An Inertia of Ownership
There are ponts when you have to stop what you’re doing (or not doing) and tear everything up and start again. I’m considering whether or not this blog here needs a complete overhaul. Its current incarnation has been online since 2019 and – apart from a technical issue about 18 months ago – it’s kept going pretty well. I’ve maintained websites and blogs since the late 1990s and self-hosted since around 2010. Usually, something has technically gone wrong and I’ve been forced to reinstall and rebuild. This time it’s different. This time I have the feeling that I want to simple restart and revivify (I love that word!). I’m just not sure whether it’s what I want it to be. Originally, it was a sort of “hub” for things I was posting online a mix of blog, reviews, educational notes and writings. But I’ve never been satisfied by how it has operated and, as time has gone on, I’ve posted less and less. I tried to compensate for this by drawing in feeds from other places like Mastodon (microblogging) and Letterboxd (micro-film reviews) which have resulted in writing less here. It’s been hard also to reconcile the various stuff I’m interested in so I’ve increasingly ended up just posting about books, comics and the occasional album. Modern life – especially online – constantly pulls you in all directions and that’s what’s happened her to the point of inertia. Plus, my note-taking and writing is now 99% offline. I don’t keep notes or write with the purpose of posting online.
What I’m thinking about doing is stripping everything away and rebuilding from scratch. I’m inspired by Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden where she combines regular weekly posting with “Big Questions” (personal projects), book reviews, music reviews, recipes and other stuff. Her site is conceptually more how I imagined this one to be six years ago. There are other considerations, too. For instance, this site manages to use something like 2gb+ of web space and I’d like to try trim that down. It’s also an opportunity to try out some other publishing options than WordPress. I need to think about it a little more, though, before I do anything drastic.
Made an Obsidian Plugin
For more than five years I’ve moved all my notes and documents – personal and professional – into Obsidian, a super-powerful app for organising and maintaining notes using markdown. I’m quite fanatical about the app. And now, I’ve written a plugin that I’ve just submitted be included in the Obsidian Community Plugins directory. It’s my…
Riverworld
From time to time I think about the books that I read when I was young. That they still have resonance all these years later and I can remember the profound effect that they had on my thinking and my imagination is testimony to their writing. Of course, novels like The Lord of the Rings…
Autechre, Artist in Residence
Thoroughly enjoyed an absorbing Radio 6 mix by Autechre (the first of four!) which was almost all new to me and has provided a wealth of music and musicians to follow up – particularly the startling hip hop tracks. The show is described as: Step into the genre-bending world of Autechre, the legendary duo whose…
Unwelcome Website Woes
THINGS haven’t been great with my blog over the last week or so. That’s an understatement. I’ve spent a great deal of time working out how to save all the content I’ve put up here for the last five years. I’ve maintained blogs of some sort or another since the late 1990s and more consistently…
Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever
Another charity shop find! A mere £1 for the trilogy of Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenent, The Unbeliever. It’s a fantasy series started in the mid-1970s in that early wave of post-Toklien novels and I read the first volume way-way-back when I was in my middle-teens (recomended by the owner of Stargate One…
Book Evocation
A discussion about the merits of reading a physical book rather than a digital copy led to considerations about the way that books – like songs – are associated with a particular moment in time in memory. There’s some truth to this. I often recall the first copy of a selection of Thomas Hardy’s poetry…
The Book of Alien, 1979
Another find at our local Oxfam bookshop, The Book of Alien. Published in 1979 to accompany the release of the movie, it’s a behind-the-scenes account of the production with lots of art (mainly by Ron Cobb but also by Moebius and Chris Foss) and photos. There are sections on spaceship design, sets and spacesuits, the…
Another Thrilling Star Wars Adventure!
Love these (fake) book covers for the first three Star Wars movies in the style of sixties pulp paperbacks. Illustrator Russell Walks is amazing!
The Dead of Night
Bought for £1 at the local hospital’s League of Friends bookshop. Onions is one of the great twentieth-century ghost story writers. This volume does include The Beckoning Fair One which Robert Aickmam described as “one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field”. There’s an intense, manic quality to Onions’ writing that is incredibly…
-2,147,483,648 Hours and 24 Minutes
Decided to reinstall OSX on the macbook air that I mostly use at home. I bought it in 2012 and, other than upgrading it to Catalina (which is as new as OSX will go without using OCLP) it’s always worked great. Over the years I’ve installed a lot of apps, fiddled with the settings and…
Weeknotes wb 16 September 2024
I have to admit that I’m struggling to maintain these weekly notes (though I will endeavour to do so). Mainly it’s that I’m over-thinking the detail and it’s taking me far too long to put the notes together. So here’s something shorter… The “Season of mists” is most definitely upon us and I’m waking to…
Radio Times Lord of the Rings Cover
Lovely piece from 2021 by Brian Sibley about the cover to the 7th March 1981 issue of Radio Times. Sibley writes about the illustration, Eric Fraser, and his acquistion of the original artwork. Much like Jimmy Coulty’s stunning 1976 poster illustration for the novel, Sibley’s BBC dramatisation which was originally aired between March and August…
Make Something to Your Taste
At the bottom of Jay Springett’s latest post, Destination Distraction, he’s added a short video, Make Something to Your Taste, his latest 301 Permanently Moved podcast episode, which caught me at exactly the right time. It’s a mesmerising video where Springett is convincing in reinforcing the importance of creativity and a call to “Make a…
The Hartnell Years
Picked up a copy of The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years by David Brunt. I’m in the middle of watching the first season of Doctor Who from 1963-4 and, while I make great use of both the first volume of About Time and The Television Companion – both of which I’ve owned for…
Weeknotes wb 2 September 2024
Weather’s changed and there’s now a definite sense that Autumn’s begun. It’s cooler – almost cold – and darker during the day and we’re experiencing sudden showers. By the end of the week the children were both back at school (fairly happily, which is a relief) and I’m getting to grips with how things seem…
Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches
I’ve just backed Andrew MacLean’s Kickstarter project, Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches. It’s a prequel to MacLean’s fantastic quarterly series, Head Lopper, a comic I’ve bought from its first issue. (The last issue, #16, was released in 2021.) Anything Head Lopper gets an automatic “must buy” from me. There are a range of “rewards”…
Weeknotes wb 26 August 2024
September has always been the pivot on which the year turns. My birthday is in a couple of days and, as a child, it would be the signal that the return to school would shortly follow (though in those days, the start of school seemed to be about a week after my birthday). And here…
Weeknotes wb 19 August 2024
There’s a definite sense that summer is coming to an end. It’s feeling cooler in the mornings and grey clouds and rain have dominated many of the days this week. Come to that late-summer point where I’m genuinely uncertain about which day of the week it is. Doing (or should that be Done?) Another “summer…
Weeknotes wb 12 August 2024
This is the first of my attempt at maintaining a weekly “weeknotes” used to intentionally review and reflect on the last seven days. I know that the format of this weeknotes isn’t quite right and will undoubtedly undergo changes. I’ve enjoyed reading the weeknotes and, after some recent posts by bloggers talking about why they…
Hüsker Dü Live
Spent a couple of hours today listening to some of the live recordings of Hüsker Dü that can be found on the Internet Archive. It’s a mixed bag: some pretty good ones that sound as if recorded at the mixing desk, while others are just muffled noise with the occasionally recognisable vocal. I can understand…
Control
Eventually picked up a copy of Control, a five year-old game I didn’t realise I wanted to play until the release of Alan Wake 2 revealed that it was set in a shared universe. Described as “a solid comedy pastiche of the X-Files, right down to a mysterious smoking man” by Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewer…
“it’s the nameless non-slop that matters”
Wonderful post by John Higgs which ranges from the Trump assassination attempt, the Olympics opening ceremony to “knobbing about”. Higgs makes the best analysis of the Olympic opening ceremony I’ve seen, dscribing it as “slop”, which he defines as The ceremony was a lot like modern digital culture. We are bombarded with seemingly unconnected ideas…
