Jonny Nexus

Category: Life

  • Black Lives Matter: A Personal Anecdote

    Some years back, a black friend took me to a Poetry Slam event organised by the Afro-Caribbean Leukaemia Trust. The event, which pitched a team of Black British performance poets against a team of Black American performance poets in a crowd-judged event, was great fun. But it was during the interval that the founder and…

  • Game Night – A Relaunch For The Streaming Era

    I first self-published Game Night (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Goodreads), my novel of six Greek-style gods roleplaying with the mortal realm below, in December 2007. This was a different world. D&D’s Fourth Edition was just launching to a largely lack-lustre response, at a time when the RPG industry was a pretty low, post OGL boom, ebb. Amazon’s…

  • Jonnycon II Makes The Local News

    A press release I put out about Jonnycon II (the launch party for the Sleeping Dragon) was picked up by our local web news site, Rochdale Online. I was quite chuffed about that. …Jonny said, “I’m a Londoner originally, but my wife and I moved to the Littleborough area nearly three years ago. It was…

  • YouTube Review: Encounter With Tiber and The Return

    My review of two books by the science-fiction author John Barnes (who’s not that John Barnes) and Buzz Aldrin (who is that Buzz Aldrin). In it, I compare and contrast them, describing how they start from similar premises (a then near-future accident to the space shuttle Columbia) but then go in very different directions.

  • The Gutter Prayer, by Gareth Hanrahan

    I’ve just (belatedly!) ordered the signed, limited Goldsboro Books edition of the Gutter Prayer, the debut mainstream novel of my very good friend1 Gareth Hanrahan (actually Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, but that’s apparently too long a name to fit on a novel’s cover). Limited edition as it is, it costs £24.99, but I think that’s actually excellent…

  • I Have A YouTube Channel

    I’ve never really got into the vlogging area. Back when Game Night came out in 2008, Jules and I filmed three videos that I thought were actually quite funny, and which I uploaded to YouTube. But I didn’t really get any response from them, and I never followed it up. Of course, since then, YouTube…

  • You Think 2016 Was Bad?

    As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking on plots of novels, and so it’s only natural that when I think about events occurring on our world, I try to imagine how they would develop were they events of fiction rather than reality. People talk about 2016 as being the year from hell,…

  • Film Review: Suicide Squad

    Director: David Ayer Writer: David Ayer Stars: Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie Shit, epically so.

  • David Cameron Might Just Have Saved The UK

    The most important news from yesterday, other than the referendum result, was David Cameron’s decision to not immediately trigger Article 50, but instead leave that decision to his successor to take, in October at the earliest. Had he triggered it yesterday, as he’d said during the campaign he would, he would have committed the UK…

  • It’s About Identity, Not Democracy

    Brexit supporters often attack the EU for its supposed lack of democracy, saying things like: “What about that President of the Commission? We didn’t elect him!” I’ve heard this time and time again, and I’ve only just realised that I’ve misunderstood it every time. Pro-Europeans such as myself hear it as: We didn’t elect him!…