Music
Books
Intermezzo -Sally Rooney
Ayoade on Ayoade – Richard Ayoade
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas – John Boyne
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April 2026
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March 2026
Music
Books
The Traitors Circle – Jonathan Freedland
438 Days – Jonathan Franklin
Mountains Of The Mind – Robert Macfarlane
Trouble With Lichen – John WyndhamScreen
Small Prophets Season 1
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Salem’s Lot
Rental Family
Black Mirror Season 3 -
Latin Joke
What did Julius Caesar say when he saw the small undernourished pagans of Britain?
Weeny weedy witchy!
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Why I won’t be using AI to help me make music
I’ve been seeing a lot of adverts for Suno recently to the point where I was temped to give it a go. I agree that the results are very impressive. It’s incredible how quickly you can go from an idea to a fully finished song.
Suno is definitely quicker than I am. I could use this tool to churn out a song every day very quickly. (If you weren’t aware I have been writing a song every day for 784 days). It probably makes better songs with more interesting parts and at a higher quality than I can. It might be true that right now the music is generic and derivative, but this could soon change.
So why won’t I be using it? Simply this – I enjoy the process of making music. I don’t want to give that joy and pleasure to a machine, I want to agnonize over songs that are carefully constructed and enjoy all the details.
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The Pink Moon Palindrome
I cannot get enough of Pink Moon. I have learnt to play it note for note. One of the things I have observed is that there is a sense in which the album works like a palindrome. This is particularly noticable when you look at the tunings for each song:
- Pink Moon (CGCFCE)
- Place To Be (CGCFGE)
- Road (EADEBE)
- Which Will (CGCFCE)
- Horn (probably EADGBE)
- Things Behind The Sun (EADGBE)
- Know (probably EADGBE)
- Parasite (CGCFCE)
- Free Ride (AADEBE)
- Harvest Breed (BEBEBE)
- From The Morning (BEBEBE)
However, having read a bit about how the tracklisting was put together, I don’t think this was intentional.
Nick also recorded an instrumental version of Plaisir d’Amour as part of these sessions, but it didn’t make it onto the album. It could have fitted quite well as a partner for Horn, as another instrumental in Standard tuning.
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OffRhyme
OffRhyme is an offline rhyming dictionary.
I use a rhyming dictionary almost every day for my songs and my haiku. The most well known rhyming dictionary online has several drawbacks:
- Its full of adverts.
- It doesn’t work offline.
- It requires full page reloads so its slow
I got tired of these limitations so decided to build my own rhyming dictionary which doesn’t have any of these problems. It works nicely as a webapp on your phone too.
All the code is open source. Patches welcome.
I hope someone else finds it useful.
scruffian 