#14: gadarene

Gavin Leech
August 09, 2026

Where I am now: Somerset. Earlier, Oxford, Bristol, Fochabers, Banff, Prague, Horni Becva, Skyrje, Fochabers, Tallinn.
What I’m doing now: ESPR. Trying to learn stand-up comedy in 24h in response to a student demand.
Last Song: “Sofðu unga ástin mín”. “Read The Lyrics”. “Ой, у гаю, при Дунаю”.
Currently watching: an offline copy of the Criterion Collection starting from “A”
Currently reading: Bernard Cornwell. Allie Brosh
Current obsession: unshepherding the youth

My new org launched with an amazing crew. I hope to lock in a little. Elsewhere this project was interesting.

I spent the summer throwing stuff out and hammering new stuff with Paul. Did a full teardown / paint stripping / hole filling / primer / painting / new carpet / new bed / new windows job on my bedroom, my first major DIY project ever. Did a 15 hour shift one time. Work like a proud horse, even when I got covid. Very time consuming and a pure delight. Accidentally burned a bathtub. Finally I want to live with friends.

I accidentally fulfilled one of my major life goals last month by joining / constituting an original literary movement.

Fable nearly one-shotted my mother’s estate paperwork… but sadly didn’t nail it and I needed (a mere) £500 of human lawyers after.

This is the best laptop I’ve ever had. Foolishly, I gave Apple a chance (Apple TV 4K) and returned the idiot PoS the next day. This was great fun and very cheap.

Went to two of my best friends’ weddings. They were very bottom-up but I didn’t contribute that much. I did get to DJ.

I got a Neko scan. Amusingly scifi staging but well-worth it, especially given the half hour with a GP after. Turns out covid still spikes your white blood cells two weeks later. Turns out I have optimal visceral fat.

Switched to Obsidian after 8 years of Roam. This sounds very tedious but actually it means that Claude Code can run rampant in my 4m word db and spot things I do not know about myself and is basically a Memex.

ESPR was marvellous. Highlights: students building a trebuchet, Euan, an impromptu organ recital from an 18yo, a ceilidh, TAPs, realising I had to totally rewrite my core class the day before I gave it, reading poetry in languages you don’t know, archery, 100 good conversations, not wearing shoes ever for two weeks, Watchet harbour sunset, going for curry with the Indians, singing Mountain Goats. The life.

Posts

Major revamp of my class on the meaning of life.
My spin on the classic SPARC-ESPR Bayesianism class.

Films

The Forbidden Room. One of the best films I have ever seen, and perhaps the highest-ever product of laughs x experiment.
End of Evangelion. The first 40 mins are pretty stupid and then the last 50 are among the most interesting scenes in popular cinema. Not experimental enough though.
Jackass 2.5. So stupid it loops back around. Probably nostalgia-based sadly.
The Phoenician Scheme. The threat and vice has been steadily draining out of Anderson’s work since the beginning. No one here is really a bad person. Violence is inert and on the order of sneezing without covering your mouth. It’s lovely but trending towards entertainment.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Fine, ordinary Good Film.
Duel. Basically just Spielberg using other people’s money to learn filmmaking. Incredible shots, but still barely watchable.
Nope. Very effective and economical and notably inspired by EVA. But while it’s well-made and scary and psychologically sophisticated it lacks something big.
Super Mario Bros 1993. One way I know I’m old is that I genuinely grieve for children’s media not being like it used to be. This contains real menace, real violence, real body horror. Half of the artistic effect comes from the simple gag “how will Hollywood now butcher Mario to adapt it?”.
Bullet Train. Too clip-centric, too made-for-tiktok for me. It is drier and funnier than I expected. Pitt ruins this as he ruins most of what he does now.

Albums

The Sound of Siam: Thailand 1964-1975. The commercialisation and overexposure of others’ crate digging is a mixed blessing, being another part of the great flattening and self-surveillance of the world. But this blew my mind and is a far cry from the typical compilation.
Black Bear, The Cinnamon Phase. A time capsule of 2006: the brightness, the lo-fi vocals with chiptune, the directness, the witty unaffected softboy . He’s actually a professor now.
Gorillaz, The Mountain. Kind of didn’t want to like this but cmon man. An actually exciting confluence of the north english gutter and brahmin/sunni royalty and the argent and Eastside hoods. That’s not easy to carry off.
Genesis Owusu, REDSTAR WU. Also not easy to do political hip hop well but this has enough musical ideas to counteract the dead weight of its idea ideas.
Jagatara, 裸の王様 [The Naked King]. Much more than the local Talking Heads ripoff they presumably started off as.
Fairly disappointed by the new of Montreal, Modest Mouse, Death Cab

Playlists

I found the old Kerrang! compilation that got me into punk and thus in some sense saved my life.
Major recreation of Wales, which truly starts to rival Scotland.
Major recreation of Northern Ireland, which starts to rival where Wales was before.
Tightened the screws on Italy
Made a good start on Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam.
Added my friend’s all-time favourite songs (she doesn’t use Spotify)

New words

nonspon (internet adj.): not sponsored; sincerely
foidken (internet n.): knowledge of women's psychology, in both its prototypical and variant forms.
ex juvantibus (medicine adj.): the “House MD” black-box method of diagnosis. Treatment as test, when tests are too slow or nonexistent. Technically a logical fallacy but still a good practice
teen takeover (US moral panic n.): a flashmob but less twee and with more trolling and emergent behaviour
assumption drag (strategy n.): describing the failure of businesses, forecasters, or organizations to update their underlying assumptions after the world or operating environment has changed. See also data fumes.
ock (NYC n.): beloved, beloving man of Middle Eastern descent running a deli or bodega. After the Arabic for "bro".
brolic (AAV adj.) Having large, well-developed muscles.
grasstops (social adj.): Advocacy which focusses on a small number of key people. As opposed to grassroots.
tee (construction n.): a new branch added to a water heating circuit
purlin (construction n.): horizontal wooden beam in a house
shadowbagging (AI n.): to nerf one's model silently. Compare sandbagging, when the model does it to itself.
garbage time (sports/ccru n.): the period near the end of a sports competition after the outcome has already been effectively decided. Waiting out the clock. Lame duck. In Land’s sense, the period after the point of no return but before the apocalypse. "Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2”.
cargo puppy (software n.): an enthusiastic junior that imitates the surface rituals of expertise. See current LLMs.
monotropic (adj.): focussed, deep, hedgehoggish, autistically locked-in.
incidentaloma (medicine n.): benign tumors and lumps uncovered by unfocussed scanning. Probably >80% of middle-aged adults have one.
Wardour Street English