Way back, probably in 2003 or 2004, when I worked on the design magazine Icon, I interviewed Shin and Tomoko Azumi, leading designers of stools, chairs and homeware. I don’t remember much about it, beyond liking their elegant and minimal but expressive work and the ride along the North London Line to get to their home and studio. So when I stumbled on the article after restoring it to this website, along with a bunch of other ancient posts that had been locked away in a Wordpress backup, I noticed something that I’d entirely forgotten:

After their BA courses, Tomoko worked at architectural practices and Shin worked in the electronic giant NEC’s personal computer department where he designed the casing for the PC Engine Duo, the first CD-rom based videogame console.

Designed the PC Engine Duo?!

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The following morning I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.

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I struggle with the idea of taking black and white photographs, and yet I love them.

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I’ve long since unshackled my web browsing from social media and instead use RSS feeds to keep up with the haps. I love RSS (here’s mine) because it sprinkles in front of me the things I’m interested in and it’s independent of social media. I own my feed.

I treasure the independent web and want to see it flourish, so, as a minuscule effort to support the things I enjoy reading, here’s a selection of my subscriptions.

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I made an Apple Shortcut that texts a random one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cool Writing Ideas from the Commonplace Book to my wife and son every day. I think they will definitely love getting these daily for eternity.

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My career has never been the subject of anything before, so this is a weird one for me. The Back Page podcast, hosted by my friends Matt Castle and Samuel Roberts, asked me to join them and talk about my experiences as part of their apparent mission to collect all the Edge editors on the show.

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An assortment of photos that I took over 2023, mostly around Bath.

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So much of life is invisible, hard to define, harder to be sure of. So finding evidence of something you’ve maybe felt for weeks comes as a shock.

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Apparently, Humane’s lapel-squatting phone-replacing everything-device doesn’t “do apps”. It instead automatically chooses “AI experiences” to interpret and act on users’ commands.

I hate that they’re called “AI experiences”, because we’re inherently passive when we experience something: it happens to us. And yet we should be inherently active when we use a device. I wish these things were called “services”, because that’s what we should expect from a device that should be a tool.

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