posts

An album that arrived a bit too late to be considered in the best of the year list, Strawberry Hotel by Underworld is a solid effort. Their 11th album, it remarks their return to the format after five years after the Drift series in 2019.

One of the absurd barriers to writing regularly is that my new post script is written to open the new markdown file in Neovim and until this week I had no idea how to type a hashtag (which markdown uses for headers) in this editor.

We had great success with our sticky toffee pudding as a Christmas Day dessert. It’s a hybrid of a recipe by Jamie Oliver, one that we found in a gluten free cookbook, and one for a make-ahead pudding by the hairy bikers.

Around this time last year, I wrote in praise of writing a diary. I also rather misanthropically referred to it as a “negativity casket” because I found that I was pouring a lot of negative feelings into the notebook. It’s not really a diary as such because I don’t write everyday and I also make other non-diaristic notes, but it does appear to have been something of a process that has helped me to work through my negative feelings.

I’m having trouble finding something to write about today. Partly the problem of having a productive weekend of doing things rather than ruminating on blog topics. So unfortunately, we get another space-filling post.

I’ve written some guides about how to play as various leaders in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, covering Hojo, Alexander, Amanitore, and Qin in his Mandate of Heaven persona. I’m pretty sure I also wrote a guide to Gorgo at some point but all I can find are game screenshots I took one of the times that I played as her.

Having recently completed my review of 2024’s best albums, I’ve been reflecting on what a strange year it was for me in terms of the music I listened to. According to my Last.fm annual report, I listened to 51% more music in 2024 compared with 2023 (and 2023 was itself a peak listening year). Moreover, I listened to 709 artists, of which 37% were new discoveries. I listened to over 2 albums a day apparently, with Acopia being the album I listened to most often. Apparently I was the 11th top listener on Last.fm of my number 1 album of the year Letter to Yu by Bolis Pupul.

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever been given about how to tackle programming problems is to treat your code as comments that describe your program to the computer, whilst the comments that are there for humans to read should tell them how the program is supposed to work.

Getting back to my occasional album revisits, I’d like to consider the 2021 Parquet Courts album “Sympathy For Life”. This is partly because I own it on vinyl and put it on the other day while I was doing some rather humdrum data downloading at work. It’s that kind of album, quite loose and jam-based.

This is a weekly lifter of spirits during the winter months!

In searching for something to write about today, I wondered whether I had ever written about Pilates on this blog before. I modified the search of my posts from yesterday’s post to look for the word Pilates I could have also just used CMD+F in Visual Studio Code, but where’s the fun in that? and it only came up once in a post about revisiting my ambitions ten years on.

I asked: