2026-09-14 03:49:04
I spent the bulk of the week struggling through a TJ Klune novel. There's nothing wrong with it — it's well-written with an interesting premise — it's just not clicking with me at the moment. So I made the difficult decision to just stop reading it.
I don't often DNF books, but there have been a couple of occasions recently. Like when I picked up "The Left Hand of Darkness" on holiday, and it just wasn't a good fit.
That's been demonstrated by starting to read "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" and blasting through more in one evening than I did in an entire week of the other novel.
I hopped on a call with a colleague earlier this week to get onboarded into a service blueprint project. They asked how my day was going, and I instinctively glanced at my notebook — on the desk next to me — to find "Wednesday" written at the top of the page and nothing else.
Turns out I've been too busy to even write a task list.
Service blueprints are an interesting artefact to work on because, as we know, the closer you get to delivery, the more complexities are uncovered. Trying to document everything in detail before you start building is a fool's errand.
But also, part of the purpose of a document like this, when you present it to a client, is not so much what we're going to do, but that we know what we're doing — it's there to instill confidence.
Reviewing a document like this from a technical standpoint is an interesting exercise too, because you can see where other people's confidence areas are by the level of detail that's been put in certain places, and where things are a bit thinner.
A lot of the task has been about structuring the document — organising the flow and specifically wording tasks so that it's detailed enough to instill confidence, but vague enough not to get bogged down in detail that's likely to change once we get to implementation.
It's a fine line to walk but I feel like we achieved that by the end of the session. I'm looking forward to seeing the final flows when I get back next week.
One of the interesting things about having children is that when your kid makes friends with another kid, you kind of have to meet the owners1. That happened this weekend — we had a playdate/pizza party which, despite a little trepidation, was actually really, really good fun. Nice people, I liked it.
Me and the dad got talking about System of a Down. He told me a story about how, a few weeks ago, he went to see them and lost his wristband in the mosh pit, and got thrown out by security. In turn, I told him a story about how I had tickets to see them when they supported Slipknot on their first UK tour, back in 2001 — but the gig was postponed because of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, and System of a Down being flagged as persona non grata over their (alleged) anti-American views.
I usually say my Silent Sunday images have no people in them. This one does because sticking to the rules isn't very punk.
1: © Dylan Moran
2026-09-11 16:22:02
Welsh metalheads Dream State dropped a new single of sparkling synths cut through with dirty guitar and Jessie's voice builds from naive cut glass to the shrieking of avenging angels — "Forever in View".
From the warping bass opening note to the sustained wash synth that closes "I've Never Felt So Hated", Chloe Slater pulls out something a bit darker than her last couple of singles. Maturing into her sound comfortably.
A new EP from Emma Blackery is always welcome. Four tracks in that inimitable style that hovers in the Venn intersection of "bedroom indie pop", "Warped Tour", and "Cure labelmates", "Shame" will likely be an insta-buy for her fanbase.
Crawlers "Cool" pairs a sludgy bass line with a furious staccato delivery that brings to mind Zach de la Rocha.
Pink Turns Blue are one of those bands I really should have heard of before now. 1987's "I coldly stare out" is sublime; a post-punk masterpiece.
The Warning comprises three Mexican sisters serving sleazy metal-adjacent poppy alt-rock. Confident and pleasant enough, "Why Do You Like It When I Cry?" from their latest album is a good introduction.
Pig, not to be confused with Pigface, Apes Pigs and Spacemen, or Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, are a NIN-adjacent industrial act from London town. "The Merciless Light" (and cleverly named remix album "The Merciful Night") are exactly what you'd expect from my description: glitchy, sleazy, distorted but accessible industrial. Shades of Marilyn Manson and Depeche Mode.
Luckily Traitrs exist for everyone who's wondered what it would sound like if Robert Smith fronted Editors and listened to a lot of And One. Brand new album "Possessor" wears its influences on its sleeve but that's no bad thing.
LA nu-grunge outfit wilt's "bundy" is so very Nirvana making them the Dead Sara it's OK to still like.
Angie McMahon has a solid line in bold Aussie cabaret pop that put me in mind of Carol Hodge (affectionate). "Light, Dark, Light Again" is introspective and vulnerable with an undercurrent of defiance and quiet feminine strength.
2026-09-07 03:53:12
There's a cardboard box full of apples by the side of the road with a crudely hand-lettered sign that makes a Mickey of design. It reads "Free Apples" — a gift from a neighbour to the neighbourhood. I briefly feel guilty for having not shared any of my windfalls. They were delicious.
A large chunk of the working week has been around evaluating, crawling, and saving websites. One of the things we do is content and site audits — things like SEO, site stability, and content consistency — to try and find content gaps or where clients are using content on website A that could be repurposed for website B, for example.
Some of this has historically been done manually. Any automation is usually an API hit to the website, with lots of disparate, myriad tools compiled together into a report at the end.
I've been looking at making a lightweight, automated first pass to try and do a lot of this in one go using deterministic principles. Also trying to do a lot of it offline as well, so we can crawl an initial data set and then query it at a later date without having to rely on the everyone else's uptime.
I found quite an interesting local site crawler that does a big chunk of the initial content pull, and I'm folding that into the pipeline I've been building. It's been a very interesting piece of work, quite all-consuming. It's been nice to be in the thick of code-writing for some considerable period of time.
Bats are out in force tonight. Whenever I see them, I'm reminded that we used to think bat sonar was incredible and infallible, that they'd never bump into anything, but it was really only because our night vision cameras weren't up to much. Now we've got much better cameras, we see the little bastards bump into all sorts of things — themselves, trees… everything.
A nice little reminder of why scientific theories are called "theories" no matter how proven they are. Everything is only based on what you're capable of measuring at this particular moment in time.
Everything seemed both endless and immediate
Victoria Aveyard, "Fate Breaker"
2026-09-01 19:18:02
Happy September!
Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.
2026-08-31 04:03:12
The combination of a giant honey-coloured moon and distant light pollution reflecting off the sparse cloud cover means, even without streetlights, it's just about light enough to walk at night without a torch.
An electrical storm fakes midday in half second bursts while divine chariots rumble across the firmament. I'm working late, punching broken code and thinking of off-grid spoon whittling, and get a front row seat from my desk.
By morning the rain has come. Everything is quiet and calm and cold, just the wet slap of rain on the leaves. There's an angry or distressed squirrel in a tree making a noise like a human newborn — quite disturbing.
The local artisan market has had the worst luck with the weather this year; unprecedented heatwave after unprecedented heatwave but rain every last Sunday of the month.
I bought a grey cotton jacket from a charity shop that my wife says I'll never wear. It's really comfortable so, partly out of stubborn spite, I wear it indoors. We open the patio doors when the thunder rolls over again, torrential rain drumming on the decking and soaking the kitchen floor. It's heavenly.
Restless spirits like goat – this is what her Grandmother would say. They enjoy the blood-letting of the meat. And, when someone has died too early, it’s best to cook a curry to show your respect, the spirits may have a difficult journey.
Imani Thompson, "Honey"
2026-08-30 15:27:56
Air France Flight 006 lands in America in March. The exact same plane lands again in June — same pilot, same crew, same passengers. The military calls in a bunch of scientists to try and figure out what is going on. Given the time difference, all the passengers have doubles, all the crew have doubles. The March landers have three months of unique experiences.
It questions the very nature of what it means to be an individual — deeply philosophical, very heavy. Content warnings for death, suicide, child abuse, and religiously motivated murders.
It's an extremely literary book, by a well-read author and/or talented researcher. But as wild as the story gets, as fanciful the prose, it always felt believable. A big shout out to the translator for keeping some je ne sais quoi that meant, despite being in English, it read very French.
The delivery — the narration — feels unusual to me. It's like an observer describing scenes to the reader, not a traditional third-person point of view. It came across a little bit like “meet Stan” from the Eminem video, and might be a clue to the solution. But, then again, I am not too proud to admit: I did not understand the ending.
Heavy, deep, inconclusive. Really well written but a more challenging read than I'm used to.