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Writing: 2018

  1. ‘Justified’ season three

    We are still enjoying it. Lots of fun.

  2. ‘The Sinner’

    Season one. Lots of flashbacks and squinting.

  3. ‘Roma’

    By Alfonso Cuarón.

  4. ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’

    I enjoyed Carson McCullers’ novel.

  5. Some movies

    Widows, Disobedience and Sorry to Bother You.

  6. The Mace Wielder’s Regenerations

    It’s nice to see a new regeneration of the Mace Wielder.

  7. Thomas’s hotels

    On the BBC’s A Hotel for the Super Rich & Famous, the second season of Thomas Kochs’ Fancy Hotels.

  8. Marzipan mince pie recipe

    At Christmas I often make some mince pies and I always use the same recipe because it seems to work. It has a lemony pastry and bonus marzipan.

  9. The People’s Front of Consumer Financial Protection

    Moving two words in an agency name potentially costing industry $300 million.

  10. Knowing one thing in depth…

    A quote by Mike Johnston.

  11. Search forms

    What are the best, most accessible ways to make website search forms? I tried to find out. Here are some examples.

  12. Your letter transitions

    On how odd post boxes, bank branches and public libraries will seem.

  13. IDLES

    No weeknotes because I had a cold. But I listened to IDLES and they’re good.

  14. w/e 25 November 2018

    An LRB letter, Portlandia season one, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

  15. w/e 18 November 2018

    Fightmilk, Bad Moves and The Beths; Wagtail and Django; and ‘Wildlife’.

  16. w/e 11 November 2018

    Art Brut; ‘Treme’; ‘The Bisexual’; and ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’.

  17. w/e 4 November 2018

    Anthony Beevor’s ‘The Second World War’ and ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’.

  18. Lots of charts

    I’ve added a couple of pages of bar charts to the site.

  19. w/e 28 October 2018

    Anni Albers at Tate Modern; ‘No Offence’; ‘Vanity Fair’; ‘Cold War’; and Ask MetaFilter highlights.

  20. w/e 21 October 2018

    Money Stuff and weeknotes.

  21. w/e 14 October 2018

    ‘Can You Feel It’ and some re-discovered house music; ‘A Star is Born’, ‘Phonogram: The Singles Club’; an acting class; ‘Killing Eve’; and Mark Kozelek at Union Chapel.

  22. w/e 7 October 2018

    The internet; ‘Wired’ is 25; Phoebe Bridgers and Mark Kozelek; ‘Beast’ by Paul Kingsnorth; Salon Collective’s showcase; and Docker.

  23. w/e 30 September 2018

    My first paid acting work; ‘17c’ at the Old Vic; ‘Trust’; and Mastodon compared to Twitter.

  24. w/e 23 September 2018

    The Festival of Maintenance and ‘Lucky’.

  25. WorldSkills.org’s new website

    A recent project I worked on launched recently… a new version of the WorldSkills website.

  26. w/e 16 September 2018

    ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’; W. G. Sebald’s ‘Austerlitz’; ordering an Apple Watch; and season four of ‘Silicon Valley’.

  27. w/e 9 September 2018

    Corporationpop; more paper scanning; ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’; ‘Leave No Trace’; and the sound of official American phone calls.

  28. w/e 2 September 2018

    Holiday, ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ season one, ‘The Americans’ season five, the end of ‘Keeping Faith’, and ‘Familiar’ by J. Robert Lennon.

  29. w/e 26 August 2018

    Document scanning, the Hobby Horse podcast, ‘Mildred Pierce’, Twitter, and slowing down.

  30. w/e 19 August 2018

    Giving up on the Culture novels, ‘Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema’, ‘Hang Ups’, more Mastodon, and a Co-op follow-up.

  31. Buying a washing machine from the Co-op

    The good and mostly bad things that occurred during the process of buying a washing machine from the Co-op

  32. f/e 12 August 2018

    ‘Keeping Faith’, ‘The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer’, some Ask MetaFilter questions, and Twitter vs Mastodon.

  33. w/e 29 July 2018

    ‘Wolf Hall’ and realistic plays, ‘Brighton Rock’, Jenny Holzer, weeknotes.

  34. Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD by Martin Aston

    My thoughts on the book about 4AD records, plus a 556 track playlist.

  35. w/e 22 July 2018

    Nothing much to say this week, but here’s one thing that stuck in my mind. From Stewart Lee’s…

  36. w/e 15 July 2018

    Play reading, ‘Optic Nerve’, a little Ask MeFi.

  37. w/e 8 July 2018

    Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs; writing and filming a scene for my showreel; more Ask MeFi questions; and a happy video.

  38. f/e 1 July 2018

    Irrepairability, Ask MetaFilter, and ‘Flowers’ season two.

  39. Total Perspective Vortex in D3.js

    I made a sort of Total Perspective Vortex, from Hitchhiker’s Guide, using JavaScript.

  40. UK parliament demographics chart

    I wondered how the ages of MPs and members of the House of Lords compared to the UK population so I made some charts.

  41. w/e 17 June 2018

    A brief one this week because my MacBook’s keyboard has decided to pack in again…

  42. w/e 10 June 2018

    People rediscovering Crazy Walls and Today’s Guardian; Half Man Half Biscuit; and finishing ‘Uncharted’ 1.

  43. How Soon is Now by Richard King

    A few notes about, and quotes from, the book, plus a long Spotify playlist of tracks mentioned.

  44. w/e 3 June 2018

    A new site for my work, and swimming lanes compared to shared space road designs.

  45. ‘The Actor’s Art and Craft’ by William Esper and Damon DiMarco

    My notes on the book that recounts a year’s worth of Esper teaching his variation of the Meisner acting technique.

  46. w/e 28 May 2018

    David Byrne’s ‘How Music Works’, Ben Moor’s ‘Pronoun Trouble’, and ‘The Split’.

  47. w/e 20 May 2018

    ‘Uncharted’ 1; Elmore Leonard’s ‘Glitz’; Chamberlin, Powell and Bon; and ‘Silicon Valley’ season three.

  48. Invalidating items from Django’s cache

    I poked around at Django’s per-site and per-view caching to work out why I couldn’t invalidate pages from the cache. I eventually worked out how to do it.

  49. f/e 13 May 2018

    ‘Fortitude’ season two, 1980s ‘Top of the Pops’, and reading Iain M. Banks’ ‘Consider Phlebas’.

  50. A kind of modern desperation

    On whether writing weeknotes could help me get back into more frequent blogging again. (Answer: they didn’t, quite.)

  51. Exploring City of London Councillors data

    I scraped data about the City of London’s councillors, and their interests and gifts, and made a site to browse and search it using Datasette.

  52. A nice picture

    On liking images that are broken, Pure CSS Francine, and Afghan war rugs.

  53. Mike’s poetry and heart

    Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer wrote a nice piece about the things he misses from the photography practices of his younger days, and much of it feels very similar to how I sometimes feel about the internet.

  54. Sara Renberg - ‘Night Sands’

    I’m enjoying this album which possibly isn’t like That Dog. And I liked Leif Vollebekk too.

  55. Fortitude, Shetland and This Country

    On season one of ‘Fortitude’, season four of ‘Shetland’, and ‘This Country’

  56. Describing events in code

    Describing how I thought about writing code to catalogue 28 years of visits to cinemas, theatres, gigs, etc. and the decisions I made.

  57. 28 years of events

    I’ve catalogued 28 years of visits to cinemas, theatres, gigs, etc on my site. Here’s a summary of it all.

  58. Run out of metaphors

    On Phoebe Bridgers’ album ‘Stranger in the Alps’ and comparing some of the lyrics to Mark Kozelek.

  59. w/e 25 March 2018

    Martha, ‘Transparent’, ‘Call Me By Your Name’, and ‘Always Coming Home’.

  60. f/e 18 March 2018

    Trying to combine two kinds of acting, and ‘Transparent’.

  61. Mini music genres: UK music press

    Some songs that mention the ‘NME’, ‘Melody Maker’, etc.

  62. w/e 4 March 2018

    Different levels of programming knowledge, and ‘Lady Bird’.

  63. w/e 25 February 2018

    Museum in a Box, ‘The Shape of Water’, ‘Search Party’ and ‘Battlefield 1’.

  64. Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder

    My notes on “The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need”.

  65. w/e 18 February 2018

    ‘The Memory of Water’, ‘Red Star Over Russia’, The Story 2018, and quitting things.

  66. w/e 11 February 2018

    More acting classes, part-way through another laborious personal project, season six of ‘Spiral’, and episode recaps.

  67. w/e 4 February 2018

    ‘Feud: Bette and Joan’, ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’, ‘Game of Thrones’ season seven, and Femi Temowo and Engines Orchestra.

  68. w/e 28 January 2018

    ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’, ‘Moeder’ and line-learning.

  69. Domains for good

    Is there something worthwhile we could do with expired domain names?

  70. f/e 21 Jan 2018

    Two plays, season one of ‘Justified’, a new term of acting classes, and a “workshop”.

  71. The “stuff” we create

    I’ve rewritten the site moving from Movable Type and PHP to Django. It’s taken months of work over several years.

  72. w/e 7 January 2018

    ‘Good Time’, ‘The Florida Project’, ‘Spiral’, ‘McMafia’ and nearly getting some code live.

  73. Hello RSS people

    The RSS feeds might break when I change the site’s code soon.