Recently updated blogs

The sashiko pattern bishamonkikkō 毘沙門亀甲 means “Bishamonten tortoiseshell.”毘沙門 bishamon refers to the buddhist god of war, Bishamonten. He looks pretty scary, but is one of the seven gods of fortune and represents dignity. 亀甲 kikkō means “tortoiseshell.” Tortoiseshells are represented by hexagons in Japanese patterns. This moyōzashi pattern is based on triple-layered hexagons.

Hello. It’s cold and it snowed on Tuesday. Heating’s on. I remain incredibly busy, sort of stretched, like non-dairy spread that has been scraped over too much sourdough. Next week is Thanksgiving in the US which hopefully means it’ll be a slightly easier one. On Thursday I met Chris for beers near Old Street. The proper pubs were heaving so we hid away in an unloved sports bar instead. While …

I was up and about fairly early, out in the half light and had to scrape the windscreen for the first time this year. Then Monday morning A road hell, not one but two major hold ups saw me arrive at the river an hour later than planned, the morning mist had almost burned away and a bright day was in prospect. The stretch was still unfamiliar so I took …

How to write a progress indicator, pro-style: (It has been a few years, so tried out Kodi again. It is still trash.) Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had …

I’ve started a Bluesky list featuring some of the brilliant writers, designers, coders, editors, and others who’ve contributed to A List Apart “for people who make websites” from the magazine’s first dawning back in the 19(mumbles). Bluesky fans, grab the list here: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pgjpl4opnmqxxpb74n4vuabv/lists/3lbozpqe2kq2t Why only *some* of the contributors? Simple. Several are, sadly, deceased. Many others are likely alive and well but not yet on Bluesky. We can’t unmake death, …

The Papermakers Arms, Hawley, Kent An inter-wars cottage-style pub in a village south of Dartford near the A2/M25 interchange. It closed in 2022, and a planning application has been submitted for a luxury car showroom on the site, which makes a change from yet more flats.

A ghost goes for a walk in the woods.

I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. The episode is “The Sum of Our Data,” and it includes interviews with The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life author Lowry Pressly and The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care author Carl Öhman. You can …

For the rest of the year, EVERY order shipped from my online bookstore comes with 4 FREE stickers.

How do you possibly even contemplate posing such a question (with such an overtly obvious answer) to such heavily traumatized... children?!?

For me, it’s important to have things to aim for, even if they’re arbitrary. I’m still on target for running 1,000km in 2024, partly because the Strava feature that tracks it shows me when I’m behind my goal. This morning, I really didn’t want to run, but being 10.3km down meant that I went out anyway. Current status: 0.2km in front of goal. This means I’ve now only got just …

My collaborator on Katabasis (Beth McCarthy) and I spoke at Devcon, one of the largest Ethereum conferences in the world that happened this past week in Bangkok! In our talk we spoke about the power of memes and the influence of capital on them and vice versa. Beth provides some good frameworks for understanding these narrative dynamics from the likes of Foucault, Walter Banjamin, Althusser, and Wittgenstein. My time in …

Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. An earlier version appeared at Project Syndicate and the Guardian. Nov. 24, 2024 –When the US election was called for Donald Trump the night of November 5, the stock market rose but the bond market fell. The yield on 10-year …

Amazing how close these Sweetsong demos made by Mike Chapman are to the finished record. (you'll want to skip ahead past the early abject bubblegum pap to the "Wigwam Bam / Little Willie" onwards stompy stuff.)Particularly on the level of the vocal inflections, the campy ad libs, the whole pitch of hysteria - almost all of it was worked out in advance. Eventually the dummies assimilated the implanted style - …