A warm, summer night in autumn 2025.

I do love me a seasonal playlist to remember a period of my life. And if some of the song lyrics/titles have a literal link to the specific season that I listened to them in - even better.

Lots has changed since my debut one in 2004. First, initially I had a lot more tunes to choose from in humanity's back catalogue. Second, I didn't make them every season, and third, the music listening experience was so different back before Spotify and endless mobile phone data. I feel like my standard for getting on the seasonal mixtape is a lot higher in 2025 than it was say in 2006. I also can't tell for sure if I look back fondly at every track that made a seasonal mixtape back in the day purely because it was on there. In the old days I would listen a lot to whole albums, playing them in my car where I couldn't change to another band on a whim. For the past few years I have had a staging process where anything I hear on an album or through the algorithm gets added to a "Liked from Radio" playlist (I forgot why I called it that back in 2016) and then usually when I'm feeling a tune on that list over a specific season it will get the call up to the seasonal.

Some tunes do hit my brain and go immediately to the seasonal as well.

By the time of Autumn 2025, I felt like making a mixtape for Autumn was tough. The main problem was that it was hot and sunny all the time. Summer lasted until April. Where was the weather I needed for enjoying some down tempo melodies, some darkness, the sound of rain on the roof?

The inverse of this problem was that I was scheduled to leave for Norway in early May, so whatever Autumn I was going to have had to be squeezed between summer finally ending and then.

Optimistically I named my playlist in Spotify Høst 25, which is Norwegian for "Autumn, 2025". And in March I added a couple of folky/dreamy tracks that gave me a feeling of what Autumn might actually vibe like. I also added a song called "Midnight Sun" from Jan Blomqvist's new album, for obvious reasons.

The reality of Autumn was a lot of moving house/selling house fun, ankle pain, and a month long cold. Plus some good tunes from Lawrence Hart, Brother Bird and Of A Revolution that had got me through some late night drives to the self storage or trips in the hire truck.

A 2m x 1m x 1m (approximately) solid chunk of an ending chapter of life.

By the time I took off for Oslo I had eight songs worth of Autumn and I thought I was either going to have to combine this with winter after I got back, or maybe release another seasonal EP (Summer 2022 was the first of those when I went arm first into the CBF).

A lot happened in Norway and I listened to a lot of music there but it certainly wasn't autumn.

On my last night in Lofoten, giddy with the heights of Reinebringen and the endless sunset and sleep deprivation I sought a playlist to soundtrack my drive back to Eggum and I started with Høst. Within about eight minutes I was listening to Midnight Sun while driving under a midnight sun and this was incredibly validating to me as a sign of my musical taste, sense of timing, and good fortune.

Because the drive was a lot longer than the short autumn soundtrack, after Gonna Be Me finished I switched to 2025's Liked From Radio and played it on shuffle.

There were a lot of good songs on that list and some I skipped. And the ones I didn't skip got instantly encoded with the vibrancy and energy of that drive along Lofoten's E10.

The sun still hadn't set when I arrived back in Eggum. Obviously. But autumn had ended. I was about to return to Adelaide for winter and a whole set of new releases and old life. But I wanted to do anything I could to hold on to that drive and that autumn where I pushed through pain and sickness to move house, sell a house, recover from injuries, work hard and then make it to glorious Norway for a life changing holiday.

So I added all the songs I'd just heard to the playlist in the order I'd heard them.

Autumn sunset colours in Adelaide, not Norway.

And now that winter is closer to ending than it is to starting, it's time to commemorate that decision and add Høst 25 to the list of seasons I've had the joy of experiencing with music.

I walked from the bottom of West Lakes all the way to Pirate Life in Port Adelaide today. The was motivated by the fact it was warm enough to wear a t-shirt outside for the entire duration.

I knew of the north West Lakes area ("The Island") and I assumed it would have lots of nice houses like the south West Lakes does. And this turned out to be true. What I didn't appreciate until I walked it was that West Lakes is basically a big moat between Port Adelaide and the rich people by the coast.

Maybe not the most effective moat as I saw a few people canoeing across it.

After the walk, which took me just under an hour, I caught up with J for beers and half a chicken. It was a good side of the moat to be on. I did not walk home.

Well I was not sorry to see the end of July. For winter, it's the worst month. June can be colder but there's still some novelty to it. July just feels like you should be asleep, in a sun patch on the rug whenever that happens (if Nash has left enough room). Or tucked away in bed when it's raining or windy. But even then my feet and fingers are like icicles, and the rest of my joints are clammy.

My employer must also feel the same about July, because they gave everyone today off to celebrate it. This was good timing for me, because the weather was perfect for a walk outside and I also saw bees pollinating some flowers earlier in the morning. So I met up with Dadism and we walked 14 kilometres through the hills and also passing by the Palo Alto garage in which I built bradism in back in 2005. Then we went to the pub. After spending a lot of July not sleeping and instead working, it was a much appreciated day to see lots of birds in some fresh air, walk up hills, and enjoy baked treats.

One cold morning as the winter solstice neared, I woke up with a collapsed lung. This didn't seem very fair as I'd already had my completely random, debilitating injury for 2025 back in January when my ankle stopped working for no reason.

Apparently it's common for spontaneous collapsed lungs to affect tall men. It does seem particularly egregious though - when I go to sleep buffered by at least four pillows - to wake up with new injuries.

I did go to hospital about my collapsed lung a couple of days after the solstice after spending a week thinking it was some kind of weird covid that only affected one lung and didn't show up on RATs. The doctor checked out my X-ray and suggested a conservative approach as opposed to admitting me to stick a needle into my chest cavity and suck out the excess air. The conservative approach was appealing to me too. So since then I've had a couple more X-rays to see if it is getting worse or better.

According to the latest X-ray it is getting better. Could this collapsed lung be a metaphor for winter? The day with the shortest amount of lung, and then slowly but surely it expands each day and eventually there's a summer of massive, never-ending lung? And then after New Year's the roulette wheel spins again to determine what my journal entries will be about in 2026?

No, probably not. If it's a metaphor for anything (it's not) it's a metaphor for the collapse of metaphors. It's dark. I'm cold. I'm growing old. I'm not running out of visual imagery, I'm running out of novel feelings to allude to with them.

But at least the solstice is done with. Soon it will be sprung.

The reason that most of the photos and entries from Norway aren't posted yet is because it takes a long time to edit photos when you have a lot of other stuff going on in life. And when I started chipping away at it in the hours before bed, I realised I was running out of disk space on bradism.com which was stopping me from uploading images and even logging in. I had to keep deleting log files that would then grow again over the next day and block me again.

I knew I needed a long term solution as I have plans to upload many more photos and no plans to upgrade my web hosting before 2027 when my extremely cheap, grandfathered deal finally runs out.

A cursory glance at my server’s file manager confirmed that the webroot directory where all the static content is hosted was consuming nearly all of my disk. All my images are currently hosted in JPG format, with an optimised JPG version as well, plus a card and thumbnail version. There are new formats, like AVIF and WEBP, that are much smaller without compromising on quality like I had been doing by exporting JPGs at low quality which made them look terrible.

I had the idea to use Cursor to enhance Bradism to handle new image uploads and convert them to AVIF. And to also add a button in the admin side so that I can convert known old images of large size to AVIF as well. This sounded like a good idea, and with AI it shouldn't take too long. Right?

Unfortunately, I had not set up the Bradism dev environment on the computer I upgraded to last year, so I had to do that, which entailed doing a lot of setup work on a new Virtual Box. And then I inevitably had to upgrade versions of things including PHP which led to deprecation warnings that I (AI) had to fix. Oh and in my new house I use the WiFi instead of ethernet which means the performance of my mounted disk in the virtual box is very bad. So yes, the AI did enhance the image upload process, add the button, add multi-image upload, come up with a new colour scheme, and fix a bunch of depreciations. It only took a week, most of which was spent not coding but setting up the environment.

Coding Bradism features was not how I planned to spend my Friday evening. I actually planned to spend it in the emergency department because I have a partially collapsed lung. But that’s a different story that hopefully one day someone will fill me in on. Instead of being in hospital I added the features and then logged on to the production server so that I could deploy them. As a quality minded individual I checked the remote server’s readiness to accept the deployment and make sure there were no modified files that would get overwritten by a deployment. And when I checked that, I noticed an Apache generated error_log in my webroot directory. And on closer inspection I noticed that this, adjacent to my JPG images, was 1.74GB gigs. Of the same deprecation warning that was for some reason being logged, fourteen times, every time someone (AI) visited my site.

So all that development effort did lead to the freeing up a lot of disk space. But it could have happened a lot quicker.

It was not a good idea to watch the first episode of True Detective Season 4 on a dark, windy night right before bedtime. Not because the horror themes make me feel scared. Because the Alaska themes make me feel cold.