dhewi.co.uk

Looking back at my music purchases of 2022, there’s some current, but a whole lot from the 70s and early 80s. One of which, weirdly, is “Plastic Love”, by Mariya Takeuchi. I can’t remember, now, why I heard it and bought it. Now, though, I know that it was suddenly everywhere in the world starting a few years before I noticed it. I know this because my wife went on a Japaneses Disco deep dive one night, because somebody has made a new video for a song of the same era called “Sparkle”, by Tatsuro Yamashita....

So what is this site all about, then? Well, it’s not really FOR anything. And sometimes that’s the point. I have thoughts and like writing. Just my thing. I’m also tired of the modern internet, where only social media, “Big Tech” and unicorn platforms seem to count. Back a few years I blogged on Blogger, which became Blogspot, which then needed a Google log-in … and Google is one of the things I’m tired of....

When I was at school, I was oddly serious about school projects. I had a mild obsession with making them look like professional books or brochures. We didn’t have a computer, but I steered my parents into getting a proportional-spacing typewriter and used that (which dates this), and a photocopier to change sizing of chunks of text. I also scraped together enough cash to get a DeVilbiss Super 63A airbrush, an old second-hand compressor, and rigged a system that let me use the compressed air at my homemade homework desk....

We are shaped by our experiences more than most of us like to think. And I grew up religious. For all of my formative years, and quite a way into adulthood, religion was the dominant force in my life. So a very big part of how I look at the world has been formed by that. I see religion everywhere. It’s all religion. Especially the parts full of people who would look at me strangely for insisting on this, because religion is alien to them and they don’t understand it at all....

When Jack woke up, it was too quiet. Obviously it was dark, because it was the middle of the night. And naturally the house was quiet. But usually there was at least a bit of noise from the main road, and instead it was weirdly still. And dark, of course. A very strange time to wake up for no reason, in fact. From the bunk bed, Jack only had to raise his head to see out of the gap between the curtains, and it didn’t look as though anything was moving outside, either....