Category: Miscellaneous

I spent February in the doldrums, struggling with my energy and enthusiasm – and a sudden cold snap didn’t help. The overall impression of the month was an ongoing slog, despite some fun activities and a wonderful holiday.

Rosy’s final performance of Musclebound took place in Nottingham. It was a pain to get there, but lovely to catch up with friends and family. There was also an excellent tour of Todmorden put on by Hwaet magazine, and I attended a couple of events put on by Bryony Good (a writing workshop and a photo walk). I later realised that I had performed alongside Bryony as part of the Two Knocks For Yes event in 2015.

The highlight of the month was a trip to Anglesey with Swedish friends Lou-Ice and Sara Starkstrom. Sara wrote an excellent book on urbex and was a great guide. Anglesey was lovely and we had only one day of bad weather – which was a poor time for Lou and I to try climbing some cliffs. The trip had many highlights, but the scenery at the slate mines was particularly photogenic.

My efforts at exercise and diet continued to be lacklustre. I walked 383,268 steps, an average of 13,688 a day, with the peak being walks around Hebden Bridge on Lou’s birthday. Being in the doldrums led to some unhealthy reliance on junk food, and I added a further half pound to my Christmas weight. But I’m feeling a little more focussed now, so hopefully I’ll get a grip on things in March.

Like everything else, my writing has felt stuck in a rut. I sent out four new stories and was particularly pleased with England is a Disease, a piece about Narnia. But generating new ideas has been a struggle. I’m refocussing on stories that bring me joy to write – because life is too short not to love my hobby.

It was a good month for movies. I repeated last year’s attempt to see all of the Oscar nominees before the ceremony. There’s a full rundown elsewhere, but it was an interesting set of movies. Anora deserved its 5 Oscars, but The Brutalist and I’m Still Here were both impressive. I finally saw Saving Private Ryan which was a weird mix of tones. The best movie of the month was Robbie Williams biopic Better Man which improved on all those slavish, obvious music movies by having the lead character played by a CGI monkey.

I’ve been trying to concentrate better at reading, dropping a few books I was not getting into. I read Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 on a sleepless night and it was a horrifying but worthwhile read. The new Julia Armfield novel, Private Rites, was haunting. All Fours was an excellent and thought-provoking book by Miranda July. I also read We Used to Live Here, which was an interesting post-creepypasta horror novel. Joseph Matheny’s Ong’s Hat Compleat, a combined text and audio book was excellent, and I loved how he mixed the two mediums.

In a month, my current job will be the longest I’ve worked for a single employer. Despite feeling flat generally, I love working there, which feels amazing. A lot of that joy is due to having only one mandatory office day a week. It’s also ten years since I left Crunch Accounting. Still can’t believe some of the things that went on there.

For most of the last year, I’d been growing my hair out a little. Ultimately I couldn’t decide what to do with it, so decided to return to a Grade 1. It took some work to persuade the barber that I knew what I was doing and wasn’t having a breakdown. I feel much better for the cleaner look.

I’ve continued improving my digital hygiene, reducing the amount of information that I take in. There’s a lack of weight to digital things (podcast queues, browser tabs, mailing list subscriptions, ebooks) that makes it hard for me to estimate how much I’ve committed myself to. I’ve been filtering out non-personal email, closing social accounts and letting things go. I still have letterboxd, mastodon and my RSS feeds, which just about feel like useful ways to spend time.

I gave a couple of talks last year where I referred to Hakim Bey’s Immediatism, and the importance of meeting offline. I’ve started thinking that the online world drains energy from in-person social interactions, so part of the process of moving off social is about seeing how that changes my engagement with the world.

I’ve mostly avoided the news, but a lot of it leaks into my social feeds. For all Trump’s flaws, I was heartened to hear him suggest massive nuclear disarmament. But, the rest of the time, I’m frustrated about how the world is currently dominated by bullies and bullshitters.

In more hyperlocal politics, Rosy and I have been filling the bird-feeders. It’s been good to see the birds gathering, although one bird – which we’ve dubbed Fat Robin – tries to keep the smaller birds away.

• I interviewed Dan for a podcast, talking about Peakrill Press and his most recent kickstarter. Podcasts might be cheesy, but it’s good that there is part of online life that is still open for all.
• The podcast episode Breakfast on Tiffany was one of the funniest things I’d ever listened to. I couldn’t listen to it outside, as it made me laugh out loud. My stomach muscles ached when I finished.
• I’ve been playing video games in the evenings – mostly the new rogue-like for The Last of Us Part 2. The other games I’ve tried recently just haven’t caught my attention – but it’s great to have an endless set of new levels for The Last of Us 2.

As with last year, I set out to watch the ten Best Picture Oscar nominees before the ceremony. I’d seen just two of them when the list came out and collecting the other eight has been fun. Most of these were films I wouldn’o’t have watched otherwise and I’ve liked trying something different.

I’m not much good at predictions but I do think The Brutalist stands a very strong chance. However, I think I’m Still Here was the best of the ten – I would also be delighted to see The Substance become the first body horror best picture winner.

Below is a list of all ten movies, in order of how satisfied I’ll be if they win the Oscar, starting from the one I liked least. Links go to my letterboxd reviews.

• Emilia Perez felt like a car crash, with overly simplistic politics and boring songs. I have no idea how this was put forward.
• Dune: Part 2 was epic science fiction story, but I found it unengaging. Too self-consciously epic, with nothing much behind the spectacle.
• I felt cheated by Wicked when over two-hours of run-time ended with ‘to be continued’. Up to then, I’d been enjoying it – far more than I’d expected.
• Like Dune: Part 2, Conclave was a fantasy movie set in a strange world. Beautifully made with a great performance from Ralph Fiennes.
• A Complete Unknown was entertaining, despite the mumbled dialogue, but felt like a fairly standard biopic.
• There’s a lot I disliked about The Substance, but it produced an intense reaction in the cinema audience I saw it with. I’d be delighted if something this extreme wins.
• Anora was a great movie which went to some unexpected places, with a great ending.
• I didn’t enjoy Nickel Boys, and I’m a little disappointed at myself for that. It tells an important story, and was beautifully made, but didn’t work for me.
• At over three-and-a-half hours, The Brutalist felt self consciously epic, and has stuck in my head since I saw it. Guy Pearce’s supporting role was excellent.
• But I’m Still Here was my favourite of the ten. The story, about a political murder, is heartbreaking, but what stood out most was the portrayal of a family enduring through difficult times. Fernanda Torres was incredible. Very glad I got to see this in the cinema.

2024 has been the best year of my life so far. The future might be a scary place – not least because, at some point, I die there – but, for now, I appreciate how fortunate I am. I live somewhere beautiful, I have a job I love, and I’m happy with my writing.

Living in a small town has made a huge contribution to my quality of life. I worried at first that I would be isolated but instead I feel calmer and happier. This suggests that I was finding Brighton far more stressful than I’d realised.

I’ve now had my current job for two years and in February this will be the longest I’ve had a single job. I find myself eager to become a better programmer and to deepen my involvement. Work has changed from being a toad squatting on my life to something that makes me happy (although work/life balance is still sometimes tricky).

I’ve written elsewhere about my writing, how happy I am with that currently, and my creative plans for next year.

Reading back on last year’s post, I was complaining about the number of headaches I had. This year I have suffered far fewer. It looked like one of the main triggers was dehydration, which was easily fixed. This has been a huge improvement.

Things won’t be this good forever, but I hope they stay this way for a long time. But there are things I am looking to work on.

Social Media

I’ve been frustrated with social media for a long time but I continue to read it. It’s definitely not worth the time spent. I need to stop social media being a default activity when I open my laptop.

Social media no longer works for me as a way of communicating with people – particularly as most sites have now removed the option of receiving notifications via email. As soon as I visit the sites I’m distracted by the streams.

I do enjoy writing posts for social media and sharing photographs, but it’s hard not to get caught by the distraction machine. The only place that I don’t find too noisy is Mastodon. While this is a small network, I still find it satisfying – not least because the lack of an algorithm reduces the incentives for people to make engagement bait.

The main reason creatives give for not leaving social media is that it will limit their promotion – but given how bad some sites have become for this, I’m not convinced it’s a big loss.

I’ll still keep the accounts open, but try to reduce my check-ins to every few days.

Health and Fitness

I’m making progress with my fitness – I ended 2023 having put on a lot of weight over that year and removed it in 2024. My back and shoulders are less tight, feeling better than I ever imagined they could. I’m stronger and have more energy.

Having a gym membership and personal trainer has been an important commitment. But I don’t feel I’m getting value for money, particularly as the cost of living rises. I need to focus more on the training, making sure I am eating properly and doing exercise outside the gym.

One positive about the training is that my hip is getting stronger, which means I can get back to running. Obviously, I’d love to set an ambitious goal for 2025, but let’s pick something modest – I want to be doing regular 5k runs by the Summer.

Clutter and Burnout

I ended work in December feeling very burned out; and throughout the year I’ve pushed myself too hard. I need to find ways to use my energy more efficiently.

Part of this is just reducing the clutter in my life. I tidied my study after Christmas and suddenly everything felt much simpler. It’s easy to let things pile up and chaos seems to take a constant toll on me.

The other aspect of this is over-committing and stressing about this. I’ve decided to stop using a daily to-do list app, switching instead to weekly lists, allowing me a little more flexibility. I’m also going to try reducing the amount of things I commit myself to. The days I enjoy most are the ones I allow myself to float a little – which also tend to be the days that I achieve most.

I also want to spend a little more time disconnected from networks. Back in October I found waiting somewhere while low on phone battery. It was the first time I’d sat quietly in months – no devices, no notebooks. I was amazed at the thoughts that emerged and realised there was a part of myself that I had suppressed. I need to make more space for that.

So, in summary, my goals for 2025 are:

• Stop wasting time with social media
• Exercise outside the gym
• Build up my running
• Prioritise calm by reducing clutter and commitment

Update: I messaged the author on mastodon and have a link to the post. See below.

There’s a blog post I read around the turn of the century that’s stayed with me over the years. It was written by Andre Torrez, and was about how ideas are worthless in themselves. I’ve tried to find it a couple of times, but the only trace remaining is a section quoted on another blog.

…that’s what’s got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they’d like to do. Stop talking about it and just build it. Don’t make it too complicated. Don’t spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site…

That fragment doesn’t really demonstrate why this post proved so powerful to me. The rest of the post talked about how cheap ideas are. An idea that can be easily replicated has little worth – the value is in the execution. Founding up a start-up based on only an idea is pointless if someone with more money can reproduce and grow it faster than you ever could.

I spent a lot of time at technologies meet-ups, and sometimes you’d meet people who had their one big idea. And they’d refuse to discuss details because they didn’t want you ripping it off. But if their idea’s only strength was that nobody else knew it, then maybe it wasn’t all that valuable.

Update: I realised I’d never messaged Andre Torrez about the post and they found it on the wayback machine. The post is as good as I remember.

tldr; I’ve paid for several years of Jetpack backups, but when I needed them they didn’t work, and it was impossible to contact support for assistance. Jetpack are very efficient about billing the customer, less so about helping them.

Towards the end of July I decided to do some maintenance on my servers, and tried to upgrade Ubuntu. I made a foolish error and up replaced the GRUB bootloader config with the default settings. I tried my best to fix the server, but this was beyond me, so I made some backups of the recent data and reverted it to the last OS image I had (which was four years old).

I often remind people to take regular backups, but I should have paid more attention to my own. I used the ancient image I had to restore the basic set-up, dealing with some ‘interesting’ problems along the way, including debugging wordpress arcana. I figured that, once I had jetpack working with my wordpress install, I could simply restore the most recent backup.

This was not the case. Despite following the instructions on the jetpack site, the backups were failing with an unspecified error. I tried to contact support, given that I had a paid plan, but found no way to raise a ticket.

I’ve cancelled the annual subscription to Jetpack, but I had 10 months remaining on my last annual subscription payment. There’s a lesson here about testing backups rather than assuming they work. But, also, I am frustrated and annoyed that a company can take so much money without giving me any access to their support.

One thing that did work well was ChatGPT, which provides excellent guidance on working through problems. Fixing these issues would have taken even longer without that.

When I was young, I loved the Dennis Pennis interviews. Pennis was a character played by Paul Kaye who attended celebrity events and asked the stars unexpected, often insulting questions. This shattered the illusion of celebrity a little, showing how staged a lot of the other interviews were, and I found it fascinating.

I saw Pennis live once, when he was introducing the Prodigy at Glastonbury. When the band’s equipment failed, plunging the gig into silence, Pennis was sent on stage to entertain the crowd, which he did by singing Hebrew songs.

Notoriously, while Steve Martin was in the midst of a career slump, Pennis asked “How come you’re not funny any more”. Martin was asked about this in a recent Guardian interview:

Before I go, however, I mention that the line has come back to haunt Kaye: he has said it is now the one thing strangers say to him in the street. Hearing this, Martin tips back his head and lets out an almighty laugh, warm and rich, yet curiously lacking in schadenfreude.

I read John Salvatier’s post Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail some years back, and then couldn’t find it afterwards. It’s an amazing piece, which starts out looking at the subtle complexity of a ‘simple’ task, building a set of stairs. I found it again when it turned up on metafilter:

At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences… But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

It’s a thought-provoking piece of writing. Metafilter also linked to a good related post, Why everything might have taken so long

I read John Salvatier’s post Reality has a surprising amount of detail some years back, and then couldn’t find it afterwards. It’s an amazing piece, which starts out looking at the subtle complexity of a ‘simple’ task, building a set of stairs. I found it again when it turned up on metafilter:

At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences… But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

It’s a thought-provoking piece. The metafilter post also linked to another interesting post, Why everything might have taken so long

I’m subscribed to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files, where he answers questions from the public. Cave is frank and honest; many of the responses explore grief, with Cave sharing his experience of tragedy. He can also be playful, sometimes sanctimonious and pompous, but it’s amazing to see an artist being so open with his audience.

One particular quote has stuck in my head, from an April 2022 edition, where Cave from about cynicism:

Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils… Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like…keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

There are so many things in life that are choices that we pretend are not. People are driven into despair, but cynicism is an attitude, an approach to the world. It might not be as easy, but it is better to choose hope.

Metafilter recently linked to Thomas Whitwell’s List of 52 things learned in 2023. At number 8 was the specialness spiral:

A specialness spiral is when you wait for the perfect time to use something, then end up never using it at all. “An item that started out very ordinary, through repeated lack of use eventually becomes … seen more as a treasure”

I heard a story from my sister’s in-laws of a neighbour who kept all their best china on a dresser, rarely used. One day the dresser tipped over, broke everything and it was wasted. Then there’s a quote from Emma Burbeck, who wrote a list of things she wished she’d done differently. Among them, “I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.”

This is something I’ve been prone to, until I read Craig Mod quoting a friend of his about what to eat from your pack when hiking: “Always eat your best thing. That way you’re always eating the best thing you’ve brought.”

Saving the best for last seems a somewhat puritain attitude, and risks never getting to enjoy that thing.