Thomas RigbyModify

2026-07-10 15:38:59

Listening to AA Williams and feeling blown away. Gothic dark rock music. A slick and polished wall of bassy distorted guitars, solid drums, and plaintive piano leaving room for Williams' vocals that sit in that Tori Amos space. At times sweeping and epic, others painfully introspective — sometimes both in the same song. Try "Wolves" for a taste of what I mean.

Kiki Rockwell's "Faery Queen" (can't fault that old-timey spelling) is genuinely unsettling. The sequel to Faery King from "Eldest Daughter of an Eldest Daughter" brings muffled drums breaking into a Middle Eastern melody, the tempo shift with those *gasp* and WAIT! interjections that are a trademark at this point. And, oh lordy!, the rattle on the bass strings 😍

One of my favourite things with Bandcamp is "stacking" preferences to find obscure combinations. Which is how I discovered Irish Black Metal. Especially Primordial — a deliciously over-dramatic take on the genre. Imagine Gary Moore's black metal band covering Iron Maiden with Dick Valentine on vocals, that's "To Hell or the Hangman".

2026-07-10 02:57:17

Interface designers must have the same maxim as doctors: primum non nocere
Matt Gemmell

Time after time we hear the same stories; companies shipping radical new UI that alienates stalwart users, "Google changed Gmail and now my mum can't find anything", MacOS Tahoe.

While it's true that no-one ever got promoted for tackling technical debt, at some point surely someone has to take a stand against the mindless rabid pursuit of "line goes up at all costs"?

Then again… * side-eyes Copilot *

2026-07-08 23:13:20

Ashur has a lovely website and a brilliant eye for detail (look at the URL!). I have been replying to folks' blog posts every now and then over the years, notably in #JulyReply season so I jumped at this nice bit of design work.

Basically inspired by social media threads, Ashur added an indicator to relevant posts to show it's part of a series or an ongoing conversation. As the whole point of this World Wide Web thing is to connect and converse with other humans, I'm planning on doing quite a bit more of it in future.

With that in mind, I created a new reply post type that is a build on a standard post type. I added custom meta to house the details of the post I'm responding to and an "eyebrow" (I think that's the technical term) to the h1 to surface those details. You can see it in action at the top of this page!

Custom Frontmatter for post details

layout: reply
origin_title: "Adding UI for replies between blogs"
origin_author: "Ashur Cabrera"
origin_url: "https://multiline.co/mment/2026/07/adding-ui-for-replies/"

The Nunjucks markup to surface the details

{% if origin_url or origin_title or origin_author %}
<p class="credit">
<small
><i aria-hidden>📨</i> A reply to {%- if origin_title and origin_url and
    origin_author %}
<a href="{{ origin_url }}">&ldquo;{{ origin_title }}&rdquo;</a> by
<strong>{{ origin_author }}</strong>
    {%- elif origin_title and origin_url %}
<a href="{{ origin_url }}">&ldquo;{{ origin_title }}&rdquo;</a>
    {%- elif origin_title and origin_author %}
<em>&ldquo;{{ origin_title }}&rdquo;</em> by
<strong>{{ origin_author }}</strong>
    {%- elif origin_url and origin_author %}
<a href="{{ origin_url }}">this post</a> by
<strong>{{ origin_author }}</strong>
    {%- elif origin_title %}
<em>&ldquo;{{ origin_title }}&rdquo;</em>
    {%- elif origin_author %} a post by <strong>{{ origin_author }}</strong>
    {%- elif origin_url %}
<a href="{{ origin_url }}">this post</a>
    {%- endif -%}
</small>
</p>
{% endif %}
<h1>{{ origin_title | safe }}</h1>

I am 200% certain this isn't as elegant as Ashur's implementation but, if it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.

2026-07-07 04:56:10

In their article "Wanting to Write More", Toronto blogger Joshua Maynard, mentions feeling like they're running out of things to say here which, in all honesty, is something I've struggled with in the past too.

I have a couple of pieces of advice that may or may not be useful to Joshua or others.

Regularity

My most consistent posting on this website is my weeknotes which I've posted every Sunday for three years but my (occasionally daily) volume of posting actually started with Friday Random Ten — a low-stakes weekly (or whenever) "challenge" that made me rethink what my website was about.

And encouraged a cadence. The fixed structure of the post allowed me to add as little or as much personal flavour to it as I felt capable of doing without "breaking" the format.

Cringe

Kill not that part of you which is cringe but, instead, kill that part that cringes

This is where all that professional advice about just write comes in. I had a backlog of drafts seeking perfection and a knot of anxiety every time I opened my CMS because my blog was empty and my drafts were full and I didn't have the time or the skill or the words to bridge that gap.

So I didn't try. I reframed some of my posts, I posted some as they were. I got happy with publishing 200 word articles in my own tone of voice instead of trying to create in depth tutorials using Andy Bell's. The world already has an Andy Bell and he's better at it than I ever will be.

I have built up a few recurring post types that I like to draw on from time to time; New and new-to-me Music is a brief explanation of a band or song I heard in the week, #TIL is something I learned today and it doesn't matter what that's about (I even created an annual "blogging challenge" around sharing daily learning called #TILvember which I promptly failed at!), and The Five is a really simple listicle format — pick a topic and tell me about five things.

Conclusion

I think, in an internet of increasingly generated "content", the most important thing a personal website should be is personal. Fill it with you from cellar to attic; what are your opinions on, well, anything Tell me about a book you read, or a show you watched, or a game you played, or a bus ride you went on. Tell me in great depth or short staccato sentences skimming the surface. But, please… tell me.

I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly little grammars. You’re the only you there is.
Alice Bartlett, Week 407: Soho-mayo

2026-07-06 20:45:55

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual is a document written by the Office of Strategic Services (now CIA) in 1944. The manual was declassified in 2008.

The manual was used to train "citizen-saboteurs" in Nazi-occupied Europe because Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war effort of the enemy.

Below I have captured ten lines from the manual that seem to describe standard operating procedures for a corporation in 2026.

1. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do
2. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines
3. Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files
4. Prolong correspondence
5. Misfile essential documents
6. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done
7. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker
8. Let cutting tools grow dull. They will be inefficient, will slow down production, and may damage the materials and parts you use them on
9. Demand written orders
10. Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned

2026-07-06 03:48:19

29th June - 5th July

It's light at 5am, the memory of last night's thunderstorm still lingers in an overcast sky and fat wet raindrops falling from leaves to the ground with a slow. rhythmic. slap.

The birds are clearing their throats to begin the dawn chorus. The air smells wet.

On the walk down the dirt track around the bog, I see a clump of tall nettles completely covered in furry black caterpillars climbing over each other. Eventually they'll become tortoiseshell butterflies, dancing over the long grass that rings the wetlands.

A magpie, clearly displeased by my intrusion, barks a loud chakka-chakka that reverberates around the fields like a gunshot.

Picked up a couple of books at the charity shop that have been on my To Read list for a while. Not entirely sure how I haven't read "Eragon" before!

Midweek trip to the People's History Museum for a team away day. Laptops off, OOO's on, and exercises to help us plan better ways of working.

These things can be kind of lame, sorry not sorry, but our leadership team did a really good job of avoiding the dreaded "write buzzwords on Post-Its®" format and, I think, ably demonstrated that every discipline has something to offer at each stage of the project lifecycle.

Back of a fag packet maths one idle morning suggests I have around 100 followers of my RSS feed so thank you! Small numbers by Taylor Swift standards but more people than I've ever presented to in real life.

Whenever Thomas writes a book review, chances are quite high that said book goes immediately on my “to read”-list. Not only do I love the same books that Thomas does, I’m also in awe of his writing and website style.
Ruben Verweij, "Junited 2026"

Links of Interest™

• In the Moment
• Manchester accent study reveals the vowel that gives away your social class
• I bought a Sony Walkman
• Ode to the Kitchen Bath by Daniel Felsenthal
• The United States' 250th Birthday?
• 15 Things Every Dad Should Know How to Fix
• You’ll miss the soul when it’s gone