Now: June 2025

This summer I’ve been doing a bit of travelling, up and down to Dublin and a work trip to Barcelona. It’s afforded me some time tinkering, gaming, reading and watching, in between all the fun family stuff that comes with longer days, easier weather and brighter mornings.

It’s been sad watching Polygon die, the internet overall become a scarier and more dangerous place. But I’ve also been trying not to dwell on the negatives and appreciate the quite lovely life I have.

🎧 Listening To

The Vergecast

This is still my consistently favourite tech podcast. They’re brilliantly critical of baseless hype or monopolist or censorious nonsense, while managing to hold onto the geeky joy of new gadgets, new tech and the possibilities these things can unlock.

The Ezra Klein Show

I don’t always agree with Ezra, but I’m consistently impressed by his ability to respectfully challenge and engage with people he doesn’t agree with. It always feels worth listening to him dig into a topic.

📺 Watching

Not watching a lot of TV at the moment. Managed to finish Severance Season 2 a few weeks ago, and Andor Season 2 – neither disappointed, but I wasn’t absolutely blown away either.

The Rehearsal

I don’t even know where to begin. Edit: I wrote a post about it!

🕺 Grooving To

I’ve started dipping into Tom Waits for the first time in what must be nearly twenty years.

📱 Apps and That

I’m getting deeper into Obsidian – used it to write this post, directly in my blog! Using it as a CMS frontend is really cool and feels great. I had been using VS Code and while I did feel like a hacker, I didn’t feel like someone writing words for a human to read.

Experimenting with using Syncthing for synchronising folders, including some of my Obsidian vaults.

👎 Not For Me

I picked up Old Skies and have surprised myself by just kind of bouncing off it. I should love it, and it’s certainly not bad, but I haven’t found the mood for it yet.

📚 Reading Books

My wife recommended If It Bleeds by Stephen King, and I’m really enjoying it so far. He’s such an incredibly strong writer, you’re really in a safe pair of hands.

My good friend Richard loaned me his copy of Hyperion by Dan Simmons and it is absolutely batshit insane and I’m quite enjoying it. An earnest attempt at a literary addition to the science fiction genre, structured like The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, it is ambitious, and often beautifully written, but frequently horrifyingly violent, and while there’s decent female characterisation, the author does seem to make a point of mentioning how most women’s breasts are looking in that exact moment.

🤓 Reading Online

Trying out self-hosted Wallabag at the moment after Pocket and Omnivore have been condemned.

• This lovely piece on the history of the Digital Garden (which inspired this current iteration of my online presence.)
• A haunting essay on trying to re-enchant and dealienate the world.

🎮 Playing

I mostly game on a Steam Deck and older games run incredibly well on it. I loved the Dishonored games when they came out but recently realised that I’d missed Death of the Outsider, so I played it and was having such a great time that I rolled right into Dishonored 2, which I’m almost finished and am kind of dreading finishing. These are such wonderful, rich single-player experiences.

I always feel so thrilled that so many talented people would work so hard for so long just so I could have a great time.