2026-07-02 20:40:27
We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40
Auntie Beeb
Just reading an article about the FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) movement and I have Opinions™. First, my obligatory declaration that I'm not talking about you.
The headline centres around a couple who big up their coupon clipping and explain how they charge their phones away from home. The BBC skims over their actual salaries with Aside from their good incomes
which is a significant aside; he is a self-employed lifestyle coach and she works in the financial industry.
The other story outlined in the article similarly buries the lede under frugality. An American from Texas retires decades earlier than the average retirement age –lauded for her ability to do so– which she did by moving to countries like Japan and Singapore to take advantage of high wages in private education, living frugally, sharing expenses with a housemate, and then retiring to Bali to exploit their low cost of living.
All of which seems to ignore the fact that most people are not capable of doing this, for many, many, many reasons.
Immanuel Kant posited if it's not possible for absolutely everybody to do it, then it has moral and ethical imperfections. It's simply not possible for the entire world to migrate to areas of high wages, stockpile cash, and then flood areas with low cost of living to exploit the dynamic there. It's simply not possible.
The article also places great weight on the FIRE community's belief that living frugally is the key. Actually, the key there is stockpiling wealth, and a primary component of FIRE, as I understand it, is investments. It's passive income — making money in your sleep. This is a strategy blending financial nous and some degree of luck as The value of your shares can go down as well as up
.
We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40
doesn't fully explain the mechanics; yes, living below your means but also well paid to begin with and investing the difference between income and outgoings.
I have myself lived frugally for my entire life; no expensive cars or lavish trips, no ostentatious jewellery or latest tech. Plenty of secondhand, factory seconds, and charity shop purchases. I've rented for most of my life. I've worked well-paying jobs, nothing incredible. No investments. I've lived a largely average life.
I never managed to stockpile cash in a way that would allow me to retire in my forties.
2026-07-01 03:49:04
Inspired, as so many are, by Robert, I'm going to attempt #Junited2026 — sharing one link to another blogger every day to celebrate some of the excellent writing out there.
I may not make it but we can but try.
This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed to read. You are invited to visit and decide for yourself what belongs on these shelves. Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it
Dua Lipa to open library of banned and censored books in Portugal by Laura Molloy at NME
We’ve had a decade of being told that the problems in our lives are caused by people who are different from us. That the NHS is broken because of immigrants. That your kids can’t get jobs because of DEI. That society is being undermined by trans people using the wrong toilets. None of it stands up to scrutiny, but scrutiny requires energy, and it’s much easier to be angry at someone visible.
I Tip Toe, But Should I? by Pete Carr
But hate speech isn’t free speech. It demands violence against marginalized people. There is no “both sides” to it. It’s not okay to “fundamentally disagree” on it. If you are a company who earns income, and that income is funneled to a fascist political party, it is absolutely part of your mission. Even if it’s turning a blind eye to a teammate with whom you disagree.
If Your Company Funnels Money to Fascists, You’re a Fascist Company by Mark Wyner
I’m unaware of any circumstance where
<div role="button">should ever be used over a<button>. Before you tell me you can’t edit your React component library, do the web a favour and delete your codebase.
ARIA, anti-patterns, and you by David Bushell
The modern web is not designed for reading, as reading requires brain power - and the brain power is what internet moguls can't control.
Internet works best in small dosages by Michal Sapka
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: discovery and alpha is best when there’s good synchronicity of thought on a team. Like when you’re on an acid trip and everyone’s having similar thoughts. Not full unity, just great alignment.
The Broad Bean by Steve Messer
I quite like what Verlyn has to say about cutting longer sentences into shorter ones because I’ve always struggled with the need to show off in my writing, to prove I can write a sentence that never stops. Verlyn argues this is due to fear and maybe that’s true. Perhaps I’m afraid to put a full stop somewhere because it’s hard and I’m an undisciplined writer, because I fear that folks will stop reading if each and every sentence doesn’t do a backflip-720-no-scope
Several short sentences on writing by Robin Rendle
I believe plain language can be just as effective as beautifully written prose, and so I’ve always loved his work for the brevity. He’s an ideas guy; the plain writing on the surface gives way to some complex philosophical ideas and themes.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick by Alice at The Wallflower Digest
Please don’t “use AI to polish” your blog posts. It makes them sound like every other blog post on the internet and therefore makes them very boring to read. I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly little grammars. You’re the only you there is.
Week 407: Soho-mayo from The website of Alice Bartlett
London traffic is so much less aggressive than Berlin. The worst I’ve seen is an electric motorcycle on a towpath (if you do this, you’re a dick), but unlike Berlin, car drivers and cyclists don’t seem to want to deliberately run you over.
Weeknotes 2026 W25: Abandoned by Denis Defreyne
In town I walk past a shop that self-describes as a “Tattoo, piercing and welding studio”. I wonder what I’d get welded on. A spare arm probably, or a pair of heat resistant tongs, which may be more useful?
15 – 20 June 2026 by DW at Walknotes
Musea have always felt like churches to me. Not only because of the often imposing architecture, but also because of the reverence I felt for the art or knowledge on display.
The next best thing to actually visiting a museum by Ruben Verweij
the fundamental difference was that those arguing for “responsible ‘AI’ adoption” had accepted “AI” as inevitable and I had not. […] Except in cases where your boss forces you to use “AI” or be fired, it is entirely possible to eschew the use of these tools today.
Everywhere Foist Upon Us by darthmall.net
It's probably for the best though that I don't have a time machine, because in every time period other than the modern age, meaning the last two or three hundred years, I would very likely be dead within days, if not hours after arriving, because I have absolutely zero survival skills.
Re: If I could be transported back by Andreas from 82MHz
As photographers, we’ve all been there. A severe lack of inspiration and/or enthusiasm. This, of course, can put you off wanting to head out with your camera. When you begin to smash up the routine and rule book, it’s a) a whole lot more fun and b) going to open up a lot more opportunities.
Photography as a Distraction by Mike Hindle
What most teams call collaboration is actually coordination. You divide the work up, each person goes off and does their piece, and then you review each other’s output. That’s not collaboration. Collaboration is working on the same problem together, at the same time, building on each other’s thinking in real time.
The case for real collaboration by Mike Bowler
Mac’s a children’s writer and in Make Believe he argues that these books aren’t a silly genre, they’re a form we should treat seriously and respect. Meaning, books for children aren’t a lesser kind of literature simply because they’re for children.
Make Believe by Robin Rendle
I've spent a lot of time lately digging through my own digital photographs - I was on the lookout for photos with interesting glitches or degredations - and I ended up getting sucked in to the sheer amount of photos I have of things that aren't actually worth keeping[…]They're not good and they're not useful, and they're not pictures of things I care about. And yet, I didn't want to delete them, which I thought was a curious feeling to have about pictures of nothing.
Album of Nothing by Frances Berriman
Things that would have been tweets back in the olden times.
• Spotify have reverted back to their original app icon. I know the reason for the disco ball one, but it was just awful.
Shorts by Kevin Spencer
The council and the press release suggest that Blackpool’s crime statistics are “slightly skewed” due to the high volume of visitors compared to the residential population Blackpool has approximately 145,000 residents but is visited by an estimated 23 million people annually. However, no analysis or formal breakdown has been provided, and none could be given on request either, showing how many recorded offences involve visitors versus residents. The claim that crime rates are distorted by tourism therefore remains an assertion without verifiable evidence in the publicly available documents.
Blackpool crime “falling”, but key figures are unverified by Adam Green at North West Bylines
We are, after all, authors on a quest, world building our own habitat in the ether between the ones and zeros, looking to connect with other like minded people.
Be Authentic by Alexandra Woolfe at Wry Writer
After mentioning this idea of somehow being able to authenticate the source of a photo, I’ve implemented and tested the idea. Here is an update on the project.
Photography Chain of Custody Experiment #2 by Cedric at Photoni.st
The characters were three dimensional – all with hopes met or dashed, and their flaws brutally exposed.
Funny, sad, tense, depressing, exciting, and satisfying. Also v long.
Middlemarch by George Eliot by felix.gripe
I started to notice how there’s an awful lot of near-future brand names and corporations and such like. Snacks like AnooYoo bars. Walk-in cosmetic surgery SnipNFix and NooSkins. Ersatz beverages like Happicuppa. Big pharma corporations like HelthWyzer. Takeaway treats like SoyOBoy Burgers. GMO fast foods like ChickiNobs Bucket O’Nubbins.
A Wombat’s Anus by futuromaniac
I watched a video review of Dirty Dancing yesterday that talked about how well it’s held up. They pointed out how the film values abortion as healthcare, that it doesn’t vilify Penny’s decision and also doesn’t vilify sex (it’s a pretty sex-positive movie), and that the class commentary is insightful and sensitive.
Dirty Dancing is still a great movie by Hollie
The physical act of framing and taking images with a phone just does not feel right. I know I am in a dwindling minority here. Humanity loves taking photos like this. But I don’t.
On Using a Proper Camera by Florian Ziegler
Sighted people have a casual, almost dismissive, relationship with the weather; they glance out the window or check an app. The weather is a visual fact; a piece of data. For me the weather isn't data — it's a symphony…
The Acoustic Signature of Weather by Robert Kingett
There was a couple of buskers, one guy with a guitar doing pop covers and my favourite busker, the Pan Pipe player from Ecuador. It's always a pleasure to hear music from the Andes Mountains of South America in Wigan. Wigan might be an old mining town, but the place is quite cosmopolitan at times.
Frugal Film Project 2026 - Compact - May by Jim Graves
Then there's AI. Sigh. I'm currently on a job hunt and I considered this time to be perfect to get a better grip on vibe-coding, vibe-designing, vibe-everything—the things that my future job will expect me to be good at. But at the mere thought of the "new way of doing things", I recoil. I've been having my objections with big tech for years—that's just who I am: looking for software alternatives, swimming against the stream, thinking maybe a little too much about how we use software in general. I haven't found a way to fit AI into my way of being a user.
Drowning in the City by niqwithq
The idea that a great photograph is created in a single, perfectly-timed instant is both deeply appealing and fundamentally wrong. Stepping into the world and courting serendipity may yield a beautiful accident, but pressing the shutter is only the beginning. The real work begins later, when those frames return from the field to the sorting table, where photography becomes art.
The Myth of Intent in Photography by David M. M. Taffet
2026-06-29 04:08:11
Midsummer. Summer Solstice. The start of Summer. The beginning of H1. The end of Q2. Whatever you want to call it, we've hit the halfway point. Week 26. And, as some of you in the UK may be aware, it's a tad warmer than usual. Maybe now you'll turn your TV off instead of standby… 👀
Work has been…challenging. A project I have been working on for months has, unexpectedly, changed scope massively after a metaphorical spanner in the works from the client's legal department. Cue a week of furiously revisiting our entire technical plan to rearchitect the whole platform without having to bin everything.
The C-Suite gave us all an optional Work From Home day to replace a mandatory In Office day because of the heat. Some of the team went in to take advantage of the aircon, I stayed home to avoid having to deal with the absolute joke that is the British public transportation system in any kind of weather outside the norm.
The washing machine we bought recently is playing up already. It sounds like a bracket has worn through and the drum moves a little more than it should. This results in a passable imitation of a jet engine at higher spin cycles. The repair guy has been contacted and we're waiting for a slot. Luckily(?) the heatwave has meant less dependency on spinning water out of clothes before hanging them to dry!
I discovered a fantastic new band this week. I will write about it in more detail later but I'm thoroughly torn; they have three excellent albums on Bandcamp — I intend to buy all of them but which to buy first‽
2026-06-24 04:47:54
This book is simply incredible — epic in its scale; a scale matched only by the darkness of the veil, the brief glimpses you get of its vastness. Like soft wan milky starlight illuminating the corners and edges of a building so enormous you can't quite comprehend its size.
This is what Le Guin does so well. I read once that if you write 600 pages, somebody will read 600 pages. But if you write a thousand pages and edit it down to 600, they will read a thousand pages — because they will still feel those 400 invisible pages. Because they're there.
What Le Guin has done in "The Left Hand of Darkness" is build an entire universe outside of Gethen. But at the same scale, she has built the entire world of Gethen itself: its customs, its practices, its language, its history. So much is told, shown, and revealed to the reader in drips and drops.
As an underlying thread throughout, the book's subversion of gender norms is extremely interesting. The Gethenian people inhabit an almost permanently sexless state, entering into a period of sexual activity on a lunar cycle — which in some ways mimics menstrual cycles on Earth. But by taking masculinity and femininity out of the equation entirely, Le Guin simply shows us what humans are like.
She's not saying "look at these strange alien creatures, so very different to us", she says "look at these strange alien creatures, who are so very similar to us".
The two kingdoms we're exposed to through the book — Karhide and Orgoreyn — clearly mirror two distinct forms of government.
Karhide comes across as quite feudal: ruled by a king, castle-dwelling, with a domesticated town life that feels quite medieval — until electricity and vehicles are introduced. It is a society that is technologically advanced but socially quite retrograde written with warmth not disdain.
We are not a sophisticated people
Therem Harth re ir Estraven, Prime Minister of Karhide
Orgoreyn, by contrast, carries Soviet parallels that are really quite overwhelming; mandatory state employment, communal living, the bureaucracy, the Gulag, the Inspectors, the constant checking of papers.
Given the book's original publication date in the late 1960s and the unfavorable Communist framing of Orgoreyn, I tried to see Karhide as the US side of a Cold War allegory but it didn't read like that to me.
Without going into enough detail to introduce spoilers, this is a book of two halves.
The first half reads like a gentle court melodrama — think Bridgerton, or Hilary Mantel at her most genteel — following the Envoy as he speaks to various councillors and statespeople to convey his message of interplanetary solidarity.
Then an event occurs. And the book changes direction, tone, and intensity entirely.
This is a book about friendship and communication and vulnerability and love. A mirror for our own hope and fear written with timeless beauty by an absolute titan of the genre.
2026-06-22 17:52:15
Thanks to James over on the Coffee Blog for this pure noughties nostalgia quiz — Blogger Archetype Quiz.
I answered the ten simple-ish questions and was duly informed of my archetype; shared below.
What I love about these quizzes, as I have said before, is discovering the similarities between people of such differing demographics.
Thanks, James!
You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next.
The web is not just its pages, but the connections between pages. You have internalised this and love spending your time exploring the web and sharing what you find with the world.
Now it's your turn! Take the quiz and share your results
Get in touch by email, hit me up on the Socials™, or elsewhere online.
Or, better yet, write an article on your own blog and send me the link 🥰
2026-06-22 16:21:37
Ansel Adams is one of the world's most famous landscape photographers with an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society and photographs blasted into space as a record of human artistic greatness.
He famously documented the stunning vistas of Yellowstone National Park; timeless renders of unsullied prehistoric landscapes.
My attempt is like ordering an Ansel Adams off Wish but I'm starting to work out how to capture his dramatic skies.