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The older I get, the more I realise that the only sensible response to an increasingly irrational world is to try and make nice things for people. And so I make music. Lots of it.
You can stream or buy my latest album Altruism's For The Poor at Bandcamp, where you can also explore my extensive discography of older material.
Looking for social media? Here's my Facebook Artist Page and Instagram. You can also follow me on Mastodon.
So here's my final blog entry for the year. I'm getting it in early, as I'll be fairly busy this evening and I'm going to need all of the caffeine I can lay my hands on so that I can stay awake long enough to see in the New Year at midnight, because unlike last year I'm not going to be able to get away with going to bed before twelve.
It should be fun, though. There will no doubt be a full report in the New Year's blog tomorrow morning, but I think I will probably be having a lie-in, given that I've been up by 08:30h for the last two days and believe me, I've really got out of the habit of doing that.
Right now, I'm seriously considering having a nap.
This blog has become one of the postiest Decembers I've had since I started the thing back in 2003, but I think I've run out of steam. I didn't get out of bed until late this morning. I woke up around eight, turned over and fell asleep again, then woke up again after ten and lay there, trying to ignore all my aches and pains and just thinking "Nope" for a good half an hour before I finally managed to drag myself out from under the duvet and stumble to the bathroom. When I weighed myself, I'd somehow managed to lose one-and-a-half pounds. Who on Earth manages to do that over Christmas, for goodness sake? It's just not done.
There was a brief break in the overcast this morning which provided the first burst of sunshine I've seen here all week, but it's dull and grey out there again at the moment. The weather has been intensely gloomy and as you may have noticed on the blog, so have I. Sorry about that. I'm tired and ill and generally not at my best at the moment.
At least I'm staying warm and dry in here—for the time being, at least; it's not quite as mild today as it has been for the last few days when temperatures were up in double figures, but the weather forecast for the tail end of this week is suggesting that temperatures could plummet to well below zero for a few days. There are also some fresh yellow warnings of wind across the country for Wednesday and Thursday.
Today I found myself wondering whether I missed the winters I had as a kid, when October and November were dependably foggy and we got regular falls of thick snow from November through until March. Well, yes, I miss the calm and the quiet, and provided that I didn't have to go out in it for too long I loved the snow, but those intense fogs (some were so bad that if you stood under a streetlamp at night you could barely see a dim glow from the light at the top) were caused by air pollution which the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968 were supposed to prevent; the pollution back then killed thousands of people every winter (in 1952, the Great London Smog resulted in 12,000 deaths in just five days). I can remember getting lost in thick fog driving around Milton Keynes one bonfire night (so more air pollution would have been involved there, obviously) as late as 1992, just before the most recent overhaul of the Clean Air Act. Since then, the fogs haven't been as memorable and that's undoubtedly a good thing.
I mention this because while it's only been misty here, many parts of the UK have been experiencing thick fog over the past couple of days. NATS reported considerable disruption to flights, which is most unusual.
I've just posted a review of the seventy-eighth book which I've read this year. That's a couple more than I managed last year and I am in the process of reading several others which I'm hoping to finish before the year is out.
I went through a phase a few years ago of not reading so much, but from the amount of content I've posted on those two links, it seems to have passed. Perhaps it's because books were a means of escape for me when I was a kid, and we could all do with some form of escape the way things are going at the moment...
Yesterday I learned that the Parker Solar Probe has survived its closest ever approach to the sun at Christmas and is expected to start returning detailed telemetry from the encounter on New Year's Day.
The probe has just become the fastest object ever built by human beings. During its flyby of the sun this week it was travelling at 690,000 km/h or 428,000 mph. It needed to be going that fast to avoid melting, even though its heat shield is designed to protect it from temperatures reaching 1,650°C (that's 3,000°F).
I'm very much looking forward to reading about the discoveries it will have made.
Ever since I first heard it, I've been meaning to figure out Joe Dart's incredible bass part for Vulfpeck's track Dean Town and over the last couple of days I've been shut in the studio with my Fender Jazz Bass with the tune loaded into Ableton and slowed down a bit, working through it bar by bar to try and figure out exactly what Joe was doing.
Repeatedly. Obsessively, even.
I think I've got it figured out now, and it's a very satisfying feeling but oh boy, my hands hurt...
I had a nice day yesterday. I ate an unfeasibly large amount of roast vegetables (because you can never have too many roast potatoes) and the joint I got this year was just what I needed—a great improvement on last year's chicken lattice disappointment.
I've been cooking my own Christmas dinners for nearly forty years now, but I think I've finally got the hang of things. Once again I parboiled the potatoes for ten minutes well in advance and left them to dry out for a couple of hours before I drizzled olive oil over them and popped them in the oven for 35 minutes. They came out perfectly; so did the roast parsnips, which were parboiled for seven minutes and roasted for 25. This year I placed some frozen carrots under the joint to raise it off the baking tray, and after they'd soaked in the fat from the chicken and bacon, they tasted amazing. I also had a brainwave and weighed out just half of the sachet of onion sauce mix (a full packet always makes too much) and that turned out to make just the right amount. Even better, I used the other half with today's leftovers! As always, a generous sploosh of red wine got the gravy tasting just how I like it.
I didn't lapse into the traditional food coma afterwards, but I definitely felt sufficiently replete by the time I'd eaten my Christmas pudding. Tomorrow I'll be on the reduced-calorie day that I usually take on Tuesdays and Thursdays and taking things very easy. I'll leave the cheese and crackers (and the mandatory glass or two of port which accompanies them) for some other day, I reckon.
Talking of cheese and crackers—the new Wallace and Gromit film was a hoot, and I enjoyed nerding out with the absolutely ridiculous number of sight gags, Easter eggs and film references that Aardman had (as always) baked in to the production. I'm going to have to watch it many times (whilst pressing pause, rewinding, and no doubt watching sequences in slow motion) before I'm satisfied that I've picked up on even half of them but right out of the gate I picked up references to Cape Fear, The Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix, Mission: Impossible, Aliens, Batman Returns, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Italian Job, and The African Queen as well as nods to many of Aardman's other films (I particularly liked the cameo by the farmer from Sean The Sheep!)
Markus's listening party was also extremely enjoyable and many of my Bandcamp friends popped up in the chat over the three hours and twenty minutes for which the piece played.
One nice surprise was a video call from Andy and Sloane in the US. We chatted for quite a while about all sorts of stuff and it was lovely to catch up with them both.
Although I exchanged online greetings with plenty of people yesterday, Andy and Sloane were the only people with whom I had a real, spoken conversation. It would have been nice to hear from a few other people too, but I appreciate that I don't really play much of a part in anyone else's life these days.
I sat through the whole of the Doctor Who Christmas Special, but aside from the observation about the way that hotel rooms always seem to have one additional door which is always locked, I thought it was terrible. Murray Gold's tediously bombastic music was as gratingly overblown as it always is and the plot was so insubstantial it might as well have been written by ChatGPT instead of Steven Moffat (who used to be the show's most dependable writer of interesting plots, back in the day).
Given that the Time Lords have always been the masters of temporal shenanigans in the Doctor's Universe, it seemed highly unlikely that they would have let an establishment like the Time Hotel run without pretty close oversight; equally, it was a bit of a stretch that the Hotel's proprietors wouldn't know exactly what was going on when a TARDIS suddenly appeared in reception. The central Macguffin was so weak I actually snorted in disgust and the rest of the story was so flimsy that one decent shove would have brought it all crashing down arond the Doctor's ears. Lampshading the nonsensical way in which the Doctor acquired one plot device was not a satisfactory means of sweeping it under the carpet and showrunner RTD's standard trope of characters encountering a purportedly mortal threat early on in the proceedings which then turns out to be something twee and completely non-fatal instead was very much present and correct, because the show these days is rather obviously aimed exclusively at six-year-old children. And I groaned out loud at the final location card, because I'd seen that coming as soon as I read the episode title.
I think I'll be skipping all of next year's episodes, thanks.
It's that day again. Whatever you're doing today, I hope you're having a nice time doing it. I'm spending today at home and rather enjoying not having to go anywhere or do anything other than drink coffee and slowly eat my way through a pile of lebkuchen and mince pies. I think a glass or two of bucks fizz will be on the menu a bit later, but I had a lie-in until 10am this morning and I'm still letting the coffee and croissant that I had for breakfast settle.
I've only ever written a blog on the big day once before, back in 2020. That particular blog entry feels like an historical document now. Not knowing how the pandemic was going to play out meant that it was an anxious time for all of us. Although Covid is still out there, it hasn't been dominating my thoughts as much as it did. But it seems to have permanently altered the degree to which I've wanted to socialise with people over Christmas, and this year I'll be here on my own, doing many of the same things that kept me occupied over the holidays back then.
I'm not going to be firing up OBS just yet, though. I'm still not doing any live streams at the moment after calling a moratorium on my Twitch activities earlier in the year. I did so because quite frankly I wasn't seeing any return despite spending literally hundreds of man hours providing content for them. It's a mug's game, and I'd had enough. I'll still be getting much of today's entertainment online, but it won't be through that particular platform. At 20:00h the final listening party in Kid Arrow's series of compositions for advent gets under way. This evening's extravaganza will consist of three hours and twenty minutes of sublime deep ambient music from the mind of the German composer and multi-instrumentalist Markus Reuter and tonight's piece also features the guitar of the one and only Erik Emil Eskildsen. It promises to be a very special event.
Over the past four years I've suffered from at least one bout of Covid and at the moment I suspect (as I mentioned in the blog last month) that I'm feeling the aftereffects of that. I had a restless night last night and don't feel particularly great this morning—which is another good reason to spend the next few days in isolation.
Last night my watch says that I spent 41% of my sleep in NREM sleep. Back in January 2021 I would have considered that to be an exceptionally good night but today I feel knackered. So I'm just having one of those glasses of bucks fizz I mentioned to perk myself up a bit. Cheers!
I didn't notice what was going on outside yesterday evening because Ghostbusters (1984) was on the telly so of course I ended up watching that once again as I always do, but the camera in the back garden recorded the scene for posterity:
As you can see from the readouts at the bottom of the camera's display the temperature was rising rapidly and it was already much too warm for anything to stick, but it was definitely snowing. Today the weather is gloomy and overcast (although the roof is still putting out 1.5 kW at the moment) but the temperature is a ridiculous 12°C (53°F) and it's likely to remain like that for the rest of the week. That's three or four degrees warmer than average for this time of year, so I think it's safe to assume that last night was as close to a white Christmas as I'm going to get.
I've just checked the blog, and it looks like the last time I actually spent some of the Christmas period away from home was way back in 2016, which would have been the last time I stayed with my father; you can draw your own conclusions from the fact that even though I had a very nice meal with my brother Dave, my sister Annabelle, and their respective families at The Pigs on the 27th, we didn't include him in the proceedings and I only spent a couple of days at his house over in Norfolk before hastily returning home to spend the New Year here, alone...
While I've spent Christmas and New Year on my own here ever since, four years ago I spent Christmas here in complete isolation—not by choice, but because like much of the rest of the country, I was stuck in my Tier 3 bubble during the pandemic. So it turns out that it was four years ago today that I released my instrumental concept album Decembering on Bandcamp during a Christmas Eve live stream on Twitch and embarked on the prolific musical journey that continues to this day. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago at all. It certainly doesn't feel like I've released twenty-eight full-length albums since then, but the stats don't lie.
As I read through those blog posts from earlier Christmases, I realise just how incredibly stressed out I was, back when I was working. I really wasn't a very happy soul, was I? There's a pervading sense that I was yearning for a life where I could just stay at home all the time and focus on making music.
And lo and behold, I got what I wanted.
Today I got my phone to connect to the trail camera in the back garden and discovered once again that it hadn't been activated once overnight. Clearly the local wildlife (and the neighbourhood cats) had decided that they'd much rather hunker down somewhere a bit warmer. I don't blame them. After a run of nights where the temperature in the back garden dropped below freezing to -1°C (30°F), things were slightly warmer this morning but it's still only 1°C (34°F) outside right now.
When I first moved here and the house had its original windows and central heating boiler, I would have had to leave the heating on all night to keep warm in this sort of weather. That's no longer the case; the heating went off last night at 21:00h and when I got up at 08:00h this morning the house was still warm enough for me to head down to the kitchen and switch it back on without shivering. All the same, I have been very grateful to be able to retreat under a nice thick winter duvet for the last few nights and I've got an extra blanket on the top, just to make sure I don't wake up feeling cold in the middle of the night. It has the desired effect and I had another good night's sleep.
I encountered a folk saying I'd not heard before over the weekend, a piece of lore to do with the solstice: "When the days start getting longer, the cold starts getting stronger." It makes sense to me. But it doesn't look like it'll apply here just yet—at least, I don't think there's any possibility of getting a white Christmas here this year. The Met Office forecast for the next couple of days is for temperatures to drop no lower than 9°C (48°F). That's really mild for the time of year.
After running a couple of recording sessions out on location in Chipping Sodbury earlier this year and really enjoying the technical challenges of capturing a good sound in an unfamiliar environment, I've been slowly improving the equipment I have available to do this sort of thing. The first item of gear that I bought was a flight case for my trusty old Korg D3200 32-track digital recorder, because carrying it around in a canvas holdall was giving me the heeby-jeebies. I picked up a couple of very cheap condenser microphones a few months later. The MXL-990 that I bought cost less than £100 but it turned out to be so good that I've been using it as the main vocal mic in my home studio ever since.
When I recorded a full band for the first time back in the late 1980s, I was using the two dynamic microphones built into my Philips cassette recorder; I simply recorded everything at once while the whole band played live. I still have that boombox, but my approach is rather more sophisticated these days and I'd like to think that I'm considerably more tech savvy than I used to be. For a start, I tracked the drum parts of each song separately and didn't record the rest of the band until I was satisfied that I'd got what I needed (and I ended up tracking all the vocals in my home studio afterwards, which—in my humble opinion—got much better results).
All the same, when I got asked to record the sessions this year I soon realised that one important thing my setup lacked was a proper set of drum microphones. I was able to borrow a friend's set (thanks Geoff!) when we tracked the drums in Chipping Sodbury, and while they did the job admirably, I knew I'd eventually need to get a set of my own if I was going to do this sort of thing in the future. But it wasn't until I sat in with Nolly Getgood at Real World Studios back in July and spent a fascinating few hours in a practical session learning how to record drums properly with a seasoned professional that I felt I knew enough about the process to buy something that I could rely on to do what I needed it to do. This week I finally picked up what I reckon is exactly what I need at this point: a seven piece set (two small diaphragm condenser mics for the overheads, a beefy dynamic mic for the kick, and four dynamic mics for individual drums) that is made under licence in China for AKG. The reviews I've read have been excellent and it was less than a third of the price of the other drum mic sets that I'd been considering.
I also realised that miking drums would involve a lot more mic stands and XLR cables, so with the money I saved on the drum mics I've been acquiring more of those as well. I used to think that I needed to limit all cable lengths to preserve signal quality, but this year I discovered that the original design limit for a shielded XLR cable was a thousand feet (304 metres) so I don't worry about that any more. And you can never have too many cables, believe me.
I've invested in quite a bit of gear this year. And I've spent a fair bit of money on my own musical development, too. I've done so because I have realised that music is one part of my life which reliably gives me back much more than I've put into it. The musical experiences I've had over the past twelve months have been some of the best things that have ever happened to me. So I'm now at the point where not only am I able to provide a fully mobile, digital 32-track recording capability for local bands, I also have a pretty good idea of what to do to get good results in the process. My life has gone in some weird and unexpected directions in recent years, but that is not something I thought I'd ever be writing about on this blog. It makes me very happy.
It was the winter solstice this morning at 09:20h. But although today is the shortest day, it isn't the day when we get the latest sunset of the year; that's already happened. In fact it was nearly a week ago, when the sun set here at 16:00h. Tonight it will set two minutes later than that.
Confused? Don't be. It's the Equation of Time, innit?
Unless you live in America (where they do things differently) today's date is written down as 21/12, which means that it's International Rush Day and as I type this, I have their 1976 album 2112 blasting out of the speakers in the living room, because of course I do. It's still a great album. They're still one of my favourite bands.
I ambled down to The Plough yesterday afternoon for a catch-up with my buddy Paul over a couple of pints. It was a good session. There was a seasonal ale from Theakston's called Legendary Beer'd on tap, and it went down very nicely. And with that, I've fulfilled all my social engagements and I'm done with leaving the house for the year. I can just stay here at home.
After braving the crowds in Thornbury in the morning (I was being fitted for the frames of my new glasses, and I also had a few things I needed to pick up from the supermarket which were sold out on my last visit) the beer was very welcome indeed. I felt somewhat drained. I've never seen so much road traffic in Thornbury before, and every shop I visited was heaving. Mind you, the town is much, much bigger than it was when I started working in Filton nearly thirty years ago and stayed in a bed and breakfast in Sibland Road every week, heading out in the evenings to look for a house to buy and returning home to Milton Keynes in order to sell my house and wind up my other commitments there each weekend. Many of the fields which used to surround Thornbury back then are now housing estates. I know it's progress, and people have to live somewhere, but it makes me feel rather sad to see just how much building has happened on green field sites around here in recent years.
I think I've done all the shopping I need to do for the next week or so. I originally typed "I have everything I need for Christmas" just then but that's not really true; I've spent too many Christmases on my own, and that'll be the case this festive season once again. I used to think that this time of year would always be about sharing the company of family and friends, but for me things haven't turned out that way. I try not to get too maudlin about it these days, but I expect there will be many moments over the next week when my contentment (such that it is) with a life of quiet solitude evaporates, and all I'm left with is nostalgia (in its original, really not-so-good sense). When this happens I am really grateful to have my home recording studio ready and waiting upstairs, because making music is a great way for me to stop myself falling into intensely negative, ruminating thoughts. These can be particularly overwhelming at this time of year, as I'm sure they are for many others. A course of cognitive behavioural therapy has been a great help in coping with chronic depression, but why do you think I've been so prolific in releasing albums over the last few years? Quite frankly, it's been more effective than anything else I've tried as a treatment; as I said a few days ago, I suspect that making music is the reason why I'm still around. But on some days I still struggle, and yesterday seemed to be one of them. Last night, I'd had enough and I had gone to bed by 9pm.
I'll muddle through, as I always do. I've got films to watch, albums to listen to, mince pies to eat, and more than one bottle of buck's fizz to wash them down with. I might not have the Christmas I want, but the one I get will be enough. And wherever you are, whether you're with friends and family or celebrating on your own like me, I hope that your Christmas will prove to be more than sufficient.
I sent off another piece of music to Ingrid last night, and that should be the final composition for the album we're working on with Henry. I will add a few embellishments to the tracks when I have mixed in her contributions (but only if I feel that they could add something; if it all sounds fine as it is, I won't bother—and realising when that's the case is one of the most important lessons I've learned as a musician over the last twenty years) and then we'll be ready to release it. Yesterday, Henry emailed me the cover art he's produced for the project and I really like what he's come up with.
Now that all the pieces are under way, I totted up how much music we've made and it turns out that my initial estimate that we'd recorded about an hour of music fell rather short. The total run time of this album is going to end up being more than eighty minutes. That won't fit on a single CD, so we have genuinely recorded a double album!
I think we'll be releasing the project as a separate entity with its own Bandcamp page, but rest assured you'll hear all about it on the blog when we do.
I was rather surprised to discover that my sleep patterns have changed significantly over the last few weeks. As far as I can make out from my watch, they've become more "normal" because I'm now dropping into phases of NREM sleep lasting 90 minutes or more several times a night (I'm assuming that my watch figures this out when I don't move about as much in bed and my heartbeat slows down). I haven't seen such long stretches of restorative sleep happen since I first bought a device that could track my nights eight years ago, and I suspect that it's probably forty years or more since they did on a regular basis. NREM is supposed to occur in 90-minute phases like this; at any time other than Friday or Saturday night when I was working in my last job I would count myself lucky if they lasted twenty minutes.
Why the change? Well, even though I'm in a lot of pain these days, my stress levels are nowhere near as high as they were when I was still working full time. My sleep is no longer being curtailed by the demands of my alarm clock. Couple that with the fact that I'm completely worn out most of the time and I think we can put together a workable hypothesis about what's going on, don't you?
But I still woke up in the middle of the night last night. The bedroom felt cold, and when I got up this morning I realised why: the outside temperature dropped to -1°C (30°F) here last night. This isn't a sign of an impending white Christmas, however. Sadly, the forecast for the big day looks like I'll be seeing temperatures in double figures instead, which is pretty crazy for this time of year. That does mean my heating bills will be less, though. Swings and roundabouts...
I've been having fun working on pieces of music together with my friends Ingrid and Henry this month and in the process I've sort of ended up being the producer, mixer and mastering engineer for the project. I'm learning a lot, because both of my fellow musicians use instruments that I've never needed to mix before such as gongs, meditation bowls, violcello and other interesting objects that have tonal ranges and timbres with significant overlap. They need careful attention to get them to sit well in a mix together (and that's before I've sat down and figured out what I'm going to do in order to add the HFO touch to each composition). It's been challenging and fascinating work and the afternoons and evenings have been flying by. Though I say it myself, I think I've got quite good at creating a decent mix. Ingrid and Henry seem to be pleased with the results, too.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that it's been twenty years since I first got a broadband connection to the Internet. Back then I would never have imagined that it would enable to work on music with fellow musicians around the globe. But it's amazing how easy it is to send an audio file to the other side of the planet when you're getting speeds of 69.9 Mbps down and 18.5 Mbps up, as I did when I ran a speed test just now. I doubt I would have become as deeply obsessed with things like February Album Writing Month if it wasn't for the convenience of an always-on Internet connection fast enough to make downloading large files a practical proposition.
It's been years since my four-track Portastudio worked; I can't even remember the last time I bought a pack of C90s. As a result, all of the means of music production I use these days are completely reliant on access to the Internet, because all the tools I use on my computer were downloaded digitally. I can't remember the last time I bought a piece of music software that came on a CD or a Blu-Ray. This week I downloaded a new release of Ableton Live (2.9 Gb), a new version of Melodyne (just 85 Mb!), and a new EZDrummer expansion pack (4.3 Gb). And it only took a few minutes to do so; with the speeds I used to get with the modem I had when I first moved here, I wouldn't have considered trying that for a second. It would literally have taken days (and tied up my landline in the process so that I couldn't make or receive phone calls).
One thing I've learned to do at this time of year is to pay close attention to music company websites and email lists, because they will usually offer their customers a Christmas present in the shape of a free plugin or two for Digital Audio Workstation users. Universal Audio are currently giving away a very nice plate reverb until Christmas Eve, but I'd already bought the thing earlier in the year (it's very good, if rather processor-heavy). I didn't have the two parametric eq plugins which Eventide were offering, however (you'll need a free iLok account to activate them). I've already downloaded and installed both of them and I'm sure I'll be having fun with them over the next couple of days.
What was I saying about this month being the windiest I can remember? There's already another yellow warning for strong winds in the local weather forecast. That comes into effect at midnight on Saturday night and lasts until 21:00h on Sunday.
When I filled up the bird feeders this morning I noticed that the grill cover was on the floor again. Yesterday's strong winds continued into the night and while I was soaking in the bath a very strong squall hit; the rain was hammering on the windows for ten minutes or so, and then all was still.
This morning it's bright and sunny, which has not only lifted my mood a fair bit, it's also meant that the solar panels are putting out around 2.5 kW. Given that we're just a couple of days off the winter solstice (it takes place at 09:20h on Saturday morning here) that's pretty good going, I reckon.
Last night I managed the unthinkable: I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow, and that just never happens. My watch reckons that I spent 65% of last night absolutely dead to the world in deep, dreamless NREM sleep, too: a new record for me. It feels about right. Since I got back home I've been feeling the effects of sitting in the car for a couple of four-hour stretches over the weekend. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm sore and knackered. For the last couple of days I've felt so tired that even thinking about doing anything feels like too much of a challenge. The idea of drifting off under a nice warm duvet is a very attractive proposition at the moment, particularly after I've dragged myself out of bed to face the world once again. Coffee can only do so much, you know?
Mind you, I only managed to get a good night with the help of a couple of paracetamol, which I took right before going to bed. If I forget to take any, it's a very different story. Kidney stones, gall stones, a bunch of cysts, and what I suspect is arthritis all mean that I ache all over, all the time. When I'm asleep, the slightest movement can result in me waking up in the small hours of the morning wincing with pain. Once that's happened, I find it very difficult to settle back to sleep again. If I'm lucky, I'll doze a bit, but that's it.
But I'm not posting this as a "Woe is me" story and I'm well aware that my quality of life is far better than most; I'm incredibly fortunate to have a roof over my head and I'm lucky to have lived as long as I have, given that more than one of my friends didn't even make it to their fortieth birthdays. The older I get, the more frequently I find myself thinking about them and what they might have gone on to do had they survived. And every morning I wake up thankful that I no longer have to go out to work and can spend the day in my home studio making music instead. I was doing that until late last night, and it remains the principal thing which sustains me these days. Even when I'm totally exhausted, I still seem to be able to find the energy and motivation to fire up Ableton and see what sort of music I can make. If I was of a more mystical inclination, I might be tempted to go so far as to say that it feels like that's the reason that I'm still here.
But judging by the last few times I've spent a protracted amount of time driving anywhere, it's going to take me a week or so to recover what's left of my equilibrium and I'm not firing on all cylinders today. I have a bunch of things I really ought to be doing, but they'll just have to wait, because I'm simply not up to it. A walk to the Post Office and back is probably going to be the extent of my exertions for the next day or two. And to be honest, that's fine; I'm not stressing about it.
I've just had to go outside in order to retrieve my bins, which have been dancing around the cul-de-sac again. There's no named storm today, but even so the Met Office forecast for here this morning is for wind gusts of up to 40 mph. I'm pretty sure that this is the windiest year I've experienced while I've lived here, and I moved in nearly thirty years ago...
The last time I got myself a new pair of spectacles was in September 2020 so I've been meaning to get my eyes tested for a while now. Yesterday I finally got round to doing so, and was delighted to discover that my eyes do still work; it was also a great relief to be told that there were no signs of glaucoma or macular degeneration. I was surprised to find out that the reading glasses I got last time are still the right prescription for me; my close-up vision has hardly changed at all over the last four years so I ended up not spending anything like as much as I thought I was going to. I like it when that happens.
But my distance vision could be better, so I'll be getting a couple of pairs of new glasses for general wear. I'm sticking to what's become my trademark round frames for the pair I suspect I'll be wearing most, but the other pair will be a radically different look for me. When I get them, I'll post a selfie here on the blog so you can see just what the new me looks like.
Yes, I know that writing this sort of stuff is incredibly mundane but I was able to look in the blog and find out exactly when I last replaced my glasses and while my memory is pretty good, it's not as good as having a diary of sorts that I can access from any of my online devices. I think that's probably the main thing that keeps me posting new entries here. I've always been the sort of person who will occasionally wonder what it was I was doing on this date twenty years ago, and thanks to the wonders of HTML and CSS I can just go and look it up to find out: I'd just got my first ever home broadband connection and I was enthusiastically making thorough and very extensive use of it!
One thing that drove me to book this week's eye test was noticing that when I use the downstairs PC I've developed the habit of tilting my head back to get the monitors in focus. And I only noticed that because doing so regularly was making my neck ache. My old Ikea office desk is ancient; I bought it when I lived in Milton Keynes so it must be at least thirty years old but it's proved to be one of those items of furniture that does just what I need it to do and while some bits have fallen off over the years, it still gets the job done. One feature that I particularly like about it is that the height of the work surface and the monitor shelf above it can be adjusted individually.
This morning I took it apart and lowered the monitor shelf by a few centimetres. I've also nudged the screens a centimetre closer to my chair. I can already feel that my neck isn't as tense and I'm not straining as hard to read what's on my displays, which is a good thing. But oh boy, the amount of dust that had accumulated behind my screens since I last gave things a clean was astonishing and the amount of stationery and random clutter which I've been "keeping handy" on it has been drastically pruned. I'm now feeling rather pleased with myself thanks to the results of this (extremely minor) triumph of housekeeping.
But the fact that I can now hurt myself simply by reading something the wrong way is yet more confirmation that I'm beginning to get properly old. It sucks.
Yes, I took a few days off from regular blogging last week. I've been travelling and I covered more miles in the car this weekend than I've managed all year: 310 miles—and when I filled up at the village petrol station yesterday, the tank was still more than a quarter full. I'd just got back from my Christmas present delivery run to my brother David and his family in Orpington. It was nice to see them and chill out on their sofa with Fergus the Cavapoo.
I'm not a great fan of the M25, though. Traffic slowed to a standstill several times both on the way there and the way back. The main sticking point was the M25 junction with the A3, which is being widened so that traffic will no longer have to filter down to three lanes from four. Every junction where this happens on the M25 ends up grinding to a halt when traffic gets heavy (which is pretty much all of the time, these days). But at least this year the temperature was in the teens and the weather stayed dry, so I made much better time than I'd done back in 2010 when it took me more than eight hours to get to Orpington (and I ended up abandoning my car in a side street and walking the last half mile to my brother's house!)
Despite sitting in the car for more than three hours each way, it was a fairly active weekend and I smashed my daily step count on Saturday by more than 170%. I was glad to get back to my own bed last night, though; I slept like a log for the first time in three days.
I headed into London on Saturday night for this year's Nine Lessons at Kings Place, round the back of Kings Cross Station. It's always a highlight of my year, but when Robin bounded on to the stage to start things off, I was not expecting him to say, "Hello everybody, hello Chris in the front row, I'm psychic now; I greet everyone in the audience by name..."
Nor was I expecting the fabulous Bec Hill to rope me into her comedy skit involving Tom Jones's rendition of Randy Newman's classic song You Can Leave Your Hat On. Reader, I did not have "Helping Bec Hill take her top off" on my Nine Lessons bingo card this year, or any other. It was hilarious and I was almost helpless with laughter.
It was lovely to catch up with the gang, too—Robin (of course) but also Trent, Steve Pretty, Professor Chris Lintott, and the irrepressible Mitch Benn amongst many other incredible people. But I was in music nerd heaven when Robin introduced me to Dan Freeman (saying, "You liked that, didn't you? I knew you would!") after Dan had wowed the audience by improvising live onstage with his home-made MIDI controller mash-up, Blinky (a Mk 2 Ableton Push, a Korg Microcontroller, and a Numark Orbit all velcro'd to a neck from a Sadowsky bass). The guy could seriously shred and his bass work in particular had me nodding in enthusiastic approval. I thought I heard a Jan Hammer influence in what he was doing, and when we chatted after the show that turned out to be right on the money; Dan is a huge Jan Hammer fan, as am I. "What were you using for that lead line?" I asked him, expecting to get an answer that it was an exquisitely artisanal, custom-coded synth and sampler running in Ableton Live 12 (Dan does teach at Juilliard and Berklee, after all). Instead, I was amazed by his reply: "Serum." It's an industry-standard workhorse VST which I've had for several years and I'm ashamed to say that I've barely used my copy, because I either use hardware synths or my go-to soft synth, Arturia's Pigments. Clearly I'm going to have to do something about that, because it sounded amazing.
I keep on remembering bits of Saturday's show and grinning. It's done me a lot of good. The state of the world these days has made me realise just how much I need to be around clever, creative, funny, and above all empathic and compassionate people like Robin and his friends. We should all have people like them in our lives because they very genuinely make the world a better place, and I'm profoundly privileged and tremendously grateful that I do.
That was a good night.
This morning friends on social media were sharing photographs of a plant described as the "moonlight butterfly begonia" which were very obviously created using generative AI. You've probably already seen the images, because they've gone viral. Searching the web for corroboration of the plant's existence in reality was a bit of a giveaway because while my search engine returned dozens of equally fake-looking images, every single one of them originated from a single website belonging to the assholes who had created the shared image in the first place. In fact their ENTIRE website is filled with generative AI images and it appears to have been written by Chat GPT's even more retarded cousin. It's complete garbage, with an informational content of zero. And just in case you think I'm exaggerating here, a quick check with ZeroGPT confirmed this, with a selection of the fake image's accompanying text identified as being a whopping 84.4% AI-generated. Try it for yourself.
But they had added a little caption underneath their social media post which read, "This is not Ai" so it must be true, right?
Bastards.
As a source of reliable information, the Internet is a write-off. We need libraries now, more than ever before.
But what makes me truly incandescently angry is the ludicrously high energy cost of creating all that garbage in the first place. The results have no positive purpose at all; they provide no benefit. Publishing that website achieved nothing of any value. All its creators have done is contribute to global warming and the decline of humanity's critical thinking skills. If this is what our species thinks is progress, we're doomed.
I had to rescue the cover for my gas grill from the lawn this morning, so I can confirm that Storm Darragh is still very much with us. My neighbour Matthew found someone else's BBQ cover tangled up in his rose bush, folks down the road lost the gold star tree topper from the Christmas tree in their garden (fortunately their next-door neighbours found it on their doorstep) and according to the windy.com website the village will be getting gusts exceeding 40 mph for the rest of the day, so I haven't bothered to put the bins back out in their usual places just yet. There is still a yellow warning of wind in effect here, and that lasts until 18:00 today. It's not raining at the moment, but it's very gloomy and I'm only getting 0.25 kW out of the solar panels right now. The trail camera in the back garden hasn't picked up anything all weekend, not even a cat.
Even though the adrenaline of Friday night's gig has finally worn off, the wind was roaring around the house last night and as a result I didn't get much sleep for the second night running. Today that lack of sleep together with the weather are making me feel a bit blurry but also jittery, so the mug of coffee which I just finished will be the only one I drink today, I think. I hope I'll sleep more soundly tonight, but I'm not counting on it—even though the yellow warning of wind will expire at 6 pm, the forecast is for the stormy weather to continue here for another day; gusts of more than 30 mph are being predicted until well in to Monday morning.
I think I'll leave going out to do the last of my Christmas shopping for another day or two.
Over the past month or so I've been working on a musical project with friends in Germany and the United States, and things really seem to have come together this week. I emailed my collaborators with the latest mix I'd come up with, and they're happy with the results. So am I. I think we've also come up with a name for the project that we think is both appropriate and cool.
There's still a lot of work still to do, but I'm already feeling very excited by what we're doing. It's something very different from my usual work, and it's taken me in musical directions that I didn't expect at all. As a musician, I couldn't wish for anything better than that.
Thanks to my habit of watching the German version of MTV (which the big satellite dish can pick up for free) I have already lost Whamaggeddon. This was a disappointment, as last year I actually managed to win!
Obviously when I said "I'm going to take things very easy" what I actually meant was "I'm doing front of house sound for a gig in Chipping Sodbury Town Hall tonight." Because I did, and it was a joy to have the band set up on a nice big stage with plenty of room for them to stretch out and for me to crank up the PA. They sounded fantastic, even if I do say so myself (the audience seem to have agreed, and the keyboard player was told after the show that the band sounded amazing!)
We were sitting in the dressing room beforehand waiting to begin when everyone's phone went off. The government warning system had sent out a red warning of high winds and this system plays a warning tone at full volume, even if your phone is set to silent. It scared the crap out of me (and judging by the immediate response on social media this seems to have been the effect it had on plenty of other people as well). This was the fault of the latest named storm to hit the UK, Storm Darragh. The South West of England took the main brunt of things but everyone in South Gloucestershire seems to have been sent the warning as well, even though we were technically outside the area affected by the Met Office's red warning of wind.
When I got home just after midnight I had to retrieve my wheelie bins, which were sitting in the middle of the road. It was already very windy, even though the severe weather warning didn't come into effect until 3 am. When it did come into effect, I was outside in my pyjamas rescuing my bins once again, as they'd been noisily rolling around the cul-de-sac and had woken me up. I tried putting them back in their normal place about half an hour ago, but they just blew over again, so they're still tucked between the house and the garage and lying on their sides, which seems to be keeping them from escaping.
From the news this morning I think it's fair to say that Darragh is proving to be a rather more serious deal than Storm Bert. The local council recorded a wind gust of 55 mph and are still advising people that they should only travel if it is essential. A lot of events which were supposed to take place today have been cancelled. The South West has been clobbered and thousands of homes have no power, and friends are reporting trees down and fences blown over, so I seem to have been lucky here so far. Even so, I'm not going to count my chickens just yet. There's still a Met Office yellow warning for high winds in effect here, and that lasts until 6 pm tomorrow.
It's proving to be an interesting weekend; so much for taking it easy.
I had another very restful night last night. For what it's worth, my watch tells me I managed to spend 57% of it in NREM sleep (that's the vital, restorative kind necessary to avoid getting nasty things like Alzheimer's in old age). That is the second-best reading I've ever got, and my all-time best happened the night before. My assumption is that something has changed health-wise to cause this, and I've been musing about what it might have been. It can't just have been that delicious Chinese takeaway, surely?
The conclusion I've come to is that at some point in the last month or so I must have caught Covid again. I suspect that it happened back in October, because back then I blogged about getting a cold and then four days later I was complaining about being off my game. It must have clobbered me a lot harder than I realised at the time because both physically and cognitively I've been pretty shut down ever since, and the obvious explanation for this is that my body and mind were trying (not entirely successfully) to recover from the infection. I didn't really touch on things here on the blog, but at the end of November I went through an episode of feeling brutally, crushingly down for a couple of days; thankfully I seem to be over the worst of that now—but if I have been properly sick, that would explain why my depression was able to take hold as strongly as it did.
I'm rather hoping that the improvement in my sleep patterns over the last couple of days is a sign that I'm finally starting to recover. I'm fed up of being under the weather to the degree that I've been recently. It's no fun. I'm going to proceed assuming that I am getting over a bout of Covid, and take things very easy for the rest of this month, though.
It would be highly remiss of me not to point out that it's the last Bandcamp Friday of 2024 today. You can find a ridiculous amount of my music to stream or buy on my discography page there and if you want to know more about the musical adventures that I have, Chris's Music Page has all the details that you could possibly want. I have several rather epic projects already organized for next year, too. They're going to be very cool, believe me.
I spent yesterday afternoon putting the Christmas tree together and covering it (and the rest of the living room) with decorations and LED lights. It's not quite the earliest in the month since I moved here in 1995 that I've got my act together sufficiently enough to reassemble my artificial tree (the current model is getting on for twenty years old); last year I'd managed to do so by December 2nd but up until 2023 the date the decorations went up was getting later and later. Why?
Because I was becoming increasingly leery of balancing precariously on a stepladder that was several feet too short to be safe and then hauling myself through the hatch into the loft so I could retrieve everything. I'm not getting any younger, and each time I did this I was thinking to myself just how stupidly risky the process was. Getting back down again was even worse. Having a loft ladder fitted last year has removed all of the faff and the danger from the task—no more anxiety over the possibility of serious injury, hooray! When I was done, I proudly messaged Helen on Whatsapp with a photograph of the results of my endeavours and she replied that her neighbours had just invited her next door; partly to admire their own freshly-decorated tree, but mostly because they'd declared that it was wine o'clock up in Otley. This sounded like such a good idea that I followed suit and opened a bottle of Malbec for myself (and I've still got half of it left; I have a glass right here and while I don't normally drink during the week any more, it's going down very nicely indeed). Let the festive season begin!
And while I was at it, I popped over to the village's Chinese takeaway for a bag of spring rolls and a portion of Singapore fried rice; I might weigh less right now than I have done at any other point in the last twenty-five years, but I do not intend starving myself. Life is much too short for that.
It was very definitely the right thing to do. I spent a quiet evening in front of the television watching the extras on the box set of Star Trek: Discovery that I picked up during the Black Friday sales (for £20 off the recommended retail price, which is not too shabby at all) and then headed off to bed. This morning I could tell I'd had a restful night but even so I was astonished when I synchronised my watch with the fitness app on my phone and saw that I'd set a personal best sleep score, spending a whopping 60% of the night in deep, NREM sleep. Chinese food is comfort food for me. Evidently it does me good, too!
My music collection gained two more music releases mixed for Dolby Atmos immersive audio this week: "Uncle" Tony Levin's latest solo album Bringing it down to the bass and the new album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World. They're both extremely good, and the Atmos mix of Tony's album in particular shows off the format to great effect by placing the listener right in the middle of what's going on.
I am so pleased with the modifications I made to my listening setup last month. I really get immersive audio now. I thought surround sound was great, but immersive audio is astonishing.
And if you're thinking that I'm a bit of a home audio nerd, you don't know the half of it. I have been since I was a teenager. Before then I didn't really have any opportunity to listen to music on anything more impressive than my precious transistor radio and once I heard what I'd been missing out on, I realised how much I needed to catch up. I've been obsessed about doing so ever since. I was blown away the first time I heard a television broadcast in NICAM stereo through the Marantz tower system that I had back in the 1980s and I could hardly believe my ears in the 1990s when I bought a television that could decode Dolby Pro Logic information and send a surround signal to its two rear speakers, which I'd placed behind the sofa. Things have moved on considerably since those days, to put it mildly. When Digital Versatile Disc technology arrived at the end of the 1990s, saying that I was a very enthusiastic early adopter doesn't even begin to convey how deeply I went down that particular rabbit hole. I thought I was being completely rational about the matter; I don't think anyone else who knows me would agree.
Yesterday Mastodon sent me a summary of how I did on their social media platform this year; I'd posted 420 times. Much to my surprise, this means that I'm in their top 5% of users.
If you want to follow me there, you can find me at headfirstonly@mastodon.social, which is where I've been since 2017.
There have been moments in recent months where I wasn't sure that I'd make it to December, but here we are. I still don't feel that great, but I went to a nice party last night and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
I guess the trick is to just take each day as it comes...
I've been thinking a lot this week about a poll that was posted on the Mastodon social media platform by user Shaterri. He asked a very simple question: "Who would you trust more: a total stranger in a Star Wars shirt, or a total stranger in a Star Trek shirt?" One thousand, eight hundred and forty people cast a vote (including me) and the results were remarkable: ninety-five percent of people (including me) indicated that they'd rather trust a person they didn't know if they were wearing a Star Trek shirt.
It would be easy (and lazy) to single out the two different communities which make up the fandom of both franchises as the reason for this, particularly because the long-standing toxicity of a certain element of the Star Wars fandom flared up again over the summer in response to Disney's latest Star Wars show, The Acolyte.
But personally speaking, I don't think that it was the reputation of either franchise's fandom which was driving that result. Frame the question differently by asking yourself if you'd want to live as an average citizen in the universes of either show, and the choice is pretty darn obvious. Simply put, Star Trek gives us an optimistic, inclusive view of humanity's future ("The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity") while Star Wars is set in a brutal, oppressive past ("long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away") full of unsavoury characters who you really wouldn't want to encounter ("You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.") Star Wars concerns itself with the acquisition of power over others, and the way power can corrupt those who possess it. For me, it only tangentially counts as science fiction. In addressing how to achieve the betterment of humanity Star Trek is the real deal, as I'll explain in a moment. But I want to take a moment to examine why it is that Disney are currently encountering problems in getting their Star Wars shows to meet financial expectations. It is, quite frankly, because they are written by people who:
(a) have appropriated the science fiction genre as a platform but have little or no knowledge of its conventions, references, or sources,
(b) who are not seasoned writers of such material, and
(c) are ridiculously, stupefyingly ignorant of how mature human beings (and the rest of the Universe) work.
No, I don't think I'm being unfair in that assessment. In the case of The Acolyte I realised that I was watching garbage at the point in an early episode when a character puts on a spacesuit to go outside their ship—because there's no air in space, after all—where they proceed to use a fire extinguisher to put out a fire (and if you can't see what the problem is with that, I suggest that you read the sentence again). Make no mistake: it was the quality of the show's writing—not toxic fandom—which got The Acolyte cancelled. According to an insider who spoke to Forbes magazine, viewing numbers had already cratered by the second episode. The show just wasn't very good.
The antagonist in The Acolyte is an amoral, overwhelmingly powerful superbeing who gets anything and everything they want by murdering anyone who gets in their way. They don't have to spend time interacting in any meaningful way with any of the other characters, not because they're not interested in compromise or negotiation to achieve mutually beneficial solutions, but because such things are irrelevant to them (or, more accurately, because if they were to do so, the writers would have had to come up with convincing dialogue to make it happen, and that was quite clearly entirely beyond their abilities—because they've never worked with proper grown-ups and don't know how such people behave). So instead, we end up with an unadorned male power fantasy, the sort beloved of the spoilt "man-babies" (a.k.a. "neckbeards") of the franchise's fandom whose poor behaviour has become so notorious that it's become a popular trope in its own right on shows like The Simpsons and just the sort of thing that any socially isolated and unpopular eight-year-old boy would be likely to come up with. It's lazy, piss-poor writing. But the rest of the Star Wars franchise suffers from the same faults to some degree or other. If you think I'm exaggerating, pay attention to the dialogue in any scene featuring the Jedi Council from any show in the franchise; it's a child's idea of how governments conduct themselves. It's not just embarrassing, it's painful to listen to. And notice, too, how often the new, young characters are shown getting the better of the old characters that were established in the original three films. Insecure, much? Jealous, perhaps?
If you look at the behaviour of most characters in the sequels to the original three Star Wars movies, there's an awful lot of petulance on display and let's face it, Luke is a whiny, petulant brat for at least the whole of Episode IV. Psychological problems abound throughout the saga, which seems odd when you realise that the people you're following on this journey are supposed to be the movers and shakers of the destiny of an entire galaxy. You've only got to look at the recurrence of daddy issues (Luke and Anakin; Kylo and Han; Rey and her grandfather; Ezra and his parents; Jyn and Galen; Grogu and Djinn) to realise that there's something unsaid going on here.
Conflicts are almost always only solvable through violence; that's much easier to write than a resolution which requires intelligence, reasoning or cunning. Even so, it's not easy to write stories where characters are able to pull off convincing military stratagems without having extensive knowledge of the history of warfare. Without it, you just end up with your heroes walking into ambush after ambush and yes, I'm looking right at you, Clone Wars. But it's the appeal of all that conflict that's the truly disturbing part of Star Wars fandom as far as I'm concerned. The Empire of Star Wars has always been overtly fascist; some elements of fandom clearly go for that sort of thing in a big way (and if you don't believe that, all I can do for you is to observe that there's a whole ISO quality-assured organisation out there who love to dress up as stormtroopers, and then gesture helplessly at the results of this year's US presidential election). The more forcefully (aha!) that the Jedi have been portrayed as standing in opposition to that, the more the franchise gets criticised for being too "woke" (even if, when you examine the films and TV series closely, the core values of the Jedi Order are remarkably nebulous and as an organization that is ostensibly at the core of the galactic government, they are staggeringly and comically inept).
Is it any wonder that people felt like they were unable to trust someone for whom the Star Wars universe holds such attraction that they bought themselves a relevant t-shirt?
In stark contrast, Star Trek is frequently described as competence porn because the show's heroes usually (not always, no, but certainly most often) manage to achieve a satisfactory outcome without resorting to space battles or waving laser swords about. It's interesting how that TV Tropes page I just linked to bemoans the lack of infighting, dead-end ideas, or crippling bureaucracy represented in the show as somehow being a bad thing. That's the whole point of the show; it's powerfully optimistic and gloriously aspirational. It shows us how much better we could be as a species, and god knows we could do with a lot more of that right now. At the end of each episode, the show's protagonists have come out on top by being smart and using their intelligence rather than by coercing people by vaguely waving their arms about or cutting them in half with a light sabre. To write a show like Star Trek, you have to be smart, intelligent, skilled in diplomacy, cultured, and have an awareness of what being supremely competent at your job would be like. Many of the writers for the original series of the show were supremely competent, ranked among science fiction's all-time finest: Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad, Fredric Brown, and Theodore Sturgeon all contributed episodes. Even though he hated the end result (because it's Harlan we're talking about here), Ellison won a Hugo award for The City On The Edge Of Forever and The Menagerie earned the show's creator Gene Roddenberry one as well. Gene had a major in police science and served in the military during World War II (he flew combat missions with the United States Air Force). His team could talk the talk, because they had walked the walk. And Trek has always been woke, because that's who Gene Roddenberry was. So his characters are as well-versed in literature, history, philosophy and the rest of the humanities as they are in military operations and wider organisational practice.
Not all of Trek reaches the high standards set by The Original Series (TOS). As far as I'm concerned, Voyager (VOY), Enterprise (ENT), and Picard (PIC) frequently suffered from many of the same faults that have crippled the Star Wars franchise over the years and I can perhaps best illustrate the point I'm trying to make here by mentioning that those are the only three shows in the entire history of the franchise that I've never felt any need to add to my ever-growing library of shows that I keep on disc.
J. J. Abrams and his team's inability to understand human behaviour is just as much a reason why his Trek movies fail so dismally as is his obsession with turning them into Star Wars Lite; in the films of the so-called "Kelvin timeline", the crew of the Enterprise behave like spoilt, petulant teenagers because that's all the director and writers involved had personal experience of. To make matters worse, Abrams's idea of an exciting plot effectively gave Starfleet its own Darth Vader and Death Star (Peter Weller's character Admiral Marcus, and his ship the USS Vengeance—and isn't that a telling, profoundly non-Starfleet sort of name—in Star Trek: Into Darkness). Abrams completely misses the optimistic and aspirational aspects of the show and the result is a nasty, mean-spirited affair that feels exactly as if it was part of the Star Wars universe, in fact. Funny, that.
I've never got the feeling at any point watching the Star Wars films and television series that the lot of the ordinary people in that universe was ever going to be anything other than dismal. Quite frankly a show like Andor feels like it's going to be getting much too close to home; I literally found it too bleak to watch. But the most recent two series in the Star Trek franchise, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are both shining examples of the sort of television series that you watch to make yourself feel optimistic about the future. And goodness knows, at the moment we could do with as much of that as we can get.