It feels like such a long time ago that we could count on exponential improvements in computing power. The leaps between one generation of consoles in the early days was massive, just as it was between graphics cards in the PC space.

However, it is becoming clear that those days are long gone. The computer hardware industry has been ransacked by Grand Theft Autocomplete (AI), collusion by DRAM manufacturers and other geopolitical issues. We’re now in the odd position where computer parts actually appreciate over time.

We are then left with a choice –pay well over the odds for hardware, or make do with what we’ve got.

Brute force

The trouble with rapidly advancing hardware performance is it allowed developers to skip the part of the development process which ensures their product will actually perform at an acceptable level on the customer’s machine. It was assumed that it may run badly now, but new hardware will fix it later by sheer force.

This idea seems at odds with the reality of what customers have been using. The current Steam Hardware survey for June 2026 shows that the most common PC configuration includes a 6-core CPU, 16GB RAM, a Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 laptop GPU with 8GB VRAM, and a primary display resolution of 1920x1080.

I’m currently running a 12 core CPU, 32GB RAM and an AMD RX9070XT GPU with 16GB VRAM. This is relatively high-end hardware and it should wipe the floor with modern titles, but it very often does not, at least not without relying on upscaling.

The problem is that the market seems to have standardised on Unreal Engine 5, which in its default configuration is a stuttering, bloated mess. It also has a way of making every game ‘feel’ the same. With care, it can be really good. It has been used to great effect in Denshattack! but Denshattack! is an indie title and indies have long been showing the corporates how it is done.

It is the indies who have been making interesting titles which push boundaries in ways that the corporates have not dared to since the PS3 and Xbox 360 era. Moreover, they tend to make games that work on hardware that actually exists.

Can it run Crysis?

In the late 2000s a little game called Crysis was released. It was a very pretty game that made use of the then new Direct3D10 (otherwise known as DirectX10), but even Nvidia’s flagship 8800GTX and 8800GTS struggled to run it properly. It started a running joke that any new hardware releasing, the question of whether it could run Crysis would inevitably be asked.

Back then we knew that the successor to the 8800 would fare much better, but in today’s market the question would not be so clear cut. The cost of DRAM has increased around 600% in the past couple of years, affecting both the main memory and VRAM. Whilst CPUs haven’t seen the same increases, the total cost of a build is now in silly territory.

The cost of hardware is reaching the point where many people will decide to bow out of gaming entirely, or just play on their phones. Developers need to realise the market for the cutting edge is bleeding out. Devices like the Steam Machine, Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2 is where the players are at.

These days a mid-range graphics card will set you back between £500 and £1000, with the high end north of £1500. It wasn’t long ago you could build a whole PC for that.

As much as I liked to live life on the cutting edge in my younger years (Hell, I even owned a PhysX card), I’m excited by the prospect of developers targeting devices at the level of handheld PCs and the new Steam Machine, which coincidentally runs a 6 core CPU, 16GB RAM and a mid-range GPU. It will force them to make games that are mechanically interesting and not just release yet another extraction shooter dressed in an Unreal Engine asset suit.

It needs to be fun, it needs to be interesting and it needs to run on the hardware people already own. The gaming industry has fallen into the same trap as the Hollywood movie industry –thinking it needed to be louder, more far-fetched, but at the expense of an actual plot worth caring about.

As that old meme went, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding”.

I’m on Mastodon

Inspired by a video by Sarah Davis Baker talking about how the internet used to be a place I had an idea. What would happen if I put the internet back in its place?

I’m not shy about the fact that my internet use is a little higher than I would like, but curing it sounds like an interesting challenge.

The idea

The basic idea behind this is that back in the dial-up days, the internet lived wherever the phone line came into the house. Laptops were still massive; we still paid by the minute to access the internet –it was essentially a really long, screechy conversation with a remote server and the whole family would share the one PC.

So, for a month (to begin with), I would put the laptop away and only use the internet on my desktop –a self-built machine currently running Kubuntu. Last weekend I decided to try to smooth some of the rough edges in my linux experience by trading in the Nvidia GPU I’ve been using since 2022 in favour of an AMD one. For the uninitiated, Nvidia insists on keeping its driver proprietary rather than as part of the mainline linux kernel. As a result, any slight issue and you’re greeted with a black screen of doom. No command line, just a whole lot of nothing. AMD’s driver is built into the linux kernel and is neatly integrated. There should be far less funnybusiness to deal with.

So, I’ve swapped a Nvidia RTX 4080 for an AMD RX9070 XT. It’s a sideways move rather than an upgrade, but should give me the stability I’ve been craving. I’m going to try to just use this computer now, putting the Macbook away for as long as I can.

Truth be told, there’s a part of me that is uncomfortable with the idea of a sealed box that can’t be repaired (or tinkered with). My desktop was built by me, using parts I chose. If it breaks, I can fix it. I can install whatever software I want on it. My laptop and many others like it uses weird screws and everything is glued together with parts you are not allowed to buy. Crucially, I decide when it is time to upgrade.

I have all the software I need on Linux so there’s no real excuse for going back to another system. There’s a great Qobuz client for linux now called QBZ, I have Obsidian or Ghostwriter for writing blog posts, I have Plex, LibreOffice, Signal’s desktop app, my emails and a web browser. I’m pretty much sorted.

This does mean I’m sticking with Qobuz. I did try to quit using it, but missed it too much. Plus, Apple Music doesn’t play well outside Apple’s ecosystem. If I want to escape, it makes sense to keep Qobuz. More to the point, it’s a great service.

The Plan

So, my idea was to stick to just my desktop. If I can get through the month without needing to dig out the laptop, maybe I’ll see what price I can get for it.

My other motivation for moving away from Apple is, well, I watched their recent WWDC with all the AI crap and it made me rather uneasy. I know they’ll let you keep it turned off, but whether it is Apple Intelligence or Microsoft CoPilot, I don’t like the idea of something trying to interpret what I am doing with my computer. I wouldn’t want someone standing over me while I’m working, nor would I want to be watched from afar, while my machine collects behavioural surplus to make the ads more effective.

I’m so tired of this AI crap. Even if you can separate the innate creepiness of these tools big tech is trying to force on us, LLMs are only ever correct accidentally and are therefore of negligible real-world use. Stop forcing it onto people; stop ransacking the computing hardware supply chain; stop trying to make AI happen.

If it was that good, we would all use it willingly, but sorry big tech, the trust is gone. AI has destroyed any love I once had for new technology. If it was that good, you wouldn’t need to pass around the same $30bn in a strangely circular motion to make it look more legitimate than it really is.

Anyway, I’m a few weeks into this experiment and it hasn’t been flawless. That’s not a Linux problem, but a me problem. I still reach for my iPad more than I would like when I’m not sat in the room with the desktop, so I think the next step is to remove most of the apps from the iPad and just leave the books.

I feel like I’m making steady progress though.

I’m on Mastodon

Whilst I’ve written about my fondness for physical media already, the recent announcement by Sony that it was ending the production of physical PlayStation games from 2028 lit a fire up the internet’s metaphorical rear-end and I think I need to talk about it again.

This announcement from Sony coincided with the news that they were removing around 500 movies from the collections of PlayStation users who bought StudioCanal movies like Terminator 2 through the PlayStation Store, hot on the heels of its decision to remove Discovery content from the same users in 2023.

Oh, while we are at it, they also said they’re turning off the PlayStation store for PS3 and Vita, erasing the content still tied to those platforms in the process.

Games

Whilst I’m not too surprised to see the end of physical games on PlayStation, I fear this has largely been the result of three big problems in the industry.

1. Games broken at launch - Sure, you can buy the blu-ray with the game on, but you will likely be faced with a download just as big as the data stored on the disc, because it was rushed to print with the intention of fixing it later. You effectively buy a disc with a closed beta on it.
2. Bloated games - Considering ‘AAA’ titles like Call of Duty are more vapid than they have ever been, pray tell why it requires a 280GB download when they have just been repackaging Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 (the first time around from 2007, I know they’ve been recycling names too) for about a decade. That arrived on a single DVD. Not a blu-ray, a DVD. Nintendo has shown that it can be done. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild weighs in at around 15GB for the Switch 2 edition…and that’s a whole open world stuffed with dynamic physics-based systems.
3. DRM - Sure, you can have the DVD or blu-ray, but when they turn the activation server off for commercial reasons, it becomes a coaster.

I think the games industry is emblematic not just of the irresponsibility of corporations as stewards of our culture, but of corporations and their ability to take good ideas and ruin them.

I’m hesitant to mourn the loss of physical games without first mourning the loss of an ecosystem where completed titles could be committed to physical media and allowed to stand the test of time. Many of the titles releasing today, particularly on PlayStation and Xbox aren’t worth the plastic they would be burned onto anyway.

The best games these days are being made by small teams, largely on a shoestring budget and with more heart than Microsoft’s rapidly depleting headcount could muster. Buy them from your chosen PC store-front, preferably on Linux and give your money to people who actually care about what they are making.

Movies and Music

I feel differently about physical media for movies and music. These usually arrive complete and anything released since the advent of DVD for movies or CD for music is going to hold up pretty well in terms of audio or visual quality.

We should all be buying these. VHS continues to hold a special place in my heart, but cassette not so much, but if they work for you, great. Whatever your choice of format, hold onto that stuff, because it will never, ever charge you rent or disappear from your library.

If corporations or platforms are not going to preserve the things we hold dear, it is up to us to do what they won’t.

Whilst I have your attention, you should read my Mastodon friend Jake’s recent post on physical media too.

I’m on Mastodon

One thing that often gets missed in debates around the internet, particularly now that governments are locking everything away behind an age-verification wall is how our relationship to the internet has changed.

In the early days, our computers were relatively benign. They didn’t know anything about us besides what we chose to share. Even though most people were running some form of Windows back in the mid-90s, Microsoft had yet to turn its flagship product into an ad-delivery platform that occasionally launched programs of your choosing.

That wouldn’t start in earnest until much later. Fast forward to today and Windows 11 could by most metrics be considered malware.

The amount of information being collected by our devices is genuinely frightening. Now the websites we visit or the apps we use on our phones collect enough data from us to know how we like our toast buttered in the mornings.

The worst part is, we’re often not choosing to share this information. It is collected routinely by closed-source applications we are all but forced to engage with, because services are now locked behind them.

Even our ‘smart’ TVs collect enough personal information from us to know what toothpaste we used that morning.

We are so far down the path of having no privacy whatsoever, you have to go out of your way to reclaim it.

It has recently started to dawn on me that most of the problems I’ve had with my mental health over the past 25 years may have been in some part due to the internet and the monster it has become. I’m well aware that preying on discontent is part of the business model of some of the biggest online platforms these days.

Various attempts to simplify my life over the years have certainly helped, but anything short of an isolated cabin in the woods is unlikely to satisfy that desire for clarity.

In real life I’d consider myself to be a relatively open book. I’m not reluctant to share how I feel to the people closest to me, but it wasn’t until I started on antidepressants nearly a decade ago that I realised just how noisy the inside of my head was.

Whilst I can hear myself think again I need to make the most of the silence to figure out what I must do to keep the noise down, ready for when the medication inevitably stops.

Ideas

I’ve started to settle on a few ideas for how to proceed. The first thing that needs to go is the short-form video content. I’m not talking about Youtube Shorts or TikTok because I already ignore those like the plague they are. I’m talking about content less than an hour long. It is too convenient and too lacking in genuine information to take seriously, yet it makes too much precious time disappear. I would be better off using that time to watch a movie or put another album on.

Secondly, I have too many computers. I need to pick a platform and stick to it. I genuinely have trouble choosing between MacOS and Linux. As hardware is so expensive these days, I will wait to see which one breaks first, before settling on the other.

Thirdly, I need to speed up my decluttering. I want to be able to move with only a couple of bags of essentials. This brings me onto gaming.

After seeing the bullshit going on in the world of gaming, with £100 games, paywalled content and the devices to play them getting more expensive with age, it’s a hobby I can no longer justify spending any more money on. So, that’s it, I think I’m out. I will milk the devices I have for all they are worth, before walking away from the hobby I embraced 40 years ago.

Finally, taking inspiration from Sarah Davis Baker’s excellent video on Nebula which talked about how the internet ‘used to be a place’ I’d like to try to go back to that.

As much as I love my chums on Mastodon, I have developed an unhealthy relationship with the platform and it consumes far more time than it should. I’m going to remove the apps from my phone for a while, whilst also deleting my Google (Youtube) account again. I will try to check in once a day on a desktop to catch up on things, but I need to see where the boredom takes me.

Who knows, maybe then I’ll have the headspace to write more.

I’m on Mastodon

In an attempt to address the harms caused by algorithmic social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, governments around the world are scrambling to put barriers up to stop youngsters from being led astray, instead of, you know, regulating the companies peddling these harms.

What seems laudable on the surface, the idea behind age gating certain parts of the internet is flawed for a number of reasons, mainly the one where you hand over your precious data to a barely-regulated third party and hope they don’t leave it on the bus. However, today I’m not going to talk about that.

I told you I was going to stay positive and gosh darn-it I am sticking to that. Anyway, I’ve found an upside.

Where there are no walls

These big platforms, with all their billions are going to have to stop people from coming in if they have no ID. Many of them already do, particularly the ones in the Meta universe. This is actually great news. I would have preferred it if they were regulated out of existence, but do you know where they are not going to be asking for you to potentially doxx yourself?

That’s right, the open internet.

What the regulations say...

Currently, the Online Safety Act 2023 as it is currently written is primarily concerned with what it calls ‘user to user’ services and with search engines. User-to-user services are mainly those we know as Web 2.0 --the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube type services on the internet. However, it does not include email, SMS messaging apps or voice calls.

It also doesn’t include what you might call good old fashioned websites.

I know I’ve been banging on about this for a little while now, but these modern yet slightly old-fashioned websites we old farts grew up with often collect no data whatsoever. This site doesn’t even have analytics, as life is too short to worry about how many clicks I am getting.

You can view this website without ID. But better yet, you can create your own website without ID too. Shh, don’t say that too loudly.

If you have a youngster in the house, or just someone who wants to practice their writing skills and exercise their creativity on the internet, get them blogging. Teach them some basic HTML and get them creating a static site on Neocities, or get them writing on Bear, Micro.blog or Pika.

They can be as anonymous as they want to be; they can talk about anything they want to. They can link to their friends blogs and start one of those wonderful web rings.

Best of all, there won’t be an app on their phone following them around trying to sell them insecurity and self-loathing.

Aging Out

As I’ve said before, I love the internet. However, I am acutely aware that I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to see the younger generations take the reins and start building the internet in their own image.

For we old farts, we have every reason to be suspicious of the companies doing the age verification and every reason to never, ever deal with them.

Let us go back to building out the open internet we knew and loved back in the 90s and early 2000s, with as much quirkiness and personality as we can muster.

If the features of these new laws start to creep and we find ourselves back in the pre-internet era unless we hand over what we hold most dear (our personal data), I have hope that we will find other ways to share, even if that involves resurrecting the sneaker net.

USB sticks at the ready.

I’m on Mastodon

Back in 2006 there was a movie starring Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale and Christopher Walken called Click.

It may have been dismissed as a typically shallow Adam Sandler movie, but there was a kernel of depth to it.

On fast forward

Have you ever arrived at work remembering nothing of how you got there? If you are still young you may not have had this happen to you yet, but after a decade or two you may start to glaze over at the routine. Your body takes over and deposits you where you need to go without you giving it a second thought.

I have done this a lot. I may not have been equipped with the Click remote, but I’ve unwittingly fast-forwarded through a lot of my life. I am rapidly heading towards the half-century without fully grasping how I got here.

Watched: Click 🍿

I have always played it safe. I have been in the same career since leaving school and can do most of what I need to do on autopilot. I’m fine with that, I think.

Perhaps work should be safe and routine. It frees up your time and headspace after you have clocked off to define your own life.

The trouble is, even now, I still have no idea what that is supposed to look like.

Grazing

At the moment, the part of me that wants to be a nerd is at odds with the part of me that recoils in horror at the LLM scam and wants nothing to do with it.

I was struck by a letter that popped up on Mastodon from a guy named Chad Whitacre who worked in tech, only to walk away from it completely to embrace a life offline.

You can read that here: https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline/

Whilst I don’t work in tech, it has in one way or another been a big part of my personal life since the dial-up era. The wonder I once felt when reading the tech news is long gone and now I am only looking for the catch. What privacy must I give up for this minor improvement?

It seems to be little more than a collection of ever-more-elaborate scams and grifts, backed up by shoddily made hardware that was designed to fail, paired with software with a built-in expiration date.

The Dead Internet

What isn’t helping with the feelings of ennui is the troubling statistic from Cloudflare that over half of internet traffic is now bots.

It would be tempting to throw in the towel at this stage, leave the bots to their internet while we meat-bags go back to the physical realm. Truth be told, I’ve started to imagine what that would look like.

Thankfully I’ve spent the past couple of years buying CDs and Blu-ray movies. I also have a shelf full of books I could be reading, but I don’t think I’m ready to give up just yet.

I think we need a new protocol. A digital space out of reach of the machines. Somewhere we can write without fear of having our efforts scraped and regurgitated back to us for yet another monthly fee.

The Gemini Protocol perhaps?

I’m on Mastodon

After a flurry of activity on this blog, there has been a couple of things in my world that have sent my words packing.

It feels like a long time since I have blogged, although it has only been a few days. The seeds of partially formed ideas scattered to the four winds.

Sometimes it is best to wait for things to happen, for ideas to form, instead of trying to force words onto the page that you don’t really believe in, or have any great desire to write.

They will come in time. Then again, sometimes you just need to blurt out a stream of consciousness until something starts to take root.

Other thoughts

I’m still in the process of minimising. This week I decided to switch back to Apple Music, which I was paying for anyway through Apple One, rolling the money saved into a separate pot for buying CDs.

I also found an app for iOS and iPadOS called Marvis. My biggest issue with Apple Music was that sending my scrobbles to Last.fm was a bind, but Marvis acts as a front-end for Apple Music and handles the scrobbling part for you. Thanks to a Mastodon chum Revival Records for that one.

I also picked up the Lifetime subscription for Plex whilst it was still cheap. It’s a £20 per month saving on both, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it will add up.

I love Qobuz and will no doubt return to it at some point, but I’m not the only one using my Apple One subscription, so it makes sense to wring its neck for all it is worth.

With that, the words are slowly starting to flow again...

I’m on Mastodon

As I’ve got older, I’ve become acutely aware of how quickly the sands of time are running out.

I started my gaming journey with a Sinclair Spectrum +2, way back in the mid-80s, but games have been a fairly constant part of my life.

Lately something has shifted.

Fun, not a second job...

Gaming in the mid 2020s is pretty bleak. The push towards derivative ‘live services’ that want to occupy all of your time is something that leaves me feeling pretty cold. I watch the latest week of gaming news and releases and there may be one game in a whole year that grabs my attention.

I don’t want to put hundreds of hours into it something just to get to the good parts. I don’t want the stress of endless checklists, of competition or to put time into something that just wants to waste that time.

The irony of all this is that the only games I seem to play these days (apart from MarioKart) are what you might call job simulators —mainly trucking simulators, or ‘cosy’ games. For the past few months I have been thoroughly enjoying Animal Crossing New Horizons.

It is a game where you live out a life on a little island with a revolving cast of anthropomorphic animal neighbours.

You start the game in a tent, before gradually building out your island, planting crops, crafting items, fishing and catching bugs. Soon you’ll be able to buy a house, decorate it and have visitors.

The beauty of it is that once you’re over the early hump, it is something you can just drop into for 10-20 minutes a day, do your tasks, make a bit of money and collecting things and put it aside until the next day.

There is a fairly steady trickle of visiting characters, ones that like bugs, ones that sell dodgy art and some that will challenge you to a fishing competition.

There’s no pressure to finish things, no pressure to spend hour upon hour of needlessly grinding. It has been a delight.

Whilst I still have a PC capable of playing games (as long as they work through Proton), I could conceivably get by with just the Switch 2 now. That’s quite freeing. I just need Valve to release Half Life 2 for it and I’ll be set.

This week I’ve managed to remove three bags of clutter from my life, but I’ve filled the wheely-bin and will need to wait until it is emptied so I can fill it again.

I would like to get to a point where I can walk out of wherever I am living with a ruck sack and a suitcase. Mobile consoles like the Switch fit neatly into that idea.

Animal Crossing feels like that comfortable home away from home that I can take wherever I may end up in the future.

I’m on Mastodon.

Ever on the lookout for what is good in the small web, I wanted to bring your attention to something that has been quite popular on Mastodon of late. A beautiful essay by Terry Godier.

The internet you grew up on isn’t dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. The Boring Internet by Terry Godier

The second one is a blog about being wrong about the Fediverse, by Matt Duggan.

I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. --Matt Duggan

Truth be told, I’ve been a bit of a daze this week and haven’t explored the small web as much as I would have liked. I have been mostly working by day and trying to binge my way through my list of unwatched movies on Plex by night.

Hopefully I’ll get my act together next week. Until next time...

I’m on Mastodon

I have referenced it in passing a couple of times now, but a few years ago when the Minimalism documentary blew up on Netflix, the whole thing made a lot of sense to me.

Back in 2017 I immediately set about trading in everything I could. Life at the time was incredibly and unusually complicated, so simplifying everything seemed like the solution I was looking for.

Getting it wrong

The thing about starting out with a process of radical simplification is that you probably don’t yet have a handle on what is really important to you.

I started out by getting rid of the things I could easily turn into cash. To be honest, I needed the money anyway, so there were additional benefits to removing them from my life.

Into a box went my Playstation 3, a bunch of games, every CD, DVD and blu-ray I had to my name; a camera; some books, my laptop; some PC components I had been saving for who knows what and my guitar. My car wouldn’t fit into a box, but I traded that too.

The fruits of this process were the drip-drip of cash back into my bank account. It was strangely addictive.

Here’s the thing... With each box of stuff I did start to feel lighter and a little more free, but it wasn’t long before I started to miss some of the things I had traded.

I think this is all part of the process though. You have to go without in order to realise what you are missing. I bought back my laptop and eventually a camera, but not much else.

Getting it right

Minimalism, at least for me, doesn’t stop at physical items. I started to question many of the accounts I had logins for and the subscriptions I had leaving my bank account every month. I cut them back mercilessly, only to let the ones I really missed back in.

Everything needs to justify its place in my life or my home, or it is likely to get the boot.

In this process I came to a realisation. The only physical things I really value are my CDs, my laptop and my headphones. Oh, and I’ll probably need a phone and a passport.

Oh, and a NAS. I’m quite attached to my NAS.

As long as I have music; some good coffee; a space to write my long, rambling blog posts and a clear head, everything else is negotiable.

Yet things have a way of creeping back in without constant vigilance.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of me saying I’m embarking on another purge. My Playstation 5 went this week, as I feel like I’m trying to cover too many platforms as it is.

My plan is to tackle the stuff that isn’t really worth anything, which makes the process far less satisfying but will make it easier to keep the place tidy.

My CDs aren’t going anywhere though. I’m not doing that again.

I’m on Mastodon

My Mastodon chum Chris recently laid down a challenge to list some bands that we love based on where we live.

Now, coming from rainy South Wales, there are slim pickings to be had in the metal department, but a smorgasbord of guitar pop/rock bands. So, let’s get cracking.

Cool Cymru

During the 1990s and 2000s a movement began that came to be known as Cool Cymru. There was a wave of new bands emerging that would...decades later still stand the test of time.

Now, in the 90s I was emerging from ‘spotty teenager’ to naive young man and I rarely deviated from the metal I had consumed during my acne-filled earlier years. Thankfully, old me has grown to enjoy some of these bands. So, here goes...

Polythene by Feeder

Hailing from Newport, South Wales, Feeder released Polythene in 1997 and would quickly develop a following, as well as pride of place in the soundtrack to Gran Turismo 1, 3 and 4. I’ve picked Polythene because it’s a great album, but also because it has my favourite track by them --Descend.

Word Gets Around by Stereophonics

Heading up to Aberdare, the Stereophonics became one of the most successful bands of that era, helped in no small part by their impressive debut, Word Gets Around.

I still hear tracks like A Thousand Trees and More Life in a Tramp’s Vest being played quite regularly, along with a selection of material that found its way into Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman’s Long Way series.

Everything Must Go by the Manic Street Preachers

The other huge band from round these parts was the Manics. Hailing from Blackwood, Caerphilly these guys really were everywhere in the 90s thanks to Everything Must Go popping off the way it did.

A Design for Life peaked at number 2 in the singles chart, with the title track just behind it in number 5. I still hear them on TV quite regularly in the mid 2020s.

Babylon by Skindred

Another big band out of Newport, Skindred first emerged as Dubwar in the early 90s, Benji Webbe and Co. fused metal with reggae to great effect. They became Skindred towards the end of the millennium.

Unfortunately they passed me by at the time, but they are still plugging away and the research for this post has prompted me to give them a proper airing. Working my way through Babylon right now and it’s banging.

They have a touch of the System of a Down about them in places, but holy moly, Benji’s such a great vocalist.

I’m on Mastodon

In my previous post I challenged you to come up with ten albums that you think would see you out. Ten CDs (or vinyl) that you have either always listened to, or you think will stay with you for the rest of your days. A collection you would own instead of renting forever.

It is only fair that I try the same exercise myself. The trouble is, I already have the CDs because I've been re-acquiring them for the past couple of years. Instead, I've been thinking about dipping my toes into vinyl collecting and often wondered which of my treasured albums I would go for first. So, here goes...

Paradise Lost - Draconian Times

This is an obvious one. I've been a little obsessed with this album since it came out in 1995. I even did a whole blog post about it not long ago. I can buy that on vinyl for ...£39.99 at HMV. Yikes.

Pearl Jam - Vs

Again, another obvious one. This one has never been far from my side since its release in the early 90s. It's the quintessential summer album --Pearl Jam has always been a good weather band for me anyway, but Vs is an album for the beach. £31.99 on HMV.

Whitechapel - Kin

This one knocked me for six back when it was released in 2021. It was largely dismissed by the deathcore crowd, because it has melody and clean vocals, but there's nothing that so perfectly encapsulates the tearing of one's soul that happens when we are depressed.

Phil Boseman's ongoing battle with his inner demon, which plays out over the course of the album I found to be very therapeutic. I'd buy this on vinyl if I could find it. £24.99, but it is sold out on HMV.

An Abstract Illusion - Woe

What is there to say about this album that I haven't already said? It's a masterpiece of progressive death metal and I think everyone should listen to it, a lot. Around £60 on Discogs.

Peter Gabriel - So

When you think of Peter Gabriel, you're probably going to think of many of the tracks on So. Sledgehammer, Don't Give Up, In Your Eyes...

Not having this in my collection would be a huge mistake. £20 on Bandcamp.

Insomnium - Shadows of the Dying Sun

I only discovered Insomnium relatively recently, but I have already played this album a few hundred times and I'm still not bored of it. £39.99 on HMV.

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

There's a reason why most people have this album in their collection (or should), it's wonderful. I still can't stop hearing the clipping of the horns on So What, but maybe the vinyl will mask it a bit. £27.99 on HMV.

I’d actually love to hear Blue in Green on vinyl at least once in my life.

The Naked & Famous - Simple Forms

I have all of The Naked & Famous' albums on CD, but this one connected with me more than the others. It's a brilliant piece of indie pop that sits atop my most listened-to albums on Last.fm for a reason. £25-£30 on Discogs.

Pink Floyd - The Division Bell

I know there are a certain subsection of the Pink Floyd fanbase that doesn't like the post-Roger Waters Floyd, but I actually think they got better after he left.

I would take Momentary Lapse of Reason over The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon any day. The Division Bell is a complete album full of absolute bangers. £49.99 on HMV.

Rivers of Nihil - Where Owls Know My Name

This is the album that opened my eyes to progressive death metal and is a perfect album. No filler, just bangers all the way. 30 Euros on Bandcamp.

Some thoughts...

Obviously, vinyl is much more expensive than CD and they do wear out, so the economic argument for buying them doesn't quite work as well here, but strangely CD players are becoming a little hard to come by, unlike turntables which have been booming of late. We may need to consider the prospect of not being able to play a CD in the not too distant future.

Still, it is a fun exercise to think of the albums that would earn a spot in my (currently) fictitious collection.

I’m on Mastodon

Back in the early 90s I bought Pearl Jam’s ‘Vs’ on CD. It was a great album that I’ve listened to regularly ever since.

I know subscriptions for all of our cultural artefacts are the in thing in the mid 2020s, but have we stopped to think about what that is going to mean as we reach old age?

Nothing to show for it

On the surface, £10 or $10 per month seems harmless enough, especially when access to the vast majority of the world’s music is (theoretically) available to you.

However, over the course of 40 years, that’s going to set you back nearly five grand in today’s money. Fine, that’s not so bad, until you realise the music stops as soon as the money stops.

Let’s add in the ten bucks a month for the movies you no longer own. Yes, these are a little more complicated because when I first started buying CDs we were also buying movies on VHS. Things have moved on a bit since, but DVDs still work fine if you don’t care about the resolution.

So, we’re up to twenty bucks a month in today’s money. We’re just shy of ten grand now, still with nothing to show for it.

Oh, but not everything is on one service. You’ll want Netflix, Disney, maybe Amazon Prime as well to cover most of the bases. Disney’s six bucks, Prime is nine bucks, so that’s fifteen bucks per month. What are we up to now?

Ten, ten, six, nine...wait, that’s thirty five bucks a month, every month for perhaps forty years. We’re not far off seventeen grand now. The scary part is, if that money had gone into a savings account at a reasonable 4% per month, you would be looking at £41,507.

A friend of mine bought the same CD around the same time as I did. He still has his. It still works great.

I however, traded all of mine in back in 2018 when I discovered minimalism, but that’s a story for another day.

It turns out, music and movies were what I valued, so now I can focus on getting rid of everything else. See, Minimalism™.

Paying for time

On the surface, the idea of a subscription isn’t too unreasonable. For the people who voraciously consume as much new music as they can, there’s a lot of value to be had in a subscription.

However, I know that I tend to listen to the same three to five albums heavily per year, along with the old favourites --Paradise Lost and Pearl Jam’s back catalogue mainly. The economics of a subscription start to make less and less sense for my consumption habits.

When it comes to movies and TV, the numbers don’t add up at all. Twenty five bucks a month for maybe one or two good series, maybe one or two good movies? What we are paying for is the hope of continuing to access them, only to find they’ve been removed from the service when we go looking for them.

What often gets missed in these cost discussions is, all being well, most of us are going to be around for a really long time. If I buy that CD in 1993, but I’m still using it in 2050 or beyond, let’s say 60 years, that £41,507 inches closer to £105,132 thanks to the power of compounding.

We’re over £100,000 now, over a lifetime of music and movies. Still with absolutely nothing to show for it.

An exercise

I want you to humour me for a minute. I want you to think about ten albums that have left an impression on you. Ten CDs (or vinyl if you prefer) that you would carry with you for the rest of your days.

Then have a look on eBay or any of the used marketplaces in your area and see how much it would cost to build that collection.

Chances are it’ll be less than a single year of your chosen music subscription, but it will be yours forever.

When you reach your pensionable age, you could use the money you saved to buy...well, anything you like, you’ve got £100,000.

Closing thoughts

I started writing this as exercise for myself. I had the idea in my head, but I never really sat down and looked at the numbers in any great detail.

Truth be told, they kinda scared the crap out of me. I had somewhat casually started racking up subscriptions for various things, not really taking the long view about it.

I would have a purge every now and again, but they would slowly creep up over time. To think that £35 per month compounds to over £100,000 in a lifetime is more than a little alarming to me.

I feel another purge coming on...

I’m on Mastodon

I first started tinkering with linux back when Ubuntu 6.04 was released. April 2006 was my first hint that things were not so good in Windows land, so I started looking for the exits.

Unfortunately, as someone who has always bought Nvidia cards, those cards were stacked against me and I never managed to make Ubuntu stick. Thankfully, it is now 2026 and my word things have changed.

Kubuntu 26.04 LTS

I’ve spent the past two decades dipping my toes in now and again to see how things were progressing. I’ve been fairly loyal to Ubuntu over this time because if there were bugs, they (presumably) had the resources to deal with them.

However, my weak spot has always been gaming. Ever since Doom 2 and the original Quake opened my eyes to what these formerly beige boxes could do, I’ve never been too far from a PC. Unfortunately, this was always a challenge for anyone looking to switch to Linux.

Not anymore. Valve, continuing to dangle the prospect of Half Life 3 over our heads, has been working on squaring the Linux gaming circle since Windows 8 came along and soiled the sheets. Now pretty much everything in my Steam library works fine on Linux.

At the beginning of the year I decided there was no going back to Windows, so I put in the request to delete my entire Microsoft account for good. I still have to deal with it at work, but my personal life is resolutely Windows-free now.

Anyway, onto Kubuntu 26.04.

Up until this week I’ve been daily driving Kubuntu 25.10 and thoroughly enjoying what KDE has become. It is a beautiful desktop environment, which is backed up by a suite of equally great applications.

I normally like to do my drafting in iA Writer on the Mac, but there is no Linux version of that (yet), but there is Ghostwriter, a feature-rich yet refreshingly minimalist Markdown editor that you can obtain for free from the Discover store.

I’ve also been using QBZ, a Qobuz client that I mentioned previously. There are of course native Plex, Signal and Proton Mail apps, along with Vivaldi as my browser of choice.

Backing all this up, a few years ago I bought a Qnap NAS and around 16TB of storage to go into it. I use Qsync to sync my documents, music and photos to my laptop –currently a Macbook, but I’m testing the waters to see if I can replace that with something I can put Kubuntu on.

To move things between my iPhone and my desktop, there is the excellent KDE Connect app, which lets you share files between iOS and Kubuntu if you don’t have a NAS in between.

The only thing left to figure out is what to do with my 20 years of RAW images from my camera. I’ve been flip-flopping between Darktable (which is needlessly fiddly) or Rawtherapee, which is closer to what I’m used to with Capture One.

I’ve not found a good alternative to iCloud Photos yet. I had hoped Ente would be it, but its editing features continue to be disappointing at a time when they seem to be aggressively pushing AI features I don’t want. I just want to be able to re-orientate a photo without creating a duplicate of it. Is that so much to ask?

It is also another subscription, which I’m trying to get away from. I don’t see much point in paying to access my own files.

Thoughts…

I think desktop linux has reached the stage where I can feel entirely confident in recommending it to people who just want a reprieve from Microsoft’s increasingly anti-user practices. It’s as good on high-end hardware as it is at keeping older hardware out of the landfill.

It is also completely free for anyone to use. Just install it on a USB stick, mash F8 when you start your machine, select your USB stick and just play around with the desktop until you are ready to install it.

As long as you don’t want to play multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat, most if not all games will work fine, in some cases better than they do on Windows thanks to the lack of telemetry and bloat.

The best part is, if you want to start from as bare a desktop as you like, they give you the option. You’re lucky if Microsoft will let you choose your web browser, but you will never be able to uninstall Edge. It is their computer, not yours.

The past two versions of Kubuntu have given me that giddy feeling I had back in the 90s, when the PC and even the internet were still new and exciting to me. KDE offers so much scope for customisation, but it is beautiful out of the box; it has a wealth of open source applications to choose from and perhaps most importantly, I feel like I own my computer again.

I’m on Mastodon

Just a quick post to share a couple of recent small-web discoveries you may be interested in.

The first one is another blogroll --https://blogroll.org

This one is apparently sponsored by the good folks behind Micro.blog, where the Reed & Pickup is hosted. It looks very slick and I should see if I can get the R&P listed on there at some point.

Music

In a world where many of us are using different sources for our music, whether that be Apple Music, Qobuz or Bandcamp, sharing links to your latest discovery is needlessly complicated.

Thankfully there’s a developer on the fediverse who came up with a neat solution: https://musiccloud.io

You either search for the track, or paste the URL from your chosen streaming service and it’ll give you handy page of links, bio and more to share with your friends. Like this one:

A song you should definitely listen to, by the way...

Lastly, I want to bring your attention to a wonderfully old-school website and hub for the small web that I landed on during a Kagi Small Web browsing session.

https://gusbus.space/blog/

The small web has me feeling excited about the internet again. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that already, but just in case...

In an attempt to address the harms caused by algorithmic social media platforms like Facebook, governments around the world are scrambling to put barriers up to stop youngsters from being led astray, instead of, you know, regulating the companies peddling these harms.

What seems laudable on the surface, the idea behind age gating certain parts of the internet is flawed for a number of reasons, mainly the one where you hand over your precious data to a barely-regulated third party and hope they don’t leave it on the bus. However, today I’m not going to talk about that.

I told you I was going to stay positive and gosh darn-it I am sticking to that. Anyway, I’ve found an upside.

Where there are no walls

These big platforms, with all their billions are going to have to stop people from coming in if they have no ID. This is actually great news. I would have preferred it if they were regulated out of existence, but do you know where they are not going to be asking for you to potentially doxx yourself?

That’s right, the open internet.

I know I’ve been banging on about this for a little while now, but these modern yet slightly old-fashioned websites we old farts grew up building and using often collect no data whatsoever. This site doesn’t even have analytics, as life is too short to worry about how many clicks I am getting.

You can view this website without ID. But better yet, you can create your own website without ID too. Shh, don’t say that too loudly.

If you have a youngster in the house, or just someone who wants to practice their writing skills and exercise their creativity on the internet, get them blogging. Teach them some basic HTML and get them creating a static site on Neocities, or get them writing on Bear, Micro.blog or Pika.

They can be as anonymous as they want to be, they can talk about anything they want to. They can link to their friends blogs and start one of those wonderful web rings.

Best of all, there won’t be an app on their phone following them around trying to sell them insecurity and self-loathing.

Aging Out

As I’ve said before, I love the internet. However, I am acutely aware that I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to see the younger generations take the reins and start building the internet in their own image.

As an aside, I would also like to see more normies writing on the internet, as I think we are in danger of skewing too far towards other nerds.

For we old farts, we have every reason to be suspicious of the companies doing the age verification and every reason to never deal with them.

Let us go back to building out the open internet we knew and loved back in the 90s and early 2000s, with as much quirkiness and personality as we can muster.

Personally I’m giving some serious thought to getting some hosting sorted out, just to see what today’s static website tools can do. I’ll keep this site, obviously, but my curious mind wants to know.

I’m on Mastodon

Whilst I was browsing the Kagi Small Web, which has become a bit of an escape of late, I came across a blog post which got me thinking.

It talked about sending emails to each other, out of the blue, like we did in the old days.

Where did we go wrong?

The post sums the current state of affairs pretty well.

If I open my email inbox right now, I see two things. The first is my abject failure to achieve inbox zero, writ in 72-point bold-face Impact. And the second is a massive pile of newsletters, purchase receipts, tracking information, and marketing emails. [Evie Fae] (https://ev-fae.quest/send-email-out-of-the-blue/)

I briefly talked about my first trans-Atlantic email exchange in a previous post, but like the old internet I never really stopped to think about how the use of email shifted from a joy to an inconvenience.

The old internet was a mostly open affair. You didn’t need to login for very much, save perhaps a chatroom or messaging client like ICQ or Yahoo!. Once your modem had completed the squawky two-step with your ISP, the world was your oyster.

It would be remiss of me to not mention the classic Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan movie from this formative era, You’ve Got Mail. It was this time when relationships were being formed over potentially vast distances. The world was suddenly getting smaller.

Now, the cookie infestation didn’t really begin until the mid to late 90s, so whilst we may have had an email address, it was mostly used for communication between ourselves.

Over time they gradually became our identities, our way to login to websites and a way for those websites to carpet-bomb our inboxes with marketing and spam.

There were of course other reasons to move away from email for communication –it is inherently insecure, unless you use an encrypted service like Proton (referral) or Tuta or manage to figure out how to configure your existing provider or client to handle the encryption key. There are messaging apps like Signal or Threema which offer the means to message people privately and with little fuss.

The thing is though, email is universal. Chat apps are invariably a walled garden which only let you chat with other users on that platform. It doesn’t matter who your email provider is, it can receive email from any other email provider.

Is it too late to reclaim email for the joy of communication? Or is doomed to be the place for spam, website logins and work tasks with impossibly short deadlines? I don’t think so.

Just like bank accounts, you don’t need to live with just one email address. I have a number of different accounts on the go, each with a different purpose.

I use the hide-my-email feature built into my password manager for the mailing lists and the logins for websites I don’t completely trust –usually those band merch websites. If any one of them misbehaves I can cut them off in a heartbeat.

I have email addresses for the more important logins; addresses for the really important stuff, plus a few spare addresses for different eventualities.

Of course, I have one that I can give out to chums if they ask for it. I’m holding out hope that one day we’ll fall back in love with email once again, one day when we break down the walls big tech has built around us.

I’m on Mastodon

I’m a little ashamed to admit I’ve thoroughly slept on The Pineapple Thief. I’m a sucker for music which sits at the proggy end of the spectrum, but I also think Gavin Harrison is one of the greatest drummers on the scene right now.

Harrison joined The Pineapple Thief in 2017, so I should have been all over them. I’m not sure what happened, but I’m here now.

PT

It seems like a strange coincidence that The Pineapple Thief shares its initials with Harrison’s other band, Porcupine Tree. However, the similarities don’t stop there. Bruce Soord’s vocal delivery is very, very Steven Wilson. Musically it isn’t a world away either.

If you enjoyed In Absentia or Deadwing in particular, I think you will enjoy what The Pineapple Thief are offering here.

Throughout you’ll find a pleasant mix of choruses you can sing along to, with the rhythmic chops you’ll have come to expect from anything featuring such an impressive drummer.

I’ve seen people compare TPE to Radiohead, but I don’t quite agree with that. I can appreciate that Radiohead has its fans, but they largely passed me by when they were at their peak.

They are a band I should probably go back to with these middle-aged ears, but they have always come across as oppressively maudlin and claustrophobic. It Leads to This is comparatively airy and light, with Harrison’s chops buying time for the rest of the band to breathe.

There are many sections spread across the album where the drums are almost the centre of attention –not in the dreaded drum solo sense, but as a pulse to carry the light instrumentation and long notes.

The drums often get buried in the mix with rock and metal, but I can place every cymbal and tom that Harrison lays a stick to here. It is actually a wonderful headphone experience.

A sit-back listening experience

It Leads to This is almost entirely free of rough edges. I’m not going to say it is background music, but it is the sort of album that doesn’t leave you reaching for the skip button when that one song comes along. It is the sort of record you can just put on, sit down and blow through without being overly challenged or irritated.

It also comes in at around 40 minutes from start to finish and doesn’t outstay its welcome. I love my technical death metal as much as the next guy, but sometimes you need something calming and easier on the ears.

I’ve listened to it straight through three times and then started on Nothing But the Truth from 2021. I think they’re going to keep me busy for a little while.

I’m on Mastodon

It is far too easy to contribute to the noise and the anger in the world. It certainly pleases the algorithms, but it doesn’t please me. I suspect you’re not much of a fan of it, either.

I’ve been thinking about how I want to approach this blog from now on and, I’m going to focus on writing about the things that I find fascinating, or exciting.

By doing this I hope it’ll force me to look for the joy in this world, no matter how hard it may be to find. We have to build the world we want to live in and that means moving towards the things that light us up.

The exciting stuff

This week I have enjoyed reading about how France is giving Microsoft the boot. I’ve also been enjoying a 3rd party Qobuz client for Linux, called QBZ. It is in some ways better than the native Qobuz app on the platforms it does support.

I’ve also been enjoying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game I just didn’t understand what all the fuss was about when it arrived on the original Switch. It turns out the mistake I was making was in trying to finish it. I put around 40 hours into it back then, but it never clicked for me.

It is a game that just wants you to explore. To look under rocks, to talk to people and just soak in the world they have built.

That’s probably a lesson for life too. When you get to middle age it is easy to start becoming cynical, to stop wondering and stop being inquisitive.

Rediscovering the small web has reawakened some of that curiosity. I need to hold on to that.

I’m on Mastodon

Before big tech commandeered the internet from the people and pushed us to the margins, we had our own social network of sorts.

Not an algorithm, or a predatory data sponge to follow us around, but a simple hyperlink to another human’s homepage.

Rebuilding

This morning I had a feeling. A feeling of excitement as the building blocks of a new World Wide Web was forming. This isn’t another proprietary platform owned by yet another sociopath from the valley, but the old standards we used to rely on creaking slowly back to life.

The simple act of linking to another person’s personal blog or website was the foundation of the old web. It was a sign that you found enjoyment in that person’s efforts. Sometimes they would reciprocate and a web-ring would start to form.

Add a few more pages into the mix and you could theoretically spend hours reading what other humans had put their soul into.

Over on Mastodon, I discovered a guy named David had started a human-made web-ring, which you can find here: Human-Made

If you look up, you’ll find a Blogroll page has been added. These are a few of the blogs I’ve been following in an RSS reader. On that note, RSS is another foundational technology that big tech would like you to forget about.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a way for blogs to push out their content in a way that can be picked up by reader software. For us it is a way to follow a lot of blogs without needing to navigate to each one. You simply get a chronological feed in your reader. Meta and Google would rather keep you hooked on their algorithm instead.

My favourite RSS reader at the moment is (unfortunately) Mac and iOS only at the moment, but it is called Reeder. Reeder has the added benefit of giving you a way to also follow Youtube channels with none of the ads. It will also split any video or audio content in an RSS feed into a section of its own.

It costs around £10 per year, but it is more than worth it. These days I constantly seem to land on sites that want to share my browsing with thousands of ‘partners’. I know it is the way these sites make money, but do they need to be so invasive? Anyway, RSS readers skirt around all that.

Kagi Small Web

I’ve briefly mentioned this before, but the Kagi Small Web is proving to be an excellent resource. The search engine called Kagi has been compiling a very long list of smaller websites into the mother of all web-rings, organising them into categories and letting you browse through them at your leisure. There is also an app for iOS and Android, but you can check it out here: Kagi Small Web

It could just be that I’m in the the fediverse bubble, but I am getting a real kick out of the desire to wrestle back some control of the internet from the companies which have so far proved to be dreadful stewards of it.

The future is human-made, chronological and deliberate.

I’m on Mastodon

If you have been following along at home, lately I’ve been prattling on about the 90s internet for the past couple of posts, railing against the constant enshittification of the internet and the mind-boggling greed of some of the biggest companies in the world right now.

April Fools Day is one of those days where you can never quite trust what you see on the internet, which admittedly in 2026 takes some doing. However, Kagi, the premium search engine knocked everyone out of the water with this masterpiece.

I’ll have more to say on Kagi another time, but I just wanted to file this one for posterity. Seeing the Kagi homepage in the style of a mid-90s search engine was a joy to behold.

I’m on Mastodon

Whilst it is true that the internet is still out there, if you know how to find it, one thing I neglected to talk about was how it felt to be a teenager on the early internet.

Nostalgia continues to be a hell of a drug, but I don’t think it is right to ignore how much of an impression it left on me and my peers back then.

Different times

It is remarkable to think there was a time when most of us didn’t have an email address, or even a computer. Yes, some of my friends were lucky enough to have a Commodore Amiga or an Atari ST, which was mostly used for games but could be used for serious things too. PC’s were still hilariously expensive for 12-year-old me.

It was only the good fortune of a grandparent leaving money to me that enabled me to buy my first PC, a 486 DX2/66 with a whopping 4 Megabytes of RAM and a 170 Megabyte hard drive. The internet still wasn’t a feature at this stage, but we would share around floppy disks or CD-ROMs, or pick up a magazine with a disc selotaped to the cover.

It wasn’t until the mid-90s when we would be able to access the internet in the computer room in school. This ignited a spark.

Up until this point, information was something you would find in books…in the library, or from your teacher, or an Encarta CD-ROM(remember that?!).

Wait, you can just type something in to this search box and find something someone put on the internet? I can’t even…

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, the internet was mostly HTML pages we coded into one of a handful of editors doing the rounds at the time, along with low-resolution images and animated text. Even on a 56K modem pages would load pretty quickly and the plague of cookies and adtech was still a few years off.

We also had chat rooms, which at least to my eyes were civilised and fun. I understand they became quite sordid affairs a few years later when when the barriers to entry were much lower, but for us early-adopting nerds it was paradise.

Being able to reach someone on the other side of the world for the first time was incredible. I have family out in Canada which I hadn’t seen for about a decade by that point. I sent them a Christmas card and received an email back. An email, from halfway around the world!

Geocities

A big part of the online world back then was from sites like Geocities. This was a network of personal pages arranged in districts, affording people the freedom to code the websites of their dreams and have their own little corner of the web.

It would eventually be shuttered when its owner, Yahoo! began to circle the drain, with around 38 million pages disappearing with it. However, there is a project to turn those sites into a gallery, which you can find here.

Now

Skip forward a few decades and most of us spend our entire lives on the internet. We often have a number of email addresses, even fake ones we generate through a password manager to try to reduce the risk of our important ones falling into the wrong hands.

The internet today is awash with adtech, spyware and cookies from sites we haven’t even visited. We need multiple-megabit connections just to download things in a timely manner and a good proportion of what we see on the internet was put there by people with malicious intentions.

Some of the biggest companies on the planet are internet companies which make a living by making users dependent on it –the infinite scroll, the pull down to refresh, the engagement-farming, whilst producing nothing of value besides dopamine and the inevitable feeling of being used. It doesn’t matter, just so long as you look at the ads.

This didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual shift from brave new world to the all-encompassing void we see today. Slowly but surely the internet shifted from a passion project to an economic one, slowly enough that we didn’t stop to mourn its passing.

Perhaps the reason I have nostalgia for the early internet is because it exists in a different world to the one we are in now. To borrow a modern phrase for a moment, the vibes are very much off.

A new mission

The technology we had back then is still here. We still have the means to build simple websites –we apparently call them Static Websites now. Just HMTL, no database, no unnecessary bloat.

There are tools like Hugo for creating static sites, if you have a domain and a host to use it with, but you can also use services like Neocities or Nekoweb if you really want to go nuts, 90s style.

For now I’m happy just having somewhere to write, without messing around with layouts and colours, but I love looking at things people have made by themselves.

In the past twenty years we have gradually and unwittingly surrendered our creativity to an unthinking and unfeeling corporate machine.

A corporate machine which then stole what we had created, only to regurgitate it back to us, somehow worse than the original and with none of the soul.

Some call it AI, but we mostly call it slop.

Find me on Mastodon

Capital realised there were limits to how much useless junk it could sell to people.

But, what if they could get you to pay for things your brain would otherwise learn to do by itself?

What if they could get people to outsource cognitive functions like ’reading a document’ or ‘making some art’ to the point where they can’t do them anymore, but can pay $20 a month to replace what they’ve lost?

The whole world’s creativity on the hook to a US corporation for a monthly subscription. We’re already renting our culture, why not our brains too.

I really wish this was a joke.

Mastodon

I’ve referenced it in passing before, but I have a longing to rediscover the parts of the internet we’ve lost since it appeared to consolidate into a handful of massive sites.

Back in the 90s, before big business started taking an interest in this fertile new ground, the internet was a sea of small websites made (usually by hand) by people who really wanted to be there.

Small beginnings

The thing about the 90s was, we were limited by how quickly we could download data to our computers. I had a 56K modem back in the mid 90s, tiny by today’s standards but more than sufficient for basic HTML pages and low-res images. Unless you were minted, chances are you were connected using the only phone line into your home and you would get disconnected if someone else tried making a call. Simpler times.

The software to make websites back then was quite primitive. They were static HTML pages that looked ugly by today’s standards, but they were ours and we put our heart and soul into them.

Connecting them all together was a handful of search engines, such as Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo! They were mostly fine, Lycos being my go-to search engine, but Google would eventually come along and eat their lunch. However, by that point the profit motive was already starting to creep in.

The thing is, whilst the likes of Facebook and Youtube would come along towards the end of the 2000s and into the early 2010s and become the “only” parts of the internet people would see, the World Wide Web was still out there, it just wasn’t being seen by people unless it was a list of the best vacuum cleaners or coffee grinders.

This is why, if you search Google for anything, chances are you are only going to find pages of listicles or advertorials.

Advertisements Suck

The trouble with Google and search engines which also have an interest in selling their customers is, search results are often skewed towards pages that are good for Google and not for the person doing the searching.

This is why nearly every YouTube video is about a product, or it is trying to sell you on a lifestyle that will require a whole host of products.

Yes, if you look hard enough there are video essays about old products, or about subjects that go deeper than a swipe of your credit card, but they generally don’t do very well. Photography YouTubers who do product reviews gain a lot more traction than channels who talk about actually making photos.

This is why one of the original photography podcasts, which became a Youtube channel, called The Art of Photography now mostly does camera reviews.

There is another way…

How do we change this? Well, first up, you need to start blogging. I’m currently using Micro.blog. It costs around $5 per month, plus you might want a domain name, but it is not essential. There is also Bear Blog. Then just start writing about things that interest you.

But please, be yourself. Readers can spot AI slop from a mile away, so please don’t try to pass slop off as your own. Let your passion shine through, in your own voice.

Secondly, look for services where you can pay to make the ads go away. I have switched my video watching to Nebula, which costs around £30 per year and the revenue share for creators is apparently much better and they’re not at the mercy of an algorithm that only wants people to buy more crap they don’t really need.

In the UK we still have catch-up TV services like ITVx and Channel4, both offer the ability to remove the ads. ITVx (£5.99) and Channel4+ (£3.99) together are cheaper per month than Youtube Premium (£12.99).

There are also search engines like Kagi and Uruky which have a subscription attached, but will put what you are searching for at the top of the list not at the bottom beneath a dozen ads.

Kagi also has an app for iOS and Android called “Small Web”, which lets you browse through a list of small sites made by people like me…and hopefully you too.

You can also switch your social media to Mastodon, which is a network of instances scattered all around the world, some geographical, some built around hobbies or interests, but all with a shared timeline. It is ad-free, there’s no algorithm, and it is resolutely free from fascist billionaires. You may want to donate to your instance though, as hosting sadly isn’t free.

If you decide to give that a go, you’ll find me here.

I love the internet, I just don’t like how it feels right now. I’d like to think we can do something about that.

My Mastodon chum over at https://spacetimetech.wordpress.com is gathering some resources together to that end, so I’ll update this post when he’s published it. I just wanted to empty my head of things it had been chewing on lately.

Music is an intensely personal thing. Whilst the corporate world has tried to package it up into a shiny box to sell to the lowest bidder for decades, there is music being released every day that precious few will get to hear.

I’d like to briefly talk about the bands creating wonderful music that I feel are criminally under-appreciated. In no particular order, mind you…

The Chant

I’m sure I’ve talked about these guys before. I know I’ve mentioned Counting Hours at some stage. Anyway, Ilpo Paasela, the vocalist for Counting Hours has another band called The Chant.

Where Counting Hours is largely a death-doom affair, expertly mixing growls with cleans, The Chant is all cleans and arguably closer to the likes of Sisters of Mercy, or more recently HOST.

Their most recent single, Peace Underwater arrived during the pandemic and I was hopeful that more would follow, but things have gone a bit quiet since.

The best place to find them is on Bandcamp.

REMINA and Light Field Reverie

These are two project by Heike Langhans and Mike Lamb, which I like to call the Heikeverse. Both projects scratch a similar itch, but where REMINA is cosmic doom (doom with a hint of space travel), Light Field Reverie is more introspective and down to Earth.

Heike’s ethereal vocals coupled with a rich but occasionally oppressive soundscape makes for an absorbing ride. REMINA has two albums out now, Strata and The Silver Sea.

So far there is only one Light Field Reverie album out at the time of writing, called Another World, but there’s another one arriving in 2026. The first single, Ender, was released a few weeks ago.

Phendrana

This was a complete surprise when their new album, Cathexis arrived earlier in the year. Phendrana is a one-man-band project from Mexico-based Anuar Salum, in a similar vein to Saor and Sgàile.

It is atmospheric black metal, but with the confidence to put together an 18-minute masterpiece at the end of its four-track album.

I would kindly ask that you humour me this one time and have a listen to The Effigy & The Titan.

A single track with a number of different movements, rounding off a splendid album. Cathexis is a beautiful, confident and patient piece of work that you might expect from one of the prog titans, not a relatively unknown solo project. It’s an album of the year contender, no doubt.

I’m on Mastodon