Last played At the Drive-In - Mannequin Republic from Relationship of Command

The Merriam Webster site has a top lookups right now feature and it's hypnotising. When I looked just now, "lumber" was there for a good couple of minutes and I must know why.

IMG 5582

A very busy bank holiday weekend

Went back home to take my mum and aunt out for lunch to celebrate their very-much-deserved retirement. Nearly melted in our hotel room. Went to a beach, a car show, and had some ice cream.

The other day, a friend posted on Instagram about Cedars of Lebanon, and I'm still cross that Cedars of Lebanon isn't a post rock band in the vein of Red Sparowes or All We Expected. I'm disappointed in us.

20230824104236 2 G5 A2693

Homer Simpson Backs Into Bushes

I love this scene, and I really like my patch and pin badge. When I found out Adidas was making these Stan Smiths, and they actually looked good, I had to try and get a pair.

DJI 0037

Flying Scotsman at Bluebell Railway

Tabitha and I went on the Flying Scotsman. I admired this train as a kid, and being able to see it up close, and ride on it was a weird dormant childhood dream to fulfil

IMG 5514

Bonus Day Off Skate

I booked Monday off to recover from ArcTanGent, then forgot I'd done it and didn't realise until just before I left. Tabitha cycled; I skated.

20230819190827 2 G5 A2560

ArcTanGent 2023

It's another bullet point list. No point me typing this up again. I went in a camper this year, like a bougie jerk, and I am now spoiled. I will not camp as long as I have the choice - the whole weekend was so much better this year

When I get out of bed in the morning, I still anticipate a waggy dog waiting for me as I walk into the kitchen. When I reverse the car onto the drive, I still check for the dog in my mirrors.

2 G5 A7578

British Lawnmower Racing Association 500

Lawnmower racing has been a discovery in multiple acts. First we watched a random video on YouTube, then our friend nearly drove their mower into their pond, and then 5 miles from their house there was a 500 lap endurance race. This was all in less than a month. I like that.

IMG 5248

Malayalam, Eastbourne

It's not often that a restaurant is so good that I'll make a specific post about it but there y'go.

DJI 0013

I got eaten by ants

It was dry for 15 minutes so I wanted to go and fly my drone a bit. Unfortunately, the ants also wanted to fly and it was quite unpleasant.

How is it only Wednesday? That is unacceptable.

IMG 5225

Steam Deck Upgrades

Absolutely sick of the 512GB space limit on my Steam Deck so I grabbed a 2TB SSD for mine. The swap is pretty easy, but very nervewracking taking something like this apart.

2 G5 A6391

Scotland 2023

Nice little getaway to Scotland. I had never been before, so we decided to spend a few days in Glasgow, then a few in Edinburgh.

2 G5 A6219

My little square of sunrise

I haven't thought to look back and see how it happens, but sunrise for the past few weeks has been cutting through a hole in everything, and making a nice little rectangle on our fence. It's one of those things that feels like it's just for me. Do you ever get that?

Woke up with a melody in my head that I could not place, but I did know the lyrics, and wait I can sing this song I definitely know this. I hate it when that happens.

David Mitchell said on an episode of Would I Lie To You that if he knew how he knew all the things he knew then he could only know half the things. But what if you only knew how you knew the things you know, but you couldn't actually remember them?

I think my Query Language is fine, and my indices are OK, but my database might need restoring from a backup.

R0000003

Festival-ready

As I'm sure I mentioned, I soloed ArcTanGent last year. I enjoyed myself but in places I was quite bored and lonely. This year I'm planning to learn from my mistakes.

I finished Ada Palmer's Seven Surrenders, and it got me thinking about types of fun. I really didn't enjoy reading large sections of this book.

Anything where the heads of the hives are colluding is written in a way that irritates me, with these characters who've given themselves stupid posturing titles conspiring to stay as important as they think they are. Everyone's always referred to as "The Duke", "The Anonymous", "Caesar", "Madame" and it makes my skin crawl.

However, I love the story. It has everything I like: future societies, politics, corruption, duplicity, crazy technology, religion, gods among people. So I guess I'm continuing the series in informed hope that the remaining books won't have as much of the stuff I don't like.

It took me so long to finish Seven Surrenders; I can't have that again with The Will to Battle. Ideally need to finish before ArcTanGent so I can read an ebook there. Last year I read a whole book in my downtime and hoping to do that again this year.

IMG 5132

Pizza Sunday

Another Pizza Sunday. Told you I'd stop counting. These were the best ones I've made so far.

Tile 0

Keyboard Pano

I've had the idea for this in my head for a while but couldn't be bothered to do it until now. I had to add something to my site for it to work. Probably broken in your browser.