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“The mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.” John Cage

I’ve listened to music in slightly different ways to normal in the last nine months, but it’s still been a decent year for music. When I checked out my Spotify Unwrapped and my Last.fm reports, I had listened to more 2020 music than I thought.

Recently I’ve had cause to dig out some old photos. If I’m honest it’s made me sad. Sadder than I was expecting. There’s a quote from Nan Goldin that once felt like a warning but now just sounds like a sad statement of ongoing affairs:

I decided to create my own deck of creativity cards. I was sick of all the adverts for similar products on Instagram. You know the kind. They’re covered in pictures, patterns, and buzzwords. You shuffle the cards and draw them one at a time. As you place each card on the table, the brain’s natural desire to tell stories, create patterns and produce meaning takes over.

“He keeps biting me on the leg” says Ingrid one day as I mill around her desk during the new water cooler moment that is a comfort break on a Microsoft Teams call. I pat Martok, one of our cats, and he rubs up against me, pretending that he might nibble at me too.

This post explains some of the modifications I made to a minimal Jekyll theme to get this blog as I wanted it. This blog (currently) uses the excellent Sidey theme by Ronalds Vilciņš. His site looks eerily similar to this one, at least at time of writing.

While sprucing up this blog a bit during lockdown, I fell into reading my old posts about South America. I enjoyed it, mostly for the memories, but also because the current lockdown is warping my sense of time and space. Hours feel like weeks, but then I blink and a month’s gone by. I find myself traipsing similar orbits each day around the house, and then perhaps over to the supermarket or the park. There’s a palpable escapism to be had in reminiscing about South America and other places.

Over the course of a week on holiday, I started reading many interesting articles. In lockdown there isn’t much to do but read articles, but I still find myself not that good at finishing them. My phone has lots of tabs open and has become a Rolodex of shame. This post is to confess my sins.

Ingrid bought me a raspberry pi for my birthday. I’ve set it up to run the Pi-hole software. Pi-hole is a nifty bit of kit that intercepts your web requests and purges any that ask for material on known ad servers. Essentially it’s like having an ad blocker on your network rather than just your computer.

I read this book on holiday in Belgium last year. Having forgotten to pack a novel I scoured almost every book in the Waterstones at St. Pancras station before settling on this Booker prize winning novel by George Saunders.

Amanitore of Nubia is available in a base game DLC. She also has her own scenario “The Gifts of the Nile”, which like most scenarios has unique tech and civic trees. You need to assert your dominance over the Nile by building seven temples. The scenario combines faith and military tactics in a satisfying way and you can also play it as Cleopatra for a different perspective.

These are some things I jotted down one day last week, I’ll refine them a bit more later on. Think of it as an aide-memoire of things that work for me, your milage may vary.

• Don’t worry about things that haven’t happened.
• Don’t turn whatever has happened and/or is bothering you into a catastrophe, especially if no one else is telling you that it is one. Seek out someone you trust and ask them “is this a catastrophe?” Not only will they say no about 99.9% of the time, they will often tell you why it isn’t a catastrophe.
• The people who are important to you will not use your personal characteristics as a laundry list of personal failings in the same way that you do. In fact they won’t do it all. What you perceive as your own obvious and innate failings, others will often struggle to even see. Self awareness and hyper-awareness are two different things.
• There will be people who don’t like you, people who don’t think you’re good enough, and people who won’t give you a chance. They most likely intersect, meaning there are fewer of them than you might think. You don’t have to satisfy these people, only those who like you and support you. Most of all, you have to be good enough for you.
• Everybody has different needs and wants in life. Even though your needs and wants will often intersect with those of others, there is still no reason to use other people as the measure for what you should be getting out of life.
• A person has more depth and dimensions than are measurable. If you focus solely on a single metric when you measure yourself against some standard or goal, you will be wrong in some way or another. A qualified and multi-dimensional validation of your progress will give you a more nuanced and more supportive sense of where you are heading and how to correct yourself.
• Always focus on your capability. Regard potential as something to be shaped into capability.
• Take time to think about things in many different ways, employing both proven mental models and lateral thinking.
• Often problems are easier to tackle once you have been for a walk in the countryside.