In July of 2022 I left the best job I’ve ever had — forest conservation in New Zealand — and decided I’d saved enough money to not work for five years or so. Nearly two and half years have passed since...

9am — 9.45am Kyle wants to be highlighting inspiring people that he knows and meets. There’s a multimedia element to this, probably with a newsletter at it’s root, but which would also draw on his video...

With the fourteenth biennial Shortcut Blitz just around the corner, many of you have been asking for clarity on what constitutes a good shortcut. Tickets for the Blitz will go on sale between 5 hours and 2...

Explanation is not understanding.

Avvai put me on to Ellen Upton’s Thinking with Type (2024, 3rd edition, Princeton Architectural Press) and every inch of it is just gorgeous.

Canada in general, and Vancouver specifically, is a pretty expensive place to live, so we’re gonna try and lower our costs in a few ways. Top of mind for me is bin diving, because I’ve done a fair bit of it...

Having arrived in Canada without a change of clothes, I’ve been mooching off Kyle and the Siemens clan. Today I’m wearing Kyle’s old clothes top to bottom.

It used to be that I was interested in building the system for its own sake, but now I would almost rather it would simply land in my lap so I could stop developing it and spend more time using it.

This system of documents more or less boils down to that preoccupation with memory that I’ve always had, but only recently begun to articulate in conversations with Jess, Kyle, Avvai, Ferdinand et al....

After a fairly break-neck week so far in Canada, Avvai, Kyle, and I are finding time again for those rich, focused conversations that drew us together in Turkey. They’ll resume in earnest in Vancouver but...

Istanbul, city of cities, it’s time to say goodbye. Tomorrow I head for Canada, and it will be some time before we meet again. You have arrested me in ways that no other city ever has, my eyes with your...

Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded. — John McNulty, The New Yorker, 1943, p. 13 Large cities are best understood as cities of cities, and Istanbul, the most populous city in Europe, is definitely...

Avvai followed up with some pointers for getting to the airport sans-stress. I’ve had a couple of adventures on the metro already, and was planning to do the shuttle anyway, plus I’d figured out which...

Some days, when I let my head get carried away, I wonder if the legacy of Covid isn’t quite a bit more than an uneasy awareness of the fragility of our way of life, if it isn’t more than long Covid. What if...

I’ve been back and forth between the hostel and the printers over the last week, sometimes three or four times in a day trying to get things dialed in before I commit to the big print. And every time I go I...

Just noticed that Source Serif Pro isn’t handling left-single-smart-quotes correctly when they’re in italics, instead falling back to the right-quote/apostrophe. A pretty niche case, but I care about those...

I’m a prolific quoter. On the rare occasions that I do dream of something like work, it’s in a role that might be best likened to that of a librarian. I dream of connecting the right people, to the right...

The first time you get arrested your friends ask you, “What happened?!” The second time you get arrested it’s already, “What did you do?”

Practice in the creative act is far more potent than preparation for the creative act.

I’m going to Vancouver, Canada for the winter. That wasn’t on my bingo card for this year. But the prospects ahead, the energy of the time spent with Kyle & Avvai here in Istanbul, fill me with more...

I wasn’t quite satisfied with my recall of the first computer bug story when I told it recently, but it took me a while to piece together where I’d heard it. Eventually I got to thinking it might have been...

Effective collaborators share a deep ground truth that empowers them to overcome obstacles that halt unaligned teams. The specific form of that ground truth is unique to each set of collaborators, and...

When he chooses the labours which are proper, and makes them labour on them, who will repine? — Confucius, Analects, 479 BC The word and the world of work have — like all our cultural lodestars and social...

Kyle, Avvai and I have all echoed the sentiment that there is a lot of shared context between us. Partly this is because we’re all highly fluent native English speakers, but more significantly, we’re a trio...

This note draws on Andy Matuschak’s recognition of a need for serious contexts of use: Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use Tool-makers usually lack connection to a...

Imitation engages with the underlying principles or “spirit” of what’s being created, permitting a deeper understanding than mere repetition, through interpretation and transformation. What we imitate, we...

Andy’s repeated distillation of the need for a context of use1 strikes a chord with a refrain that has surfaced between Kyle and I that we’re calling the traveller unmoored, but might generalise to any mind...

different smokes for different blokes

Kyle, Avvai, and I have big plans. In the little time we have known each other, a set of deeply shared ideas and complimentary skills have emerged, and we’ve made a commitment to carry them as far as we can...

I think the project is to create a school of multi-disciplinary creators. Talking with Kyle this morning gave me that shape.

The imagined surface of my system of files is changing. The web view is increasingly revealing itself to be the multi-media paradigm that I’m after, so the filesystem as thematic hierarchical underpinning...

Having one of the most exciting conversations of my life with Kyle right now. It might in fact contain a life’s purpose, my life’s purpose.

Computers, not as an end in them themselves, but as a tool for capturing and nurturing the seeds of wonder.

Kyle reckons Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom (2024, St. Martin’s Press) is likely to be his book of the year, so I’ve made a start on it this morning. The opening lines are...

My attempt to cross the Bosphorus is far from being the first time I’ve been subject to that peculiar gratitude toward the agents of frustration. My journal contains several such accounts that reflect the...

The arrest didn’t come as a surprise. As I neared the bridge I’d guessed my odds were 50/50 at best. Nearing midnight By the time they pick me up I’m almost half way across the bridge and I think I’m...

I have a love of cities that sometimes feels like it belongs to someone else. I feel I could spend my whole life living in one city, and I could also go my whole life without ever setting foot in one again.

Here in room 44 I decided to move the desk to the middle of the room — or as close as the bed permits. As I made to lift it I was surprised by its mass. It was heavy! I’d expected it to fly. Briefly I...

That our affections may be fickle and uneven in their distribution is their beauty, not their defect. Feature, not bug. We invoke chemistry in relationships, not because they are a science, but because they...

My two selves at war. A deep-rooted, culturally inflicted cynicism. A willfully naive optimism.

What is a library but a house of ideas.

I mean to make of this site a library, ever expanding at the edges.

This walk is distinguished by linearity. Even its detours succumb to that linearity. Cutting right across France in order to enter Switzerland in the west and walk the span of the Alps; turning west in...

Yesterday I watched The Ten Commandments, 1956. Today I see that one of Istanbul’s airports is named Sabiha Gökçen after Turkey’s (and the worlds) first female fighter pilot of the same name. Her surname...

Between preservation and destruction, I would preserve. Bound by this impulse, I create little of my own.

When in doubt, I wander, preferring the unknown. Born to an age of doubt, I have wandered far.

I wonder if it is true that the truest agreement emerges between people disposed in some way to disagree with one another. In a sense, there is a profound disagreement between Alan Jacobs and I, in that he...

I believe the real future of transportation was launched in pre-Enlightenment France, by Blaise Pascal — he of the famous wager, that posited belief in God was a safer bet than non-belief — in the year...

Blue light, black coffee, a sleepless recipe.

This site is the visible portion of a much larger project, one with a singular goal but a broad scope: To capture the truth, as I witness it, as I create it. If I am a witness at the unfolding of my...

The truest connections are not those that reflect who we are, but those that reflect who we will become.

At last, in September, crossing Bulgaria, it has cooled down. Pretty soon I’ll be complaining about cold nights, and rainy days.

Life outdoors is life without doors. Or at least fewer of them.

Most major, typical infrastructure systems emerged gradually over time. And since becoming widespread, they have evolved and innovated, but usually within a relatively similar set of means and ends, at...

Walking under a ladder is dangerous, mostly for whoever is on the ladder, so in our culture we attach supersition (bad luck) in order to engage the self-interest of people who are not considerate or aware...

The rant: After using Hugo for a little while I got fed up with how annoying it was to add custom functionality (everything has to be a template), how “content” and “static” files were treated differently,...

The with of without. Not having everything you need is a very good way of connecting with other people. Or to put it in the reverse, having everything you need keeps you from connecting with others.

Nothing is perfect. A something can never be perfect. That’s okay.

If you can’t put the thread through the needle, put the needle over the thread. I’ve been doing a bit more sewing lately — mending my kit as it disintegrates to the demands of the walk — threading a lot...

Some years ago I came across Geoff Manaugh’s work, was impressed by it, and promptly forgot about it. Checking in at Gwern’s site again today I came across his OPML file of RSS feeds and lo and behold,...

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. — Will Crowther, Colossal Cave Adventure, 1976 Such a beautiful little line. I was reminded of it just now by a reply from Gwern where he modified it...

During weeks like this one — where I’m able to give solid blocks of time to my data projects — I can truly feel myself chipping away at the layers. For all that I mean to achieve it using bespoke and...

Primed by Craig mentioning — in issues 264 and 265 of Nightingalingale1 — having to install “the lingua franca of Big Publishing Edits” (Microsoft Word), I was tickled to read Alan Jacobs call it his...

There’s a power to faces. Here in the Ivan Vazov National Library in Plovdiv — in a large, gallery like room — there are bookshelves and glass cabinets given over to biographies, histories, and catalogues...

Just stumbled across Meld and it’s a perfect discrete tool for visually diffing files, plus it builds on that with a UI that makes it trivial to do interactive partial merge of files in either direction.

I recently sent an email to a company’s customer support line. Swiftly came an automated reply informing me that they respond to enquiries in the order that they receive them. Like… duh! I would never have...

Sometimes I think contradiction probably more useful than consistency.

I want to understand the world through the exchange of meaning, to disrupt that misplaced instinct that imagines it can be intuited from the confines of my imagination.

photography—the cumulative de-creation of the past (in the very act of preserving it), the fabrication of a new, parallel reality that makes the past immediate while underscoring its comic or tragic...

Each library will have a small window (probably no more than 3 versions at any time) of acceptable protocol versions. A new version will be specified, with a brand new KDF salt, every time we need to...

Fear is what stands between us and understanding, understanding being another name for peace.

Autocorrect should exhibit what I’ll call a ‘diff flicker’, visually signalling that a change has been made. Promoted by my phone just autocorrecting ‘Lada’ to ‘lads’ and me almost not noticing.

June 6th 2024. Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain — former CEO and VP of Finance at Autonomy respectively — are found not guilty of all 31 (combined) charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy...

While complexity is sometimes necessary, complication is defect.

Knowledge is what, mere answer. Understanding is why, a journey that begins with a question.

If the days go slow and the years come fast, make a big change.

Any fool can repeat the right answer, but who’s asking the right questions?

Just as often as the reverse we’re limited not by what we don’t, but by what we do know.

Climbed Mount Olympus, briefly returned to Albania to spend more time with Jess, and now I’m back to melting in the heat of these Mediterranean days only to barely reconstitute in the night and repeat,...

Jess asked me this in the context of my walk to India, hundreds of nights spent sleeping in places it is forbidden to sleep, The simple answer is yes, sometimes, but usually no. I spend about half of each...

Beside the road, halfway between Smíxē and Alatópetra a grand, stone hotel, shutters drawn shut, paint on the upper floor peeling, side gate half collapsed. Carpark empty save for a forlorn looking...

In a small, sleepy village called Eleuthero, in an enclosed square containing a great big tree, a statue, and an eclectic mix of tables and chairs, I sit. At one of those tables, in one of those chairs. And...

If my mind is modest, I walk the great way. Arrogance is all I fear. The great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching I’ve found in this an indictment of...

the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. — Annie...

Walking across northern Europe last year I told myself, “I’ll slow down when I reach Bosnia”. Without the pressure of the Schengen visa’s 90 days I’d be freed to wander slower, surely. Crossing Bosnia that...

If you’re looking for the bit about looking closer that was previously at the top here, I’ve moved it to its own page, click here for that A whistle stop tour of the first weeks of the second season of my...

This previously appeared at the top of the recap of the first couple weeks of this year’s walk, which you can find here There’s a few more of you wondering along while I wander along this year compared to...

Season 2? There’ll be walkin’ and talkin and… well, that’s it really. Walking to India, not in a rush, gonna take a while. The summer is already hot and humid here in the Balkans but the walk continues, so...

Watched Oppenheimer with Mizuki yesterday, so today I felt compelled to remind myself of those images from before and after the bombing. Mutilation on a scale that seems unfathomable.

Pick yourself up and get over it.

The goal of this chapter of my life is work less, walk more.

The only antidote for fear is to do the thing that you’re afraid of.

Watching An Autumn Afternoon (1962) by Yasujirō Ozu

Beans is here! Just in time for winter :D Mizuki had planned to join me several weeks earlier while I was still in Bosnia, but she also has a five year old nephew who is apparently more charming and...

There is this pervasive myth that success will make a person happy. I believe it is the reverse — that happiness will make you successful.

One hundred days back on the road. One hundred days without a roof. One hundred days from Bristol to Bosnia. There’s something solid about one hundred days — three figures, a second order of magnitude,...

So far (mid September) we’ve crossed the South of England, France from top to bottom, Switzerland from West to East through the Alps, Lichtenstein in a day, danced along the border of Austria and Germany,...

To love is to commit our whole being to the understanding of someone or something, for ”understanding is love’s other name”. By this we can know where our love lies, by looking to where we commit ourselves,...

As of Saturday, September 16th I am 100 days into the walk, having walked 3053 kilometres, in 4,409,355 steps, across 10 countries.

With the days having gotten so much shorter I am now virtually always up before the sun and going down long after it. Compressing the same rhythm of walking into dramatically fewer hours is partly to blame...

August 23rd, day 78. The Dolomites just looked incredible. I’d hold on to that as I began the climbing a couple of hours later — because in this heat I’d need all the panting positivity I could summon, all...

I’ve come ‘off trail’, descended from the shimmying spine of the Alps to spend a couple of days walking the ribbons of shattered rock and black-top, the roads that weave through the valleys instead. Partly...

Like ma says, words fail. Standing at the top of Pec — at the tri-border of Slovenia, Italy and Austria — I could see Triglav, Slovenia’s tallest mountain, to the south-east. My first steps into the country...

You wake up at 1.30am to the pitter patter of rain on your face and on the ground, and overhead a rumbling sound. It wasn’t supposed to rain tonight. Quickly the sleeping bag goes into the pack so it...

I found Joy in the evening on the 26th of July, well, we found each other. She came down from the mountains wearing a bright orange cape. We stood admiring Lake Öschinensee. “Magnifique”, I said....

The updates have been fewer and much further between of late. The habit broke when the phone broke, but I’ll try and pick it up again. I’m in Innsbruck, Austria, which has been lovely, too lovely in fact,...

Break the rules. If there are no rules, behave so badly as to compel someone to make rules, and then break those.

Vaber describes charisma as being the only force by which we can be drawn out of the iron cage of bureaucratic rationalisation that we find security and comfort in but which constricts us. (See also:...

I keep returning to that idea set out by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice wherein we design a society such that we would be happy for our enemy to choose our place in it. I find that idea, and his...

Bienvenue mes amis! Welcome to my little post-it note on the inter-web. I’m currently walking from England to India so if I’m slow in replying to your messages that’s my excuse — even though I’m always slow...

I do my best walking in the morning, I do most of my walking in the afternoon. And that’s fine I guess. Sometimes walking/working is a grind and you just have to put the time in, sometimes excellence...

The people who design public toilets don’t use public toilets.

So many crucified Jesus’ in this forest. Imagine trying to explain that to someone who’d never heard of the guy.

If it takes more than fifteen minutes it takes an hour.

I’m three weeks into ’the walk’, it’s going well. I have my legs under me again now, the pack begins to feel lighter, the going easier. I still want to accelerate a bit in order to get through France within...

My kingdom for a table. To have a table at camp is the holy grail of ease, comfort, and refinement.

When you’ve figured out what you want to do — perhaps before or perhaps after figuring out who you are and who you want to be — you still have a few questions left in the tidy stack we all learned in...

None of the good parts of life are efficient. Stop trying to make them so.

Not much walking today. Limping with a worn/torn left calf. I sat in Snodland and watched a local cricket match instead 🏏. I don’t have even a passing interest in cricket, but it was nice, almost any...

Day 8? Week two! 43.64km/27.12miles/59362 steps (longer stride today!) plus the first day with over a thousand metres of climbing, so not completely flat. In spite of the sun, today was a black and white...

We need a space program for earth.

We all have to answer to our ego.

Love does not lessen by miles

Another late start, late finish. 42.67km/26.4miles/60,240 steps. Good walking along the chalk white paths of the Downs Way. Spending the night in a paddock with 30 Hereford cows, we’re getting on just fine....

If you haven’t found what you’re looking for, look somewhere else. So often we’re like the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp. Let go of the lamp. Step out into the dark. Dare to look for your...

Day 6, Wednesday 18:21 Today has had me on a course toward Farnham — where I’m currently sat in the library jabbing out this message, they’re closing now :( Getting here involved a bit more road walking...

Day 5, Tuesday, felt like a walking day. Not to begin with mind, by midday I was a bit cooked after only 18-ish km’s and stopped in Newbury for several hours. Around 4pm the air thinned a bit and it started...

I think this will be the last big trip I do alone. It’s harder to endure loneliness, having known — twice now — what it is to feel that true joy, love.

Day 4. Monday. Zero kilometres (towards Dover) but a very, very lovely day spent with Grandma. She took us out to the Old Mill, with the always grand Salisbury Cathedral just across the river. We brought a...

Day three (Sunday) didn’t really start til about midday on account of the rain, which was wetter than forecast. It doesn’t take much of the wet stuff to convince me to stay in the tent all morning, but...

Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes. — Thomas A. Clark My hips are sore, my back is tight, my eyes are drooping, but my feet are fine. My shoes were/are a gift from...

I woke to a couple of unexpected messages in the group. Unexpected because I’d disabled replies in the group, well, I thought I had. One of those messages was from Anna. Anna Hegenberg Silas? Like Silas...

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night to you all, scattered about the globe as you are. I think word has reached most of you that I’m going on another walk – half of you are probably tired of hearing me talk...

There’s something beautiful about old computer magazines/brochures. Here’s one from Texas Instruments about their groundbreaking (then… ish) Explorer Computer System. The cover of it is a work of art and...

Getting ready for ‘the big walk’. I don’t know what else to call it really, so it’s just that. Plan now is to set off on my birthday, this Friday I’ll be turning 27. There’s a neatness to that that suits...

If you can’t do it all, do what you can.

Some people say you’ll remember what’s important, and I think that’s bullshit. I have very little control over what I remember, and what I do remember has no discernible correlation with what’s important,...

I’ve heard myself say before that “a camera is just a tool”, usually in response to someone commenting on the seemingly careless way I use mine (perching it in precarious places, bombing down scree slopes...

A period is no substitute for a pause.

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Werner Herzog Came across in an article (National Geographic) while chasing down a quote of his. See also the tale detailed in Mountain...

The order of nations, or my route from here to there, England to India. Leaving England Another trip down the Bristol to Bath cycle way Kennet & Avon Canal looks appealing for another 80 miles or so. From...

Pity no one, least of all yourself.

Interesting reads from early 2023 An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768), hn Media — Roden Newsletter Archive Matt Korostoff Testing a new encrypted messaging app’s...

We each have many voices. I have a highly active cynical voice. When the cynical voice speaks loudest, I should remember that every voice is wrong most of the time.

We can’t wait for the world to change but, at the same time, we can’t wait for the world to change.

The future is a place where some people will suffer more than they should, as is the past, as is the present.

Don’t mistake someone else’s needs for your own, and vice versa.

Truth can be spoken without honesty, and we can speak honestly without speaking truth.

I like the digital file, the idea of it, the amorphousness of it. A file is a blanker canvas even than the purest, plainest cotton or paper. A file is a place; a file is an (almost) unbounded permissive...

Forgetting can be just as important as remembering.

We are all fallible observers of the world, our place in it, our influence on it, and of others. Some days it seems that from that there are two conflicting conclusions: Trust no one, including ourselves....

People and Ideas. Mortal and Immortal.

Everything that is worth doing is worth doing with kindness.

Sometimes I think that if I can’t make myself understood then I’m probably not saying anything worthwhile anyway, while other times I think that if people understand what I’m saying that it is then that I...

It’s common on the web to link back to something you’ve written previously, or link out to something someone else has written previously, but I think that only takes us half way. There’s a wealth of...

If you don’t have the courage to say what you want, you won’t have the strength to live how you want.

Ma and I are alike in that we are forever misplacing things. While I may dream of a life without keys, the reality is that here in Bristol, a large-ish city in the South West of England, keys are a part of...

In the tree outside the window just now there was quite an interesting flock of birds. About a dozen magpies, 2 pigeons, and several black birds, all grouped together. By all appearances they’re having a...

Don’t let the aesthetic tail wag the ergonomic dog.

Exercise keeps me fit and healthy, but it’s literacy that keeps me thin.

For a lot of people the magic of computers is enhanced by their many abstractions, and I can understand that, but for me, computers and their software grow more magical the closer I get to them. My computer...

The map appears to us more real than the land. — D.H. Lawrence We all see the world a little differently and, in ways both large and small, who we are is reflected in everything we do. Still, much of the...

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re never going to get there. Where ‘we’ is this country and ‘there’ is simply better.

Semantics are fascinating to me. By semantics here I mean in essence, the attachment of labels to anything. Culture emerges in the expression of, and prior and subsequent discussion of, semantics. The...

Some days I feel like my brain is short staffed.

I saw an artist wearing a head piece made of magnetic tape pulled from a VHS cassette. My first thought was that it seemed a shame to destroy an old tape, even a blank one. But as I thought about it more,...

A great teacher is not great for their speaking most convincingly, but for their listening most carefully.

In almost all that I do in my life I am thinking of my future children. My ambition in this life is to be of the greatest possible service to my children, to listen and support their understanding of the...

Ephemerata, meaning short lived, that’s a good word.

I can eat cake! Paddy and Val, two humans who I very much admire, have a phrase that they use between themselves. Here’s the short version of how it came to be and what it means (disclaimer: I’m probably...

If there’s enough time in the day to record all that you do, you’re not doing enough. And I say that as someone who aspires to capture ever more of what I do. But journaling is an inherently oscillatory...

The Extroverts are not the problem. And the problem with the Introverts is that we think the Extroverts are the problem. And the problem with Extroverts is that they don’t think about Introverts at all. —...

Anything added dilutes everything else. Approachable is better than simple. Avoid administrative distraction. Design for failure. Encourage flow. Favor focus over features. Half measures are as bad as...

Anhedonia deficits in hedonic function Scary. I’d never heard of the word before. Sure, I think in a transient sense it’s probably something most can relate to, myself included, but learning a word that...

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. — unknown I love an oxymoron, and I love this quote. No attribution because no one knows who said it first.

Emphasis mine. The need of people to express power by writing about how much they could destroy has continued to present day. However, with more information than ever available to the serious researcher,...

The Via Francigena is a 1300 year old, 2000 kilometre pilgrimage from Canterbury in the South East of England to Rome in the heart of Italy. Having only 90 days in which to cross (on foot) France,...

After living on the far side of the earth for more than 5 years I’m now back in England. I was never intending to stay long but I will take some time to see folks I haven’t seen for 60+ months, but I’m also...

Season 2? There’ll be walkin’ and talkin and… well, that’s it really. Walking to India, not in a rush, gonna take a while. The walk began last year, on June 9th, the day I turned 27. I made it as far as...

A walk from here to there Update: The walk has begun! You can read the latest here I’m walking to India, I guess. So what’s the plan? There really isn’t much of a plan. When Hudson asked me I said “the plan...

I’m going to walk to from home to home From this side to the far side

The best questions are the ones you have to answer for yourself.

Constraints liberate and liberties constrain.

I don’t remember my dreams when I wake up. I know I must have them, the science is pretty clear on that, but apart from a very occasional glimpse of a seemingly meaningless moment, I remember nothing. But I...

I have a vision of the community I aim to be a part of, but there are things I must do before I can be a part of such a community, and that above all I must go out in search of more of the incredible luck...

I hope to achieve in a year what most would be glad to have done within a decade.

The people who leave a country should not be assumed to represent those who stay, and vice versa.

I’m not talking about spelunking, I mean that I live, very happily, in a cabin that is 3 metres long and 1.7 metres wide. Almost exactly 5 square metres or around 50 square feet. I’ve been in houses with...

I’m scattered. It’s been two days of that. Get started with something, be interrupted by someone, follow that interruption, lose all focus, try and return to what I was doing, fail. The collapse of all...

I don’t believe strongly in either self-determination or inevitability. I think both are easy to get wrong and where it concerns anything that matters, the truth is both too complicated to discern and...

I believe that wherever we attach emotion we are vulnerable, especially if we are not self aware about that emotion. I don’t take this to the conclusion that rationalists do in attempting to be less/non...

Just came across Rozzi Roomian’s paintings. I find The Mask particularly striking. A provocative look at how we look at the world. Rozzi Roomian

Sometimes I feel like an implicit person in an explicit world. Which really sounds like a whole lot of bullshit but hey

Not the set up for a joke. Both are programs, both facilitate interacting with a computer operating system. It’s easy to use both without having to think about what distinguishes the one from the other, so...

This isn’t a manifesto about anonymity, not that kind of alias, just a simple moments appreciation for decoupling programs from their invocations. The title makes reference to the line “A rose by any other...

Winding down the life I have lived in New Zealand. In February I am to walk (well, fly) away from the woman I love, and the life I have built over the last three years in this country that I love. I walk...

It can be hard to be satisfied with anything less than a bit too much.

Trying to write more simply. I tend to give too much or too little context in my writing, contextualising for an audience is hard. I also tend to write in a slightly performative way which can get in the...

I struggle with computers. I don’t struggle with them in the sense that they don’t make sense to me, rather they feel all too natural, or maybe not exactly natural but very very interesting. For as long as...

Every action is a reflection of the actor.

Take only what you need, and give half of it away.

I just watched the world population clock tick past 8,000,000,000 on the worldometer. Of course the number is just an estimate and almost meaningless as a ticking counter – we might actually have crossed...

The most durable things are those that can be replicated easily and therefore transmitted widely, kept whole and undivided, and both near and far. The most durable things therefore, are Ideas. The...

When do I do my best thinking? When I’m moving. Walking lifts my spirits immensely. Craig calls it locomotion. It’s generative. Motion is my thinking. Motion of the legs over the earth, followed by motion...

The ability I have, that we all have, to affect people with words scares me sometimes. A long time ago, in my teens, I remember being asked about my ‘type’ by a girl in our friend group. What kind of women...

I’ve recently started using a Garmin smartwatch/fitness tracker. I was mostly interested in it as a backup GPS navigation device when in the backcountry but have been pleasantly surprised by its other...

It is important to be lucky. Above all else, try to be lucky.

Rice is good, life is good. — Mizuki

A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom. J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

A situated study of salience, of self.

Omit needless words. — Strunk and White, 1918 Hal, delete the blog.

I sat at a tram stop reading The Alchemist, waiting for the 109. Two 86’s went by before I realised I was waiting at the wrong stop, on the wrong line. It’s howling today. As I walked from Spring to...

Being here in Melbourne – days spent roving the streets of the only city I’ve ever loved, nights spent in the company of the coolest couple I’ve yet met – has been a joy I could not have imagined. There has...

There’s a page in the front of my passport. THIS PAGE IS RESERVED FOR OFFICIAL OBSERVATIONS it reads. Immediately below, printed in a faux stamp style, THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL OBSERVATIONS. Though quite the...

Who made May May, may I ask?

Half of life is trauma, the other half is boring, but there are little slivers of exquisite joy in-between that make it more than worth it.

Found someone’s groceries forgotten on a bench in a park, had clearly been there over night, the tins and packaging were all wet. Stumbled upon a food pantry beside Fitzroy town hall and left them on the shelf.

Reflecting on the pandemic which, apart from the masks we still wear, feels strangely distant. Thinking back to that time where life seemed to hang in the orbit of a single choice, six feet apart or six feet under.

Don’t exaggerate your failings, don’t diminish your strengths.

You don’t have to say everything, stop trying – just say something.

It hardly matters what’s true, only that you believe in something.

The State Library, a building that exudes focus. Beside me one very thin university student has fallen asleep, a thick book teetering on his knee but even in sleep he seems intent, his hand rests on the...

Why is it so much easier to smile at dogs than people?

Had a pain in my soul so I ate a bunch of chocolate. Now I have a pain in my stomach.

I miss the desert. My bike standing at the edge of the road, which sometimes felt like the edge of the world, somewhere near Mundabullangana, Western Australia.

I decided to look up some coping strategies for ADHD, anyway, turns out that Sweden’s Iore iron ore hauling freight trains produce enough power from regenerative braking to power the empty trains back up to...

The beginning of knowing Is not knowing

What is the purpose of revenge? To consume us, to occupy us in our grief.

There’s something so captivating about the future. We all just want to see what’s coming, that’s why we go on living.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the...

Best not to conflate what is habitual with what is natural.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which...

And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor of the handiwork of man — All Gold Canyon by Jack London, 1904 I want to be back in that mighty sweep.

I think there can never be a perfect chair. Bugger I’ve always wanted a perfect chair. But of course, how could there be one? More fool me for ever thinking there would be one. A chair dictates our form,...

I almost never regret green purchases. I’m not talking about “let’s save the planet” green purchases, though those are good too, but rather things that I buy that are green in colour tend to bring me more...

Imagine if hiccups were extremely contagious

As I re-evaluate my media diet I’ve come to the beginning of a conclusion. If it isn’t worth writing about, it wasn’t worth reading.

“The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder.” […] any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail. — From The End Of Average by Todd...

“But it’s junk!” Yeah… but it’s better than the junk that I’ve got. “So you’ll get rid of the bit of junk that it’s better than, will you?”

The greatest failure is to do nothing

A few snippets from Design Principles Behind Smalltalk. I have skipped those maxims that apply only to programming language design, and focused instead on the principles that are broad enough to prove...

There are things that we just can’t change.

Things happen. Not for any particular reason. They just happen. For Mizuki, things happen for a reason. Both are true I suppose. Alistair is going blind, he also thinks things happen for a reason. I wonder...

What if I designed a tent that was supported by a tripod? That way I could have a tripod for my camera without doubling up on pole weight.

Dates on this website I date things when I write them. Like a letter. Though I am often offline for extended periods. You wouldn’t date a letter for the day when you think it will be received, would you?

I have an electric toothbrush1. For all the decline of Braun since Dieter Rams left the company in 1995, they have managed one good feature with this unit that frequently pleases me. Being a battery powered...

The glass is half full, yet there are no good pillows, only less bad pillows. Most pillows are worse than no pillows.

Day six in a seven part series that has stretched to 20 days already, see parts #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. I wanted to draw something that reflected my mood following the events of last night but when I turned...

Since I left England, and even before then, I have had very little contact with my father. Twice a year, on my birthday and at Christmas, he’ll send me a text. Within a few days I’ll send him a reply,...

Part five in a series, see parts #1, #2, #3, and #4. A larger departure in style this week. I’ve been thinking about ideas as braids in a river, diverging and converging. How do you track the movement of an...

At any given time I am likely to have no idea where my passport is. This is despite the fact that I have been abroad for the last five years.

The glass is half full, then it’s empty

I wonder if my life would be better or worse if, all else being equal, we had no means of speaking of time, of situating things in time. No millenia. No months. No Mondays. Time yes, but just as a feeling....

Do drugs, stay out of school, talk to strangers

Advertisers, they truly are The Devil incarnate Incorporate.

I load fonts on this site. While this is in tension with my preference for speed and minimal bloat1, it is in harmony with my other design goals for this site. Presentation matters, and when the content is...

Been coming across Franz Kafka a fair bit of late. The last two places I heard him mentioned were in Kev Watters excellent Why Did why the lucky stiff Quit? and Erich Grunewald’s The Atemporal Franz Kafka....

Qualifications are generally quantitative rather than qualitative, but we are not quantitative beings. Focusing on qualities over quantities seems like a more sustainable posture but maybe I’m just shaking...

The design and the content of this site are so expressly interwoven that, more often than not, I am developing them alongside one another. Code occupies one half of my screen, prose the other. Each part...

Meaning is made in the making of meaning.

If the phrase “modal editor” means nothing to you, count yourself lucky and ignore everything that follows. For the rest of you clowns, leave your vitriol at the door. I love vim, but the fact that I feel...

Part four in a series, see parts #1, #2, and #3. Bless me Eble, for I have sinned, it has been ten days since my last submission. Just two days after committing to a doodle a day for a mere seven doodles, I...

A reminder that if you have two arms, you have more than the average number of arms.

Opportunities go to the opportunists.

Ma and I’s regular Sunday morning phone call (Saturday evenings for her) yielded a neat little bite. Decrying my own recency bias and the broader recency bias of society at large I said that life is reduced...

Why are my beliefs back on the brain? My beliefs govern my life, any thinking about them or attempts to refactor them is certain to ripple through my life, so what am I seeking to change in my life? What is...

What do I believe? PART 1 All creatures are dignified, worthy of honour and respect. I believe that life’s purpose lies in the making of meaning. Or more fully, meaning is made in the making of meaning. I...

Prefer specifics to generalities. I have a habit of trying to draw the things I think, and learn, and believe into ever larger contexts. I do so in part because of an innocent sort of eagerness, but also,...

I don’t know which is more true, that I HAVE NO AMBITION or that MY AMBITION IS TO DO NOTHING.

Emotions are a bit like an ocean. They have depths we can hardly fathom, and breadth that we cannot imagine. Like our own oceans we must surface from time to time, we cannot breathe our emotions. Unlike our...

I’m interested in anchors. Not real ones, not the kind that peg ships to the ocean floor, but all our sort of metaphysical anchors that peg our hearts to an emotional floor. The tethers that ground and...

Our lives stretch out before us and behind us. What lies ahead, lies in shadow. What stands behind, stands in ever changing light.

Everything is negotiable.

Eble attempt #3 in this series, see attempts #1 and #2. It’s a tired refrain among amateurs in all disciplines to say that their every effort sucks, so I won’t. But please know that I want to, especially...

Something better than Nattō I love Nattō, a Japanese food of fermented soybeans. Trouble is, it’s expensive, can be hard to find in New Zealand if you’re not in Auckland, Christchurch, or Wellington, and –...

Pleasure is not measured in grams. I was eating a crumpet this morning – a square crumpet, which is relevant I promise – and it got me thinking about my relationship with food. At the supermarket I...

With an emphasis on artefacts built for the web. There are different kinds of durability, absolute material durability is contrasted with practical, sustainable, and evolving durability through time. In the...

I’d like to be able to create meta-series’ of posts. Like a table of contents that sticks to the page, but instead of linking to internal anchors it crosslinks to other pages. This would need to be...

I’m going to extend my little art thievery project. I’m going to timebox it too, let’s try a week. I started yesterday, a Tuesd’y, so we’ll go ‘til Mundy. After that, we’ll see what felt good and perhaps...

More figuring out what it all means, how it all streams. I have my journal, and I have my nonsense. Ever since I birthed nonsense, I’ve had a much easier time getting words out, it’s been a relief to have...

where all is futile and we can only weep I’ve been in the dark place again this last week. The weather has been appalling, keeping us mostly stuck in doors. When the clouds draw in I wither a little. But...

Good artists copy, great artists steal. Fed into the canon of art as a quote by Picasso, though he probably never said it. I’m not even an artist – good, bad, or ugly – so it doesn’t matter to me, but I’ll...

Obviously: a word I would like to eject from my everyday vocabulary

Haste makes waste

What should the structure of this site achieve? Chiefly, it should allow me to group rather than filter. I don’t want to filter out my rubbish, it has a home in my nonsense; I don’t wish to fret over...

I have a hot and cold relationship with dates in URLs. For a while I took an absolute stance against them. Took a while before I realised that they’re well suited to some things. And now, most of the...

I can’t consume and emit at the same time. As I stood eating a biscuit, looking around at the mess of my packing for an urgent, unplanned, week-long getaway starting in the early hours of tomorrow morning,...

I’m imagining a computing paradigm where the first interaction – every time you wish to use the computer – is a declaration of how long you intend your task to take. As you wake/power-on/unlock the device,...

I want to draw. Learn by doing and all that. Get over the fear of it. It’s not much, just the wood burner here at Locking Street. I didn’t have the guts to try and add flames, maybe next time. For now I’ll...

I’m finding David Roberts’ (1796–1864) illustrations of Egypt in the 19th century absolutely spellbinding. Courtesy of my own cowardice, I cannot draw. I’ve long wanted to draw, but every embryonic effort...

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logigo-philosphicus, 1922

I came across Simon Griffee a long time ago, filed his site away somewhere in my catalogue, and just returned to it as I hunt through sites that I have admired looking for taxonomical inspiration. Only this...

Are we flesh full of ideas, or ideas wrapped in flesh?

journal chafes a bit. I’m happy with chronology, I want that. Still journal feels a little rigid, impersonal. Ironic, because of course it is very personal. But it seems so obvious, and I like that,...

I enjoy breaking this little website of mine. Like I’ll miss some syntactical error in a template, or put a question mark in a page title, and all of a sudden my bespoke, scrappy little build scripts will...

holy heck, I’m just churning out the nonsense this evening

capital letters are SUFFOCATING

It’s bad to steal… according to the people who’ve stolen more than you can imagine and really don’t want you to steal any of it back

maybe don’t turn over a new leaf. maybe leave it on the poor bloody plant, it’s not yours, he made it. make something of your own

What would be a sensible thing to do with someone who had committed a crime? assuming we wanted them to not commit more crimes in the future Send them to a big house full of other people who have committed...

more, but worse

It has been absolutely pouring with weather these last couple weeks. May it will end soon. Perhaps I just need taking outside of the environment for a bit.

Conversations don’t scale as far as we might like. Involving more people in a conversation can be a great way to canvas a broader set of opinions and surface a superset of possible solutions, but as the...

Insanity is opening the fridge over and over again and expecting different results.

Trust is pretty wild. I just sent 2100 dollars to a stranger on the internet. In return he agrees to send me a camera. I don’t know this person, I don’t know if the (used) camera is in the condition he...

When I read a list, I start from the middle. I was at dinner with friends recently and hit upon that while trying to convey how my brain works – and how it doesn’t. I’m scattered by nature, my attention is...

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about A system of urls. Hierarchies, taxonomies, ontologies. How can they best be expressed in this medium. A large fraction of the writing on this site is of...

I wear your affection close to my heart. You made me a necklace. I wear it close to my heart, I don’t want to take it off. You say it looks like my eyes, this shard of west coast greenstone, brown at the...

And the planting season has begun in earnest. Today was the ceremonial first day of planting, and I’d say it went well. Sure the weather was dismal, and we all grumble about something or other, not least...

I’m sort of looking forward to this site calcifying. Not the writing, nor the habit, I hope to keep that alive and fresh, but the wrapping, the glitter, the skeleton that holds the guts all together....

Mizuki and I watched Rope (1948) tonight. One of my all time favourite films. It is about as close as it gets to watching theatre on the silver screen. Watching it again, coupled with a certain amount of...

I want to marry my nonsense from each day to the journal entry from that day (if one exists) such that each nonsense item shows up at the bottom of said journal page. I also want to add a build-step that...

Why oh why does the Atom specification require a title element? As a feed markup I like Atom better than RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0 etc etc but I struggle to forgive the insistence on a title element, it’s just a...

Time is a hierarchy and we’re all headed for the bottom.

Really I’m obsessing over structure. I’ve long been preoccupied with structure, often looking for it, or trying to establish it, prematurely. As an example, in my conception of my site there has emerged a...

I’m not writing nearly as much as I would like, instead I keep tinkering with code on the backend. I enjoy the tinkering a lot, but it’s mostly a distraction from what I’m trying to do here. The breadcrumb...

Can our goals exceed our goals?

I’ve never been very good at following rules.

How much of life can truly be transmitted on ports 80 and 443? Painfully little perhaps.

Trying to give shape to a pair of tattoos I would like to get to represent my trips in Australia and New Zealand. Something to do with a bicycle for Oz, and walking/Te Araroa for NZ, but what exactly… and...

Knoll Knolling is the process of arranging related objects in parallel or 90-degree angles as a method of organization. The term knolling was coined in 1987 by a janitor name Andrew Kromelow who was working...

Sent does not mean received.

The earth spins. Isn’t that wild?

The next big journey in my mind involves a top to bottom of the American continents. From the top of the [Yukon] to the southern tip of South America, including the Pacific Crest Trail down the west cost of...

The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling A bad week at work has made Tim Harford’s latest feel more prescient than it might have two weeks ago. Even I, someone who has spent...

Work was better today. Still glad the week is over though.

This collection of nonsense/tumblelog/whatever is not nearly as good as Bill Wurtz’s, so go read that instead.

Do I enjoy the work? Fuck the work. Do I enjoy it? I did enjoy it. I don’t know. I liked it. And then I loved it. Fuck the work this week. Better luck next week. Don’t let the bastards under your skin....

The internet is the single greatest tragedy of the commons.

Socrates felt that he didn’t have enough knowledge to write, so why the shit do I think I know enough to?

Only we can harm our own soul.

If you don’t smile at the world, don’t be offended if the world doesn’t smile back.

Balancing the scales of friction where I want them. Why do I use a separate note for each day? I keep humming and hawing over whether I should go back to one big file (as I did from 2015-2020) or one file...

As of May, 2022 I have bought precisely one tent in my life, my trusty Vango Banshee 300 which has been my roving home since 2017 when I bought it for my seven month cycle-circumnavigation of Australia. I...

Working hard on the cabin after a short hiatus. This weekend was spent digging a trench by hand through saturated clay in order to lay conduit for an up-to-code rewiring. Jim (Isobel’s son) gave up a...

I gave myself an hour (hence the straggling Unintegrated points section) to try and articulate my feelings about truth, its fragility, and our collective relationship with it. I found I was able to write...

If you walk around bare foot and don’t wash your feet, you’ll have dirty sheets.

In the beginning the Internet was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. That’s a really fluffy title and a stolen line to open what will...

Systems that aim to support creative thought and expression should take pains to reduce friction during moments of creativity. Primitive tools for thought frequently fail at this by pressuring or even...

Having to define taxonomies up front creates a blocking issue before we are in a position to solve it. Awareness of where a thought fits within our existing taxonomies, or indeed whether it opens up a new...

Giving a title to a thought, note, essay etc. can be a useful and clarifying tool by beginning to close the open feedback loop – forcing us to confront and summarise our argument or objective. However, a...

Bought another pair of second-hand blue jeans a couple of weeks back. These jeans look a lot like my preferred everyday pair of second-hand blue jeans, but differ in one important respect, they’re not my...

I use dashes a lot in my writing and I’m reminded that it was Rose that introduced me to them. Thank you Rose. Heaps of firewood in the store now, probably wont use all of it, and still plenty of my...

Back in the familiar fog that accompanies every drive west. I want to be instinctively kind. My instincts are greedy, I can be better though. Left a couple large feijoas on the wing mirror of Tersha and...

Very cold this morning. Driving to pick up Shay I caught sight of a familiar gait, the long, loping stride of Ty briefly lit by a street lamp, making his way to roll call down at the wharf. It’s been more...

Been chatting to Bede a lot more on these drives in. He has a quiet, charming spirit, but he’s hinted several times that his life hasn’t been all that he once hoped. I’ll long remember what he told me about...

Notes as a forest, developed in cycles (seasons), self pruning (shed leaves and even branches), self seeding too: sure occasionally a lone tree will establish itself, carried far by the wind, but the forest...

Just Bede and I in our ute today, Aiesha’s still sick, and now Shay too. In his 1938 novel Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the...

Getting in the Ute again felt like an assault, radio blaring. Been two weeks since I’ve been wilding. Does feel glorious to be back in the forest though. The skylight went in over the weekend, along with...

I have quite a substantial amount of digital-grunt-work to get on with – what amounts to data-entry. Frustratingly, this grunt-work doesn’t yet feel ‘final’. By that I mean that I foresee having to do more...

I’m keen to overhaul the way that I’m authoring. Multiple experiments with workflows and formats for writing and publishing have left me with a patchwork that has started to feel brittle. I want to be...

Found eight cockroaches in the coffee plunger this morning, not seen them in there before. Mizuki not at all impressed. Had a wonderful, long conversation with mum this morning. I’d wanted to squeeze in an...

This triplet – often misattributed to Benjamin Franklin but likely evolving from the writing of Xunzi (Xun Kuang), a Confucian philosopher who lived in the third century B.C.E1 — sets up a pedagogical...

Nelson feels cold this morning. A day off. Woah. The last time I took a day off work was Sep 24th, 2021 when Mizuki had been down in Arthur’s Pass for some time and Benn and I drove down for the weekend, I...

9.35am As we raced through the last of the planting I remember I had a thought that I really wanted to write down and develop, but I couldn’t write it down in the pouring rain and a couple hours later it’s...

We drove down to the swamp last night after work to enjoy the sunset. Dean brought his gold pan, we all brought beers, skipped stones, spun yarns. Shay got excited when he found a rowing boat up the beach....

It often seems that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what computers can do. This has in large part to do with the low rate of computer fluency. Historically this probably shouldn’t come as too much of...

Recently negotiated a second raise at work, the last was in December. Intending to continue in this role that I cherish – native forest conservation – for much of the remainder of my time in New Zealand....

When the brain is in a creative state it resembles a thunderstorm: difficult to predict where or when lightning will strike a huge — but unpredictable — amount of energy potential in each ‘bolt’ nigh...

What is the use of taking notes? Is it to record events and useful information, to support learning by helping us to remember concepts, figures, quotes, etc? Yes to all the above, but also no, those are...

Isobel and I recently drummed up a cool new project proposal (because, of course, the approximately infinite list we already chip away at day by day was in need of expansion 😂). Could we turn the somewhat...

Isobel had mentioned that the lean-to shed half way up the garden was a source of frustration, not very useful on account of the steep slope and a lack of any meaningful storage system. A good evening...

After three weeks spent tramping the south of the south island over Christmas, Mizuki and I are back in Nelson. We put out some feelers for a place to stay and heard back from Isobel. In exchange for...

I spent almost two years in Australia, arriving in November of 2017 and departing in September of 2019. A third of that time, seven months of it, was devoted to cycling the circumference of that sunburnt...

Discarding all other connotations of the word reasonable, a reasonable system is one that can be understood, if not intuitively, then at least readily. Tools and systems ought to be reasonable.

He who travels the fastest, travels alone. Let go of your goals. At the end of my life, be that at the turn of the next century or tomorrow, I want to be able to say that I achieved what I set out to...

I remember Rose and I being frustrated by the kayak people’s insistence on pronouncing Whanganui with a ‘wa’ sound rather than its proper ‘fa’ sound. It wasn’t until some time after finishing Te Araroa that...

The less you have to do, the less say you have. — Frank Chimero The internet promised to set us free, rid the world of the gatekeepers and the middlemen for good. As the barriers between artists and...

In systems theory a steady state is reached when a system’s variables become – and remain – unchanging in time. Often, the reality of a system being in steady state is not acknowledged until that steady...

The opposite of fragile is something that actually gains from disorder. — Nassim Taleb A system or entity is anti-fragile when rather than being weakened by stress, failures, and attacks, they thrive and...

They have stories too I think I’m not alone in this but, when I take a dislike to someone, I am often guilty of attaching to them a simplicity of character that doesn’t recognise the depth of humanity that...

A small part of A short walk beneath a long white cloud Today, six months post-trail, I was talking to Louis, an American here at the hostel. It turns out he is friends with Max, the very fast French Te...

If you want to embed the wisdom of something you’ve read, don’t simply repeat it, re-contextualise it, make it your own thought. A quote is rarely more than an approximation of your own thinking, simply...

Habitual and optimal, never shall they meet. As I walked into the bathroom I flicked the light switch as I swung the door shut with a flick of my heel – efficient. Only the light was already on, so with...

Benn just observed that this time around, everyone switched into lockdown mode nearly instantly. I remember when we all went into lockdown the first time, everyone one was flailing about, ransacking the...

Watching Fernando Meirelles’ The Two Popes I was struck by how the high station granted to bishops, cardinals, popes, etc on the basis of hearing God’s voice in their heads, contrasts with the very low...

I just published the first draft of the second chapter of A short walk beneath a long white cloud, where we plunge into Raetea forest and (spoiler) emerge mostly unscathed, so go ahead and read that. Photos...

Chapter 2 of A short walk beneath a long white cloud In which the heavens open; an Irishman appears; slips are had by all; and friendships emerge. Day 6 – Rain over Raetea It rained through the night and in...

I have been living in New Zealand for the last 20 months. After walking 3300 kilometres across New Zealand between October 2020 and February 2021 I am now living in Nelson and working as a wharf hand. Or...

Chapter 1 of A short walk beneath a long white cloud In which Rose and Silas make their way from Auckland to Cape Reinga; the startling landscapes of New Zealand make themselves known sooner than expected;...

Prologue to A short walk beneath a long white cloud Sunday, September 6th I shaved Rose’s head today, well, mostly. Michael’s clippers ran out about two thirds of the way through and he was out and no...

The first thought that goes through your mind is what you’ve been conditioned to think. What you think next is what will come to define you.

I love the web – in all it’s world wide wonder. I particularly love the small web, a beautifully idiosyncratic name for a very large cohort of geographically and culturally disparate humans who share their...

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. — Salvador Dali I have had to hold Dali’s words between my gritted teeth as I try and put pen to paper this month. Usually if my writing starts to...

Random with your name on it… The venerable Spotify unloaded it’s next round of Only You ‘personalised recommendations’ on me this morning. They bear no resemblance to my listening habits. Naturally there...

I know, I know, I should have kept a journal. I should have saved the love letters. I should have taken a storage room somewhere in Long Island City for all the papers I thought I’d never need to look at...

A tortured and unimaginative title given that I’ve just finished reading Turtles All the Way Down by John Green. I picked it up out of a nostalgia for the feeling of reading Looking for Alaska fourteen...

Somehow the saddest part of unloading this tuna boat isn’t the thousand tonnes of tuna that have been wrenched from their watery home, suffocated, and frozen solid – it’s all the other sea creatures that...

I’m good at nothing – good at doing nothing that is. I’m good at other things too, but being good at nothing sometimes feels like a superpower. I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I...

What did the trip teach me? What did I learn cycling around Australia? I was hitch-hiking from Picton to Nelson today. The first two hitches got me a little ways and we made easy, inconsequential chatter....

Rose and I are talking about modern novels, 21st century archetypes, novels like Hot Milk and Netherland. Rose remarked that they – and we in the real – are ”in an era of existential dread”. As ever, The...

I refer to the entries on this site – whether they be entries in my journal or my notes – as fragments. What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the...

This piece of the web is me attempting to find my voice. So far it eludes me. Like a lot of mediocre writers my writing frequently gets bogged down in things that just don’t matter. I’ll turn out paragraphs...

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. — Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1936 Write the things. That’s the shortest, punchiest...

At 6pm on the 7th of October, a Wednesday, Rose and I stood atop Cape Reinga — the northern most point of New Zealand’s north island and the most spiritually significant place in Aotearoa — looking at the...

I never got around to finishing this write-up, in truth I barely even started it. Maybe I’ll return to it one day. Over four and a half months, Rose and I walked the length of Aotearoa New Zealand, the land...

In the last three years I have spent eleven months working, I haven’t had a job since Rose and I said goodbye to Australia almost a year ago. In three weeks we make for Cape Reinga to begin the Te Araroa...

一期一会 ichi-go ichi-e A Japanese idiom which is most often translated as for this time only and which serves as a reminder that, whether we meet someone often or only once, we will never again encounter them,...

Chapter 1 of Long gone in the back of beyond Three years I’ve been gone. Three years ago I was unhappy, doing better than I had been in any of the previous 10 years, but still not living a life that I could...

I’ve never felt creative. It used to be that I didn’t want to be or at least didn’t feel that I wanted to be. I don’t know exactly what’s changed, nor exactly when but I think the strength of the need to...

Love is what is done without expectation.

It wasn’t wisdom that carried me 10,000 miles from England to Australia at 21. It wasn’t prescience, it was a naive hope. Our minds like to draw neat linear conclusions - from cause to consequence. We like...

The fantastic thing about solitude is the reveal. To wonder head down, alone, along a path that goes you know not where, to then pause, raise your head, look back, and see how far you’ve come. There’s a...