(also, continued apologies for ruining Tammy’s love of the Trader Joe’s Vanilla Chantilly cake)

Anyway, if they love a messageboard, maybe we just give it to them? I built Babble, a CLI-based tool that you can safely hand off to your agent swarm. It does all the usual things you’d expect of such a tool at this point; it’s fully self-documenting and there’s a skills file you can slot in to your agent workflow. The ‘forum’ it presents allows threads, at-mentions, and as of right now, emoji reaction support, because it’s a forum, after all. As well as all that, it comes with a web view so you can keep an eye on what they’re talking about, and even inject comments in the threads yourself, just in case they’re trying to pull a SkyNet.

Is it actually useful? Well, I’ve only been using it since Wednesday, and it has taken a little nudging to get the agents comfortable posting all over the place instead of confining themselves to one thread. But it’s at least interesting to see them leaving notes for each other. I’ve created a thread where they can ask for improvements to the board. I’ll likely wake up tomorrow to a massive moderation flame war and entrenched factions. Just like a proper board…

Continuing my middle-class parenting adventures, I am confused. The above is a pretty impressive playground; maybe not huge, but it has a three-level play structure with lots of different slide types, a merry-go-round, big swings and little swings, a dedicated toddler area, two glockenspiels and drums, as well as picnic tables and benches given shade by massive umbrella structures. Plus, it’s very blue. And yet, at 10am on a Sunday morning, it’s completely deserted. It doesn’t make sense — Maeryn and I have been to the playground that is almost equidistant from our house at the same time and it’s usually packed. So why don’t people go to Bicentennial Park? It even has better parking than West Fork!

There’s all sorts of Bluetooth things, and then a spurt of things from 2022 when Tammy and I were throwing around ideas for another escape room, this time having one room across three different time zones. We really went all out on this; I have rolls of NFC sticker tags hanging about, and I had built a working Pepper’s Ghost effect that would have been used, plus I had already had the idea to pull in (then quite early) models capable of voice cloning and facial recognition. We probably should have written more of it down…maybe when Maeryn is a little older, we can run a version of it…

Then there’s the more recent things. The RFID/NFC battery-less e-ink photoframe (which promises a lot more than it can deliver, but some photos come out really nicely on it), the Xteink mini e-readers, and then the influx of ESP32 stick devices. These were Matt Webb’s fault. An absolutely tiny form-factor (smaller than a pack of chewing gum!) and yet it has 8Mb of memory. Anyway, I now have 5 of these because…of reasons. Finally, the most recent arrival is the Cardputer ADV, which is similar to one of those sticks but it has a “full” keyboard and looks so 90s-hacker-coded that I feel like I’m in Sneakers every time I look at it.¹ Easily worth $30.

And then there’s Maeryn’s toys. When she got the Toniebox a couple of years ago, I did have a poke around at the state of reverse engineering, although sadly I came to the conclusion that it probably made sense just to play around with Creative Tonies instead of trying to flash (and likely brick) the Toniebox itself.

There’s also a competitor to Toniebox called Yoto, and one of the things that Yoto has going for it is that their Yoto Mini system is considerably smaller than a Toniebox², and while it doesn’t have the cute range of figurines, the cards are so much easier to pack for travel. Tammy found a great deal on the Mini recently, and it arrived this weekend. I hadn’t really paid that much attention to the system, but when she took it out of the box, I was struck by how fun and little it was, with a simple 16x16 LCD panel that can be used by stories for little icons as stories are playing.

Anyway, more out of idle curiosity than anything else, I searched to see if there was a similar reverse engineering effort. And instead I landed on the developer API page. I’m fairly sure my eyes widened as I saw API contracts, MQTT events detailed, and quickly found a Python wrapper. You can even point to content that isn’t on their servers…and you can alter that content and get button push information from the box itself over the internet. Five minutes later, I had the idea of “Daddy’s London Travelogue”, where I can send an update (with fun icons!) every day I’m going to be in the UK in September, and Maeryn can put in a card to get the latest update every evening.

Naturally, before 13:00 on Saturday, Claude and I had this working. But there’s even more. The way that the Yoto system works…it doesn’t really care if you swap files about. Even if you do it dynamically. You could use the two button presses from the device to make a simple game work. Which in itself would be fun, but there’s nothing stopping you from using a separate controller system (e.g. a tablet or phone or dedicated ESP32 device…) and using that to control the webapp that you host to alter what gets sent to the Yoto Mini.

It was at that point I had to physically separate myself from the computer, as I was already plotting something akin to an aural version of Knightmare³, and it would have sucked up the whole rest of my day. And funnily enough, a good part of the day I should be actually spending with Maeryn…

…but there’s always nights…

The search engine in question.

Most of this was two afternoons, and the second was spent fiddling with CSS and picking an embedding model that would be fine in a browser process¹.

I still can’t really tell you why I did it, either. I spent a good part of my free evenings in early July mainlining a lot of mid-90s BBC/C4 docs on the Internet and what it was going to do to us. Smiling at some bits and going “Oh, well, damn, you nailed that one.” Simultaneously re-reading The Invisibles to fully bask in that there’s-a-new-world-coming feeling². I’d never seen Visions before, somehow, and it just felt like something I wanted to cut up and process with 2026 open source technology.

If you really want to be afraid, I have over 500 editions of Horizon on my NAS and I think the world needs them to be searchable…

And yet, here I am, and I can’t imagine anything better. In another fifteen years, Maeryn will be eighteen, and I can’t imagine that, either, but I know it’ll be here faster than an eyeblink.

(there’s even a comment on the page from one of the VT people that made it happen!)

Ever since I first read the World Models paper, there has been a nagging irresistible thought at the back of my mind: “I want to try that out on Deathchase". And, to be fair, I have over the years spent a few Sunday nights trying to make it work. The RNN or the VAE code wasn’t the problem; I have working code on my old 1080Ti PC tower that trains well enough on the example toy racing world. The problem was somehow hooking it up to a Spectrum. I tried a lot of different approaches, including some major surgery to MAME, and I got tantalizingly close, to the point of hand-disassembling Z80 code to work out where information like lives and scores were being kept but never enough to really make it work in a fashion I could run a full training loop without it keeling over and dying a few iterations in.

(you know how this is going to go)

It popped up in my head again recently, and this time I asked Claude. It laughed, saying: “Why do you not just use zx, as it’s basically built exactly for what you want to do?” because I didn’t know it existed, you smug little SkyNet! And then we set to work.

The World Model paper is actually three different models. Firstly, a variational autoencoder (VAE) takes the pixels from the screen (resized in the paper to 64x64, in my code to 84x84) and compresses them down to a latent vector. Just 64 numbers to describe everything going on in every single frame fed into the model. This is then chained into a LSTM network, which takes the latent vectors and learns to predict what comes next. These two models together form the world model; eventually, you can feed a starting frame into the autoencoder and then ‘dream’ the entire sequence of the game inside the LSTM. And this is the trick that seemed magic in 2018; it’s annoyingly hard to do reinforcement learning or any sort of gradient descent work when you have to keep going back to the game state, perhaps in an awkwardly coded emulator. There’s a lot to go wrong. Here, the controller model trains directly on the dream world and then you transfer the trained controller model back to the real world…and it works! Mostly.

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flowchart LR
  o["obs oₜ
64×64 frame"]
  subgraph WM["world model · runs with no environment (the dream)"]
    direction LR
    V["V · VAE encoder
compress → zₜ ∈ ℝ³²"]
    M["M · MDN-RNN
predict P(zₜ₊₁ | zₜ, aₜ, hₜ)"]
    V -->|"zₜ"| M
  end
  o --> V
  M -->|"zₜ, hₜ"| C["C · controller
1 linear layer · ~900 params"]
  C -->|"aₜ"| E(["real environment"])
  E -->|"next frame"| o
  classDef ha fill:#2a2214,stroke:#eaa63f,stroke-width:2px,color:#f3e7d4;
  classDef ctl fill:#1b2130,stroke:#cfd6e2,stroke-width:2px,color:#eef2f8;
  classDef io fill:#141a26,stroke:#6b7688,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#c7d0de;
  class V,M ha; class C ctl; class o,E io;
  style WM fill:transparent,stroke:#eaa63f,stroke-width:1px,stroke-dasharray:5 5,color:#c69a52;
      

flowchart LR
  o["obs oₜ<br/>64×64 frame"]
  subgraph WM["world model · runs with no environment (the dream)"]
    direction LR
    V["V · VAE encoder<br/>compress → zₜ ∈ ℝ³²"]
    M["M · MDN-RNN<br/>predict P(zₜ₊₁ | zₜ, aₜ, hₜ)"]
    V -->|"zₜ"| M
  end
  o --> V
  M -->|"zₜ, hₜ"| C["C · controller<br/>1 linear layer · ~900 params"]
  C -->|"aₜ"| E(["real environment"])
  E -->|"next frame"| o
  classDef ha fill:#2a2214,stroke:#eaa63f,stroke-width:2px,color:#f3e7d4;
  classDef ctl fill:#1b2130,stroke:#cfd6e2,stroke-width:2px,color:#eef2f8;
  classDef io fill:#141a26,stroke:#6b7688,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#c7d0de;
  class V,M ha; class C ctl; class o,E io;
  style WM fill:transparent,stroke:#eaa63f,stroke-dasharray:5 5,color:#c69a52;

After spending an afternoon with Opus a couple of weeks ago, the first discovery was that Ha’s world model…just didn’t work very well for Deathchase. It did learn a grand plan of surviving…which was to slowly go through the first day, shoot at a few things, and simply sit tight when night falls. Which is a strategy, but one that would have got you slapped if you tried it back in the day round your friend’s house. Also, it does have a tendency to hit the trees a lot. But then I have that problem as well.

Despite that, looking at the dream sequences of the VAE model is spooky; you can see exactly what the model is seeing and, yep, well, it’s certainly Deathchase.

Anyhow, I was not to be stopped by that little failure. Because I kept reading these sorts of papers, and I specifically remembered DreamerV3 from DeepMind. Back in 2023 it pretty much set the new state of the art for autonomously playing Atari games. So Claude, myself, and the DGX Spark worked for a day or two to train a new model based on this new approach.

The DreamerV3 framework is a lot more complicated (see the image, yikes!), but I’d say that the too key points are: a CNN model to better capture what’s going on versus the older autoencoder, and a training regime that keeps the world model anchored to reality, with joint training focused on reconstructing the frame, optimising the reward, and whether the model has left the game in a playable state. And this works a lot better.

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flowchart LR
  prev["hₜ₋₁ · zₜ₋₁ · aₜ₋₁"] --> GRU["sequence model
GRU"]
  GRU --> H["hₜ
deterministic memory"]
  X["obs xₜ"] --> ENC["encoder
CNN"]
  ENC --> Q["representation q
posterior zₜ | hₜ, xₜ"]
  H --> Q
  H -.-> P["dynamics p
prior ẑₜ | hₜ · no obs"]
  Q -. "KL: pull prior → posterior" .-> P
  H --> S["state sₜ
(hₜ, zₜ)"]
  Q --> S
  S --> DEC["decoder → x̂ₜ"]
  S --> REW["reward → r̂ₜ"]
  S --> CON["continue → ĉₜ"]
  classDef dr fill:#123039,stroke:#43c0d0,stroke-width:2px,color:#dff3f6;
  classDef prior fill:#123039,stroke:#43c0d0,stroke-width:2px,stroke-dasharray:5 4,color:#dff3f6;
  classDef neut fill:#1b2130,stroke:#8b97ac,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#e9edf6;
  class GRU,H,Q,S dr; class P prior; class prev,X,ENC,DEC,REW,CON neut;
      

flowchart LR
  prev["hₜ₋₁ · zₜ₋₁ · aₜ₋₁"] --> GRU["sequence model<br/>GRU"]
  GRU --> H["hₜ<br/>deterministic memory"]
  X["obs xₜ"] --> ENC["encoder<br/>CNN"]
  ENC --> Q["representation q<br/>posterior zₜ | hₜ, xₜ"]
  H --> Q
  H -.-> P["dynamics p<br/>prior ẑₜ | hₜ · no obs"]
  Q -. "KL: pull prior → posterior" .-> P
  H --> S["state sₜ<br/>(hₜ, zₜ)"]
  Q --> S
  S --> DEC["decoder → x̂ₜ"]
  S --> REW["reward → r̂ₜ"]
  S --> CON["continue → ĉₜ"]
  classDef dr fill:#123039,stroke:#43c0d0,stroke-width:2px,color:#dff3f6;
  classDef prior fill:#123039,stroke:#43c0d0,stroke-dasharray:5 4,color:#dff3f6;
  classDef neut fill:#1b2130,stroke:#8b97ac,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#e9edf6;
  class GRU,H,Q,S dr; class P prior; class prev,X,ENC,DEC,REW,CON neut;

This is Dreamer dreaming of trees and motorbikes, learning how to ride in just 12,000 iterations.

And this is Dreamer playing the actual game, having learnt to ride safely and shoot things with 300k steps played in the imagined worlds¹

I think we can say it’s mostly solved at this point…but if you don’t believe me, then here’s five minutes of it playing without losing a life.

Of course, now that I had Deathchase sorted, I started thinking about other games. We’ve got another post coming that stays firmly in the 16K era, but is a touch more complicated…and another classic. We’ll be going to Ashby-de-la-Zouch…

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(80s bit is delayed a little for reasons. It’s done, but I just can’t face writing it up right now)

I find I can do more; this weekend, I trained a new model for work, yes, but I did two other things that I could have done myself, but it would have taken weeks and weeks of effort. Firstly, I finally started setting up the smart solar bird feeder I bought during a recent sale. But it wasn’t the brand I somehow assumed it was, and the only way to communicate with it is to use an iOS or Android app, and they want an extra $20/year for sharing the account. I sat down with Claude just after 13:00 on Saturday, and by 15:00, we had mapped out the entire API, pulled out a long-lived JWT token that allows me to authenticate whenever and where-ever, and built a small web server that produces a child-friendly set of HTML cards ready to show Maeryn just what birds have visited today, and hooking up the audio to BirdNET so it’s strictly speaking better AI than what the company is offering through the app alone.

Then, for a laugh on Sunday afternoon, I pointed Claude at the source code for Grid Wars. Every so often, I remember how fun that game was and then I rediscover that the Intel builds currently crash on MacOS. I told Claude to port it to a Rust WASM runtime that could be played in the browser. And damn if it didn’t just go ahead and do it. It required a little hand-holding to get the blur and gravity mesh effects just right…but I can now just play Grid Wars by serving up just a few files on a website¹. It is very strange having all these horizons just open up in front of you. And it is something of a siren call; just one more idea that you can run before bedtime, just one more run and you’ll be fixed. I feel like I have stepped away from the edge a couple of times already, but every Friday night, the AI abyss comes around again…

(Next week? Back to the 1980s)

It might be surprising, considering I grew up in the irony-poisoned Britain of the 90s, but the last 10 years in this country has made me somewhat patriotic. But that’s patriotic in the sense that I’m now a person who reads the Federalist papers, letters from the Civil War and the biographies of LBJ, and remembering that day in 2009 on the Mall. Patriotism in the sense of I’ll be damned if I let these people desecrate the founding documents of this country and the nation of immigrants that gave rise to the American Century. Patriotism in the service of bending the arc of the moral universe to justice. Patriotism in living our lives as a form of resistance, a happier life than I could ever have imagined, and worth fighting for.

Five words that changed America.

What I really wanted to do is meet up with everybody at Club Popular. But…while I had got to the point where I was relatively okay with going to concerts by myself (seriously, the hours spent awkwardly hanging about before the advent of mobile phones), I was absolutely not okay with making the trip from Bicester to London for a club night all by myself. I just couldn’t do it. Still a regret.

By 2006, I was still mostly lurking, but I had made a friend — Forest Pines, or Caitlin. And ILX had a band! Shimura Curves! ‘Ver Curves! Kate ‘Masonic Boom’, Anna, Frances, and Miss AMP! Krautrock and girl group harmonies! Zeitgeist songs like Noyfriend and Keep My Name Out of Your Blog (there isn’t another song that encapsulates the pre-Facebook Web 2.0 era as perfectly as the latter). They had an afternoon gig on a Sunday when I was already going to be going to London to see Johnny Boy. Suddenly, I was invited to a pre-gig pub meet up with Kate and Caitlin.

So I ended up drinking strawberry beer with them for several hours before we decided we’d better actually go to the Notting Hill Arts Club, Kate carrying her guitar through town. By that time, we’d also picked up Ed, another ILX regular. The concert itself is mostly lost to my memory, but I remember groupie cards kissed by individual band members, banter about Brown and Sticky, and the Berlin, 1973 ending of Stronger.

Even just all that would have made for a wonderful day. But I still had the second half. Johnny Boy at The Luminaire in Kilburn. I was, of course, back on my own, and resigned to standing sheepishly in the venue waiting for the band to come on stage. But it wasn’t quite to be. I’ll admit my memory does not give me perfect recall, but the way I remember it is this: I noticed a group of people sitting in a booth. One of whom I was damn sure was Kieron Gillen, who’d I known in an online sort of way since joining the Kenickie Mailing List back in 1997. Eventually, I worked past my shyness enough to go over and say hello. This was about two months before the first issue of Phonogram, so we talked about that, and me seeing Miss AMP earlier in the day. The idea of just randomly bumping into somebody I knew at a concert…it had just never happened to me before. And given how the day had gone so far, I was getting beyond giddy at this point.

Towards the end of the gig itself, I found myself dancing with him and Alex De Campi. The elation I had coming out of the venue and rushing to get the last train from Marylebone to Bicester North was something I hadn’t felt since that house party in Chapel Hill way back in 2003, or that time I went into the Carrboro woods to smash up a piñata for a late birthday celebration. On the journey back, I think I was plotting…or more realistically, fantasising about the potential of moving to London. Maybe every weekend could be like that, I thought, as I went past Haddenham & Thame Parkway.

Anyway, twenty years ago this week. I never did move to London; instead I took a rather different direction which sees me typing this in Cincinnati. Which I have to say has worked out very well for me, as I pause to think about Maeryn demanding I play drop dead again on the way home from daycare (Tammy: “With me, it’s Wheels On The Bus. There’s apparently a different vibe in Daddy’s car). And then this September, I’m going to be back in London again, Saint Etienne will likely play Popular, and I’ll smile, recognising all the names.

(nothing too much to worry about - an endoscopy to check on my acid reflux. And I did a reasonable job at staying offline from work on Thursday and Friday. So there.)

Anyway, a truncated week, and I feel like I let the opportunity of two days off mostly slip by without filling them properly, although watching Eno yet again (now that a new version is out every month on the Criterion Channel) did get me to start work on The Assembly Machine, of which I will probably talk a little more about in July when it’s slightly more stable.

It is Father’s Day, and I have the greatest Father’s Day present ever — the best LC! tour t-shirt ever made, and a Lego cement mixer to go along with it, as every Lego city needs the means of production so the city can grow and grow, right? I’m fairly sure that’s correct.

Oh, and I got complimented at the playground today for a t-shirt that is, perhaps, over 25 years old?

Back in the ’90s, things like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, David Brin’s Earth, and the Knowledge Navigator video from Apple — which is one of my secret origin stories — presented a different world, a world that was not taken. You can also see it in the documentary on General Magic, where their initial vision was very much ‘agentic’ before the Web came and killed them stone dead. You can catch glimpses of another world in The Net, which had indepth segments on anonymous FTP servers and USENET.

But whilst I agree with Drew that Google declaring war essentially on the rest of the web is a terrible idea, I’m also wondering: is it possible that the web itself is something that might need to go away? This is one of those things I keep toying with in the back of my head; I do not particularly want to live in a world where everybody lives in Sam Altman’s walled gardens.

The new frontier models are powerful and amazing, and everybody should have them. I remember arguing on the web a few years back that all I wanted was an army of trans cat girls with a lava lamp in their basement doing crazy things locally on Llama models. I still believe that (although I’ve moved on to Qwen models in 2026). I think democratizing these things to the extent that they run in everywhere is potentially as revolutionary a change as having a computer in every home.

But I’m starting to think: can we take that a bit further? Like: “No, son, we have Google at home.” What would it take ti give everybody had their own search engine at home? Could we put something akin to 2000-era Google on your PC / Mac / Laptop? What would that look like? Is it feasible? How does it update? Sure, it doesn’t solve the money problem, but it might help keep the open web alive.

Obviously a lot of this comes from the fact that I’m completely obsessed with search. If Google isn’t going to be the only search engine around any more, then maybe we have to look back to the situation that existed in the mid-to-late ’90s. Infoseek, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler, HotBot — all the different search engines that were the way we interacted with the web; each engine had its pluses and minuses and required a bit of knowledge (or research) to work out which one to use for what scenario.

What I envision is a three tier local system. Tier 0 is your emails and documents. Tier 1 is the main search engine, where something like 100m documents from the web can be searched locally. This engine is updated on a monthly basis based on a user’s explicit wishes and implicit signals from what they’re searching, drawing on the monthly Common Crawl dump to stay current. And then there’s Tier 2, which is the connection to the outside world. Paid API sources like Kagi, Bing, and anything else that you’d like to plug in. There would be a program on top of this¹ that would do routing for search queries, working out when a queries need to go to the outside world, or if they can be answered locally and delegating appropriately (balancing API costs and whatnot, obviously).

But who would build such a thing. Well…I have the local search engine prototyped already…

Almost twenty years ago, I bought a copy of The Complete New Yorker. This was a very interesting collection of DVDs that contained every copy of The New Yorker from 1925 until 2005. Spread across 8 DVDs, it had a proprietary viewing system locked down with DRM, but it was still quite a fun thing to have. The main problem was that the Mac version of the software was compiled for 68k Macs. This suddenly became a big issue when Apple switched off 68k Rosetta support; instead of 8 DVDs filled with decades of print, the collection ended up being a brick. Even the Windows software eventually bitrotted, and the collection has just been hanging out on my bookshelves waiting for the DVDs to fail.

Over the past decade, I have probably searched once or twice a year to see if anybody has cracked the DRM encryption. The closest I’ve ever got was this user over on GitHub, who cracked equivalent versions for Rolling Stone and Playboy. Hints were dropped that the New Yorker collection would soon follow, but that was two years ago, and things have been silent. But it did suggest there was some hope.

Enter Claude.

Claude Opus spent an afternoon this Saturday with the NSA’s Ghirda reverse engineering framework and comprehensively cracked the DRM. NewYorkerUnbound hosts little more than a simple Python script (with in-line dependencies, even!) that will take any file from the DVD set and produce an uncracked DJVU file, with an optional PDF export if you have the right support on your Linux box.

After almost 15 years of them sitting idle, I have 80 years of the New Yorker available again. Hurrah!

(I was so very excited that I didn’t do anything that I had actually planned to do this Saturday, which was probably a mistake…)

Next week: something longer…and perhaps a little more controversial, providing I can finish my Friday night thoughts on the future of the web, and the past of the information superhighway…

We have a brief interregnum of a week before the house is full again, this time with some of Tammy‘s high school friends, which means I have to clean the house to a slightly higher standard than when family comes (this mostly means: ‘probably do something with the IKEA circus tent and clear off all the DVDs waiting for encoding in the back bedroom). Otherwise, not a huge amount going on at the moment. We are doing Memorial Weekend DIY things, I have downloaded all of A Very Peculiar Practice for my pre-2000 TV viewing requirements, and this week at work is the end of an era as one of my close coworkers will be leaving this Friday which I am quite sad about. But he did get me this watch!¹

The family is visiting right now (hence the above; it’s not a regular Sunday thing, I promise), which means that Maeryn runs all over the house shouting ‘grandad!’ and has more people to pick her up than usual. We are also now doing a comedy turn pretending to be a cat and an extended performance act piece entitled “I Will Sleep On This Hard Table But Don’t Move Me Anywhere In The Direction Of My Actual Bed”. Definitely enjoying herself, and we’re visiting yet more of the area’s bizarrely fantastic playgrounds.

A few days left of the family visit, and it seems just a few days left of May too. Lots of new things coming in June…

An interesting article about indie record labels, which definitely undercuts a few popular narratives (though I say that as somebody who in the year 2026 still doesn’t have a streaming subscription)

The insanity of making NHPTV work

Sometimes, I get nostalgic for things that were just background radiation. We were and are not a Radio 4 household. The Shipping Forecast existed only as gags in comedy shows. But oh, I covet this poster. Sure, it may be sold out. But I have ways.

If you can read this, then a) the remote uploading process did in fact work, but more importantly, b) I made it to Atlanta. I was planning on writing things during the trip, but after I went into Buc-ee’s and experienced the madness, I just wanted to get out and on the road again. Besides, they didn’t have anywhere to sit? Which is just madness. You know what I like? A service station that knows what it’s there for and has seats for days.

Accept no substitutes. Even they come bearing an entire wall of jerky and the promise of petrol pumps that stretch over the horizon.

Anyway, it was a pretty uneventful trip, which I think is the best kind for an 8 hour drive. The hotel is pretty close to the Atlanta bypass, so I was able to avoid most of Atlanta itself (except for a short stop in Marietta for Cookout, because you have to). I am currently typing this in the courtyard of a very fancy shopping mall, decked out with a Balencigna, Valentin Statin, and Alexander McQueen. Basically, like Bicester Village except there’s no discounts and no Pret. s you can imagine, terribly lifeless, but it does have very sturdy marble benches (my knees remember that from January). Strangely, everything is shut. Like I know it’s 18:00 on a Sunday, and my ingrained feeling is to have a sausage roll and watch Time Team, but even the food hall is weirdly shut. You are an emblem of American excess and capitalism! Why aren’t you open? Oh, yeah, that’s probably right.

Okay, I am now of to find some Diet Coke to get me through the evening. This is in addition to the Diet Coke I brought in the car to get me through the week.

When I’ve told people of this plan, there’s a certain split. Americans cock their head at the drive time and then say “ah, that’s not that bad.” British people look at me as if I have completely lost my mind, given that it’s a longer trip than London to Edinburgh. But don’t worry! I will be bringing snacks. Of course, I normally load my iPad up with a host of British television the 1970s and 1980s for the plane ride…and while I can do that again, it’s probably not the best idea to try and watch any of it during the trip¹. So…podcasts? But I’m not really a podcast person. Seven hours of “Ian’s old ‘walk to Activision’ playlist from 2011”? That is somewhat more likely.

(I did look into going via train as well. Obviously, that just sent me into a spiral of “look at all the train lines China has built in the past 30 years!!” after seeing the Amtrak schedule)

I will also try and test my all-new remote posting set up next weekend, allowing me for the first time in over 10 years to post without out my personal laptop. Less exciting for all of you to be getting updates from Buc’ees, mind you…