Ask Paul: September 4 ⭐

Happy Friday! We've been in Berlin this week for IFA 2026 and we're heading back to Pennsylvania on Sunday. But let's get the weekend started first.
"Initial foldable iPhone production is limited to only a 'few hundred' units"

Apple is going to need a bigger boat.

📖 Fictional
helix2301 asks:

I was wondering if there is a reason you never wrote fiction or anything along those lines. I know you are a big fan of books and reading. I was just wondering why you never got into that genre.

No, not as an adult. I wrote comic books and humorous (to me) stories when I was kid through my first year in college, but that was the end of that. I was originally going to pursue an art-related career, which is almost an oxymoron, and when that suddenly didn't make sense to me almost immediately after landing in college, I was pretty lost as I didn't have a Plan B. So whatever happened, happened, but I never really intended to become a writer, let alone a fiction writer.

I guess I always wanted to make ... things. These were often in the form of drawings and paintings, at least through high school and maybe for a few more years after that. But in addition to the comic books (which included drawings, of course) and the stories, I also made pretend and humorous (to me) radio show recordings with a friend for a few years before high school. So it's an odd coincidence that I did become a writer and have been on podcasts over 20 years now, as that oddly parallels some of younger activities.

But once computers became a thing, my desire to make things shifted to software. And that's what I eventually did go back to school for after bailing on art school, though I was side-tracked by what became my career. All those previous experiences helped, though. I do pretty well with graphics editing when I need to make images for web articles or whatever. And my software development background helped me having a different level of conversation with folks from Microsoft and elsewhere over the years, compared to others.

There's a line about everyone having some story in them, but I'm not sure that's true for me. Most of my stories were inspired by other things--Star Wars, a huge influence, or other science fiction and fantasy--and were just a way to express my sense of humor. I do recall coming up with the final scene of what I saw as a sort of comedy movie where it's an overhead view of a car driving down a street of almost identical homes on either side and the driver (me?), exhausted from all the weird things that had happened over the course of this movie, presses the button on his garage door opener and every garage door in every house on that street goes up at the same time. End scene.

I don't have too much of that saved. And I'm not sure I know of anyone who seriously writes fiction let alone made a living out it. My wife and I are both writers, and she did take writing classes many years ago, but neither of us has tried writing fiction in recent...