Today I went to watch three time NBA champion JaVale McGee play basketball. It was a game which went down to the wire, and the free cheeseburger was not sealed until 0.6 seconds left in the final quarter.

JaVale did nearly get a triple double and he did an amazing dunk so it was well worth the trip.

In November 2018 when my cactus flowered I thought it was a sign that I was going to get a novel published in 2019.

Out of context this may sound stupid, but I'd been working very hard for the years prior to become a published author. I'd sold my first semi-pro story a few months earlier, and at the time I was working on my third full novel manuscript that I fancied benefited from the first two attempts.

Anyway we all know how that turned out. Time moved on, things changed... Except for this amazing cactus that pops out a flower mid-November every few years despite being neglected and never having its soil changed over the seven years since that flower appeared. I literally plonked it down near the shed when we moved houses on April 1st and it has subsisted purely on rain and whatever nutrients come in the steam off Nash's turds in the seven months since. This week? Another flower.

Maybe that's the lesson? Hard work doesn't lead to success, but the opposite. Just be yourself in place and see what happens.

Well, I felt kind of bad when I saw this flower pop up looking so impressive against a backdrop of spiderwebs and dead tomato plants. It's not like the pot is that heavy; I could move it somewhere with a nice aspect. Give it some fertiliser. If I was going to do that, maybe I could even take if for a walk around the neighbourhood? Maybe there was another cactus flowering predictably at exactly the same time and they could touch stamens and make a baby cactus?

I didn't do exactly that. I nearly did. I did the walking and looking for cacti part. But I left my cactus in the backyard. And guess what? I found another cactus!

A girl one (obviously). Just down the street. I could bring my cactus over and introduce them.

...I didn't do that. After another day my cactus flower drooped and wilted. So did the pink one. I felt bad that I'd missed an opportunity to make my cactus happy just once after it had made me happy about four times.

Oh well, I'm sure it will flower again in a year or two.

Recently I've been working on designing a board game. The efforts towards this can be broken down into:
- Thinking about gameplay and game elements
- Researching and watching videos about my game's subject
- Building a webapp to help me store and manage my game data

I feel like the area I have focused on the most is predictable. After a few days with the spreadsheet I soon had a fully featured CMS to store all my elements, scrape information from the web to fill in stats, calculate rankings and points. I built it using Svelte 5 and Pocketbase. When I say I built it, what I mean is I architected it and Cursor built it. This technology is so amazing I am still dumbfounded occasionally by how effective it is.

Last week, I felt like I had my game conceptually ready to go. All the data I needed was in my database, I'd chosen the elements. Now I wanted to create a whole lot of cards. So I requested a quick MVP: I would upload a blank template and draw boxes on it where I wanted bits of data inserted, and then with the click of a button a image would be generated that I could print out and slip into a card sleeve and use to prototype my game. I hit generate and went to clean my teeth. When I came back, it was ready.

It took me less than an hour to add a whole image editing, zone drawing template editor to map the rest of the data onto card templates, and then a template cloner, and adding icons dynamically based on data. Every feature required about 3-4 sentences for me to describe the requirements and parameters, I would hit Go and a few minutes later it was ready to test.

Would I run this code in production? No. But does it do a nearly 100% perfect job of obeying instructions, implementing requirements, and just working when it's done. Yes.

Tonight I had an hour before bed to try and add a "Print" function to the app. I wanted to press a single button and for the app to generate all the cards based on the data in the database, put them all on a grid across as many pages as needed for printing at 600 dpi and then spit out a PDF. The AI did it in less than five minutes. I barely had time to watch some NBA highlights. This kind of functionality would have probably taken me a week to get right on my own. It did it in one shot. I didn't spend all night programming, I spent most of it taking a long walk along the beach with Vanessa as the sun slowly set.

Is there an AI bubble? It's a very hot question right now. I'm sure I'll come back to this one way or another, and this anecdote is not an answer to that. But the power of this technology is so potent it's impossible not to be impressed.

I downloaded the PDF and my game dream had come to life on my screen.

Now the question is, do I have any friends to play this game with? Or do I need to add a new feature to get the AI to play it as well...

Another baby in my life has reached the age at which they cry any time they see me. There have been too many babies for this to be a coincidence. The first six months seem to be okay because those babies just cry indiscriminately. But once they reach the point of mental development where they really know what they want to cry about, Brad instantly appears near the top of that list.

I feel like babies shouldn't dislike me so naturally. I'm really just a very large baby myself. I'm toilet trained, but other than that I approach every day with an open minded sense of wonder, I have trouble communicating in some situations, and I like naps.

But the way these babies cry, year after year, baby after baby, tells me that I am not a very large baby in their eyes. The looks on their face as they sob and bury themselves into the comfort of other, more acceptable adults is one of pure fear. They look at me like… They know. They know the truth about me.

Now I don't actually know what truth this infant collective sense in me. They can't tell me. I can only guess. Maybe I shouldn't let it unnerve me, but it's hard to ignore. I think I've always known there was something wrong with me. I think I've known this since I was a baby.

That was a very long spring. Perhaps it’s because this week’s weather - cool, wet and windy, a lot of showers about, bouts of pleasant sunshine - mapped closely to the first week of September’s weather. And in fact nearly every week of the past three months has been cool, wet and windy with lots of showers, and bouts of pleasant sunshine. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a spring with quite so much consistency. I put my jacket away and then got it back out again multiple times. Yet there is no doubt that the sun sets after 8pm now and there was even a test match - briefly- last weekend, so spring did happen.

But what did happen in spring? A lot and not much. Personally that is. Globally and domestically there was a lot going on, but for me the last few months have been one of pleasant routine, general health (ignoring the cold from the end of October that I nearly had to write a memoir about surviving) and mundanity.

I had the same customer all season, the same personal project for the evenings, the same gym routines, a lot of chicken breast salads. A lot of berries, cereal and yogurt. A lot of walking around the same lake, canal and seaside. Some good audio books. Pub Quiz. Walks with Vanessa and Nash - often to the bakery. Lots of good music.

I did go to Sydney. And for some hikes in the hills. And I saw friends and family. One night I saw the southern lights. It was very chill. I could probably have lived in that spring forever.

I clearly had a lot of time for reflection in spring 25 because my spring playlist reached 101 minutes and 26 songs. That’s two new songs a week on average that I considered worth engraving on my psyche to remember this time of my life by.

Songs that remind me of walking while wearing a jacket. Lunchtime exercise. Walking by the lake. Cooking BBQs. Driving around the suburbs. Writing XML by hand. Walking by the lake (again). Going off to get motor oil for my chainsaw. Walking by the lake (a third time). Walking by the lake (wow).