2026-04-02 00:51:43
Happy April!
Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.
2026-04-01 15:56:10
Julia Donaldson is one of the most prolific authors of children's books ever. She writes poems for kids using the same "bouncy" anapestic meter as Dr Seuss and collaborates with artists to bring these tales to life. One of the most popular collaborations is with Axel Scheffler; a partnership that has seen their work translated from page to screen by Magic Light Pictures animation studio every Christmas for the last decade.
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.
Spoilers
This is an analysis not a review so plot points will be discussed in detail.
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 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.
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.
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.
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".
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)
2026-03-30 03:50:55
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!
2026-03-28 05:04:44
Sol Seppy has a fucken cool name and, on debut album "The Bells of 1 2", sounds a bit like Jenny Lewis crossed with Lily Allen singing on dark and moody trip hop beats with slow hoover rave.
"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".
2026-03-23 17:29:03
I have a dilemma;
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
2026-03-22 15:59:13
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.
| Common Name | Scientific Name |
|---|---|
| European Robin | Erithacus rubecula |
| Eurasian Blackbird | Turdus merula |
| Common Woodpigeon | Columba palumbus |
| Mistle Thrush | Turdus viscivorus |
| Eurasian Wren | Troglodytes troglodytes |
| Common Chiffchaff | Phylloscopus collybita |
| Greylag Goose | Anser anser |
| Carrion Crow | Corvus corone |
| Eurasian Blue Tit | Cyanistes caeruleus |
| House Sparrow | Passer domesticus |
| Song Thrush | Turdus philomelos |
| Rook | Corvus frugilegus |
| Common Pheasant | Phasianus colchicus |
| European Greenfinch | Chloris chloris |
| Great Spotted Woodpecker | Dendrocopos major |
| Pied Wagtail/White Wagtail | Motacilla alba |
| Canada Goose | Branta canadensis |
| Eurasian Siskin | Spinus spinus |
| Goldcrest | Regulus regulus |
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"