Recursive Words

When I write for the blog, the words have recently started out in a note taking application called “Obsidian”. I like it primarily because it writes in plain text. When starting a new post, I invariable name the file with the date, and then the name of th

When I write for the blog, the words have recently started out in a note taking application called “Obsidian”. I like it primarily because it writes in plain text. When starting a new post, I invariable name the file with the date, and then the name of the day until I think of something better.

Tonight’s post’s initial title is “Saturday Night” – so guess who’s now humming Whigfield’s one-hit wonder, and knows he will now be humming it for the next few days. So will you. You’re welcome.

It says something about the way I typically write that I don’t have a clue what a post is going to be about until I’m writing it.

I just launched Spotify, and asked it to play “Saturday Night”. Maybe if I listen to it, it will drive it out somehow?

I need a playlist of 1990s dance anthems. Ear worms. For some reason the memory of a box-set of dance music I once owned just climbed from the catacombs of my memory. The box was branded with the logo of a club called “Miss Moneypenny’s”, with a picture of Melinda Messenger in a silver lycra suit on the cover.

Isn’t memory odd. The things we have seen, heard, watched, read, or experienced get stored away for years – decades – with the happenings of every subsequent day, month and year piled on top. All it seems to take to recover any of it is a sound, a word, or a smell.

I can almost imagine my brain as an old curiosity shop or library – filled with a ramshackle collection of curios, junk, and brick-a-brack – overseen by a Professor Quirrel type character – who hears a sound or tastes the air, before holding a finger up and racing off into the labyrinthine catacombs before returning with a tome of memories – a bound volume of a place and time with an embossed binding and ribbons tied across it’s pages.

I can smell the library, even though it doesn’t exist.

I love the smell of libraries and second hand bookshops.

I fell down an internet rabbit hole this week. After posting my frustrations with Substack’s increasingly steep slide towards becoming a walled garden, a number of people got in touch – relating their annoyance too.

I fell down an internet rabbit hole this week. After posting my frustrations with Substack’s increasingly steep slide towards becoming a walled garden, a number of people got in touch – relating their annoyance too.

Substack *used* to be simple. Online newsletters with email subscriptions. Then they added comments, likes, notes, chat, and all manner of other things that nobody really wanted or needed – and all of which required membership in one way or another.

Fish in a barrel.

So I started looking at options.

WordPress.com is still out there, and Automattic’s founder – Matt Mullenweg – is still waging an idiotic war against WP Engine. Regardless of my issues with Matt’s behaviour, WordPress.com (the hosted solution) is a walled garden, and always will be. I get it – there are advantages to forcing your audience to have an account – likes and comments can’t be traced to somebody otherwise.

The default behaviour of WordPress – behind the JetPack plugin – is the same as it always was; with commenters email addresses being recorded for blog authors to discover. Not a lot of people know that. More than once I have reached out to a commenter, and they were shocked to discover that any blog they had commented on within the WordPress ecosystem has their email address.

Blogger is still out there too – acquired by Google in 2003, and then left to rot for the last twenty years. I looked into importing some of my posts into it – to see how viable it still is – and the importer repeatedly fell over without reporting any issues.

I wandered over to Wix – who seem to be spending more than the GDP of a small African country on TV and internet ads at the moment. Quite apart from their AI designer not creating responsive designs, I was also shocked to discover that much of their blogging user interface is set in stone. Given the cost of the platform (it’s not free), I was genuinely shocked.

I took a look at Squarespace too – another darling of the commercial advertising world. I built a company website based on Squarespace a couple of years ago, so know exactly what it’s capable of. It’s probably the best option – but also not free.

I looked at Ghost a little while ago – the content management platform started by a group of ex-Wordpress engineers. It’s very good, but also quite expensive, and it’s treatment of email subscribers leans heavily towards monetising them.

I even looked at Jekyll – the static site generator built into Github – that allows anybody to create a blog from a pile of markdown files (and guess who has 6,000 markdown files). It works well, but would mean strapping on a third party subscription engine – something like follow.it – which is messy, and a bit clunky. It also doesn’t handle images easily.

We all know where this is going, don’t we.

I’m not leaving Substack.

I don’t want to run my own platform – and I don’t want to surrender to the entry requirements of WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or wherever else. Of course as soon as I post this, Substack will probably change their commercial model and force my hand – but for now, Substack does seem to just work.

I might switch liking and commenting off though. It doesn’t really need it – and people can email me if they want to pass judgement about a post. It’s only when liking or commenting that the heavy handed membership workflow kicks in. If the blog had no likes or comments, it wouldn’t have the opportunity to hassle people.

Anyway.

It’s late, and I’ve just written several hundred words about nothing at all.

I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

p.s. I’m continually surprised at the influx of famous faces at Substack. I’ve been reading Pamela Anderson’s posts for a while – she’s been an unexpected delight – thoughtful, honest, transparent, and a wonderful writer.

Everybody else went to bed some time ago. I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of the desk lamps while Billy Joel plays the piano and sings.

Everybody else went to bed some time ago. I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of the desk lamps while Billy Joel plays the piano and sings.

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this evening – cleaning and tidying the thousands of blog posts hidden away in the backup I curate and maintain. Away from the public gaze I have everything I’ve ever written stored in “markdown” format – plain text files. It’s an insurance policy of sorts – to make sure I don’t lose my writing in the event of disaster.

Over time I’ve become lazy – copying and pasting into the archive from various platforms and text editors – some of which are far too clever for their own good – decorating text with curly quotes, em-dashes, non breaking spaces, and so on. In the grand scheme of things, spotting the odd ligature in your text isn’t the end of the world, but once you know they are there, they eat away at you – or rather, they eat away at me.

It’s a slippery slope. What started out as few minutes tidying up some obvious issues turned into an entire evening. An entire evening I might have spent far more productively.

It didn’t help that I then spent an hour creating a second incarnation of the blog using a static site generator called “Jekyll” – mainly because I could. I do that sort of thing a lot.

We won’t mention that it occurred to me that I might move the motherlode of text files into Obsidian – a rather wonderful cross-platform note-taking tool that also uses markdown.

I really am my own worst enemy sometimes.

While writing largely about nothing at all, the clock has ticked past midnight once again. Billy Joel went home some time ago. Tori Amos has dragged her piano out to centre stage, is sitting sideways on the seat, and has begun singing “Winter”.

I’ll always have a soft-spot for Tori.

It’s late. I should go brush my teeth, then fall into bed.

As the weekend ebbs away and a new week approaches, you find me sitting in the junk room, listening to music, and attempting to shut the rest of the world out for at least a little while.

As the weekend ebbs away and a new week approaches, you find me sitting in the junk room, listening to music, and attempting to shut the rest of the world out for at least a little while.

Emptying a few thoughts into the keyboard is proving deceptively difficult.

Not quite knowing where to start, I’ll start with today.

I spent the majority of today wandering around a nearby town with my middle daughter. She asked last night if I might accompany her. I had no other plans, so shrugged, smiled, and said “why not?”.

I needed some new clothes anyway.

In response to the warmer temperatures this weekend, yesterday morning saw me digging through the clothes drawers in the bedroom in search of any kind of shorts. I came back empty handed. I wondered for some time about their whereabouts, and then yesterday evening recalled perhaps throwing them away, on account of them falling to pieces.

I’m regularly reprimanded for wearing clothes in various states of disrepair – be that socks with holes, torn trousers, ripped shirts, or whatever else it might be.

Along the way the gravitational pull of both the record store, and the bookshop grew too strong. I came home having bought three vinyl albums, and three books. I would be listening to the albums now, but my other half tends to dictate what goes on in the living room (where the record player is) – hence me sitting in the study, listening to Spotify.

I’m still on the female recording-artist bent – today’s haul brought Carly Rae Jepsen, Kate Bush, and Carole King albums to the collection. And yes – it’s “the” Carole King album – “Tapestry”. I’ll listen to it later; for the moment Carly is singing about beach houses and lonely times. The Kate Bush album is the one with the oriental cover – “Wuthering Heights” and “The Man with the Child in his Eyes” are among the tracks.

As much as I love the serendipity of flipping through vinyl records in the music store, I will admit to frustration that they don’t have everything I might go looking for. I guess the world of streaming music has shifted expectations somewhat. You can’t underestimate chance discoveries though. An algorithmic time-line would never have caught my eye with Miles Davis.

“On Green Dolphin Street” remains one of my favorite instrumental pieces of music – if you get the chance to listen to Miles Davis’ rendition, it’s so worth it. I think it was originally included on an album called “Kind of Blue”. You can close your eyes while listening and be teleported to just about anywhere, and any time. In a strange sort of way, it’s a soundtrack to all of our lives.

Anyway.

Here we are, or here I am. Writing. Trying to remember how to open the faucet filled with words that used to flow so freely. I’m not quite the open book I once was. I think once you start filtering what you share with the wider world, you begin to hesitate about everything – or at last I do.

For me, getting started is the hardest part. Letting go. Once I start writing, it’s not so bad. Those first few words though… painful.

After several days of seemingly endless struggling, I started to make progress today.

After several days of seemingly endless struggling, I started to make progress today.

I’ve spent the last two days pulling swathes of example programming to pieces – not so much asking “does it work”, as much as “how does it work?”.

Using a car engine as an analogy, instead of asking “does the engine work”, I’ve been asking “how does a spark plug work?”, “how does fuel get to the spark plug?”, “how does it ignite the fuel”, “how does that drive the pistons?”, “what are the pistons connected to?”, “how does the gearbox work?”, and so on.

After two days struggle, I’ve begun to understand the whole. After watching endless tutorials, writing endless notes, and using the knowledge to piece together a working prototype out of the computer equivalents of sticky tape and string, I’m beginning to understand.

I need to be careful now.

I’ve been here before. As soon as you start making any sort of meaningful progress there’s a huge temptation to keep going – to burn hours, days, and weeks crafting an invisible software engineering marvel that nobody will ever see.

I need to engineer occasional escapes from the code. Meetups with friends. Quiet walks. Perhaps even pull on the running shoes. We’ll see.

p.s. I might have ordered myself a Nintendo Switch

Today marked the beginning of perhaps a long journey into the unknown – learning something entirely new – or new to me at least.

Today marked the beginning of perhaps a long journey into the unknown – learning something entirely new – or new to me at least.

I’ve been busy reading documentation all day – and writing pages of notes about an endless list of programming frameworks and libraries that I’ve never heard of or seen before. The climb ahead is looking pretty vertical at the moment – I’m sure it will get easier.

Before I knew it, the day had gone – the evening has almost gone too. It’s funny how that happens.

Quite how I’m still awake is anyone’s guess.

I knew my middle daughter was working until midnight in the pub last night, so stayed up to make sure she got home in one piece. Midnight didn’t seem like such a big deal – until it became 1:30am. As she approached the front door in the darkness, it magically swung open in front of her and I stepped from the shadows, smiling.

I whispered “hello”, and she silently waved her key at me.

We crossed paths minutes later on the upstairs landing – with whispers of “goodnight” before collapsing into bed.

There’s a temptation this evening to fall down the internet rabbit hole in search of knowledge – to make tomorrow’s continued climb up the vertical cliff a little easier.

I’m resisting – so far.

I asked an artificially intelligent machine learning algorithm to draw a concept art character of a 50 year old software developer sitting in a room full of old computer hardware (so essentially, a pretend alter-ego of myself).

I asked an artificially intelligent machine learning algorithm to draw a concept art character of a 50 year old software developer sitting in a room full of old computer hardware (so essentially, a pretend alter-ego of myself).

The result was interesting. I always find it interesting to see what biases artificial intelligence has – how it portrays nationalities, ages, and common stereotypes. It’s interesting to see how it portrays people with different percieved or presumed backgrounds.

I asked one of the famous AI platforms to pretend to be this non existent person, and write a blog post – and to base his personality on recent posts in this blog. I half expected guard-rails to kick in and refuse my request.

Imagine my surprise when the machinery of the internet turned it’s cogs, and said “fine… here you go:”

Here’s an excerpt of what it came up with:

I was re-reading an old journal entry this morning – something I scribbled down months ago in a moment of fleeting clarity. It struck me how many of those half-formed ideas, those nascent understandings of myself and the world, still echo within me. They haven’t quite solidified into conclusions, haven’t found their neat little boxes. Instead, they drift like wisps of smoke, occasionally coalescing into a momentary shape before dissolving back into the ether.

There’s a certain comfort in this state, I think. A permission to not have all the answers, to reside in the ambiguity of the in-between. Life, after all, rarely presents itself in neatly packaged solutions. More often, it’s a series of unfolding moments, each carrying its own subtle nuances and unresolved threads.

I find myself drawn to the spaces where clarity blurs, where the edges of understanding soften. It’s in these liminal zones that the most interesting discoveries often lie – the unexpected connections, the subtle shifts in perspective that reshape the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

Am I really that nebulous?

I will admit to being endlessly fascinated with computers – and with what their programming comes up with when not given enough information to form what we might deem sensible or plausible answers.

I can’t help being reminded of Robin William’s speech in Good Will Hunting – about Will’s invented persona – used to shield from the trauma he had experienced:

So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written…Michelangelo?

You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right?

But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.

The monologue famously contemplates love, loss, and more – but this small excerpt (for me) says everything about the state of AI at the moment. It’s a parlour trick. Yes, it’s very good at looking things up – it’s read everything, after all – but all that makes it into is an insufferable know-it-all.

If it asks after you, it’s not doing so out of empathy – it’s doing so because it’s been told to.

There’s a wonderful moment in the movie “AI” where William Hurt is demonstrating the limits of AI to a classroom full of students – he asks a female robot what love is:

Professor Hobby: Tell me. What is love?

Sheila: Love is first widening my eyes a little bit and quickening my breathing a little and warming my skin and touching with my…

Professor Hobby: And so on. Exactly so. Thank you, Sheila.

I can’t help wondering how long it will take for artificial intelligence to begin to understand the more complex facets of human interaction – empathy, happiness, sadness, longing, kindness, sorrow, humor.

I suspect it will happen faster than we imagine.

While sitting here in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of lamps that stand on either end of the desk, a server farm somewhere is having a quiet heart attack – having received every blog post I’ve written since 2003.

While sitting here in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of lamps that stand on either end of the desk, a server farm somewhere is having a quiet heart attack – having received every blog post I’ve written since 2003. The posts are slowly appearing – back-filling the past towards the present, re-constructing the “story of me”.

You’re probably wondering why. So am I.

The entire escapade was triggered by a conversation with a friend earlier – who mentioned they had been reading my blog recently. All of the over-think cogs started turning at once following the conversation, and I began wondering how I might bring “the motherlode” to life on the internet once more.

I’m nothing if not organised.

Hidden away on the internet, I’ve always had a backup of my blog in various states of disrepair, hidden away in a source code repository, stored as “markdown” (a plain text format used in the publishing industry).

After a few minutes of head scratching, and some re-purposing of old python scripts, I turned the collection of plain text files into WordPress import files. Substack understands wordpress import files.

And so – as I write this, the Substack server farm is churning through somewhere in the region of six thousand posts – expanding the stories told here to include twenty years worth of traveling with work, running, IVF, adoption, parenting, cats, dogs, and everything in-between.

I’m not sure anybody would be mad enough to go back and read the whole damn thing, but you never know. Some of the older posts are a bit broken in places – the result of one too many migrations between platforms in the early days of the social internet – but the words are all there. Or at least, mostly there.

Anyway.

I’ll shut up. It’s been a bit of a day. The project I’ve been working on involves a lot of mathematics – lots of angles, distances, and coordinates. Trigonometry. I’m not quite sure how I remembered it, but I did – and the math miraculously worked – conjuring business graphics onto the screen more-or-less where I planned it to. I joked with a friend that I almost did a happy dance through the house.

We won’t talk about the next project coming down the pipe – which will apparently keep me busy until next year and beyond. Fun times.

Do you ever get to the end of the weekend, and wonder not only where it went, but also what you spent it doing? Last night I sat in bed, wondering exactly that – trying to piece the weekend back together in my head.

Do you ever get to the end of the weekend, and wonder not only where it went, but also what you spent it doing? Last night I sat in bed, wondering exactly that – trying to piece the weekend back together in my head.

It was my other half’s birthday on Saturday.

After unwrapping presents in the morning we wandered into town for lunch – with the intention of perhaps wandering along the high-street to visit some of the pubs we have never been in. Somehow that changed into eating as fast as possible, having one drink, going home, getting in the car, trying to get a lane at the bowling alley in a nearby town (unsuccessfully), going clothes shopping instead, going food shopping, and then having a birthday dinner at home – oh, and causing more washing up than I’ve seen in years.

Yesterday was a little bit more relaxed. My in-laws visited for a meal at the pub. This of course necessitated cleaning the house as one might for a royal visit ahead of their arrival (read: hide anything and everything in cupboards and rooms just out of sight).

My brother-in-law gave me a belated Amazon voucher for my birthday earlier in the month – so I scrolled endlessly through books yesterday evening – wondering what I might acquire to read. I know – I have a pile of unread books higher than the Eiffel Tower, but that doesn’t make the possibility of buying another book any less exciting.

I’ve still not spent all of the voucher. How do you even choose books with money you didn’t expect to have?

A good thing that came out of the shopping trip on Saturday was the opportunity to visit the music store – the one that sells vinyl albums. After much rummaging through boxes of records I found a Bjork album that I played to destruction perhaps 30 years ago. I’m still almost exclusively buying female recording artists, just to bring balance to the rag-tag collection of vinyl albums we have (my other half’s collection is almost entirely male). I almost picked up “Tapestry” by Carole King too.

I’m thinking Fiona Apple might join the record collection soon. I had never heard of her until a good friend introduced me a few months ago. I’ve had her playing in the background on Spotify from time to time ever since.

Anyway.

Time to stop writing words, and start writing code. Again.

Let’s see what the week throws at us.

I’ve been meaning to write something all week – somehow each time I sit down at the computer, something happens to either distract or divert me.

I’ve been meaning to write something all week – somehow each time I sit down at the computer, something happens to either distract or divert me.

Never mind. I’m here now. Better late than never.

I’m slowly getting better after the lung infection that floored me for several weeks. The cough has pretty much gone – I’m just tired now. It doesn’t help that I’m still trying to burn the candle at both ends – working all day, doing chores whenever I stop for a “break”, and then working all evening on content creation for YouTube.

I went out for dinner with coworkers last week, and the subject somehow turned around to the YouTube channel – with several of them asking how it was going. The looks on some of their faces when I told them how many subscribers I have was amusing.

I often get the feeling – whenever I’m asked about the YouTube escapade – that there’s an element of jealousy in the air. I guess there will always be people that want the end result, but don’t want the work it takes to get there. I can’t help feeling it’s related to a trend – perhaps most commonly among millennials – to try and invent businesses that scrape from other businesses in some way – it really annoys me.

I’m always a bit defensive about the YouTube channel – I don’t know why. I’ve never thought of content creation as a “proper job” that can be aspired to. I suppose a lot of that is seated in my own prejudices. I’ll never understand the legions of content creators cranking out “reactions”, “pranks”, and “virtue flexing” videos – polluting the internet with increasingly deplorable detritus.

By far the worst trend I have seen in recent months is a trope where people “find” a kitten or a puppy in the wild in dreadful condition, and dramatise the rescue story. The animals have obviously been either drugged or abused before being planted to be found for the scripted “discovery and rescue”. It’s monstrous.

Don’t even get me started about the continual need some people seem to have to be seen as the “funniest person in the room” – passing comment on anything and everything with as much sarcasm as possible, and yet never creating anything original or substantive of their own.

Deep breaths.

Anyway.

It’s the weekend!

It’s my other half’s birthday tomorrow, so I imagine we’ll be wandering into town for a drink or three, and something to eat. We live in a very affluent area, so the high-street is filled with wonderful pubs, restaurants and cafés that I’ve rarely if ever visited. Maybe a drink in each place – purely in the interests of research? A birthday is a good excuse, isn’t it.

Perhaps a long lunch and wander around town?

Her presents are wrapped, and tucked under the desk behind me. She knows what she’s getting – she chose – I paid. It’s easier that way.

The in-laws are arriving on Sunday to go out for a meal too. Out-out two days in a row!

I suppose I should go clear the table ready for dinner. I can almost guarantee my daughters will have filled the table with sports bags, coats, and junk mail – because of course we don’t have anywhere else that any of that stuff could go.

I swear – it wouldn’t take much in the way of detective skills to reconstruct any of my daughter’s days – all you need to do is walk through the house, picking things up – the story writes itself.

(an hour passes while we eat dinner together)

I was just thinking (always dangerous, I know) – that if the kids take anything away from their early years, I hope it’s the whole thing about sitting at the table together at dinner time – sharing the story of our day with each other.

My eldest daughter arrived home just as we were finishing dinner – her journey home is sometimes long. She got to choose a pizza from dominos, and strangely didn’t feel bad about that at all. I don’t think I would have either, to be honest.

I might have added myself some ice cream to the Dominos order.

p.s. I’ve finally turned on the various monetary options in the blog – meaning that if I ever choose to, I can put posts behind a pay-wall. I’m not quite sure what I might hide behind a pay-wall, but you never know.