Adactio: Journal

Looking for something to do in Brighton this weekend? I’ve got ya covered. Come to the excellent Prince Albert pub on Trafalger Street at 8pm on Saturday, September 5th. Head upstairs with your ticket. There you will be treated to an excellent triple bill. First up is Figure In The Half Light AKA Charlie McConnochie: Expect dreamy, fractured songs of dark and light. Then it’s The Self Help Group: Americana-influenced vocal harmonies, emotional tales and intertwining melodies. The headliners are…

I try to see my friends Dan and Sue as often as I can. The problem is that I live in Brighton and they live in Baltimore (that’s Baltimore, Maryland not Baltimore, West Cork). We sometimes make it work though. Like crossing the Atlantic together. Dan and Sue were in Italy last week. Their son Rex was attending a mandolin academy in Acqui Terme as part of the terrific Mando for Kids programme. As a mandolin player myself, this very much aligned with my interests. Jessica and I flew out to meet…

Remember when I wrote about a session I was at in Belfast where I was sitting next to a fiddler who it turned out had written a book and then I ended up reading the book? Quite an unusual occurrence, right? Definitely not the kind of thing that’s likely to happen twice (you can see where this is going…) During the Fleadh, I went to quite a few sessions at Cumann Cultúrtha Mhic Reachtain. I ended up chatting to a fiddler named Rus from New Mexico. He told me about a book he had written twenty…

I went to plenty of great sessions when I was in Belfast. One of the best was during Belfast Tradfest, out at The Hatfield with Bríd Harper, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, and Michael Rooney. I ended up sitting next a lovely local fiddler named John. I saw him again the next day when I was at Ulster University for my workshop. He had a stand there, selling a new book of tunes that he had published. It’s called Pass It On. I couldn’t resist buying a copy. Then he mentioned that he also had a few copies…

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey comes at just at the right time for me. I spent the last two years reading the Robert Fagles translation, finishing it just a few months ago. When I heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting Homer’s poem, I thought it made perfect sense. I really like the way that he plays around with flashbacks and narrative structure—something that The Odyssey is absolutely stuffed with. Meanwhile, inspired by Madeline Miller’s Circe, I’ve also been reading lots…

When I was immersed in the Irish language for a week in Donegal last month, I made plenty of mistakes. But there’s one mistake that I’m actually quite pleased I made. The emphasis at Oideas Gael is on conversational Irish, so our teacher would often put us into groups of around four people to discuss a particular topic. On one occasion, the topic was food. We had some starter questions to ask one another to get the conversation going. One of the questions was about how we liked our eggs in the…

I spent the last three weeks in the north of Ireland. Myself and Jessica flew to Belfast where we spent the first night. We managed to get to a session that evening where we were warmly welcomed. The next day we travelled to Donegal. A train from Belfast to Derry. A bus from Derry to Donegal Town. Finally another bus from Donegal Town to Glencolmcille, our home for the next week. Oideas Gael This was our second year coming to Oideas Gael to spend a week learning Irish in the beautiful…

I really liked Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls so when I saw a copy of Girls In Their Married Bliss for £1 in a local charity shop, I snapped it up even though it had the worst cover you could possibly imagine. This is the second and final sequel to The Country Girls which means I’ve skipped over the middle book, The Lonely Girl. I’ll have to rectify that. Once again the narrative centres on frenemies Kate and Baba but things are different this time around. For a start, we get the first-person…

I absolutely loved Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, particularly the first book, Ancillary Justice which blew me away when I first read it. Since then I’ve enjoyed the other books she’s written in the same universe, dealing with the fallout of the events in the original series. Radiant Star is the latest addition to the canon. I think the story falls into the category of planetary romance; the narrative is very much driven by the unique characteristics of the world we find ourselves on. Or…

At The Web You Want event in Amsterdam last month, Léonie gave an absolutely fantastic talk. You can now read the whole thing: Accessibility is resistance! She makes the very good point that generative tools are a necessary accessibility recourse when humans have failed to do their job properly. Images without alt text? Somebody messed up. But this is damage that can be routed around with large language models. So if you—like me—don’t like the idea of people using extractive generative tools…

In preparation for my jaunt to a Greek island, I figured it would be good to have some Greek-adjacent reading material with me to peruse on the beach. So I scoured the shelves of my local library to find a modern retelling of a Greek myth that I hadn’t already read. That’s where I found Medea by Rosie Hewlett. The book attempts to rehabilitate—or at least give context to—one of the women of Greek legends who has been cast as a villain. See also Clytemnestra, Elektra, and more. On the face of…

Exactly one year from now, UX London 2027 will be wrapping up. Mark your calendar: July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 2027. If you really want to be ahead of the curve, you can grab a very limited super early-bird ticket now before the price goes up. I’m about to start putting the 2027 line-up together. The real reason why I’m mentioning an event that’s still a year away is that I’d like you to consider speaking at it. Yes, you. Here’s the form you can fill out with your proposal. It can be a 30 minute…

“Radharc álainn” I said. Beautiful view. “Nach ea!” he replied. Isn’t it? He sounded surprised to be addressed in Irish. We were, after all, very far from Erin’s shores. The beautiful view in question was of the bay of Loggos on the Greek island of Paxos. But I knew that this person was a fluent Irish speaker. That’s why I figured he wouldn’t mind a chat as Gaeilge while we were both strolling along. I was talking with Liam Ó Maonlaí. We were both on Paxos for the same reason; the annual Irish…

The Vaster Wilds is a remarkable book. It somehow manages to be both harrowing and uplifting at the same time. I had read one of Lauren Groff’s previous books, Matrix, and liked it well enough. But The Vaster Wilds is in a different league. It starts with urgency, suffering, and wonder, and that combination never lets up for the whole book. The plot is decepetively simple. A servant girl escapes a starving colony in 17th century America—probably Jamestown—and runs through the woods in…

It started in Dublin. Myself and Jessica got there in the afternoon and I went straight to The Cobblestone in Smithfield for some tunes. Then I went up the street to the headquarters of Na Píobairí Uilleann, a beautiful Georgian building on Henrietta Street. I was there to deliver my talk on the making of The Session. There weren’t that many people there in person but quite a few people watched it live online. You can watch the video of the talk if you want. I’m pretty pleased with it. The few…

This is a collection of short stories by one of Ireland’s best playwrights. I think you can tell that these stories were written by someone who’s at home with the stage. The dialogue really shines. And some of the stories feel like scenes in a play. But that’s no bad thing. If most short stories are like mini-novels, why not have short stories that are like mini-plays? Some of the stories are very short indeed, just long enough to convey the mood of the piece. That mood is often wistful,…

CSS Grid Lanes has started to ship in browsers. It’s in Safari and behind a flag in Chrome and Edge. It enables masonry layouts, where items get packed together in the most efficient way possible. Unsurprisingly, I’m a fan of a layout tool where the browser does all the hard work. It very much aligns with the idea of declarative design; you specify the boundary conditions, and then browser does the maths and heavy lifting. There’s a handy website called The Field Guide to Grid Lanes where you…

I’m giving a talk this week. Usually this wouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve been giving talks for over twenty years now. But this one is different. I’m going to speaking at Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Society of Uilleann Pipers, in Dublin. They have a monthly series of lectures called Notes and Narratives all about Irish music, and they’ve asked me to deliver this month’s talk. So this will not be my usual audience. I will be talking about a website, The Session, but I won’t be talking about the…

I give Apple a hard time. That’s mostly due to how they treat the web on their own mobile devices. Though iOS ostensibly supports the ability for websites to be added to the homescreen, they make it so difficult for users to do, the functionality is practically worthless. It’s dispiriting to see the web so hamstrung by that decision. The Webkit team has come in for other criticism too. For a while there, Safari was lagging so far behind in features that people were calling it the new Internet…

Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way. On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around. That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre…

I’m heading to Amsterdam for CSS Day. It’s one of those events I try my best to get to every single year. I have no doubt that this year will be brilliant as usual. There’s another event the day before CSS Day: The Web You Want: What would the web be like if it was up to you? There’ll be workshops and talks, all absolutely free. I’ll be giving a talk. It’s supposed to be about the web I want, but I’m going to do my usual shtick of looking back at the history of the web to see what kind of…

The Session existed in a very basic form since the late 1990s. It was just me posting a different tune every week. But The Session as it is today—a community website where everyone can add tunes—first went online on June 3rd, 2001. That’s 25 years ago today. Considering the typical lifespan of a web page, I’m proud of having a website still online and thriving a quarter of a century after launching it. At this point it’s fair to say that thesession.org is my life’s work. Though, really, I’m…

I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition: I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk music and collections. As an incredible and heavily used repository of tune collections, I would like to print a graphic screenshot of a page from The Session to demonstrate digital dissemination, sharing and preservation of…

Bhí me i Londain an deireadh seachtaine seo caite mar gheall ar an Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. Cúpla lá iontach ba ea iad! Bhí na ranganna ar siúl Dé Sathairn agus Dé Domhnaigh, ceithre huaire an chloig gach lá, i gColáiste na Rí. Bhí ceithre leibhéal ann—tosathóiri, meanleibhéal-iseal, meanleibhéal-ard, agus an ardleibhéal. Bhí gach rang lán le foghlaimeoirí. Roghnaigh mé an rang meanleibhéal-ard agus bhí an leibhéal foirfe. D’fhreastail Jessica ar an rang tosathóirí agus dúirt sí go raibh a…

I enjoyed Kim Curran’s debut novel, The Morrigan, so when I saw a copy of her brand new book in the local library, I snapped it up. Like The Morrigan, Brigid is modern retelling of Irish mythology, but in a very different time period. Whereas The Morrigan was set in a mythical time of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, Brigid is set in the relatively recent past of early Christian Ireland. I was curious to see which Brigid this book would be about: the pagan goddess or the Christian saint?…

When I told you about the schedule for UX London 2026, I said: After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar. These closing talks are a way of bringing everyone back into the same space after spending the afternoon in different workshops. It feels right to start the day and end the day with a shared experience. On day one, discovery day, the closing talk will be delivered by Michael Kibedi. It’s called Whose English gets to be…

Lesbian necromancers in space. That’s the usual pitch for Gideon The Ninth and it’s not wrong. Though there’s a lot more necromancy than space or lesbianism. The book begins in an environment fairly dripping with death, all bones and darkness. It sounds like it should be grim, but thanks to the sarcastic attitude of the protagonist, the tone is actually quite fun. Sassy goth; that’s how I would describe the general vibe. Once I settled into it, I found that tone thoroughly enjoyable. The bulk…

There’s just under a month to go until UX London 2026—exciting! You can peruse the full schedule if you need to decide wether you’re coming for just one day or for all three. The event is designed to flow together, from discovery day to design day to delivery day, but each individual day is also designed to be a standalone experience by itself. Day one on Tuesday, June 2nd has a focus on research: Maria Isachenko will talk about how You don’t need more research time: You need a system that…

In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google: The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken. He’s absolutely right. But… Have you ever clicked on a result from a search engine? Unless you’re lucky enough to land on a nice personal website, you’re more than likely to be confronted with pop-ups to allow tracking, or a desparate plea to…

Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird. Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’s how we can describe events as being “simultaneous”, even though according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s no such thing. It’s thanks to these small relativistic effects that GPS works. But when you approach the…