Hi, I'm Rob.

⤳ A pretty busy Bank Holiday week. Went to see Jez Butterworth’s new play, The Hills of California on Thursday evening and really enjoyed it, even though the last ten minutes left me a little emotionally destroyed. ⤳ On Sunday I met my friend Mik...

⤳ A highlight of last week was the Interesting Conference at Conway Hall. My notes from the evening go like this: Taps, Compost, Dust, Pensions, Tea Kitchen Appliances, Fashion, PR. And that wasn’t even the whole shebang. The quality of speakers ...

⤳ Well, it stopped raining. It’s about 23 degrees as I type this and the allotments that my window looks out on to are full of people tilling (is that the right word?), hosing, weeding and… sitting around smoking and drinking (that last one is the...

⤳ Here we are in May and… Yep, it’s still bucketing it down. ⤳ To be fair we had about half a day of sunshine on the bank holiday Sunday, so I made the most of that by walking the dog around Crystal Palace park and doing a few bits of gardening. ...

⤳ In the middle of the week, I schlepped up to Camden, to the Roundhouse to see Brett Anderson and the Paraorchestra do their Death Songbook show. It was a really good show, very different from your normal gig, in a low key and beautiful way. Here...

⤳ This week was all about seeing friends in pubs, bars and restaurants. ⤳ But before that kicked off, I went to the National Gallery to see The Last Caravaggio. It’s free and definitely worth a look if you’re passing (wow, I just damned Caravaggi...

⤳ Finally got see Dune 2 on the big screen, just before it left the cinema. It’s an impressive spectacle, and it didn’t feel as long as its 2h 47m (!) running time; but I don’t think I was as blown away as others have bene. Something about the sci...

Last night I watched the 1945 Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going!. I didn’t plan to. It’s not a film I’ve ever paid much attention to before even though (as the trailer below points out) it’s Tilda Swinton’s favourite film ever. ...

Last week, I flew off to Antigua for a week. I struggle a bit with those kind of holidays because I tend to go a bit stir crazy after a few days, but I just about managed to power on through this one :) Basically, it was a week of eating, drinking...

There is something really interesting and insightful in the latest issue of Alex Morris’s Strat Scraps newsletter (there is something interesting and insightful in pretty much every issue, so you should subscribe if you ever have to ‘do strategy’)...

I’ve just finished Cory Doctorow’s latest book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. I’ll talk more about the book in a future post, but something I wanted to get down right away was a couple of things in the book that I guess c...

“Writing for an audience keeps me honest.” So said Cory Doctorow in his 2021 blog post, The Memex Method. Here’s a bit more context: “The genius of the blog was not in the notetaking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your logfile ...

Just a quick admin update to say that: The page which archives all the Cracking Flags shows from loose.fm has been updated. It used to contain embeds from Mixcloud, but they all seem to have disappeared from loose.fm’s Mixcloud page, so I’m us...