We live forward, but understand backward. — Harald Høffding A week ago there was seven of us sleeping in this small one bedroom apartment. Four-by-four and two-by-two they went, tonight it’s just me....

One thing’s for sure: until you have a backup strategy of some kind, you’re screwed, you just don’t know it yet. — Jeff Atwood, What’s Your Backup Strategy?, Coding Horror, 2008 So it turns out computers...

Inspired by my writing in public everyday for a month, which often draws from things I’ve read or watched, Kyle wants to get into the habit of writing a little something about the things he...

The first episode of The Morning Show takes its name from an unsung F. Scott Fitzgerald essay, In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. — F. Scott...

I don’t know my father. He wasn’t absent, but he was. I grew up in his house but we’re still strangers. I used to blame him for that. He was a difficult man sure, but when we broke it was me that did the...

It’s not often that you meet a person who can see right through you, see the daft wee child crouching within. I was half-managing a warehouse in Moorabin — an industrial suburb of Melbourne — when Cy joined...

Know the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. — Richard Feynman in Christopher Sykes, Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1981 It’s easy to think we understand...

Last night, walking back from Jessey’s after watching The Substance, reflecting on the place of gore and horror with Kyle, my scepticism toward it, I was reminded of a memory of a particular kind, a memory...

I’m not a watcher of horror, and certainly not of body horror. I’d say encounters with cinematic horror, and certainly gore, have been a reliable source of regret for me. I still vividly remember a rare,...

“What is the matter with you?” “Oh, don’t ask! I never expected it; no, I never expected it! It’s… it’s positively incredible!” — Anton Chekov, Joy, 1877 I’m reading Chekov’s Joy while I reckon with my own....

The Dutch football team visited a Polish orphanage during Euro 2012. “The sight of those empty, hopeless, and sad faces deeply affected us,” said 13-year-old orphan Oskar Kowalczyk. Dutch is known by almost...

I’m reading In The Cart aka The Schoolmistress, written by Anton Chekhov in 1897. I’m reading In The Cart because in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain George Saunders is telling me to. I’m reading In The Cart as...

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. Susan Sontag, On Photography, Ch. In Plato’s Cave, 1977 We are the glutton, unable to escape...

Like a fool I’ve committed myself to publishing something every day for a month. I can’t lie, it’s already been a struggle. I’ve been succumbing to distraction, if anything, more than usual. I’d have given...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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’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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

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, #4, and #6 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...

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...

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...

Part four in a series, see parts #1, #2, #3, #5, and #6 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...

Eble attempt #3 in this series, see parts #1, #2, #4, #5, and #6 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,...

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’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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, Esquire, 1936 Write the things. That’s the shortest,...

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...

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...

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...

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...