I’ve realised that I’ve been holding back loads of stuff here, personal stuff, worky stuff, just general life stuff, certainly political stuff. On the one hand I feel the same risk that I hear from other people that stops them blogging at all and keeps them in walled gardens. On the other, I’m not even posting very much to the walled gardens. I’m hiding everything, because of the perceived need to hide something(s). And I’m not trying to tell anyone else what to do, but for me, I know that the risk of not sharing is greater than the risk of over-sharing. And while I’m kind of OK with insta and bluesky, I’m not posting much at all to FB and nothing to Substack – so it’s not even consistent (which might be ok?) and it all tends towards stuff staying on my hard drive or other places that only I can see.

So, if we met up for a coffee and you wanted to hear all my news, and all you’d got was my blogging and social media “output” then there’d be a lot of me talking and you probably being surprised. Because that’s the other effect of walled-garden-itis – the tendency to just share the good, shiny, positive stuff. And it’s not that I’ve got loads of bad, dull, negative stuff, just that life is life, y’know?

So what is there?

We’re living in Godalming now, did you know that? Yeah. Lovely. Very green and leafy. Our road only has houses on one side, the other side of the road is the back gardens of another street and the back gardens are all very long, and we’re higher up the hill than that other street and so our view consists of people’s garages, back hedges and then the trees that line the main road in the distance. At this time of year it’s gorgeous, so many greens. Even in the winter it’s heartwarming to look out over a bit of valley.

We have a baby. Yeah. Lovely. We had expected to do this earlier, like when we got married 11 years ago, but things didn’t work out until now. So I was thinking I’d be a dad again in my early fifties, rather than my early sixties, but it still works. in utero we called him Baby Nugget and we’re going to continue to do that online until he can express some other view. At home, he’s Nuggy, Nuggy-noo, Nugs, Nugmeister, Prince Nugbert, etc. And that’s how it will be here and everywhere else online. So if you have inside knowledge, please keep it to yourself and revel in being an insider. He is totally adorable, the best baby in town, smiley, and friendly all the time (except when he isn’t). He’s here in my office right now, in the moses basket, listening to Chopin Nocturnes while I write.

I’m finding that there’s a lot of muscle memory in child-rearing. If you didn’t know, the last time I did this was in the early nineties. There are some things that have changed, in terms of the advice that professionals give you, but there are also the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that have changed much more slowly. Writing in June 2026, we’re getting ready to give him a first taste of solid foods. Back in the day, that meant a lot of puree-ing and/or buying ready-made gloop. Now we are to give them (within reason) what we’re eating, just in smaller non-chokeable pieces.

One of the choices we’ve made is for us to attempt equal responsibility in child care. One of my favourite bits is taking him to church every week (we alternate between the URC in Guildford and the Unitarians in Godalming. Both congregations are lovely and he’s a big hit with everyone.

Laura is being paid her full salary to do her bit. My paternity leave is less formal and less well paid (not paid). But I’ve had a great six months to not only spend time with him, but get my head better around the sort of work that I want to be doing in this next phase, work that can allow me to spend more time with him and Laura than I did in the olden days when I was commuting to London every day and beating my head against brick walls at the Audit Commission.

And then there’s where I am with the old ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed for five years now and I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. Although there’s still a lot of undoing to face up to – and as with any process of learning and unlearning, there are always new things lurking behind the last thing you feel you’ve conquered. Forty years of either holding my nose, sucking it up and battling on or else wondering why work just didn’t work for me, why there was so much promise and so little delivery. There’s also a lot of crossover with my addiction recovery, with me realising which bits of my inventory aren’t actually character defects but traits of a differently working brain. The end result is the same – letting go of trying to fix them by myself – but it’s good to let go of some of the judgement, that was only reinforcing the judgement I was getting from people who didn’t get what was going on either. The key phrase from my Upper Sixth year head’s report is “he frustrates us all, and in the end himself, by burying his talents”. And that was 43 years ago, I didn’t get much less frustrated in the meantime and I know it drove lots of other people mad too.

I’ve written about 1000 words here and I haven’t even got close to talking here about paid work and I think I’ll leave it until there are actual things to announce, but I think it’s enough to say that I’m not retired (!) and whatever I do needs to fit into the context of all the previous paragraphs.

Two weeks later, what’s going on?

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Well, it’s hot again. And we’ve got a six-month-old baby. And time is feeling weird, here in my early sixties. I have an intention to write here every day, and I’m doing lots of writing in private, just not quite ready to lift its head out of the water or peek out from behind a curtain, or whatever.

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How about some logs of my web reading this morning?

Cory makes the distinction between the atrocious activities of point-haired bosses and the rest of us tinkering away with vibe-coding just the latest iteration of homebrew computing.

In there he also points to Wreccer which he describes as:

“a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems.”

which sounds interesting in a “dark forest” kind of a way. Depends on your definition of “small” in “small groups”, I suppose. Cory points to the github readme which is… brief and the site is invite-only, but somehow it grabbed my attention enough to write about it, so…

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Doug Belshaw points to folk.zone as an IndieWeb “collection of free, open-source internet services, federated social media, a writing platform, a git forge, a wiki, IRC, and more.”

I’m writing something about the human and technological building blocks of social infrastructure and I think this is what I hand-wavingly call “lightweight social tech”. It’s all NOT the big guys, and I think I’m OK defining things simply in terms of what horrible thing they’re not, right now.

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Hamish Campbell is pressing on in a similar vein, but not as hand-wavy as I am.

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Jay Springett is picking up on the subject of taste again. Taste, interfaces and discernment. It’s all very chewy.

like: “If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries.”

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I hope that, given the current situation, this linkblogging might be a way into me writing more consistently – back to the links and the thinks. I read some links and do some thinks pretty much every day, but it takes a little bit more effort to write them down, slap a random featured image on them and press publish.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

We’ll be doing the next in-person Living Culture Coffee Morning at Essex Hall this Friday, 5th from 10am. You should come if you’re around.

I just realised when I sat down that yesterday’s post wasn’t published. There’s an extra publishing step that I’m somehow tricking myself into thinking doesn’t exist (is a way of saying it’s my fault, not WordPress, but I do think actually that it’s WordPress’s fault). Maybe I need to go back to Wordland.

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I’ve liked the idea of being a sysadmin since I sat next to a bloke looking after an AS/400 for a large FMCG company in 1992. Looking over his shoulder, it looked pretty easy. He took longer lunchbreaks than the rest of us and I heard he was on a higher day rate too.

Today though, 40 mins of setting up a new VPS has already made me more weary than I can say.

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Dave pointed to Doug Belshaw’s Substrate which does look fiendishly interesting. It’s got that “made by AI” look (because it was) and that will make some people scream. But perhaps it’s better to be honest than to try to make something like look more it’s more organic.

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I think I may have just accidentally deleted a draft post that I wrote last week, thinking that it had already been published. Oh well, we’ll never know now!

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I’m working with an ADHD coach at the moment and it’s really helping.

One great insight of the last week or so is that the same actions I’ve learned to take to remedy the depletion of executive function (dysregulation) can also be used to reduce the chances of dysregulation in advance. And of course, prevention is better than cure, right? Because tired Lloyd is miserable *and* incapable Lloyd. So although it’s great that I’ve found gentle music (Chopin’s Nocturnes and my ‘Baroque Adagios’ playlist) to be calming and restorative at the end of the day, I can also start my day this way and give myself a better chance of making it through.

Another side of this is that looking at the shadow side of the characteristics of regulation give hints to what I might see as red flags warning of impending doom. So for example, in a regulated state, I find it easy to access compassion, but when/if i can spot myself sliding into rescuing, martyrdom or enabling then I’m getting a heads up not only that I’m doing things that I don’t want to do routinely, but also that I’m doing things that are likely to deplete my executive function.

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I’m also thinking a lot about how scenes get formed out of small groups and individuals. And what you can do to nurture and nourish such scenes and thereby increase the chances of some ‘scenius‘ emerging.

If you know me, you’ll know that I tend towards laissez-faire approaches to getting people together and helping them form relationships and networks and do useful stuff. But there are times when you have to do something more active or interventionist and remind people that you do know what you’re talking about. Another aspect of this is what Brian used to say at C4CC. When someone would describe us as ‘catalysts’ he would point out that catalysts remain unchanged once the reaction that they’ve helped get started is complete. It goes for the work we did at C4CC as a whole, but as I write, I think perhaps that at the time it was mostly about how we branded Tuttle Consulting.

Anyway, Dave Snowden has written a brilliant post that reminded me of all this, (and reassured me of my own preferences) as a continuation of his series on ‘trialectics’. If you’re allergic to theological explanations, then skip to the bit headed “Three Positions in Ordinary Language”.

I’ve fallen into the trap before of seeing these three positions as a ladder to be climbed, that I’m taking a more advanced stance by believing in innate capacity than those facilitators who think it’s their only job to fix some assumed deficit in the group or individuals. (Mutually) Transformative encounters can be very exciting (and/or disturbing) but they’re not a one-size-fits-all approach or the ultimate goal either. I’ve experienced the best work coming from taking what Dave calls an ‘aporetic’ stance (what a great word that is!) and being open to what’s really going on (and therefore which approach is needed) in the room. But this gives me a mental framework for it that makes much sense. The theological/historical background is the cherry on the top and fits well with conversations I’m having in Unitarian circles.

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Amazon tried to push some Peppa Pig at me this morning. Foolish algorithm that conflates “new parent” with “millennial cultural tastes”. My child will be fed Bill & Ben, Noggin The Nog and Bagpuss – they never did me any harm!

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Never a bad time (especially the week after a full moon) to revisit Rushkoff’s stuff here from Present Shock.