about me
I am a poet, editor, event host and university lecturer. I live in London with my wife and kids and like to keep a low profile these days.
About this site
This site is the unruly sibling of my main website, niallosullivan.co.uk. Whereas my main site functions as a typical website with info about me as well as blog posts and poems, this is more of a place for me to post the kind of ephemera and trifles that might find their way onto my social feeds. It’s also a place for posts that might read like early drafts as well as throwaway poems and aborted ideas. This is a place where I can write and share things without worrying about maintaining standards and keeping up appearances.
why does this site look like the BBC Micro game Granny’s Garden but without the charming pixel art?
I’ve always been attracted to some retro aesthetics with my online stuff and normally can’t resist a good typewriter font. This is probably because I started out as a serious writer with a typewriter and I often get nostalgic about those early days and the creative frenzies that accompanied them.
I’ve always been attracted to some retro aesthetics with my online stuff and normally can’t resist a good typewriter font. This is probably because I started out as a serious writer with a typewriter and I often get nostalgic about those early days and the creative frenzies that accompanied them.
But this site isn’t about being a serious writer, it’s about playing around and there’s something about the 8/16bit computer font that, for me, accentuates this playfulness. It also reminds me of all the Indie, Pico-8 and Bitsy games that seem to push the imagination further because of the boundaries they have to work through. I spent a few childhood afternoons typing out BASIC code from a page of a magazine on the rubber keys of a ZX81 or Spectrum in the hope that, if I got it all right, a game would suddenly come into being from all that inpenetrable syntax.
In some ways, that’s what I’m doing now, hammering out sentences in the hope that something magical will happen. The look of this blog reminds me that this is all just another form of play and that none of it is very important.
contact
There is a contact form on my main website
I can sometimes be a bit rubbish at replying to email, it’s nothing personal, as said above, I like to keep a low profile and have a tendency to vanish into my own cave.
other links
mastodon substack youtube soundcloud instagram
I am no longer on twitter and have no plans to return. My facebook still exists but I choose to ignore it rather than kill it.