About

Cartoon by Carro — my dad.

Me, Borneo. The hat is optional.

Alan Carr here. Not that smoking guy, RIP. Not the comedian either. I’m the third Alan Carr, the one you don’t know about, because I used to be behind the curtain.

Son of “Carro”, a famous-back-in-the-day newspaper cartoonist, I’m the crazy Englishman out in the midday sun doing stop-motion movies in the jungle, as an excuse to feed sausages to stray cats. Srsly.

Back in my dad’s day, everyone was a reader, and they actually read newspapers.

I loved reading everything, even my big sister’s romance novels, and I especially loved adventure books.

Biggly Meaning

My favorite adventure books were the Biggles books by Captain W.E. Johns. I was usually carrying one, so picked up the nickname “Biggly”. I rather liked it, and so it stayed.

As an adventurer, I left the UK over 20 years ago and washed up on the island of Borneo. I rather liked that too, and so I stayed. Still here.

As a “digital nomad” (and a bit of a nerd) I made my own software. And so was born the original classic, Biggly Bodybuilding.

It even had its own metric, the Biggly Body Index, my cheeky replacement for the BMI. Forget your height-to-weight ratio. The Index measured how sexy you looked. A proper muscular physique scored a glorious “100% Biggly”. The aim was to replace “on steroids” with “biggly”, and it rather worked.

So yes, it’s two g’s. My word since 2004. I was here first, quietly making “biggly” happen as a verb two decades before anyone else tripped over it – and I’m keeping it!

Learning how to sell my own software led me to hanging out with people who needed help to sell their software. For a reason unknown at the time (I’ll come back to it soon) I found it way more fun to learn about – and sell – other people’s software than selling my own. New, shiny challenges were my thing, and so was born a 20-year career as a marketing consultant, working online from Borneo, with a machete. And a funny hat.

And then it all went to… Enshittification.

I knew all the tricks, my life was literally learning them, testing them, using them, making products profitable, helping other small company owners live their dream life, like I was living mine. It was a fun mix of science and sexy – but it just kept getting worse. And my first love, software, was the worst of all.

Watching products quietly became a subscription. Tweaking features and levels to extract maximum spend, without losing the lower-end. And a thousand other ways that, if I were to follow the trends and proven science, I would have to advise clients to actively work against their customers, instead of helping them.

No.

I had to walk away from all that, and so was born The Shopping Addiction Guy. I can’t change the world, but I can help the worst-hurt people, one at a time.

Escaping that world led me to re-discovering my sense of humor, and so was born The Sausage Hunters. I can’t draw like my dad, so use stop-motion and dolls, with a silly series about 3 dolls who hunt wild sausages in the Borneo jungle, to feed stray cats…

Then I put that comedy thing on hold, because a new shiny object! Yeah, turns out I have ADHD. The new shiny object was AI. I tried hard to make it work for therapy, to help my hypnotherapy clients and people in general. Well for various reasons the current LLMS are just not suitable for that – but they’re great for fiction and entertainment.

Then the makers of the AI app I was using, decided to… yeah. The same.

And so I came back to Biggly. To make my own.

AI software, for fictional entertainment, without the enshittification.

Guiding Principles

Biggly Bot is a modern take on reading, but it’s old-school software, on purpose.

I know exactly how to build all the modern traps – and I choose not to.

Normally, every app like this eventually dies or turns nasty.

The makers get bought, get greedy, or hire someone like I used to be. Then the thing you loved is gone, or holding your stuff hostage behind a new paywall. The subscription creep, the features dialled to extract maximum spend, the slow squeeze. It all works because they keep the control. Their app lives on their servers, on their terms, and the day they change the deal, you don’t get a say, you get shafted.

So I deliberately built Biggly different, so it can’t do that to you. Ever. It lives on your machine, not mine. It used to check my licence server every 90 days, until I realised that handed me a kill-switch over your app, so I tore it out. Now the day I go offline, get bored, or get hit by a bus, your copy just carries on. It can’t go out of date either, because you plug in whatever AI model or provider is newest, whenever you like. The app is yours, the brains are yours to choose, and nobody, not even me, can reach in and take it away.

There’s no subscription. No vendor lock-in. No creeping paywalls, no holding your data hostage.

You can use whatever local AI models or online AI services you like. I offer curated, high-quality premium characters and books, but you can freely edit them – or create your own. For free.

At every design point, the guiding principles are always the same: what gives the user freedom of choice, makes their life easier, and maintains their privacy?

It has its own .biggly format, but also works with standard V2/V3 character cards, EPUB or PDF books, and MP3 audiobooks.

Biggly is not built by the marketing consultant I used to be. It’s built by the guy that The Shopping Addiction Guy strives to be.

Because this is what I’ve always loved doing – helping people.

And it’s about time somebody did.

Alan, Borneo