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Yard Act are a post-punk band from Leeds. “Where’s My Utopia?” is their second album. I first encountered Yard Act in a review of this album, which sent me to look at the excellent video to their non-album single “The Trenchcoat Museum”. I enjoyed the metatextual references both in the video and the song, so I eagerly added “Where’s My Utopia?” to my library.

A nice feature I added to this blog in its recent update was a tags page. With the help of this very useful discourse thread and some additional CSS tweaks, the resulting page is something that I am very happy with. It lists all of the tags that apply to any post, along with the number of posts with that tag, in alphabetical order. It’s mostly intended as a guide for you the reader, to help you see whether your preoccupations match my own.

A hardback book called “The Satsuma Complex” is all that remains of a mysterious young lady that young lawyer Gary is chatting up in the pub one night. It’s a book that everyone reckons is “a bit sh*t”. But Gary’s moping about after the Satsuma lady doing a runner while he was in the loo will have to be put on hold when his friend turns up dead.

Welcome to the new look for my blog. I’ve had my eye on a more minimal look for a while now. Whether this new look is successful or not depends on how often I write new posts. To that end, this theme also supports a separate (or almost separate) stream of photos. Once I’ve got back in to the habit of putting photos up, that should be a nice additional stream of content.

Once upon a time, a cat named Nerys ripped into the bottom of our sofa to make herself a cozy burrow. This was all well and good, except for the times when she would do it when we were using the sofa too. On these occasions (and presumably on most others) she would proceed to sharpen her claws on what remained of the fabric. (A less charitable reason for this behaviour would be that she was simply widening the whole for her future self after eating more and more kibbles!)

One of the things that people tend to start around this time of year is a diary. They usually get filled for as long as your new year’s resolutions last.

There was an excellent article on The Verge yesterday about how Google is transforming the kinds of sites and blogs that are on the internet. I also read this slightly more personal take by Jason Velasquez, which is more about how social networks have gobbled up all the time and attention of people who might otherwise be making interesting web sites. This has made me think deeply about what this blog is for, and why I might continue to blog in Twenty Twenty Four.

When I wrote about Maara’s “The Ancient Truth” over Christmas as part of my albums of the year rundown, I mentioned at the end that I would love to find a copy on vinyl to listen to. Well dear reader I managed to! It arrived today from the Netherlands with minimal fuss. It sounds great and I’m not sure whether my review did it justice: that’s the problem with attempting to (re-)review ten albums in ten days with Christmas and New Year all happening at the same time!

The cats broke their new resolution not to knock stuff over in my office. Oh, who am I kidding? They never had such a resolution! If you can see a sheet of saturated paper, that was my to do list! Oh well.

Dear Future Matt,

Here are some reflections on 2023.

A quick list of ten other albums I considered to be among the best of last year. I either listened to these less, or in the cases of “Transmission Three” and “Be Opened By The Wonderful” considered them to be ineligible as they are compilations.