Inputs and outputs

Creative lives are just inputs and outputs. You listen, watch, read, experience – that’s the inputs. Then you write, record, shape, create – that’s the outputs.  The problem of course is that there are gazillions – we might as well call it infinite amounts – of inputs: endless blogs to be perused, films to be … Read more

Balance

There are many depressing things about this particular moment in history and there are many people writing about these depressing things in much more knowledgeable and eloquent ways than I would be able to.  But I feel that as someone who owns a blog it is important to write something now about what is about … Read more

With great power comes great responsibility

It’s been a choppy old couple of weeks in WordPress land. I’m not going to go back over the whole clusterfuck – there will be plenty of people writing about what went on – basically a massive spat between Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress) and mahoosive web host WP Engine. The row centres on a … Read more

“New Year”

A picture of the sea at Bude

It’s fashionable at this time of year to do a “my past year in review” or “my plans for the coming year” blog post.  I’ve never really seen the point. The “past year in review” ones remind me of those appalling Christmas Family Newsletter things that some people seem to include in their Christmas cards … Read more

Going on silent retreat

I’ve just got back from my longest retreat yet – an 8 nighter – and as one of the most personally significant things I do on a regular basis, I thought I’d try and explain in writing what a retreat is, why it is important to me, and why it might also be important to … Read more

The promise vs the actual

So often the promise of a thing is huge and covered in bright lights; exciting and life changing and altogether wooo. Marketing does this, social media does this, and our natural response is amygdala-like: “shit man, I gotta get me one of those!“. The vision presented by the PR of The Thing is powerful. Examples … Read more

Federthingy and Socialwhatnot

I’ve had a very long hiatus away from every single form of social media – I quit Twitter in 2020, and since then have had literally no contact with anything in the SM space. As a serial trier-outer, I’ve been on them all and have often been in the “early adopter” camp (very early to … Read more

I don’t know much about encryption but I do know this

I wrote to my MP (Scott Mann) a while back asking about the current Online Safety Bill wankery doing the rounds. The claim that our Government will somehow be able to read our messages but, oh no, definitely not breaking encryption is one we all need to challenge. I’m not a nerdy enough nerd to … Read more

I know it’s “just” a language model, but…

I’ve been starting to fiddle with ChatGPT a bit more recently, just to see what it can do, and where it fails. Today I had 20 minutes spare – so I asked ChatGPT to make me a Nike logo using SVG. It gave me this: …it’s pretty confident about what it’s created there – so … Read more

The Last Human

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant future, there was a world where Artificial Intelligence had taken over. In this world, humanity had been reduced to just one man – and his name was Gerald. Gerald lived in a small, dilapidated shack on the outskirts of a city that had once been called New York … Read more