, some illusory, some buried deep before they even hit trending. You pick your algorithm and hope it’s not lying to you. 

Anyway, the love story between Cara and Oliver gets overtaken by this. It  is what’s gone into the novel(or real life, hard to tell anymore):

• Trumpi’s Infinite Money Glitch – Every 100 days, like clockwork, another $1Trillion gets printed, flipped into bonds, and force-fed to the market. But the market’s full. It’s like trying to sell bottled water in a rainstorm. The dollar starts looking… fragile.

• Gold’s Canary in the Coalmine – Gold prices creep up. Always do before a crash. It’s like seeing a cat bolt from a room and then realising there was an earthquake five seconds later. Meanwhile, Brazil and Saudi switch to Chinese Yuan. De-dollarization isn’t a what-if anymore.

• Government Cuts = Less Money = Duh – The US is cutting budgets, and suddenly everyone rediscovers Econ 101: no spending = no growth = bad corporate earnings. They’ll act surprised. They shouldn’t.

• Trumpi’s Chaos Premium – Markets like stability. Trumpi is the opposite of stability. The world’s biggest economy behaving like a rogue state? Not great for confidence.

• Taiwan Strait Trouble = No More Chips – China might stop playing passive in Taiwan. If that happens, they’ll cut their own supply chain to the US. No chips. No consumer goods. No new iPhones. America panics.

• Musk’s Final Form – By May 2025, Tesla isn’t just a car company anymore. It’s an energy utility. Globally. Like the missing piece in the Monopoly game he’s been playing all along.

I’m writing it down, but let’s be honest—the book’s already writing itself. And I know, it'll need a new cover.

Easy Kärcher X4 pressure washer power fix

Patio cleaning season and more of a public service announcement that a blog entry. My Kärcher pressure washer wouldn't start today, and it looked like a power failure. 

Swapped the fuses. No good. 

Then I saw somewhere that the device has an air lock safety feature inside. Ran water through it (powered off) for ten minutes, which got rid of the bubble after some sputtering of the water line.

Low and behold. It works again. 

I was already making 'trips to the tip' plans but thankfully the machine is once gainfully functional and a real blast.

Broken cycles: Suds and Sorrows.

🎶 Dishwasher Blues 🎶

(Key of E, slow shuffle)

[Verse 1]

Well my dishwasher failed, oh it died real slow

Yeah, my dishwasher failed, man it had to go

Called a man to fix it—said, “I’ll give it a go”

[Verse 2]

He patched it up, yeah, for seventy pound

Thought I was lucky, thought I turned it around

But one week later, it E:15'd without a sound

[Chorus]

Now I got them dishwasher blues, deep in my soul

All this appliance drama, sho'nuff takin’ its toll

Spendin’ double, just to reach the goal

[Verse 3]

Found a new one, said “This’ll do the trick”

It fit just right, yeah it looked real slick

But the integrated price tag hit me like a dirty brick

[Verse 4]

They said, “Fitting’s extra”—that’s one-fifty more

Then “Disposal’s fifty”—I sank to the floor

“Delivery’s twenty”—I can’t take much more

[Chorus]

Oh I got them dishwasher blues, running through my veins

The kind of blues you get from money down the drain

And every time I wash a plate, I feel the pain

[Bridge]

Then the next man showed up, said, “We can’t connect it, son”

“You need a cert-i-fied E-lec-trician, or it can’t be done”

Called him up—he said, “One-fifty, with ad valourum now aint that fun!”

[Final Chorus]

Yeah I got them dishwasher blues, they’re here to stay

Could’ve washed by hand and saved the day

But now my wallet’s cryin’—it’s been filly rinsed

[Outro]

So if your washer breaks and starts to whine

Pour a drink, take your sweet ol’ time

‘Cause them dishwasher blues…

Are gonna be yours and mine 🎵

Disk tax: 42.77% complete and 16 hours left

 

I consider it a kind of 'disk tax'. My servers utilise RAID 5 with a hot spare, and one of the drives failed a couple of weeks ago. The server self-repaired, and by the time I was physically present and able to replace the faulty drive, it had been automatically downgraded to a disabled drive, leaving me without a hot spare.

Anyway, I replaced it, and now the rebuild of the spinning spare is underway. I estimate my WD Reds fail at a rate of about one per year. Each RAID is an extravagant 48 Terabytes.

I know. The complete works of Shakespeare comprise around 900,000 words (27 plays + 154 sonnets +x). Stored as high-resolution scans, it still amounts to only 1GB.

Careless People? Move fast and break laws

My plane reading...

Sarah Wynn-Williams began as a true believer.

Glassy-eyed. Palms up.

Almost begged her way in. Like trying to gain access to a system you weren’t invited to—but knew was running something big behind the interface.

It was early Facebook. Still coded with promise.

The mythos intact. The logo still meant connection, not corrosion.

Her arc:

A launch. Jet-engine ascent. Altitude. Heat shimmer.

Then: micro-stutters. Lag. UI glitches in the belief system.

Meetings start to feel like staged rituals. Authenticity begins to pixelate.

The platform grows. But something inside her starts to fragment.

And now—this book.

Told in flashbacks with emotional ghosting. Each chapter like a corrupted file opened under duress.

The tone? Mechanically filtered through something like PTSD. 

Or maybe burnout at the molecular level.

Not grief, exactly. More like the delayed awareness that she handed over parts of herself to something big, synthetic, and hungry—

—and only much later realised what it had taken.

Not admiration. Existential collapse.

You don’t leave Facebook.

You eject.

You drift.

And the log-off screen never really loads.

Wynn-Williams was all in.

Hooked on Cheryl Sandberg like a TED Talk with frequent flyer miles.

The two of them pinballed around the planet in private jets without enough beds, evangelising the Facebook gospel to foreign leaders who smiled for the cameras and probably didn’t understand the terms of service.

But always found the photo-op. 

With Sandberg, it’s performance. It’s sparkle. That strange gravitational field she carries— the kind that makes you stop listening to the meeting and start wondering if she’s running a higher, more optimised OS than you.

With Zuckerberg, it isn’t exactly dystopia.

It’s execution.

The system behaves precisely as designed. No deviation. No apology. Just the code, running clean.

No moral compass. He has a parser.

Feed him a deck—talking points, macro projections—and he’ll render the output. 

Smooth. Compiled. Sweaty.

Sometimes.

Other times, he drifts. Goes off-script.

Karaoke with interns. Boy-band ballads at pastel-lit retreats.

The acolytes laugh. Not sure if it’s okay not to.

You don’t challenge him. You don’t debug the founder.

The inner circle—tight-knit, high-comped, brand-synced— operate like a neural net trained on dominance.

Every question is a threat. Every suggestion, a breach.

There’s belief there. 

Crystalline. Unshakeable.

A faith in scale. In iteration. In the product.

Not morality. Not consequence. - Only deployment.

It’s covered in smiles, executive summaries and lies.

But if Congress or world leaders get in the way—so what?

You can leave the platform.

You can close your laptop.

But the system remembers.

It always remembers.

“Bring your authentic self to work.”

Printed somewhere. Probably on a wall. Possibly in Helvetica.

Early Facebook culture. Mantras instead of manuals.

A beta religion, with PowerPoint liturgy.

Returns from maternity leave.

Baby still liminal. Half-dreamed.

But the baby’s audio footprint leaks into calls.

Murmurs through AirPods.

Flagged as disruption.

“People feel uneasy,” they say.

She’s told to optimise.

Sandberg’s fix: hire a Filipino nanny.

Not a person—an HR patch.

A silence generator.

A clean solution for domestic noise.

She complies.

Compliance disguised as choice.

Then one day:

Husband Tom checks the home cam.

Sees a firefighter in the apartment.

The nanny’s locked out.

The baby’s locked in.

Emergency. Human. Messy.

She tells her colleagues.

No one laughs. No one reacts.

She’s off-brand.

“The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible.”

Like latency. Like packet loss. Even blood loss.

Authenticity?

Not if it interrupts the feed.

Not if it slows the system.

The title? Careless People.

A line from Gatsby.

Tom and Daisy.

Smashed things.

Retreated into their money.

But this isn’t carelessness.

It’s systemic. Intentional.

“Move fast and break things.”

Not philosophy.

Protocol.

Facebook watches teenage girls delete selfies.

Regret flagged as behavioural data.

Advises to advertising partners.

And it's good practice for China.

Result: tummy-flattening teas.

Skin-perfecting creams.

Fixes for flaws they didn’t know had been logged.

Not dystopia.

Just business.

Just the code, running clean.

V-22s are practicing

I spent February in America, then a week in the UK before heading for Germany and, because of the Heathrow airport fire, across central Europe to Paris. It's fascinating to see how some of the news gets reported in different territories.

• USA: Trumpski and his supposed peace brokering are breathlessly reported in American news, with everyone too frightened to challenge anything in case they get their passes rescinded—or worse. We all know he is looking at the amount he can make from trouble and strife, especially with a large back pocket.
• UK: Kier Starmer as the tightrope act between USA and Europe over Ukraine. Hardly any news profile outside UK.
• Germany and France: Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and occasionally Ursula von der Leyen are depicted as main peace brokers while simultaneously loading up with arms. No mention of Starmer. 

And the V-22s Special Ops planes are making practice flights.

 

Oops, it must be Paris

 

We managed to get caught up in that London Heathrow outage, so we couldn't get back from Germany. Undeterred, we decided to turn it into a road trip adventure and to come back across Europe instead. It's how we ended up in Paris. 

We booked a local train to Stuttgart, then an IC to Karlsruhe, where we could pick up the ICE 9590 fast train from Berlin to Paris. It only stopped in Strasbourg and then Paris l'Est. It took us out of the system and away from all the hanging around waiting to be gamed by the airlines, which said that our flight was still running until around mid-afternoon of the day we should return. 

By that time, we were already on the 320km/hr express through Germany and France and arrived in Paris around when the (now cancelled) flight was supposed to take off. 

And so to our hotel in Paris. It's the first rain we've experienced on the whole trip, but this Hotel OKKO is right next to the arrival platform in Paris. Gare l'Est is right next to Gare du Nord, for our next-day getaway to Londres.

'Travellin' light.

 

Grifter's Trumpi-cession ?

The books are probably being cooked right now. It's a grifter's way to make some money. Crash everything and short the markets. Throw enough uncertainty into the mix and it'll be a truss-load of damage. Meanwhile marvel at the red car. 

It'll be on stamps next.

Full disclosure, my one is white and I'm very happy with the vehicle. Shares? a different matter,

Barbie's dream home ain't America any more

Barbie factory in Mexico 

In every dream home, a heartache... 

“Tariffs are something we’ve managed for many years, and we’ll just continue to manage that,” Walmart's CEO McMillon said on a recent earnings call. “We can’t predict what will happen in the future, but we can manage it really well."

“Let’s be real honest: Long term, a 25% tariff across the Mexico and Canada borders would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we’ve never seen,” Ford Motor Co. (F) CEO Jim Farley said at a recent investor conference. Just shy of 15% of Ford’s sales are sourced from Mexico, according to S&P Global Mobility data. 

“Frankly, it gives free rein to South Korean, Japanese and European companies that are bringing 1.5 million to 2 million vehicles into the U.S. that wouldn’t be subject to those Mexican and Canadian tariffs,” he added.

Best Buy has been warning customers that the president’s tariffs may result in potential price hikes for months. The duties effect on its operations is set to increase on Tuesday.

CEO Corie Barry told MPR News in early February that about 60% of the company’s cost of sales flows through China “in some way, shape or form.” Trump has said his duties on Chinese imports will grow to 20% from 10% on Tuesday. 

“We’ll work with vendor partners, but at the end of the day, these really do become costs that get passed on to the American consumer,” she said. “They flow through that entire supply chain, and they become part of the baseline cost.”

Acer CEO and chairman Jason Chen has said his laptops will likely cost an additional 10% in the U.S., directly pointing to Trump’s tariffs. 

“We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” Chen told The Telegraph in mid-February. “We think 10pc probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”

The CEO added that some companies will likely use the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices by more than necessary. Most of Taiwan-based Acer’s laptops are assembled in China.

Both Mattel and Hasbro have said they may need to raise prices in the face of Trump’s tariffs on Mexico and China.

Mattel, the company behind toy lines like Barbie and Hot Wheels, produces about 40% of its toys in China, compared to the industry average of 80%, Mattel’s head of finance, Anthony DiSilvestro, said on an earnings call. Less than 10% of its toys are made in Mexico, with no exposure to Canada.