[{"content":"And this time, I mean it.\nLearning more about front-end frameworks, infrastructure-as-code frameworks, deployment frameworks and framework-managing frameworks, isn\u0026rsquo;t appealing to me and it never really was. For some reason, all dashboards for managing websites are so bad that whenever I look at them, my eyes glaze over and I start wondering if I should have become a scientist. This conflicted with my wanting to improve my lovingly made and artisanal (amateurish and clunky) website. So, I needed to make some senior dev decisions.\nQuestions How do I make creating content mega easy? How do I make deploying it mega easy? Answers: By making it a static site. Hugo is a big framework with tens of thousands of stars on GitHub. LGTM 🚀. By going onto Cloudflare and clicking the \u0026ldquo;use GitHub\u0026rdquo; buttons. With that stuff sorted out and one prompt later, I had what I wanted, a super easy to use website that looks nice and is easy to add things to. It requires basically zero effort from me to maintain, and that is the key to good software engineering.\nPerfect. All I need to do is write down whatever is on my mind now.\njosephbriggs@Josephs-Air writing % claude ▐▛███▛█ Claude Code v2.1.308 ▝▜██████▀ Opus 5.5 · Claude Pro ▝▝ ▝▝ ~/writing ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ❯ [⧉ In index.md] Please complete this blog. Make no mistakes ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ⏵⏵ auto mode on (shift+tab to cycle) ","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/website-final-v2-final/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAnd this time, I mean it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLearning more about front-end frameworks, infrastructure-as-code frameworks, deployment frameworks and framework-managing frameworks, isn\u0026rsquo;t appealing to me and it never really was. For some reason, all dashboards for managing websites are so bad that whenever I look at them, my eyes glaze over and I start wondering if I should have become a scientist. This conflicted with my wanting to improve my lovingly made and artisanal (amateurish and clunky) website. So, I needed to make some \u003ccode\u003esenior dev\u003c/code\u003e decisions.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Website-Final_V2_FINAL1.docx"},{"content":"Steven perched on a bench outside the small Tesco picking at his meal deal. He\u0026rsquo;d perfected his lunch. He knew how to get 76g of protein in one meal deal, but he resented Tesco. Did they think he was an ignorant fool? Of course he noticed the 15p price hike. The bench was in a plaza surrounded by flats and offices built in the new London vernacular, with an ersatz country pub, \u0026ldquo;Punk Pizza\u0026rdquo;, and an estate agent\u0026rsquo;s. Steven watched a pigeon hobble about on gnarled stubs but it didn\u0026rsquo;t care. It seemed to take whatever chance it got to get food, and on a whim it could fly up on top of anything it liked.\nThat afternoon, during the company\u0026rsquo;s quarterly town hall, he was sentenced to death by PowerPoint. As slide after slide burned away his precious life, Steven\u0026rsquo;s eyes landed on the windowsill, and there he saw a pigeon. It could go wherever it wanted, and it could be among the trees and its friends. It did things that mattered, that really mattered. Who cared about this year\u0026rsquo;s revenue? Instead of worrying about nonsense like jobs, we could all scavenge flakes of pastry outside coffee shops and flit between our favourite lampposts.\nSteven walked to the lift, and when he was inside he noticed he could see himself twice but also zero times. He cocked his head to get a better look but the 360 view of himself bewildered him. He stumbled and saw his feet were covered guano but he was ambivalent. He flapped his wings and pecked the ground floor button out of habit before he realised he didn\u0026rsquo;t need the ground anymore. He was shooed out of the polished lobby into the street, and he went to get on the train for free. People were giggling, whispering, holding up their phones and filming him. He could be viral content. Steven puffed up his chest with pride, and went to perch on a chair. He arrived at the coast and went to eat the vagrant chips around bins for the rest of the day under the glorious setting sun.\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/pigeon-steven/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSteven perched on a bench outside the small Tesco picking at his meal deal. He\u0026rsquo;d perfected his lunch. He knew how to get 76g of protein in one meal deal, but he resented Tesco. Did they think he was an ignorant fool? Of course he noticed the 15p price hike. The bench was in a plaza surrounded by flats and offices built in the new London vernacular, with an ersatz country pub, \u0026ldquo;Punk Pizza\u0026rdquo;, and an estate agent\u0026rsquo;s. Steven watched a pigeon hobble about on gnarled stubs but it didn\u0026rsquo;t care. It seemed to take whatever chance it got to get food, and on a whim it could fly up on top of anything it liked.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Pigeon Steven"},{"content":"Life In what was formerly the drawing room of a grand Victorian tenement in the fashionable west end of Glasgow, utilitarian bookcases of the sort you\u0026rsquo;d find in a library with midcentury aspirations lined the walls. The shelves were packed with curious and cryptic tomes filled with mathematics that has largely been forgotten by most people since it was discovered in the late 17th century, and accompanying these were Cordelia Graham\u0026rsquo;s self-penned treatises on cosmology. The collection had long outgrown the shelves which Cordelia had bought forty years ago, and much of the floor was now underneath a Himalayan topography of books and papers.\nA narrow path of threadbare scarlet carpet led to an oak desk in the south-facing bay window. On the rare and treasured sunny days in summer, light would cast itself onto the desk from 7am until the early afternoon, and afterward, a pleasant shadow from a grand old sycamore tree would keep the room cool. In front of the desk was a peculiar ergonomic chair with no apparent way to sit on it without some contortion. Cordelia had reached the great age of 96, and had now retired from the special chair which was supposedly good for you to an armchair facing the electric fireplace.\nSeveral slender coffee tables orbited her within arm\u0026rsquo;s reach, populated with pens and notepads for her scribblings. She never used these for a cup of coffee, as that was, in her view, a vulgar drink, similar to cocaine. She had a speech prepared for whenever someone suggested coffee, and this was something Hughie, her great nephew, knew and found both entertaining and fascinating. There did seem to be a glimmer of truth to what she said, and he respected her intuitions and insights into the greatest cosmological questions, so perhaps she was right about the nature of coffee. On the other hand, they did sound like the ravings of someone who held modern life and consumerism in contempt, and perhaps Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s disdain had nothing to do with coffee at all. The one luxury she allowed herself was regular and opulent cups of the most exquisite Ya Shi Xiang tea.\nApart from the tea, Cordelia had led a spartan life. Her tastes in clothes, holidays, and food were akin to those of a wandering hermit. She possessed no interest in gathering material wealth, and she\u0026rsquo;d often quote Deuteronomy, \u0026ldquo;man does not live on bread alone,\u0026rdquo; or Tom Weir, Scotland\u0026rsquo;s eminent ornithologist, \u0026ldquo;Some view a home as a place to return, some see it as a place to leave,\u0026rdquo; for this gave her a wise and profound stance, even if she was responding to questions like \u0026ldquo;what shall I get you for your birthday?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Are you sure I can\u0026rsquo;t get you anything, even a nice cup for your tea or a good pen?\u0026rdquo; Hughie asked.\n\u0026ldquo;No, darling, I\u0026rsquo;m quite okay. When you\u0026rsquo;re 97, you are just happy to be awake every morning. I may not outlive the fruit bowl, dear,\u0026rdquo; replied Cordelia.\nHughie felt his youthful optimism diminish as she spoke this ultimate truth. Did she have to be so morbid?\n\u0026ldquo;Birthdays are supposed to be a special day, and we should do something. We could go to that nice cafe down the road,\u0026rdquo; said Hughie.\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose we could do that. Perhaps I could try one of those avocados I\u0026rsquo;ve heard so many dreadful things about,\u0026rdquo; said Cordelia.\nCordelia had always been a great independent thinker who was hard to put in a box. She was the daughter of the wealthy engine magnate Sir Earnest Graham. Born in 1921, she was destined for a life of reclining on the teak decks of sailing yachts in the Mediterranean, buying exclusive designer clothes from Harrods, being invited to parties attended by people who appeared on the silver screen and Broadway, and eventually marrying a man whose third cousin was in the Royal Family. But she gave up the pampered life of an Edwardian lady in a gilded cage to join the war against the Fascists. Unbeknownst to old Earnest, she joined the army and was shipped off to Egypt in 1940 to kill Nazis. Earnest would often threaten to withdraw her allowance if she did not return and behave, but despite his cruel industrialist sensibilities, he could never follow through with his threats. Upon her return from the war, she again defied old Earnest and insisted on reading physics at Oxford, specialising in theoretical cosmology. Earnest thought this was frivolous, futile, and disrespectful, but he saw it as an act of philanthropy to give her freedom, similar to the donations he made to the Glasgow Academy of Fine Art. For the next fifteen years, she worked alongside greying men who seemed to have all invented the radio, but to her dismay, her ideas were never regarded as serious and were given no more than a condescending first glance. Upon the death of old Earnest, she took her inheritance and resigned from her position at Oxford. She returned to Glasgow and bought a well-apportioned flat in the west end, where she was able to spend the next five decades developing her cosmological ideas in peace.\nHughie was Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s great nephew. He\u0026rsquo;d heard apocryphal tales of a mad aunt from his relatives. He would see her at the odd gathering of the clan. Whenever one of the Grahams got married, they hosted it at their ancestral home, Struan House, in Perthshire. By a peculiar line of succession involving a helicopter crash and a horse, Cordelia had inherited the baronetcy and Struan House and was legally unable to relinquish them to one of her more tasteless and ostentatious relatives. At one of Struan House\u0026rsquo;s weddings, various awful cousins were gossiping:\n\u0026ldquo;I hear Cordelia will be coming to this. I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen her since Rabb and Carol\u0026rsquo;s wedding. You wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know she was a millionaire. She looked like all her clothes were second-hand from twenty-five years ago.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s sad, really. You can tell she\u0026rsquo;s not really with it. She told me she was visiting her friend in Stockholm once, said something about attending a gala while she was there because he\u0026rsquo;d won a medal.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;She kept talking about the hole in the centre of the universe as well. Like, I\u0026rsquo;m into horoscopes, but she\u0026rsquo;s mad into it, you know?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I know what you mean. I dropped her back off in Glasgow on my way down to London. In the car, she wouldn\u0026rsquo;t stop talking about conspiracy theories. Proves Oxford is full of quacks. She never seems to finish a thought before she moves on to the next one.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;She wasted her opportunity. Her life was basically handed to her for free when she inherited this place. Granted, she lives in a perfectly nice flat, but when you go in, it\u0026rsquo;s wall to ceiling junk. Some of that stuff hasn\u0026rsquo;t been touched for decades. I bet under that heap of crap in her flat, we\u0026rsquo;d find some of granddad\u0026rsquo;s diamond collection.\u0026rdquo;\nHughie was fourteen when he first met Cordelia. All the superstition surrounding her eccentric life had piqued his curiosity, and he\u0026rsquo;d ended up in a chair next to her at tea. He felt star-struck, and words could not come out of his mouth. What was an appropriate question? He couldn\u0026rsquo;t ask if she was mad, could he?\n\u0026ldquo;Hello, dear,\u0026rdquo; Cordelia said, breaking the several minutes of silence that had formed between them since he\u0026rsquo;d sat down, despite the silence not fazing her.\n\u0026ldquo;Please, would you go and find me a cup of tea? And when you\u0026rsquo;ve found it, would you bring it to me?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Uh, okay, Auntie.\u0026rdquo;\nUpon returning, Cordelia said,\n\u0026ldquo;Thank you, Hughie. How old are you now?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Fourteen. Fifteen soon.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You must be thinking about the end of school. Do you like to read?\u0026rdquo;\nHughie was taken aback. He had no idea how to have such a mature conversation. Moments ago, his cousin Jake had challenged him to see who could drink the most water the fastest. What did he like to read? Whatever people made him read, but he didn\u0026rsquo;t want to sound two-dimensional, so he named the book he was reading for English.\n\u0026ldquo;Dracula is pretty good.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, you like fiction? And which subject do you like at school?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m quite good at maths and science. I\u0026rsquo;m doing each science as three separate subjects. Most people only do one. We\u0026rsquo;ve just finished the solar system.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And what about the solar system did you learn, dear?\u0026rdquo;\nCordelia and Hughie spoke about the solar system for the rest of the evening. He was amazed that she seemed to know everything, and he\u0026rsquo;d hoped he\u0026rsquo;d impressed her by quoting the sun\u0026rsquo;s mass in kilograms. She thought the mass of the sun was a trivial thing to worry about, but she wanted to kindle the spark she\u0026rsquo;d seen in Hughie, and encouraged him to keep talking throughout the evening. Amongst her dreadful, vacuous relatives, Hughie stood out as a careful listener who had a love for the beauty of the natural world. From then on, Hughie looked forward to the various gatherings of the Graham clan. She was rarely there, however.\nHughie had decided to study physics at the University of Glasgow. The summer before his first term, he went to stay with Cordelia. His parents weren\u0026rsquo;t skint, but they weren\u0026rsquo;t well off either. They\u0026rsquo;d spent their share of the industrial cash pile on huge parties in their thirties and neglected to get proper jobs until they were in their forties. His grandparents had blown a sizable portion of old Earnest\u0026rsquo;s wealth on living an idle life by maintaining a private swimming pool, keeping horses, gambling in Vegas. All that led to Hughie looking for the cheapest way to go to university, and he thought it was a great opportunity to stay walking distance from the physics building for free. He conceded he\u0026rsquo;d miss out on meeting people his own age, but he\u0026rsquo;d get to know Cordelia better.\nHis parents dropped him off with a suitcase of clothes, and he buzzed the number labelled in spidery handwriting: \u0026ldquo;1/1, Dr Graham.\u0026rdquo; He made his way through the close to the faded, peeling red door and found Cordelia Graham smiling to see him.\n\u0026ldquo;Hello, dear, come on in.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Hi, Auntie, thanks for having me.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, it\u0026rsquo;s no problem at all. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a room for you, but you\u0026rsquo;ll need to help me shift the boxes of papers out of it. There\u0026rsquo;s a bed in there which the Ikea people left for you to put together. How are you managing with Glasgow so far?\u0026rdquo;\nHughie entered the threshold, and fascination gripped him. Behind stacks of yellowing and bluing books, Greek letters peeked out on a now-grey blackboard. His eyes picked out a black book with gold letters: \u0026ldquo;The Hamiltonian for Particles Orbiting Singularities Within the Locus of Increasing Entropy.\u0026rdquo; On a coffee table, atop a pile of papers built through the delicate, decades-long task of stacking for later, there was an arrow pointing to an inflexion on a graph with the corresponding note \u0026ldquo;confirmed.\u0026rdquo; This was like a cave of wonders, the entire flat filled with artefacts of this sort. Hughie\u0026rsquo;s eyes struggled to settle on any one piece before being drawn to its neighbour. His parents had warned him that Cordelia was an eccentric hoarder, but it became clear to him that Cordelia was a genius. They made small talk, since they didn\u0026rsquo;t really know one another, and then Hughie went to set up his room.\nAfter his first term, Hughie found amongst Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s yellowing bookcases an envelope with \u0026ldquo;Earnest\u0026rdquo; scrawled on it.\n\u0026ldquo;Cordelia, is this from your dad?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, no, dear. That\u0026rsquo;s another Earnest. You can read it if you like.\u0026rdquo;\nHughie took the envelope and read its contents.\n\u0026ldquo;Wait, this is Rutherford? You knew him?\u0026rdquo;\nHughie was astounded to find out that Cordelia had maintained a decades-long correspondence with Ernest Rutherford. Hughie spent a significant amount of time in his first term of studying physics finding out this guy was something of a Big Deal.\n\u0026ldquo;How did you meet him?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Through work, but it wasn\u0026rsquo;t really through collaboration. He was sort of there with the other Cambridge lot. There were fewer physicists in those days, so it was easier to know most of them. You\u0026rsquo;d go to some college dinner and there\u0026rsquo;d probably be one of them there. I\u0026rsquo;ve got some letters from Dirac too, if you\u0026rsquo;d like to read them.\u0026rdquo;\nFor the following seven years, Hughie became Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s apprentice, and he began to navigate Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s library and locate information with efficiency. She\u0026rsquo;d worked for decades on her grand cosmological schemes in relative isolation, so having an assistant who could carry out some of the more modern tasks was invaluable to her. He\u0026rsquo;d spent a year documenting and publishing her FORTRAN code to the internet, and running exploratory projects under her tutelage. He\u0026rsquo;d taken her nascent idea about dark matter and written a 126-page thesis entitled \u0026ldquo;The Distribution of Dark Matter Within a 6-Manifold.\u0026rdquo; Much of their work relied on openly available data, but a significant amount of the paywalled research was paid for by engines made for steamships 100 years ago.\nHughie had asked Cordelia early on in his stay with her why she wasn\u0026rsquo;t working at the university.\n\u0026ldquo;Because then I\u0026rsquo;d have to work with a bunch of crusty old men, and I\u0026rsquo;ve done enough of that in my life. I\u0026rsquo;m 92, dear. Those boys speak to me like I\u0026rsquo;m a child. They assume they know what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;But times have changed since 1970, haven\u0026rsquo;t they?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Maybe they\u0026rsquo;ve changed, but should I work at the whim of men? Societal mood improved in my favour decades after all the men my age retired, but it\u0026rsquo;s not hard for it to go back to the good old days.\u0026rdquo;\nDeath Cordelia and Hughie returned from the cafe. Her 97th birthday felt special to Hughie, even though they\u0026rsquo;d done the same thing they did most days: talked about a nuance of the interior of dense cosmological objects over tea and shakshuka. She was sharp, but she looked small and often seemed tired. They returned to the flat, and 1/1 was becoming harder and harder for her to reach. Hughie was looking at bungalows, but Cordelia had lived in 1/1 so long she was carved into the masonry of the building.\nIn the gloaming, under a purple hue, a white BMW crept down the quiet, leafy street. It stopped, and a figure materialised. It advanced up to the tenement\u0026rsquo;s portal and scanned the buzzers with its spectral eyes. The sky darkened and the wind in the trees stopped. The soft chatter of the city drowned in silence, and the figure raised its hand to its temple, and buzzed for 1/1.\nHughie was mid bungalow search when he heard the buzzer go. It was unusual for someone to be at the flat at this time of day, so he assumed one of his neighbours had a lost friend. He answered the buzzer.\n\u0026ldquo;Hullo?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Hello! Is Cordelia in? I\u0026rsquo;m her nephew, Gare. I\u0026rsquo;ve got her a birthday card and thought I\u0026rsquo;d pop by to see how the old crow is doing.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, right, yes, I\u0026rsquo;ll let you up.\u0026rdquo;\nHughie was perturbed. Gare Graham was a relatively distant cousin he\u0026rsquo;d seen a couple of times but never properly spoken to. He didn\u0026rsquo;t have clear memories of Gare Graham, and the more he tried to picture him, the blurrier Gare became in his mind\u0026rsquo;s eye. His voice echoed through Hughie\u0026rsquo;s thoughts, and it became harder to hear. Gare had also never dropped by before, and people don\u0026rsquo;t say things like \u0026ldquo;old crow.\u0026rdquo; But Hughie let him up anyway. Despite Gare Graham being a made-up-sounding relative he could barely remember, and despite instincts which didn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to him, Hughie buzzed Gare in.\nIn the close stood Gare. He was tall, with dark hair and pallid skin, dressed in a designer tracksuit with a gold bracelet. His vacant stare and wicked smile were obscured under a Von Dutch cap. Hughie looked into the study to alert Cordelia to Gare\u0026rsquo;s arrival, but in her usual place sat a grand Maine Coon with eyes like stars and whiskers longer than wisdom. The cat\u0026rsquo;s coat was an exquisite silver, and it had eyebrows to match an ancient lore master\u0026rsquo;s. Bewildered and troubled, Hughie went to look for Cordelia in the kitchen but was interrupted by Gare knocking at the door. He put the huge cat and the missing Cordelia to one side so he could deal with the Gare-shaped problem.\n\u0026ldquo;Hullo again, come in, Gare. It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since we saw you. Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s just in another room, but you can go sit in the lounge. Would you like a tea or anything else to drink?\u0026rdquo;\nHughie furtively scanned the kitchen as he asked this, but Cordelia wasn\u0026rsquo;t there either.\n\u0026ldquo;Wee Hughie! What\u0026rsquo;s going on in this flat? There\u0026rsquo;s shite from wall to ceiling. Have you been managing to cope with Cordelia? I can see you\u0026rsquo;ve let this place go to ruin. Cordelia! It\u0026rsquo;s Gare, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to drop off your card. Hughie, can you go and tidy up a bit, maybe chuck out some of the stuff on the coffee table so we can all sit down.\u0026rdquo;\nHughie was taken aback.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll just move the papers to the other room. Cordelia and I are working on a project.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Where\u0026rsquo;s the old crow? Wow, what a hideous cat. You shouldn\u0026rsquo;t keep them. They make the flat stink of piss.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Maine Coon had come out of the study and begun hissing at Gare.\n\u0026ldquo;Sorry. Yes, the cat\u0026rsquo;s staying here temporarily. Cordelia will be out in a moment. Please, go and sit down, make yourself comfortable.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I can see you\u0026rsquo;ve made yourself comfy, haven\u0026rsquo;t you, Hughie? Yes, you\u0026rsquo;ve got quite a nice arrangement here. You know, nobody\u0026rsquo;s spoken to Cordelia for quite a while, and we\u0026rsquo;d begun to worry about her, so I came down to check in on you two, and well, it\u0026rsquo;s worse than we thought. You\u0026rsquo;re not looking after her properly. You\u0026rsquo;ve let her flat become a crack den.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Maine Coon leapt at Gare, but he seemed ephemeral, and the cat crashed into a pile of books behind him.\n\u0026ldquo;Jesus, Hughie, your cat is totally feral. What sort of way to live is this?\u0026rdquo;\nHughie was now mute, and he felt as though his feet were trapped in cement. Gare went on,\n\u0026ldquo;I am going to check that Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s okay. You stay put, and we\u0026rsquo;ll talk about how to look after her properly once we\u0026rsquo;re all sat down.\u0026rdquo;\nGare ceremoniously checked the rooms.\n\u0026ldquo;Not in here, either.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Oh, not here too?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Cordelia, wherever are you?\u0026rdquo;\nHughie\u0026rsquo;s arms felt weak, and a migraine began pounding behind his forehead. The Maine Coon followed Gare into each room, protesting his presence, trying to trip him up, but he treated the cat with irreverence.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, what\u0026rsquo;s this, Hughie? You\u0026rsquo;re looking at buying a house? And where\u0026rsquo;s Cordelia? You said she was in, but I see an urn.\u0026rdquo;\nGare\u0026rsquo;s voice turned sepulchral as he intoned,\n\u0026ldquo;In this urn are the remains of Cordelia Graham. She is no longer with us. She is dead, Hughie. You know she is dead. And you know that you are guilty. Your crime is called fraud on Earth, but to hell your soul is destined, for you are guilty of deathly lies, lies which use departed dear old Cordelia as a means to get rich. And for this, you must pay.\u0026rdquo;\nHughie stammered,\n\u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s, um, she is just in the other, well, we just need, ah, I haven\u0026rsquo;t done anything.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Then why, Hughie, are you looking at buying a bungalow? Why have you let this flat fester with decades\u0026rsquo; worth of trash while you buy yourself pedigree cats? Tell me, Hughie, if you can. But of course, you won\u0026rsquo;t. Because none of that makes sense. Your lies are plain to see. Of course, if the police were to find out, you\u0026rsquo;d be thrown straight in jail.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No, the cafe down the road will tell you she\u0026rsquo;s alive and well, we were there just this afternoon.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The cafe down the road? Hughie, the cafe down the road doesn\u0026rsquo;t know you\u0026rsquo;ve been hiring vulnerable old people as actors as part of your puppet show. On the other hand, a death certificate signed five years ago, an urn full of human remains labelled Cordelia, and stacks of receipts proving you tricked old ladies into thinking they were making a documentary called Our Unheard Story tell another tale entirely. Hughie, you can\u0026rsquo;t lie your way out of this.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Maine Coon hissed \u0026ldquo;lies\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;scum,\u0026rdquo; but Gare remained unfazed. The cat bared its teeth and went for his ankles, but Gare seemed to have no graspable body. The cat catapulted itself into a spindly table, toppling it, and a will fell at Gare\u0026rsquo;s feet. Gare stooped to retrieve it, rose to meet Hughie\u0026rsquo;s eyes with a catenary smile and piercing stare, and resumed his proclaiming.\n\u0026ldquo;This will says that I am Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s only heir. Hughie, of course, I want to help you out of this mess you\u0026rsquo;ve made. You were always such a nice boy who got carried away with a joke, a lie that got out of hand. I do want what\u0026rsquo;s best for you. I think I won\u0026rsquo;t mention any of this to the authorities. You can stay here for one final night. But tomorrow you\u0026rsquo;ll need to leave, and if you don\u0026rsquo;t, I may change my mind.\u0026rdquo;\nGare faded out of view, and when Hughie heard the door to the flat close, his migraine vanished and his wits restored themselves. He searched the house for Cordelia while the cat pawed at him, but it was hopeless. She was gone. He went to lie on his bed, and as he drifted between waking and sleep, he dreamt of teeth falling out and choking him, of people putting guns to his head, of Gare standing in the close telling him to die.\nRevelation The morning sun crept into the flat. Hughie felt relief to see the pale morning light, and the cat had curled up on his bed where the sunlight pooled warm and generous. Hughie began replaying the previous evening in his mind. Nothing seemed real, but when he returned to the scene of the crime, he found the will, the urn, the stacks of receipts. The cat crept into the room and meowed at him.\n\u0026ldquo;Yes, I\u0026rsquo;ll get you some water and food.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Meowww.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re a chatty one, aren\u0026rsquo;t you.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Meowww.\u0026rdquo;\nThe cat flicked its tail up and brushed against his legs. He felt a familiar bond between him and the cat. He decided to get some cat supplies. As he left the tenement, he saw a skip had been placed directly in front of the building. When he returned with a bag of cat food and litter, he felt all hope evaporate. The vanilla\u0026rsquo;d pages of a life\u0026rsquo;s work had been dumped into the skip, and he heard the gleeful cry of Gare.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah, glad to run into you, Hughie. Your clothes are over by the bins. I didn\u0026rsquo;t know if you wanted them, since they all looked horrible. You can hand me the keys now.\u0026rdquo;\nThe weather turned dreich. Hughie\u0026rsquo;s clothes were in a bin bag, which he emptied and started refilling with pages from the skip, desperately picking them out at random. The rain grew heavier, and soon the pages were becoming nothing more than pulp. Entropy was destroying all that Cordelia had worked on. Distraught and soaked, Hughie hurried off with the precious remnants of Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s insights to a bus shelter, and the cat followed him. He went to stay with his parents, and the cat came too.\nThe cat turned out to be a girl, so he called her Astrid. When Astrid stared at Hughie and meowed, it seemed to coincide with him recalling a detail of Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s theories. For the next five years, during the day he filled notepads with equations and pieced together an extraordinary theory of how the universe worked, and at night he made ends meet through zero-hour contracts.\nOn the night of Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s 103rd birthday, Hughie drank a cup of ceremonial tea in her memory with Astrid curled up on his lap.\nAstrid looked back at him, her eyes deep as space, and a vision stared into Hughie\u0026rsquo;s self. He took the notepad at his side, scribbled an unintelligible shape onto the page, and felt transcendental euphoria. Astrid jumped off his lap, and as he stood up, before him he saw the universe, unfettered by its usual three dimensions. Brilliant white starlight surrounded a pupil, and he reached out to touch it. Astrid leapt into the eye, and he felt the eye\u0026rsquo;s powerful gaze compelling him to follow. As his fingertip reached the centre of the blackness, he saw all of time and all of space simultaneously. Struan House, the flat in Glasgow, the wealth of old Earnest, his money-grabbing relatives. All were but mere specks in the cosmological tapestry, without and within him. The bliss of understanding took hold of Hughie, and he stepped into the eye.\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/dark-matter/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"life\"\u003eLife\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn what was formerly the drawing room of a grand Victorian tenement in the fashionable west end of Glasgow, utilitarian bookcases of the sort you\u0026rsquo;d find in a library with midcentury aspirations lined the walls. The shelves were packed with curious and cryptic tomes filled with mathematics that has largely been forgotten by most people since it was discovered in the late 17th century, and accompanying these were Cordelia Graham\u0026rsquo;s self-penned treatises on cosmology. The collection had long outgrown the shelves which Cordelia had bought forty years ago, and much of the floor was now underneath a Himalayan topography of books and papers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Dark Matter"},{"content":"We are walking between bowers of birch,\nA breath of air gently moves the branches\nAs it begins to rain, the trees release an organic perfume\nAnd we listen to the patter of droplets falling onto leaves\nWe are walking among the granny pine and hazel\nAs the trees becomes sodden, their leaves channel heavier drops\ninto moss that has grown as deep as our ankles\nWe step over tree trunks, we hear the soft crumpling of rotten wood under our feet\nWe are walking through the burn,\nWe told ourselves that the water is not too deep and our feet will stay dry.\nAs we stepped into the river, water filled our shoes,\nIt is a moment that I will remember forever.\nWe stand among the wind-blasted juniper forest.\nOn the plateau, together, we take refuge by an old stone shelter\nand we can hear wind and water all about us\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/a-rainy-walk-with-a-friend/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe are walking between bowers of birch,\u003cbr\u003e\nA breath of air gently moves the branches\u003cbr\u003e\nAs it begins to rain, the trees release an organic perfume\u003cbr\u003e\nAnd we listen to the patter of droplets falling onto leaves\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are walking among the granny pine and hazel\u003cbr\u003e\nAs the trees becomes sodden, their leaves channel heavier drops\u003cbr\u003e\ninto moss that has grown as deep as our ankles\u003cbr\u003e\nWe step over tree trunks, we hear the soft crumpling of rotten wood under our feet\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Rainy Walk with a Friend"},{"content":"Have you ever found yourself in the midst of a soiree, regaling the captive audience with one of your classic, spontaneous anecdotes only to find it\u0026rsquo;s as deflated as the tyres on an abandoned bicycle? Your audience is captive merely because they already like you, perhaps for your kind nature or punctuality; they are not engaged with your impotent narrative. Well, you are not alone. Believe it or not, I used to suffer from the damp anecdote on a regular basis, but with the following tips, I will take you from delivering dull monologues to keeping your peers on tenterhooks at the ebbs and flows of your Shakespearean soliloquy.\nAn anecdote is like a house. What your listeners expect is a front door, a living room, a bathroom, a kitchen and a bedroom. More bedrooms are good too, and it can be further elevated with a loft conversion in the mansard roof, a conservatory for use in the summer months, a boot room, and perhaps a drawing room for your posher friends, but it is key to sort out the unseen elements such as the foundations, joists, studs, and so on. I will assume you have a story that is built on bedrock and has a strong, square frame but lacks paint, plaster and ornamentation.\nIn this guide, I will illustrate my points with an example of an anecdote, and we will iterate upon it from under seasoned to delectable.\nI rode my bicycle through a puddle.\nMost listeners will instinctively notice something boring about this story, but the untrained ear will not be able to dissect and diagnose what ails this story. The story\u0026rsquo;s soul is full of vigour and vitality, though. Most people can relate to riding a bicycle, and at one time or another, they will have seen a puddle, so this story has the elemental properties associated with the effective anecdote.\n0. The basics. Speak from the diaphragm, stand erect with your shoulders pinned back, and never put your hands in your pockets. Doing these three things will make everything you say have a literal and metaphorical resonance. People do not want to talk to a timid mouse. You must appear and sound like a field marshal. If it helps, imagine you are the Duke of Wellington.\n1. Introduce an Element of Peril The British are predisposed to enjoying the misery of others. It\u0026rsquo;s an unfortunate national trait, but we can use it to our advantage. In our original anecdote, there are plenty of opportunities to insert misery. Consider the following additions to our anecdote.\nIt was raining. I rode my bicycle through a puddle. My shoes got soaked.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve created a misery sandwich composed of wet bread and our original story. However, you must be careful when adding misery since the following will backfire.\nIt was raining. I rode my bicycle through a puddle. I covered my elderly neighbour, Miriam McCandles, in dirty road water.\nDespite our love of the misery of others, we do not enjoy the glee of a villain. You will appear cruel. On the bright side, poor Miriam McCandles will have her own brilliant anecdote with you as the antagonist.\n2. The Meander The Meander sits beside the Amazon and the Yellow River at the river dinner party, having its own Greek god, being mentioned by Homer, and connecting many cities in Asia Minor to the Aegean Sea. Thus, I encourage you to make use of the rhetorical meander to enhance your anecdotes. The simple form of the meander is the fusion of all the elements of the story into one sentence. Advanced usage involves inserting a digression. Do not worry if the digression is not related to the central themes of your anecdote; they are there to give the listener\u0026rsquo;s mind\u0026rsquo;s eye more stimulation.\nIt was raining and I rode my road bicycle that I\u0026rsquo;d bought in 2016, so I\u0026rsquo;d say I\u0026rsquo;ve cycled it close to 5000 miles by now and once I took it on a ferry to the Isle of Wight to stay in a BnB in Newport, but the owner had no space for bicycles, and I rode it through a puddle and my shoes got soaked.\nThere is an art to the meander. I accentuated it with some misery by mentioning the owner of the BnB had no space for the bike.\n3. Insert an Exclamation An exclamation adds emotion to your prose. It is easy to use but can go wrong. For instance, when speaking to a vicar, you may use \u0026ldquo;Jesus wept\u0026rdquo; if you know them well enough, but you must never say one of the more potent phrases. If you are speaking to your pals at Sam Smith Pub, you will have no trouble if you stick to \u0026ldquo;blinking\u0026rdquo; and its clan. If you\u0026rsquo;re in private or a more rowdy establishment, you can make use of an expletive. \u0026ldquo;Oh my gosh\u0026rdquo; will work in all circumstances.\nBlimey, it was raining and I rode my racing bicycle that I\u0026rsquo;d bought in 2016, so I\u0026rsquo;d say I\u0026rsquo;ve cycled it close to 5000 miles by now and once I took it on a ferry to the Isle of Wight to stay in a BnB in Newport, but the owner had no space for bicycles, and I rode it through a puddle and oh my gosh my shoes got soaked.\n4. Filling the Gaps Throwaway words and phrases can do wonders for your speech. A bodybuilder doesn\u0026rsquo;t need the volume of muscles they have, but it impresses people to see them.\nBlimey, it was raining, rain like you\u0026rsquo;ve never seen, and I rode my racing bicycle that I\u0026rsquo;d bought, what in 2016 (?), so I\u0026rsquo;d say I\u0026rsquo;ve cycled it close to 5000 miles, that\u0026rsquo;d be 8000 kilometres, by now and actually once I took it on a ferry to the Isle of Wight to stay in a BnB in Newport, but the owner had no space for bicycles, and I just rode it through a puddle so I did and gosh, my shoes were very soaked.\n5. Add another person Another person can be added to the anecdote with the correct meander. People tend to love their families, so to make a story more emotional, I like to add at least one nephew.\nBlimey, it was raining, rain like you\u0026rsquo;ve never seen, and I rode my racing bicycle that I\u0026rsquo;d bought, what in 2016 (?), so I\u0026rsquo;d say I\u0026rsquo;ve cycled it close to 5000 miles, that\u0026rsquo;d be 8000 kilometres, by now and actually once I took it on a ferry to the Isle of Wight to cheer on my Nephew who was taking part in the 10k, and we stayed in a BnB in Newport, but the owner had no space for bicycles, and I just rode it through a puddle so I did and gosh, my shoes were very soaked.\n6. Ad-infinitum I promise you that you will be the centre of attention if you follow the principles laid out above. It is a blessing and a curse to be this charismatic; on the one hand, you\u0026rsquo;ll feel like the moon surrounded by moths, but on the other hand, the eyes of your onlookers can feel like the sun\u0026rsquo;s light is being focussed onto you through a lens.\nNaturally, your audience will want to hear more. To give them what you want, follow up the first anecdote with a second anecdote. You can choose from a variety of safe topics:\nAny dream, but your most recent dream will have the greatest effect. Your gym routine. Changing internet provider. Things you learnt at secondary school. How well prepared you were for the weather. Your most recent trip to the Imperial War Museum To seamlessly blend anecdotes, the following phrases can be employed:\nBut I digress. Well, you see the interesting thing is. Of course, it\u0026rsquo;s not quite as bad as when. 7. In case of Emergency You may be playing to a tough crowd, and your anecdotes may not be landing. In this circumstance, I permit you to invent a few fictional details. Of course, you should not lie as a psychopath might. Your goal is not to acquire money or end your friend\u0026rsquo;s long-term relationship. You are lying for the benefit of the crowd, to enhance their enjoyment of the evening. For example, you can insert some fabricated peril.\n\u0026hellip; and my shoes were soaked, they were six inches underwater, and as it was happening, a double-decker bus missed me by an inch.\nIt is a moral grey area to do this, but I am not here to be the arbiter of judgment. I am merely telling you how to delight guests at a party.\nClosing Remarks I\u0026rsquo;ve alluded to my historical affliction, but over the last fifteen years, I have honed my technique to become objectively one of the most talented tellers of an anecdote. It took graft, and there were many failed attempts. For example, I spent years deprogramming my urge to finish every anecdote with \u0026ldquo;Well, what\u0026rsquo;d you know?\u0026rdquo;. I am telling you this because I do not want you to have the impression that you will become an overnight sensation.\nHowever, if you make use of my fifteen years of discovery, your road to popularity will certainly have fewer bumps than mine did. I recommend you practice your anecdotes in front of the mirror for at least 5 minutes a day and introduce each element one at a time. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you may borrow my bicycle anecdote, but soon you will not need these training wheels, and your astute wit and charm will come across as effortlessly as the wind blows blossom from a tree.\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/elements-of-the-effective-anecdote/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHave you ever found yourself in the midst of a soiree, regaling the captive audience with one of your classic, spontaneous anecdotes only to find it\u0026rsquo;s as deflated as the tyres on an abandoned bicycle? Your audience is captive merely because they already like you, perhaps for your kind nature or punctuality; they are not engaged with your impotent narrative. Well, you are not alone. Believe it or not, I used to suffer from the damp anecdote on a regular basis, but with the following tips, I will take you from delivering dull monologues to keeping your peers on tenterhooks at the ebbs and flows of your Shakespearean soliloquy.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Arthur Roberts' Elements of the Effective Anecdote"},{"content":"The Astonishing Life\u0026rsquo;s Work of John Buchanan. My dear friend and mentor, the late John Buchanan, devoted his life to discovering and translating the lost languages and dialects of the mediæval inhabitants of this island. He held the esteemed position of Professor Emeritus and Chair of Philological Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and he had an unparalleled understanding of how to interpret arcane, ancient, and archaic texts. In the last three years of his life, unburdened by political or monetary motivations, he could devote himself to a project that he had begun in 1959 while completing his PhD. This research was of the utmost political and cultural significance, so much so that it could instigate a constitutional crisis and result in the collapse of the British Establishment. Therefore, John felt the project must be completed to the highest standard with no room for ambiguity, with rigour and forensic attention to detail, and with every nuance thoroughly explored. If this research were to enter the public\u0026rsquo;s consciousness, it would inevitably be a sensation in the press and be brought before the highest courts in the land.\nHowever, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and should any of his arguments fall down upon scrutiny, whether they be in good faith or otherwise, it would mean the destruction of his career as an academic. Being a working-class boy from the coal-blackened slums of Govanhill, John\u0026rsquo;s family was relying on him to pull them out of poverty with his lucrative and bright future. Given the profound consequences for himself and society, he kept it secret. John only revealed its existence, but not its extent or content, to me in the months before his passing. I have been given the honour of organising his research and extensive notes, and I will spend the next several years preparing his life\u0026rsquo;s work for publication. Contrary to John\u0026rsquo;s conservative approach, I am eager to share with you what he discovered. I am astounded by the gravity of the document at the centre of his incredible magnum opus. John found this text in the sale of a library belonging to Malcolm Farquharson, a wealthy Victorian collector of Scottish documents. John was intrigued by its unusual dialect of Old Gaelic that had yet to be translated, but upon deciphering it, he realised he had encountered a declaration so profound that it could shape a nation. It is plain from the words that John has translated that the essential idea of Britain, and indeed, Scotland, is built like a house of cards. We have come a long way since 1959, and I think as a people we are ready to step into a new age of enlightenment. From his translation, the truth is as clear as the ink on this page is black, so I will reproduce his groundbreaking work verbatim.\nThe Declaration of Ballachulish Enforquentious, we the lords and lairds over all the Glens, reclencerait and unending bramour, and Strathdee the Just, and the Lord of Glen Affric, and the pious Laird Machar of the Isles and Kyles in the Westerness, and Magnus of Manx, by convexicalation and extemputation, redarclarents of mighteness, and the holy Knights of the Order of St Luke, truth and truwardness, and the reverend Brothers of the ecclesiastical Order of St Jude, pronounically, and all the children of the Gael, bereclify the emproclimated bestowal of the right to wear the Caledonic Crown upon the brows of a Royal house, by the blood of the womb, the blood of battle and by the blood of Christ, the wise, just and fair, the garter of St Stephen, uptemstuemous majesty; aftermore, and upon these braes, Strathmarr, wherein his holiness, Supreme Pontiff and Vicar of Christ, Patriarch of Rome, apostolic successor to Saint Peter, Gregorvis Septimus of the Holy See has bestowed us with this right, and as God has directed that the House of MacLachan, forinuationally and profound, recognised by all of Christendom, is appointed henceforth now and forever until the day of reckoning whence the world is rent, as serene and to whom we are vassels, hencetoforwidth has been declareated as the one Druoich of this land in perpetuity and pretensiquentiality; Aformore, the land, and the lochs, it\u0026rsquo;s people and it\u0026rsquo;s yieldings will be carintorated and mattermidst by Lachlan MacLachan of Clan Lachlan, heroic and virtuous, and his progeny for the rest of time, the detensiclature, from hayclerinenity whence signed by this hand and hands, until the end of eternity, this land, and the depths below and heavens above, and its the righteous rights will be truthfully harnessed in the eyes of the Lord God Almighty, as witnessed by us the witgenmoot who are most ennobled, who in his just wisdom has made this appointment.\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/the-findings-of-john-buchanan/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"the-astonishing-lifes-work-of-john-buchanan\"\u003eThe Astonishing Life\u0026rsquo;s Work of John Buchanan.\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy dear friend and mentor, the late John Buchanan, devoted his life to discovering and translating the lost languages and dialects of the mediæval inhabitants of this island. He held the esteemed position of Professor Emeritus and Chair of Philological Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and he had an unparalleled understanding of how to interpret arcane, ancient, and archaic texts. In the last three years of his life, unburdened by political or monetary motivations, he could devote himself to a project that he had begun in 1959 while completing his PhD. \u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Findings of John Buchanan"},{"content":"February \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m interested in Marxist Impressionism, mostly.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What do you mean, Marxist Impressionism?\u0026rdquo;\nIt was becoming clear to the rest of gathering that Drummond had no idea what he was on about, but he\u0026rsquo;d got swept up trying to impress the gathering that he was inventing his opinions on the spot. Drummond was self-proclaimed radical and polymath, not realising that polymath isn\u0026rsquo;t someone with a good enough grasp the on contents of Stroud\u0026rsquo;s Calculus for Engineers to pass their degree nor someone who watches a few Youtube videos a week with titles like \u0026ldquo;Visualising the Fourier Transform\u0026rdquo;. Drummond\u0026rsquo;s radicalness was exemplified by his authoring of an impressive number of communist memes on Reddit. By doing this, he had become familiar with a decent amount of left-wing jargon. Drummond believed that because he understood how serious things, like concrete, worked, he should be able to do a good enough job at bullshitting his way through a conversation about a style of art he\u0026rsquo;d just made up mere moments ago.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, I mean art where the focus is on the worker\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nInspiration struck.\n\u0026ldquo;and the means of production is the message. Anything where the lumpenproletariat can be shown that they have the means of production and how they are being are exploited for them. The means of production is the message, comrades.\u0026rdquo;\nDrummond thought he\u0026rsquo;d nailed that. He\u0026rsquo;d really turned that quotation into something of his own. Of course, he wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to follow it up with any substance since he had no idea what he was on about, but that didn\u0026rsquo;t matter since it\u0026rsquo;d engaged most of the communists now that left-wing theory was being discussed instead of art. People didn\u0026rsquo;t care that Drummond was full of shit. It gave them a pass to try their hand at being card carrying members of the intelligentsia, and none of them felt like they were on solid ground with art. It just came up because one of the comrades was trying to better themselves by reading \u0026ldquo;the story of Art\u0026rdquo;, a book they thought was about art but was really about art history. Now they were back in comfortable conversation territory - discussing the plight of the proletariat.\nAmong the comrades, there were recently graduates who\u0026rsquo;d decided to take a few months off while they were figuring out how to live and a few people who needed to have a job, so they were doing shift work on zero hour contracts. None of the comrades could countenance a graduate scheme for a consultancy, go work in finance, join a Big Tech firm, drill for oil or build weapons. But they were keen to seize the means of production from their feudal masters despite the fact that none of them had ever produced something that anyone had found useful. The group\u0026rsquo;s most recent activism was a sit-in at the University of Glasgow, and vice-chancellor, the executives at Shell, the government and the Monarchy all had a hard look at themselves and decided to make the world fairer.\nMaxwell ignite some red hatred in the group\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah well, the fucking fascists that run the Burrell Collection are never going to put something that\u0026rsquo;d further the cause, comrade. The decadent bastards have spend £11 million doing it up instead of repatriating all those vases. If I ran this country, that place would be turned into gravel\u0026rdquo;\nMaxwell was a rowdy drunk in his own way. When he was among laddish men, he was reserved and didn\u0026rsquo;t like to offer up his thoughts, but among his friends, he said what was on his mind without much of a filter, and that\u0026rsquo;s why his friends gravitated toward him. When he\u0026rsquo;d had a few, he\u0026rsquo;d start suggesting things like\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; and fuck Eton, that place ought to be turned into gravel\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; and fuck Oxford and the bastards that place turns out, we should turn it all into gravel\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip; and fuck parliament. The place is full of posh cunts and we\u0026rsquo;d be better off turning that fucking building into gravel.\u0026rdquo;\nAt some point, Maxwell had amused himself with the concept of these old stone buildings into a material reserved for fire roads through forests and posh driveways, and now reiterated this joke despite it never landing the way he\u0026rsquo;d hoped. Drummond and Maxwell started scheming to bring down the Burrell Collection, as for too long it had a strangle hold on the culture of Glasgow. In their new order, there\u0026rsquo;d be no room for an establishment as decadent and Fascist as the Burrell Collection.\nApparently this gathering was a party. Most of the people there referred to their mates as comrades, much to the discomfort for the tangents of the group who\u0026rsquo;d only come because they didn\u0026rsquo;t know what they were agreeing to. The room had a cheap, naked, laminate floor from about 20 years ago and was furnished with a fridge and a sofa that faced a TV-less TV console. The walls were covered in a lavender and white flower pattern and there was no music. This accentuated the awkward interactions between communists and the tangents\n\u0026ldquo;Comrades!\u0026rdquo;\nRuaridh clattered into the front room. He carried himself as if he was the captain of a ship, and he was keen to direct the conversation when he entered a room.\n\u0026ldquo;So I heard there was a hot tub? Maxwell, who the fuck buys a hot tub around here.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I know, it just came with the place. The neighbours told me this used to be a swinger\u0026rsquo;s house.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Thats fucking lovely. This place is a real shit hole Maxwell, why\u0026rsquo;d you even move here. All the pubs had bars over the windows and I saw a guy on the bus eating a manky McDonalds out of his pockets.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I saw a guy piss himself on it once. My Grandad died and left me a bit of money, and I thought a place with a hot tub would be living the life, but it turns out sitting in a hot tub by yourself is shite.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Turns out you say? No shit pal, it\u0026rsquo;s the same as having a bath but it\u0026rsquo;s on your patio.\u0026rdquo;\nRuaridh felt like communist. He\u0026rsquo;d read the manifesto and despised the land-owning elite. He would never forgive the English for Glencoe. Oh fie, MacKay, what gart ye lie! Born in Edinburgh to parents who he\u0026rsquo;d described as \u0026ldquo;working in media\u0026rdquo;, he\u0026rsquo;d attended a public school that in his words \u0026ldquo;was full of posh cunts\u0026rdquo;. He\u0026rsquo;d think less of people if they weren\u0026rsquo;t interested in something like obscure Requiems, Renoirs and Rembrandts, or Religious Schisms. A cynic would have thought he was just another posh twat having a go at being poor while it suited him, but an optimist would have noticed that at least he wasn\u0026rsquo;t donating money to the opera.\n\u0026ldquo;Your street, man. Pebbledash makes an area look depressing. I\u0026rsquo;d much rather live in one of the tenements.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If you have money, those places are alright. My one was a draughty and damp\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah but at least those houses are affordable\u0026rdquo; Drummond replied. He was trying to impress Ruaridh with his a astute sensitivity to the plight of the working family. He was disappointed that Ruaridh had missed that thing he\u0026rsquo;d said about Maxist art, and he\u0026rsquo;d spend the rest of the evening hoping it\u0026rsquo;d come up naturally again. Colin, a tangent, had, unlike the interlocutors, grown up in a scheme so felt he could join in with this\n\u0026ldquo;Nah mate, trust me living there is shit. My wee upstairs neighbour used to call me a cunt and the alcoholic next door was a proper mess.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well, its better than the affordable housing they\u0026rsquo;ve been approving recently. Did you see the plan they have for Hamilton hill? Who the fuck is going to be able to afford those flats?\u0026rdquo; said Maxwell.\n\u0026ldquo;you know, Since covid, a bunch of Londoners bought the flats around my bit. Gentrification is ruining Glasgow. I used to be able to buy a coffee and a croissant from this cafe near my flat for pretty much nothing, but now its like £5 to do that.\u0026rdquo; Drummond responded. Drummond was talking about Govanhill, which had been slums until 1960.\nThe atmosphere in the gathering had turned into millennial anger. They were all pissed off they couldn\u0026rsquo;t afford to settle down anywhere. Being in this cold, slightly damp flat in a scheme in Maryhill had made the middle class comrades resent their parent\u0026rsquo;s generation for owning so much. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t fair that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t live on a quiet leafy street within eyesight of a botanical garden or an independent music venue. Maryhill was a thirty minute walk from those things. Their expectations that they\u0026rsquo;d just end up living somewhere pleasant and be able to work on instantiating a communist state three days a week had begun to seem unrealistic after university had finished and their parents mentioned to them that a grad scheme at Deloitte might be a good idea. Ruiridh was making a difference though,\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve been making mirco-documentaries about poverty in Glasgow. One got over 10,000 views.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;How\u0026rsquo;d you get into doing that\u0026rdquo; asked Colin.\n\u0026ldquo;I got into it when I was 16. I went on a trip with my mum to Indonesia to interview fishermen about plastic. I\u0026rsquo;ve been building my portfolio while helping the comrades with their social media. It\u0026rsquo;s a powerful medium, film. People can read the same news story for 10 years, but when they hear a story told through film, the drama of it must speak to their right brain.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Sure, yeah I know what you mean Pal. Normally I rely on drinking six pints to get my right brain going.\u0026rdquo; replied Colin. He was enjoying how oblivious Ruiridh had revealed slightly more about his parent\u0026rsquo;s mysterious jobs in media. He\u0026rsquo;d met people like this before. They\u0026rsquo;d go on sunny holidays during the break between semesters at university while he worked gig shifts. He\u0026rsquo;d gone to university to study chemical engineering, and was pretty keen on being one of the first people in his family to benefit from capitalism. He\u0026rsquo;d recently got an Audi on finance.\nMaxwell, Drummond and Ruridh got in the hot-tub. Ideas were abubbling abound. Which statue were they going to deface next? James Watt, the inventor of the means of production which they wished the seize, was a prime candidate.\n\u0026ldquo;James Watt is a proper cunt\u0026rdquo;, declared Maxwell, \u0026ldquo;All our troubles basically started when some prick decided to connect steam up to wheels\u0026rdquo;. Drummond, being the worldly polymath he was, secretly admired Watt\u0026rsquo;s genius, but he felt Maxwell had a good point.\nMaxwell continued, \u0026ldquo;And look what we did with it. Colonised half the planet, wrecked the environment and invented mass-produced war. And the cunt is just sat on a fucking chair in George Square as if all of that was totally wasn\u0026rsquo;t a fucking crime against humanity.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I reckon George square is pretty well covered by the polis\u0026rdquo; remarked Drummond, trying to affect a type of glaswegian which didn\u0026rsquo;t come to him easily so that he could impress his comrades. \u0026ldquo;I reckon that Burrell collection idea we had earlier would work though. We could, like, mess it right up?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What like, set it on fire or something?\u0026rdquo; Ruiridh ruminated.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean we could. We could also throw some paint all over it?\u0026rdquo; replied Drummond.\nMaxwell saw his chance \u0026ldquo;Who the fuck are you, Just Stop Oil?\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah mate, I got some pretty original thoughts, you know me.\u0026rdquo; Drummond could laugh at himself, which is why the commrades didn\u0026rsquo;t mind when he started being pretentious.\nMaxwell continued, not paying attention to anything apart from his own voice, Nah we could turn the Burrell Collection into a pile of gravel\u0026rdquo;, but yet again nobody seemed to listen.\nRuiridh spoke \u0026ldquo;aye, so you do Pal. No we need something really powerful. Like irreversible. Sort of like a face tattoo. Do either of you want some of my Prosecco? This hot tub is toasty.\u0026rdquo;\nDrummond replied \u0026ldquo;Yeah, a glass would be well nice. The fire idea is alright, but it\u0026rsquo;s kind of dangerous. We could break in and just push over some of the exhibits?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;d show those fascist pigs. Yeah, if all their ill-gotten gains were pushed over, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure we could instigate the uprising\u0026rdquo; scoffed Maxwell. He then caught a glimpse of how much of dick he was being in Drummond\u0026rsquo;s reply.\n\u0026ldquo;Alright mate, I\u0026rsquo;m just coming up with other ideas. No bad ideas and that\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I guess its not a completely shite idea. We could cancel the director?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, but they\u0026rsquo;re pretty fucking dull. I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s much to say about them other than they are the head of a neo-fascist colonial institution.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re making it sound like they\u0026rsquo;re the fucking Ku Klux Klan. What the fuck are you on about.\u0026rdquo;\nThe group started laughing, and the hot-tub finally degenerated into something resembling people enjoying themselves.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean, they\u0026rsquo;re pretty shitty. Probably not as shitty as the KKK, but they\u0026rsquo;re an institution that is central to the power structure in our society. Its exists to certify that there is a type of culture, a zeitgeist, that is legitimate, and if you\u0026rsquo;re outside of this, then you are wrong. You think wrong, you speak wrong, you see wrong. I think tearing this building down will be the start of the revolution. I\u0026rsquo;m serious. All it\u0026rsquo;d take is some power tools and we could fuck that place up beyond belief.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Alright, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve got a pretty idea. Get some power tools, fuck up the stuff in the collection, and if we can, try and burn the fucker down. Who\u0026rsquo;s committing?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m down\u0026rdquo;.\n\u0026ldquo;Aye, me too\u0026rdquo;.\n\u0026ldquo;The presidium has come to a unanimous decision. Comrades, good, we\u0026rsquo;ll get to it proper planning tomorrow\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/the-communist-party/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"february\"\u003eFebruary\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m interested in Marxist Impressionism, mostly.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026ldquo;What do you mean, Marxist Impressionism?\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was becoming clear to the rest of gathering that Drummond had no idea what he was on about, but he\u0026rsquo;d got swept up trying to impress the gathering that he was inventing his opinions on the spot. Drummond was self-proclaimed radical and polymath, not realising that polymath isn\u0026rsquo;t someone with a good enough grasp the on contents of Stroud\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eCalculus for Engineers\u003c/em\u003e to pass their degree nor someone who watches a few Youtube videos a week with titles like \u0026ldquo;Visualising the Fourier Transform\u0026rdquo;. Drummond\u0026rsquo;s radicalness was exemplified by his authoring of an impressive number of communist memes on Reddit. By doing this, he had become familiar with a decent amount of left-wing jargon. Drummond believed that because he understood how serious things, like concrete, worked, he should be able to do a good enough job at bullshitting his way through a conversation about a style of art he\u0026rsquo;d just made up mere moments ago.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Communist Party"},{"content":"There are loads of ways of making websites and not all of them suit the problem or the person making the website. This post summarises my experience as someone who knew nothing about web development to someone who has a website. I hope readers can take away some ideas if they\u0026rsquo;re wanting to make a website.\nFirst impressions matter. Before the end of 2023, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t done any web development, but I had a general idea of how to put together an application from my experience with developing an Android app. The main gaps in my knowledge lie around Javascript frameworks. I wanted to know why React had become the de facto standard, apparently, for developing user interfaces.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;d never done any web development before, I haven\u0026rsquo;t got holdovers from before the proliferation of javascript frameworks such as React. I\u0026rsquo;ve never known anything apart from what is currently in vogue in the web development world. This affects my perception of how good certain tools are vs others since I haven\u0026rsquo;t fallen in love with and had my heart broken by any of these technologies yet. You could say my point of view is naïve, but I like to think of my view as fresh and objective.\nI had no preconception of what should be easy and what things are complex. I later learned that managing the state of the application is essentially where the complexity lies within a project such as a website. Maybe something I should have guessed since out of each of the letters in REST, the S is the only abstract one which is therefore the only one you can mess up. RE is a verb, i.e. you need to write some JSON or HTML, and the T is also pretty much handled for you. You just need to work out what \u0026lsquo;state\u0026rsquo; you are sending between your server and client. That\u0026rsquo;s not obvious when any API that sends JSON seems to be referred to as a REST API. This may sound like philosophical pondering, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to have a broad view of a topic.\nThe project I had in mind was a personal website. Its requirements were to look nice, be easy for me to add documents with some formatting and pictures, be easy to deploy and be easy to maintain. If the ends justify the means, the best way to do this project would be to set up a WordPress blog, but I was primarily interested in learning some new skills.\nThis is a pretty simple project, but it would allow me to explore all of the fundamental components that websites are built with. I\u0026rsquo;d need to figure out how to set up a database and an API that lets me interface with it, how to make a user interface, and how to deploy it on my own hardware.\nThis website is my first impression of the world of web development. It took two goes to make it, or two and a half depending on how you count. My general feeling from this experiment is the go-to standard way of making front-ends, i.e. React or other heavy javascript frameworks, would have added needless complexity, and a good alternative to these frontend frameworks is combining server-side rendering with HTMX. This lets you keep the intelligence of a website in the backend and you can pick whatever language you like to render the webpage.\nThe first go I needed to choose some technologies that let me write blog posts and let other people look at them. I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be writing HTML documents to create a new post, so I thought it would be good if the website had a rich text editor which I could use to create documents.\nI went for the following technologies:\nI wanted to use Rust to make the backend. I wanted to learn more Rust since I liked it\u0026rsquo;s safety features and the Rocket framework looked pretty neat. I wanted to use React for the front-end. I liked the sound of making components and the examples I\u0026rsquo;d seen on YouTube made it look pretty easy to get basic stuff working. I wanted to use Matertial UI to do all the styling. What I wanted was something that generated a nice set of shapes, colours, and various standard components that all websites have. I\u0026rsquo;d had good experience making the Android app, and that used Material UI, so I didn\u0026rsquo;t think there was any better way to go. Later on in the project, I found myself to more than happy to scrap all my Material UI code. I decided to use MySQL for the database. I knew I had a pretty simple data persistence requirement, so this seemed like a good choice. To talk to this database, I used SQLx with Rust. I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to obfuscate the SQL queries behind an ORM since I wanted to brush up on my SLQ skills. I got pretty far with this prototype. In a month or so, I had implemented most of a rich text editor with Lexical, and I was able to write documents which had pictures and a variety of fonts. I had set up the backend with a JWT log-in flow so that as an admin, I could open the text editor, save the new post, and publish it. The post would appear in a grid of other posts. The website had some ok-but-a-bit-developery-looking components, and overall the website felt reactive and modern.\nAbout 80% of the work seemed to be done. However, despite the first 80% going relatively well, the remaining parts were becoming increasingly hard and less fun to work on. Our sage colleagues will tell us that despite finishing 80% of the work, there is still another 80% to go. I had some growing discomforts about the project, and it was time to confront them.\nThe rich text editor I had made serialised and deserialised documents into nodes which were in a non-standard format. The serialised version of it wasn\u0026rsquo;t pleasant to read, so the only way that I could view these documents was in the React component I\u0026rsquo;d built to show them. It\u0026rsquo;s not hard to imagine the world moving on from these technologies, and I think, most humbly, the value of my website would be various bits of writing I\u0026rsquo;d upload to it. Losing the writing would be a shame. I can imagine one day not wanting to support a website and getting a selection of my writing bound in a book. For instance, I\u0026rsquo;m sure my descendants will be thrilled to read musings on web technologies from the 2020s. I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to get locked into a technology and format which nobody would understand in the years to come.\nFurthermore, while it was a bit of fun to learn how a rich text editor works, the one I made wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to be as polished as a more mature project, so writing wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be as pleasant an experience as it could be. I primarily wanted an easy way to create documents, and a rich text editor lets you do that. But less is more. I felt like I wanted something more basic because there would be less stuff to get in the way of writing.\nI decided to scrap the rich text editor. Instead, one option would have been to write everything in HTML, but I felt like seeing tags all over the place would be distracting. The alternative, I felt, was markdown. I enjoyed the simplicity of writing markdown, and it is easy to read in the source file as well as in a dedicated viewer. It is ubiquitous and has been around for ages. I settled on the idea of making the server ingest markdown documents and produce HTML from them which could be displayed to the visitors of the website. With this new process of creating documents, the project became simpler. I just needed to make a HTML form with which I could upload a document, associated images, and metadata.\nOnce I got around to getting the server-generated pages into the client, I found myself writing this:\n\u0026lt;div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={html} /\u0026gt; That looks a bit sketchy. I hadn\u0026rsquo;t spent much time thinking about what it meant to render a webpage until this point in the project. The change from the rich text editor to the server processing markdown was a significant pivot in how data flows through an application. Now, the server would do the work of turning a document into HTML rather than the client. When I created this div, I didn\u0026rsquo;t appreciate that I had fundamentally shifted how data flows through the application, and this meant that some of my design choices were no longer fitting the problem. The page gets rendered in two places with that div. Most of the website is rendered in the client by the React code, but the article is HTML which the server rendered and sent to the client. That just seems wrong.\nOn a slightly random-seeming tangent, I wanted to use an HTTP PUT in a \u0026lt;form\u0026gt; submit button, but for some reason, this isn\u0026rsquo;t possible without implementing a workaround in the front end or changing the back end. This seems like an obvious deficiency in HTML.\nI chose React for, basically, no reason. I just thought it was the way you make websites. But what is React for? It is for managing the state of the application in the client and rendering it there. This makes sense for certain user interfaces that are highly interactive, but it is complete overkill for a website that is essentially showing static text to the user.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t like that the website looked like a \u0026ldquo;Material UI\u0026rdquo; website. I began customising some parts of it, but when I used it with the Android app, it let me make something that looked like native software. Along with a few other minor gripes, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t generate a set of harmonious colours without zero effort, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to use Material UI. I felt like I was about to start fighting with the framework, and that\u0026rsquo;s a good sign that you\u0026rsquo;re doing something wrong. The fundamental problem I had with Material UI was I couldn\u0026rsquo;t get it to give my website my own personal flair.\nWith these things in mind, it was time to try another approach which would deal with the flow of data through the application properly.\nThe second go. HTMX is an interesting project which lets you do web development without needing to write much javascript. I\u0026rsquo;d basically had enough of writing React. HTMX solved the weird half-server half-client rendering of a simple webpage. It removed a huge stack of Javascript dependencies and this allayed my worry of Javascript packages becoming deprecated and becoming incompatible with future changes I\u0026rsquo;d want to make. It also made it possible to use an HTTP PUT in my form without any hackery. Basically, it gave my HTML superpowers.\nHTMX is a fairly simple dependency. Not simple in the sense that it was easy for the authors to make; it is simple in the sense that as a user, I can get it to do what I want without much hassle. It\u0026rsquo;s about 4000 lines of self-contained Javascript that doesn\u0026rsquo;t rely on outside javascript packages. You don\u0026rsquo;t need to include a build phase to \u0026ldquo;compile\u0026rdquo; your front end, and that simplifies the deployment of the frontend code since you don\u0026rsquo;t need to rely on a build tool being configured correctly. You just stick a \u0026lt;script\u0026gt; in your webpage and you\u0026rsquo;re good to go.\nI used Tera in Rust to render the website\u0026rsquo;s HTML. This still had the modular feel of the components which I liked from React, but it was nice to be writing Rust and HTML instead of javascript. I can see though that this will still be hard to manage as a project grows, and I found myself unsure where one template should start and where one should end. It\u0026rsquo;s probably something that becomes easier to get a sense of as you gain experience using them.\nI was happy to replace the Material UI. Besides being incompatible with the other parts of my technology stack, using Material UI makes you miss out on some pretty basic parts of CSS which are handy to know about. After trying to write my own extensive CSS classes for about one day, I decided that I\u0026rsquo;d give Tailwind a chance. While Tailwind does require you to build some CSS classes from your HTML pages, the tools for Tailwind were easy to set up and use and they even offer it as a standalone CLI tool, so I was happy to include Tailwind in the project.\nMy knee-jerk reaction to Tailwind was it was overly verbose and made HTML look like a mess, but as I got used to it, I grew to enjoy using it. It solves one of the hardest problems in programming - naming things. You are saved from writing hundreds of utility classes and instead, you can focus on putting Tailwind\u0026rsquo;s classes together to get your page looking just the way you want.\nTailwind doesn\u0026rsquo;t force a style on you, which can be a good or bad thing. If you like designing stuff and are good at it, this makes it easier to create what you want. If you have no interest in designing a page and are bad at making creative choices, this slows you down. I personally enjoyed choosing colours, fonts, shapes and spacing, so I was happy to tinker with Tailwind.\nI could write HTML which did what I wanted to the backend, I could easily personalise the website, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t have to manage much javascript. I was very happy with the combination of HTMX and Tailwind, and I\u0026rsquo;d recommend trying them out. The Rust backend was fun to make, and the Rocket framework is easy to use.\nDeployment So, I\u0026rsquo;ve done all the hard things? Well, creating a solid deployment flow is worth doing, and I found docker-compose to be ideal for this. I can quite happily spin up the server and the database with one command. Combine that with a decent readme, and I am able to develop and deploy the server without having IT issues.\nThe next problem to solve is how do I get this on the internet. I could rent a computer for a website that practically nobody will look at, but why should I do that? I have a spare PC with 500GB of free space and 8GB of RAM. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit old, and the screen is slightly damaged because it has the worst build quality ever. I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it for anything in years. In other words, it is perfect for being used to host my projects, so I put a new version of Linux on it, connected it up to my router in my house and deployed my code there. Great, that kind of hardware would cost me a few quid a month to rent.\nI then set up NGINX to reverse proxy my website. It provided the SSL certificate, as well. I thought this would be great and that it would be feasible to host as many random projects on this computer and NGINX could handle all of them quite nicely.\nBut this only works on my home network. What about all the other computers in the world? Well, for that, I needed to acquire a static IP, and as far as I\u0026rsquo;m aware there\u0026rsquo;s no basically-free way of doing this. So I had to set up my router to talk to a DDNS service. I did manage to host it for no monthly payments in the end, but if I want to use HTTPS and have a better domain name, I\u0026rsquo;d have to fork out the price of a coffee every month, and that is completely unacceptable.\nClosing Thoughts The hardest part of this project was choosing the right technologies for me. But the other hardest part was making a decent backend, and I was happy with my choice of Rust and Rocket. If I wanted to learn more about Rust, I would go through the effort of writing my own web server to get an appreciation of how much these frameworks do for you. I am also keen to try out Go since it has a templating library that comes with the language.\nI would stick with HTMX for my next web dev adventure. It is the easiest way I\u0026rsquo;ve experienced to create a frontend which covers all the types of interactions that I wanted to make. I now know why people rile against React, but I think it will solve certain problems which HTMX doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve as well - I don\u0026rsquo;t know what problems these are yet, but they\u0026rsquo;re probably to do with low latency user interaction or to reduce server-side CPU load.\nTailwind was great fun to use, and I\u0026rsquo;d never want to use Material UI again. People moan about Bootstrap, but I think if I wanted to quickly make a prototype of a website, it might be a good option. It can be used without any extra javascript written by me, and that is appealing.\nDeploying the website onto the internet was a bit tedious and it felt kind of like doing admin. It didn\u0026rsquo;t seem well explained anywhere, and my expectations of what was possible were too high. It took several evenings of research to get this working properly. The world seems to be geared towards paying someone else to host your project, which does make sense if you have reliability requirements since it\u0026rsquo;s fairly likely that I will disconnect my router by accident while I\u0026rsquo;m hoovering my flat. Digital Ocean offers a simple and decent hosting platform known as \u0026ldquo;Droplets\u0026rdquo;, and that is a good alternative if you\u0026rsquo;re willing to pay a small monthly fee.\nI consider this project to be a success. I got what I wanted: I learned how frontends and backends can work together, I learned a bit about React, I learned how to use templating to create web pages, some of the technology involved in running a website, and I got a website that I can ramble on out of it.\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/my-first-website/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThere are loads of ways of making websites and not all of them suit the problem or the person making the website. This post summarises my experience as someone who knew nothing about web development to someone who has a website. I hope readers can take away some ideas if they\u0026rsquo;re wanting to make a website.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst impressions matter. Before the end of 2023, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t done any web development, but I had a general idea of how to put together an application from my experience with developing an Android app. The main gaps in my knowledge lie around Javascript frameworks. I wanted to know why \u003ccode\u003eReact\u003c/code\u003e had become the \u003cem\u003ede facto\u003c/em\u003e standard, apparently, for developing user interfaces.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"My First Impression of Web Development"},{"content":"Nobody asks you write to anything and it is probably because nobody cares what you think.\nThat was hyperbolic and cynical. Of course, some people care what you think but they don\u0026rsquo;t require you to express it to them in one thousand spell-checked words. So, why would anyone who is not paid to write bother doing it?\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t have a desire to write until I was midway through my PhD thesis. I\u0026rsquo;m embarrassed to mention that I did a PhD as I think it makes me (one?) seem pretentious, but it is relevant to mention my degree here since it is the only time I\u0026rsquo;ve had to write a book. When I set out to write my thesis, I saw writing up as a means to an end, but as I was working through it, I found that I was enjoying the process of writing. Putting your thoughts into a coherent order is satisfying because it replaces a vague sense of how things are with some clarity. By the time I had finished writing up, I genuinely cared about what made a piece of writing well-formed. I felt, though, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to write in the way I wanted; instead, I had to write in a formal, neutral voice and there wasn\u0026rsquo;t space for personal flair or meandering thoughts. So while I had enjoyed writing with the goal of precision and clarity, I felt that the process of writing up had ultimately taught me some mechanical tricks about writing and editing.\nI finished writing up in 2021 and I didn\u0026rsquo;t feel like I had the time to write again until the end of 2023. Writing as an adult is different to writing as a child. In school, you are made to write essays about things which are not near and dear to you, and you can\u0026rsquo;t imagine why anyone would want to read, let alone write, them. Indeed, nobody wants to read the essays written by children unless they\u0026rsquo;re paid to. Now, I get to write about what I want and explore ideas however I please. If I wanted, I could write a bunch of recipes as haikus and I don\u0026rsquo;t have to worry if what comes out is half-baked. Since I\u0026rsquo;m not trying to make any money from writing, I can quite happily write polemical essays on the overuse of brackets without worrying that almost nobody would want to read about the overuse of brackets. Being able to express yourself is freeing, and I suppose that is one reason why I want to write.\nWriters are egotists. To some extent, I want to write because I want to look clever. George Orwell said so, and let\u0026rsquo;s face it, if you go through the effort of writing, you probably want other people to think you\u0026rsquo;re a bit clever. By mentioning George Orwell, I\u0026rsquo;ve attempted to look clever. When I read something that inspires me, I want to emulate it in some way. For example, you may have noticed that I nicked George\u0026rsquo;s idea to write an essay titled Why I Write. When I read a great piece of writing, it makes me want to write something. In the same way as watching Tony Hawk do a 900 and going \u0026ldquo;Yeah, I reckon I can do that\u0026rdquo;, reading something great and trying to do it yourself requires a bit of ego.\nA writer\u0026rsquo;s worldview leaks into their writing, and maybe you will be able to detect my political beliefs despite me not writing Joe\u0026rsquo;s Manifesto: Solutions to the Problems in the World. However, to avoid any confusion, I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth being clear and candid here. I live life on easy mode as a fit and healthy, straight white cisgender middle-class man in the UK. That\u0026rsquo;s not to say that people with privilege can\u0026rsquo;t experience suffering. What I am saying is specific to me. The day-to-day stresses I face are trivial and normally self-inflicted by my disorganisation rather than systemically entrenched into society. In short, I want it to be as easy for a trans person to live as it is for me. I think that someone else telling you how it feels to live your own life is at best frustrating and at worse some kind of erasure. However, never mentioning serious problems is also a flawed mode of operation. So, I will try to balance things between tacit approval and mansplaining society\u0026rsquo;s problems.\nOriginally, I thought I would write tech blogs. I heard they were running out of people to do this and that\u0026rsquo;s why they\u0026rsquo;d invented ChatGPT. But then I read Come Dine With Me by GDPL. I\u0026rsquo;d never read a short story like it before and thought it was so great that I might give writing short stories a go. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan and Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson were among some of my favourite books I\u0026rsquo;ve read in the past couple of years. I enjoyed the menacing and supernatural elements of these short stories, and I admire these authors for being able to tell a compelling story with brilliant characters in such few words. Unlike writing a novel, I can see myself being able to finish writing a short story. If it goes terribly, I can always stick to writing down cold hard facts and technical articles, I guess.\nThis entire piece has been a little self-indulgent, but now you know what some of my motivations are, and isn\u0026rsquo;t that nice? I think my motives are relatively mundane. Despite it being unlikely that anyone cares what I think, I want to write since I think it\u0026rsquo;s fun.\n","permalink":"https://writing-6d6.pages.dev/posts/why-i-write/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eNobody asks you write to anything and it is probably because nobody cares what you think.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat was hyperbolic and cynical. Of course, some people care what you think but they don\u0026rsquo;t require you to express it to them in one thousand spell-checked words. So, why would anyone who is not paid to write bother doing it?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI didn\u0026rsquo;t have a desire to write until I was midway through my PhD thesis. I\u0026rsquo;m embarrassed to mention that I did a PhD as I think it makes me (one?) seem pretentious, but it is relevant to mention my degree here since it is the only time I\u0026rsquo;ve had to write a book. When I set out to write my thesis, I saw writing up as a means to an end, but as I was working through it, I found that I was enjoying the process of writing. Putting your thoughts into a coherent order is satisfying because it replaces a vague sense of how things are with some clarity. By the time I had finished writing up, I genuinely cared about what made a piece of writing well-formed. I felt, though, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to write in the way I wanted; instead, I had to write in a formal, neutral voice and there wasn\u0026rsquo;t space for personal flair or meandering thoughts. So while I had enjoyed writing with the goal of precision and clarity, I felt that the process of writing up had ultimately taught me some mechanical tricks about writing and editing.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why I Write"}]