When we have the ball, it’s a game and when we don’t, it’s a fight.
— Manuel Ugarte

Love this quote and why this player is quickly becoming a cult hero.

⚽ Oh my word. Arsenal getting pushed out at home. Amazing from the boys, 10 against 12. That referee was rubbish (and I don’t normally blame the ref for very much, they are also allowed to have an off day I suppose).

⚽️ C’mon Tamworth?!! Is that even how that is spelt? Love the FA cup because of all this weirdness.

Reading The Message by Ta-Nehesi Coates is a really difficult read. Not for how it’s written but the parallels it draws between black America and what is happening in Palestine at the hands by the Israelis. If a nation has done these things to people in its own borders, why are we surprised that it would support the same actions somewhere else.

Fuck Twitter. I noticed that Micro.blog allows you to cross post to Twitter, so I wanted to try it and see the flow. Somehow, in the brief seconds I was on there I found myself watching some Joe Rogan garbage with Mel Gibson talking about blue dyes curing cancer and just rattling off pharmaceutical names like they were characters in a show. What the fuck is happening on that piece of shit of a platform? Die platform. Die you abomination.

Always a good time when you discover a nice little coffee place within a decent setting.

As I look at these five men, I wonder if the world was favoured with better humans, what they could have done to change the world for the better. They are all complicit in a wide range of evil. For me however the ongoing racist and imperialist action against the Palestinian and Lebanese people, in the name of Israeli brutality and inhumanity, makes anything good they might have achieved practically irrelevant.

🥶❄️ It has been absolutely freezing in Toronto this last week. The coldest since we arrived here 2½ years ago.

Honestly America, you guys bringing the deranged 🍊 back into my newsfeed is just a dick move. Now whenever this old idiot has a brain fart and says stupid shit like he’s taking over Canada, Panama Canal and Greenland, it’s everywhere.

⚽️ I predict a proper drumming. 4-0 to Liverpool. But the boys have started with a little bit of desire at the moment. See how long that lasts.

After a decade of playing around with pizza making, I think I’ve finally dialed it in to my ideal combination. 250g dough and grate the cheese on top (sprinkles more evenly that way).

The BYD Seal. It was only a matter of time before the Chinese car industry started to produce something that ticks a lot of boxes. It might not have a future in North America or Europe (because of tariffs) but in other parts of the world?

Finished reading: Scalped Deluxe Edition Book Two by Jason Aaron 📚 . Tearing through these at the moment. If you like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Narcos or anything similar, this is for you.

Finished reading: Scalped Book One by Jason Aaron 📚. Easily one of the best comic book series ever made. Crime noir at its very best, with incredible art. I started reading this when it was being published monthly, really looking forward to finishing this story.

Here are my stats for 2024. Mega year for publishing on my site. No idea what happened in March but clearly I went turbo.

Reading Again

By my own standards I read a lot of books in 2024. Easily my biggest standout year since University I would argue. It was an incredible journey and one I can’t wait to better in 2025 (all this is thanks to the Toronto Public Library system which is magnificent).

Micro.blog played a very helpful role in cataloguing this transition as well. The bookshelf feature while not necessarily a core feature is one that I love to use and engage with.

Personal Finance

The Simple Path to Wealth was easily the most important book I read in 2024. It went straight to the top of my financial books that if you’ve not read you should absolutely do. It was an eye opener and something that I wish I had read 25 years ago. Having said that, some of the necessary financial plumbing to achieve some of the advice in the book wasn’t always easily accessible to those outside North America. Regardless, there is a way now and you should totally make the painful steps to get your finances in order. It took me over 5 months of wrangling and I am still working through a few things, but it is super important that you do this and this book is the easiest way to get you there.

Graphic Novels

Shubeik Lubeik was easily one of my favourite comics this year. It had some stiff competition, as I caught up with Saga which is immense and one of BKV’s best work (which is saying a lot as the man does not write anything that isn’t an 8/10). A Distant Neighbourhood was easily one of the best manga’s I have ever read. For someone like me in my 40s it totally hit the right notes, even though it was set in Japan.

Personal Growth and Hobbies

The Art and Business of Online Writing was incredibly instrumental in how I am looking to continue with my more considered writing on the web. I still believe in what I am doing at Stet, but clearly I am not using the various online platforms to the fullest extent. I read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. There were some good concepts in there. Seasonality of work and getting a matinee in the work month being two important ideas I will hopefully look to implement. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman was the book I think I needed the most. 2024 was not a year of major production and creativity. Work played a major role in destroying my mental health for a while, the wars in Gaza and Lebanon destroyed my drive because these side hobbies felt frivolous. This book framed things in a way to help me get over all of that. I did a ton of reading instead. I let ideas percolate in my head. It reminded me that it’s ok to have a seemingly less productive ‘season’ if that season was 8 months or more.

Cookbooks

One of the things that I didn’t catalogue are the plethora of cook books I checked out. Ottolenghi’s books Simple and Plenty More were great, Falastin being my favourite. I also bought Chef Jack’s Dig In and looking forward to trying a bunch of recipes in there. I also thought Joshua Weismann’s An Unapologetic Cookbook was excellent (his second book was less important to me).

⚽️ This Newcastle team is so well drilled on their press. Team can’t really do very much at all. So predictable.

⚽️ That’s more like it Rasmus. Finally doing something. Anything.

⚽️ They are being totally schooled. Everyone is having a shocking time of it.

⚽️ Oh my word. Dogshit. This team is dogshit.

Reading in 2024

9th of April was when it all happened. I walked into the public library to get a sheet of paper printed and left with a library card and 5 books under my arm. This then opened the door wide for me to borrow and read 39 books this year.

I remember a few years ago seeing some others online ‘claiming’ that they had read 40 books or more in a year and I honestly didn’t believe it was possible.

This year I found out how. When the price entry to a good book is free, then it can become a source of incredible joy (and knowledge) and 40 books is really not that large of a mountain to climb.

The beauty of course is that I am not limited to one way of ‘reading’. This year was the first time that I enjoyed a few audiobooks as well. As long as I am in North America, I have access to whatever I want (not always at exactly the time I want, but that’s ok).

Just rewatched Dune. Complete masterpiece. The sound. The costumes. The visual effects. All wrapped in excellent performances and a tight script. Escapism at its finest.

🏈 Watching my very first NFL game. I don’t know the rules or what is going on. Why are some of the players wearing fanny packs? Who are the coaches speaking to through their microphones? Why do the Steelers have one of the worst bland corporate looking logo I have ever seen? What is with the little towels the players have on their side?

🎄 Oh the lies we tell our kids for the sake of preserving the myth behind a man in a red suit. Merry Christmas everyone!

Christmas Message from Irish President Michael D. Higgins. I remember years ago listening to Higgins address the world during covid and being super impressed with his thoughtfulness, warmth and poignancy. This message is no less powerful but for very different reasons. The Irish have endured and come out on top. Here’s to the Palestinians and Lebanese achieving even a fraction of this type of success in the future.

Year of Kindness

2024 was a lot of things to me and most people I imagine. One thing I believe is that 2024 was not kind. The genocide in Palestine at the hands of the racist imperialist Israeli ethnostate (enabled and supported in full by the morally bankrupt Western governments) remains a particularly harrowing episode in our collective history as humans. These demons in Israel have lost their humanity. Human beings are not meant to do these atrocities to other humans, and certainly not celebrate it while doing it. If you’re an Israeli, or an Israeli-sympathiser that condones the slaughter of babies, children, women and men then you have also lost your humanity and I hope that your way of thinking is something that can be eradicated in the near future. You are the worst of what humanity had to offer in 2024, or even in the last 50 years - and you had a lot of competition. I wish you nothing but misery in all aspects of your life.

American politics continues to fall further down the toilet. Stupidity and social engineering at a mass scale has finally yielded the results that its creators intended. Total unaccountability and chaos to do what is right. People who barely have a grasp of the issues are being given weapons they don’t know what to do with.

Lebanon’s regular 20 year pummelling continues without missing a beat. Every fucking 20 years. I can’t recall a more unfortunate series of events, spanning decades, happening to a tiny collection of dirt. There will always be resistance to evil. The Israelis (and their sympathisers) seem to have forgotten this very simple fact.

All these events have played their toll on me. I am less able to function apart from work. My enthusiasm for my projects feel completely and utterly meaningless in the wake of some serious shit that is happening around the world, to people I care about. This has happened to me before. Part of me is broken, but I want to do something about it.

For 2025, my theme is kindness. Kindness to myself. Kindness to those around me. Kindness to those further away. We could all do with a little bit more kindness.

Design Complete

It took a minute - well actually it took around 7 years - but I finally got the site where I want it across text, photos and my bookshelf. The last two pages have been annoying me for years but it was fine until this morning when it was bloody not fine anymore. I also tweaked the colours a little so that they are both neutral both in normal and dark modes.

Over the last 20 years of playing around with websites I have wondered to myself why I bother spending time tweaking and fixing and sweating the pixel details. I’m not alone in this space as clearly many, many others have the same tinkering itch. It’s an itch that you can’t help but scratching away at. Leave it alone and it will be fine. Not that I spent ages over the last 7 years playing with the design (I would tweak once or twice a year), but my feeling now is that unless there is a major shift in what I do with my site, the design will remain consistent and the same for many, many years to come.

Finished reading: Just Enough Design by Taku Satoh 📚. I don’t tend to read a lot of books about design. This one hit all the right notes. The concepts being Japanese design by way of hodo-hodo. Tiny little book with short essays that showcased the designers thoughts. Loved it because it celebrated some of the best of what I feel is Japanese culture.

⚽️ Watching MU is seriously bad for my mental health. Highs are high. Lows are underground.

⚽️ What is going on with MU? I mean total capitulation to this Bournemouth team…at home.

The Cure has a new album and it’s amazing. 2024 has been a great year for my kind of music.

🎄Finally work is over for at least the coming week. Have a couple of emails to close out a couple of minor things, but then just total disconnect. It has been an incredibly challenging year but needless to say, a lot of life has happened in 2024. Looking forward to chilling with the kids and doing things that make me happy.

⚽️ What a shame man. 13 min is all he had in the tank for this game.

⚽️ Mason Mount is clearly a broken player. Made of fucking wheatabix.

⚽️ Pretty cagey game so far. Nothing serious been created. Just a lot of ball passing at the moment with plenty of errors from both sides.

Monument Valley is easily my favourite iOS game series (so much so I have a print above my desk). The third instalment of the series continues the fine tradition by adding a new way of moving around. The colours, design and music remain on point. If I had a ‘complaint’ it would be that there isn’t any merch I can get easily.

Tomorrow is Monument Valley III day. Something like 11 years after the first one was released.

I’m still not up to speed with what has happened in Syria. It feels like a civil war that started some 12 years ago. The rebels lost a few years ago, only they didn’t, rather they came back and managed to take over in a matter of a week? What the hell is going on here? Why now? Not that I feel anything but contempt for Bashar, but the whole thing has unfolded or unravelled during very curious timing…

⚽️ So many bodies in the middle of the park. Forest parking the bus here.

⚽️ I’m about to throw something at the TV.

⚽️ This team sucks so hard. Just shit.

⚽️ Slightly boring game. United has had a few good chances so can easily see this ending 3-1.

I missed posting one for 2024, but alas it was a bit of a strange year for the design of the website (went a little maximalist for a while there), back to clean lines that have defined this site for 7 years (?!) now.

❄️ First snowfalls in Toronto. One of my favourite scenes in Mad Men is of course the Carousel scene. Posting photos on my site allows me to briefly jump back and relive a year in seconds. It is one of the most powerful parts of any personal site (and probably the inherent power behind Instagram as well). So much life has happened. 2024 has been a wild ride.

🍁🍂 Do you know what is worse than garbage day? Garbage day when you have to collect all the leaves from around the house. On the bright side only have to deal with it once a year.

⚽️ Comfortable game in the end….first time in years? Now hate watching ManCity getting thumped. I’m all for it.

⚽️ Amad is having a bit of an off start to the game. Things are not connecting in the general manner we are used to him.

Got my winter tire on this weekend. Then somehow the battery in the car just stopped working. Have had to get a booster charger. Car problems have not been something I have had to deal with for years…

The ‘My Soundtrack’ feature on Amazon Music is easily one of my favourite finds related to music I’ve had in years. It’s like I’m listening to a radio station from my teens and twenties.

🍊 I got to say a big thank you ‘Merica for making everyone bend the knee to the tangerine. First up. Justin Trudeau. Feels more real this time that I am actually living in Canada.

For the last 5 weeks we have been hitting the Toronto pavements in search for a house. It’s been a brutal experience. What has surprised me sometimes is the level of mess that we have encountered in some of the homes we have visited. I mean in some cases it’s been really eye opening to see how some people choose to surround themselves with stuff. So. Much. Stuff.

I am a distance from being a true minimalist (or someone who has enough), but so many out there could really do with some Marie Kondo advice.

As I am getting older I am finding that I have increasingly become more and more sensitive to sound. Whether it’s the stuff blaring from the streets or my own kids going crazy while playing it all just impacts me, my thoughts and my mood. I have found that wearing my earphones increasingly more even if not listening to anything (or even not turned on) has helped me manage this a little.

⚽️ Hojlund and Zerkzee coming on at the same time? Love it.

⚽️ Rashfords link up play at the top is not going well. It’s like he’s doing this for the first time. Also the attack is just not getting it together for some reason.

⚽️ Luke Shaw first game since February. Wonder how long his current fitness streak will last.

⚽️ Not going to lie, I am pretty excited by the new formation. Never seen these players in this combination before so it’s going to be super interesting to see if this works. I’m all for it.

First hockey experience in Canada. I know long time coming but worth it.

Every once in a while I am reminded that I live in North America and that there are doofuses in power that have the ability to do things that contradict basic progress. Take Doug Ford’s war on bike lanes. What is this guy’s problem?

Actually liking Bluesky and the interactions/vibe of the place. Will still obviously be POSSE, but dipping in there and replying to things is a nice way to go (stuck a hell of a lot more than Threads).

America is a freedom to do something. While other developed countries are freedom from something.

☀️ Fresh Monday morning in Toronto. The world is a little better when the sun shines.

New York. New York.

I just got back from New York and still letting the whole experience unpack itself out of my brain. I’ve flown into Newark airport countless times but we would then head in the other direction towards Princeton. This time was different, we landed in Newark and headed east. As we approached the Manhattan Island, the landscape was a very familiar American highways construction. Looping freeways, lawyer billboards hugged the edges of the roads. The road twisted inbetween trees, that felt different to the ones we have in Canada, these were shorter in stature.

The first real signs of what was to come unveiled itself as we took the bend just before entering the Lincoln tunnel. I caught a glimpse of Bjarke Ingel’s VIA 57 West building (I had no idea what the thing was called but knew of the building). What I didn’t realise was that I was also looking at Hell’s Kitchen1. The view lasted a split second. I tried to grab my phone and take a pick, but the moment was over as we quickly turned into the Lincoln tunnel.

When we emerged on the other side, the transition to a startling density came almost instantly. Looking outside the car window it took my eyes a little while to fully grasp what we were driving through. A hyper dense city where every block is fully occupied by a building structure from edge to edge. In front of the buildings a slender pavement wraps around the structure. The biggest shock however was the limited space between the roads. The streets could barely fit one car down the centre, with another car width on either side for drop offs and pick ups - or as was exceedingly common, construction.

As we made our way through the chaos, the logistics of making this place function in a reasonable manner began to present themselves in real time. Life here would require an understanding of consequences and compromises. We were instantly given a demonstration. Traffic was bumper to bumper, blocked on all sides. And then an ambulance siren was heard behind us. There was literally nowhere to go. Intersection crossings had to be respected but there was no flexibility to allow emergency vehicles to pass.

The Grid

What totally captured my imagination was the grid. Not only the audacity to create something like this, but also the ability to implement and maintain this grid. It created a space unlike anything I have ever seen. My mind has accepted that cities were messy, organic constructions. Roads wind around as we built things sometimes around the natural world that existed. Sometimes we would tame the land to suit our very specific needs. The common element was that there was no consistent order within them.

Here however was an island that seemed completely flat and where there was a complete embodiment of a grid that was then turned up to the max by building straight up. I have lived in dense areas in my life, but this order to density to scale was a unique combination.

Someone had to wrangle this defining city element into existence. I had to find out more. Thankfully The Museum of the City of New York has collected all this information to celebrate and educate on this very unique city design aspect.

General Observations

  • Another defining element of what I imagined New York to be are all the elements that define a city. The yellow cabs were still there, but they did not occupy the same vibrancy I had previously imagined.
  • The entrances to the subway stations were inconspicuous, and was missing it’s own identity. Unlike the Metros in Europe there was no unifying sign that invited you in and announced itself. Rather New York has green railing with signs attached to the railings. To my mind this was a missed opportunity.
  • New York is a very live musical city. In the lobby of the hotel, on the short cruise boat that took us around, across Broadway avenue leading up to Time Square. Live music was everywhere.
  • It’s very difficult to truly appreciate massive structures from up close. So in NY your viewing angles are limited.
  • The body traffic was something I had not experienced since I was last in Asia.
  • Walking north/south (so crossing streets) became a little annoying. It felt like I was always walking and hitting a red light. Every. Single. Time. Maybe that’s just being in New York for the first time and it feels like that for everyone?
  • Its hard to explain, but this density and complete use of every portion of the available grid made it feel less real, made it feel like a theme park.
  • There was a little bit of self-importance on display by the locals. ‘Greatest City on Earth’. ‘Mega exclusive club’. ‘Insanely expensive apartment’. This is the kind of language that I have experienced in nearly every city I have been to (apart from the greatest city on earth moniker, that is reserved for American arrogance).

  1. A familiar name because of all the Daredevil comics I’ve read of the years. ↩︎

Ok I really hadn’t appreciated how tightly packed Manhattan actually is. It’s tiny and super densely packed…truly unlike any other place I have been to (and I’ve been to a lot of dense places).

⚽️ What a seriously painful miss. I mean that really should have gone in. Great cross from Fernandez.

⚽️ They just don’t play like a team. Just a bunch of individual moments and seriously bad passes.

Honestly I’m finding it hard to concentrate on my own passions and hobbies because they feel so trivial in comparison to what is going on in Gaza and Lebanon. A building next door to my cousins supermarket got bombed this week. My cousin was in the building at the time. Aside from the destruction one of the girls at the cashiers died. The utter randomness of hurt and destruction continues unchecked.