The writing
The Battle of Cannae
On a small field in southern Italy, in August 216 BC, an eighty-thousand-strong Roman army was annihilated in a single afternoon. The reason, mostly, was that Rome had been arguing with itself.
Albert Camus
On Albert Camus, his short novel about a man who refused to lie, and the cheerfullest piece of philosophy of the twentieth century.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Two of the twentieth century's celebrated philosophers spent ten minutes shouting at each other over a fireplace poker. Neither of them was wrong.
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov spent twelve years writing a book the Soviet apparatus had no language for. He was right to.
Context Harvesting
What happens if you try to create Claude guardrails from Git logs? The agent already has the context it needs.
AI-Powered Potatoes
Spending months and a small fortune to grow spuds in order to test what an LLM can really teach a layman.
The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord saw something coming. A note on a small, sharp book that has aged into something almost unbearably accurate.
Learning to Abandon Peace
A photographer who likes quiet places goes looking for it in cities, fails, and finds something better.
Birding
Standing in a field for hours waiting for a crow. Apparently this is what I am now.
Astrophotography
A first attempt at the night sky, with all the rookie mistakes intact and on show.
Ballykelly, Lough Foyle
Walking a flat road towards a flat sea, with Binevenagh looming and the train going the other way.
A Class 5 Solar Storm
The aurora over Northern Ireland, settings, mistakes, and a brief encounter with the Overview Effect.