Yesterday, Emma and I were at Rock Werchter in Brussels to see Agnes Obel, who was amazing! Such talented musicians. The cellist in particular was so good looping up layers of strings texture. Wolf Alice was an added bonus, but the surprise highlight of the day was Scene Queen. Absolutely brilliant.

Realised I’ve not been on here for ages. Hello again. What’s going on?

Happy 35th Birthday WorldWideWeb – the first browser! On December 25, 1990, at CERN, a British physicist and internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb. Try the browser emulator worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/ #InternetHistory

Seeing as it's 5 November, something about Bonfire Night... The topsy-turvy celebration of Guy Fawkes interconnected.org/home/2022/11...

The topsy-turvy celebration of Guy Fawkes

Posted on Thursday 3 Nov 2022. 646 words, 1 link. By Matt Webb.

interconnected.org

Youngest daughter and her friends are watching The Shining on their Halloween sleep over. It’s been going like this… ‘Omg, is so boring!’ ‘What *is* this film about!?’ ‘Shit! Oh, it’s so creepy’ ‘I don’t like it’ ‘Can we come and sit with you?’ ‘Don’t turn the lights off!’ ‘Did you hear that?’

Been vibe coding a cycling app. It’s like a cross between being a hovering art director and a baby sitter.

Superman. Superdog. Funny droids. Clearly I’m 42 years too old for this film.

Carb loading for a bike ride tomorrow and am approx 80% bagel and jam, 10% banana bread, 7% orange juice, and 3% gaviscon.

Liquid Glass is upsetting.

Made a thing on my website. markboulton.co.uk/rides/ For a while I’ve been wanting to continue to own my own data and I do a fair bit of riding with a lot of data. So putting them up on my site and tinkering felt like a nice thing to do.

I have opinions about notebooks. The Midori MD A5 gridded notebook is almost perfect. From its lay-flat design and the weight of the paper. But its cover is rubbish. Light weight and gets destroyed by travel. And the separate covers aren’t that great. I’m not going to make my own but I’m tempted.

It’s been 25 years since I’ve seen G Love & Special Sauce and tonight they treated us to the entire first album and a few extras. Just a wonderful experience.

During the first lockdown, I blogged about making a bit of an aggregated feed reader (I guess I was doing a lot of doomscrolling). markboulton.co.uk/journal/my-o... I hadn't looked at it ages, but it feels like a scary, depressing, triggering time capsule. broadsheet.markboulton.co.uk

I hope Alien Earth gets better. I think what it hasn’t nailed is that, like the shark in Jaws, the xenomorph’s horror lies in its absence. It was so quiet, so fast, so stealthy, that you have no chance of witnessing it take someone.

I wrote about crit today as I revive my Handbook series of posts. markboulton.co.uk/journal/crit/

Back on the weeknotes. markboulton.co.uk/journal/week...

Just digging around a four year old Eleventy build of my blog going ‘huh?’. I reckon I may have to zero the desk if I’m going to rebuild this thing (Zeroing the desk: markboulton.co.uk/journal/zero...)

In my ‘shake up my blog and get back to reading and writing’ renewed energy I’ve now tweaked my reading workflow. RSS, for things I like, save to Instapaper, IFTTT to raindrop with a specific collection, Eleventy builds from the raindrop API. Enjoying some tinkering.

In my ‘I’m going to redesign my blog’ frame of mind I’ve been going back through some blog posts of mine. Weeknotes, in particular. I’m going to start writing them again. Nice to look back, but also a really good habit if I make it stick again.

Well, it's only taken me about two years to get back on the RSS horse. Blank slate. Who are your go-to reads?

After all these years I’ve finally bought a little rice cooker. Game changer. Why? Perfectly cooked rice every time. Dead easy setup. Rice is healthy and good for your gut (even white rice, but, yes, less than brown).

microsoft paper essentially says that AI is best used for management and sales tasks not creative or specialist ones arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935

All the feels about Ozzy. The world owes him a great debt. His band launched the careers of thousands and inspired probably hundreds of thousands to pick up their first instrument, me included. Rest up.

Le Tour on tv whilst I’m finishing up work ahead of holidays. Today they climb up Mont Ventoux. I climbed it a few times in 2018. Hard but not the hardest climb I did. Galibier was harder for me. Valley of Tears in the canaries was the worst. Long, hot, fiercely steep, remote, no shade.

Browsing Goodreads for a fairly recent excellent fantasy novel/series and 95% are Romantasy. I get that they are commercially successful, but has there been any really good fantasy published in the last 12 months that doesn’t look like some Twilight/50 Shades/GOT hybrid?

I don’t know what part of my stupid lizard brain thinks it’s acceptable to get anxious about a connecting flight two days out. Brains, eh?

Sonos send me an email telling me how they now have AI. Please, Sonos, fix your app. Just make it usable. Then you can muck about with the latest and greatest. Please, Sonos, fix your hardware. I lose count (and patience) with the drops, the hangs, the disappearing speakers. That is all

Day 5 of being sick. Films watched: Prospect. Excellent 4* Rocky. Again. 4* Longlegs. Junk. 0* Jurassic World: Rebirth. Urgh. 0* Warfare. Excellent. 4* Mickey 17. On the fence. 3* Next up: The Brutalist Poor Things The Vast of Night And stage 3 of the Tour de France. Even if it’s a sprint stage

After years of boring, new Muse song is a banger. Clearly the world does in fact need more 8 string guitars.

Figma going public means new industry tooling coming because they will slow down, focus on 1/4 by 1/4 numbers before eventually being swallowed by a PE firm or sold for little to Adobe who will rename it. Be on your toes design folk. Now is the time to try everything and use what works.