An Experience I Do Not Wish to Repeat

Well … that was an experience I do not wish to repeat. I still don’t feel 100% but I’m back in the land of the living and things are getting done around the house.

Thanks to everyone who emailed, DM’d and/or otherwise reached out with best wishes. I really appreciated them.

I honestly don’t really remember much of the last 10 days or so. It’s all lost behind a haze of brain fog and naps.

I played a shit ton of Borderlands 2 on Nintendo Switch whilst I was sick. But for the life of me I can’t tell you the plot beyond: ‘Go to the indicated diamond on the world map and shoot shit until you complete the mission’.

Eve was double jabbed with AZ and has also been really sick, she’s tracking 2 days behind me so I have to stay inside for another few days. Really looking forward to ‘going outside’ and ‘leaving the house’ though. A real novelty.

I’m hoping my sense of smell and taste buds return quickly as right now I can only distinguish sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, etc. Coffee tastes like ‘brown’ and is actually rather unpleasant.

I was shocked by the news of Dawn Foster’s passing this week. I’m gutted. Can’t belive it.

I first met Dawn a decade ago though friends. A group of us would go on cycling trips along the canals in North London. In the beginning she was just ‘someone from Twitter’. But that quickly resolved into her becoming the kind hearted, generous, and funny individual I will always remember.

I’ll miss our ‘quick and quiet’ 🤣 impromptu afterwork pints in central London the most. She was also my absolute savour in 2016 when someone stepped on my foot in parliament square and gave me a hairline fracture. She nursed me in the pub whilst my foot doubled in size, got ice from the bar, and then helped me hobble back to Waterloo despite the extremely late hour. She was kind like that.

She was also always supportive of so many things I and many others have done over the years. She attend, spoke at, and boosted thethoughtmenu event series when it began in 2012 and used her reach to promote it etc.

I’ll also miss her uncompromising moral voice in the public sphere. As a journalist and writer she was a champion for the underserved and forgotten segments of society. Her writing on the housing crisis, and reporting on Grenfell was exceptional.

I realised during the week I hadn’t seen her IRL since the first or second week of the 2019 election campaign. Time has flown by.

My thoughts are with all her really close friends and family at the moment.

Permanently Moved

Regular service returns next week.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Well, I haven’t done anything for over a week. I haven’t even written in my diary. So theres not much to say. So much I want to get done tho. Raring to go.

I had to cancel recording 3 Episodes of CIWM in the last 10 days so it might take a while to get up to speed again.

With the launch of WordPress 5.8 I think I’m going to redesign the site…again. I’m going to try and fully lean into FSE.

I’d like the front page to have more magazine-y vibes. With content broken out by vertical: weeknotes, essays, podcast etc. It also means I can just post/blog every day if I feel like it.

It’s going to be a big job as there are over 350 posts on this site. Most using features from my current theme in one way or another. *mwah mwah*

Dipping the Stacks

Living with Just Enough | Global Oneness Project

The Edo Period began in 1603, at the close of 200 years of civil war, and lasted two and a half centuries, coming to an end in 1868 as the country opened to the world and was first exposed to the fruits of the industrial revolution.

Wildfires 2021: Why fire is our best tool against megafires – Vox

Wildfires are essential to many Western ecosystems in the US, restoring nutrients to the soil, clearing decaying brush, and helping plants germinate. Without these fires, vegetation in woodlands, grasslands, and chaparral shrublands accumulates, so more fuel is available to burn, especially when a megadrought keeps drying out the fuel, year after year.

What Are the Internet’s “Backrooms”? – Popdust

According to the Backrooms wiki, people end up in the Backrooms when they glitch (or no-clip) out of reality and find themselves wandering through empty rooms with yellowing carpet and fluorescent lights above.

Oral History: Audrey Witters | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

“Assorted Tip and Tricks”, chapter 6 of Richard Koman’s GIF Animation Studio manual, published by O’Reilly in 1996 starts with the wise remark “Your Web page can be a lot more fun if it’s not always crystal clear exactly what is going on” (p.69).
As an example of the best practice Koman brings the Blinking Alien, attributing the authorship to Audrey Witters from MetaTools.
Today Audrey is a Managing Director of Online Executive Education at Stanford and she was very surprised that I wanted to talk with her about her alien.gif.

How I learned to hate InDesign | Revue

Everything’s connected – adding just one character can have serious cascading effects and unbalance the entire book: the whole paragraph moves to the next page trying to avoid an orphan or a widow, an attendant image needs to follow and pushes another image, the footnote that was previously safe now has to negotiate its space with a new contender.