drynice

06-05-2026

MachFest

on 1st may 2023 i swore i would never camp again. i was staying in a 2 person eurotent. it was a good tent. it had a decal of a mountain on the side and some reassuring outdoorsy compound word e.g. eurotread / hikesafe / drynice.

i'd gained the tent in 2015 during a complicated system of trades. i wanted to do a satire of One Red Paperclip - the guy who kept trading until he'd transformed a paperclip into a house. the idea of plucky rags-to-riches entrepeneuralism felt like airport book billionaire class apologia to me and i couldn't see how it would work in the real world (where i live). and as someone who was constantly travelling the country for shows, i was in a good spot to cast the net wide and see how far i could trade until splatted upon a figurative wall.

i started with a laserdisc of the titanic as my starting item. that might sound like a semi-valueable piece of early digital ephemera, except paramount really bet big on the upcoming ubiquity of laserdisc technologies and there's still a ton(ne?) of them floating around. i got it for 50p.

from there i gained some hand puppets, then some sketches by Rebecca Sugar of a character called MuscleCat and with those I got the tent. In three trades I was up at least £150-200 (based on the tent's original rrp). as a satire it was going very poorly - but as a series of trades i was drunk on success. thats when the wall appeared. people weren't really willing to consider trades for properly valuable stuff. once the average value was in the £400-500 range things really dried up. out of desperation i accepted a terrible compromise: splitting the trades - accepting multiple items with a combined value greater than the single item i was giving them. that appeared to be the only way the trades would stay alive. it was a disaster. before long the bedroom of my houseshare had become a warehouse for mid-value junk. i had gallons of contact lens solution (i dont wear contacts) i had a small library of limited print hardback books. i had 12 boxes of artisinal alcoholic jams. i had a hazardous materials suit lined with images of organs that was used to film a youtube glue review (now deleted). it ruined my life (and i wasn't flourishing in the first place).

anyway, i parted with that tent eight years later. it had developed grass mold and the vinegar i used to disinfect it made it smell like vinegar. it rained relentlessly and i couldn't warm my toes. i could see my soul leaving my body. it looked like a lasagne sheet.

anyway i bought a new tent so i could go to Machynlleth Comedy Festival this year. its just that good. i challenged myself to write a new show for it. i called it midcult - though by the time i finished the show that title didnt make sense anymore. i wasnt intending to perform more than once, i wanted to give birth directly into a bin, but it turns out no one does that because the parental instinct interferes. i'm going to finish the show properly at some point and you'll hear more about it after edinburgh (or christmas).

initially i really wanted to push the boat out and make something grotesque. my first draft was set in the rounds during a tense family meal. id be eating a big plate of spaghetti throughout. over the course of the discussion it would become apparent that the audience is all one person within the narrative logic of the show, and that they're my child and that i'm an overbearing father unable to articulate their worry. brash, insecure and probing. the blunt force of fatherhood. the red stains of ketchup. the audience were also all going to be given worksheets implying the show is a murder mystery puzzle and that the scenes are actually a series of riddles. what im trying to say is that it was perhaps too ambitious for the timeframe i gave myself. but i remain happy with what i did amount to.

Why Do I Hate The Delivery Robots

Now Then Magazine let me write about the delivery robots that are operating in my city (Sheffield). It was a good afternoon out and about holding the machines to account. I've been sent lots of screenshots of people on reddit and facebook who hate it who hate me - you don't need to share any more of these with me if you encounter them!!

Normal Game

With Mach done the next hulking figure on the horizon is the Normal Game WIP shows. I really want to make a game show and I guess I ought to learn how to communicate the idea. Basically, Normal Game is a game you play on your phone in a game with lots of other people. Normal Game is also a webapp that lives on a server on the internet.

This allows lots of things I think will be interesting:

Rounds can use real databases from the real internet. Some rounds include TheyWorkForYou, Wikipedia or ArchiveOfOurOwn. Because people have their own screen to play from, they can receive different instructions to everyone else in the room. Or players may be able to communicate or interact secretly. Players can contribute answers into the server, but also questions, maybe images, maybe voice notes.

At least for now Normal Game is a design space. I've engineered at least a dozen rounds, and they all need playtesting with a real live audience with real live technology. Do they work? Are they fun?

WIP #1: Sheffield, Sunday 14th June, 2:30pm (2pm doors) - tickets.

WIP #2: Manchester, Sunday 28th June, 2:30pm (2pm doors) - tickets

Sheffield Preview

In July I'm doing one final preview in the north before Backchannel goes to Edinburgh for the month. I'll be joined by Eric Rushton whose show Innkeeper I really enjoyed last year. I really enjoy Eric's flow and the way he talks to the audience. I'm also excited to put something back on in Regather where I ran a comedy club for half a decade before the pandemic, please join us if you can. Tickets are here.

Recc: I Who Have Never Known Men

Read this on the way back from Mach on the strength of a recommendation (my partner kept putting it on my nightstand and in my bag). It's great! Its also short. You can get through it in 2-3 hours. It's a book that's been pulled from obscurity (90s Belgium) by tiktok. Confusing - I thought booktok was eroding culture? i thought there was a panick about the young women who want their books rubberstamped with hashtagable genres and steaming with wet kisses? you're telling me they elevated this ice-cold book about utter sexlessness into the zeitgeist? well heres what i think about that: wahoo!

That said, I've seen a lot of people online asking people to explain the book to them like it's Blue Prince (2025) and they just need to find some expository hint and the plot will unravel like a puzzle box. But that's not a media literacy crisis - that's just people. You've met people before, surely. you can't move for them.

Anyway the book is about 40 women who are trapped in a cage because ??????? At the end of the first chapter it threatens that something very interesting will happen in the second chapter and you should trust it because something very interesting does happen in the second chapter. And then just like that you're reading a book, the way an adult might.