Something I've been pondering lately, particularly with world news, is the way that oppressive regimes seem so intent in removing rights from people who I associate with being full of joy.
I think to experience joy to its fullest, you need to be vulnerable, and so I guess it makes sense that "powerful" people would want to stamp out joy fully because they can't properly experience it, but it makes for real-world tragedy.
And then for my part, it's hard to experience joy to its fullest in the knowledge that there’s so much basic injustice happening within reach.
So much of what I read (online) I end up thinking: “What’s the point of this?” Or “Why is this a thing?”
Learning to ignore most of that and just move on inch by inch is the way.
Last week, my mood was low, and I listed the reasons:
- tired
- cranky 6yo
- hadn’t had a parenting break for a while
- took on a new grab-bag project
- new schedule
- feeling a lack of artistry
This week, my mood was up, and I listed the reasons:
- caught up on sleep
- a positive few days of the 6yo
- had a parenting break at the weekend
- the end of the project is in sight
- schedule no longer new
- played some ukulele every day
Go figure! Sometimes we’re very predictable creatures, but it’s hard to recognise it in the moment.
Pro-tip for guitar: if you want to learn to play and sing a song: learn the words first. With the prevalence of chords where you can see the lyrics and chords on the same sheet, it’s so easy to just play those and nothing goes in.
Once you’ve learned the words, it’s much easier to try to play the song without the chords after a few goes with them. If you don’t know the words, it’s just too much to learn at once.
Learn the words first.
I had a spitball as I picked up a rental car just now: what if electric cargo bike rental was the norm at airports. The problem is that the one hour drive I have would be six hours on a bike, and even with assist that wouldn’t cut it.
But then that leads to the further thought: what if the bike took me to a station and I could roll on to a bus or a train that had proper bike storage.
We should have awards and whenever someone achieves $100 million, which is already obscene, we give them a bronze statue of a dick, and when you get $1 billion, we could give them an even bigger dick.
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/
(via @brianleroux@indieweb.social)
I'm working from WeWork in Dublin today. It's amazing how much hype folks can create around what is essentially some desks and some convenient utilities.
That said, it's great to have it right here in Dublin. Since I signed up to Revolut Ultra I get three free days per month (I'm still on the fence about whether it's worth it). Today I came in because it was about 2 minutes from the coffee shop I was in, and as it turned out, I could have just come here and had coffee here. Go figure!
Ending the week tomorrow I think with a positive chunk of work on https://io.rsvp, by essentially re-implementing the Tito checkout, but attempting to simplify the code and logic significantly so that we can iterate on it more confidently. Looking forward to seeing the first customers using this new flow.
It's weird to read on the one hand local Irish news report on the new US bill as just a list of "things" and then on the other hand on the Kottke blog "There's No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy. It's hard not to feel bitterly disappointed, even from over here.
Things I want to add to this little personal blogging server:
- Replies (so that I can update posts and add to them)
- Image support (for posting images that I don't want to put on third-party sites)
- Maybe ActivityPub / BlueSky
- Maybe the ability to mention folks and follow folks on other instances of this
But so far as just somewhere to post that's easy to do, I can do it from my desktop or mobile easily, and with handy Markdown support, I am very, very happy. Should have done something like this years ago 😁.
David Lynch considered AI “a pencil”. I would add that it’s a very sharp pencil that should come with a disclaimer, although that’s literally what Anthropic say on an article linked from their homepage.
Nothing quite beats home internet for reliability and speed. I guess I over-engineered our setup, but it's just been so reliable for the past 7 years. Particularly through the Covid years.
My setup is pretty simple: a Dream Machine Pro with 2x Unifi access points. It just works.
After playing with Figma Make, the idea of "AI" as an assistive tool has further made my head spin with the ethical grey area it represents. I've struggled for so long with translating what I think I see in my head with what I actually mean. I've found it very difficult to describe this to humans, but when I describe it to Figma Make, I get something visual and interactive to continue the discussion around. That is incredibly enabling for me.
Parliament Street going car free. How delightful. So many early Tito (and before) conversations were had in the Larder cafe, since closed. Looking forward to walking along it in a zig zag to celebrate 🥳
Update 1st July: I drove up Parliament street today, so that I could say I was one of the last ever to do so. Still hope to be one of the first to walk on it!
Still very happy to be posting to something that I have some control over. Psychologically, it’s so much more appealing. I feel free to just post.
Update: I realised I could edit this several days later. “No editing” is hard-coded Twitter muscle memory!
I really have to take a deep breath before reading the news these days. It adds so much to my stress, which has a very real impact on me at home. I want to feel like I’m aware of what’s going on, but the levels of injustice can cause me to shut down.
I've been listening to Pet Sounds a lot recently in the wake of Brian Wilson's passing. Nothing else the Beach Boys did (save for Good Vibrations) reached the heights of Pet Sounds, but my word, what a masterpiece. It's so perfectly crafted. Every note serves a reason, every beat is considered. It’s easy to see how it put such high expectations on him for a follow-up. What a tragic story.
Optimism is a privilege, but it’s also a bit of a drug. Tricking myself into optimism is like a missing dopamine boost.
The level of sicko here is high. I can’t imagine the levels of depravity required to conjure such a scheme let alone the sinister shamelessness to deploy it.
And how if I want to fix something, I can just… fix it!
What I love most about posting here is the quietness. There's no noise. Just me, this post box, and the electric feeling that someone could be reading it, but that they're probably not!
(Although I do need to fix some buggy posting behaviour. Should be handy enough!)
Trying to resist the urge not to write and to just put thoughts down. Right now, literally nobody is watching!
Sometimes I feel like there’s not enough musical artists out there and then something like Glastonbury reminds me that there are too many to count.
When the kids are older, I’d love to do a summer of festivals again. (Could maybe chance it with the older one, but not the younger!)
Never heard of “Raye” before. Sounds like a really cool story, breaking free from the constraints of narrow-minded industry execs https://youtu.be/woUVreVQcwY?si=Tg7pERNDPRKNIoVN
I still prefer writing on here. It seems so much more sensible to not gift my thoughts to a platform of any kind.
I don’t normally hear my own accent as Irish, but sometimes it just comes out, for example: just now I said “calenthar” with a soft d and it happened completely subconsciously!
Did a little bit of tidying on this microblog app that I made for myself. I haven't known where to post: whether it be on Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever, and I've also known that I would be most comfortable posting to a server that I had control over.
And so here I am: posting to my own app on my own server. I'll post to nobody for the time being and see how it goes.
The Kneecap stuff continues to amaze me at how politicians choose injustice by default.
https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2025/0628/1520755-kneecap-to-perform-at-glastonbury-amid-calls-for-ban/
It's weird being Irish for all of this too, when you have the Irish Taoseach up and saying that the EU response to Gaza is a stain on the bloc: https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0625/1520337-taoiseach-israel-gaza/
It's like in Ireland the status-quo is entirely logical, and everywhere else, folks are tying themselves up in knots to justify the worst things.
The level of nobbishness in this article is high. The contempt that rich people in NYC have for fairness and equity in society is reprehensible. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/hot-commie-summer-zohran-mamdani
Alright. It's nice to post on here now and again. I've run out of time to get tweets in though, but that's ok.
Next steps: getting all my tweets in here.
Ideally I would just write everything here and people would be able to see it there. That remains the goal!
Writing something here because it's my damn server and I think this is cool and it only took me like 2 hours to make!