Recently updated blogs

UPDATE 8/1/22: Some confusion about the date for this one. Some are saying that it was the end of November, but one newspaper article (coming to this page soon!) published on Tuesday 10th December indicates that the party took place on 7th December. A Spirals document entitled SPIRAL TRIBE’S CALENDAR OF POLICE HARRASSMENT AT FREE PARTIES – 1991-1992, still accessible via Wayback Machine, describes the bust at the end: 9.12.91– …

I did a lot of trying to say no to things and step down from things I wasn’t doing (well enough, or in some cases, at all) which was kind of my therapy homework and which was very difficult. Why is focusing so difficult? Why can’t we live 6 lives at once??? Why am I getting older and more tired? It just has to be. More centrally (the therapy part …

Yes, this is my first post in almost a year. I’m no longer prioritizing this blog, but I will still occasionally post something. I wrote ~2 years ago that it was hard to point to concrete opportunities to help the most important century go well. That’s changing. There are a good number of jobs available now that are both really promising opportunities to help (in my opinion) and are suitable …

Off-continent after 446 days!

Thinking back on the time that my Mum gave me the first six A Book Apart books as a gift when I first left Canada to start my career in the UK in 2011. They meant so, so much to me. Not just for the enlightening words within, but also because they were this tangible thing that reminded me of the encouragement from my very academic family to take on …

A cover reveal; an event in the city. Read here.

Image with some help from Dingboard. In 2023, I wrote two pieces on machine learning engineering for The Pragmatic Programmer. (Part 1 and Part 2). However, since I started working with LLMs recently, neural architectures have changed some of those assumptions. To be clear, most of machine learning in production is still not related to large language models or generative AI, and even deep learning projects, of which LLMs are …

There we go. That’s better. I love this moment here. A full moon rising as the sun sets behind me while in the near total silence of this space with its infinite skies. The short version of this story was I heard a song about the American west that made me miss it dearly and I somehow managed to find an opportunity to go alone for a bit. I soon …

Greetings to all and sundry, it's now 2024 believe it or not. It sounds so odd when saying it, and even more so when typing in "2024". Shouldn't we all be living like 'The Jetsons' (a cool futuristic Hanna-Barbera cartoon series of the sixties for those too young to get the reference). Where are the flying cars, transporter beams and such like?Anyway, here we are again with a veritable bounty …

Listening For Ghosts In Dr. John’s Gris-Gris By David Toop Paperback: £19.99 Hardback: £35.00 Published in two editions, a standard trade paperback and a limited edition hardback with dustjacket. Paperback with flaps 148mm x 210mm 300 pages (approx) ISBN: 9781913689605 Available to Pre-Order Soon Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper’s Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum …

Twenty-two years on the pier, and yes, it’s been a bit quiet, imagine the requisite gesture at all of [an all-encompassing roundel of a wave] THIS, I mean, look back, to the turn of the century, then look about us, here and now: can you seriously say any of us has learned any single God damned thing? —I thought not. There’s been shit I’ve been thinking about meaning to write, …

I am a man with too many hobbies and interests, but James’s lovely ode to OD&D has me thinking about the game once again. Some of the longest campaigns I’ve ran and played in have been OD&D games: impressive for a game that came out 6 years before I was born. The 50th anniversary of D&D is this year. I suspect we’ll see a lot of writing about the game …

Silk Is For Seduction audio edition I promised to leave you alone, but this just came up, and I want my blog subscribers to hear about deals first. I’ll keep it short.For the next couple of weeks, you can download the audio edition of Silk Is For Seduction, the first Dressmakers book, for $4.99. The bargain price is available from Chirp audio. The easy way to do it is to …

“Consider raindrops: you can feel them on your head – but you can’t perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn’t this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system? I can think and compute climate in this …

One of the most touted benefits of Caesars Diamond status is that you can get a free stay at the Atlantis Bahamas. This is a destination I wouldn’t ever have normally considered, but there was a really good sale fare from Vancouver to Nassau so I grabbed tickets a couple of months ago. This is usually a rational strategy: if there is a good deal on flight tickets, just grab …