Rants and Reflections
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Bandwagons, Paywalls, and the Sad Death of Roscoe
Lewis Hamilton lost his dog. Roscoe wasn’t just a pet, he was family to him, same as my two were to me. Having had to say goodbye to two of our own dogs in recent years, I know there are few things in life that cut as deep. That part I get, and I feel…
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Why I used the word “Perplexed” on my website name
I didn’t sit around with a brand consultant and a mood board to come up with the word Perplexed. I chose it because it’s the only word that sums up how I feel most of the time. Half the time I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw every bloody device out the window. Perplexed…
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When “We Missed You” Means Absolutely Nothing
Not so long ago (actually, blooming years ago), a message saying “Lovely to see you last month, hope to see you again” carried weight – it was genuine. It meant you’d been noticed. It meant your presence mattered. That little line was personal. Genuine. Remember those days? You walked away feeling good. Someone had taken the time…
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The Fear Isn’t About Change. It’s About Weak Leadership.
In Brief: We’re a country run by people who have all the power but none of the courage. Every time something dreadful happens, we hear the same line: “We’ll do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.” But they already have the power. They make the laws. They set the policies. They could act…
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Why I Say Hello to Dogs Before People
When I see a dog, my instinct is to say hello. Same with cats, or even horses. They get my attention straight away, usually with a smile and a bit of fuss. When I see a person, it’s different. My first thought is often to look away, avoid eye contact, and keep walking. Not because…
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YouTube Censorship – When Content Creators Bleep the Truth
I get proper pissed off by this, and I can’t be the only one noticing it. You watch these long-form interview channels on YouTube, the ones where someone sits down for an hour or two with people who’ve got genuinely important stories to tell. Prison officers, social workers, police officers, people who’ve lived through awful…
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Criticising the Machine Algorithm Game While Feeding It
There’s a pattern I can’t unsee anymore. It’s so flipping common. Plenty of tech commentators on YouTube and podcasts love to rant about algorithms. About AI. About attention. About how recommendation engines are rewiring us, shortening our focus, spoon-feeding us ideas instead of forcing us to think. They’ll ask the big questions. All valid questions.…
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The YouTube Audiobook Circle of Slop
If you feel like YouTube has quietly filled your recommendations with soulless “audiobooks” read by lifeless robot voices, you’re not imagining it. You’re watching a new content racket evolve in real time, and it runs on low effort, AI tools, and platforms that pretend to care about “authenticity” while cashing the ad cheques. This is…
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£532k for Moving a Dot. The Broken Procurement Exposed
In Brief: The UK government spent £532,000 moving a dot halfway up the GOV.UK logo and changing its colour. Taxpayers got a turquoise full stop and 150 pages of brand guidelines explaining how “the dot” serves as a “guiding hand for life” whilst the NHS maintenance backlog hit £16 billion and people struggle to heat…
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AI Slop is Not New, Just Industrialised
The behaviour came first, the label arrived later. For many years, lazy and shady people have been building “channels” by scraping other people’s clips, Reddit posts, pet videos, podcast moments and news footage, then stitching them into compilations with a new title, thumbnail and maybe a watermark. AI simply took that lazy mentality and put…