I summarised myself.
It sounded complete.
The present resisted.
I changed anyway.
Nice To See You
I went back to the chalk at the weekend to see my parents. The main mission was to top and tail my last visit back in November when I got the Christmas stuff down from the loft for them. This visit I took all the boxes back up again.
But, I also went to a friend’s birthday whilst I was there and had a lot of conversations with people I haven’t seen since my early 20s. Fun, but a bit strange. It meant I had a dozen or so variations on the same conversation:
Them: “Hi Jay! nice to see you!”
Me: “You too! So then, what’s happened with you in the last TWENTY YEARS?”
Them: “Same!”
It’s the sort of question that feels like an assault on your sense of narrative identity. The gap between the lived density of a life and socially acceptable summary is … weird. Also, given the context of who you used to be the last time you knew each other, and everything that has happened, what do you say?
You can’t explain who you’ve become to people who only knew the “before” version of you. You can’t hand someone the texture of your inner life or explain how your values or sense of self has shifted without sounding like you’re giving a TED Talk in a kitchen doorway at a houseparty.
Most of us I think choose the “socially acceptable summary” in this situation. We compress twenty years of mess and growth into a few “milestones.” But standing there, reciting my life’s highlights multipul times inside of an hour, I realised the summary only works in the past tense.
It might be just my Aphantasia and SDAM talking ,but this sort of summary turns your life into a sequence of closed chapters. You end up talking about yourself as if you’re a character in a book you just finished reading. Like a narrator giving an account of someone else’s adventures.
I really enjoyed the party, but it’s left me with a lot to think about. I think I’d like to speak to my friends about their own narrative identity and how they experience it.
On The Blog
2025 – Annual Review
After skipping my reflections on 2024 last year, I realised at some point during 2025 that writing these ‘year in review‘ things on here have become quite important ritual for me.
It is after all how the blog more or less got started way back in 2012, and without it, my year feels somewhat ‘unarchived’, the previous year bceoms a collection of events without a cohesive narrative put down and published.
I sat down last week intending to write this in one shot, but it quickly became a 5,000-word monster
Big shout out to everyone thats shared this, or been in touch! glad its helped deepen thinking etc
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Wrote my 2025 year in review post (see above)
- Wrote a conference abstract – call tomorrow about it with an *actual* expert
- Wrote and submitted a solarpunk talk/session proposal for a UK conference in the summer
- Final edit on 1/10th 302.
- More calls with folks experiencing vibe coding mania lol
Terminal Access
Andrew Dana Hudson has a new story out “Pursuant to the Agreement” which can be found in the ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination anthology Our Radioactive Neighbors. Here’s what ADH had to say about it:
My group got interested in that bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, and we devised a story, told in documents, about trying to keep such a facility going over decades — decades in which America experiences a profound political crisis that sees the breakup of the Union. Back in 2023 this “Great American Fracture” felt like a distant possibility.
Dipping the Stacks
From Civilisation to Celebrity Traitors: the BBC’s cultural decline has been astonishing
The BBC can still produce blockbuster television like Celebrity Traitors, but the consistent arts and cultural programming which used to be a staple of our national broadcaster is a distant memory. The primary reason is a two-pronged lack of confidence: in audiences themselves to enjoy high culture, and the Western tradition itself.
The leaked Prescott memo has shown that the BBC had ignored Oxford and Cambridge dons who had critiqued the organisation’s factual programming for consistent woke distortions, expressing disdain for British history and the West.
Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field
The spectacle, of course, runs both ways. While taking reporters’ questions on Air Force One last Friday, Trump shouted at one, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy!” The comment was reportedly directed at a female reporter who was following up on the question about Epstein she’d asked a few moments earlier, and the president’s declining brain thought it was appropriate to admonish her in this way.
It should be noted that not a single other reporter in the press pool spoke up to defend their humiliated colleague.
When grades stop meaning anything
UCSD, one of the country’s best public universities, has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it
What I Meant When I Said Substack Isn’t Cool | GQ
I said Substack “wasn’t cool,” and people had feelings about that. A lot of feelings. They also missed the point. Substack is a tool, like Google or ChatGPT; it’s infrastructure, not culture, no matter how badly it wants to cosplay as something more. And to be clear, I’m not anti-newsletter; you are reading mine right now.
The hard task of exiting the populist trap
populism is economically, as well as politically, damaging. How damaging is illustrated by the fate of Argentina, a country that has been plagued by populism since the rule of Hipólito Irigoyen in 1916. Since then its real GDP per head has halved relative to that of the US and gone from five times Brazil’s to one and a quarter times
Reading
I finished reading King of Dogs by Andrew Edwards. It’s one of the best fiction novels I’ve read in ages. Its full/total operator competency porn but absolutely like nothing I’ve ever read in the genre. The main character is a fascinating person to spend time with inside their head. Also, this book has one of the best and most realistic feeling chase scenes I’ve ever read.
As a Soviet-style collapse unfolds in America, Grayson, equal parts philosopher and warrior but legitimately neither, makes a death-bed promise to watch over a couple with a child on the way. Driven by his own severe loss, he must make good on his promise, and carry the psychic consequences as he races headlong into the fallout of our imploding civilization. Set in the hallucinatory desert southwest, populated with hunter-killer teams, awash with refugees, third-country mercenaries, and hostile, conspiring elites, King of Dogs pits the beauty of language and western philosophical ideals against the deep depravity and violent decay of our times.
Music
IAN – Come On Everybody, Let’s Do Nothing!
Post-Metal noise rock isn’t for everyone. But this album is for me. IAN are an immensely powerful riff band from London. The whole album is a mix of crunchy grinding doom riffs, screaming vocals and violin which come together in a way that i can only describe as foggy, or maybe that moment when the bechamel goes gloopy in the pan.
This track rules.
Remember Kids:
David Foster Wallace revised it for the different context of a book consisting entirely of his own writing, not subject to editorial control. Rethink, revise, do it again. Students come to see writing as a recursive process without end.
Why They Can’t Write – John Warner
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