I just got my PAC from Three via SMS, then signed up for a new contract with EE online. I worked at Phones4u when I was 18 and this process used to be an absolute nightmare. I dread to think, the amount of time I've spent on hold to networks to get a customer's PAC just so the sale didn't walk out the door.

No, I am not cut out for sales. I know this. I can't imagine me doing it either, but someone had to pay for my Marlboro Reds and hair bleach.

There's loads of new music out today. I like days like this where there's a few records out from bands you like. Funnily enough, my favourite is from a band I've never really liked, doing something I never heard before. Turnstile - Glow On is such a weird mix of things that shouldn't work but really does. Then there's Jinjer - Wallflowers, which is another refinement and technical progression of an already very polished sound. Then finally there's TesseracT - Portals, which is a very accomplished live album, and a good mix of TesseracT's career. If you're new to them but familiar with the genre (how?), it might sound a bit samey, but I'm enjoying it.

As a bonus, something that came out a while ago that I can't stop thinking about is Alexis Marshall - House of Lull House of When. Incredibly bleak and unsettling. A really coherent, borderline jazz direction of the sound on Daughters' latest record, which is still (and may always be?) my favourite live music experience ever.

Every time we feed Sudo, we ask "is it dinner time?" and since revisiting Donald Glover, it always reminds me of this song, which has been stuck in my head for about 3 weeks. It'd be annoying if I didn't love this song and its video, I suppose.

One of my favourite things to do, when I've written a long blog post, is to go back through and edit it to remove the 500 occurrences of the word "really". No idea why I use it so much. I wonder if I do that in speech as well.

When I was a kid, my dad knew this guy called Ronan O'Connor. His mother was an Austrian woman called Maria, and my dad used to work on their vehicles. They lived in a huge house with loads of land, right on a flood plain. When it flooded Ronan had a kayak he would take from his front door to his front gate so that he could do things like leaving his home.

Once I was a precocious ~ten-year-old; if you can believe that. I forget the exact content of this conversation, but one day Ronan was trying to tell me something. He had a left-hand-drive VW Scirocco, and he'd obviously seen a lot of the world. I distinctly remember being blasé and obstructive. I already knew what he was trying to tell me, and so the conversation ended before it began.

Later, I asked my dad what Ronan had been trying to tell me. He didn't know. I was so busy trying to impress Ronan that I'd missed out on something cool he could've taught me.

I learned three things that day:

1. Always keep your ears and mind open
2. Your parents don't know everything
3. Get your damn COVID vaccination. I don't care about your half-baked research. This isn't about you.

Real Life

When I was a kid, dairy grossed me out. Don't know why but I have a real problem with food texture so maybe there.

Anyway now I have two favourite butters and I don't remember the last time I wasn't eating cheese.

Pralines and Cream is the epitome of ice cream flavours. If I could only ever have one flavour of ice cream forever it'd be this. 10/10

Here's a hot tip for you, if you're making a TV show: if you need to fill some product placement obligations, you should contrive to shoot a scene in a supermarket. All the cool kids are doing it!

Literally every time one of our clients says "what's the ETA?" I have to almost physically force myself not to say "it's the estimated time of arrival". Because apparently I am still 7 years old, or Lloyd Bridges.