Albums of the Year 2023
For everything else that 2023 may have been, or not been, there’s been a lot of excellent music. Here we are at the end of the year. Grab your headphones, hide from the world outside. Here are my favourite records of the year.
Shit and Shine - 2222 and Airport
S&S produces a lot of music, and a lot of it has never really connected with me. But this one does. By turns full of good beats, funny stories and weird noises. Excellent stuff.
Squid - O Monolith
I don’t love this quite as much as their first, but its still great. Spiky, post-punk loveliness.
Memorials - Women Against the Bomb
I was surprised by how much this stuck in my head. It’s the soundtrack to a film about the Greenham Common protests and isn’t subtle at all, but I keep finding myself singing little bits of it.
Lankum - False Lankum
This is my kind of folk music. Macabre, dark stories, told over shuddering bass and weird noises. Fabulous.
Hey Colossus - In Blood
Short and sweet, walls of fuzzy guitar noise.
Meatraffle - Superstructure
Cracking post-punk tunes with some wickedly funny lines. As you’d expect from a band called Meatraffle.
The Loving Paupers - Ladders
Gorgeous NY reggae. Their first album is equally good. Get to know.
The Mountain Goats - Jenny From Thebes
It’s the Mountain Goats. It’s a polished one, with horns and all. I love it.
Overmono - Good Lies
This is an absolute gem. Sits alongside Bicep’s Atlas in my mind, and that’s high praise.
Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - The Nation’s Most Central Location
Understated electronica. This one pulses and bubbles and fizzes. For fans of Pye Corner Audio, Demdike Stare and the like. I love this sort of thing.
Mungo’s Hi-FI - Past and Present
Mungo’s are a reliable source of bangers, but this one is wall to wall greatness. Absolute stomping tunes.
Reverend Kristine - SAVED
OK, this won’t be for everyone. It’s deeply weird and not an easy listen but its fascinating and very memorable. I love it. Very hard to describe. Give ‘All of my friends are going to hell’ a listen.
Belbury Poly - The Path
Sleeper hit for me. It’s very understated. All gentles tunes with a little folksy storytelling. Worth giving some time to. I love all this hauntology business.
Jellyskin - In Brine
Leeds Leeds Leeds. Bringer of Brine was my most listened track of the year, and ‘I was the first Tetrapod’ can’t have been far behind. Stomping techno-tinged wonky pop tunes.
James Ellis Ford - The Hum
I know nothing about this. Don’t know anything about the artist. Can’t remember how I found it. But it’s great.
Goat - Medicine
Everything these folk make is excellent and this one goes hard. Psych-folk? Alt-fusion? Chant-rock? The internet has no idea how to classify them. It doesn’t matter. This is ace.
Leeds International Film Festival 2023
And the film festival is done! Unlike some previous years where I’ve tried to review every single film in detail, this year I’ve decided to keep it light. So here are my Tweet-like short reviews of everything I watched. Let’s go!
Leeds International Film Festival 2023 Preview: Official Selection
It’s back. It’s nearly November, and that means it’s time to grab a copy of the film festival programme, a pencil and comfy chair. It’s time to start picking out the films to get excited about. It’s time to start working out quite how long it takes to get from the city centre up to the Hyde Park Picture House. It’s time to buy some tickets!
The programme launch, with its compilation trailer reel shown on a big screen in Vue has whetted the appetite, so now I’m diving into the list of films and trying to work out what I can see. The plan here is to do a post on each of the major strands, taking a look at what I’m excited about. In this post, I’ll start with the official selection. Let’s go!
Opening and Closing
The big name pictures that bookend the festival are reliably interesting. I’m definitely excited to see Poor Things, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos. I’ve loved a lot of his films. Dogtooth and Alps are probably due a rewatch - I remember enjoying them, but not a lot about them. The trio that followed (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite) are all certified bangers. Each very different and bonkers in their own ways but utterly compelling. The trailer for Poor Things looks pretty promising. A good pick for an opener.
All of which leaves closing film, Slow, with rather a hard act to follow. It sounds interesting enough but I’m not wildly excited about it. But I’ve misjudged a lot of small romances in the past. Sometimes the films that look a little bit dull on paper turn out to be memorable worlds that drag you in. We’ll see…
The rest of the selection…
I’m not going to look at every film, so much as pick out a handful that are calling to me loudly. And there’s a trio of films that are shouting the loudest. Anatomy of a Fall, Palme d’Or winner, looks like my kind of thriller. Meanwhile, Monster is the latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda - I loved both Shoplifters and Broker (both at previous LIFF screenings!) so am very excited for this one. Rounding out my top three is Sultana’s Dream: I din’t know anything about the director or the source material (though a 1905 sci-fi feminist text certainly has me interested!) but the trailer was jaw-droppingly beautiful.
After that, we move into a mix of the enjoyable, the interesting and the downright weird. Both The Queen of My Dreams and The Holdovers look pretty approachable. I don’t think I’m expecting anything particularly new or exciting from either but they look like they could be sa lot of fun.
After that we’ve got All of Us Strangers (Andrew Scott in a relationship with Paul Mescal from Aftersun!), The Breaking Ice (I’m a sucker for a story about small lives in China) and Kiddo (a chaotic law-breaking mother-daughter road-trip). And my picks are rounded out by a couple of seriously weird looking choices: Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (staged miracles in an attempt to be more saintly than the other members of your church) and Sweet Dreams (a Dutch colonial tale set in Indonesia. The trailer looked weird).
In short…
It’s an exciting looking selection. The main strand can occasionally be a little bit earnest and heavy. This year though, there’s a good mix and plenty that’s calling me loudly.
How this all works
I’ve not done a how-it-all-works post on here before. Truth be told, quite often I’d probably have struggled to tell you how it worked. Some nice ideas, often half-implemented, a distraction or two, and somehow there it was. Until it wasn’t… I’d regularly forget to sort out SSL certs, because I’d never got round to automating it. And writing a new post was surprisingly hard. Where did I have to put the files? What makes it build? And suddenly I’ve lost the will to work on it and gone off to do something else.
But no more! No. For I have re-organised, redesigned and reimplemented this site from top to bottom. So here’s a whistlestop tour through the web-stack.
September 2023 update: Yikes! This post is already outdated. I’ve started moving to automatically triggered AWS builds which seems like an exciting step!
Site code
The content of the site is essentially a bunch of text files. They’re plain text, with formatting done in Markdown. This makes them very simple to write. To make them look a little better than plain text though, and sort out all the pesky HTML we lean on Jekyll. There are heaps of static site generators out there. I first discovered Jekyll years ago so have largely stuck with it because its what I know.
When moving the site around I did toy with jumping to Hugo - it looks like a more modern sibling to Jekyll with a lot less code in ruby - but in the end I couldn’t really justify the work to learn a new framework. Most of the tangible benefits seemed to be in the build times. I do believe it is faster. But my site builds in Jekyll in … checks console … 0.53 seconds. Build time is just not a problem I need to fix right now.
Having run Jekyll, all of my text files are transformed into lovely HTML. I check my new post looks like it should and then its time to push the files up to the webserver. And here’s where the next big changes come in…
Containerise everything!
My webserver is a cheapish VPS. It’s not particularly well resourced but its sufficient for this site. Previously all the config for serving up my site was sat around on the VPS in a bunch of different files. This caused a few problems:
- Testing anything was basically impossible, there was no dev server at all.
- Migrating between VPS setups was an absolute pain. You could all but guarantee nothing would work.
So once we had the problems, how to solve them? Containers. I’ve now migrated the entire setup (this and a couple of other sites) into a handful of Docker containers, all held together by Docker Compose. It’s neat. It’s so neat I wish I’d done it years ago.
SSL Termination
One of the first good steps I took was to split out SSL termination. This means I’ve got one container, the one that’s exposed to the outside world and its whole job is to serve up SSL certificates for all three sites, and then just pass on requests to the relevant site’s container. Currently, this is running NGINX but I’ve got half an eye on replacing it with HAProxy.
The real joy of splitting out the SSL functionality is that I can run the actual sites themselves entirely without certificates. This makes testing changes much easier. I don’t need separate dev or localhost configs to run dev versions of these sites now - I simply start the container up anywhere and it just works exactly the same as the real site.
The rest
The other containers are largely very simple. The one that serves up this site is another very simple NGINX image with the HTML files from earlier injected as a volume. Sorted.
Version controlled config
And it’s all under git. Finally, I can test changes on a dev setup, commit them to the repo and then just run a pill, build and relaunch command to deploy my site changes. And be confident that they work.
A cloudy future?
Earlier on I mentioned the difficulty of migrating this setup. I’m now relatively confident that this is a solved problem - the whole site is now just a bunch of config and static files, all version controlled and easy to check out. This should make moving to any other VPS an absolute breeze. The exciting alternative though is to explore some of the ‘serverless’ options out there - AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. I’m not very experience with any of them but given that the basic modus operandi is spinning up Docker containers with the server-layer abstracted away, I’d say the site was primed ready to make the switch. Exciting times.
And lastly, here’s a bonus picture of “the internet illustrated in the style of The Matrix”, for no better reason than I really like it. You’re welcome.
All images generated with Midjourney
Why the internet is broken
The internet is garbage
The internet is garbage. Nearly all of it is awful. There are still pockets of good all over the place but the overwhelming trend towards big tech platforms, trapping you in walled gardens and exerting monopolistic power is incredibly depressing. What started out as a utopian dream now seems much more like a dystopian vision. Black Mirror episodes that once seemed outlandish are now basically history lessons.
It’s money. The relentless desire to monetise everything has pushed us down this road. For a good portion of Web 1.0 the internet was weirdly blasé about money. Services were generally free. People made stuff for the sake of it, out of interest or curiosity.
SEO has broken everything
Nowadays it’s all plastered with ads. They’re everywhere. And the places that aren’t actively ramming autoplaying video ads down your throat are busy collecting data about what you’re interested in so they can sell it to someone else to force feed you ads.
The inherent competition in selling ads (there’s only so much time anyone spends looking at the internet) means the push to be top of the search page heap and trample all your competitors is all consuming. SEO is a nightmare. Search engines are broken. Google is objectively much less useful for finding information on than it was a decade ago. Is this what progress looks like?
Communities are harder to find
One of the real paradoxes of how the internet has changed over the last 15 years is how much harder social media has made it to find real communities. The relentless drive to make every platform bigger and to suck in more and more users has torn apart the many weird little communities that spent years just doing their own thing. I spent years on forums: music, film, food, books - niche little worlds where people chattered away. Reddit, twitter and Facebook are a poor alternative. All 3 are clearly ailing and beginning to fall apart but it’s not at all clear what replaces them.
AI is the next wave of awful
As if all this wasn’t enough, here comes GPT. Why wade through tonnes of lazily churned out SEO optimised copy when you could instead drown in gigatonnes of AI generated SEO optimised copy? This is the future and it doesn’t look like the search engines are ready for it. If you thought that finding information was hard now, just wait till 90% of it is AI hallucinations lies.
Human voices
Unsurprisingly, I don’t have the answers to any of these problems. I’ve no idea how this is going to pan out. However it goes, though, I feel like the need for human voices, for recommendations, for curation, for selection, is only going to become more important. The AI generated playlists on Spotify are boring. The Netflix recommendation algorithm is terrible. And who’s going to trust an AI to review a restaurant?
As we drown in a sea of algorithmically generated junk, it feels inevitable that we’re going to long for human voices. But will it be too late?
All images generated with Midjourney (because of course they are!)