Published by

“It’s a magical kind of sadness, saying goodbye. A bit like preparing to travel again, but no longer together.”

Read Joe Hammond’s final article in the Guardian

Author Joe Hammond passed away recently at age 50 from motor neurone disease. He covers so much loss in his final article, particularly the loss of the future with his two young boys and wife.

Other losses are simpler and more incremental. Sometimes they are nothing more than adaptation and sometimes, like the loss of my voice, they are devastating. I lost my swallow very quickly. There was a three-week period when Gill made sure I had lots of really nice soups, and that was it. Food was a thing of the past. I’ve never got over that loss.

My grandpa on my dad’s side lost the ability to swallow years before he passed. When it started getting bad he could still have ice cream every once in a while, his favorite thing, and then no more. I find it almost impossible to imagine how hard that must have been, particularly for someone as social as him. He probably managed to stick around as long as he did because of my grandma. She was his college sweetheart, his always.

Published by

gemmacope.land

gemmacope.land

Gemma Copeland’s new site is online! This was really fun, one of the truest collaborations I’ve done in a while. Minimal JavaScript, Eleventy + Netlify, Arena API fun, unicode arrows, accessibility at the fore. It was an exercise in playful sufficiency, hopefully we’ve created a functional sandbox that she can work with for some years to come.

I’m hoping to write a bit more about the development at some point, particularly on working with the Arena API. Ran in to some interesting hurdles with block ordering! In the meantime, see the repository on GitHub and check out the making-of post on her website.

Published by

1979 to 2012 on 70,000+ VHS tapes

Black and white photobooth photos of Marion Stokes

Marion Stokes recorded television news twenty-four hours a day between 1979 to 2012 on to over 70,000 VHS and Betamax tapes, planning her days around the length of a tape and storing her output in various apartments. Her collection was donated to the Internet Archive and the tapes are now being digitised so that they will eventually be available to the public online.

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a documentary, a portrait of Marion Stokes by filmmaker Matt Wolf. The image above is a still from the trailer. I really hope to see it at some point, maybe it will come to London. Thanks to RE for bringing this to my attention.

Published by

Slow Radio from the BBC

Listen to Slow Radio, more excellence from BBC Sounds brought to my attention by SB. The first episode I listened to was a short one, a 16 minute visit to a snowy forest near Oslo. I’ll most likely listen to all of them at some point, but might particularly listen to Dementia voices, the last Elfdalians, life on a shanty boat next.

Definitely looking forward to the multipart, multi-hour Arctic Sound Walk coming up on 24–26 December.

Published by

Chocolate nut muffins

Double chocolate and nut muffins recipe

Calling these muffins instead of cupcakes is reallllyyyy pushing it IMO, but we’ll let that slide. I made these w/o the chocolate chips, with a dash of orange flower water instead of vanilla, and with pecans instead of walnuts + almonds. They were great, would definitely make again. They look super presentable with a single whole pecan on top of each muffin.

Published by

Some background and selected projects

I’ve just added a Work & Background page to this site that provides a bit more context for what I do and some selected projects. It’s a WIP, there are some thumbnails I would like to swap out and I’m sure the text will need tweaking. Nice to have a version up at any rate.

I’m really hoping to explore a few new-to-me bits of tech in the near future, particularly related to our books index. SB has been doing some very cool experiments with that recently.