The problem with procutivity systems:

*Present me* comes up with a goal and assigns it to *future me*;

Cometh the hour, *future me* becomes *present me* and the goal-setting *present me* becomes *past me*;

*Present me* tells *past me* to feck off and comes up with his own goals;

Repeat.

Some little omens have emerged to indicate that the great gentrification project might have stalled –⁠⁠
the whoozy rat pottering a few inches away from my footfall, skirting the bases of a series of permanently locked shutters before finding a crag to vanish into.
The butchers, wholesalers and cheap cookware shops keep on keeping on while the bougie boutiques replace each other to little fanfare.
I’m grateful for the better coffee but not so much for the hikes in rent.
Nobody who frequented Champagne and Fromage had to fight for their place here and none of them fought for it to remain.
None of them caught a truncheon to the temple in their mission to make this area feel nicer.

I remember the Fridays and Saturdays in the early 00s when I was too skint for a single pint, so I marched about for a couple of hours, as I once did in the suburbs,
to soak up all the noise and vibes I could before I skulked back to my flat to see if a poem would hatch,
so that the locals could endure my open-mic edgelordism like they endured everything else.
We all seemed a little unhinged but were on the whole nonchalant about the madness of others.
I never headed out with the intent of making friends, but am grateful that a few were found regardless.

Read more...

https://niall.garden/on-bowie-and-brixton

We got to it this morning, ripping down the Hello Kitty reliefs and Cinnamoroll lights from their masking tape moorings on the wall; stacked the cards with their repeated motifs of trees, bearded men and penguins and scribbled pleasantries that will never be read again; stripped the tiny fake tree and closed it up like a dried out brolly to slide into a thin box that stacks neatly within a bigger one.

It's January now, here to remind us how bleak a beginning can be; that the daffodils might shoot up earlier each year but never this early –⁠ t⁠hey're hunkered down deep but will break their thresholds before we can clamber out of our overdrafts.

Whatever djinn of bad fortune has been keeping his eyes peeled for the household that hasn't yet flung a stunted conifer beyond their threshold, may his gaze miss our poky little hearth –⁠

the year that's gone was unlucky enough, and we're not asking for loaded dice, rollover jackpots or for every dropped slice to land butter side up.

Just let us pack the old year into another little box; sprinkle a pinch of dust to aid a slight, subtle forgetting; let our delusions remain hopes a little longer.

6/1/2026

🌿

[[poems]]
https://niall.garden/late-decorations

Back in the early 00s, my friends coined a nickname for me: Binge-Purge.

This was because of my habit of periodically switching between the two poles of excess and asceticism. I'm not sure which was the most insufferable –⁠ ⁠the boisterous, mouthy drunk or the holier-than-thou teetotaller.

I'm off the sauce right now, have been for over a year, and it feels great. I've always enjoyed sobriety. Whenever I switched to my purge phase, I’d often find myself at the same shebeens and drinking dens that once proliferated in basements and upper rooms of Soho before the licensing laws were loosened. As the inevitable political debates erupted from my cadre of inebriated open mic poets, I'd find myself playing David Dimbleby, pausing one line for a moment while signalling the next speaker’s turn. As I bounced off to catch my night bus an hour or so later, sobriety would feel like a performance enhancing drug, which was partially down to the microdoses of caffeine that I'd imbibed all evening instead.

In my current sobriety, I don't really head out on the town that much. I miss the old social circles that went with the necking of jars, but I don't miss the booze at all.

Read more...

https://buttondown.com/niall/archive/the-ballad-of-binge-purge/

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/poets-are-now-cybersecurity-threats-researchers-used-adversarial-poetry-to-jailbreak-ai-and-it-worked-62-percent-of-the-time/

Bookmarking this for the next time a student asks about the value of poetry.

I was thinking of getting some new hardware next year and was thinking of a Framework laptop until I saw their inability to take back their promotion and support of a distro made by a racist. Now it looks like my Linux adventure will continue with a Steam Machine instead.

Yeah, I know that Valve aren't squeaky clean as an organisation, but sometimes a situation that is not properly resolved can really taint a product and that's how I feel about the Framework.