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About eighteen years ago, I got a copy of Nicola Barker’s “Darkmans” for Christmas. It’s a hefty novel, one of those small runs where the ‘hardback’ is actually a paperback. I have the first edition and it’s ginormous. I read it at home because I couldn’t really take it anywhere.

But I got through it with the help of the following hack.

It’s been about 5 months now since the release of Civilisation VII and it’s starting to become a playable game. This is partly due to me getting used to it and partly the effect of quality of life patches and additional features.

At the time of writing, one way to demonstrate the illusory nature of LLM intelligence is to get one to try and answer a cryptic crossword clue.

“I’ve never had one fail” says my Dad brandishing his drill on Boxing Day 2022, before heading out into the garden and putting up our Christmas gift, a handsome wooden bird box. “If I put it up, they’ll come along eventually.”

I sometimes wonder if I picked the correct 808 State album for my understated classics series. That’s because today I was listening to their 1996 album Don Solaris and it’s pretty darn good. For understated classics I chose their earlier effort Gorgeous, partly out of the belief that probably no one else ever would, but also because 10X10 and Plan 9 are such total bangers.

I’ve been trying to settle on a text editor, IDE, and terminal for a long time now. Partly I’m limited by what I can use at work because I owe to myself and my colleagues to be able to reproduce all my skills in a work setting. However, part of me has also wandered off a bit after reading about the idea of a “personal Development Environment” (or PDE I guess, though in a former life that meant something very different), which is essentially an application where you can do anything and have it configured exactly how you like. Here’s an update on my progress on that front:

As part of getting the garden done, we’ve been out and about looking for trees. It’s quite exciting seeing in person all the trees we’ve discussed with our garden designer. Here are some of the species we’ve been looking at:

45 is Bill Drummond’s sort of memoir, albeit one with a hazy memory of the events most readers (myself included) are likely to be interested in. Drummond is/was one half of pop-pranksters The KLF, but 45 barely mentions them at all. There’s a lot about before (e.g. managing Echo and the Bunnymen in late-70s and early-80s Liverpool) and after (various shenanigans in the art world and attempting to relate to his children), some of that writing is very interesting. Nevertheless the whole lacuna of his pop heyday seems to punches a hole through the entire book.

In 2022, I invested in the big superdeluxe box for Wilco’s most successful album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. Across 11 pieces of ‘silver’ vinyl and one CD, the box set showed the tortuous process that Wilco went through to create that album. It’s a magnificent collection of music, though if you don’t like hearing multiple versions of the same song and are not fond of unfinished material, it’s not going to be as pleasant an afternoon as it is for me.

Yesterday I pulled everything out of our shed and we took the stuff we didn’t need down to the dump. No one likes going to the dump, but it was strangely cathartic. It’s due in part to letting go of things from the past, but also the fact that I haven’t felt up to much lately. It ended up being a sunny afternoon so it was a pleasant walk back after we dropped off the hire car.

Here are some more stats about the blog after I ran out of time yesterday due to data cleaning! This time I’ve taken the date of each post and extracted the month and year. Then I added the number of posts in each month and the number of words written. I had to left join on the complete time span between August 2010 and February 2025, filling in any NA values for the zeros that were missing before I did that.