Seeing as it's 5 November, something about Bonfire Night... The topsy-turvy celebration of Guy Fawkes interconnected.org/home/2022/11...

Youngest daughter and her friends are watching The Shining on their Halloween sleep over. It’s been going like this… ‘Omg, is so boring!’ ‘What *is* this film about!?’ ‘Shit! Oh, it’s so creepy’ ‘I don’t like it’ ‘Can we come and sit with you?’ ‘Don’t turn the lights off!’ ‘Did you hear that?’

Been vibe coding a cycling app. It’s like a cross between being a hovering art director and a baby sitter.

Superman. Superdog. Funny droids. Clearly I’m 42 years too old for this film.

Carb loading for a bike ride tomorrow and am approx 80% bagel and jam, 10% banana bread, 7% orange juice, and 3% gaviscon.

Liquid Glass is upsetting.

Made a thing on my website. markboulton.co.uk/rides/ For a while I’ve been wanting to continue to own my own data and I do a fair bit of riding with a lot of data. So putting them up on my site and tinkering felt like a nice thing to do.

I have opinions about notebooks. The Midori MD A5 gridded notebook is almost perfect. From its lay-flat design and the weight of the paper. But its cover is rubbish. Light weight and gets destroyed by travel. And the separate covers aren’t that great. I’m not going to make my own but I’m tempted.

It’s been 25 years since I’ve seen G Love & Special Sauce and tonight they treated us to the entire first album and a few extras. Just a wonderful experience.

During the first lockdown, I blogged about making a bit of an aggregated feed reader (I guess I was doing a lot of doomscrolling). markboulton.co.uk/journal/my-o... I hadn't looked at it ages, but it feels like a scary, depressing, triggering time capsule. broadsheet.markboulton.co.uk

I hope Alien Earth gets better. I think what it hasn’t nailed is that, like the shark in Jaws, the xenomorph’s horror lies in its absence. It was so quiet, so fast, so stealthy, that you have no chance of witnessing it take someone.

I wrote about crit today as I revive my Handbook series of posts. markboulton.co.uk/journal/crit/

Back on the weeknotes. markboulton.co.uk/journal/week...

Just digging around a four year old Eleventy build of my blog going ‘huh?’. I reckon I may have to zero the desk if I’m going to rebuild this thing (Zeroing the desk: markboulton.co.uk/journal/zero...)

In my ‘shake up my blog and get back to reading and writing’ renewed energy I’ve now tweaked my reading workflow. RSS, for things I like, save to Instapaper, IFTTT to raindrop with a specific collection, Eleventy builds from the raindrop API. Enjoying some tinkering.

In my ‘I’m going to redesign my blog’ frame of mind I’ve been going back through some blog posts of mine. Weeknotes, in particular. I’m going to start writing them again. Nice to look back, but also a really good habit if I make it stick again.

Well, it's only taken me about two years to get back on the RSS horse. Blank slate. Who are your go-to reads?

After all these years I’ve finally bought a little rice cooker. Game changer. Why? Perfectly cooked rice every time. Dead easy setup. Rice is healthy and good for your gut (even white rice, but, yes, less than brown).

microsoft paper essentially says that AI is best used for management and sales tasks not creative or specialist ones arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935

All the feels about Ozzy. The world owes him a great debt. His band launched the careers of thousands and inspired probably hundreds of thousands to pick up their first instrument, me included. Rest up.

Le Tour on tv whilst I’m finishing up work ahead of holidays. Today they climb up Mont Ventoux. I climbed it a few times in 2018. Hard but not the hardest climb I did. Galibier was harder for me. Valley of Tears in the canaries was the worst. Long, hot, fiercely steep, remote, no shade.

Browsing Goodreads for a fairly recent excellent fantasy novel/series and 95% are Romantasy. I get that they are commercially successful, but has there been any really good fantasy published in the last 12 months that doesn’t look like some Twilight/50 Shades/GOT hybrid?

I don’t know what part of my stupid lizard brain thinks it’s acceptable to get anxious about a connecting flight two days out. Brains, eh?

Sonos send me an email telling me how they now have AI. Please, Sonos, fix your app. Just make it usable. Then you can muck about with the latest and greatest. Please, Sonos, fix your hardware. I lose count (and patience) with the drops, the hangs, the disappearing speakers. That is all

Day 5 of being sick. Films watched: Prospect. Excellent 4* Rocky. Again. 4* Longlegs. Junk. 0* Jurassic World: Rebirth. Urgh. 0* Warfare. Excellent. 4* Mickey 17. On the fence. 3* Next up: The Brutalist Poor Things The Vast of Night And stage 3 of the Tour de France. Even if it’s a sprint stage

After years of boring, new Muse song is a banger. Clearly the world does in fact need more 8 string guitars.

Figma going public means new industry tooling coming because they will slow down, focus on 1/4 by 1/4 numbers before eventually being swallowed by a PE firm or sold for little to Adobe who will rename it. Be on your toes design folk. Now is the time to try everything and use what works.

After 8 years, the dog has suddenly decided that our stairs are unsafe. He stops half way up, as if stuck, moans until someone coaxes him up. He won’t even turn around and go back down. I think he’s broken.

Dear people of America. I have a question. You know on the movies, kids on their paper round just chuck them into the garden from riding down the middle of the road? Is this real? Or like that thing in the movies where people sleep with no curtains?

Summer solstice. Winter is coming.

Went surfing. Sprained my ankle.

Spent the last week riding my bike in the alps. This was taken this morning half way up the Col de la Madeleine. A beautiful, but long, climb. 27km, topping out at 2000m. It was so quiet when you could hear above my heart beat throbbing in my ears.

One look at LinkedIn and you’d think design was all over. This is the fourth time design has died in my career. It’ll be fine.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or impressed by the guy who drops a huge fart and then immediately leaves the train without a single look back. The disgusting confidence of it.

The Sleep Token marathon continues. How this band (and drummer!) escaped me for so long I’ve no idea. Like some I think I was put off by the theatrics. But the music is very hard to ignore.

I normally discover new music through listening to drummers. Today I’ve been mostly listening to Sleep Token. Holy shit.

Greg wrote two things this week that really spoke to me. This second piece was like a gentle hand on the shoulder at exactly the right moment from someone with a soft smile and kind eyes. Thank you, Greg.

Norovirus is all around me. It’s like circling sharks. The kids school sent home 200 children and staff last Thursday. Eldest said it looked like a scene from 28 days later. Wondering if these stomach cramps are in my head or really in my stomach.

I’m not going to be the guy shouting at clouds. But… All this ‘Vibe coding/prototyping’ talk at the moment is making me a bit grumpy old git. It’s defined as 1. Sketch an idea. 2. Make it with AI as real code in a browser or OS. 3. Test it. 4. Iterate. No different to 2005. We just wrote the code

What the hell is severance about?

Did my best approximation of Birds Eye fish fingers from scratch. Turns toasting the panko before hand in some butter, then adding Parmesan, was a good decision. Nice colour, fish cooked well.

Just saw an absolute peach of a thought bomb from a design grifter of LinkedIn. ‘The best designers are now prompt engineers not pixel pushers’ What utter bollocks. I mean, I don’t really know where to start with such click-bait nonsense.

Identifying typefaces does not make you a good typographic designer. My advice to any designer is don’t worry about remembering and identifying type. Instead, spend that time using just a few for (almost) everything. You learn a ton. Leave typeface identification to academics or type designers.

Sometimes, I am exactly Cameron. m.youtube.com/watch?v=d51t...

Spent a few days snowboarding in Flaine in France. A purpose built resort set in a bowl in the mountains. Struck by the architecture. Not sure what it is that makes me excited about modernist / brutalist architecture. Nostalgia? Honesty? Optimism?

4am, this morning, i took daughter number 1 to the airport for a school trip to Auschwitz for the day. A Welsh charity does this every year. They charter a plane, fill it full of children, and tell them a story that should never be forgotten.

🌟 Front-End Developer and Design Systems Practitioner seeking remote work. 🎨 With 10 years of experience in Design Systems, I excel at the front of the front-end. 🤝 If you’re looking for a friendly collaborator to bring your vision to life, let’s connect! 🌐 www.alwaystwisted.com 🙏🖤

If I filter out all catastrophising, toxic news, crazy dictators, billionaire loonies on here, I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the only thing left would be @erikahall.bsky.social ‘s chicken paintings. And I think that’ll be just fine.

Uh oh. The feature creep is starting to set in here. I’ve noticed a few ‘trending’ things. Videos, topics. Next will come monetisation of those. Then the algo changes. Gotta give those designers work to do.

What freelance product designers do I know on here?