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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.

Doves are a band from Manchester who traded dance music for rock yet never left their former genre behind. Starting out as Sub Sub, they scored a worldwide hit in 1993 with “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)”: a timeless dance tune that immediately owns whatever room it plays in. However, subsequent releases by Sub Sub did not catch on and people started to think of the band as a one-hit wonder.

Alexander of Macedon is available in a base game DLC pack alongside Darius of Persia. He also has his own scenario “The Conquests of Alexander”, which is both fun to play and instructive in how to use the formidable benefits of his bonuses and unique units.

Let’s write a guide for all the leaders in Civ 6! It’s a nice writing project and I seem to have plenty of time on my hands. For playing Civ VI that is, writing a post for every leader might be another matter…

Anyway, let’s start with one of my favourites: Hojo Tokimune of Japan.

I haven’t written one of my monthly album digests for over a year. The reasons mostly boil down to a lack of time and motivation but other factors include the changing way in which I listen to music. I bought more albums on vinyl and only a small proportion of those were recently released music. Meanwhile, the attractions of Spotify’s release radar proved too great to resist: it is a very convenient way to consume new music.

I managed to read all of the foundation novels since I wrote about the first one. In this post, I’ll write about the next two, which covers the original trilogy of ‘novels’ created from the original short stories. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers.

Ingrid and I love playing Civ VI. It’s a fine game that improves on previous versions, adding many layers and mechanics that mean you can vary your playing style. In fact, with the recent Gathering Storm expansion there’s now an incredible variety of ways to play. The 39 leaders to play with both reflect and provide the game’s increased complexity. Each leader has a slightly different mechanic that influences how you play the game, and of course the leaders you are up against also affect your game play. You can pick leaders to go up against that will make your game easier or harder. Some leaders can even be an existential threat if you spawn near to them and, as I’ve learned the hard way, it’s not always the leaders you expect that cause these problems.

Back in 2012 I wrote a post listing my ambitions for the future. Well it’s the future now isn’t it? Almost. After all, I’m a whole new person now. Anyway it’s probably time to take stock. Have I achieved any of them? Have any of my ambitions changed? What’s replaced the things that I’ve decided not to worry about? What has come after the things I managed to do?

Here are some recipe book recommendations. A good set of recipes can provide you with many a project for a rainy day.

Five years ago I set out at 3am for Heathrow airport to catch the early morning flight to Madrid. There I connected with a flight to Quito in Ecuador. The previous days and weeks had been fraught with worry about whether I was doing the right thing. Did I get the right vaccinations? Would I have enough money? Would I cope with all that travel? Was I coming back? What was I going to do with all my stuff?

“The Overstory” by Richard Powers piqued my interest among the novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And once again the book that interested me most did not win. One year I will succeed in my prediction!

For our first anniversary we decided to exhange books. What better way to celebrate a paper anniversary? Ingrid bought me the entire Foundation saga, most of which were reissued in fancy new paperback designs by Mike Topping in 2016. All save for 1993’s Forward The Foundation that is, but Ingrid got me a copy anyway. Hence, here is a new series of blog posts!