Recently updated blogs

This is a short book review and I will confess straight away that I have never read a book quite like it. The author is refreshingly honest about their own lived experience and their multiple divergence. The author was diagnosed with Autism and ADHD as a child and bipolar as an adult along with borderline personality disorder. The author grew up hating themselves and believing that they were a problem …

I’m very excited to announce my first proper album: Melodic Guitar Music. It’s ten original guitar tunes, inspired by Django Reinhardt, The Beatles and Chet Atkins. I’d describe the style as “Django phrasing + Chet Atkins fingerpicking + 1960s pop sensibility.” I’ve wanted to record an album for many, many years. I’ve been posting YouTube videos on-and-off since 2007, but generally the YouTube video format is very ephermal and not …

Nothing marks more eloquently the end of summer than the sight of a deserted beach. The joyful voices of children playing in the waves, once resonating in the salty air, have now vanished. A lone stranded barrel jellyfish, heavy with seawater and stripped of its ethereal qualities, has washed ashore, its beauty still intact, its frilly tentacles unfurling beneath its purple-edged umbrella that, white and blueish, shimmers under the September …

It's very good. Available to buy from Do, from Bookshop, from Amazon and from other places.

The government is changing the rules of the work capability assessment in an effort to push more people into work and thinking of cutting benefits. There's a link between this and those incessant scam phone calls we all get. To see it, remember a fact which most political journalists neglect because of their focus on the minutiae of Westminster court politics. It is that the nature of capitalism shapes politics. …

Introduction to everythingPlease note that I really do like Enigma, and I have mad respect for everybody who designed its levels, since the levels are an essential part of the game. As you read, please try to keep this in mind, even when my review sounds negative or occasionally sarcastic.There is a puzzle game called Enigma. The player controls a black marble and rolls it around a top-down view to …

Full Circle

In light of the fact that Twitter (‘X’) has become completely unusable / untenable for self-promotion over the course of the past year, we’ve discontinued regular posting on that particular social media service. We’ve finally decided to set up shop …

I know what you’re thinking. “David Benoit?! We’ve waited a year for a record review and it’s David Benoit?!? What the heck is Tarik doing writing about HIM?!” Weeeeell hold on there. This may seem out of place, and this is definitely the most recently-recorded music I’ve written about so far on my humble blog, but this record is major to me on a personal and musical level. With that, …

It’s moved to Substack, and it’s a quadfecta this week: three words and one name, all beginning with the letter D. Read and subscribe—it’s free! Here’s a preview of one of the words:

I was late. The minibus was already at the stop. I did something I very rarely do and broke into a run. I was the last one there. I was shown into a minibus that, at first glance, appeared to have no spare seats in it. The driver indicated a space at the back that would have suited a small child if they had been prepared to rough it a …

Connections The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid. I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter. …

A model I return to a lot when talking about engineering processes is Push and Pull. Often when we design a new process or system we struggle to get buy-in. That lack of buy-in can often be traced to having forgotten the Push, the Pull, or both. We’re all familiar with processes like “write a weekly status update” that start strong and eventually fade out to low participation, engineers automating …

Everybody everyone

If you had to choose software to begin working in architectural design, which would be your first choice? Many might think that a BIM solution such as BlenderBIM or FreeCAD would be the ideal choice. In many cases, they offer numerous advantages. However, despite these advanced and modern workflows, a simple 2D CAD solution can still address most of our project needs. Using a 2D CAD solution has numerous benefits …