Recap | August 2025

Fun

Music

The band that resurfaced in my brain this month was The Spill Canvas. Two of their albums – “Sunsets and Car Crashes” and “Gestalt” – are in a strange place for me: while I really like both albums, they were also part of the soundtrack to a very complicated time of my life. Most of the time they are just good albums that I enjoy listening to, but occasionally they become a stronger reminder of that time and catch me off guard. Luckily “One Fell Swoop” was not in the dysfunction-soundtrack and so is always enjoyable.

My only new album this month was the new Three Days Grace album, Alienation. Having both singers working together seems to be going well for them, and I prefer the new album to their last few releases. (One-X is still my favourite though.)

Other

At the start of August I went to UWE with Danny so that he could say goodbye to it and I could have a nostalgia-trip. While there were a lot of new buildings, and we explored areas that I had never seen before, such as the cottage-styled music-building with its own orchard, much of UWE was still familiar to me. Our visit led to some thought-provoking conversations and gave us both a lot to think about afterwards.

Finally, this isn’t really “fun”, but I hadn’t prepared a heading for it, so it can live here. At the start of August I wrote a letter to my MP with my concerns about how the age-verification aspect of the Online Safety Act is being implemented. I’m not sure if it will achieve anything, or will even be read, but I might as well try. (As of a month later, I’ve not had a reply except for the automatic confirmation).

Games

While my Xbox gaming time was mostly spent on old favourites, I enjoyed some brand-new indies on Steam.

Is this seat taken? is a relaxed game of logic puzzles based on arranging groups of sentient shapes to best fit their quirks and preferences. For example, some levels are based on arranging customers in a diner so that everyone is sat next to their choice of food, the people who want to chat with each other are together, and the people who chew loudly are separated from the people who hate chewing noises (put me in the latter group!).

It’s best played in smaller doses because it is so calm that it can become boring when played for too long in one go. That’s not really a criticism, however – it intends to be a low-stakes, chilled-out game, and carries out that intention.

Tiny Bookshop involves running a bookshop out of a trailer across the town of Bookstonbury while helping and befriending the slightly book-obsessed residents. One mechanic I really like is that during each day of sales, customers will ask you to recommend them a book from your stock, with requests that range in fussiness and complexity. Your book stock uses the titles and descriptions of real books, and being able to recommend someone a book they love the idea of based on my own experience of reading it feels great.

Now that cozy games and community-building games have become such a trend, finding well-made and meaningfully-different ones in the flood is more difficult, but Tiny Bookshop definitely deserves those adjectives.

Birdigo is a wordy and birdy rogue-lite where you aim to complete the migration path of each bird. The usual rogue-ish mechanics of additive and multiplicative scoring supported by passive buffs and active upgrades are all present, and the rules are laid out simply enough that you can start playing very quickly. (Finishing routes will not happen as quickly though).

A small issue for me is that while the on-screen birds which gather as you progress are very cute, their continual bobbing did get a bit uncomfortable for me. There is a settings toggle to remove motion, which is nice to see, but the motionless birds then looked kind of eerie, so this might need a little more tweaking. (I’m aware I’m being fussy here, this experience was just a little unexpected because the cute-factor is so central).

Work

For the last few months I’ve been kind-of-line-managing a colleague because I’m the person in my office who best understands their specific role and tasks. Their contract ended at the start of August, which is annoying as I had hoped my team could keep them for longer. We’ll now need to find a way to keep the tasks she was doing done, which is going to be tricky.

Now that my attempt at peer-line-managing has finished, my conclusion is that I’m not very good at it! I know I was a good colleague: she said that she could always rely on me to answer her questions and to find any information she needed. But I don’t think I was a good line manager, especially as I wasn’t organised enough to fulfil her only real request of providing more feedback on completed tasks so that she could be sure they were done correctly.

However, I am comparing myself to my own line manager here, which is a high bar to clear; she has been even more supportive than normal this month as I have again signed myself up for more work than I can logically fit into my weeks. We’ve gone analogue and used a pile of post-it notes to try and arrange every typical part of my week, so that I can better see what time I actually have for side-projects and tech-support requests, and she has offered to meet me briefly every week to help me work out what my schedule needs to be for the week ahead.

Family

My aunt decided to remove the dreadlocks she’s had for the past 7/8 years, and asked if I could help her remove them. She thought, based on her friends’ experiences, that it would take two people working together an afternoon to unravel and comb out all of them. That estimate turned out to be comically wrong! We needed two 8-hour days, and my aunt spent some extra time beyond that. Those days were pleasant, however, as we had some interesting conversations, and shared podcasts and pizza.