posts

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.

Here’s of graph of how the number of posts and the total word count on mattischrome has evolved over the years:

It’s still quite wintry outside, especially in the wind. We’re having to make do with daffodils indoors to brighten our day. They’re being kept in the ensuite because the cats keep knocking them over.

This is record one of nine from the new “A Ghost Is Born” superdeluxe edition. I was hoping to write a review tonight but I haven’t managed to listen to it all yet!

If you are thinking about making your own blog, here are some links to help you on your way.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is out today to much fanfare. After spending what top scientists are calling “far too long” playing Civ VI and a couple of run-throughs of the new game during the early access period, here are some thoughts on the new instalment.

I bought a Barbara Hepworth calendar in the sale at the Tate Modern shop that I thought was a steal until I realised it was a 2024 calendar, not a 2025 one! However, the joke’s on them because I only have to wait until 2029 for the next year that starts with a Monday.

Unfortunately, unlike 2024, 2029 is not a leap year. This means all the days of the week would be wrong from March 1st onwards. It gets worse! The next two years that start on a Monday are 2035 and 2046, both of which quite obviously fail to be leap years.

Oh dear…

I recently watched the entry about Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album “So” in the Classic Albums series on Amazon Prime. It was an entertaining way to fill an evening hour.

I absolutely love “So”. I came to its songs via the “Secret World Live” album, and it was “Red Rain” specifically that convinced me of his greatness. Previously, I’d been aware of “Sledgehammer” (also on this album) and “Steam” (from the similarly titled “Us”), but “Red Rain” really captured my imagination.

Writing a blog post every day is not essential. It’s not part of some new year’s resolution, despite the fact that the start of this unbroken streak of posts was January 1st. If anything my new year’s resolution has been to try and step gently away from my perfection. And the adoption of that resolution began in the middle of 2024 rather than new year’s day.

The problem with keeping up a blog streak for however many days it is now is that you don’t actually get a huge amount of time to think of ideas for posts and actually write them. Ironically, I’ve been thinking about this post for a while though.