Hours burn into nothing.
Systems fail before implementation.
Learning calculates its own cost.
I continue regardless.
Up In Flames
Episode 302 of Permanently Moved, barring any emergencies, is out tomorrow. Alongside a bonus episode where I check in with the feed and talk about the last six months. What’s changed and why.
Both episodes were actually finished on Friday morning. But since I’m now going to be selling copies of the Start Select Reset zine, I spent the weekend working on my website. Spending a weekend working on your website is, from the vantage point of 2026, a very quaint thing to be saying. I love it. LOL
Anyway, I spent the weekend implementing a WooCommerce store on the blog and sorting it all out. It’s been a real learning curve. I got all the way through the implementation and was all good to go until my international tester, the ever patient PGR, pointed out European VAT and import charges, on the shipping etc.
The whole thing made my head spin. Looking at the cost of plugins I would’ve needed to buy or pay for yearly to manage it all…
This evening I just junked the whole thing and went with Etsy, as they do it all for you. So that was 12 solid hours in front of the computer this weekend totally up in flames.
I have, however, learned a lot making this zine. Not just writing and producing the thing, but also sorting everything out. I estimate the amount of time and effort going into it has been 5x what it’ll be once I find my groove—which seems more manageable.
Anyway, lots to do. I have a podcast to release tomorrow.
On The Blog
In addition to the podcast, and woostore waste of time, I tidied up around the blog. Re-wrote my about page for 2026 and cleaned up some of the other text on categories pages etc. A little spring clean!
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Photo 365
Terminal Access
Andrew Dana Hudson wrote a very engaging piece over on his newsletter solarshades prompted by a zoom conversation I had with him about how we are surrounded by many of the 20th century’s most popular signifiers of futurity. Also, if you enjoy this, check out this thing I wrote a while back that has similar vibes.
This future-present is also so damn weird. Yes, there’s the immense evil and stupidity steering the US government and the post-culture war discontent brewing in response. But there’s also an off-the-map feeling in tech, in education, in entertainment, in our brains and souls. The flows of money that keep our world semi-functional are now swirling through massive alien abstractions like the Nvidia gyre that are hard to understand using traditional economics or labor-value theory. It’s unclear to me whether those abstractions are bubbles or scams or just how the economy is now, some emergent property of an increasingly complex tangle of global systems.
Our current moment feels less like a set of trend lines that could be neatly extrapolated into various potential futures and more like a bundle of tensions that could each resolve one way or another at any moment.
Dipping the Stacks
Hand shape in Indonesian cave may be world’s oldest known rock art
The faded outline of a hand on a cave wall in Indonesia may be the world’s oldest known rock art, according to archaeologists who say it was created at least 67,800 years ago.
The reality that hyperscalers and fabless chip companies need to wake up to, however, is that avoiding the risk of working with someone other than TSMC incurs new risks that are both harder to see and also much more substantial. Except again, we can see the harms already: foregone revenue today as demand outstrips supply. Today’s shortages, however, may prove to be peanuts: if AI has the potential these companies claim it does, future foregone revenue at the end of the decade is going to cost exponentially more — surely a lot more than whatever expense is necessary to make Samsung and/or Intel into viable competitors for TSMC.
Why Your Organisation Needs Someone “Unemployable”
There is another element to this “unemployable” label that interests me. Although my CV lists a number of traditional credentials, CVs have never been very good at capturing the kind of capability I am describing here. They list job titles, institutions, and qualifications, but they rarely show how someone learns from failure, works with ambiguity, or spots and acts on systemic patterns.
Can you steal game gold pieces? The Court of Appeal says yes – TechnoLlama
This brings us to what I consider the judgement’s most sophisticated insight. The Court carefully distinguished between gold pieces as functional assets and the underlying code that represents them. Lakeman’s defence argued that code is just information, freely replicable. But as the Court noted, the same is true of Bitcoin, the code is public, the blockchain is public, the only private element is the key.
Yet Bitcoin is widely recognised as property.
‘The War for Middle-earth’ Review: A Faith in Literature
Generations of readers have fallen in love with the fantasy novels of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in part for the reprieve they offer from the dreary and mundane. But these tales offer something more enduring than mere escapism: the faith in human dignity and virtue that conservative thinkers have called the moral imagination.
Reading
I haven’t been reading all that much this week. Well, not books anyways. I’ve been catching up on the pint magazine and journal subscriptions I have. So lovely not to be looking at a screen before bed, even if it is epaper.
Still reading A Million Years of Music by Gary Tomlinson 😰 I’m about 1/3 of the way though Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network.
Music
Dane Valley – Man Band (Single)
Very old buddies from 20+ years ago are still making DIY punk music at home back in Margate. Newest iteration is Man Band which contains members of stoner-sludge band OHHMS.
Dane Valley is named after an estate back home. The subject of the songs lyrics is highly relatable, part railing against snake oil salesmen, a reflection on masculinity and part recounting of getting mugged at the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill (I presume). The single is currently at #10 on the Kerrang chart – whatever that means in 2026.
Man Band remind me a bit of early Idles, or Softplay, but more abrassive. Good on ’em. Can’t wait to see them live. On the subject of the video… I just marvel at how fucking ripped Chainy is.
Remember Kids:
The breach in their friendship was not healed until, when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they happened to meet each other on the train. But throughout these years, thoughts of Wittgenstein haunted him (Moore) so much that he contemplated writing a diary devoted to: ‘what I feel about Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk
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