posts

Summer 1954 is a pair of one-act plays by Sir Terrence Rattigan that are currently being performed together at the Chichester Festival Theatre. I really enjoyed both plays.

Ian MacDonald’s “Revolution in the Head” is a book that I’ve read parts of dozens of times and even all the way through once or twice. I picked it up again today and thought I would write about it. It’s a detailed analysis of every Beatles song ever released, along with the details and events of their recording. I own a copy of the second edition which was updated to include the anthology material. Today you can still get hold of a 3rd edition on the Waterstones website (not sure that I like the new cover though).

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!