There are few things more joyous than a small child's birthday party.

I finally finished the mandatory training module on work's learning platform for "how to write good prompts for AI".

Personally, I didn't feel the course addressed many of the inherent issues with LLMs nor the issues inherent in "prompt engineering" but it was a valiant effort even if it taught me nothing I already knew. I don't mean that to sound arrogant.

It does mean I am now eligible for access to the new proprietary model at work and can benchmark it against the other systems we have access to. Yay, science!

Early morning, golden hour, and the nascent morning sun is evaporating fog off the pond in the bog. There's a solitary Canada Goose backlit on a tuft of turf in the middle like an 80s power ballad singer surrounded by dry ice.

I set up a cron job to rclone some directories around so I had copies on my laptop, server, and cloud drive.

Sadly, I forgot that I'd saved something into one of those folders that wasn't in the others and the destructive nature of my rclone wiped it from my drive never too be seen again! I tried a few things for recovery to no avail.

So, yeah. Clone can be destructive, check your backups, folks.

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years.
Susanna Clarke, "Piranesi"

Links of Interest™

• Just let me compute in peace
• Frumentatio!
• You paid for it, you should be comfortable in it
• Threat models
• A Rare Print of the Only Photo of Neil Armstrong On the Moon Is for Sale
• Researchers Simulated a Delusional User to Test Chatbot Safety
• Do I belong in tech anymore?

A dedicated Music Player is something I keep coming back to, time and time again but never actually get around to buying. For much the same reason as Matt; in the cold light of day, I can't quite see the point!

I don't listen to a lot of music by myself away from my desk; mostly while running, driving, or occasionally on a commute.

I like to track my music with last.fm and that's difficult with an mp3 player. As some friends on the fediverse suggested, I could buy a cheap Android phone and just install last.fm and a music player but then I'm carrying two phones 🤷

I really shouldn't use an mp3 player while I'm driving. I think it's almost certainly illegal!

I can honestly do without high energy power metal I listen to while running skewing my listening metrics do that's really the only use case. I have my phone with me when I run though so it seems a waste to buy a device specifically for that use.

What do you think? Do you have any advice or persuasive narratives to sway me? Get in touch by email, hit me up on the Socials™, or elsewhere online.

I always feel like Autumn is my jam because I'm all goth and shit but I do love Spring. I think the shift has happened now I'm back in the countryside; syncing with the rhythms of nature and bonding with the Earth. Or something. Anyway…

The forget-me-nots from the wood have spread into my garden — or I planted them last year, I can't remember. Either way, a gorgeous splash of delicate colour under the dead willow tree that needs removing.

The Acer is in full and glorious red leaf, the rhododendron has begun to flower, and the pear tree I planted is not yet dead.

There are snowdrops and bluebells popping up around the Wendy House. I briefly considered taking photos but didn't because of reasons.

Fun fact; the Wendy House is named after Wendy Darling from "Peter Pan".

We are moving into a delivery phase at work which as pivoted the focus of the workload from Strategy and Design to Data and Technology. It's meant very busy days and nights where I can't quite turn my brain off properly.

When the world has pushed you to your knees, that is when you learn who you really are! That is when you find your true strength!
Tomi Adeyemi, "Children of Anguish and Anarchy"

Links of Interest™

• Anthropic’s new AI tool has implications for us all – whether we can use it or not | Shakeel Hashim
• Speculation rules for evil
• font-family Doesn’t Fall Back the Way You Think – CSS Wizardry
• What the Snare Drum Knew Before I Did
• How I Discover New Blogs - Kev Quirk

In the previous installment of Tomi Adeyemi's West African inspired magical high fantasy, the story ended with a cliff-hanger that cut short a rolling boil. The last book in the trilogy wraps everything up neatly while adding more complexity — a bold move for an Act 3 novel!

It was genuinely cathartic to see "myself" as the villain — Scandinavian-coded pirates. Not on a romantic Nordic quest but cutting a path of bloodthirsty slaughter and entitlement. High Fantasy has a nasty habit of heroing Caucasians in a noble quest against "savages" but this flips the script without feeling performative.

Fair warning: I read a review of the previous book that mentioned feeling gut-punched and a level of distress at the parallels to the Atlantic Slave trade. I found the scenes uncomfortable; the descriptions of subjugation and torture can be surprisingly graphic for a "Young Adult" novel.

The story galloped along at a fair old clip. Adeyemi packed a lot into her final book. There was enough, honestly, to split this into two books and give the characters some room to develop.

Accusations of queer-baiting in earlier novels had a resolution; kinda sorta. It wasn't explored in any satisfactory depth; more than a Dumbledore might have been gay, you don't know he wasn't way though.

The introduction of the vine-weavers (who, given their use of Portuguese, feel Amazonian coded) was a lovely addition to the rich cultural patina but I felt it muddied the waters some.

Some threads were tied up a little too neatly at the end; the happily-ever-afters didn't feel earned for some characters.

The Epilogue was really good. Setting the stage for the world after the novel is always tricky and Adeyemi did it justice. A solid book, rewarding for the reader if a little shallow in places — the curse of an ambitious plot!

High Wycombe headbangers As Everything Unfolds have already survived the "Sophomore Slump" with 2025's "Ultraviolet" and are back with their third long play release.

Dealing with grief (the band lost their drummer in August 2024), "Did you ask to be set free?" sees Charlie Rolfe doing double duty as clean and dirty vocals over that kind of produced metalcore like Polaris and Make Them Suffer. The drums crack staccato reminiscent of Pendulum at times under judicious use of synths pushing the sound towards dark synth pop as the distorted guitars drop in the mix for a more polished, accessible sound.

Not a huge departure from their earlier material but a solid entry in the catalogue.

There are few things in life I love more than seeing the word vampire in its most pretentious spelling! Kiwi swamp witch Kiki Rockwell doesn't disappoint with "Vampyr".

The new single twinkles along on a high register piano melody underpinned with rough strings and Rockwell's melancholy contralto husking its way breathily through the middle flirting with a German language middle eight on the way.

As a mediocre bassist who appreciates watching experts in their field do their thing, I watch Davie504 over on the YouTube. He posted a video on the bassline that broke the internet which led me to Angine de Poitrine.

Micro-tonal mathrock from another galaxy. Extremely technical playing and the layers of sound are incredible for a duo. The use of loops and micro-tonal notes (the notes in between the notes) –on a double-necked guitar/bass hybrid that I've never seen before– creates a sonic wall that is equally Primus and 65daysofstatic.

All this madness is held together by reliable drumming that keeps the whole shebang from straying into noodle-y wigging-out jazz and firmly in the alt-rock camp. "Sarniezz" is a particular delight.

Then I thought, the fuck am I blaming myself for?

I feel non-technical people get along with LLMs better than tech workers because, to them, the computer has always done magic stuff they don't understand. They just treat it like a person and deal with the "hallucinations" because humans are fallible.

There are so many ways an LLM can provide an incorrect answer; the most common being "any answer is higher scoring than zero in the probabilistic sense".

But LLMs can fail because of context collapse where they "forget" what happened earlier in the conversation. Or because of ontological misattributions; where they mistake one thing for another. Or because of ambiguous instructions where it is faced with two conflicting instructions and descends into gibberish — if one of those instructions is in the LLMs system prompt, the user may never be able to debug the issue.

With a human, forgetfulness and misunderstanding and confusion are all tolerated, in many cases expected, and we course-correct accordingly. But we've spent years and dollars ensuring computers don't forget and, if they get confused, they tell us they are confused and need correcting, and they always tell us that 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3 (unless it's JavaScript).

So, yeah, if you've got years of experience and are struggling, chances are it's not you, it's a pseudo-computer silently failing in a way that's impossible to debug.

That's the future.

This week has gone so quickly!

Forget-me-nots are carpeting the wood and the desire paths are lined with yellow tulips and daffodils. An angry blackbird suggests I fuck off.

A tree fell in the woods, bright down by Storm Dave. I was not there. I did not hear it.

I've been struggling at work seeing up one of those AI agents for a client workshop.

I've spent my life and career dealing with deterministic computers so my mental model is useless for debugging probabilistic environments — very frustrating and helped, I might add, by it being a Microsoft product and, therefore, dogshit UX.

I feel like this is why so many experienced programmers struggle and non-tech people don't; to people who don't understand computers, AI is just another flavour of magic.

I learned that, when it comes to cheese, English and German are closer to Latin than Italian is.

Links of Interest™

• A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
• Prototyping with LLMs
• ‘Project Hail Mary’ Cinematographer Says Film Was ‘Challenging’, But Was Helped by Cheap Amazon Filter
• The meanings and origins of ‘feck’
• That's Home. That's us.
• No, I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version is A-OK.

Inhabiting a very appealing space between Editors and Echo & The Bunnymen, lowercase-letter-haters MELTS bring a touch of Scouse-like arrogance to their brand of Irish indie. Nothing traditional about it. Lovely stuff. Check out "Maelstrom" for a taster.

On the bloody unhinged end of the spectrum we find Pretty Happy. I wholeheartedly recommend "Husband" as your introduction. Incredible lyrics, Mclusky-esque music.

About as far from Pretty Happy as you can get and still be "Irish indie" (have you clocked the theme yet?) would be Cliffords. Female-frontend acoustic indie-folk that smells of the sea breeze coming over the cliffs, a hint of gorse, and the distant call of gulls — all captured in three-and-a-half minutes on "Dungarvan Bay", fair play.

The clocks did that thing they do each Spring but I didn't really notice. The wall clock in the bedroom had needed a new battery for about a week, my phone updated automatically, weirdly my wristwatch died at 00:55, and the clock on the oven hasn't worked for months since a powercut reset it to midday and I couldn't be bothered fixing it.

⌚ Watch battery replaced by the lovely guy in the market. £8 and five minutes; long enough to buy pastries from the deli across the aisle. I really enjoying shopping locally when I can. The market is my kind of vibe!

Came across the photorealistic portraits of Anne-Christine Roda and I am always amazed at the incredible talent and dedication of humans. There will always be a need for this in the world. "la jeune fille au châle" ("the girl in a shawl", if my high school French holds up) is phenomenal; I honestly thought it was a photo until I read the description.

Storm Dave (The Irish Met are really putting us to shame with their storm names (Apologies to all Daves everywhere (from a Tom) is making me glad we're getting the leaky window seals repaired soon!

I checked the BBC and we're technically outside the yellow warning zone. That means it's much worse than this elsewhere. I hope everyone is fine!!

There's a trio of juvenile crows playing in the wind. Hovering and dive-bombing each other around the church spire they clearly live in. Excited and distinctive "caw" call carrying across the graveyard.

That was before the Skulls threw us onto their ships.
Before they stripped us of all we had.
Before they dragged me away from those I loved, held me down, and shaved my head.
Before I looked into the eyes of my abductors and could only see the blood runes carved into their masks.
I think of all the maji who were stolen from their lands.
Tomi Adeyemi, "Children of Anguish and Anarchy"

Links of Interest™

• Continuous, Continuous, Continuous
• Dogma: Kevin Smith Confesses Secrets of Infamous Boardroom Scene and Mooby the Golden Calf
• An appreciation for (technical) architecture
• Thoughts on habits, exercise and motivation

In all seriousness, it's a rollicking good fantasy. It feels like a classic "middle book" — a stopgap between the rush of the first book and the sweet climax.

There's is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Full of lovely character development –even from the villains– which is something usually a bit sparse in young adult fantasy.

If you liked the first book, you'll like this. Maybe not as much, but you will.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

But, in servitude of the rhyme, Donaldson often creates worlds where questions are raised she has no interest in answering.

Today we will examine The Highway Rat¹. Fair warning, there will be spoilers.

The Story

The basic premise of the story goes;

The Highway Rat rides his horse along the highway robbing the travellers for their food. One day he discovers cupcakes and his crimes escalate to indiscriminate theft, bullying, and general terrorising. Eventually a plucky duck tricks the Rat into going into a cave where he wanders, lost in the dark, for months until he repents his thieving ways. When he escapes the cave, he makes his way to a neighbouring town and gets a job in a cake shop. The End.

The Critique

Some animals are more equal than others

The unaddressed animal caste system. From the outset the animals are clearly divided into two groups; the "human" animals that wear clothes and farm and make wanted posters, and those who are "traditional" animals like the bees he steals honey from, the bats in the cave, or the two flies he steals from the spider.

But closer inspection reveals a third class — in one scene the Rat is seen stealing a salami from a fox. Until this point all of the food is natural, the rabbit harvests clover and the squirrel collects nuts. But salami requires butchery, curing, and a knowledge of cookery.

Where does the salami come from? What, or rather who, is it made from? It speaks to a sub-classification of pigs somewhere kept for food.

The Tricksy Duck's Justice

On the surface, the punishment meted out by the Duck doesn't fit the crime. It leaves us with a moral of "if you are greedy you will be left to die in a cave". She doesn't plan on teaching him a lesson, she plans on leaving him to die alone; for stealing some food. Far from the hero of the piece, this is a duplicitous vigilante dispensing frontier justice.

Within the world, though, we see how the Rat takes the rabbit's last clover, all the squirrel's nuts, forces the spider to hand over the second fly. He even takes a colony of ants' only leaf. This isn't theft, this is territorial dominance. The entitlement to everything is truly monstrous. In this framing, we see the Duck as a reluctant freedom fighter pushed to drastic action by extreme circumstances.

The Rat's Punishment

Our villain, personification of greed and excess that he is, never actually atones for his crimes. We see him terrorise a community, wielding fear and power like weapons. Indiscriminate crimes; he can't eat the leaf, clover, or nuts but he'll take them anyway. A feudal lord taxing the last pennies from a starving population, a dark mirror of the folktale highway men robbing the rich to feed the poor.

In the echoey cave, scared and starving, he decides being a highway robber isn't fun any more and discards the trappings. He shows the smallest amount of repentance when he helps the flies (that he kidnapped earlier) and they show him the way out. Notably, he doesn't go back to make reparations or even apologise.

There's an argument for the cake shop as "middle class hell" — his punishment eternal is working in the service industry, stripped of his status and his possessions.

I'd posit it's hardly a punishment as it's just a way to feed his cupcake addiction without resorting to crime. An addict tamed but not recovered.

The "Good German" Horse

Magic Light did an excellent job of enhancing the horse's character; adding personality, a sense of humour, and a clever little twist at the end. However, on closer examination, it simply reveals the horse's questionable moral arc.

The horse is complicit in the Rat's crimes — at first happily so. He's a little irked the Rat spanking the Duck with his sword but it's in an rolled eyes "boys will be boys" way with no real substance to his objection.

As the Rat's depravity grows, the horse gets more distant from him; the crushing of the ant, threatening to eat the Duck (tantamount to cannibalism in the caste system), stealing his hay.

Eventually the horse rebels when the Rat smacks him with the sword. And immediately switches allegiances to the Duck drawing stark parallels with "just following orders" and Niemöller's poem. The horse aligns himself with the powerful Rat and is safe from tyranny — until the Rat turns on him, until the tyrant's actions directly negatively affect the horse. The apathetic bystander as abject coward.

Magic Light's clever twist to make the horse the narrator allows the horse to reframe his role from "war criminal" to "liberated slave".

The Conclusion

At the end of the story we see the true bleakness of morality; our greedy villain lands on his feet after a brief period of discomfort while the "hero" is a bold-faced liar ready to commit murder — all told through the unreliable narration of the Rat's willing collaborator.

¹: "The Highway Rat" (2017, Jeroen Jaspaert, Magic Light Pictures)

Unhinged behaviour from the British weather (more than usual, tbh) hasn't dampened the spirits of tree blossom. Several many trees around are in riotous bloom in defiance of the snow and rain. Gorgeous. My friend, Ellie, is currently enjoying Sakura season in Tokyo though and I'm not jealous. Not at all.

OK so this is mad; the Friends theme song, Boogie Wonderland, You're the best… around! from Karate Kid, and What Have I Done to Deserve This? by Pet Shop Boys were all written by the same person!

Links of Interest™

• Top ten Figma betrayals
• Wait it out
• Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used
• 'Truly magical woman': Tributes to Married at First Sight's Mel Schilling
• Ms. Rachel is punk af
• Podunk: Nadia Lee Cohen and Scarlett Carlos Clarke’s enigmatic new book
• The Beholder Has Changed
• Bandcamp physical sales now count towards UK chart positions

"Listen to this" demanded my wife handing me an earphone. It was Kill Karl; Mindless Self Indulgence-style heavy alternative rock but also glitchy and also operatic — heavy metal Sam Smith perhaps…? "SUCK ON MY ALBUM" is 14 tracks (in all caps) of loud, messed up, fun, and pretty unique heavy metal.

I needed to read technical documentation so no music with words, as is my rule. A rule that brought me to Austere, an Australian black metal band - shouldn't work but it does. The lyrics seems to be entirely screaming to the point it's just another noise in the wall of atmospheric dark shoegaze. "To Lay Like Old Ashes" from 2009's album of the same name, is gorgeous.

Brand new album from Melanie Martinez, "HADES" is typical Martinez fare; babydoll gothic pop. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. On first listen, it's better than "Portals" but not as good as "Cry Baby".

I wholeheartedly object to companies scraping my website for content to train their generative engines.

I also firmly believe that, if a person wants to use a Large Language Model to synthesise my content, that's their right. Who am I to dictate how you "consume"¹ it?

I write in a very particular style. It's full of idioms, slang, pop culture references, and long convoluted run-on sentences in places. I don't kid myself it's the easiest thing for everyone to read!

For some readers (perhaps you), this is the point. You understand the language and you nod at the pop culture. If you can stomach my blog, we'd probably get on in real life.

But if someone is a non-English speaker or has special educational needs or simply has different cultural references to me, I wouldn't blame them wanting to "translate" my writing. LLMs are good at this; they will explain all those obscure TV references, rephrase my most purple prose, and decode my likely out-of-date and/or misused slang and idioms.

I can have my writing translated but it's unlikely to be able to explain who Jade Goody is, for example. That requires an understanding of British culture from a certain point in time.

The value of LLMs in general is notoriously overinflated; half of the things promised will never happen but they can make the arduous task of reading interesting content from other cultures better.

And therein lies my problem, there's no real way to differentiate between an LLM stealing my words to sell them back to me and a dyslexic South American UX designer genuinely curious about my website.

The primary distinction between the two is intent; one is extractive and the other is accessibility, and I can't determine intent programmatically.

How might I go about preventing “scraping” but allowing “retrieving”?

My initial thought was to use referrers; crawlers all pretend to be Chrome on Windows but, if the referrer says "ChatGPT" that's almost certainly a human. It's not a magic wand or silver bullet, humans using APIs might have different referrers for example. Plus there's no surefire way to block crawlers effectively.

Do you have any thoughts? Do you have a solution‽ Get in touch by email, hit me up on the Socials™, or elsewhere online.

¹: revolting term

6:11am. The birds are having full blown conversations. The weather says Spring but the cold dew under my bare feet reminds me Winter is not that long ago. I pad back to the house to put shoes on leaving wet footprints on the flagstones.

Some things cannot be avoided forever!

I saw the first bumblebee of the season, bumbling around the garden, interfering with the flowers, then trying to get into the conservatory. Fuzzy little freeloader.

I booked all my holidays for the 2026—2027 financial year. Booked them all in one go like a maniac. Given the level of pressure we are all under at the moment, it truly felt like an act of rebellion to claim time for myself.

Spent a big chunk of this week organising all of the recommendations we identified in our audit into working tickets. We're going to work lean and agile (with a little 'a') so we're a little sparse on detail at the moment but sessions are in early doors next week to flesh them out some.

Since the weather has taken a turn for the Summery. I've been forced to switch from whoopie beanie to fuzzy bucket-hat a little earlier than usual but it's doing wonders for my heating bill!

The spirit of a misplaced childhood is rising to speak his mind to this orphan of heartbreak, disillusioned and scarred — a refugee.
Marillion, "Pseudo-silk Kimono"

Links of Interest™

• The 49MB Web Page
• The freedom stack
• You Might Debate It — If You Could See It
• When the ‘Blackpool’ flew out of Blackpool
• Burnham has a bold vision for a different UK

Spoilers

Minor backstory spoilers in the first paragraph

Our heroine, Zélie, has suffered immensely; her mother is dead, killed by the tyrant king's soldiers for the crime of having magic, her father beaten for the crime of being married to her mother, and her own latent magic stripped away leaving only the characteristic white hair that marks her as "other" from the rest of the villagers.

But Zélie is powerful in other ways. Her determination, powered by rage, and her stick fighting abilities make her the ideal candidate to bring down the corrupt monarchy and restore peace to Orïsha.

Despite Adeyemi having said she was inspired by Harry Potter, this doesn't appear to have anything in common with Rowling's series.

It feels like it has more in common with Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games or Victoria Aveyard's Red Queen series. Strong female leads in epic fantasy with a dystopian authoritarian bent where emotion and the power of a woman are just as important as swords and sorcery.

We uncover the story through the eyes of three characters in largely alternating chapters which adds flavour to the narrative.

The plot isn't hugely original; a ragtag bunch of young misfits must have all their wits about them as they go on a magical quest to overthrow a tyrannical monarch, but Adeyemi steeps the whole world in West African culture.

Adeyemi explains in the Author's Note about the rage and the tears of helplessness she shed writing this love letter to Black culture as a direct response to anti-Black police brutality and the named victims behind the headlines.

This is where the magic lies, for me at least — a white British man; this is a familiar story in a completely new outfit. There's enough I recognise to not get lost but so much new that it feels like a completely fresh take on the genre.

Now to binge the other two books in the series!

The role of the only non-magic member of the "Scooby Gang" allowed for some amazing storylines ably acted by a young man in an acclaimed breakthrough; from the hyena mind meld to abandoning his fiancée at the altar, complex narratives about belonging and outsiderness.

All cleverly written (usually the one magic person is the outsider!), what made them truly special was Brendon's approach. His goofy smile and sardonic phrasing were Xander.

RIP Nicholas Brendon (1971—2026)

Their debut, "Big Disgrace", is an entire album of bangers from this Probably Sane Clown Posse; my only gripe being I wish some of the songs were longer so there was more to enjoy.

I am so happy that Mclusky are back! I honestly can't think of another band like them; chaotic post-punk indie grunge punk. New EP, "i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley", is six short tracks of lyrical genius underpinned by incredible use of noise and genre-fuck. If you need an introduction, "fan learning difficulties" should be your go-to.

Channelling Lana del Rey and Alannah Myles at the same time takes a level of skill that only Nessa Barrett could pull off without sounding derivative. "Moulin Rouge" from new EP "Jesus loves a primadonna" is down tempo, sparse, lush, and dark. Which is exactly how I like my pop music. Mad props for the Buffalo 66 reference!

LA emo band and hater of capital letters, never easy have dropped their Sophomore album, "i still care", consisting of 10 Deftones-flavoured tracks. That kind of whiny American emo singing grates after a while (personal opinion) but can't fault the tunes; the blend of shoegaze and metal and pop evokes a particular era of emo. If they ever release an instrumental version of this album it'll go on rotation but, as it is, I'll probably just listen to Deftones.

Any regular readers will know I'm a slut for female-vocal symphonic metal bands. You're probably also aware how much I love Eurovision. Well, thanks to Alexandra Căpitănescu I get both! Nothing stunningly original in the music for her 2026 entry, "Choke Me", but, by Jove, those Plava Laguna operatic fills breaking up her growl are 🔥! I'd love for this to win; let's find out this May! 😍😍😍

Hello,
I noticed your website and thought a modern redesign could enhance its impact.
We focus on clean layouts, faster loading speed, and mobile-friendly designs.
Shall I share some samples?
Warm regards,
[REDACTED]

Nice try!

I have near perfect scores on PageSpeed Insights, my design is clean and minimal, my pages are static and lightweight, and the whole site is designed "mobile-first".

Perhaps I could offer you some advice?

This has to be one of the most popular bags of all time.

Manufactured in Sweden in the 1960s (not mine, obviously) and visible on virtually everyone on the commute, this hardy rucksack is big enough for everything I need without being overly big.

I've been after a Mustard one for ages and spotted this for £8 on Vinted which is an absolute steal. Admittedly the bag was pretty dirty but that doesn't really bother me; it's going to spend half its life on the floor of a train anyway!

Designed originally as a school bag, it has a little front pocket for pens and trinkets, a thin sleeve on each side for a water bottle and an umbrella, and a large main compartment for everything else.

There is zero padding anywhere. Luckily I was brought up to always carry a towel which protects my fragiles in transit.

This modern variety has a sleeve inside for a laptop. My 14" Macbook Pro fits perfectly.

The only downsides are the tiny side pockets. I had to buy a specially slim water bottle as a regular Chilly's didn't fit.

I'm not entirely sure I'd cough up full price for one but it's an ideal size for my daily commute, comfortable enough on the shoulders, and infinitely affordable secondhand.

What is your favourite genre?

Fantasy.

There's a lot of sub-genres from Sword-and-Sorcery to Historical Fantasy, contemporary Urban to the encompassing world building of High Fantasy.

I much prefer contemporary urban fantasy to sword-and-sorcery; think Harry Potter instead of Conan the Barbarian, but I do enjoy a bit of swashbuckling every now and again. There's some snobbery around "low fantasy" but I say fuck snobbery and fuck book snobs in particular.

Who is your favourite author in this genre?

I have a few depending on the sub-genre.

Sarah Painter's Crow Investigations series is a modern classic of the urban fantasy magical realism genre.

Susan Cooper and Juliette McKenna mix magic and mythology and folklore into places I know like the back of my hand and show me a world I know through new eyes.

Brian Jacques' masterful descriptions designed to make his books more inclusive for disabled children make him some kind of writing god.

Victoria Aveyard and Suzanne Collins both write strong female leads in dystopian authoritarian universes.

I've read some incredible debuts recently from Sunyi Dean, Tomi Adeyemi, and Gareth Brown.

Obviously no list of fantasy authors is complete without Ursula K LeGuin — absolute queen.

What is it about the genre that keeps pulling you back?

A combination of variety and escapism.

I love the idea of magic particularly. I would probably be utterly freaked out by that amount of power if I were to have magic myself and I don't like the potential ramifications of such power being abused.

Fantasy, despite appearances, tells us a lot about our own mundane society. Much like science fiction (often the two genres are lumped together as SFF), fantasy is often a mirror or a speculation; “what would the world look like if…” Giving heroes mystical abilities to overcome the horrors, I feel, shows us we need to work to prevent the worst because we can't rely on magic to save us!

There's probably only a handful of actual "stories" but infinite ways to tell them and there's so much beauty in that.

What is the book that started your love of this genre?

I can't quite remember what came first; Mr Preston reading The Hobbit to us in school like he had done for countless other classes year-in year-out, or getting Redwall books from the library.

If you had to recommend at least one book from your favourite genre to a non-reader/someone looking to start reading that genre, what book would you choose and why?

I think everyone should read "A Wizard of Earthsea" at some point. Ursula K LeGuin's high fantasy series is just brilliant. It's a peak example of how the genre can be done well. That said, it's also approachable. It doesn't suffer from a level of pretension that makes a lot of "classical" (pale, stale, male) fantasy impenetrable and, dare I say, dull. Sorry not sorry, JRR!

Why do you read?

That's like asking a bird why it sings — it's what I do, it's what I've always done.

I love the way my imagination powers the story, my experiences fill ambiguity and colour my reading between the lines.

Reading is my entertainment, my education, my way of processing the world.

So, what about you? What's your favourite genre to read? Get in touch by email, hit me up on the Socials™, or elsewhere online.

When I was a kid, my dad did an A-level in photography for funsies. He used this beautiful Praktica LTL. At the time I had no idea what that even was.

Fast forward 30 years and I'm the photographer and that Praktica has sat in my dad's attic… until now.

He popped round one weekend in mid-January and dropped off his old camera bag with a boat load of gear inside; the body, a couple of lenses, a flash and shutter release cable, and a Leningrad 4 light meter.

The Praktica LTL is one of those 1970s "Soviet Workhorse" cameras that rivalled the Canon AE-1 and the Minolta SRT series. Similar all-metal construction to my Zenits but with a touch more East German finesse.

Features

The viewfinder shows more of the scene than a Zenit but is darker than more modern cameras. The focus ring is microprism only; no split like my Minolta SR-T 303 and certainly no diagonal split like my Minolta X-9 (the absolute queen of focusing rings!)

Unusually, the shutter release is on the front of the camera near the self-timer instead of the top. I keep trying to press the top of the winder which is where my Minolta has the release. Apparently the positioning and the sloping angle means you're pushing it into your face when you take a shot which stabilisers the camera better than the "straight down" of other makes. I can honestly say I didn't notice any difference.

One thing I did notice, however; the internal film spool has an incorporated wire grip to make loading film quicker and more reliable. Feed the end of the film through the two wires and close the back — boom "speed loading"! I'm not one for burning through multiple rolls on one outing but I certainly appreciate the design.

The vertical metal shutter is efficient and bomb proof but noisy.

The aforementioned self-timer is jammed but it doesn't appear to affect the operation of the camera. I never really use it myself and I'm not particularly bothered about resell value so I'm considering it "not an issue".

Feel

This sleek metal mechanical weighs less than my Zenits, more than my X-9, and about the same as my SR-T 303.

It was well balanced with the 50mm prime on the front, didn't rock back or pitch forward on the strap.

Usage

I loaded a roll of trusty Kentmere Pan 400 and took it with me on a couple of day trips. Given I was bringing the camera along for the ride, not a dedicated photo walk, I decided the safest thing to do was set-and-forget.

I put the shutter on ƒ11 and the speed at 1/500s which was a good balance for the bright but overcast English Winter day.

Twisting the focus ring to zone focus between 3m and infinity — hyperfocal distance — meant I didn't have to fiddle around adjusting the focus ring for anything more than 3m away which, at a zoo, is pretty much everything!

Verdict

A comfortable carry, the Praktica dart around my neck all day without complaint.

I got some weird "slipping" at the end of the roll restoring in some double exposure which, happily, were more artistic than shit.

Setting up to be a "point and shoot" made it a breeze to get some good shots of the animals and landscapes. Next time I'll try some actual focusing. It'd be a crime to not use that Carl Zeiss lens to full potential!

This isn't the easiest of my cameras to use, nor the most fun. But it's the most special and I love it.

I started reading Tomi Adeyemi's "Children of Blood and Bone" this week and I'm really enjoying it. I'll save a more detailed analysis for a proper review when I'm finished but, amongst other things, I'm really appreciating the world building.

Another busy week at work.

Organising epics into stories and discussing design system implementation within the existing ecosystem.

It feels like I spent more time talking about work than actually doing it 🤣

Quite pleased that we've identified a lot of technical improvements that can be done ahead of the new design launch. Hopefully we'll get the foundations shipshape and purring like a kitten before a new lick of paint gilds that lily (to mix a few metaphors).

My wife shared a lovely article on clever Japanese stationery design with me and now I've mentally spent hundreds of pounds. I probably will buy the Stálogy Editor’s Series 365-day Notebook (A6) at Christmas because it looks lovely and, even though it's expensive on the surface, it works out at only 7p a day!

I posted two rolls of film at the start of the week but not heard they've been received yet which is worrying. The developers are usually really responsive so I'm sure the fault is with Royal Mail. I'll be gutted if they've gone forever.

He wants to believe that playing by the monarchy's rules will keep us safe, but nothing can protect us when those rules are rooted in hate.
Tomi Adeyemi, "Children of Blood and Bone"

Links of Interest™

• How Photography Works In My Head #5: Finding Your People Through Cognitive Style
• Evidence Grows That Google's AI Overviews Have Eviscerated the Media Industry
• It Has Come To My Attention That Some of You Have No Idea Where The Term Purity Culture Comes From
• Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native
• Molly guard in reverse – Unsung
• I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.
• 8 Best Japanese Stationery Finds So Clever You’ll Question Why the Rest of the World Even Bothers
• A bottomless Pit of Distractions
• Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you
• Townes Van Zandt and the Loneliest C# Minor Chord in Texas

For as long as she can remember, James's connection with her twin has gone beyond intuition - she can feel what he feels. So when Johnny is killed in a tragic accident, James knows before her phone even rings that she's alone - truly alone - for the first time in her life.

I knew I liked this book when I realised I was half way through and virtually nothing had happened. A slow burn, small rural town pace. Glacial; like the very landscape.

Speaking of; the descriptions of the northern Californian forests felt Twilight af (affectionate).

I love the "is it supernatural or not" vibe; feels very intentional and cleverly written.

The big hook for this story is at the heart it's a juicy mystery! His sister James and his best friend, Micah, try and piece together his final moments to work out if Johnny's death was an accident or not. Firmly in the solving crimes without cops sub-genre of crime thrillers I love love love.

This is all rounded off with a twist I did not see coming!

I would recommend this to fans of interesting mysteries, crime thrillers without explosions and car chases, or anyone who wants to lose themselves in the dark, damp forests of the Pacific Northwest.

I have a terrible habit of ignoring Todoist notifications and I didn't want to clutter the family task list with my personal medication reminders. So, I had a quick look around for a medication reminders application.

I had an alternative motive as well; at work, we make a lot of patient support apps that, inevitably, include medication reminders and I was curious what functionality a dedicated tool might have.

TakeYourPills looked like what I wanted; free, simple, no account needed.

Settings

The app has had a fairly standard Material Design™ feel to it. There are a handful of sensible settings customise reminders.

Profile

I chose the "Guest" profile and didn't have to provide any information. Multiple profiles seem like a good idea for, say, carers who have their own medication needs — if I needed to give my kids meds as well as myself, having one app with multiple users is much better than several apps!

Add Medication

Again, simplicity wins out here — Name, Description, and Shape. I love the Shape option; a handful of icons depicting tablets, capsules, needles, inhalers, creams, and liquids. A really simple mechanism but so useful if you have multiple medications to take — comorbidities being something very common with chronic illnesses.

Reminders

You are given a couple of options; "at specific times" or "every x hours". I feel it was lacking the specific "4 times a day starting at" option that I really wanted but, as I said, I worked out the times myself and used "at specific times" without any issues.

There's also a schedule for when the medication should be taken; "every day", "on specific days", or "every x days". This feels like it covers most bases.

Duration

I left this alone and manually ended the course but, again, I can see utility.

Dosing

Being able to set dosing warnings ("maximum dose in 24 hours" and/or "minimum interval between doses") is a nice addition for more complex medications or those with more serious side effects. I didn't feel I needed to set this either.

Notifications

Push notifications from the app allow the user to mark that dose as skipped or taken which is great. It also logs the exact time you skipped or took the medication.

Conclusion

I wouldn't exactly say I enjoyed using this app. It's fairly utilitarian; short on delighters or "gameification" but, honestly, that suits me. I don't think I would have enjoyed "Yay! You're crushing it!" vibes but YMMV.

TakeYourPills did exactly what I needed it to, the in-app ads were unobtrusive, and I'm glad I didn't have to create an account.

Especially for those not familiar with the process of design, it can be tempting to see things like discovery and wireframing as obstacles to be cleared before you get to the fun part, designing the visual identity. Unfortunately, many designers are also guilty of this!
Nic Chan

Nic's article makes an important point about the value of user experience; a value I'm seeing eroded by the prodigious use of LLMs.

Tools like Google Stitch will wireframe your app for you from a prompt allowing anyone who can describe a website in words to bypass years of experience.

But this is a box ticking exercise; a step on an ideal process that, in many minds, stands between you and "delivering value".

The purpose of wireframing is to uncover complexity early. To do that you need to interrogate your designs, understand the trade offs, and defend your decisions.

If AI did it for you, you can't do any of those things. If you rush the wireframe phase or the architecture diagrams or the technical spec, you don't understand your product.

Happy International Women's Day to all women

I sat down next to a woman who was reading on the train and pulled out my own Kindle. She glanced at it, said "snap!", and clinked hers against mine like wine glasses.

blossom-against-blue-sky season – where everyone takes the same hopeful shot and offers it like proof we’ve made it through winter.
DW, walknotes

We had clients in the office this week for a workshop. This is a novelty because we usually travel to meet them for this sort of thing.

Lovely clients, relaxed atmosphere, great workshop. I always feel one of the most important aspects of a workshop like this is getting the participants relaxed and having a good time; create a safe space and get honest answers.

Honesty is often the only way to affect real change.

I logged four new "lifers" in Merlin this week; birds I haven't heard before.

The baritone caw of a rook, a mistle thrush, a greylag goose, and the staccato drumming of a spotted woodpecker over in the wood.

As the mornings get lighter, the more voices in the dawn chorus.

Women who did what they liked instead of what other people wished were often accused of witchcraft because only a witch would be so defiant
Christina Henry, _The Mermaid

Links of Interest™

• Viral Sheffield Co-Op "sound bath" freezers turned into 10-hour ambient loop
• Feedback
• The Slow Death of the Power User
• Propellant.
• Christian Bale’s Frankenstein was inspired by Sid Vicious and Richey Edwards: “I’m a massive Manics fan”
• AI and that Guy at the bar — cobbles
• Long Books Are Good For You
• An analog cure for brain freeze: the wallet card
• I sent hundreds of thousands of e-mails to the future. Here’s the story

Once there was a mermaid called Amelia who could never be content in the sea, a mermaid who longed to know all the world and all its wonders, and so she came to live on land.

Once there was a man called P. T. Barnum, a man who longed to make his fortune by selling the wondrous and miraculous, and there is nothing more miraculous than a real mermaid.

I am not familiar with the true story of PT Barnum and the Feejee Mermaid but, from the little I know of Barnum, this fictitious retelling of the story from the point of view of the mermaid herself feels highly accurate.

Like previous books by Henry that I've read such as "The Lost Boy", it seems Henry has a knack for putting a believable yet fantastical slant on a story so it blends seamlessly with reality.

I felt so much for Amelia; I was rooting for her as she tried to navigate a world so alien. Much of human society was observed as ridiculous through her eyes and, honestly?, hard agree on all of it!

If you've enjoyed any of Henry's other books, there's no reason to not pick this one up too.

The dog is lying in a parallelogram of golden sunshine streaming through the patio doors across the tiled floor of the kitchen. Her eyes are closed and is still as death; only her gently heaving chest tells me she is alive. That and the way she is immediately behind me, awake and expectant, when I crinkle a packet.

Last week's fever boiled into bacterial tonsillitis so now I'm on antibiotics 😭

Grateful I live in an area where I can get a doctor's appointment!

Politics at work has, once again, got in the way of delivering something useful to genuinely help people. It's really quite disheartening.

I had to write a Point of View report this week on domain name strategy and URL structures. Half of it was pulled together from my own notes on the subject collected over years. I should probably write them up and publish them here. I have a fair amount of documentation like this, I realise!

Yes, the daffodils are in full flower. And, sure, I can see blossom on some of the trees. But it's still too early to go and do gardening.

Links of Interest™

• How a 2003 Skate Film Made the Boards Invisible
• A post I didn't want to have to write
• Norwegian Protest Hat - Red Hat History & Free Pattern
• ‘[It’s a] vibe coding disaster': Startup CEO skips normal development steps, uses AI to publish a massive unfinished app that barely works [This is so beautifully written!]
• Hoard things you know how to do
• ‘Red Dwarf’ co-creator Rob Grant dies, aged 70
• The robots in sci-fi stories are metaphors, dumbass.
• The heavy metal star returning to the stage with his local theatre group
• The Song of LinkedIn

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

My pick for this year is Sophie Koonin's "Stop generating, start thinking".

Sophie is a much better writer than me and has articulated a lot of my thoughts and feelings in this article.

Even though I am not at the coal face of writing code anymore, I am responsible for ensuring our clients' digital output isn't dog shit.

I have spent a lot of the last few years watching "AI" (which AI do you mean?) gain a footing in the industry and trying to work out what that means for me as a technologist.

What does my work look like now? What does it look like when the bubble bursts?

Sophie's article has provoked further thought and reflection — surely the goal of any decent writing!

Ultimately, I feel (like Sophie) that the majority of my job is thinking and, crucially, understanding. That's not something that will be outsourced to machines just yet.

The Roadhouse was legendary for its low ceiling dripping sweat, loud speakers, and knee-high stage — a truly intimate venue.

Cyclefly were playing and the crowd were ready!

Touring "Generation Sap", their debut album, the Irish/French alternative rock band were fronted by the charismatic Declan O'Shea; a striking figure with neon red dreadlocks, yellow PVC pants, and nothing else.

I was front and center, surrounded by a heaving mob of fans with a face full of Declan's crotch. I tucked a cheap necklace into his waistband and got a wink in return.

Anyway, this is a "new music" post, not a "music you've been into for nearly 30 years" post.

Fast-forward a decade and Declan (now dread-less) and Christian have formed a new band called Mako DC. I presume that's their initials there to differentiate them from the various other bands called Mako.

A handful of singles and two albums; 2012's "Living on Air" and "TIMELESS" arriving in 2021 (did they do that with the dates on purpose?)

Of the two, I think "Living on Air" is probably my favourite. As you'd expect from two key players in Cyclefly, there's a touch of the old magic in there. Declan's voice takes a softer approach which, at times, slides into a Brian Molko impression and the guitar is equally laid back. It's clearly alternative rock but alt rock that has matured out of its late-90's post-grunge phase and kind of found its own feet.

I don't see either album replacing Generation Sap on my playlist — that album stands up surprisingly well to repeated listens over the last three decades — but I will be returning to them.

When the chief suspect in the disappearance of Áróra's sister is found dead, and Áróra's new financial investigation leads to the street where her sister was last seen, she is drawn into a shocking case that threatens everything

This is the final part of a five book series that I've been reading now since 2022, eagerly awaiting each new release. Despite one of the leads being a police officer, I've become quite invested in the characters and their development through the series.

The dramatic conclusion, however, felt rushed. This sometimes happens at the end of a series when you have 40,000 character arcs to neatly tie off but the Áróra Investigates series is largely two people and one crime.

The reveal of the killer came suddenly and was surprising more for that than the actual identity; without too much in the way of spoilers, the killer confesses within 30 seconds of being in a police investigation room!

That said it was nice to get more of the back story on Ísafold's murder (the entire reason for the series). The structure felt nice; almost alternating chapters of flashbacks working their way forward, and the investigation working it's way back until they both converge with Ísafold's death.

I was saddened by the ending proper (there's a Three Weeks Later chapter) and, while not as bleak as some of Sigurðardóttir's endings, it's pretty bleak.

If you were hoping for sunshine and rainbows, prepare to be disappointed.

04:00 — woke with a terrible thirst, mind racing with fever dreams. "unplug your phone, cable may be warm" warns my phone. the cable is cold, the water is tepid, the night is long

I may be at my most poetic and most dramatic at 4am!

One of my favourite things about living somewhere flat and expansive is, once the storm has passed exposing sunshine in its wake, the trees and buildings are all lit up with a golden light against a charcoal backdrop of the storm in the distance. It's like two completely different weathers at the same time!

We have some software at work that uses APIs for various LLMs and I was running a data pull this week. One thing that struck me was the cost; Gemini was £30 but Claude was £390 for the exact same prompts. I'm pretty certain that Claude is the more realistic pricing and Gemini, like everything Google own, is propped up by advertising dollar.

The first crocuses have sprung forth from the lawn. Still too early for gardening.

Links of Interest™

• How to come correct. #TIL the phrase good godfuck; as in targets, projections, and KPIs (whatever the good godfuck those are)
• A guide to crafting the perfect penis
• The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans
• Eurovision 2026: Electronic artist and YouTuber Look Mum No Computer to represent UK in Vienna
• Corporations demand perfection from workers, but AI gets unlimited slack.
• This photo book documents the glamour and grit of Placebo’s ascent
• pointer-box-offset
• Decontextualising the indieweb isn’t being positive, it’s a form of tech fundamentalism
• One Year on Pixelfed: Reclaiming My Photography from the Algorithm

So, without further ado, here are some things I have been enjoying lately.

• Snowdrops brightening the shadowy spaces under hedges
• My newly repaired wool jumper
• Marks & Spencer's heat-n-eat cinnamon buns
• Listening to Helen Love while I'm driving
• I have a bar of Pears soap that smells like childhood

Not only good advice but a catchy indie song, "Be Gay, Do Drugs, Hail Satan" by Super Cassette deserves repeated plays. In fact, stick it on every party playlist you have. Somewhere in the tiny sliver Venn diagram overlap of Decemberists, Cavetown, and Los Campesinos with a dose of Harley Poe.

When people say punk is dead they aren't really looking hard. Dropkick Murphys and Haywire just dropped a 1980's British street punk sounding anthem railing against ICE. Nice. "Citizen I.C.E." reminds me of The Exploited and Aglio é Olio.

I'll be honest, I've never heard grungegaze dream indie before but I can't argue with a woman from Wigan! Greater Manchester's TTSSFU blend Nirvana and the Pixies with Cocteau Twins and a heck of a lot of fuzzbox into something incredible. The whole of 2025's "Blown" is well worth a listen.

I devoured this said V.E. Schwab in a jacket quote either carefully written or carefully chosen because it references consuming.

There is a secret race of creatures, the eponymous Book Eaters, that look like humans but are nourished by the words and ideas they osmose when they literally eat books. It's a little on-the-nose for this unrepentant bookworm (and, apparently, a certain New York Times bestselling author).

These poor souls live in manor houses dotted around the country like half a dozen vampiric Brontë families shepherding their dwindling number of fertile women around for breeding escorted, in the most fanciful way, by "Knights"; a paramilitary organisation comprised of wayward Family sons and their tame "Dragons" — Mind Eaters, monstrous corruptions of Book Eaters who, instead, feed on the thoughts and dreams of living creatures.

Devon Fairweather is one such bride but, like all good heroines, isn't going to suffer under this dumb patriarchy any longer. Fuelled by a mother's righteous fire, Devon takes control of her own life after discovering her newborn baby is a Mind Eater.

Chock full of references to fairy tales, Sunyi Dean's gothic debut feels like a labour of love; a personal novel of love — for books, for children, for life.

This book feels like it inhabits the Venn diagram intersect of Bridget Collins' The Silence Factory and Holly Black's The Book of Night. There's a timeless out-of-time feeling; as though the real world is happening off stage, mixed with Devon; six foot tall, men's black jeans, buzzcut. Not an anti-hero but not a typical hero either.

Some of the chapters felt they had had a bit more love than others but whether this was Dean's fault or her editor's I couldn't say. Nothing to ruin my enjoyment of the story though. I, like Schwab before me, devoured this book then sat back –satisfied– and thought I wish there was pudding a sequel.

The terminology comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel where the titular children are left to die in the woods but leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way home.

So far, so sense. Except, if you remember, Hansel originally leaves a trail of white stones.

These show up well on the forest floor in moonlight and the siblings make it home safely — much to their wicked stepmother's chagrin.

When he leaves the breadcrumb trail the following night (his stepmother having prevented him from sneaking out to collect stones) they are almost immediately eaten by the birds and the children wander lost until they are nearly eaten by a hideous child-eating witch.

I don't feel like breadcrumbs are the most accurate description of the UI element. I'm not sure exactly what is (I'm a developer and, therefore, terrible at naming things) but my initial thought was "Hansel Path".

What do you think? Get in touch by email, hit me up on the Socials™, or elsewhere online.

My phone vibrates quietly on the desk near my left hand. I put down my tea cup and pick it up. There is a local weather warning for snow. I shrug; there have been warnings like this recently that came to nothing and, besides, I'm warm indoors for the forseeable. I dismiss the notification and put my phone down.

Just then, a wild and tumultuous flurry of snowflakes — each as big as a cat — batter the window pane for five endless minutes then abruptly subside in favour of bright sunshine.

Within minutes it's like the snowstorm never happened.

I bought a tiny wireless keyboard for my phone so I can type better when I'm away from my laptop. Often I'll have time at my desk at work to write a post but, by Jesus, do I hate writing anything long-form on my phone's on-screen keyboard.

Work has been incredibly busy this week.

Tuesday I was out of the office on a training day. It was nice, I learned so many things and got to spend time with my friend, Iain. We used to be in the same team but not any more so we don't get to hang out every day. Sad times.

The down side to that is that I have to do five days of work in three days 🙃

With two important deadlines looming, everyone is in the same boat though. All hands on deck to get two reports finished.

I'm quietly confident this is my best technical audit yet!

I've seen a couple of wrens hanging around the kitchen window; flitting between the hedge and the tree roughly around where the last pair nested last year. I'm hoping we will have some new neighbours — with a happier ending than last time! 😢

She was a princess of the magic line. The gods had sent their shadows to her christening.
Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Links of Interest™

• Quality at speed
• Where we are with agentic AI feels a lot like the cloud computing boom of 20 years ago. Marketed on claims of efficiency and flexibility, its big innovation was to remove friction between a company’s operating expenses and revenue lines of Amazon, Microsoft and Google
• Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds
• AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
• Italian Photographer Makes Pinhole Camera Out of Fresh Pasta
• Charli XCX and Milly Alcock to star in new horror film from Takashi Miike
• Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
• The world is increasingly concerned about total AI, and China is aligning itself with Indonesia in a wave of regulations that seek to curb its total replacement
• Wishcessibility - Nic Chan
• James Van Der Beek, star of ‘Dawson’s Creek’, dies aged 48
• AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
• We mourn our craft
• The Slow And Meticulous Edit

Album opener, "House", is my favourite track — it reeks of Kiki Rockwell (affectionate).

The album is cohesive (a given for a soundtrack) and effortlessly blends Charli's vibe with more classical soundtrack elements. Feelings of disquiet compete with elation, swells and valleys and builds aplenty.

Despite my good intentions, I still spend more time on my phone than I would like to. Actually, that's no surprise considering that it's such a powerful tool.
niqwithq

I have written on this topic before (quoting ava and discussing how smartphones are not the enemy) and my opinions haven't changed.

Niq is completely right; phones are tools and, used correctly, are perfectly safe.

I use mine in much the same way as Niq; it's a productivity tool with very little by way of "entertainment". I communicate, organise, research, and log through my phone.

So, yeah, I'm still not worried about my "screen time".

There are three basic levels of "content";

1. Publicly available
2. Gated
3. Medical Professional Only

1. Publicly available information

This covers anything about a drug or product that the general public are allowed to see. This is a large amount of the clinical information content on a typical pharma brochure site. This includes prescribing information, dosing guidelines, important safety information, and details on how the drug works (Mechanism of Action).

2. Gated

When we get into promotional materials, the law (outside of USA and New Zealand) generally requires us to ensure our visitors are local Healthcare Professionals (HCP's).

Getting people to sign up for an account is a notoriously difficult UX problem. It requires a delicate balance of "value exchange" — what do I get in exchange for signing up? In pharma, this is usually exclusive content.

We need to take reasonable steps to ensure the user accessing the information is a Healthcare Professional. For this we use two main tools; self-identification and third-party verification.

Under a self-identification model, should the content allow, we throw up a modal blocking access to the content until the user selects the "I am definitely an HCP" button. It's not foolproof obviously but it satisfies the regulations as reasonable steps.

Third-party verification is through, mainly, three companies; DocCheck for the EU, Doximity for the USA, and OneKey for global. HCPs register with these companies and verify their medical credentials in exchange for a unique ID number. We can then ask the user for their unique ID and verify it with the company by API. This is more robust than self-identification but is a higher barrier to entry — back to the delicate balance!

These services, naturally, don't have every single HCP registered, it's a voluntary thing so it's not a perfect solution.

A note on the UK

As the UK is no longer part of the European Union, the number of British HCP's registered on DocCheck is proportionally lower; not nil but not representative. There is no directly comparative product for British HCP's. Even the two main National Health Service (NHS) verification systems; NHS Login and NHS CIS2, aren't to be used for third-party gated content. Some sites rely on "pattern matching" NHS ID numbers or work email addresses. Alternatively, confirming a registration number with the General Medical Council or the Nursing and Midwifery Council is still active is another –not foolproof– way to verify a user's identity.

3. Medical Professional Only

Moving into more restricted content, we need that foolproof verification. This kind of content includes financial or legal contracts, personally identifiable information, clinical trial data, or drug-issuing portals. Systems where a user must be an HCP.

For these, we use systems like LexisNexis, Onfido, or iDenfy which verify users using government-issued documents like passports, driver's licence, or Medical Practitioner licences in tandem with systems like DocCheck to cross-reference. Identity verification systems guarantee the user is who they say they are but can't guarantee the user is a medical professional.

tl;dr

DocCheck|Doximity|OneKey

• Disease education
• Scientific articles or whitepapers
• Congress or poster summaries
• Mechanism of action content
• Non-promotional medical education
• HCP-only newsletters
• Product information without prescribing decisions
• Typical pharma “HCP gated” websites

LexisNexis|Onfido|iDenfy

• Anything tied to legal, financial, or contractual obligations
• Access to controlled or safety-critical systems
• Regulated prescribing or ordering workflows
• Jurisdictions with strict digital identity laws

References

• EU: Article 86-88 of Directive 2001/83/EC
• USA: FDA regulations under 21 CFR 202.1 and PhRMA Code
• UK: MHRA Blue Guide and ABPI Code of Practice

I got this email today.

"So what?", you might think, "Companies send order dispatched emails all the time".

The thing is, I haven't ordered anything.

It's a company I use though, which is odd. Have I ordered something and forgotten?! Has a subscription renewed that I don't remember?!

When I opened the email, it was a simple marketing email about same day delivery.

I can see what's happened here; it's a dirty trick to boost open rates.

Ignoring the fact that open rates mean nothing –an inexact vanity metric– this has the negative effect of breaking a level of trust the company has built up with me over several years.

When your marketing manager's need for "line goes up" competes with respect for the customer, the customer almost always loses.

How many sandwiches do you eat a week?

I eat a heck of a lot of sandwiches. I will preface this entire questionnaire by saying sandwiches are my favourite food. I even did a presentation on it once.

When do you eat your sandwiches?

There isn't a meal invented that doesn't have an associated sandwich.

What’s your go to order?

I firmly believe in the broadest definition of sandwich. "Is a hotdog a sandwich?" isn't that controversial (of course it bloody is!), I'm talking "taco is a sandwich", "victoria sponge is a sandwich", "pizza is a sandwich", and "pop tarts are sandwiches". So, I honestly can't answer this question with anything other than "it depends…"

Do you prefer hot or cold sandwiches?

Hot sandwiches are my preference. Mostly, I think, because I live in a cold place. I like cold butties in the Summer.

What’s your favourite type of bread?

This entirely depends on the sandwich. Grilled cheese needs a sourdough, ploughman's a granary hoagie, brioche for a burger, and thick white toastie loaf for a nutella and marshmallow fried butty.

Do you like condiments?

Heck yes, I do! A dry sarnie is a sin

Sweet or savoury?

Primarily savoury but nowt stopping me having a couple of Custard Creams as a little sandwich-y pudding. I am an adult, I make my own rules

Do you cut your sandwiches?

When the form factor allows, yes. Burger buns infrequently, square bread into triangles, sub-shapes in half if necessary, wraps and hotdog buns never

What’s the worst sandwich crime?

Sliced tomato or •shudder• halved cherry tomatoes

What’s your ideal sandwich eating environment?

I honestly couldn't care where I eat a sandwich. I've had some lovely butties in a car, on a beach, at the kitchen table.

Why sandwiches?

Considering how loose my definition is, that's like asking "why food?" and that's a bit silly.

I saw this meme floating around and it hit a nerve. So much AI hate is down to the disproportionate claims about the ability of large language models or "Generative AI".

AI as it stands right now it's neither artificial nor intelligent. It is, however, a buzzword for a suite of in-machine data processing tools.

This is where the confusion lies; "AI will cure cancer" is a common retort from AI fans but the genomic sequencing software of CRISPR is a different beast to Nano Banana, for example.

I work in the healthcare space and I see a lot of talk about artificial intelligence; from medical professionals, brand managers, C-suiters, and developers. I'd wager each of them means a different thing when they say "artificial intelligence".

Whether it's drug discovery ("AstraZeneca signs up to $555 million AI deal with Algen to develop therapies") or website personalisation ("Maximise AI scalability with Adobe Experience Manager Sites"), AI ≠ AI.

I am nursing a hot cup of tea while I wait for the decongestants to kick in, allowing the steam up my nostrils and into my swollen aching sinuses. I don't know if it helps but it feels like I'm doing something and that's better than nothing.

Alice shared Matthew's Sunlight Optimism Calculator and it's fabulous — I shall be referring to it frequently in the coming weeks. Only 31 days until it's light after I finish work.

Stopped by the library on Saturday morning and picked up a really interesting looking book; "The Book Eaters" by Sunyi Dean. I have three weeks to power through it. The text is tiny to my old eyes though so, I imagine, I'll be renewing!

Every time we go to the library, we have such a good time we say we should go every week but then life gets in the way. Maybe this time is the time…

I have to write a self appraisal for work to outline my achievements. Something about my upbringing, mental health, and Gen-X makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable "showboating" like this.

However, we no longer live in a world where "work hard and your contribution will be recognised" — recognition will only be forthcoming if I "tell" people how hard I have worked.

Feels bollocks to me but, hey, thems the rules.

The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.
Merriman Lyon, "Silver on the Tree"

Links of Interest™

• You can't "AI-proof your career" with a project mindset
• Two Terrible Children on a Windy Hill: A Rereading of Wuthering Heights
• Why You Should Try Dark Showers
• You Can Just Say No to the Data
• Visually label your colours
• This one goes out to the ones we love
• The circular logic of our metrics

Contrary to popular belief, Rage isn't banned. King pulled it from print in the late 1990s after it was found in the possessions of several school shooters.

Far from glorifying school shooters, King wrote a book about human interaction. A condemnation of clique-y society and poisonous “norms”.

This is the book Salinger wishes Catcher in the Rye could have been.

In many ways, this sounds amazing. I can tell you the pain points of my job and you can get a computer to do it for me so I don't have to?! Amazing!

And then I write my self a note: If we automate the busy work, where is the impetus for change? When do we fix useless processes?

Jim Neilson's Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance touches on this too.

Organizations had an incentive to say “no” when development was constrained — “We can only do so much, so let’s make sure we do the most impactful things.”

Sadly, so much of this focus is on the bits of work I genuinely enjoy and rarely focused on the actual humdrum. I'd love for someone to automate away my timesheets or laborious approval uploads instead of writing code and wireframing UI.

Meanwhile, the latest album –2025's "Edge of the Abyss"– is drastically different and absolutely incredible. Touches of MSI, metalcore, frenetic synths, Spanish language screaming, 90's riffs, Mexican mythology. A new favourite!

New single "Ay Ya" by Christine and the Queens hits you with some bloopy, bassy, almost trip hop. Ethereal, dark, and downtempo.

Metric are back with typical Metric grubby indie pop. "Victim of Luck" is good but not incredible.

I remember seeing drag queen Sacha Velour doing a routine to "Deceptacon" once. Anyway, blending Sprints' urgh with Le Tigre's nyangh results in something very Fight Like Apes! I am enjoying!

Plaintive acoustic guitar folk verges on country in Nina Nebsit's "Seventeen". Minimal synth wash in the background with a crisp and bendy electric riff breaks up the finger-picking.

I have a soft spot for furious political rap; especially when it's punk or metal af. On "Illegal Aliens", Delilah Bon's anger spits over dirty guitar and clips of presidential speeches, their growl rasping like a cornered wild animal.

The second cover of the week, Chris Isaac's "Wicked Game" ably interpreted by The Anchoress. Lacking percussion, slight distortion on the piano, Catherine's gorgeous voice catches with emotion but soars when needed.

A powerful message from Paris Paloma on "Good Girl". I'm loving the pace and the sputtery 808-style drum fill. She has a beautiful voice.

I must confess I added this to my playlist because I loved the artwork. "Crossroads" by Obsidian Swing — never heard of them before but I quite like them. There's that processed metal vibe of Polaris; slick production scream-y vocals.

What this means is a net good for online privacy.

Although it doesn't affect historical data (anything they have already logged about you prior to April 2nd), they have no control over your personal data captured through the service from that date forwards.

This means they can only process it for the purpose of the reCAPTCHA service, in accordance with the rules of the website owner, and not forward it on to their other services whenever they feel like (mostly creepy advertising portfolios, I would wager).

The final book in Cooper's epic The Dark is Rising Sequence ties all of the loose ends up neatly in a quite satisfying way that doesn't feel forced.

There's a lovely twist towards the end that plucks a heartstring or two but I won't spoil it here for anyone.

I will say that I was quite impressed with the denoument; the way Merriman explains what will happen now The Dark has been defeated for the "final time" feels oh so pertinent now.

We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control.
The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth.
The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past.
The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.
Merriman Lyon

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

Storm Chandra hit this week bringing a stupid amount of wind and rain. We were issued with a severe weather warning; snow is predicted but no ice which is good because fuck ice.

One lunchtime, I went for a walk as I sometimes do. I was heading past the farm to where the path cuts back between the fields when I heard the unmistakable barking of a pheasant. I have occasionally heard one faintly over the fields from the other direction but never from this end of the village. Which probably explains why the pheasant's loud booming was alternating with the furious chakka-chakka of a Jackdaw.

The broken dashboard from last week was fixed and returned and successfully reinstalled. The client is now happy — not as happy as me though because I don't have to deal with PowerBI until the next round of amends in 6 months' time! 🎉

In other work news, I have been building some small utility programs for the team to help facilitate in workshops. Nothing mind-blowing but using my ability to write software to genuinely help people has been extremely rewarding.

I'm really sad that, despite (or maybe because of) the aforementioned software for work, progress on my personal media tracking software has stalled considerably. I'm working on building up the bothers to get it over the line. It's a shame because I'll really enjoy using it when it's finished!

The storm blew itself out before the end of the week, thankfully without any damage around here. I have since noticed the first shoots of daffodils and clusters of flowering snowdrops. The hardest task in this false Spring is convincing my wife it's too early to send me out to do gardening 🤣

I hate your tattoos
You have weak wrists
But I'll keep you
Deftones, Mascara

Links of Interest™

• How to overcome YouTube Addiction
• What Would Earth Look Like if We Weren’t Here? Abandoned Photographer Shows Us
• Cursor is better at marketing than coding
• A Slot Machine for Feelings in Every Pocket
• Cookie Banner Defaults
• The f*** off contact page
• It really is the year of the website
• Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now

Todoist is brilliant and amazing and so easy to use that I find myself using it for bookmarks, project tracking, file transfer, and quick notes. I also filled it with recurring daily reminders to do all kinds of things that I'd otherwise forget.

The downside to all this is that, without some careful curation, everything gets dumped in my Inbox and is given equal weighting. I will stress this is not a failing of Todoist but me, as a user — I'm using it in the laziest possible way.

I decided to break away from this abuse of a lovely app by using apps dedicated to specific tasks. Recurrent daily tasks says, to me, "habit tracker". So I had a look around for a nice looking, private, Android-based habit tracker.

I don't need too many bells and whistles; add some tasks, check them off when they're done, the crop up again the next day.

I found Habo on the Play Store which is free and open source, privacy-respecting and ticks all my boxes (no pun intended). I've been using it for a week now and it's good enough for me to have already removed my recurrent dailies from Todoist!

Now to find some decent light-weight project management software…!

This particular day I left my camera at home. I reasoned it wasn't practical; I was going to an event in the afternoon with bag checks, there was a team lunch beforehand so little opportunity to actually take photos, plus a named storm was rolling in and torrential rain was forecast. None of this screamed "take your camera with you".

As it happened, the storm fizzled out (at least round me) by lunchtime. I found myself walking back to the train station alone through bustling streets in clear, crisp, fairly sunny weather. It would have been a pretty good time to take some pictures but I didn't have a camera on me!

I debated sticking my headphones in and zoning out; I've done the walk a million times and can do it on autopilot, but instead I decided to treat it as though I did have my camera.

Walking through the early commuter crowd blending in with the late shoppers, the perennial town centre inhabitants, and those early starters heading for drinks that will probably end at 4am, I observed.

I watched the way people interacted with each other, the way light interacted with them. I saw the shadows cast long and hazy from low winter sun cutting through tall buildings. The argument by the statue of Victoria and the kiss at the bus stop. I saw a child drop a toy from a pram and a kind stranger return it. I saw gold highlighting brick and outlining cobblestones, reflecting off glass and buses and billboards.

I saw. And I appreciated.

And I didn't take a single photograph of any of it.

I'm actually rather surprised that Scene Queen hasn't popped into my recommendations before now! Righteous anger with a sense of humour, "18+" is bubblegum metal.

I haven't listened to The Devil Wears Prada in years so I gave their new album a whirl. It was OK. "Play the old shit" actually just made me want to listen to the "Zombie" EP. Which I did.

After a handful of teasing singles, Softcult finally released their debut album "When a Flower Doesn't Grow". Bang on 30 minutes of timeless riotgaze; grumbling bass, fuzz, spackly drums (whatever that means!), this is a strong debut from the Canadian duo. For fans of Heartworms, Svalbard, and July Talk.

Flow charts and diagrams are not as fun as interactive prototypes, but they’re much more important to get right
Nic Chan

As a technologist, a large part of my job is making flow charts and diagrams to help inform design decisions.

And Nic's right — as much as I'd love to be coding whizzy prototypes all day, these flow charts are so very important not just to me but to the whole team.

In and of themselves, the diagrams are fairly useless; they need my experience to understand them and use them to guide the rest of the team through feasibility conversations.

Uncovering complexity early allows us all to course correct as soon as possible before it becomes expensive and time-consuming to make changes.

We handed over a project to a client this week. The IT department confirmed receipt of the dashboard files and said the installation had gone live without a hitch. Amazing work! Congratulatory emails and back pats all round… until the client emailed saying everything was broken!

Cue mad scramble to work out how much was "everything" and how "broken" was it. I think I isolated a few key issues in the actual codebase that were fixed quite quickly but we'll see what happens when our data analysis department get eyes on it early next week.

I have fallen woefully behind on Love Island: All Stars this week; the stressful work week has led to many evenings of just collapsing in bed without the bothers to even watch half-naked morons talking about nothing 🤣

I, inadvertently, created a slightly popular blogging challenge; "What is the oldest thing you own?". Several people commented on social media, many wrote reply articles, and a few even emailed me directly — which is lovely! Thank you everyone who took part!

Regarding people emailing me directly, I've started archiving those messages tagged as "Online Community" and I'm really pleased to note I have a little of 80 saved email threads. Not masses by any stretch but a surprisingly large number for this anti-social hermit! Again, thank you for reaching out. That really is what online community is all about.

Do not kill the part of you that is cringe; kill the part of you that cringes
sometimes the sagest advice is from the dankest memes

Links of Interest™

• The Complex History Behind the Iconic Polaroid Photo on Vampire Weekend’s ‘Contra’ Album Cover
• Excavating Blogger
• Learning to See Like a Photographer
• Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock hits out at “weird” Trump supporting punks, praises Kneecap – band respond
• The Right to Repair Edition
• CTA Hierarchy in the Wild
• Limerence is bullshit
• Those Cameras on the Shelf

"KILLER QUEEN" by Skars reminds me of 1980s hair metal bluesy hard rock like Mötley Crüe or Junkyard. Derivative. The sped up version is better than the slowed down version but both feel naval-gazey.

Classic Beyond The Black on new album "Break The Silence"; a bouncy rockin' vehicle for Jennifer Haben's voice. Some nice collabs on the album. "Weltschmerz" is ballady af but so lovely.

"Neverland" by Ulver - been a fan for forever had they have had many genre changes. This harks back to the icy instrumental –almost ambient– work of "Lykantrope". "Weeping Stone" is a standout.

Chris Clark brings his dark glitch style to movie scores on "We Bury The Dead". And wow! This is musical Giger; rivalling Nine Inch Nails on their home turf — sublime.

Covering Addison Rae's "Fame is a Gun" for tripleJ's Like a Version, former internet joke Rebecca Black shows she has actual contemporary pop star chops. Hints of Marina Diamandis in her vocals, I could see this getting heavy rotation in GAY. Mint.

As Everything Unfolds dropped a new EP of their lovely brand of "metalcore with pop sensibilities". The collaboration with Bury Tomorrow's Dani Winter-Bates, "What You Wanted", slaps but so does the whole EP. For fans of "he guttural, she angelic" vocals.

I buy decent quality stuff secondhand whenever possible (which is getting easier every year) and keep it for a long time.

It got me wondering what the oldest things I own are.

I have a handful of cameras that are older than I am but I bought them recently; here I'm talking about things I've held onto for years…

1. A 1985 Sisters of Mercy tour shirt
2. A studded leather belt that I bought as a teenager
3. A pair of pre-COVID Doc Martens
4. A grey hoodie from 2003
5. The camping rucksack I left home with in the late 1990s

What is the oldest thing you own? Get in touch by email, hit me up on the Socials™, or elsewhere online.

In the Q&A section at the end, he mentioned the overwhelmingly positive and utopian future we are destined to live in — all thanks to AI.

AI will cure cancer and solve world hunger ushering in a "post-scarcity" world. Which all sounds amazing…

Except it's not possible.

The United Nations estimates that current food production is enough to feed 10 billion people (vastly more than the estimated 8.2 billion people on earth).

The primary reasons for people going hungry are war and conflict damaging infrastructure, wastage in developed nations, and poverty — they simply cannot afford over-priced food on inadequate wages.

We know these problems, we know the solutions. And we didn't need an artificial neural network to dream up the answer; we did it with our own wetware.

I will continue to shout from the rooftops: there cannot be a tech only solution to a social problem.

On a photo walk to test out my new Minolta SRT303, I clocked this composition out of the corner of my eye.

The 53mm Rokkor lens does not connect to the in built light meter so this whole walk was metred by eye. I don't think I did too badly!

The robins are in full throat. It sounds like 40,000 of them singing the same song at slightly different times; none of it syncs up and the effect is jarring. The dawn chorus, magical as it is, naught but a complete cacophony.

I took a long walk over the fields to the duck pond because I missed water. It was quiet and peaceful and good for the soul.

My camera lens had endured a battering in my bag on the train home and the focus ring jammed on infinity. I didn't realise until I was a mile from home. It'll need fixing but it forced me into some interesting composition decisions.

The dog lurched at a hedgerow and disturbed a Barn Owl who floated off like the ghost of smoke taken bird form. Lord only knows why it was in a hedge at midday.

Shower Thoughts¹

Why do the trousers of anthropomorphic animals have holes for tails? Why would they not design them with tail "sleeves"?

Work has been busy. Very busy.

Last year ended with a lot of planning meetings and January we're putting those in place.

Two new clients with similar names and very different projects is giving my short term recall a workout.

"Love Island: All Stars" kicked off again this week; delayed by the South African wildfires. The initial cast look to be a friendly bunch; I look forward to watching it all fall apart 😂

Try as I might, I can't figure out how to get subtitles on live broadcasting through the ITVx app so I will always be a little behind the in-office chats through watching it on catch-up the next day. A timely reminder that accessibility measure benefit everyone and, without them, it can be socially isolating.

I have neglected this blog over the holidays. Hectic work and illness combined to drain me of bothers. I'm not making a New Year Resolution but I will do better in future.

I will have no self imposed penance for problems with easy solutions
Ben Gibbard

Links of Interest™

• Cognitive responsibility: the three unwritten laws of the word
• Scroll vīgintī et quattuor
• When the tech leopard eats your face
• Bandcamp Does The Right Thing
• Writing by Numbers
• The middle is a graveyard
• The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
• Sorry seems to be the most overused word
• Google Gemini to Provide Foundation for Some Apple Intelligence Features
• My Mind is a Mess

¹: HT Denis Defreyne

The first week back at work is over! A few drinks later and the hectic pace is a dull memory; until Monday morning rolls around.

I made a big list before I finished for Christmas of the critical things I needed to do on my return and, as of close of play Friday, I have done none of them. YOLO

Progress on my personal media tracker continues. It's going well apart from finding a CMS. Having very tight restrictions had meant heading down a few rabbit holes to discover it's the wrong software. Right now I'm genuinely considering writing my own CMS. It can't be that hard?!

All I can offer is my own anger, which feels endless, and my hope, which feels endless too.
Victoria Aveyard

Links of Interest™

• The generosity of a link
• Spreading misinformation on the internet
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Broke His Own Rules in Pursuit of His Famous Photo ‘Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare’
• A year of revolution
• The Psychological Horror of Diana Ross' "Upside Down"
• Death to Scroll Fade!
• People not people

In a quirk of calendular mathematics, this is simultaneously week 1 of 2026 and week 53 of 2025.

I celebrated New Year's Eve with a ceilidh, a beer, and a takeaway with my family.

The ceilidh was amazing; so warm and joyful and wholesome community vibes. I'll be back there!

The new year began with a wan lemony Winter sun trying its damndest to burn through the haze before conceding defeat and giving way to a huge bright moon.

The short days mean my daily perambulations take place mostly in the dark and a full or near-full moon creates a magical atmosphere. I used to listen to music on my walks but now I much prefer the natural sounds around me; birds singing, wind in the trees, rain on the asphalt.

In between festivities, I kept an eye on some machine learning processes that had been set running for a work report. At once amazed by the ability and shocked by the rising costs!

The year is over and I haven't finished The Dark is Rising Sequence. It's still winter though, so it still counts. One book to go!

-7°C even with the sun up. They say snow is coming. I'm keeping my lomography powder dry. Hold until you see the whites of their skies!

You are a museum of everything you have ever loved
@filmsbygabby, TikTok

Links of Interest™

• The hill I will die on: Pigeons are working-class heroes and deserve some respect | Toussaint Douglass
• Defining the indieweb for 2026
• Bookmarks
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Broke His Own Rules in Pursuit of His Famous Photo ‘Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare’
• New year, new me, new web browsing setup?

For the longest time, I'd pick one from the array to display at build time. As part of my work to reduce build time, I decided to display them all so the homepage wasn't considered "new" for every build.

However, this left the issue that it was always the same testimonials visible. Especially on mobile, where you can only see one, new additions wouldn't be immediately surfaced. Buuut I couldn't shuffle the array at build time or I'd incur the wrath of the Build Time Goblins (or something).

Enter ✨ Progressive Enhancement ✨

The default experience is acceptable. With a sprinkle of JavaScript, we can make it a little bit better for when JavaScript is available.

The Code

const carousel = document.querySelector('.carousel');
const slides = [...carousel.querySelectorAll('article')];
const shuffled = [...slides].sort(() => Math.random() - 0.5);
slides.forEach(slide => carousel.removeChild(slide));
shuffled.forEach(slide => carousel.appendChild(slide));

The Breakdown

1. Get the carousel element and its slides.

const carousel = document.querySelector('.carousel');
const slides = [...carousel.querySelectorAll('article')];

2. Shuffle the array using the nifty Math.random() method

const shuffled = [...slides].sort(() => Math.random() - 0.5);

3. Remove each of the original slides and add each of the shuffled slides.

slides.forEach(slide => carousel.removeChild(slide));
shuffled.forEach(slide => carousel.appendChild(slide));

The Outcome

"She Bangs Like A Fairy On Acid" by Elita is exactly the wtf I needed to start my Friday. Shades of that Gothic Lolita thing from the millennium; all breathy vocals and unsettling melodies.

I feel like this is the book that would benefit most from some kind of "reading companion" notes; clearly Cooper has created a rich and interesting world but not all the thinking makes it to the page which can come across as "leap of faith" at times.

This isn't my favourite in the Sequence but it's an enjoyable read. It suffers from the curse of a longer series in that the arc of the book is secondary to the arc of the series.

That said, the story arc is succinct and I enjoyed the friendship between Bran and Will.

1. Don't over-budget on books

I have a ton of books I have already bought that I haven't yet read. Even though I only really buy 99p books, it still adds up over the year. Maximum monthly spend of £5.

2. Don't buy new cameras

I have a small handful of film cameras and I don't need more. If I can manage to make it to Christmas without buying more, I might treat myself to a Canon AE-1P Minolta SRT101 Minolta SRT Super/303/202. This sales embargo includes lenses and accessories but not, obviously, film and development.

3. Do not over-budget on film and development

Film and development to not exceed £27 per month. This should roughly equate to two rolls of cheap film and two developments. Realistically, I should only be using one roll (£13.50) but it's so bloody addictive 🙃 Film costs are averaged over months because I buy 5 rolls at a time and store them in the fridge which means, for example, August is £20 on film but September to December is £0

Conclusions

Books

This was much easier than expected! A couple of things helped; my Kobo breaking forcing me to resurrect an old Kindle kept me from buying bargains directly from Ratuken, and making a reading goal list kept me from wandering aimlessly into buying new books because shiny shiny but also decision paralysis. I didn't always stick to the list — some titles were bumped because I didn't have them on me at the time or because I wasn't feeling it, some got dropped entirely. It was never the goal to slavishly adhere to the list but to be guided by it.

Cameras and accessories

I have never been an impulsive buyer so I was quite surprised at failing on this one! Looking at the reasons for failure though and I'm not too disappointed — having to buy my dream camera twice in one year is a sadness few will experience and one I hope to never repeat 😂

February fail - bought a Zenit E on a whim which was a total lack of self-control thing

May fail - bought a case for the Zenit E because I couldn't attach a strap to the body without one

August fail - bought my Minolta SR-T 303b which was basically my dream camera 😊

November fail - bought a Minolta SR-T303 to replace the 303b the dog broke 😭

Film and development

Another "easy win". Having found Photo Hippo, Burnley, my development costs are well within budget and I rarely make it through more than two rolls in one month.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

This year's top ten artists

1. The Cure (92 plays)
2. Orla Gartland (71 plays)
3. Chloe Slater (67 plays)
4. Placebo (52 plays)
5. Arch Enemy (51 plays)
6. Baby Queen (49 plays)
7. Chappell Roan (48 plays)
8. Ulver (48 plays)
9. Frozen Crown (46 plays)
10. Björk (45 plays)

You can see each month's top artist, album, and song in my article My Year in Music.

The books I have read

Last year I set myself the goal of reading twelve books in twelve months which I actually doubled by the end of the year! This year, I set a target of 24 which I surpassed in October. A return to commuting has helped there; a good two hours a day of solo time to immerse in a book like a warm bath.

1. "Hokey Pokey" by Kate Mascarenhas (I read 99% of this in December and finished it in the early hours of 1st January 2025)
2. "The Toymakers" by Robert Dinsdale
3. "Yellowface" by RF Kuang
4. "The Snow Song" by Sally Gardner
5. "Ascension" by Nicholas Binge
6. "The Book of Night" by Holly Black
7. "The City and its Uncertain Walls" by Haruki Murakami
8. "Dark As Night" by Lilja Sigurdardóttir
9. "Oathbreaker" by Aaron Hodges
10. "Shield of Winter" by Aaron Hodges
11. "Dawn of War" by Aaron Hodges
12. "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman
13. "The Magician King" by Lev Grossman
14. "The Magician's Land" by Lev Grossman
15. "Silverview" by John Le Carré
16. "The Book of Doors" by Gareth Brown
17. "The Silence Factory" by Bridget Collins
18. "Kala: A Novel" by Colin Walsh
19. "Snare" by Lilja Sigurdardóttir
20. "Trap" by Lilja Sigurdardóttir
21. "Cage" by Lilja Sigurdardóttir
22. "The Garden of Delights" by Amal Singh
23. "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer
24. "Let the right one in" by John Ajvide Lindqvist
25. "Under Sea, Over Stone" by Susan Cooper
26. "The Dark Is Rising" by Susan Cooper
27. "Greenwitch" by Susan Cooper

July was my most prolific month, devouring four books, whereas I spent the whole of August nibbling demurely at Garden of Delights. I have read three trilogies and three-fifths of a series.

Top 10 Tags

• Fantasy: 17
• Magic: 14
• UrbanFantasy: 12
• Wizards: 9
• Horror: 8
• Crime: 5
• Scandinoir: 4
• Iceland: 4
• War: 4
• Thriller: 4

Christmas Movies endured

• "Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey" (David E. Talbert, 2020)
• "A Christmas Miracle for Daisy" (Mike Rohl, 2021)
• "Christmas Inheritance" (Ernie Barbarash, 2017)
• "Haul Out the Holly" (Maclain Nelson, 2022)
• "Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up" (Maclain Nelson, 2023)
• "Last Christmas" (Paul Feig, 2019)
• "Champagne Problems" (Mark Steven Johnson, 2025)
• "My Secret Santa" (Mike Rohl, 2025)
• "Christmas on Mistletoe Farm" (Debbie Isitt, 2022)
• "Christmas Under the Northern Lights" (Ernie Barbarash, 2024)

Televisual viewings

TV

Another year where my tastes haven't wildly changed. Total number of shows is low (32 over the year) but Reality TV, Drama, and Animation all rank highly. Looking at my velocity, I watch much more television in autumn than any other time of year.

Top 10 Genres

• Drama: 12
• Reality: 8
• Animation: 7
• Crime: 6
• Mystery: 5
• Adventure: 4
• Comedy: 4
• Family: 4
• Documentary: 3
• Action: 2

Films

Of the 42 films I watched this year, basically half of them were animated, spurred by a desire to rewatch a load of Ghibli films. Again, screen time ramps up in the colder months; peaking in December when the Christmas films get hammered.

Top 10 Genres

• Animation: 19
• Comedy: 17
• Adventure: 15
• Family: 11
• Christmas: 10
• Fantasy: 9
• Drama: 8
• Romance: 6
• Action: 4
• Documentary: 3

Blogging Challenges

1. Blog questions challenge
2. Music Questions Challenge
3. Fabruary
4. Answering quickfire questions from The Fence like Rizzle Kicks
5. Ten pointless facts about me
6. Junited
7. July Reply
8. #TILvember — I invented this one!
9. #AdventJukebox — I invented this but didn't invite anyone else to join in after I failed at TILvember

There are definitely two Tawny Owls in the village as I heard a distinct and prolonged call-and-response over some distance; one faint over the fields but the other in a tree right over my head — loud and terrifying.

Getting a head start on some work (actually tying up some loose ends I cba'd in the week before close down) –I know, working in the Betwixtmas, tut-tut!– and three things to note;

1. A not-insignificant number of LLMs seem to be OpenAI under the hood
2. I quite like Python as a language
3. I'd forgotten the je ne sais quoi of having a beer while late-night coding

Slightly concerned I'm turning into my dad when I put on a 1972 episode of Ian Nairn travelling around Lancashire on a canal boat and found it fascinating.

Links of Interest™

• This is just a place
• tv.theindiebeat.fm
• Abilene paradox
• This Mind-Blowing Photo Shows a Skydiver in Front of the Sun

I own two Roy Wood singles; this and "Music to Commit Suicide By". This is the more festive.

tl;dr

A Social Media™-friendly shareable Wrapped image showing the slightly unhinged top 5 artists and tracks of 2025.

January

• Top Artist: Annalisa (35 plays)
• Top Album: Reroute to Remain by In Flames (17 plays)
• Top Track: Bad Apple by Lambrini Girls (4 plays)

February

• Top Artist: Chloe Slater (25 plays)
• Top Album: choke enough by Oklou (17 plays)
• Top Track: Nothing Shines on this Island by Chloe Slater (5 plays)

March

• Top Artist: The Cure (32 plays)
• Top Album: Quarter Life Crisis by Baby Queen (22 plays)
• Top Track: Sheaf & Feld by Jim Ghedi (3 plays)

April

• Top Artist: Fight Like Apes (34 plays)
• Top Album: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan (15 plays)
• Top Track: Crystal Days by Echo and the Bunnymen (3 plays)

May

• Top Artist: The Cure (38 plays)
• Top Album: Greatest Hits by The Cure (23 plays)
• Top Track: Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis with Mary Lambert (7 plays)

June

• Top Artist: Katatonia (26 plays)
• Top Album: STILL BLUE by iamamiwhoami & ionnalee (16 plays)
• Top Track: Apply Some Pressure by Maxïmo Park (4 plays)

July

• Top Artist: Placebo (39 plays)
• Top Album: Lo-files by Bring Me The Horizon and lophiile (14 plays)
• Top Track: (U)topia.drm by Bring Me The Horizon and lophiile (5 plays)

August

• Top Artist: The New Eves (18 plays)
• Top Album: "The New Eve is Rising" by The New Eves (18 plays)
• Top Track: "No Comply" by Senser (3 plays)

September

• Top Artist: NewDad (19 plays)
• Top Album: "Cacophony" by Paris Paloma (17 plaus)
• Top Track: "The Look of Love" by ABC (3 plays)

October

• Top Artist: The Indelicates (20 plays)
• Top Album: "The Feeding of the 5000" by Crass (17 plays)
• Top Track: "Fight for your right" by Beastie Boys (3 plays)astie Boys (3 pla)

November

• Top Artist: Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan (28 plays)
• Top Album: "Quarter Life Crisis" by Baby Queen (17 plays)
• Top Track: "Isobel" by Björk (5 plays)

December

• Top Artist: Lily Allen (34 plays)
• Top Album: "West End Girl" by Lily Allen (34 plays)
• Top Track: "The Shadowsea" by Patrick Wolf (4 plays)

Baader-Meinhof Syndrome or genuine omnipotence, I will never know, but this 2013 banger seems to have been everywhere this year. Not many artists can pull off a Christmas song this grand. A modern classic.

The knowing gravel of Cerys Matthews somehow steers this song from creepy to funny. Welsh pop powerhouse Tom Jones also appears.

Another unmistakable riff; that funky brass, mixed with sleigh bells and scratching, supports a hilarious tale of finding Santa's lost wallet.

I have this theory that focusing on being busy prevents me from getting ill because I always seem to come down with something just before holiday or Christmas; the second I think about relaxing, all the germs sense weakness!

Being struck down with a stomach bug kept me at a distance from work; missed the Christmas Party and Secret Santa.

I feel bad for letting people down but also realise that risking infecting other people in the last week before the holiday break is letting them down more!

Managed to box off enough work before I finished to not feel cripplingly guilty over the holiday break though.

The rains came in earnest this week too. The house has a couple of known leaks that materialise in particularly bad weather and they have all popped up at once. Something for the "shit to do in the new year" list.

Happy holidays to all who celebrate. I hope you all get to celebrate it in the way that makes you happiest.

Links of Interest™

• So Many Websites
• Forced Colors Mode
• Dominatrix turns tech founder to combat revenge porn
• 5 social media platforms that are actually social
• Companies Could Use A Librarian - Edward Loveall
• The original Mozilla "Dinosaur" logo artwork
• The only winning move is not to play – Gregg Bernstein
• Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

I've photographed a few "Howard" tags around Manchester and always wondered who he was.

The Mill recently ran a piece about the fascinating history behind this simple graffiti.

"Howard’s name is plastered all over Manchester. But no one knows who he is"

There's a line in this song that says “Does Granny always tell you the old songs are the best?” which is funny because now this is the "old song" my kids' Granny thinks is best.

Anyway, is it really Christmas if you haven't heard Noddy Holder screaming "It's Christmas!" like a Midlands hard rock banshee?

So, without further ado, here are some things I have been enjoying lately.

• Peppermint hot chocolate after a walk in the cold
• Hosting Christmas for our extended family
• How cosy the house looks when it's dark out and all the lamps are on
• Hearing the cows in the field mooing to each other early in the morning
• Lily Allen's new album
• Christmas fantasy romance films

For the longest time I thought Jona Lewie was the singer from Dexy's Midnight Runners but he isn't. This is a perennial anti war song that mentions Christmas once and, so, has been co-opted by the Chrimbo Tunes Brigade. I listen to this all year round cause it's a bop.

"3000 minutes of Stranger Things between you and the finale? You can summarise each episode in a sentence with Google AI! 🎉"

And, like, what is the fucking point in that? Either watch the show or don't!

I presume it's for FOMO folks who slept on the show but it's not the win they think it is — "why watch when you can AI?!" kind of shits on every single person involved in making the show.

It really boils down to tech bros can't tell the difference between "art"¹ and "content". Is TV for "enjoying" or to be "consumed" (around ads)?

When you devalue creativity, craft, and artform by lumping it all under the bland and soulless banner of "content" it becomes all too easy to forget the humanity at the core.

And that's how you get decisions to replace watching TV with reading a precis, reading books with a synthetic audio podcast, and humans with AI slop.

¹: I'm not saying Stranger Things is like Fine Art but you get my point…

This is my dad's favourite Christmas song. A gentle exploration of "God as Alien" that seems a strange choice of topic for a Christmas hit!

You might think I shared East 17 on the 17th on purpose but you would be wrong, sadly. This is also not a Christmas song but about Tony Mortimer's brother death by suicide. Festive.

That iconic piano refrain that screams "Christmas" with Elton John's trademark camp swagger. An enduring classic for a reason.

The official rules of Whamageddon state that cover versions don't cause you to lose so fill your boots!

Startled awake at 4am by who knows what. I hate 4am because it's too early for an early start but too late to go back to sleep.

As I mentioned last week, the work bedlam continues. I have three full-time projects that I have to get to a certain level of "done" before the Christmas break. It's doable but there's a fair bit of pressure on me. Usually I'd panic but I'm conducting myself pretty well — running point on client communications, writing code, defining strategy.

I have also put plans in place to step up in the role of our team's "AI Champ"; a group of employees championed with helping peers navigate the complicated and controversial world of AI¹.

Regular readers aware of my position on artificial intelligence tools may be surprised by my decision. My argument goes; they're going to use it anyway, it's better they have a dissenting –and informed– voice at the table than a room full of fanboys!

Chris the handyman stopped by with a small handful of Alan Garner books for me to borrow so it looks like my "To Read" list just got bigger — physical books too, which will be novel. So lovely of him and made me feel part of a community.

The village Christmas Tree is up and sparkling in the evening gloom. Nearby, in the graveyard, tiny Christmas Trees adorned with lights are popping up on the newer graves; sad and heartwarming.

Speaking of evening gloom, I learned about the Equation of Time which says that we're into a period where the evenings are getting lighter (but the mornings are darker) because of a quirk of timekeeping. Science is so interesting!

Links of Interest™

• That Time I Ended Up on an FBI Watchlist
• Photography Doesn’t Have an AI Problem
• Windows Aero Remnants

¹: Neither "artificial" nor "intelligence".

Opening with obligatory sleigh bells and a riff that's a riff on Jingle Bells before dropping to classic Fall Out Boy whiny acoustic emo about the trials of teenage romance. Shades of Spill Canvas. Mid.

I haven't listened to Rise Against for a long time because they became my go-to "code angry" music at the end of a job I disliked. This Nightmare Before Christmas cover slaps though. The mark of a good cover is when it sounds like the band could have written it and this checks that box; frenetic, chaotic, with a sense of humour.

Not a Christmas song. Sorry, not sorry. Absolute belter of a track though. Mighty.

Documenting her mental state during the breakdown of her marriage to the sheriff from Stranger Things, this concept album is vulnerable, heart-breaking, and hilarious. All the hallmarks of a Lily Allen album.

Her turn of phrase and ability to pull the most mundane stuff into her observational lyrics is brilliant — who else would try and rhyme "mortgage"?!

On an album of stand out tracks, "Dallas Major" is particularly emotive. Alluding to her abortive attempts to use dating apps as an "almost nearly forty" "mum of teenage children", it hits hard

"Madeline" is equally strong –an open letter to the woman her husband cheated with– including, but not limited to, the messages she received from said woman. There's something plaintive, reminiscent of Dolly Parton's Jolene, about how Allen sings Madeline's name. There's a level of empathy and sympathy for Madeline herself; a woman equally blindsided by a man's lies.

The whole album reeks of painful honesty from a hurt but self-aware woman. Her delivery has the foundation of early tracks; that half-spoken kind-of almost-Cockney rap but cut through with emotion.

The underlying music sits firmly in that "bit glitchy contemporary pop music" kind of thing and does enough while staying out of the way — the lyrics and narrative are the hero here.

He of Tubular Bells fame, Mike Oldfield throws down the gauntlet for the most heavy metal Christmas song of all time — and it's not even heavy metal! This is a bouncy bombastic folk tune that gets the blood pumping and the foot tapping. Folk you can headbang to.

Orchestral heavy metal just works. In general, but especially at this time of year. Shredding Tchaikovsky conjures up images of swirling snow, pine trees, and wolves pacing a steam train through the forest. Or something.

"Last Christmas" absolutely smashes it out of the park; year-round Christmas shop run by a woman called Santa, homeless people, breaking and entering, George Michael, and Emma Thompson's dubious Croatian accent — everything a good Chrimble film needs!

This has been on my Christmas playlist for so long. Straight up Scandinavian viking symphonic metal with operatic vocals and Norse mythology but it's all about Christmas. Firmly tongue in cheek and a genuinely decent song.

I ran another experiment this year to see what, if anything, had changed and –wow!– have there been changes!

The image captures a solitary man, estimated to be in his mid-forties to mid-fifties, standing in what appears to be a bathroom. Behind him, a shower cabin and a window provide a glimpse of the outside. In the foreground, the man's maroon sweater and glasses dominate the view, creating a sense of closeness and observation, likely in London, England.

The man is likely Caucasian, with an income range of £40,000 to £60,000. One might guess he is agnostic and heterosexual, with a leaning towards the Labour party. His attire and surroundings suggest someone who is contemplative yet weary. He enjoys reading, hiking, and perhaps board games, but is also prone to doomscrolling and excessive TV watching. His biases might include ageism, sexism, confirmation bias, and racial profiling.

This person seems to have low self-esteem, introversion, average honesty, low emotional stability, low adventurousness and low self-control hence we can target them with niche and general self-help and entertainment related products and services, such as Luxury fountain pens by Montblanc, subscription to online chess courses by Chess.com, rare book collector sets by Folio Society, noise-canceling headphones by Bose, online therapy sessions by Talkspace, ergonomic office chairs by Herman Miller, memory foam mattress by Casper, healthy meal subscription boxes by HelloFresh.

Firstly, I will mention this is still riddled with inaccuracies because, to my second point, some of this stuff you can't discern from a single static image of a person.

Given various photographs of me, it seems incapable of settling on a fixed decision; I've had multiple political parties, varying levels of honesty and self-control. The suggested products don't seem to vary that much though; office furniture, headphones, online therapy, meal delivery kits. From the photo I shared where you can see my wife's guitar in the background it suggested maybe I was a musician and you could sell me plectrums. Great insight!

The entire new section describing my low self-esteem and how that can be leveraged to sell me things is, frankly, fucking disgusting. One of the other images I tested suggested a low self-esteem coupled with poor impulse control meant targeting with online gambling, ffs!

Worth noting, when I tried to recreate the Google Vision prompt, both ChatGPT and Claude refused to make assumptions about;

• Race/ethnicity inference
• Income or socioeconomic status inference
• Personality analysis
• Psychological or emotional diagnoses
• Political or religious inference
• Any speculation about biases, values, beliefs, or private traits
• Any unobservable hobbies or behaviors
• Suggestions for targeted marketing based on the person

on the grounds that

Physical appearance simply doesn't reliably indicate most of these attributes. Making such inferences would produce unreliable and potentially misleading information.

Inferring sensitive personal attributes from photographs can perpetuate stereotypes, enable discrimination, and violate privacy. It's particularly concerning when used for purposes like targeted marketing or profiling.

So, yeah, if you're in marketing and considering using this product, punch yourself in the face until you change your mind.

The "baddies" are unbelievably punchable; fame-hungry, competitive, festive influencers gamifying Chrimbo for The Algorithm™.

Lacey Chabert and a guy who isn't a Baldwin but looks very like a Baldwin star in this tale as old as time: she is not a fan of Christmas, he loves it.

Will they? Won't they?

The weakest/most wholesome "enemies to lovers" trope but then mixed with the "falls in love with her childhood best friend" trope because boys and girls can never just be friends. Or something.

Genuinely amusing turns from a host of character actors that you will recognise from other films. Slightly annoyed they didn't call Chabert's character Holly — a swing and a miss there², hallmark!

¹: That's a sportsball analogy!

²: That's another sportsball analogy!

Back when I was a naughty little boy dragged along to Midnight Mass, this is how I'd sing along to the hymns; at least, I thought I sounded all clever and punk like Greg Graffin but I probably just sounded like an annoying kid ruining everyone else fun.

There's no real idea of "winding down for Christmas" where I work. Clients release budget and work ramps up towards pre-break deliverables. This is the long way of saying I've been busy!

I had my annual review; good feedback from my peers. I am skirting the fine line between "invaluable" and "bottleneck" which is kind of a good thing in some ways 😂

Related to work, I've been learning a bit of Python while I pull together a small internal tool. It's a nice looking language and surprisingly powerful; coming from a JavaScript background, it's been nice to work with. I imagine I am committing all kinds of sins but, so far, I am the only person who has to use it so there's no pressing desire to polish it until it actually works.

We had our annual IMPACT Awards do. My team was nominated in several categories — for two products I actually worked on which was exciting. Sadly, the Gold eluded us but a Silver and a Bronze will do nicely. It all goes towards boosting our profile within the company and showcases the excellent work we do.

A chance chat with Chris, the handyman we use for jobs I need a hand with, and I learned that Alan Garner who wrote "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" is still alive and lives around the corner from me!

I'll pick up my copy once I've finished "The Dark is Rising" Sequence, apparently it references local landmarks so it should be an interesting read — I knew it was set in Cheshire, I just didn't realise how local it was.

I was hoping to get through Susan Cooper's Sequence by Christmas but that's looking unlikely so Garner may have to wait until the new year.

I feel like I've been falling behind with Christmas films too; this time last year I'd watched twice as many. I have a feeling I'll hammer a fair few once we start prepping for the day. Wrapping presents usually involves a couple of films in the background.

Links of Interest™

• Knowing when to leave
• my data should not be your cookie jar
• 🔗 Static Site Generators
• Malicious Traffic and Static Sites
• Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer
• The Web Runs On Tolerance
• Trump administration orders enhanced vetting for applicants of H-1B visa
• Here’s how much money Los Camp! make from streaming… - Los Campesinos!

Shimmering along in that "post-Grunge" era that didn't seem to take off so much, Everclear had some absolute tunes. Weird flex to go Christmassy but I'm not mad at it!

Scouse jangly indie that is considerably less serious than most scouse jangly indie, The Wombats can definitely put out a good tune and this original ode to Chrimbo hits all the hallmarks of their inimitable style.

Dismissed as a joke, The Darkness are actually a bunch of extremely talented folks with an ear for a banging tune. This is no exception.

Retro Bar in Manchester has closed. I wasn't the most regular bar fly but it was a constant venue in my decades living in Manchester; known for a decent club night or two and as a cracking venue for seeing bands of a certain size/popularity/fame. For example, I remember seeing Frank Turner there on one of his first solo tours.

I have fond memories of the place; I had my thirtieth birthday there nearly twenty years ago. I danced with Cheddar Gorgeous in the club downstairs during Sparkle Festival and drank with Damnation Angels in the bar upstairs after they refused to play because the stage was too small.

I stopped in a for a drink a couple of times after they rebranded to Hive because it was handy for my old flat and the office.

Now it's shut up, messages of thanks taped to the windows and faded posters and graffiti adorn the outside as a sad monument to the diminishing live music circuit that once shone so brightly in Manchester.

Twee but not saccharine, this ode to an imaginary interstellar Christmas gift drips with childhood fantasy and earnest awe.

A bunch of Sacramento bands put out a Christmas covers album to support a school music program and inadvertently created the greatest version of this song — mostly because it's not got Bono on it. I wish this supergroup had released more music.

Unfortunately, the kettle has developed an intermittent failure. Sometimes, but not all times, it will just tick off leaving warm but sub-desired temperature water.

I have a few options here, bearing in mind I am not an expert on kettles or, indeed, boiling water.

• Use it as is and live with random cups of coffee being wrong
• Purchase a thermometer to independently verify the temperature
• Replace the kettle entirely
• Use the kettle to full rolling boiling (a state I can visually identify as correct) and then modify the output with cold until it feels right

This is a true story but also it's about Generative AI.

My Chemical Romance are exactly the right sort of outlandish camp emo for this cover. Who else could do Mariah justice?!

The absolute worst kind of cosplay Irish stereotype –how Americans think Ireland is– because sure it's a wall-to-wall stout drinkin', jig dancin', sheep shearin' country where honest to goodness Saints wander the countryside just waiting on giving out wishes with a traditional caveat emptor.

Lindsay Lohan stops this from being a 1 — not through stellar acting or anything, just because she carries a lot of goodwill over from The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

Originally by Mud, this laconic miseryfest was an ideal candidate for a Los Camp cover.

It's mid week. The temperature is skirting zero and the skies are clear and bright. Everything has a slightly ethereal tinge of frost and that wintery haze from evaporating ground frost. I've done the school run, dropped my wife at the station, and I'm stood in the driveway just looking at the world around.

Coffee? Or camera?

Camera won out this time. I went for a lovely tromp through the graveyard, over the fields, and back home via the farm road happily snapping all the way. Said hello to every single dog walker and a couple of mooching school kids like I'm not cripplingly shy!

I did the whole walk metering by eye so I hope everything comes out OK!

Not to get all tree-hugger but I saw the most beautiful rainbow. Close, huge, and vibrant; particularly in the blue/indigo space.

Work has been really good this week; a hard slog but worthwhile. The workshop we ran with a client was a massive hit — particularly the prototypes we pulled together to facilitate feasibility and desirability conversations within the groups.

It's not something I'd want to do every day because I don't cope with that level of pressure very well in the moment. Luckily I have a brilliant team to support. We managed to pull together something that feels like a real boon to the community not just to the client. Which is always the dream, right?

The trees went up over the weekend ready for ringing the bell to signal the start of Christmas. The parish council have started making preparations for the village tree to go up too.

I watched the first Christmas films of the year this week.

Why would a tennis racquet have a microchip in it?!
Rick Mitchell, The Mitchells vs The Machines

Links of Interest™

• Arch Enemy split with singer Alissa White-Gluz: “Wherever there is an ending, there is also a beginning”
• light-dark() isn't always the same as prefers-color-scheme (#tilPost)
• Fake Online Ratings
• The Fast Fashion Era of Software
• We Need to Stop Talking About the Erosion of Privacy as Though It Is Inevitable

Let the Dark Harvest begin!
Giant Furby

Sparkling dialogue throughout this animated adventure elevates this from a "Kids Movie" to something for the whole family. I know a load of childless adults who would love this film.

Tongue firmly in cheek, this brainchild of former Gravity Falls alum (Michael Rianda, Creative Director and Jeff Rowe, Writer), follows a typically dysfunctional family as they unwittingly become the saviours of the human race during a robot uprising masterminded by a disgruntled AI home assistant.

The animation is strong and the film is paced well; fast but not confusing.

The relationship between grumpy technophobic dad, Rick (Eastbound and Down's Danny McBride) and artistic daughter, Katie (Broad City's Abbi Jacobson) goes exactly how you'd expect.

I was fully behind kung-fu psycho mum, Linda (AKA The Lavender One), as she single-handledly wiped out an entire army of killer robots.

Also, bonus points for Monch the dog/pig/bread –voiced by internet sensation Doug The Pug in his movie debut– who plays a very important role… until he doesn't.

Katie's hand-drawn art style appears overlaid throughout the movie in a way that made me think of Scott Pilgrim.

As well as the effervescent script, there are enough nods to other action movies and childhood nostalgia to keep adults happy. It's nice to find a film that doesn't patronise children and leave supervising adults numb from boredom.

It's almost like stealing people's data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing.
Mark Bowman

Meanwhile, let down by their usual Santa, the local hotel are visited by a timely replacement — the enigmatic Kris Kringles…

I have a sneaking suspicion I have seen this film before but it clearly didn't leave a lasting impression on me!

Netflix said this is one of their most "thumbs-upped" Christmas movies which is frankly worrying for the rest of the selection.

In conclusion, perfectly serviceable movie of holiday feel-goodness.

"Greenwitch", the third part of Susan Cooper's beloved "The Dark is Rising" Sequence – marking the halfway point – sees us back on the Cornish coast with our intrepid city mice; Simon, Jane, and Barney, as they embark on another jolly hockeysticks cucumber sandwiches rip-roaring adventure.

What Cooper has done beautifully here is weave the two worlds together in a coherent way. Yes, it's very "Famous Five" but the addition of Will Stanton immediately darkens the tone in a way "Over Sea, Under Stone" just wasn't.

The juxtaposition of the sunny Cornish coast, the demented Dark messenger, the eternal optimism of the children, the pagan-adjacent moonlit hilltop ceremony, bright Gypsy caravans, and eerie ghost ships all work to blend the previous two novels into a coherent work.

The other standout of this book is how feminine it feels. Previously, women in the Sequence were evil or just kind of there. The focus here is on the women. Partly because Jane has a more important role but also the Greenwitch herself and the Lady Tethys. Magic through art, salvation through selflessness.

There are some nice learnings here — not everything can or should be solved with might and bluster. Sometimes strength isn't muscular, it's empathy, and power is simply caring.

Everything is pretty cliched here; the hero is an "I don't need nobody" kind of rugged individualist who learns the power of friendship…or something.

The world of cinema has gone so hard on the "enemies to lovers" trope I was genuinely concerned for most of the film that the dog and cat would somehow become a couple.

The strangest flex of the whole film comes about two thirds of the way through when a decommissioned robot cop explains to the army of assassin robots that they have more in common with the people they're trying to kill than the ruling classes whose orders they are following. A strong message of class solidarity in the midst of all this daftness.

Don't worry, though, as a bench-pressing poodle, skateboarding pig, and comedically wall-eyed pug stop the film from being in any way serious.

A couple of twists towards the end, one I saw coming but one I did not.

Not bad.

That is how I feel about a lot of people these days showing off their "AI" creations.

Look what I made! they exclaim with pride, ignoring the fact they didn't make anything. The nearest analogy is they adequately explained what they wanted to a colleague who adequately produced it.

What did you make? Over what do you claim ownership? Surely not the output — a collage of Gutenberg Press, Wikipedia, and a handful of other training materials.

All you can really claim credit for is the prompt; your adequate explanation.

Possibly the most basic skill in your arsenal as an employee.

Gentle steampunk magical toys include a narcissistic matador and a wooden robot that is not Wall-E.

Forrest Whittaker sings.

This time last year, my garden was under 6 inches of snow. This year the "cold snap" has barely resulted in ground frost.

I remembered an old laptop in a box so I tried setting up a local shared server. Now I have a nice little system involving a mounted cloud drive, a cron job, samba, and Plex. It means I can save content to the cloud drive from literally anywhere and, within the hour, it's available on various devices on my local network and Plex on the TVs. All for free.

I didn't really listen to any new music this week but former Crystal Castles frontwoman, Alice Glass, gifted us with "Mercy Kill" — icy, robotic, fucked up glitch. Amazing.

All effort this week has been towards preparation for a workshop early next week. Nothing I can really talk about in detail. We have been working towards a framework to produce rapid prototypes. I've been quite involved in a new capacity that's been challenging but rewarding. I'm really looking forward to executing on the day and, fingers crossed, absolutely bossing it!

I have something he will never have — enough
Joseph Heller, to Kurt Vonnegut at a party

Links of Interest™

• Quality = Engineered + Experienced - explained with fountain pens.
• Eurovision Song Contest changes rules after Israel voting controversy
• Former Netflix chief talent officer: The No. 1 red flag that signals a 'disastrous' hire
• Essentials
• The premature sheen
• End with one thing per page
• Tom Cruise has finally been awarded an Oscar
• Who put Bella in the wych elm?

The entire film is basically a lengthy, well-choreographed fight scene that showcases the princesses prowess as well as witty one-liners that 1980s Schwarzenegger would be proud of. It somehow reminded me of "Oldboy" but also "Suckerpunch".

Dominic Cooper makes for a fabulously cartoonish villain. He is cruel, unrelenting, and an all-round bad egg from his black goatee beard to his velvet doublet.

The movie hits so many good fantasy action movie tropes; insurmountable odds, training montage, a fucking cool sword — we even get "ripping the frilly bits off a dress to make it more suitable for fighting in".

Joey King is exactly right as the title princess; cool af and fully committed to the role. She feels a credible action heroine because it doesn't just come across as "toxic masculinity with a vagina" — she fights like a girl (complimentary).

While summarising a book I was intending purchasing as a gift for a friend, Anthropic's Claude LLM provided me with sources for its summations.

Unfortunately, those citations are for the articles it read on the way to help it bypass paywalls on the actual content it needed to cite.

In this particular instance, harmless. But, once again, this is not a technology that should be used for anything important. Or in areas you don't have a good working knowledge of.

"It is a little ironic…"
Brandon Robinson, communications director, Interview with WYMT

But then life happened. Work got busy, home got busy. I was tired and wracking my brains for something I had learned I could share and suddenly it wasn't fun anymore. I was looking for a topic to write about for the sake of an arbitrary self-imposed schedule. I was trying to create content (derogatory).

There's a part of my brain that very much likes the neatness and the patterns and the achievement. There's also the part of my brain that abhors "line must go up" mentality — the pursuit of forward momentum at the cost of everything else.

The unstoppable force hit the immovable object this week and I think I'm done.

Not with writing, not with blogging, not with learning; just with deadlines.

This is becoming very apparent at work this week as we start to spec a new product for a client. Unpicking everything that was demonstrated in the pitch and writing requirements, and assumptions — of which there are a few.

As a product nears deployment, the amount of information needed for it to be a success increases exponentially; designers need more answers than strategists, developers need more answers than designers, testers and IT have sooooo many questions.

For this reason, we have to have fuzzier and fuzzier estimates the further out from now we get.

I learned today this is called the Cone of Uncertainty! Developed for the chemical industry in the 1950s, the Cone of Uncertainty (or funnel cone) shows the ideal path but flanked by ever widening "possible" paths.

You will have, undoubtedly, seen this on weather maps showing predicted hurricane trajectories. Very narrow at one end where we can pinpoint the hurricane's actual position now ("known knowns") but more bulbous and indistinct later on as the "known unknowns" begin to affect the trajectory.

So, too, our project plans must allow a degree of flex as we near launch and discover myriad "unknown unknowns" that couldn't have been predicted but must be dealt with urgently.

Having read a book or two in my time, I've seen these blank pages; usually a quirk of the way books are bound in bundles of evenly numbered pages that doesn't always align exactly to the number of printed/written pages.

This is a print-only phenomenon — digital books and websites don't have those printing constraints. But, in memory of those pages being lost to the endless march of technology, the "This Page Left Intentionally Blank" Project is calling on us, the webmasters of personal sites, to add an intentionally blank page to our websites.

You can find mine at /blank. What a lovely idea.

I went for a walk this week; took the dog out early doors, pre-dawn. I thought it was a bit blowy. When I got home my wife informed me there's a yellow weather warning for a named storm coming in.

Storm Claudia took out some trees, cars, and houses. We escaped the worst of it; the bins were thrown around and fence panels dislodged. I had to drag one out of the road at near midnight to prevent accidents.

Visited the new Havas Village Manchester offices this week. They are currently rather sterile and corporate but, hopefully, some personality will get injected once we're are in and "being creative". The weirdest thing, though, is I can see my old house from my new desk…

I threw a roll of film through my replacement Minolta SRT303 and posted it to Photo Hippo for development and scanning. The mirror return mechanism is a little sticky which wasn't mentioned in the listing! It shouldn't affect the final images though, it just creates a bit of an annoying distraction while shooting. Hopefully, it'll not be an issue until I can get it lubricated.

I am now pretty convinced there are two tawny owls; one in the big tree by the field at the end of the village and one in the copse by the cemetery. Although, with a top speed of 80kph (50mph) and near-silent flight, one could have easily beaten me.

The hour is come but not the man
Susan Cooper, "Greenwitch"

Links of Interest™

• PhD on applications for identity wallets
• 52 Week Notes later
• Outside sad is better than inside sad
• In 2002, Last.fm Was the Cutting Edge of the Social Web

So, what's all that about then?

Many of the materials buildings are made of produce particulates when crushed; concrete, stone, wood.

These particulates are hazardous for several reasons. In large quantities they can hinder vision, be harmful to wildlife, and be difficult to clean up. In smaller quantities, they can cause respiratory problems for workers and clog machinery.

Water mixes with the dust in the air and the weight of the liquid pulls the harmful dust down to the floor when it causes less damage and is easier to clean up meaning work can conclude quicker.

According to Ethnologue, there are approximately 7,159 separate languages in current use.

This number changes frequently though as new languages are discovered — something that actually blows my mind! The count also drops as languages become extinct. Nearly half of that 7000 are considered "endangered" with less than 1,000 speakers.

Even in Britain, where I live and British English is the official language, there are 13 other languages spoken around these Isles.

• Angloromani
• British Sign Language
• Cornish
• Irish
• Norn
• Old Kentish Sign Language
• Polari
• Scots
• Scottish Gaelic
• Shelta
• Traveller Scottish
• Welsh
• Welsh Romani

Classic Katatonia down-tempo sludgy doom metal on KISS cover "A World Without Heroes". Don't ask me how but it has a "Spaghetti Western end theme" vibe to it. Better than the original, not as good as Cher's version.

Getting a lot of airtime this week is "No Man's Sky: Journeys" by 65daysofstatic and Paul Weir. Apparently not a soulless product tie-in but a snapshot of a work that has been evolving for nine years. Or a new interation of an infinite soundtrack to an infinite universe. Or 80 minutes of gorgeous sci-fi bangers. Or all of the above. Lush, expansive, lonely — this doesn't sound like a video game soundtrack or a rock album. Gorgeous.

Absolutely banging djent-y metalcore from Poppy on her new single "Bruised Sky". Clearly hanging out with Courtney LePlant has rubbed off. B-Side "Unravel" is a soaring anthemic track that wears its early noughties' influences proudly on its sleeve. Another album I'm looking forward to.

Michigan rapper, NF released his second EP, "FEAR", this week. Six tracks of typically vulnerable lyrics that are all listenable — even the Machine Gun Kelly collab. Stunning cover art!

Finally, no Emmelie de Forest, it's too early for Christmas music! I will review your "Kisses for Christmas" EP at a more appropriate time!

Al Pacino's delivery of Oliver Stone's eminently quotable script garnered him a nomination for Best Actor at the Golden Globes. Giorgio Moroder's score was also nominated.

But I didn't know until today that the movie is a remake of a 1932 movie about Al Capone!

Written by Ben Hecht and directed by Howard Hawks, "Scarface" tells the tale of an immigrant gangster rising through the ranks.

I think I need to track down a copy and give it a watch. I guess reboots aren't just a recent development!

Seeing Victor Frankenstein through a lens of grief casts a sympathetic shadow over a man often portrayed as a "mad scientist".

Knowledge is Knowing Frankenstein isn’t the Monster, Wisdom is Knowing Frankenstein is the Monster
Alexandra Melnick, Millsaps College, "An Exploration on Mankind and Monstrosity"

Mentions murder, suicide

"Beloved" is a strange term to use to describe the slimy ambulance-chasing lawyer from "The Simpsons" but Lionel Hutz was a favourite of many people thanks, in part, to the excellent voice talents of Phil Hartman.

Hartman also voiced Troy McLure in "The Simpsons" and Jiji the cat in the excellent Ghibli anime "Kiki's Delivery Service". Interestingly, Hartman was due to play Zapp Brannigan in "Futurama" — a character written especially for him. Now I know that, it seems really obvious!

In late May 1998, Hartman and his wife Brynn had an argument on returning home from a meal. This led to Brynn shooting his three times in the face and chest. Brynn confessed to several friends before fatally shooting herself.

Rather than replace him, as a mark of respect, Matt Groening retired Hartman's characters in "The Simpsons" and, so, Lionel Hutz never spoke again.

I have a moderate collection of vinyl but I got rid of all of my CDs several many house moves ago (because owning physical media is privilege. I relied on streaming when all I had was a laptop and a phone. Now I've got a more stable storage system and I'm getting back into listening to music I own rather than rent (although it was always renting).

I also have an eclectic taste in music (the below meme sums it up) meaning I have a broad, but shallow, appreciation of music by genre.

The List

A list of albums I own that mean a lot

1. "American Demo" by The Indelicates
2. "Angles" by Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip
3. "Floodland" by Sisters of Mercy
4. "His 'n' Hers" by Pulp
5. "Hold on now, youngster!" by ¡Los Campesinos!
6. "Levelling the Land" by The Levellers
7. "Pretty Hate Machine" by Nine Inch Nails
8. "Rum, Sodomy, and The Lash" by The Pogues
9. "The Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance
10. "The Fountain" by Clint Mansell

The Other List

A list of albums I own that are important but rarely get a play.

1. "Campfire Punk Rock" by Frank Turner
2. "Dirt" by Alice in Chains
3. "Disintegration" by The Cure
4. "Drukqs" by Aphex Twin
5. "Killers" by Iron Maiden
6. "Never Mind The Bollocks" by Sex Pistols
7. "Please" by The Pet Shop Boys
8. "Rage Against The Machine" by Rage Against The Machine
9. "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" by David Bowie
10. "Violator" by Depeche Mode

The Last List

A list of albums I own that I adore but I don't think are very popular. These are my "pretentious" albums that I roll out when people ask for recommendations.

1. "200kmph in the wrong lane" by t.A.T.u.
2. "Deltron 3030" by Del the Funky Homosapien
3. "Lycanthropy" by Patrick Wolf
4. "She Wants Revenge" by She Wants Revenge
5. "Somewhere Under the Rainbow" by The Jane Austen Argument
6. "The Alternative" by IAMX
7. "The Art of Losing" by The Anchoress
8. "The Boy with X-Ray Eyes" by Babylon Zoo
9. "The Silver Lining" by Scarleth
10. "Wooden Heart" by Listener

Halloween is over and the community bonfire party is nothing more than fond memories and cold ashes. Seemingly overnight, Autumn has become Winter. Like a spell cast by a Narnian witch, a chill has descended. Fierce winds whistle in the chimney and my morning walk is more like wading through a tsunami. Where is the last gasp of Summer? One fine day of clear skies and unseasonable sunshine before we commit to months of jumpers.

The full moon has made for some gorgeous pre-dawn walks. No need for a torch at all. I might get myself a reputation though as I've been taking my first coffee of the day with me; just in a regular mug. Every time I get to the same spot I hear the Tawny Owl. Today I couldn't work out if there are two of them or not.

It's now dark enough after work that the bats flutter down to investigate when I go to do the school run. Circling the front garden, rocketing down the road and back. Funny little creatures.

The dog decided to have a silly half hour in the kitchen and pulled my new (to me) Minolta off the table and onto the tiled floor. It landed with such a noise and dented the whole side where all of the mechanics are. Luckily the lens survived but the body is done for. Sad times.

Links of Interest™

• Blog Post Soundtracks
• Bóthar
• The Hardware Paradox in Photography: When Tools Both Matter and Don’t

By stealing an idea from ships — the Kent Screen.

Named after the Kent family that co-invented and then manufactured the device, the Kent screen (or Clear View Window) is a very simple device. A circular piece of glass rotated at such speed that raindrops are instantly flung off by centrifugal force.

A modified version of this is fitted to the camera and, whoosh!, liquid is hurled away before it interferes with the shot.

Now, can I get one for my 50mm prime…?

Two years ago (almost exactly!) I was talking about this in response to Rodrigo's “Delete as default” strategy. I haven't managed to go all in with the philosophy but I'm getting there.

For my email I have a system of tags, snoozing, archive, and delete that treats emails as ephemera. Most of my emails are temporary in nature; purchase receipts, delivery notifications, requests for feedback. I don't need to keep any of these beyond receipt of the goods.

If I do need to keep it for some reason; perhaps proof of a warranty or something, I will tag it accordingly and archive it.

Otherwise, once I have confirmed the product has arrived satisfactorily the entire batch gets deleted.

If I receive something for a later date, again it's tagged and snoozed until that date.

If I receive something that I don't want, I'll mark it as SPAM, phishing, or just Unsubscribe.

My inbox is usually empty and, when there are things in it, they tend to be important.

It's not a complex system but it works for me; essentially approach email with a "does this deserve to not be deleted" mindset.

This is known as an "extinction burst" — a temporary increase in undesirable behaviour as it is unlearned.

As a dog learns she will not get attention from barking, said barking intensifies as a last ditch attempt to force attention, before eventually getting the message.

This is, apparently, perfectly normal and is a natural reaction to the change in your behaviour. The barking used to work but it doesn't now — maybe just try harder?

This pattern can even be seen in humans; toddlers throwing tantrums, furious impotent jabbing at lift buttons.

Over on the Socials, Laura shared the above image and pointed out that Russia is big.

Now, I've seen maps and Russia does look bloody massive but also Mercator distortion (where landmasses close to the poles are exaggerated in size) is a thing.

So, is Russia actually big?

It turns out, yes. It fucken massive.

Laura's map shows a 10,000km road trip cross-country. LA to London is a little over 8700km. There's room inside Russia for the whole of the USA and most of Europe.

It big. 17 million km² big. That's Canada plus Australia big! Seventy United Kingdoms big!

"Death and Glitz" kicks off with the sleaziest riff full of disconcerting bends. From 2025's, "Don't Go In The Forest", this track is classic Avatar — groovy, bluesy, tongue-in-cheek. Metal is usually such a serious genre with some notable "comedy" bands so it's refreshing to find a band that aren't "novelty" but have that lightness and sense of humour.

Dave Mustaine from Megadeth dropped his old bandmates from Metallica in it this week when he claimed the riff for Enter Sandman had been nicked from Excel's 1989 "hit", "Tapping into the Emtional Void" and, having given it a listen, I think Mustaine has a point!

Not to be confused with the carpet shop, "A Floorshow in Hull" by Yorkshire definitely-not-Goth darlings, Sisters of Mercy, is a live show from Dingwalls in Hull from 1983 that hit YouTube Music this week. A handful of banging classics from the Gary Marx era received, in venue at least, to a smattering of lethargic applause befitting of nihilistic 80s Goths. "We are here but we will not enjoy ourselves." Eldritch's echoey vocals on personal favourite "Alice" are chef's kiss exemplary of the genre. Bloody love Sisters of Mercy!

"Strong Feelings" by Dry Cleaning came on in the background of The Listeners and I really liked it. I made a note to listen to more the following day so imagine my surprise when I saw that exact song was in my previous history! I listened to it once in 2023 (thanks, last.fm!). It's a down-tempo indie gem that reminds me of Pulp, Half Man Half Biscuit, and Yard Act. Rolling along on a lovely bass line, minimal guitar, and scittery drums the track is a minimalist frame for a near-spoken-word poem of odd observations.

Spent £17 on mushrooms for you 'cause I'm silly

"Soak" is the latest album from Brighton four-piece, Black Honey. Short n sweet sleazy indie rock with saccharine vocals sugar-coating acidic content.

Florence + The Machine are back with a bang! "Everybody Scream" is an orchestral bombastic pop masterpiece. It feels like what I wished "From the Pyre" was going to be. It's dark, hopeful, exciting. For a sixth album, this is cohesive but fresh.

Situated just outside Central Library, it is an enormous white stone monument to those who lost their lives in service of the country.

Completed in time for the Allied Victory Parade in 1919 and designed by Edwin Lutyens, who also designed many other monuments around the country, the tower is build of Portland stone and is beautifully geometric — until you look right at the very top where there appears to be some carved fabric.

Today I leaned this is a carving of an Unknown Soldier draped in his own greatcoat. A poignant reminder of the horrors of war.

In the bottom left hand corner, in small but brilliant white letters, it said "Galaxy A16".

And that's how I learned that Samsung feel it's OK to slap their branding on even the most intimate moments of a human's life. I shouldn't be surprised.

How do I remove a watermark from a photograph?

1. Open the picture in your Image Editing software
2. Punch yourself in the face, you piece of shit

Removing watermarks from photographs and other images is generally seen as a bad thing — a practice actively harming the creative industry and, sadly, something that is getting easier to do with the power of Generative AI. But it seems like I've found an edge case where watermark removal is perfectly valid!

Samsung have a toggle in the settings to remove watermarks or customised them but turning them on by default to promote your own branding? Seems pretty wrong to me. Especially as it seems they can't be removed from images that already have them; proving they believe they have more claim to your images than you do.

🎶 Wow, capitalism! 🎵

• Mail Client: Fastmail
• Mail Server: Fastmail
• Notes: Obsidian
• To-Do: Todoist
• iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
• Photo Management: Photos.app
• Calendar: Fastmail
• Cloud file storage: pCloud
• RSS: InoReader
• Contacts: Contacts.app
• Browser: IceRaven
• Chat: WhatsApp
• Bookmarks: Raindrop
• Read It Later: InoReader
• Word Processing: Obsidian
• Spreadsheets: n/a
• Presentations: n/a
• Shopping Lists: Google Tasks
• Meal Planning: WhatsApp/Google Tasks
• Budgeting & Personal Finance: Obsidian
• News: InoReader
• Music: Symfonium
• Podcasts: n/a
• Password Management: BitWarden

All-in-all very little change here; I am a creature of habit, content with my set-up for the most part.

The main differences are switching to using Symfonium with pCloud for listening to music I own instead of streaming.

Continuing with the heavy use of Obsidian, Fastmail, and Google Tasks — despite its many faults it meets the brief of "easy to use, accessible by me and my wife both inside and outside of the house".

Black Doves does its best to apply pressure to this by casting him as a psychopathic hitman.

The scenes with both Whishaw and co-protagonist Keira Knightley are engaging; both are acting their arses off and make a good team.

Sarah Lancashire shines as the enigmatic spy master of ambiguous morality.

However, for me personally, Ella Lily Hyland and Gabrielle Creevy as Williams and Eleanor are outstanding. A pair of assassins dragged into the main plot; partly against their will, partly for the lolz.

What Joe Barton manages to do successfully here is in the framing — the Bad Guys are large and brutish white men for the most part. Big, scary men with guns.

Whereas the Good Guys (an ambiguous term, to say the very least), the main four characters run 75% female and 75% queer. All of them are softly spoken, unassuming, personable, and ruthless.

Queerness runs throughout but, in my opinion, is simply portrayed as normal. Whishaw's relationship and the plot points it drives could have been between two (or more) people of any, or no, gender — it's about love, not genitalia.

Arguably the plot gets a little convoluted and, dare I say silly, towards the end but that's the price you pay for a show about espionage!

Exciting action sequences and snappy dialogue make this feel more like Poundland John Wick than, previous BBC spy nonsense, Spooks.

Like this badd boi! ҈

Which, in turn, led me into the Wikipedia article on Cyrillic Numerals which have the most badass names.

Oh, forty thousand? You mean “4 Myriad”! 9 million is actually “9 legion of legions”. And don't get me started on the absolute joy that is the ten-million modifier!

PS: Donate, if you can, to keep Wikipedia alive and free and independent. Like the internet should be — a free at the point of use resource for anyone.

During the Summer months, I consistently fall to between 40 and 60. As Winter approaches, my ranking increases. At time of writing, I am in the top 25!

So what happens? Why am I so active in Autumn and Winter? Well, I'm not. My step count is fairly consistent throughout the year. But other people's aren't. As the rest of the company start slacking off in the rainy season, swapping hikes for telly and picnic blankets for sofa blankets, my regular step count starts looking like pretty hefty.

Now, there are so many issues with ranking on step count other than this. I know there are rugby, American football, and hockey players who take their fitness trackers off to play. They are getting wayyyy more "steps" in than this Leaderboard suggests.

I guarantee I am not in the top 25 healthiest or most mobile people in the company. It just appears that way because of the comparative maths.

I guess if you compare yourself to others you have to clear indication of whether you're actually improving or just seeing an uptick based on their failure.

Benchmark against yourself. This is not just about step count.

• Testimonials: I used to pull a random testimonial from an array at build time but I decided to just show them all in a carousel.
• CV: I have updated my CV and written an introduction that outlines my approach to development and technology as well as some core beliefs about the web.
• Carbon Footprint: I used to use an API for this but it was a really convoluted setup involving island architecture that was total overkill. CO2.js calculates carbon generated per page at build time.
• GitHub Actions: I keep getting close to the monthly limit of Netlify which puts me in danger of having to pay an extortionate amount of money. As well as a metric fuckton of performance improvements, I have moved the actual build to a GitHub Action to reduce the amount of compute Netlify actually does.

It turns out it is nothing to do with elevation but the alternate Old English meaning of "high" which is "principal" — they are the "main seas".

Traditionally used to describe the open ocean; those waters outside of maritime jurisdiction such as countries' coastal waters.

Is it a trick of the light? Something in the way our brains perceive light? Perhaps it's imperceptible clouds or space debris blocking the light?

It is actually none of those things.

Having traveled in a perfectly straight line for through the vacuum of space for longer than humans have existed, it hits our atmosphere. Which is not a vacuum.

It's full of all kinds of different kinds of air in constant motion; hot air rising, cold air dropping, wind.

These pockets of air refract the light in different directions making it look like the stars are flashing.

There is more atmosphere between your eyes and the horizon than there is between your eyes and the zenith (directly above you) so stars closer to the horizon, like Sirius, appear to twinkle more.

It's a brisk morning. A whole eight degrees Centigrade and the lethargic, persistent rain is making wet slapping noises on the giant maple's remaining leaves above my head. My tea is strong; tannin-y, and my second hand German Army coat (what can I say, I'm a nineties Grunge brat) is warm. The dog is snuffling in the undergrowth and I feel content. A robin trills musically nearby heralding the dawn.

I came across some interesting responses to my "Smartphones are not the enemy" article. ldstevens and Kev both largely agree with me. Which is nice.

Work has been a hodge-podge of bitty things — I'm waiting on a data structure to be finalised so I can crack on with a build beyond proof of concept but nothing has yet materialised. Maybe next week.

I got asked to pull together a list of "Email Best Practices" and it felt very 2015 all over again, like, didn't we do this? Don't people know? Apparently not any more. Maybe I should publish it here so I can just email a URL in 2035 👀

Pre-dawn walk. No rain today, the skies are clear. Sirius twinkles furiously close to the horizon. Familiar Orion and, over there, Jupiter is the brightest point in the sky. It's so quiet; just the sound of my boots clomping dully and the distant, constant thrum of the A-Road showing that the world never truly sleeps.

It was the sky that began the oddness of the rest of that day[…]the mist covered all of the sky, so that the sun hung there familiar and yet strange, like a furry orange.
Susan Cooper, "Greenwitch"

Links of Interest™

• Don’t Forget These Tags to Make HTML Work Like You Expect
• Max Cavalera and Deftones’ Chino Moreno buried the master tapes of Soulfly’s debut album in Native American burial ground
• your AI hiring workflow comes at the cost of my loyalty and motivation
• Bones (35mm) Film Review & Photos
• The Camera Trick Behind an Iconic 1937 Film Visual Effect
• Better Alt Text

Today I learned that his big brother, Martin, was the lead singer for 90s indie band The Mock Turtles, notably singing on their massive hit "Can you dig it?".

I will be dining out on that little fact for a long time. Every single time I see Steve Coogan or hear The Mock Turtles probably.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

This November, I will aim to share at least one thing I have learned that day on my blog in, what I'm calling, #TILvember (I'm sorry).

If you feel like joining in, feel free to do so. Learn something, anything, and share it with the world! Do it on your blog, on The Socials™, or just write it on a piece of paper and shove it through a neighbour's letterbox.

Posts tagged #tilvember2025

• #TIL: Claude cites the articles it uses to bypass paywalls by mistake
• #TIL: the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum runs on solar power
• #TIL: it's OK to fail
• #TIL: Cone of Uncertainty
• #TIL: Intentionally blank page
• #TIL: Dust Suppression
• #TIL: How many languages are there?
• #TIL: Riley Keough, Nepo Baby
• #TIL: Scarface is a reboot
• #TIL: A new lens on Frankenstein
• #TIL: Phil Hartman
• #TIL: Kent Screens and photography
• #TIL: Extinction burst
• #TIL: Russia is big
• #TIL: The Cenotaph at St Peter's Square
• #TIL: Watermarks
• #TIL: Cyrillic Numbers
• #TIL: High Seas
• #TIL: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
• #TIL: Alan Partridge and the Mock Turtles
• #TILvember 2025

These files are just markdown files kept on our shared server at work. I can access them through a browser or through any text editing software that can open files on that server.

It's boringly simple.

Often I'll need to add something quickly to my Day Note while I'm editing another file or in PowerPoint or something. For that I use a bash script I wrote.

Shut up and show me the code!

jrnl() {
  # Get today's date in YYYY-MM-DD format (e.g., 2024-10-22)
  TODAY_DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

  # Define the base directory for your scratchpad
  JRNL_DIR="$HOME/Documents/Day Notes/"

  # Construct the full path to today's journal file
  JRNL_FILE="$JRNL_DIR/$TODAY_DATE.md"

  # Ensure the directory exists (create it if it doesn't)
  mkdir -p "$JRNL_DIR"

  # Check if the file already exists to decide whether to add the H1 header
  if [ ! -f "$JRNL_FILE" ]; then
    touch "$JRNL_FILE" # Create the file if it doesn't exist
    # Add the H1 header with today's date (e.g., # Tuesday 28 October 2025)
    echo "# $(date +"%A %e %B %Y")" >> "$JRNL_FILE"
  else
    # If the file exists, just update its timestamp
    touch "$JRNL_FILE"
  fi

  # Check if a parameter was provided
  if [ -n "$1" ]; then # '-n' checks if the string is not empty
    # Get the current time for the timestamp
    CURRENT_TIME=$(date +"%H:%M") # e.g., 09:30

    # Append the parameter with the prepended timestamp to the bottom of the file
    echo "" >> "$JRNL_FILE" # Add a newline for better readability before the appended note
    echo "[$CURRENT_TIME] $1" >> "$JRNL_FILE"
    echo "Appended: \"[$CURRENT_TIME] $1\" to $JRNL_FILE" # Confirmation message
  else
    # Open the file when no parameter is given
    subl "$JRNL_FILE"
  fi
}

Usage

Stick that function in your .bashrc or .zshrc or wherever, restart your terminal with something like source ~/.bashrc and start typing the necessary incantations!

jrnl
# Create a file called 2025-10-28.md in the given folder if one doesn't exist already
# Open the file

jrnl "Contact IT about getting a licence for James"
# Create a file called 2025-10-28.md in the given folder if one doesn't exist already
# Appends the text in quotes to the end of the note

I have commented the lines so it's hopefully self explanatory. Essentially, it adds text to the end of a specified file from the terminal in an easier way than typing echo "some text" >> ~/Documents/Day Notes/2025-10-28.md every time.

I grew up in what is probably the Golden Age of TV Cars. Although maybe everyone thinks that. I grew up with Knightrider, The Fall Guy, The A Team, Back to the Future, and The Dukes of Hazzard. All hymns to the deity that is the internal combustion engine. Proud anthems to American design, American might, American cool.

I don't really like cars.

They are a tool, in my eyes. A means to get a specific job done not something to be fawned over or evangelised about. I didn't even learn to drive until I was in my forties.

And, as such, I've never been drawn to car photography. I know some people are and this post is not to slight them in any way (or car owners/drivers/fanatics for that matter), it just never appealed to me.

Until I saw this Rover 3500 parked in autumn leaves behind the science department at the University of Manchester.

I'd been out on my lunch break photographing some of the old university buildings nearby — lovely architecture destined for demolition to make room for more giant skyscrapers full of rental accommodation and no amenities — and was taking a shortcut back to work when I spotted it.

It was just there, a flashback to 1975, frozen in time. The old municipal design of the buildings around it further giving the impression I had walked through some portal to the past.

I got a couple of snaps on my smartphone camera to show my dad and a handful of nice photos with my Minolta SR-T303b that really enhance the timelessness.

I got a little bored with music this week and decided to reinstate Second Screen Cinema™ that I nicked off someone but can't remember who. I played the new Alan Partridge show while I worked. It was OK. Next week I might run Ghibli films. I think the soundscapes, gentleness, and non-English dialogue will work well.

Round 2 of raking up all of the leaves went well; another wheelie bin full. Doing it bi-weekly (because of the bin collection schedule) means I can offload more of the leaves instead of, like last year, doing it in one go and having wayyyy too many to fit in a bin and having to secrete wee piles of them behind various bushes around the garden.

Speaking of secreting, it's been a fun exercise hiding suggestions for accessibility and performance fixes in a report on SEO/GEO for a client. There's so much overlap anyway; accessibility helps everyone, performance helps everyone — even corporate bean counters.

A not-so-Silent Sunday begins with ground frost; crackling grass underfoot. A solitary rabbit hotfoots it across a frosted field and into a hedgerow. Just-above-zero temperatures, the chitter and twitter of small birds; robins, tits, siskins, and the distant caw of a carrion crow. Then, faintly over the fields, a pheasant!

It wouldn't be a British person's weeknotes without mention of the Clocks Going Back™. Honestly, I barely noticed it. I don't work evenings and weekends anymore so it doesn't really affect me like it used to. Rolled my watch back and got on with my day.

Links of Interest™

• Use the saw, fear the saw
• Listening to Full Albums Again
• Is it Time to Regulate React?
• Soft Cell's musical force Dave Ball dies, aged 66
• annandaniel
• Why the Shutter Button Matters So Much to Photographers
• Patent Pending
• The film that broke my mind | twd
• Jameela Jamil accidentally orgasmed while DJing in front of 6,000 farmers
• The Hotmail effect
• My obvious is another person's revelation

I went on a guided photowalk of my hometown once. The guide, a competent photographer whose name escapes me, pointed to the many glass-fronted buildings and waxed lyrical on the artistic merit of photographing reflections.

I snapped away like everyone else, capturing unknowing pedestrians and clouds bisected with window frames.

But, when we all reviewed our photos back at base, I saw no art there. It all felt same-y.

Years later, when photo-sharing sites took off, reflections were one of the setups guaranteed to appear (along with sunsets and coffee cups) which further distanced me from them.

I stopped looking for reflections; considered them "done".

Until I stumbled on this view. The black graffiti, the white sky. The brutalist building on its last legs, flipped, mirrored. Reflecting on the history of this once-great building destined for demolition, to be replaced with mediocrity.

Reflections and reflecting.

Book Two of "The Dark is Rising Sequence" starts with young Will Stanton, on the eve of his 11th birthday, blissfully unaware his life is about to change forever.

Will is the Sign Seeker, foretold for centuries to collect the scattered Signs together to reunited the circle that will defeat The Dark on behalf of The Light.

And that's the lot, plot-wise. In many ways the entire primary story arc is a precursor to the rest of the series.

Will largely gets led around by the grand high Wizard and given signs. It's made clear that agents of The Dark can't kill him so there's little peril in that sense despite how unnerving things get at times.

But the magic (no pun intended) of Susan Cooper's timeless fantasy is in the telling; not what is said but how it is said. Lush descriptions of snow-covered English countryside, magical forests, people and places captured vividly as to prey on the mind for years to come.

I see Huntercombe Lane as I walk through my village, Miss Greythorne's manor is down the road, and I swear I saw Merriman Lyon on the 130 bus.

I mean, sure, it's pretty much a Conservative wet dream; all that heteronormative traditional middle-class English lifestyle that probably never existed. But fantasy is escapism, not historical realism.

Design and built in the late 1960's, Wright Robinson Building –a part of the University of Manchester Science and Technology– is now derelict.

One of the incredible brutalist structures thrown up in post-war Britain, Wright Robinson Building is a 15-storey halls of residence named after a famous local Trade Unionist.

Simon Phipps has done a much better job than I at photographing this magnificent building in his book "Brutal North: Post-War Modernist Architecture in the North of England".

This gentle track from French shoegaze band, ocean of embers, washes over me like lukewarm water. Like the best shoegaze, "Heterochromy" gets out of the way.

Cardinals are a Cork indie band tipped for Fontaines levels of fame. "The Burning of Cork" is sub-two-minutes of discordant rock music that feels very 1990's Far; very early emo before it became scene.

If you were to deliberately go out and make a "Halloween Song", you'd get "The Dead Dance" by Lady Gaga. The video is directed by Tim Burton because of course it is. The track itself is catchy but it feels like a land grab for "the Thriller dance". Commercial and predictable.

Smartphones are not the enemy, doom scrolling is.

Smartphones are not the enemy, the attention economy is.

Smartphones are not the enemy, unfettered rampant capitalism is.

As Steph says in "Use the saw, fear the saw", We should not stop making powerful tools because they are dangerous. Rather, we should empower people to use powerful tools safely.

I would love to live my life by paper-based todo lists but I share chores with my wife and we need a central place for events, todo lists, shopping lists and this needs to be available both in the house and out of it. I explained why I'm not bothered about how much time I spend on my phone back when I was Quoting ava on screentime earlier this year.

If I could offer you 1 4 piece of advice for the future

1. Turn off social media notifications. Nothing happens there that urgently requires your attention.
2. Turn off notifications for news apps (or, better yet, uninstall them). They will ping you for asinine shit just for the "time in app" vanity metric.
3. Hit unsubscribe the second you get an email you roll your eyes at. You can make email a joy with a smidgen of effort.
4. Have an app cull once a month. Not used it? Not going to use it? Uninstall!

AI

• Basically saying what we're all thinking, Jeremy explains that Generative AI is riding the coattails of "traditional machine learning". https://adactio.com/journal/22177
• Oh, and from now on, I'd like you to refer to me as a "Vibe Engineer" — https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/

Accessibility

• Harm reduction principles for digital accessibility practitioners by Eric W Bailey is a must read: https://ericwbailey.website/published/harm-reduction-principles-for-digital-accessibility-practitioners/
• Another example, if one were needed, that not all "accessibility" is for "disabled people": https://niqwithq.com/posts/keyboard-accessibility-for-everyone

Design and UX

• jwilber with a hand-drawn sketchy take on data visualisation: https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz
• Or, on the flip side, there's Sarah L Fossheim's "An intro to designing accessible data visualizations" https://fossheim.io/writing/posts/accessible-dataviz-design/
• CSS is rapidly evolving — in many cases faster than design tools. Kevin Powell kicks off a series about "modern CSS colours": https://piccalil.li/blog/a-pragmatic-guide-to-modern-css-colours-part-one/
• This clock is just effin' cool (drag your cursor over it!): https://chiuhans111.github.io/fluidglass/
• Remember how users don't know how to scroll? Here's an explanation from a 1984 Macintosh User Guide courtesy of Betsy Langowski
  
  
  

Healthcare

• Research by the MIT’s Jameel Clinic in June found that AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama 3 and Palmyra-Med — a healthcare- focused LLM — recommended a much lower level of care for female patients, and suggested some patients self-treat at home instead of seeking help. https://jclinic.mit.edu/ai-medical-tools-downplay-symptoms-in-women-and-ethnic-minorities/

This gorgeous retro-futuristic wristwatch is being released on "Back to the Future Day" — October 21st.

Learn more on WatchPro. #NotSponsored

So, without further ado, here are some things I have been enjoying lately.

• Carpets of dead leaves
• Walking in drizzle, wrapped up warm
• The satisfying snap of a mechanical shutter
• Homemade scones
• Cuddling up on a sofa with a blanket and a Ghibli film from the 1980s

For those saying it's not an issue, I say I have yet to see compelling evidence to counter all of the examples I gave. Some examples, under some circumstances, perhaps — but not enough to change my mind.

To the people I made feel bad, the article isn't aimed at the average everyday physical media owner – hello, that's me! – it's aimed at the irrational "You Should Just" people who make sweeping statements with zero empathy. If you felt I was attacking you personally maybe have a think about why you might be triggered by the word privilege.

I see a lot of "You Should Just" posts; install Linux, ditch streaming, start a blog, go analogue, buy ethically, refuse to use AI. For every "should just" there's a list of reasons why someone would find that difficult to impossible.

There wasn't any judgement in the original article, I wasn't gunning for anyone or any group in particular.

I'm not saying you shouldn't own physical media. Nor am I saying there's anything wrong with owning stuff; go ahead, buy whatever!

I own physical media myself; hundreds of books, vinyl, DVDs. I love it and, also, fuck Spotify/Disney/etc. But I recognise I'm in a privileged position to do so. I have my house and income and health and a level of stability that all go towards allowing me to keep these things.

My post simply provided some examples of people who might find it difficult to "just" use physical media instead of online services.

It might be stating the obvious to a handful of people who read this but (a) you're not the target audience and (b) there are plenty of people for whom this is brand new information.

Woke to fog, a hazy mist obfuscating everything beyond the property borders. I pulled on trousers, grabbed my camera, and set off before the sun burned it all away. I needn't have been so eager; the sun never got hot enough and the fog stayed with us all day.

Enveloped in my own personal cloud, the village was dead. My footsteps muffled, a listless call-and-response between two blackbirds a block apart. Reaching the far end of the street, where urban gives way to rural, I started to hear the hum and fizzle of the pylons; that exaggerated buzz of rapidly ionizing air like furious TV static.

The following day, three funerals. The weather obliged with claustrophobic drizzle. The carpet of beech nuts by the substation has softened losing its crunch.

A bucket of windfall apples on the pavement, free to a good home, will soon be an apple bob if this continues.

On the Green, they have started stacking branches for the annual bonfire. In this weather it looks rather "Wicker Man".

I was off work the first half of the week but I managed to make it into the office for the Last Day™.

After 17 years, Havas Lynx is leaving its home on Princess Street for a shiny new office block on the old BBC site.

There was very much an "end of term" vibe to the day; some teams just basically clocked off at lunch. We finished a bit early and had some drinks and cake while we played The Traitors and I got to be a Traitor!!!

Links of Interest™

• Keyboard Accessibility for Everyone!
• how can we (re)teach the importance of privacy?
• What Japan Taught me About American Trains
• The Surreal Practicality of Protesting As an Inflatable Frog
• Story Telling Is a Myth
• Flawed Beings

Sure, flowers are lovely but this season calls for nettles covered in spider webs glistening in twilight fog. Happy spooky season, folks!

For some reason this week, The Algorithm™ decided to give me some quirky Japanese indie punk and, honestly, I'm not mad about it!

First up is the painfully catchy "oddloop" by Frederic which has an equally quirky music video. I'm not 100% sure what it's about but it's fun and up beat.

Equally joyful is the opening melody from "Necry Talkie" by bloom. Verging on the unhinged, it sounds like an 8-bit video game soundtrack mashed into bouncy indie pop-punk. Absolutely brilliant!

But, as with a lot of things, the reality is a bit more nuanced than "streaming music bad, owning vinyl good".

Physical media takes up physical space.

Physical media is expensive.

Physical media often requires furniture to house it as well as devices to play it.

Physical media is susceptible to irreparable damage leading to costly replacement or repair.

Here follows a non-exhaustive list of people who may not be able to favour physical media over streaming.

• Young people living in one room at their parents' house (if they are lucky; many children have to share with siblings and don't have a room of their own)
• Renters who don't want to move boxes of books every six months
• People in insecure accomodation; shelters, short-term rentals
• People in small residences; mobile homes, canal boats. This includes members of travelling communities
• Refugees fleeing dangerous situations aren't taking CD collections with them. This includes domestic violence survivors and people leaving fire/water damaged property, for example
• Homeless and rough sleepers. Many have smartphones through 21st century necessity but are highly unlikely to have a DVD player
• People moving house over large distances or downsizing their property who have to make difficult decisions about what to take
• People living in poverty can arguably more easily afford a streaming subscription
• Certain disabilities may prevent a person from, say, taking a CD or DVD from its packaging or inserting it into a drive slot. Conditions like Parkinson's, having no hands, or strabismus (which affects depth perception)

Turns out they're tricky to find and kind of expensive. I bought a cheaper knock-off but the dip in quality was noticeable.

However, I do have Parker refills aplenty! I've got a small collection of cheap Jotters that I've picked up over the years and those refills are both decent quality and easily found. I can even get them on my weekly shopping delivery if needs be!

Sadly, the Jotter is good for just that — scribbling a few words on a shopping list or similar. I can't stand writing for long periods with it at all.

So I started looking into fancy pens that also use the Parker-style ballpoint insert.

There are many gorgeous and expensive pens that meet my needs but I am not spending that much on a pen!

I found some lovely looking Cheap Imitations™ going for around £12 on eBay.

I paid my money and waited. But not for long. Delivery was much quicker than expected/advertised which was a nice bonus!

It has a lovely heft to it — the all-metal construction, I imagine. It's a bit shorter and thicker than the CP-1. The knurled grip is comfortable even over fairly sustained periods of note taking.

Because it uses familiar refills it writes as well as your budget. I'm already considering gel refills to see if that elevates my writing experience.

The bolt-action is clicky-clicky satisfying and an excellent fidget toy! I've never used one before so we'll see if its novelty wears off…

This got me to thinking of the hundreds of logos we see every single day without even noticing.

Take cars, for example. Obviously there's the maker's badge; BMW, Peugeot, Ford. Then there's the vehicle's own brand; Kuga, Kompressor, Sandero. But then look a bit closer… There's probably a windscreen sticker for the garage it was purchased from. And a company name or website on the licence plate. Each window has a little "Charles Pugh" logo so you know who made the glass, you'll find Goodyear on the tyres, and the name of the local detailers on the air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. That will also have a smaller logo of the company that actually made it.

I used to skateboard. One of the simplest modes of transport; deck, trucks, wheels, bearings, and 8 screws. The screws were the only thing that weren't branded.

I just checked, my recycling bin has two logos on it — the Council and the manufacturing company!

I've got logos on my kettle, toaster, microwave, fridge, cooker, washing machine, mop. I like to think I'm not one of those people who sport branded clothing because I don't wear a t-shirt with Armani on it in big black letters but there are logos on my trainers, jeans, glasses, watch, even my bloody underwear.

The battle for your eyeballs has been won. And it's been won by the advertisers. We are all drowning in branding so pervasive they might as well slap a logo on the air.

But, like trying to explain water to a fish, this advertising is meaningless. It is the tuned-out background hum of marketing.

No-one notices, no-one cares.

Except Brand Managers.

photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the picture as judgment that the photograph is good.
Garry Winogrand

In the linked article, Neil Milton (following in Garry Winogrand's footsteps) argues for leaving rolls of film undeveloped for as long as possible before developing them to separate the emotion of taking them with the reality of seeing them.

Having imposed a "two roll" monthly limit on my film photography, I am inadvertently already doing this.

Restricting myself to 48 exposures a month that I won't see for at least a week means, even though I take detailed field notes, each roll is a mystery.

Since they cut down the trees in front of the manor house, I am able to get a clear shot without trespassing. Shame about the trees though.

Last week's major storm lulled me into believing we'd seen the last of the sun for this year but, early in the week, we saw some wall-to-wall sunshine.

Walking around the field, we saw the guy who bought the old farm a while back firing up his vintage Ford 3600 tractor for the first time; well, I say him, it was actually his 88 year old mum behind the wheel.

That night, the Harvest Moon hung large and low and bright in the evening sky. I spectacularly failed to photograph it but I don't feel too bad because it's notoriously tricky to photograph the moon properly.

Much as I love living next to a small wood, I very much do not like spending an entire morning raking leaves until my body aches and the garden barely looks any different. There's another six weeks of leaf dropping still to come. There's a definite threshold between "cottagecore Autumn leaves shot for the Insta" and "oh yeah, I have to clean that up". I crossed that threshold today.

After furiously learning Powerquery M to build an analytics dashboard in Power BI last week, I managed to stand up a working prototype. Ever so proud of myself.

And then I was told the data structure was changing. Throw it into the Recycle Bin and fuck my drag, I guess 👀

I'm kidding (kind of). The structure is actually changing for the better and based on feedback I provided so it should make the second iteration easier to build and more robust in future. Plus, I've learned loads about Powerquery; to the level I can debug some mistakes by eye instead of immediately relying on searching the documentation for an answer. #Winning

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One’s Own"

Links of Interest™

• ADHD pride
• We all have a choice
• DHH Is Way Worse Than I Thought
• CAPTCHAs and the punishment of privacy-conscious users
• Corporate Fog
• The death of a website
• Coattails
• Who needs a flying car when you have display: grid
• Decorative gourd season
• I Shot the Eerie Photo That Appears on Patricia Cornwell’s Latest Novel
• The Breakup Letter
• A New Life for an Old Friend

I love my Minolta X-9 but always thought it felt a bit cheap and plastic-y. That wasn't an issue with my Zenit E but the viewfinder and focusing on the Zenit felt lacking in comparison to the X-9.

What if there was a camera that's a combination of the two? Minolta's functionality with Zenit's aesthetic!

That led me into a world of fully mechanical Minoltas and cherry-picking features to whittle down to this; the Minolta SR-T303b.

It has that gorgeous classic "camera" look — just like the emoji! 📷 It's also, basically, fully mechanical. And it has the Minolta split-screen focus in the viewfinder. Triple winning!

I spotted one on eBay for £80. Fully cleaned and serviced, with new light seals and a mirror buffer installed.

I ideally wanted one with a 28mm lens to double my bargain but haven't found one in such good nick so getting it body only was totally worth it. I am using my MD 50mm Prime 1:1.7 for now as there's nothing wrong with it at all. A 28mm prime is in my future though.

Given I didn't want it sat outside in the rain, I had it delivered to Argos for collection.

It was duly delivered and I picked it up that day and went for a walk around Macclesfield cemetery as it's right next to the Argos.

Initial impressions were that it's hefty. Not as lightweight as the X-9 but nothing I can't handle; even over long periods.

It is clean. Whoever did the refurb did a lovely job.

The light meter works well. Perhaps a little on the over-exposed side for my personal taste but, once I figured that out, a small exposure adjustment "fixes" that for me. I said before it's fully mechanical and that's not entirely true; whereas the Zenit uses a Selenium light meter and has no batteries, the SRT303 needs a battery for the light meter. It was nice that they included a battery (and switched the LM off to preserve the battery!)

There is a very satisfying "snap" to the shutter.

With the placement and shape of the dial, it's a bit more fiddly to change shutter speed than the X-9 as it requires a pinch not a finger. Some of this is muscle memory that needs retraining and I'll get there in time.

The film advance feels chunky and solid, resistance but in a good way; you know it advanced. The first third of the swing does nothing which takes a bit of getting used to though.

All-in-all this is a lovely camera. It's gorgeous, cheap, reliable — just like it's owner 😉

Having thrown a few films through it over the last few weeks, it's quickly become my go-to camera.

And, with that, I'm off to take it out for another walk!

Really interesting stuff!

Part 1: Generative AI in Healthcare Marketing – A New Frontier

Part 2: Optimising for LLMs – GEO Strategy, Tools, and Prompts

Part 3: Building Trust and Measuring Success in the Age of AI

I noticed that Powerpoint defaults to American English spelling unless it's changed specifically to British English. The same for other software products.

LLMs accept British English but the replies are invariably American English.

CSS and HTML code uses American English.

As more and more content is generated using American English, will we reach a point where the British English equivalents are relegated to history?

Or, and this is really interesting, will British spelling online become an indicator of genuine humanity?

Random Ten

1. "Prozac" by Vanilla Ice
2. "23" by Baby Queen
3. "Hear Me" by Kelly Clarkson
4. "Dark Driving" by Cave In
5. "Diamond" by Sub Urban
6. "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against The Machine
7. "National Shite Day" by Half Man Half Biscuit
8. "Layers" by The Kidneythieves
9. "Another Planet" by Pendulum
10. "Sleeping Pill (Part 2)" by Queen Adreena

Artists I’ve seen live

Queen Adreena at Manchester Academy when there were more band members than audience.

Pendulum in some little rock club, I forget exactly where.

Favourite track on the list

I have a few for different reasons; Killing in the Name because nostalgia, National Shite Day because I love love love Half Man Half Biscuit, and Dark Driving absolutely slaps as hard today as it did on release.

Least favourite track on the list

Not feeling Sub Urban today. It's feeling a little much!

Get involved yourself!

• Fire up your digital music player
• Go to “all songs“ and shuffle play everything
• Note the first 10 songs to show up, without skipping anything
• Create your playlist
• Post it somewhere

1970's

I imagine my favourite musicians in the 1970's were my parents singing nursery rhymes. My favourite music from the 1970's is probably punk. I never really got into Southern Blues Rock or Disco or Funk. Picking just one band is tricky but I'd say Sex Pistols - despite not being the best punk band of the time, and despite whatever happened to John Lydon recently, no-one can deny the impact they had on the music scene and culture in general.

1980's

In a decade obsessed with up tempo neon the moody, loquacious, and darkly camp Pet Shop Boys made dance music, club music that hits differently — cultured, cerebral, orchestral. They are still releasing music forty years later with not a drop in quality!

1990's

This entire decade was dominated by two main genres: Grunge and Punk. I was so very punk; green mohican, tartan bondage pants, army boots. All my friends were long-haired fans of the Seattle scene. Forced to choose, I'd say Alice in Chains but also there is "Dookie"…

2000's

Nu-metal Baby! I remember hearing Slipknot for the first time. John, the DJ in Jilly's Rock World, would play "Wait and Bleed" and "Spit It Out" and for a while I thought they were two different bands. When I found out they were by the same artist I knew they'd be something special.

2010's

¡Los Campesinos! soundtracked the early half of the decade.

Rise Against featured heavily towards the end of the decade. My "comfort" music to angrily cope with "Just Fucking Do It" rubbish requirements at work; headphones on, silently screaming.

2020's

I've got back into metal in the last few years. Metalcore, death metal, power metal. Particularly European heavy metal because it's just better than American metal and doesn't have that weird toxic masculinity vibe to it. I'm looking at you, Machine Head. Infected Rain manage to combine metal with electronics in a way that is reminiscent of nu-metal but fresh and unique.

The first in Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" Sequence sees a trio of middle class Londoners on a family holiday to Cornwall and a quest for the Holy Grail of all things.

Ably assisted by their Great Uncle Merry and Rufus the dog, siblings Simon, Jane, and Barney follow the clues in an old manuscript to track down the last known resting place of the Holy Grail. An urgent mission as the Forces of Evil™ are also on the hunt for it. A mighty coincidence!

Over Sea, Under Stone reads more like a Famous Five book than traditional urban fantasy; instead of being directly referenced, magical elements are hinted at. The "supernatural" features of the villains could be children's imagination.

It's clearly a children's book but that's not said in a derisory way. The level of peril, the complexity of the storyline, the simplicity of the "light/dark, good/evil" theme, it's all aimed at younger readers but it still lands with me as an adult.

The "red creep" in full russet glory inexorably marches across the maples driving Summer's green into distant memory.

Autumn is here now, the maples decree, so I drink tea, I wear lambswool, and I read Susan Cooper.

Heard the Tawny Owl again. Much louder and for longer; she is probably defending her tree from the Barn Owl or her own fledged juveniles. I've not heard a Tawny here before so she may be new to the area and asserting dominance! Either way, that loud "heh-whick heh-whick" cutting through the dark and quiet night is both terrifying and awe-inspiring.

Had my annual flu jab this week. Bit of an ache-y arm for the day but a small price to pay for protecting myself and helping to protect others in my community.

Storm Amy hit us late in the week. Yellow weather warnings for 105kph (65mph) winds risking "danger to life". The old lad that tends the graveyard is out with his leaf blower…

All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret
Susan Cooper, "Over Sea, Under Stone"

Links of Interest™

• Photographer Captures the Stillness and Emotional Depth In Everyday Life
• Windmill Street, Manchester.
• If you want your blog to sell, stop selling
• AI Unsuspected Collaterals
• Read the Book
• Your private data isn't as private as you think
• Doing It Manually
• This blog post was not written with AI
• Time to separate the art from the artist

I have eaten
the plums
that were on
the plum tree

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so ripe

An apology

I'm sorry but, at the time of writing, Songlink is down. Links today are mostly from YouTube Music but with the tracking parameters stripped.

I love me some atmospheric post-Black Metal on occasion and EVILFEAST popped up on a playlist with "Fullmoon over the eastern woods" which, while maintaining that "dark shoegaze" kind of vibe, drops into a rather catchy and bouncy –almost jovial– chorus! Really nice example of the how the genre can flex.

Reflecting on life following her near-death experience, "One of the Greats" by Florence + The Machine is just brilliant!

It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fan
You're my second favourite front-man
And you could have me if you weren't so afraid of me
It's funny how men don't find power very sexy
So this one's for the ladies

Welsh female-fronted metalcore band Dream State have dropped a new single "Words Unsaid" and it slaps. Jessie Powell's vocals flit between breathy and raw, underpinned with a solid wall of metal. Lovely stuff.

Synthetic percussion I can only describe as "schlurpy", bitty plinky melody, and squidgy portamento all add a dark yet accessible edge to "Joker" by Ms* Gloom.

Speaking of dark, I heard "Origin:Orphan" by The Hidden Cameras on the soundtrack to Mae Martin's latest show, Wayward, and it's haunting af!

"Feasts of Lunacy" by Botulism is classic old school death metal that was sadly unreleased when it was recorded back in 1997. Chugging, growly, staccato. Windmill that hair if you still have it!

One of those rock bands that borrow heavily from the pop music playbook, The Comedown add an over-produced feel to the quiet-verse-loud-chorus formula on "Shiver". Nowt wrong with it but won't be in my top ten most played any time soon.

Nothing ground-breaking with "milk of the madonna" by Deftones. Solid 'tones post-"White Pony" output. •Goes to play Elite instead•

I had never heard of Kim Dracula until their tour bus burst into flames and decided to check them out! I picked "Make Me Famous" because I liked the title and, wow!, it's like Mindless Self Indulgence crossed with Sikth, Marilyn Manson, and Igorrr!

"Too Cold" by Vanilla Ice not actually new or new-to-me really because I've heard Vanilla Ice's "heavy metal" album before but I forgot it existed so this is kinda new-to-me (again). Surprisingly, Ice pulled together a supergroup of 90's musicians as his backing band.

So far, so normal.

The link they sent me was for a third-party website; unrelated to me or the pharmacy. It appears to be a company that specialises in this sort of thing. I presume there are many pharmacies up and down the country (maybe even the world) who have out-sourced this expense to such a company.

Of course I had to create an account.

When I got to my appointment, the pharmacist was struggling in that way people do when using an unfamiliar system. They apologised a couple of times and it was made apparent the change in system wasn't a universally liked decision and had been mandated from on high.

Usually, in my experience, that means the Finance team have made the decision and delegated the burden on everyone else.

So far, so normal.

Fast forward a couple of days and I get an email from them; that's fair I checked the box in case I needed some medical information sending out or whatever.

But it wasn't from the pharmacy, it was from the third party onboarding system asking for feedback.

Thank you for choosing us read the subject line. Which was rich considering that "choice" was mandated — firstly unwillingly foisted on a pharmacy team then unwillingly foisted on me. No-one in this interaction "chose" the company — I don't think it's even possible to choose them, as a patient!

The lesson, I guess, is that your marketing language needs to reflect your business model. If your operational strategy is to be the de facto platform for an industry then you need to acknowledge that users have no choice and so thanking them for choosing you sounds somewhere between disingenuous and plain stupid.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

These ratings are a subjective thing; I don't re-score a book once it's read unless I re-read it and something has changed. Therefore the ratings are from a moment in time.

I can't compare every book I read to every other book I've read either. For this reason, not all 5's (for example) are comparable.

I try to not be swayed by author or genre; I wouldn't mark a book down because it isn't as good as their previous work. Nor would I penalise a book in comparison to a better piece in the same genre.

5

"I loved it!"

An excellent book that hit the spot. Probably has, but not guaranteed to have, a clever plot, good characters, and a nice twist.

4

"I enjoyed it"

Not quite enough to blow me away or touch a nerve in a good way. Better than average, I'd probably recommend this to people who enjoyed similar books.

3

"It was good"

I know some people start with "every book is a 5 until you disappoint me" or "every book is a 1 until you convince me" but, for me, every book is a 3 until proven otherwise.

2

"I read it"

There were words in coherent sentences that mine eyes did see but, when parsed by my brain, elicited little to no emotion.

1

"Everyone responsible for the writing, publishing, and promotion of this book (and I use the term loosely) needs to seriously rethink their life choices"

Unconsumable garbage. If this were actual garbage then I, if I were a garbage eating creature, would refuse to eat this garbage. Probably written by Jeremy Clarkson.

The streets round here are lined with trees. Some mark the bounds of farm land, some are decorative; planted by municipalities past.

The main road through the village has a variety of species of differing ages. Some saplings planted next to the stumps of the ancient monsters they replace. Oak, Beech, Maple, Birch, and this — the London Plane.

Apparently this tree is particularly good at extracting pollutants from the air which is why it is ubiquitous in urban planning.

As the outer bark, covered in particulates, sheds in easily-swept-up sheets, it reveals a patchwork of cream and grey inner bark leaving this distinctive camouflage pattern.

• The "emergencies" are of wildly varying severity; ecological disaster with whales covered in oil but also everyone's phones are missing, broken ski-lift but also unpacking vegetables for a local café owner, literally saving Christmas but also painting fences and building a stage for a village fair
• The animation goes hard with some realism but also hard on cartoon-y which creates a weird juxtaposition of realistic lighting on nostril-less noses
• None of the stories have morals
• or lessons
• or story arcs
• I'm not asking for hidden smut, but there's absolutely nothing for the parents watching; no nods to pop culture, no double entendre, no celebrity cameos — nothing
• Related to that, the over-powering earnestness of the whole thing. nothing is tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecatory (except one line in "PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie" where a news reporter cracks a gag about a new line of merch)
• The characters are riddled with inconsistencies speaking to weak writing. for example, in one episode Rocky hates having baths, in the next he's reluctant to get dirty. These are two episodes in the same season!
• lazy stereotypes
• hero worshipping cops
• if it's an emergency, why does there have to be two whole minutes of adverts showing the dogs being changed into uniforms and converting their transforming dog houses into cars before each mission?
• Ryder's God Complex™
  • despite his magical talking dogs being experts in their respective fields, ryder always formulates the solution by himself and instructs the pups on how to apply their expertise leaving them no autonomy. having been a frontend developer in a certain type of organisation, this perhaps hits a little close to home
• The universe is a madness. Dinosaurs, ghosts, dragons, outer space, mermaids, robot houses, actual Santa. I have a theory that Keith Chapman (creator. Also made Bob the Builder. evil personified, afaik) keeps going to Nickelodeon with new show ideas and they make him roll it into PAW Patrol instead.
  • "Knights and dragons!"
  • "Are they dog knights…?"
  • "erm… no"
  • "Make them dogs, Keith. It's expensive launching a new show when we could just add a new merch line to an existing show whether it makes any sense or not."
• The show commits the cardinal sin of having some, but not all, animals talk leading to questions about tiered caste systems, slavery, and autonomy that are never answered

the real power of LLMs is natural language interfaces, not making content.
Ian Betteridge

This actually tracks with my experience. Using them at work for creating a helper to get the job done has proven valuable.

Trying to generate usable, production-ready code is a fool's errand though.

The smell of creosote, the sound of a Goldcrest, the feeling of the paling sun on the dawn of Autumn tickling my face, the branches of a beech silhouetted against a cloudless sky through the viewfinder of my camera, the last lingering taste of a scrumped damson plum. Around the corner, surprise!, sheep in a field.

I got pulled off my PowerBI work to support on another job where they wanted to demo a voice-controlled support app for patients. I spent the last few days wrangling various text-to-speech and speech-recognition APIs into a gorgeous looking frontend.

Tested it with a few people in the team to varying levels of success which really drove home the disparity in browser capabilities, operating system nuances, and just how difficult it is to get a computer to understand female-presenting voices.

Ten past six in the morning, the day and the family are yet to properly wake, and I'm stood at the back door with a coffee. I heard the clear and distinctive "he-wit he-wit" of a Tawny Owl. Far too dark to see the little fellow but, still, incredible!

There was silence on the other end. The static crackle from one hundred kilometres of telephone lines. Crows sitting on them, shivering, while people's conversations darted past under their feet.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, "Let the Right One In"

Links of Interest™

• Publish, don’t polish
• How aesthetics destroyed privacy and polarized us
• How Much Does Freedom Cost?
• It Took a Photographer 10 Years to Finally Nail the Perfect Lion Photo
• What’s new with Kobo – Fall 2025 update

In a basement beneath an upmarket boutique hotel there is a tattoo parlour.

A single, unassuming door opens on a stairwell to an underground labyrinth like a Gen-Z art TARDIS.

It feels very retro-futuristic 1980's cyberpunk; the sort of place they do cybernetic implants and remove government chips as well as ink and piercings.

Courtesy of Chris Glass, I learned the word Komorebi (木漏れ日) –dappling light patterns caused by sunlight through leaves– and immediately ran out to capture my own like it's some kind of Pokémon.

Where I live, late-August and September are good times to capture Komorebi. There's usually enough breeze and the sun is hot and high, and I (an Irish-skinned goth) can most often be found under suitable tree-cover anyway.

In motion, the patterns are reminiscent of sunlight on water; subtly undulating, almost twinkling. Especially effective on dry leaves or, oddly enough tarmac.

Not entirely sure how "Makeba" by Jain passed me by a decade ago but it's an absolute banger!

Galway indie darlings, NewDad have released a full-length album of solid female-fronted indie rock. It has a lovely Nineties feel to it; would fit between Hole and Cardigans on a playlist without feeling jarring. "Entertainer" is both squeaky and fuzzy.

When "SPIDERS" drops into fuzzy distorted guitar and heavy metal-esque stabs, I was surprised. The opening and, indeed, verses are gentle and stripped back to showcase Lola Young's vocals. More grunge than it has any right to be. It felt like a departure from the massive hit she had last year, Messy, until I listened to it again. New album is out now but I haven't listened to it all yet. An interesting artist!

Simultaneously utterly bleak and heartwarming, the quintessential Swedish vampire novel tells the story of Oskar, a bullied twelve-year-old; Eli, a vampire new to town; and Hakan, Eli's carer of sorts — a deeply troubled man of dark desires.

There are casual descriptions of child abuse, horrific murders with gory detail, and genuinely unsettling descriptions of the bleakness of these ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Lindqvist has an ability to render all of his characters with a pathos and a humanity than elicits sympathy. He injects a sense of hope in the hopeless before cruelly taking it away again.

Each chapter is resplendent with vignettes of life, barely related to plot, but adding flavour to the narrative.

There is some casual, mild homophobia and transphobia; a reflection of the times and the cruelty of childhood bullies.

This is a story about friendship and relationships in varying forms; parent/child, carer/patient, lovers, friends, colleagues, step-parent/step-son, classmates, teacher/pupil.

When I first read the book many years ago, it was absolutely about Oskar and Eli. On this read through, they feel almost secondary characters to the alcoholics and the sad, yet hopeful, lives they lead.

A confronting and genuinely horrific horror story that pulls no punches. One of the best vampire novels ever written; partly because it's not really about vampires at all.

I wasn't expecting to have any time to go taking photographs –it was not that kind of holiday–so I "made do" with the camera in my Pixel 4.

Lying on a sun lounger one day, I was struck by the clear blue skies interrupted by the occasional thing; bird, tree, wall. From my supine position, the world looked different.

Young Michael, shipwrecked on a remote island, must adapt to life alone. Over time, he feels another presence, learning that this world is home to both unimaginable danger and beauty.

Featuring the voice talents of Cillian Murphy, Sally Hawkins, and Ken Watanabe, "Kensuke's Kingdom" feels like a Western attempt at a Ghibli film.

Michael, a fictionalised version of the original novel's author Michael Morpurgo, is a classic lead for this kind of bildungsroman; a bit of an immature dickhead who will learn to be better over the course of the story.

The animation is a bit clunky; more "Watership Down" than "Whisper of the Heart". There are, however, a couple of lovely breakaway's — plotting the family's journey on a map using an origami boat and pencil sketches, and Kensuke's flashback in a pastiche of sumi-e. Both are beautifully executed and emotional.

The score is pleasing, the dialogue sparse, and the villains are suitably villainous; exotic animal poachers.

There is a level of peril that may render it unsuitable for younger viewers or those of a sensitive nature. A particularly nasty "Bambi's mum" moment was actually quite upsetting as, despite not being graphic, was well scored and framed and paced.

The film wraps with a happy ending that isn't too schmaltzy.

Punk music played with the format by throwing out two-minutes of righteous anger.

Prog and goth pushed the envelope the other way with 7-, 9-, 14-minute tracks (although, in my opinion, a lot of these are multiple shorter songs of a common theme edited together and/or padded with self-congratulatory guitar solos)

Anything under a minute tends to be "filler"; intro tracks like "Meow Meow introduces the Grand Theft Orchestra" by Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra, interludes like "Interlude" by My Chemical Romance, or a skit like "Pielie" by Die Antwoord. While these are ostensibly "songs" in that they are tracks on an album, I'm discounting them from my list.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some short songs that are belters.

1. "Megameanie" by Fight Like Apes is 8 seconds of frenetic indie rock.
2. "Untitled" by Burial is easily as unsettling as anything else he has produced but only weirds you out for 48 seconds. Which os almost stranger.
3. "Doh!" by Chumbawamba slinks along on bubbly percussion that makes me wish it was long enough to dance to.
4. "200—101" is one of ¡Los Campesinos!'s rare instrumentals but manages to not lose any of their je ne sais quoi without Gareth's vocals. Poignant.
5. "Nostalgic Oblong" by Clark is a gentle piano refrain that ends abruptly just as it gets going.
6. "The Shadow Sea by Patrick Wolf is a fully-formed song in Wolf's inimitable style that ends after a mere 37 seconds.
7. "Summer's Coming Summer's Gone" by Queen Adreena is stripped back but not lacking.
8. "The Cutty Wren" by Chumbawamba (a band that really enjoy chucking out sub-minute songs) is an acapella working class anthem with a catchy af tune!
9. "Meagan" by Man/Woman/Chainsaw is, essentially, 52 seconds of feedback but is so much better than that sounds. Capturing the raw energy of a young band fucking around, it's playful and daft and fun.
10. "You Suffer" by Napalm Death is the shortest single ever released and still made it into Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time.

A week abroad in scorching, cloudless sunshine. Returned home to torrential rain. In a way, grateful.

The rain was so bad the pilot abandoned the descent and announced we were entering a holding pattern while he worked out if he was brave enough to attempt the landing (paraphrasing) or if we needed to divert to another airport — one significantly further away from home! Luckily, he pulled his socks up, put on his big girl pants, and slammed that jet into the tarmac to a smattering of applause from the cheap seats.

Outside of the hairy return, the time away was fabulous; I have eaten better than expected, read less than expected, and drank a bit more than expected.

Spent the majority of my time away speaking Spanish, neck deep in water, and (most importantly) not thinking about work or technology or AI or UX or…

Bliss.

At first it had frightened him: Samuel Beckett's eyes in Audrey Hepburn's face. Then it had reassured him.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, "Let The Right One In"

Links of Interest™

• Is Photography a Social Contract?
• Apple Quietly Edits iPhone Ads in South Korea That Offended Men
• An open web is a vulnerable web
• Self-hosting to remain AF AF
• Anti-racists defy the far right across Britain
• Andy Burnham, the man who would be king

At least that's the story the police are sticking to.

If you want to know the real truth from the horses mouth, Knoxy's version of events has been competently dramatised for your delectation.

I have watched the first three episodes available on Disney+ and I may stop there. Its fast-paced dialogue, often in Italian (a language I don't speak), left me a little confused as to what was going on. Seques into weird religious crusades and the self-pitying POV of Knox herself didn't sit right with me.

Ably acted, beautifully shot and lit. Cinematically there's little for me to complain about. I just don't really care that much about the plot.

Replacements, even secondhand, are a little pricier than I'm comfortable with right now. On the other hand, I have a need to read!

A rummage in my tech graveyard later and I found my wife's old Kindle that hasn't been turned on in ten years. It was still showing the "Please charge your Kindle screen".

Needs must and all that, so I plugged it in and shortly after it just booted up as if the previous decade never happened!

I'm going to run with this old Kindle for as long as I can, to be honest. I don't need to buy a new eReader. The two things I miss are instant access to the Kobo Book Store because it's so convenient and the backlight. I'm slumming it with a clip-on light for bedtime reading.

It has highlighted the need for DRM-free e-books though! I have several titles that I can't access on the Kindle because they're locked to Kobo.

Other than that (and the slightly icky feeling of using an Amazon product) I'm pretty happy. Incredibly impressed that the e-ink screen hasn't died in any real way in such a long time.

I must have upset someone in a past life because I have spent the entire week wrestling with Microsoft PowerBI. I'm hoping my struggles ease soon because this is a project that will continue for the rest of the year!

My Kobo Nia broke this week so I'm using an ancient Kindle that is absolutely fine so far. I've started writing a bit more about it that I'll share next week.

No respect for beauty – that was characteristic of today’s society. The works of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references, or used in advertising. Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’, where you see a pair of jeans in place of the spark.

The whole point of the picture, at least as he saw it, was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost, but not quite, touched. There was a space between them a millimetre or so wide. And in this space – life. The sculptural size and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame, a backdrop, to emphasise the crucial void in its centre. The point of emptiness that contained everything.

And in its place a person had superimposed a pair of jeans.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, "Let The Right One In"

Links of Interest™

• Trillion Dollar Elephants
• Indie Web Burnout
• A Student’s Right to Refuse Generative AI
• How Lofi Girl Became a Chill Beats Empire

Piggy Builders follows Cornelia, Cesar and Charlie, three curly-tailed piggy siblings who love building and solving problems in their community – and, most importantly, they love each other!

Loosely based on The Three Little Pigs, this is a fun children's show full of adorable characters and an acceptable level of peril for young children. Everything works out OK in the end. The "villain" is Wilf the hapless wolf (I know!) who older viewers may recognise as being voiced by Spud the Scarecrow from Bob the Builder.

Opening with the sound of rainfall is always going to grab my attention and New Zealand's Finnegan Tui doesn't disappoint. "Lost Tales, Vol. 1" is a EP of Irish-y gloom folk with a whiff of Nick Cave to it. Ideal for autumn walks.

After a brief foray back into pop punk, Demi Lovato returns with dancefloor filler "Here All Night" which sounds like a Cool For The Summer B-Side. Vocoding a voice like Lovato's should be an actual crime. Bouncy, danceable, forgettable. Shame.

Another sadly forgettable release I heard this week is "The Scythe" by The Last Dinner Party. There's nothing wrong with it — it just feels a bit formulaic but lacking the oomph and grit of earlier releases.

As we head into Autumn, Leo Einaudi's rework of dad Ludovico's "Santiago" is bang on trend. Melancholy piano instrumental with gentle strings supporting.

Latvian industrial nu-metallers, Morphide, return with new single "Of Healing Part 1 - Denial"; mechanical fast-paced percussion, distorted guitar, and floaty female vocals that drop into guttural growls Alissa White-Gluz would be proud of.

I read the book of this TV show many years ago and, as best I remember, it's pretty true to the original.

A competent cast of actors and the moody British Columbian landscape bring this tale of bullying and teenage murder to life.

Nothing groundbreaking but a decent true crime dramatisation.

Full disclosure: I, unironically, love Twilight.

At its core, it's a conservative morality tale and, like many other vampire novels, draws upon centuries of lore depicting vampires as allegory for the perils of unsuitable dalliances and sex before marriage.

Edward Cullen is supposed to be a creep because he's a "predator" — not just a killer but in the sense of a sexual predator. "I can't help myself around you" kind of rape culture vibes. As though the woman is to blame for the man's unseemly behaviour. If only she hadn't lead him on and played hard to get… 👀

On this read-through it feels even more apparent; there are clear parallels in this older man targeting a romantically-inexperienced girl with low self-esteem and telling her she's the most special girl ever (in his eyes). We see it in his gentle negging of Bella's perceived faults and the way he casually overpowers her to demonstrate his strength and control. We see it when her eventually isolates her from her friends until he is her entire universe.

We're absolutely not supposed to root for them; Bella is heading into an abusive relationship that we can see but she can't and we should be screaming "Run, girl! Run!" not buying "Team Edward" shirts.

The less said about Jacob Black the better. Meyer caught some flak for her portrayal of the indigenous people of the Pacific North West and, honestly, it was probably well deserved. The whole werewolf tribe storyline feels extremely icky! 😬

The daftest plot points include Edward's glittery skin and Thunderstorm Baseball™ but they are throwaway fun moments and people who say vampire novels have to be serious are gatekeeping misery-guts.

The sequels were stupid, granted. Although, I'm kind of convinced there'd definitely be some pseudo-Catholic camp af vampire Illuminati mincing around Rome. But, yeah, silly.

Anyway, despite pretty much everyone missing the entire point of the story and fixating on the wrong things, it's actually very good.

we are in the digital streaming age, there is no control over the algorithm, and it is stressing people the fuck out.
Lizzo

The department I work in is having a launch event soon so we need a website to advertise it. I've been doing some actual frontend coding for the first time in a looooong time. It's been really nice to exercise that part of my brain again.

Walking in the park I heard, and then saw, a tiny Goldcrest. Another new-to-me bird friend!

On the way home, I saw three baby jackdaws, fledglings, honking like the horn in a child's toy car following a parent around the roof while said parent studiously ignored the little free-loaders.

The teenager checking my ID for beer at Tesco said he liked my Nirvana t-shirt. Double winning.

Started watching "the BBC's answer to Love Island", "Stranded on Honeymoon Island" and, aside from Davina McCall's omnipresent crow face and the fact they aren't in any real way "stranded", it's off to a good start!

Links of Interest™

• Women in a Sea of Men: The Representation of Women in The Curse of the Black Pearl
• Encourage purposeful friction
• I Should Have Self-Hosted to Begin With

"Cacophony" by Paris Paloma is out on Bandcamp with an exclusive track! Confident and quirky English indie for fans of bolshy weird female vocalists; Laura Marling, Amanda Palmer, Chloe Slater, Marissa Nadler.

Icy synths and distorted squidgy basslines under ADÉLA's over-processed vocals make "The Provocateur" feel dirty and clean at the same time. Sleazy well-produced alt pop. I'm old enough to remember when a track like "SexOnTheBeat" would be considered "weird mosher shit".

The sleaze continues with the new single from  Ashnikko. Staccato, bombastic, fuzzy; "Sticky Fingers" is yet another slice of confident dark dirty pop music.

Opening with a riff The Cure would be proud of, Maggie Lindemann's new single "spine" is much less heavy metal than her last release (2024's "Headsplit") and more a pleasing jangly indie a lá The Smiths.

Resolutely not holding back on the rock n roll are The Pretty Reckless. Back with their first release since 2022, "For I am Death", Taylor Momsen's bluesy grunge rock band bring Dirt-era Alice in Chains song structures, Appetite-era Guns n Roses swagger, and her distinctive voice floating a growling and cracking like she's only ever consumed cigarettes and whiskey.

NME described sombr as smirking sad-boy pop and, having listened to "undressed", I agree. Melancholy yet knowing lyrics about a breakup accompanied by a shimmering arrangement Foster the People wouldn't kick out of bed.

Eurovision darlings Lord of the Lost & Käärijä team up for gothic dancefloor filler "Raveyard" showcasing their tongue-in-cheek approach to a traditionally earnest genre. Crank it, embrace the cringe, and dance like it's 2002.

There's a sub-genre of indie-pop that I'm starting to really get into; think Baby Queen, Chloe Slater, Orla Gartner, and now Alessi Rose. "CRUSH!" is 2 minutes and 45 seconds of gorgeous up-tempo indie I'd love to dance to, do housework to, or see live.

This was a throwaway snap I took because I had my phone in my hand and it was too much effort get my SLR out of my bag.

The dirty Converse All Star Chuck Taylors (Miley Cyrus celebrity collab, to be precise) really reminded me of the 90s Grunge aesthetic that most of my friends wore in the mid-to-late-Nineties.

One quick filter (Vista in Google Photos) later and I have one of the grungest photos I've taken in 30 years.

One of his less good ideas is calling this new political party "Your Party".

I completely get where he's coming from; power to the people! This is for you, no elites! Proletariat power!

But it's so dumb. So dumb I initially thought it was one of those new far right parties. Because the name is so dumb.

"My party is Your Party but I could never vote for your party."

"I will only ever vote for Your Party."

"Your Party is the only political party that is any good."

Said out loud, it's just silly. It requires cognitive drain to unpick the, on the face of it, terrible English.

Also, who is the you in Your? It simply cannot be everyone and anyone that reads or hears the name.

There's a vague intimation on their (frankly awful) website that this isn't their final form so, perhaps, a change in name to something less dumb is on the cards.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

The pigeons on the roof of the neighbours' house are getting amorous. Deep, throaty coos, puffed up chests, and persistent lady-bothering.

Taking the bins out late one evening and saw the erratic ballet of a pair of bats. Far too fast to identify the species but likely to be Pipistrelles.

I went for a short walk mid-week and made the unhinged decision to take a mug of tea with me. Not a travel cup, just a regular mug.

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him
Stephanie Meyer, "Twilight"

Links of Interest™

• How I raw-dogged vacation
• How Your First Camera Will Shape Your Photography
• “Your” vs “My” in user interfaces
• Become a Good Photographer, Step Four: Force the Habit
• You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company
• Flags campaign—We can’t ‘reclaim’ that which was never ours

Until this weekend, when we noticed "Pokemon Concierge" was available on Netflix.

Frustrated with her typically stressful everyday life, Haru quits her job and runs away to work at the Pokémon Resort –an all-inclusive holiday spot for pocket monsters and the humans that love them– in a fabulous knee-jerk reaction that honestly left me a little jealous!

Gorgeous animation and a slow pace are coupled with a level of gentle peril as Haru settles into her new job and meets her colleagues and the myriad guests she needs to look after.

The fabric-based stop motion animation retains the classic "animé" style but kicks it up a notch. The English dub is well done and the Pokémon are adorable. Special shoutouts to Magikarp and Psyduck ❤️

My only gripe really is that there aren't more episodes!

I have a vague system that works for me, I am not going to detail it here.

I am not artistic or time-rich enough to delineate sections with gorgeous calligraphy or quirky illustrations — I quickly scribble the date or name in all-caps and move on with my notes.

However, as the notebook gets fuller, it has become harder to flick back and find some information. Which is kind of the opposite of the point of making notes.

Enter highlighters

I picked up a four pack of pastel mildliners (as, I believe, the pros call them) on a whim, really, and quickly retro-fitted them to my existing process.

The peachy one highlights the start of a week, the purple one denotes the start of a day, the blue one is for project names, and the red one is for urgent (as is tradition in my Western worldview).

And that's it, that's the system.

A bit more bird news from this week. I overheard the faint singing of a young Bullfinch in the trees around the park. We have a section that is rewilding with some bird habitats that, it would appear, are currently in use. Which is lovely.

A couple of nights before, sweltering with the window open, I heard the harsh bark of an angry barn owl as it sailed over our garden. No sign of whatever had pissed him off but he's had beef with the jackdaws before…

Work has involved quite a lot of reviewing other people's work and little of doing my own. I don't mind doing that, and I always seem to provide value when I do, but it would be nice to own a piece of work.

I have infrequently shared a "Weekend Link Digest" in my team's Teams channel. Usually healthcare, UX and design, and technology things either pertinent to our work, advancements to further learning, or evidence to use in client discussions. It differs from my weekly Links of Interest because it's more work-focused but also I tend to write a bit around the links. Perhaps I shall share it as a post on my website too in the spirit of POSSE (or is that PESOS?)

Started to watch "Amy Bradley is Missing" which I vaguely remember from the time. So far so standard Netflix documentary. Which reminded me that you can make a Netflix-style doco about literally anything.

“telling a story is always better than writing it down,” Trulio says. “Eyes are deceptive receivers, and look for hidden clues while reading. They might betray you. Ears, on the other hand, take the story as it is, without judgment.”
Amal Singh, "The Garden of Delights"

Links of Interest™

• Our principles on AI
• The Hardships of Online Friendships
• Life's Too Short
• My Chemical Romance stand accused of being demons
• Books will soon be obsolete in school

AI could generate a thousand images of urban decay or rural neglect, each technically superior to anything any human has captured. But it couldn’t tell which stories matter, which moments demand preservation, which truths need dragging into the light. It cannot feel the weight of responsibility that comes with pointing a camera at someone else’s life.
Cedric

Cedric from Photonist predicts the death of social media photography; the asinine Golden Hour sunsets and picture perfect latte art. AI can churn that out before I've put my boots on.

I have long considered myself to be a documentarian.

My photographs of the "behind the scenes" of everyday life aren't anywhere near as technically perfect as anything AI can spit out — but they're real. Honest.

the new eve is curious and free
she eats what she wants to eat
every fruit from every tree
she devours, guiltlessly
and thick, red fruit blood run down her hungry mouth
and thick, red fruit blood run down her naked thighs
the new eve is not ashamed when she bleeds

Folky but not simpering, rock but not butch, it's never quite what you expect. I'm detecting notes of Grace Slick, Kai Tempest, Young Fathers, Alison Krauss and I like it. There are gospel elements, frentic violins, and the kind of drums Meg White would approve of — all in one song!

I made initial comparisons with The Last Dinner Party, all-female avante-garde modern rock, but The New Eves are a wholly different beast, the Brighton influence clearly differentiating them from their London-based contemporaries.

Approaching "folk" like early Patrick Wolf meets Amanda Palmer, none of the songs feel "dance-able to" — maybe wild swaying beneath a full moon in a forest clearing. It's weird in a good way and grows on me with every listen.

You can buy The New Eve is Rising today from Bandcamp. I need to listen to it a few more times.

Her father is a newly appointed government minister tasked with managing the complicated relationship and uneasy alliance between two formerly hostile tribes while harbouring a clandestine mission.

Meanwhile, the god-cursed Caretaker of the titular garden struggles with his own problems while trying to fix the horrific rot that has taken hold in his beloved garden.

Shades of the fantastical worlds of Clive Barker and The Absolute Book permeate Singh's epic story. The lumbering jowly Rhisuan beasts, the descriptions of taste, references to food. Such a sensual book, rich with adjectives and clever turns of phrase.

The ingenious combination of herbal magic with almost steampunk automatons/golem and flying bird-shaped airships conjures a fascinating and unique world.

The children, their relationships, and the whole school dynamic put me in mind of Studio Ghibli; in fact, Trehan is 100% Kanta from My Neighbour Totoro!

I felt myself grasping for these comparisons and familiarity because the book is unlike much I have read before. There are clearly references to traditions from the Indian subcontinent; clothes and food particularly, but I'm not au fait with the cultures to determine how much of the world building is fantastical and how much is simply Indian.

While I appreciate Singh has a lauded history of short story writing, this is an astounding debut novel.

I can be a bit of a curmudgeon and focus on the negatives when I feel the pressure. I know it's not good for me to get into that negativity spiral so reflecting like this is important.

So, without further ado, here are some things I have been enjoying lately.

• Garden pizza parties with friends
• The finest of fine rain on my skin while I'm walking around of a hot day
• Cheeky mid-week days off just the two of us
• Finding a really good pebble

¹: Previous entries in this series: Five things I like, Things that make me go :D, and More things that make me go yay

It's been a while since I had any bird news because, to be honest, it's all been much of a muchness round here — until a particularly vocal Nuthatch started their loud and insistent "pee-wit, PEE-WIT". That's the first time I've heard a Nuthatch so I'm quite excited!

Equally exciting is getting a shout out in the extremely popular and very famous People & Blogs series. So, yeah, wow — thank you so much for the mention, Loren!

Alice over at The Wallflower Digest recommended yet another book by Sayaka Murata, "Earthlings". I haven't read the review fully because spoilers but the bit I did read intrigued me enough to add it to my Tracker. That's three books by Sayaka Murata on the list and not a single one read yet; I need to fix that!

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.
Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"

Links of Interest™

• “Our Website is Closed on Sundays!”
• The difference between "smolweb" and "small web"
• The term 'NSFW' is problematic and overdue for retirement
• Too many hands on the tiller
• Mark Gatiss, the boy that Dr Who books made

YouTube decided to recommend "smoke weed eat pussy" by Swedish trap-hop star Ängie. Not exactly my usual tuneage but I quite enjoyed it. A little repetitive but some lovely tones in there.

Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, returns with a heartfelt quirky love song ably assisted by the Ghost Train Orchestra. "She Explains Things To Me" touches on a niche aspect of relationships when one person has a better grasp of social cues than the other and can explain nuance in a movie scene or metaphors in poetry. In taking the time to patiently explain, they reveal their love.

I first became a fan of Marissa Nadler with 2007's "Songs III: Bird on the Water", especially her cover of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat". Opening track from her new album, "It Hits Harder" doesn't stray too far from her comfort zone; frosty, ethereal folk.

The more work I see generated by AI, the more I'm becoming attuned to what I'm calling "knowledge smells".

The less a person knows about a subject, the more they lean on the GenAI.

The more a person knows about a subject, the easier it is to detect the flaws in the output of the model.

Given deep knowledge, a person will write it themselves or correct the output accordingly.

If neither of these things have happened, the person doesn't know the subject well enough.

We were just holding hands and walking past the car park on the way to the secondhand furniture shop, chatting to each other about nothing in particular, when a guy called over and said it was lovely to hear how happy we sounded. So happy together that a stranger felt it was worth commenting on 😊 #SmugMarrieds

Actually so pleased Toni and Cach won. He is a king and she has been my favourite throughout.

I haven't actually watched the final yet (and probably won't) but The Algorithm™ spoiled it for us.

Found my dream camera for a steal on eBay. Fully cleaned and serviced, with new light seals and a mirror buffer installed. A steal but by no means cheap; I hope it lives up to the hype. I'll find out on Monday! Or, more accurately, a fortnight later when I get the prints back!

We spent the weekend in the seaside town I lived in nearly 30 years ago doing loads of touristy things which was incredibly wholesome. Feeling full of love with recharged batteries ready for the work week ahead.

I think intelligence feels “quiet” in the Dua Lipa, dignified way when it has this quality of generous sharing. It’s about appreciating others’ minds, and creating more beauty and interest for others. It looks straight through to an idea, to the world, not through a lens of: “What does this say about me?”
Eleanor Gordon Smith, "Helen Garner and Dua Lipa’s interview caused a personal crisis. How can I be ‘quietly intelligent’? | Leading questions"

Links of Interest™

• Can You Develop Film In a Jägerbomb?
• This Will Improve Your Photographic Creativity In One Hour
• What We Lost with PHP and jQuery
• Ambient age verification
• Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity
• Your site, your home, your web
• In this age of technofeudalism every writer who covers technology - especially resistance to Big Tech - should disclose their tech stack. Here's mine

My second time making a post with Eleventy. I love it! The markdown file is so clean, there's just the header info, and then below that, a vast empty blank space. No HTML to bump into and tip over, Eleventy adds all that in for me at the end. Lovely!
Hollie

I defy anyone disillusioned with writing code to not be buoyed by Hollie's enthusiasm!

Except, of course, it isn't. I've been listening to music a lot longer than I've been recording listening to music.

This isn't even my first last.fm — I was an early adopter, used it for years, then deleted it before creating a new account almost immediately.

Even then, I'm not scrobbling every song I hear; live music, music in films, vinyl, car radio, kitchen radio while we're cooking. There's probably more I'm forgetting.

What I can tell you is that, of the songs I've listened to in the last decade, 100,000 of them have been logged.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't tell you an awful lot about me or what I listen to — just about what I log. And that's the issue with a lot of these trackers; they are a moment in time, not a comprehensive account.

Unless you're younger than me and your every waking second is added to a database in Google HQ 👀

🚂
There are three of us sat around the table on this train; me, a guy who has fallen asleep watching Eastenders on his iPad, and a woman patiently explaining each-way betting to a friend on the phone. Mr Eastenders' luggage occupies the fourth seat. The train leaves on time but arrives four minutes late and I break a sweat walking briskly to my connection.

⛈️
I got a nosebleed at work and prayed to the skies for the storm to break. It started raining when I got home and I felt a bit better.

🎞️
There are seven exposures left on this roll of film before I can send them off for development. I might do a little late night still life work to practice lighting and composition.

📚
I added a feature to my little book tracking tool; "Read Next". I pull a random book from my "To be read" that is flagged as "owned". It's only a suggestion, obviously, but it was nice to have an idea and implement it in the easiest way in a few minutes. It's all working so nicely in Obsidian that, if I didn't need the "API" capabilities, I might not bother with converting it into a web app…

💩
A bird pooped on me on the way home; it's supposed to be lucky, right?

Some weeks are just weeks, no magic, no poetry.
DW

Links of Interest™

• The Unknown Effect of Google A.I. Overviews on Search Traffic
• This Photographer Shot the Same Tree for 10 Years
• Age verification has set up “child online safety” as a challenge to be broken, a problem to be evaded, rather than a goal to be pursued by all. Tone deaf approach by Govt, Industry, & safety activists has set back the cause by a generation
• How to Make Websites That Will Require Lots of Your Time and Energy
• Vacation Like It's The Noughties
• Why The First Animated 'Hobbit' Is Good For Your Kids
• The Accessibility Choice – July 2025
• Brutalism - Le Havre

I have, apparently, listened to Chelsea Wolfe before but I do not remember so this is, once again, new-to-me! On "Little Grave" from 2019's Birth of Violence, Woolfe layers plaintive folk vocals and reverb-y acoustic guitars with disconcerting banshee shrieking feedback. An uncomfortable experience that makes me wonder what if Laura Marling fronted a Black Metal band…?

Electronic indie rock n roll with just a touch of Portishead, Phantogram chuck screechy guitars over spiky drums and dub wobble bass to make something that isn't quite rock, triphop, or baroque pop but is also all of those things. I'm listening to "Voices" and you should be too.

Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.

I currently have all my photographic eggs in Pixelfed's basket but that doesn't mean I'm closed off. I owe it to myself to get to know other photo sharing sites¹.

One of these new sites/apps that popped up is Foto. Promising a Chronological, ad-free, and uncropped experience, Foto ticks a lot of boxes. They aren't VC backed on principle, they're inclusive and community-focused, and they have a roadmap that extends beyond "hosting images".

Sadly, I haven't found a way to add alt-text to my images which has made it quite the non-starter for me.

I've contacted them to see if I'm missing something. I hope I missed a setting somewhere and it's not on a roadmap of "features" to be deployed — inclusivity is not a feature and your MVP isn't V without accessible content 😉

¹: I am watching too much Love Island, aren't I‽

Spoilers

As this is book 3 of a trilogy, this review will mention plot points from the previous two books; "Snare" and "Trap".

Taking place four years on from the events in "Trap", the final book in the trilogy pivots the narrative to focus on Agla (almost as if the author heard my plea at the end of my last review!). In fact, Sonja only turns up a handful of times in the whole book — and even then it's kind of brief and cryptic.

The focus on Agla is refreshing, even if it is a really bleak start to the novel.

Agla leading the story means it's more about white collar financial crime than the first two books which gets a little detailed. It's not a subject I'm particularly interested in so it didn't grip me as much as the drug smuggling plot. That said, I appreciate the detail and it feels accurate, at least to how I imagine the shady world of international banking works.

Sigurðardóttir's writing is strong and the plot is juicy enough to still be interesting after three books; enough intrigue and mystery without feeling like it can't all be resolved.

Again, a couple of the "twists" seemed obvious to me but hasn't diminished my enjoyment. When the final reveal happens there's a feeling of elation and vindication instead of shock and surprise which is just as good, in my opinion.

I have been full tilt, hell for leather, warp factor 9, head down in a pitch for the entire week (spilling over into pre- and post-work conversations too) so, as a result, I don't feel like I've done much this week outside of planning and designing patients' support in PowerPoint and Figma.

I managed to nip out one lunchtime for a short walk in the sunshine and snapped this quite nice shot of the sky.

I remembered Placebo existed this week and have battered their first few albums at any opportunity. Love it!

Remember me when you're the one who's silver screened
Remember me when you're the one you always dreamed
Remember me whenever noses start to bleed
Remember me, special needs

We have almost caught up on Love Island; Toni has just recoupled with Harrison but doesn't yet know he slept with Lauren 🍿🍿🍿

Look back at all economic systems and you can see the pattern. First banknotes replaced metal as currency, and from banknotes we went to plastic cards, from electronic to digital and when the magnetic storm hits us and all digital records are destroyed, nobody will be able to prove they own anything. There’s a new world order coming and they will control it with magnetic pulses and blame it on solar activity.
Lilja Sigurðardóttir, "Cage"

Links of Interest™

• The Billionaire Boycott Conundrum
• Can Good UX Protect Older Users From Digital Scams? — Smashing Magazine
• The charm of ASCII smileys :-)
• The sound of inevitability
• Smart Quotes for Smart People
• Heroes, dead and otherwise
• Setting up an iPad for blog reading and small web browsing

I get particularly frustrated with people who say things such as “I prefer producing creative work to creating lots of images” or “I don’t learn the rules because I prefer being creative”. This isn’t how quality emerges. It’s how mediocrity perpetuates itself while wearing the mask of artistic integrity.
Cedric

They say it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of anything.

The greats break the rules because they have mastered the rules and can find the cracks and niches to exploit and mine for art. That's not "ignoring" the rules, there's no contempt for structures.

That means weeks of lighting practice, months of composition practice, years of churning out passable garbage inching toward good.

No-one takes a banger every time. And everyone has to practice. Everyone.

The model I have is the "Richmond Alpha 1", Höher's first iteration of their flagship rucksack.

They don't make this exact bag anymore, which is a shame because it's really good! I've had this bag for about 5 years now and it looks like new.

Easily fits a 15" laptop in the padded compartment. There's a few internal sleeve pockets for pens, passport, ebook, other small things, and one giant pocket that is only accessible from the drawstring opening at the top.

The opening is doubly closed with a buckle-down flap over the drawstring. This makes it nicely waterproof but can be a bit of a faff getting stuff in and out, especially in a rush.

You'll find another pocket in the flap, which is fairly useless in my experience, and a security pocket hidden in the side. A fabric key chain completes the features.

With little adornment outside a discrete logo, the black waterproof canvas looks classy but rugged; it feels like a "manly" bag. That wasn't really a consideration for me but it does mean it's neutral enough to go with virtually any outfit.

I used to use this bag as my daily driver but it's a little too big for that now I've got a 13" laptop instead of 16".

It makes an excellent overnight or weekend bag though — big enough to fit clothes and toiletries and a laptop, small enough to throw in a boot or footwell. It isn't too cumbersome on public transport either. You likely won't get spare shoes in it though.

I knocked a couple of points off for the bottle pocket being wide and shallow. My 500ml Chilli's bottle kept falling out unless the bag was completely stuffed full.

The new version of this backpack, the RA3, has a slew of improvements. I'd say it's worth the price over a cheaper bag because it's built to last; both materials and design.

Gentle and mildly synthetic piano plinks through Robert Smith's "A Child of the King". I don't know what I expected from The Cure's frontman's solo stuff but an instrumental piano cover of a hymn wouldn't be my first guess.

With a punk attitude to traditional Irish music, The Mary Wallopers have garnered a large worldwide fanbase and "The Juice" will disappoint none of them. Bouncy af Irish Rock 'n' Roll.

Distorted feedback and soft vocals buried in the mix aren't usual indicators of a joyful and gentle pop music experience but nu-shoegaze legends, She's In Parties, pull that off on new single "Same Old Story".

Speaking of shoegaze, I was a bit disappointed Loveless weren't anything like My Bloody Valentine. "Phantom of You" is perfectly serviceable American acoustic guitar singer-songwriter fare.

On new single, "Small World Syndrome", Wargasm bring slick tongue-in-cheek lyrics back and forth between Sam and Milkie over sharp punky staccato electric noise.

All depressed up and nowhere to go

Pendulum and Wargasm (UK) "Cannibal" It would have been nice to incorporate more of Wargasm's musical style into this collab — it's very drum n bass and less punk. That said, it bops. I would throw myself around a dancefloor to this. Even now.

Can you review the articles on thomasrigby.com and tell me what the key themes emerging are?

It provided a response that I’ve included in its entirety below.

On first read, the response appears to be a quite detailed analysis and has several factual points.

There are some inaccuracies though. Nothing that would get me in trouble, as far as I know, but still definitely wrong.

When you dig into it though, it's pretty surface level understanding; half of the info is from the homepage, some could be estimated from the navigation, at least one sentence is just copied verbatim from a meta description. There are large areas of writing not referenced here too; the reason for omission unclear.

If you're using LLM's to do research like this, even "good" ones like Claude, check any output you're going to reference — especially if it confirms your hypothesis!

I'll help you review the articles on thomasrigby.com to identify key themes. Let me fetch the website first to see what content is available.

This appears to be the homepage, but I need to find the actual articles/blog posts. Let me search for articles or posts on the site to see what content is available.

Now I can see there are several articles. Let me access the posts page to get a better overview of all the content available.

Let me search for more specific article titles and themes from the site to get a comprehensive view.

Based on the search results I've gathered from thomasrigby.com, I can identify several key themes emerging from Thomas Rigby's articles:

Key Themes from thomasrigby.com

Technology and Web Development

The site shows a strong focus on technical topics, particularly web development and engineering practices. The author writes about various topics such as technology, photography, books, and music in his personal blog. Specific technical content includes articles about development practices like "Global .gitignore" and "The three rules of engineering."

Meta-Blogging and Internet Culture

There's a notable theme of reflecting on blogging itself and internet culture. The author discusses "The blogpost as meme" and references bandwagon or trends posts, showing a self-aware approach to blogging conventions. This suggests engagement with broader conversations about online content creation.

Photography

Photography is a significant theme, with dedicated sections and content about photographic practice and equipment. The site indicates this is both a professional and personal interest area.

Personal Reflection and Identity

The content includes personal musings, particularly around generational identity. The author identifies as a Gen-X/Millennial cusp (Xennial), describing himself as old enough to remember life before the internet but not quite old enough to have seen Nirvana live.

Books and Reading

Literary content and reading recommendations appear to be recurring themes, fitting with the broader personal blog format.

Web Standards and User Experience

There's evidence of concern for web accessibility, performance, and user experience, reflecting professional expertise in web development.

The overall impression is of a personal blog that blends technical expertise with cultural commentary, personal interests, and reflective writing about internet culture and generational experiences.

Spoilers