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The walk is the encounter

I walked to the gym this morning. That sounds too ordinary to announce, which is probably why it matters. The gym is only seven minutes away by car. My normal routine is to get in, drive there, work out, drive back, eat something, shower, and be behind the desk by nine like a good citizen of the industrial clock. That’s the sensible move. The 9-to-5 clock still lives in me. I can feel it. Even now, self-employed, answering to no manager hovering over my shoulder, I can still feel the old tribunal warming itself up somewhere behind my eyes. By

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July 6, 2026 No Comments

Know thyself sounds a little too noble

I woke up this morning in my tent thinking about self-validation. That’s the barefoot philosopher taking advantage of a little solitude before the day starts. If the ego is partly a protection system, can it ever be trusted to validate the self it is trying to protect? “Know thyself” sounds noble until we remember that the self doing the knowing is also the self editing the footage, hiding the evidence, managing the courtroom, and sometimes bribing the judge. So yes, self-validation is possible, but probably not as a solitary act of pure inner certainty. It’s more like a triangulation. Self-validation

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July 3, 2026 1 Comment

In the street, I leave footprints. On the web, I leave links.

I’ve been using the Plaud NotePin for a while now. I wear it around my neck like a lanyard. It’s a pretty stylish-looking device, so it doesn’t tend to draw attention to itself. I wear it on my wisdom walks. It’s an easy way for me to walk and capture my notes hands-free. And because it has a 20-hour battery life, I can just record and forget about it. I probably look like a bit of a madman walking and talking to myself. But that’s OK. And then when I get home, Plaud converts into an MP3, and I upload

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July 1, 2026 No Comments

At Orwell’s Grave, Still Asking Who Watches

Today I went to the , held beside George Orwell’s grave on what would have been his birthday. Orwell, of course, was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903. George Orwell was the name he wrote under, the name that now floats above him like a warning label attached to the twentieth century. But at the grave, it felt less like visiting “George Orwell the icon” and more like standing beside the resting place of a man whose questions are still walking around without him. The gathering itself was wonderfully un-grand. No stage. No branding. No big institutional apparatus.

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June 25, 2026 No Comments

Welcome to the Textual Underground

What appears here as a blog post usually began somewhere less presentable. A sentence in a daily note. A line spoken into a recorder while walking. A paragraph abandoned three years ago. A highlight from a book I wasn’t expecting to matter. A half-formed thought dropped into Obsidian before it could evaporate. A conversation with Milton, or Claude, or Copilot, where something in the archive started tugging at my sleeve. By the time a piece reaches the blog, it’s already got a little history. This is easy to forget, because blogs make writing look cleaner than it is. A post

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June 24, 2026 No Comments

Working Notes: Gonzo Spirituality and the Bar of the Psyche

This old post has wandered back into consciousness: Holy Gonzo! Embracing Chaos and Truth on the Path to Self-Discovery. I reposted on social media over the weekend. I wrote it back in October 2024, but reading it now, I’m feeling drawn to explore the subject further. The phrase at the centre of it all is Gonzo Spirituality. At the time, I was trying to name a kind of spiritual practice that didn’t require me to step away from the life I was actually living. I wasn’t drawn to the serene, white-robed, mountain-retreat version of spirituality. I didn’t want a path

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June 23, 2026 No Comments

Better Than Sex, 30 Years Later: Revisiting the Book That Broke My Brain

07:39. I’m in my lounge chair drinking black coffee, the morning still soft around the edges. For my morning read today, I’ve been revisiting Hunter S. Thompson, starting with the book that began my literary love affair with his work: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie. There’s something about Hunter that still gets under my skin in the best possible way. He doesn’t simply report the story. He enters it. He becomes part of the event he’s describing. He’s not pretending to stand outside the madness with clean hands and a neutral expression. He is in the room,

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June 20, 2026 No Comments

Being, not becoming

Saturday. Kessingland. A camping field on a sea cliff; the morning is already bright by the time I properly arrive in it. I wanted to watch the sunrise. That was the plan in the loose way plans form when you sleep outdoors and imagine yourself becoming more elemental by morning. But the field gave me sleep instead, and the sun did its work without me standing there to witness it. There’s something almost comic in that. I had come to the edge of the country with the vague heroic notion of rising with the light, looking out across the water

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June 18, 2026 No Comments

NOTES

I finished Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie. The first part was a nostalgic trip through the 80s. I enjoyed that; however, I bought the book for the second part, Sean Manseau’s Phonomancy work. a bit disappointed. Read like a drug-fuelled psychodelusional trip through his own ego consciousness. Maybe my discomfort stems from me seeing more of myself in Manseau than I care to admit. Shadow gold.

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June 9, 2026 1 Comment

I asked this question a couple of years ago. I would rephrase the question now. The world definitely doesn’t owe you a meaning. You have to make it for yourself. It’s built slowly from the choices you make that compound over time. You can be free without direction. You can have direction without freedom. What really matters, though, is whether you can wake up and choose the same life again.

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June 8, 2026 No Comments

I’m wondering if invoking the ends justify the means argument to support why it’s ok to use AI in creative endeavours is a little extreme. I was reading Moody Warlock‘s blog post last night about using AI for DND worldbuilding. His main argument against the use of AI is that there is no blood, sweat, and tears involved in the process. That using AI is a shortcut to the end result. For him the journey to the end is the main point. For him, if there is no struggle, then the end is hollow. This is what conjured up the

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June 7, 2026 No Comments

Existential Consent Consent is the move most people miss when they talk about uncertainty. We have better words, or at least more familiar ones. Acceptance. Surrender. Choice. Courage. Faith. We reach for them because they’re already waiting on the shelf, already worn smooth by use. But each one bends the thing slightly out of shape. Acceptance feels too passive, as if life hands you the terms and all that remains is to stop arguing with them. Surrender carries too much defeat in its mouth, too much collapse, too much kneeling before an indifferent force. Choice sounds cleaner, but it often

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June 6, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been testing the Kospet Tank M4 special edition smartwatch. It’s a fraction of the cost of something like the Apple Ultra smartwatch. Performance so far has been top-notch.

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June 5, 2026 No Comments

I’m not asking what happens to productivity or output. I’m asking what happens to meaning. When thinking is distributed across human-AI systems, something genuinely new appears. Not better thinking or faster thinking. A different category. Meaning that emerges from the interchange itself, that no single node, human or machine, can claim to have authored. You can’t point to the moment you had the idea. You can’t separate what you thought from what the system returned. The origin dissolves. What remains is only the pattern that emerged between you. This isn’t collaboration in the old sense. Collaboration assumed distinct agents contributing

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June 5, 2026 No Comments

This short clip from Ted Nelson in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World is less about technology and more about a philosophy of connection. Nelson reflects on the core insight that has guided his life’s work: reality is not made of isolated things but of relationships, connections, and ever-changing patterns. The central idea As a child, Nelson recalls trailing his hand through the water while sitting in a rowboat. Watching the water flow around his fingers gave him a profound realisation: The universe is a system of ever-changing relationships. That experience became the foundation of his thinking. Everything

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June 5, 2026 No Comments

When the hammer works, it disappears. You just hammer. The tool recedes into pure function. Then it breaks. Snaps, slips, refuses. Suddenly, the hammer has an inside. A being separate from its use. Heidegger noticed this first. But he left the human at the centre of the story. The hammer becomes visible when it fails because we stop using it and start examining it. The human is still the measure. Graham Harman says: that’s not what’s happening. The hammer was always more than its function. It withholds something from every object it encounters, not just from us. When two billiard

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May 31, 2026 No Comments

I love a good samurai film. Not for the swordplay, but for what happens when an absolute code meets a world that doesn’t care about your code. The best ones are philosophical texts in motion. Honour as ontology. Discipline as worldview. Violence as the moment when the story you’ve been living inside reveals whether it can hold. Yojimbo. Seven Samurai. Harakiri. They’re all asking the same question: what do you do when the system that gave you meaning stops working, and walking away would require becoming someone you don’t know how to be? The samurai doesn’t get therapy. He gets

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May 30, 2026 No Comments

Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke, he wasn’t sure if he was a man who’d dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was a man. What gets missed is what comes after. He doesn’t resolve it. He doesn’t land on an answer. He names the gap between the two states and sits with it. The transition. Not a man or a butterfly. The passing between. The Western self wants resolution. It wants to know which one you are. It wants a coherent story and defendable borders. The Zhuangzian insight is that the wanting is

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May 29, 2026 No Comments

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