Weeknote 44/2025
This week has been fantastic. I needed to do a bit of work to get in our newly-formed consortium’s application in for CivTech Challenge 11.9, but mostly my wife (Hannah), daughter (Grace), and I spent her half-term holidays relaxing.
Pre-pandemic, we’d often go away at this time of year but, for various reasons, haven’t got back into that rhythm. This year, that’s partly because my son, Ben (now at university) wouldn’t be able to join us, partly due to the uncertainty around my health, and partly because of Grace’s football commitments. She played for Sunderland ETC on Monday, played futsal on Tuesday, went to a high-performance session on Thursday, and played for Boro Rangers near Pontefract on Saturday.
As I mentioned last week, I’m feeling much better on my new medication. So much so, in fact, that I managed to run 5k on the treadmill, complete a shorter (hilly!) run outside, and even went wild camping on Wednesday night. The latter was utterly magical and restorative. I popped my head out of my tent at 04:30 and witnessed this:
More on the above in this microcast, which I published at Thought Shrapnel along with the following:
- Everything you’d need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap
- Immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity
- We can’t control what life throws at us, but we can choose how we deal with the hand we’re dealt
- Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice
- Slop Evader
- Seizing the means of ontological production
- The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.
- Monocultures are perilous not just in agriculture, but in software distribution as well.
Other than that, Hannah and I went to Saltburn while Grace was at the high performance session, and then on Friday for brunch at BURDS in Newcastle. Truffle parmesan hash browns! Turkish eggs! What’s not to like?
I watched House of Dynamite with Hannah and Ben, who came home for the weekend, last night. I can see why it was made, especially in these geopolitical times, but the ending is extremely disappointing. TL;DR: don’t bother. On the other hand, Hannah and I finished Season 5 of Slow Horses this week, which was excellent. If you haven’t seen them, I’d recommend starting at Season 1. A rare situation where the adaptation is better than the books.
Ben’s got a lifeguard shift today and then, afterwards, we’re planning to watch TRON: Ares while it’s still at the cinema. The reviews haven’t been great, but then we loved TRON: Legacy and that’s only a 6.7 on IMDb ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Next week, I’ll be doing a bit of work on the Amnesty International UK community platform project on Monday and Tuesday, before heading to Barcelona via Edinburgh airport on Wednesday. It’s the Mozilla Festival at the weekend and I’ve been invited, along with fellow WAO members Laura and John, to an Mozilla alumni event on the Friday, preceded by dinner on the Thursday.
I’m returning the following Monday night, before which I was hoping I might have time to visit the Sagrada Familia again. I first experienced it in 2018 when Team Belshaw went interrailing around Europe, but there don’t seem to be any tickets left. So unless I fancy going to mass (nope) I’ll have to leave it until next time.
Photo taken on Thursday morning during my wild camping micro-adventure