Blog

Interview cycle

2022-09-06

I’m interviewing for other jobs. It’s a very strange process that sometimes feels like having a professional affair. You arrange off-the-calendar meetings with some exciting new thing, because the old one has turned sour. I’ll stop myself before I go to deep on the “jobs are like relationships” simile, which I don’t really believe in. What I want to say is it’s a tiring situation to both have a job and be applying for jobs.

Links, August 2022

2022-08-24

First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It’s astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond “pretty funny clip”. It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works.

Wet bulb

2022-08-24

We’ve had successive record high temperatures everywhere, but most importantly to me, in London. There was a bit of respite for a week or so but yesterday the humidity starting rising and today the temperature will follow. I don’t think I’ll find 28° intolerably hot after getting used to almost 40° a couple of weeks ago, but the humidity doesn’t make it easy. Hyde Park is parched. The leaves have fallen off the trees weeks early, which I’m told is some sort of survival technique.

Cove

2022-08-22

Pieces of aeroplane sprayed across the water in front of them, but only Arlo saw the distinct shapes of people striking the sea’s surface. The beach was the thin fringe of a wide bay. At their backs, the drastic slope of the mountains dove into the ground. The town, just four streets deep, was squeezed tight between the mountainside and the sandy beach. The double blades of beach and town pinched off at the end of the bay: a headland the shape of a fist.

A swim in a pond in the rain

2022-07-21

Image generated by Midjourney Sarah asked me the other day, “do you actually find you enjoy writing?” Writing is always something I feel I ought to be doing. I feel bad if I haven’t written creatively for a long time. I don’t think I’m a great writer, nor do I really hope to become one if I applied myself and commited serious time to it. Nevertheless, I read a lot, and reading gives you a taste for writing that often wants satisfying with doing a bit yourself.

German is hard

2022-07-20

Image generated by Midjourney I was always a bit cocky about languages. I got good marks in them at school and by the end of sixth form I felt I had a pretty good grasp of French. That felt like a lot in the context of semi-rural England where very, very few people learned and spoke a second language fluently.* French faded because I was an idiot and didn’t keep it up after I went to university.

Taking down Goodreads

2022-04-12

Image generated by Midjourney TL;DR I’m switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code). I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it’s owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult.

New job, new season

2022-03-14

I left BuzzFeed two weeks ago and started at Kaluza the following Monday. The full implications of that are yet to be seen but for now they include: exciting new problems, lots of new people, nice new office, new cycle to the office through lots of parks, being a bit tired. I’m a really simple creature. When people at the office asked me on Friday how my first week went I kept just talking about how nice the bike ride through Regents Park and Hyde Park was and how I was looking forward to spring.

A year in ads

2022-03-12

Image generated by Midjourney When, from the outside, a collection of people or an institution is doing things I strongly disagree with, it often turns out that from the inside I can see all the mechanisms and incentives that make perfectly normal people works towards bad outcomes. Take online advertising. In my last year at BuzzFeed I finally bit the bullet and started working in the part of the team that makes the money: the ad tech team.

The layoff business

2022-03-12

Image generated by Midjourney When I was growing up I sometimes thought I wanted to be a writer, but I quickly realised that doing it for a job wasn’t going to be fun or rewarding. My position is that I took the coward’s way out in choosing to go into software engineering, for a more financially stable existence, but I went into the world with a respect for the writing staff and a general dread at their constant mistreatment.