[{"meta":{"title":"Elephanti Sunt Personae","date":"2023-01-31","subtitle":"Pink Elephants","titleBgColor":"#db259e","titleColor":"#000"},"path":"/blog/pink-elephants","content":{"html":"

After moving to Walthamstow, I kept finding status of elephants all over the area. With no obvious clues to the reason or origin, it became a real life Easter Egg in my life. I resigned myself to the fact that I would never know why or how Pink Elephants came to reside in my borough.

$\"Two$ \n $\"An$

Statues on Orford Road and Lea Bridge Road

Eventually, I found a mural on one of the streets.

$\"A$

The mysterious Elephant mural

I still live in Walthamstow, but now nowhere near these statues. After I moved house, I eventually forgot about the Elephants. Until just recently when I cycled past the mural.

Elephanti Sunt Personae led me to We Are People. A guerilla art campaign to show that the consciousness of an Elephant and other species can be considered comparable.

Elephants are people, one day this will be thought self evident to all

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"The future of transport","date":"2023-01-21","subtitle":"Two wheels good, four wheels bad","titleBgColor":"#00d","titleColor":"#fff"},"path":"/blog/future-of-transport","content":{"html":"

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of transport.

In July last year, my car overheated and had to be scrapped. I mostly used it for the weekly shop. But a few times a year I’d drive a few hundred miles around the country for music festivals, weekends away, and visiting friends. After that July, I had no more big drives planned, so I held off immediately buying a replacement and decided to wait and see if I could survive without.

Since then, I’ve adapted to living without a car. I work from home nearly 100% of the time, so I don’t have a commute. I’m also lucky enough to live in London and within Waltham Forest, which was part of the Mini-Holland programme. Waltham Forest is a nice place for cycling, with a lot of bike lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods. I’ll cycle to meet friends, run errands, go shopping, and go to the pub.

Cargo

My house is on the North side of Walthamstow. The canals and the towpaths run alongside us North to South, which also runs right underneath the North Circular, which itself is followed by industrial estates and retail parks.

When we were doing a lot of DIY to the house in November, Lila ran out of ceiling paint, so I hopped on my bike with my takeaway tray and cycled the 10 minutes over to B&Q. Coming back with 10 litres of white matt paint was a little wobbly, but doing it a second time would be fine.

$\"My$

My first test of no car club

I love this bike. I’ve owned it for seven years. It’s got a hub gear, which means I can change the gear while stationary. No downshifting when coming up to traffic lights and I can zip off when the light goes green. Adding the basket 18 months ago made me love it even more.

Distance

Carrying capacity alone, does not a transport mode make. I love cycling, but sometimes I don’t want to arrive somewhere as a sweaty mess and need to cool down or have a shower. When I worked in central London I cycled in about half the time. The first place I lived was only a 20 minute cycle to the office but when I moved to Walthamstow, it became closer to 50 minutes. Showers and lockers in the office made it a good workout. Free exercise without paying for the commute.

Recently a friend decided to sell his e-bike, so I jumped on the offer. £500 is a steal for an e-bike. Cycling all over with little effort is nice, but if I was cycling longer distances regularly I’d prefer the exercise. The battery is good, and it’s fun to glide along. The furthest I’ve cycled is probably 18km with about 1/3 of the battery remaining.

Longer journeys

When my car had to be scrapped, we were on our way to spend the weekend with friends in Devon. Rather than cancel, we rented a little Seat Ibiza from a HiyaCar and didn’t let our car trouble ruin a good weekend.

Just last weekend, we rented another car through HiyaCar to drive out to a little Airbnb about 2 hours from London. Along the way, we discussed the pros and cons of becoming car owners again. Once we’d talked it through and crunched some numbers, we decided to stick with our setup for now. We don’t do long car journeys that often to warrant spending a few thousand on a car, with another thousand for insurance on top.

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

We went to Rotterdam at the start of the Summer on the Eurostar. Rotterdam is like a nicer Amsterdam. We cycled out of the city and through the Dutch countryside, full of amazement at the bike-first culture that the Dutch have. Other cities are taking notice, like Paris.

If you want to help the environment, one of the best ways you can do that is to get rid of your car. When we had ours, we would drive short distances that we could’ve cycled.

Maybe bikes, and by extension e-bikes, are the real transport of the future. Combined with a solid train network, you can go nearly anywhere. Not flying cars, self driving cars, cars in enclosed tunnels or cars in a vacuum tube.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Monthnotes: December 2022","date":"2022-12-24","subtitle":"Beer and cheese","titleBgColor":"#00ff00","titleColor":"#000"},"path":"/blog/monthnotes-december-2022","content":{"html":"

We finished off a load of DIY just in time for Christmas. After owning the house for a year, it’s nice to have least done half of it. Our house is starting to feel like ours.
At Castrooms, we had a few test parties culminating in a set from a guy who regularly plays at Notting Hill Carnival. I managed to get a pretty difficult feature working just in time. It was a great way to end the year.
I’ve got more and more into RSS feeds again. I bought Reeder on macOS and iOS which is really nice, but it has a few little differences from NetNewsWire which I’m still getting used to. I’ve enjoyed coming back to reading blogs. It’s a better way to ~doom~scroll when I’m bored. I also added RSS to this blog, if that’s how you roll.
I wrapped up work on the 16th and had grand plans of making great use of my time. Instead, I mostly played Destiny 2 and Vampire Survivors.
I did however, add albums to Lineup.fun, which has already came in handy for end of year lists.

Here’s some things I’ve enjoyed

The aforementioned Vampire Survivors. It combines the great element of idle games like Universal Paperclips which Bullet Hells
Christmas specials everywhere, but Behind The Bastard’s Keep The Yultide Gay chronicles pre-Christian Christmas: Part 1 and 2

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"30 year loop","date":"2022-12-03","subtitle":"The 90's are back","titleBgColor":"#1DA5BE"},"path":"/blog/30-year-loop","content":{"html":"

Many years ago, I read this incredible article about how pop culture exists in 30 year loops. It’s why Back to the Future jumps from 1985 to 1955. There’s plenty of examples within that article and now that you know about it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Now that we’re firmly in the 20s, we can see a big resurgance of pop culture from the late 80s and early 90s. Remakes, revists and spin-offs have came back around again - Dune, Scream, Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Toy Story and Predator to name a few.

When I read that article and started to notice the 30 year cycle in media, I also noticed that a lot of the games that I played around that time fully embraced the 80s 8 bit retro era. Celeste, Hyper Light Drifter and Return of The Obra Dinn were 3 of the biggest, and all recall an older era and the limitations emposed by technology.

What the article put forward, made me think that eventually, we’d begin to see newer games referencing the games of the mid to late 90s. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much evidence of that assumption. Only in the last few weeks did I start playing 2 new games that have distilled the games of that era.

Prodeus

One of the first games I ever played, was DOOM on an uncle’s PS1. I remember barely any of it, other than the hard as nails difficulty, incomprehensible story, and the brutal guns.

Prodeus takes all its inspiration from those early DOOM games. The guns, graphics, and gore, are all throwbacks to that style of first person shooter from the 90s.

\n\n

Signalis

This one is a bit different for me, as it’s channeling the early survival horror genre, which I was never into. Resident Evil and Silent Hill are what I’ve seen it compared to. I never had the patience for those games, but I loved this one. I’d also compare it to Metal Gear Solid for a lot of reasons.

It’s full of CRT scan lines, limited inventory, save points instead of checkpoints and some very cryptic puzzles.

\n\n

The CD case

Playing Signalis reminded me of one of my favourite puzzles in Metal Gear Solid - you obtain a disc before need to contact a character on your radio. You’re told “the frequency is on the back of the CD case”. I have no idea how long I spent trying to look at the disc in my inventory, which you actually can’t do. Eventually, I realised the the frequency was in a screenshot on the back of the physical game case. Searching for this online still has plenty of people trying to figure it out. I think this must be one of the most incredible examples breaking the fourth wall and one that might only be possible in the medium of videogames.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Once more, with feeling","date":"2022-11-11","subtitle":"Let's give this another go","titleBgColor":"#dd00ee"},"path":"/blog/once-more-with-feeling","content":{"html":"

Yet again, here I am, attempting to blog regularly.

In previous years, I had a blog that involved designing each post. A carefully hand crafted framework and toolchain allowed me to create a post with individual colours, layout, and art direction. Sometimes the design I had in my head wouldn’t translate to the screen easily, so I’d spend many hours over many days, tinkering away. Either getting it right, or figuring out something else that I liked.

I also made the mistake of thinking that every post had to be a think piece. That I had to have some grand idea worth exploring.

I’ve recently tried to get back into RSS feeds. Familiar names and URLs keep resurfacing from 10ish years ago. One site I came across was Chris Coyier’s, and one of the first posts I read from him was There is no bar, which has this thought provoking question:

Why do people have a hard time with that publish button, even on ready-to-rock personal sites?

For me, the hard time of publishing was waiting for a deep thought and designing something that I was happy with - they kind of went hand in hand. A great article deserved a great design. Without one, I couldn’t let the other see the light of day.

A new adventure

Since April, I’ve been working on a startup in the music streaming space called Castrooms. It’s a new and exciting thing to be the ~~only~~ best engineer at the company. One of my colleagues, Will, has been writing for years, and is increasingly putting out thoughts and questions on Twitter. We both spent formative parts of our careers at the Government Digital Service, where we constantly heard Make things open: it makes them better.

Not many people in our field get to do what I’m doing - working on something from the beginning, that I’m personally interested in. Maybe I should write about it?

It’s also technically hard. We’re combining real time audio and video from many sources and using multiple third party services together. I’m writing some complex and horrific code. But that’s all OK because it’s a startup, so we’re still figuring things out and prototyping. Maybe I could write about that?

Shit’s on fire yo

Much of the modern web is a walled garden. When I last tried to start blogging, I kicked it off with a post titled “Let’s make mad shit”. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to after that, but I did make a few mad shit things, like Lineup.fun. I still think we need more art galleries than malls on the web. And for me, I want some way to express myself online that can’t be ruined by a serially divorced dad obsessed with imaginary trains.

Once more, unto the breach

So, yet again, I’m saying that I’m going to blog more. I’m cutting myself some slack this time round. Everything I write doesn’t have to be some well researched and deep article. It can just be something I want to share. This doesn’t have to be some world changing website. I can just have fun with it.

My little corner of the Internet is just that - mine.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"Let's make mad shit","date":"2021-01-03","subtitle":"Fill this town with nonsense","titleBgColor":"#6234eb"},"path":"/blog/lets-make-mad-shit","content":{"html":"

2020 has shown us that The Internet can be utter shit. It’s awful. It’s full of depressing news, racism and people without medical degrees thinking their opinion is as valid as a Doctor.

But 2020 has also shown us that the Internet can be amazing. It kept us together and in touch when we couldn’t do it in real life. It allowed for so much creativity, interaction and communication in this fucking terrible year. So many people out there are making cool things but we don’t see it because we get bogged down hating all of the terrible shit.

Remember when people had blogs? And they wrote things? Everyone had their little corner of The Internet. Now we write them in 35 part Twitter threads. Or even worse, Medium articles. You want me to make an account on Medium just so I can read more than 3 articles a month? Oh and if you’re trying to browse them on mobile, I hope you have an iPhone 12 Pro Max because otherwise you’ll not be seeing the article when the page loads.

Both of those are terrible ways for us to create and share things.

Even with all of that stuff making the Internet worse, people are still making fun and cool things on The Internet.

Here are a few things I enjoyed in 2020:

Poolside - ultra vibey website and app that brings a pool party to your internet communication device.
JavaScript30 from WesBos - I’m pretty good with JavaScript but in an effort to understand it more deeply, I did this free course at the start of Summer. It took me a bit more than the 30 days, but I found it really enjoyable beginning my day with some coding and Wes’ cheesy jokes.
Jon’s experiments with three.js shaders.
Jonty’s camjam - watch a feed from a selection of random TFL CCTV cameras.
govbins - I helped Harry rebuild govbins this year, but even with my obvious bias I’ve enjoyed the abusurdity of people taking photos of wheelie bins.
it is what it is - an injoke taken to an extreme but then used to raise awareness about systemic racism
Sketch’s article about native being better - regardless of weather or not you agree with their point, you have to agree that it looks absolutely gorgeous.
Clubhouse - drop in audio chat that replaced office shit chatting for me and kept me slightly more sane whilst working from home.
Ogmios’ School of Zen Motoring - drives through North East London with a soothing narration.
I Thought About That A Lot - a series of essays which includes a really touching story about disposing of a body and thoughts on Caroline Quentin’s career.
Many Twitch DJ streams from my friends, with a simultaneous Zoom call to chat and see familiar faces.

A while ago I’d decided to start blogging again in 2021, but I didn’t really know what to write about first. Before my thoughts started to coalesce, I read this great blog post from Simon Collinson and suddenly it all made sense to me.

He talks about two things I want to call out here:

Admittedly, most company or client work tackles real issues for real people; it’s rarely a sandbox for us to climb into and make mad shit.

He’s absolutely right on this point. Even as someone doing more development than design, I have ideas of fun things to build or fun ways to build them that I just don’t get to do. Why don’t I do that? I should do that!

And this:

…just because GOV.UK does an excellent job of helping you pay your car tax doesn’t mean your own playground should look like it’s been built with a government design system.

Although we should make sure our own spaces work for everyone we think will use them, if you want to do something weird with your own site, go ahead! Why not? Nobody is going to tell you it impacted conversion or a client didn’t like it.

Like most people in 2020 I also watched The Social Dilemma, though I watched it later than most on 1st January 2021. Something stuck out to me near the end, when Bailey Richardson described The Internet now as being like a mall and that she remembered when The Internet was full of creativity.

I want more art galleries and less malls.

We used to have fun on the Internet.

We used to make mad shit.

I’m going to do that again in 2021.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}}]

Something I've written

Elephanti Sunt Personae

Something I've written

The future of transport

Something I've written

Monthnotes: December 2022

Something I've written

30 year loop

Something I've written

Once more, with feeling

Something I've written

Let's make mad shit