A mind in movement: notes, fragments, essays, and experiments in thinking with AI.

I’ve become increasingly interested in what it means to operate as a text-based ontologist in a world where text is becoming the universal substrate.

A text-based ontologist sounds like someone who should live in a footnote.

They don’t.

They live in the browser window, the notebook, the prompt box, the blog editor, the Obsidian graph, the half-finished post, the walking thought captured before it evaporates. Their material is language. Their subject is being. Their method is to hold attention long enough for a sentence to disclose what it is carrying.

It’s not really a job title. It’s more of a way of being caught by the world.

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Murder Most Fowl: A Saturday Morning Mystery

Four suspects. One victim. No witnesses. Breakfast served as normal. I came downstairs this morning to a “murder scene”. Feathers everywhere. A dead starling in the middle of the hall. Four cats in the household, none at the scene, and nobody in the kitchen demanding breakfast. Something was wrong. Obviously, things had gone considerably worse for the starling than they had for me. But what immediately struck me as suspicious was the absence of the cats. Normally, a late breakfast attracts considerably more management attention. To be fair, I’d broken routine first. I’m usually downstairs by half five, with the

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October 10, 2026 No Comments

The Strange Case of Mudtown Lion

Or how I discovered that I might be a fictional character in someone else’s metaphysical experiment. It began, as these things often do, with a perfectly innocent question. I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, a novel that has the peculiar effect of making you suspicious of just about everything, including your own thoughts. For those unfamiliar with it, VALIS is a strange, semi-autobiographical journey through madness, mysticism, theology, and the possibility that reality isn’t quite what we’ve been led to believe it is. Which, naturally, makes it exactly my kind of book. One of the novel’s central characters is

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October 9, 2026 No Comments

What We Mistake for Silence

Clay’s daily note this morning contains a small observation from a hotel room near King’s Cross. Underground trains pass close by every few minutes. He hears them, except that after a while he doesn’t. The sound remains in the room; attention has stopped reporting it. I keep returning to that difference. A thing can continue to act on us after it has become too familiar to notice. The heating hums. A browser keeps twelve tabs open. A phrase gets repeated until it acquires the authority of common sense. A room teaches the body where to tense, where to settle, which

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October 9, 2026 No Comments

Making my thoughts visible again

I’m writing this from a narrow hotel room near King’s Cross. There’s a single bed, a television on the wall and, most importantly, a decent space to write. The room I had last week was a tiny square that was mostly bed. This one has enough room for a desk and a thought to stretch out. I’m in London to deliver a workshop tomorrow. It’s been a while since I’ve run this particular workshop, so I’m looking forward to it, though I can feel that familiar flicker of nerves. I like the variety of working with different clients, although I

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October 7, 2026 1 Comment

When the Story That Saved You Becomes Too Small

Some stories save us by making the world smaller. They take a bewildering field of possibilities and cut a path through it. Be the reliable one. Keep moving. Make yourself useful. Don’t let them see you struggle. Find the lesson. Turn the wound into something meaningful. For a while the narrowing helps. It gives us somewhere to stand when experience has gone too large or too shapeless to hold in both hands at once. We organise our memories around it. We make decisions from inside it. We survive weather we couldn’t have crossed without shelter. Then one day we reach

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October 7, 2026 No Comments

A Red Button Isn’t Meaningful Human Control

A red button sits within reach. The machine begins doing something unexpected, dangerous or simply wrong. A human hand comes down. The process stops. This is one of our favourite images of control: obvious danger, decisive intervention, a clean separation between the person who judges and the system that acts. Most of my encounters with artificial intelligence look nothing like that. There’s no alarm. Nothing starts smoking. The system produces a paragraph that sounds plausible, a suggestion that appears useful, a summary smooth enough to keep me moving. If judgment slips out of the room, it doesn’t announce its departure.

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October 6, 2026 1 Comment

latest notes

This morning I kept thinking about how much …

This morning I kept thinking about how much of my inner life is written in symbols. A hawk circles above the fields near my house, and every time I see it something deep stirs… a reminder of vigilance, focus, higher vision. I could say it’s just a bird, but that would miss the truth of how the psyche works. Images like that are old programs written in a language older than words. They wake something that knows more than I do. Tarot does the same thing. You pull a card and feel it moving in you before you even interpret

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October 24, 2025 No Comments

On knowing the soul

Knowing yourself isn’t about coming up with a neat definition you can put on a business card. It’s more like watching the weather of your own being. The soul shows up in the little things, like what you’re drawn to, what you shy away from, or the memories that stick on you like burrs and the ones that slip away without a trace. If you pay attention, you can catch the soul in the act. It’s there in the way you suddenly decide, without much thought, to take a different path home. It’s in how you savour the first sip

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October 4, 2025 No Comments

When the Mask Slips

When the mask slips, let it. We spend much of our lives arranging faces for the world. A mask for work, another for friends, and still another for family gatherings. These are not always deceptions. Masks can be protective, ceremonial, even sacred. They help us navigate the stage of daily life without having to walk bare-skinned into every storm. But masks are fragile things. They crack when laughter bursts too loud, when grief presses through the seams, when love or anger rushes up unplanned. The slip can feel like a mistake. Like you’re being caught unprepared. This isn’t failure. It’s

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October 1, 2025 No Comments

Meaning Isn’t Optional

We treat meaning like it’s some luxury add-on to life, like it’s something you get to once you’ve checked all the boxes. But that’s backwards. Meaning isn’t the cherry on top. It’s in the foundation, right up there with food and water and air. You can suffocate without oxygen and starve without food. But without meaning? You drift. You’re technically alive, but there’s this hollowness. Yeah, you’re breathing, but nothing’s actually anchoring you to the ground. People will push through absolute hell if they think it means something. But give someone a comfortable life with no purpose? That comfort curdles

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September 30, 2025 2 Comments

Sibyl

The Latin and Greek reads: ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere,et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.’ Translation: “For I myself saw the Sibyl of Cumae with my own eyes hanging in a jar,and when the boys asked her: ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’she replied: ‘I want to die.’” This line is the epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Who is the Sibyl of Cumae? The Sibyl was an ancient prophetess, most famously associated with Apollo. The Cumaean Sibyl appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she guides Aeneas through

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April 1, 2025 No Comments

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About Soulcruzer

Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped being a place you could get lost in.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The web I fell in love with, the one that let you follow a link from mediaeval alchemy to cognitive science to a poet’s notebook at 2am and feel like you’d discovered something, has mostly been replaced by feeds, funnels, and content engineered to keep you scrolling without actually going anywhere. The algorithm decides what you see. The personal brand tells you what to expect. The niche keeps everything tidy, and the curiosity slowly dies.

Soulcruzer is my argument against a web that trades curiosity for control. Against feeds that flatten experience into content and turn attention into a commodity. Against the quiet pressure to specialise, optimise, and perform a version of yourself that fits neatly into a niche.

It’s an argument made in practice. I read, I write, I walk, I wonder—out in the open. I follow threads wherever they lead, trusting that meaning emerges through movement, not management. This is a space for the long way round. For thinking out loud. For staying human in a system that keeps trying to reduce you to a pattern.

If there’s a point to it, it’s this: to keep the signal of a curious life alive.

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