9: homes

Gavin Leech
September 08, 2025

Where I am now: Bristol, home, first time in 4 months
What I’m doing now: getting back to work. Winding up a bunch of cool Arb projects and plotting a winter away
Last song: Sean Hoss Whips it Out by Solska
Currently watching: ‘The Expanse’. It's very stupid (I spot about one plot hole or idiot-plot per episode) but also likeable.
Currently reading: I lost a bet with Peli and have to read After Virtue
Current obsession: the future

I am currently not on many major projects; ping me if you have something for me.

July: Spend a few days heaving and straining and in relatively intense psychic pain trying to compress the entire current affairs of AI into 1) any comprehensibility to me at all, 2) one hour spoken duration, 3) comprehensibility to the audience. Gave it as the first talk at HAAISS in Prague.
August: Spent a few days heaving and straining and in relatively intense psychic pain trying to compress all theories of human nature into one hour. Here’s some crazed draft slides and a bad recording. Listen to the end for the water fight.
The Fabric Book is now out. Went through about 10 runs as I slowly and ineptly learned digital book design.
ESPR is, as always, the most intense and fulfilling part of my year. The home which disappears and reappears. Joys included the origins of human intelligence in 3 minutes, the larp, the poetry, the repersonalising water fight, the Mountain Goats, hanging out with the students, the old crew, and the new crew Peli, Abi, and Julia.

So that was my summer holiday. Oddly, it felt like a big waste for the first 8 weeks - and but then suddenly I achieved all of my goals.
✅ Recover the joy of work
✅ Make a Gavbot (currently just basic OpenAI file API over my blog)
✅ Take a week offline.
- Was amazing; attention and perception recovered fully within 36 hours.
✅ Read intensely. Hegel, Shelley, anthropology, local history.
✅ Do something really creative (EXP)
✅ Meet 20 people
✅ Get fit
✅ Work out what’s next

On the psychogeography / vibe of Glasgow and Aberdeen. The first time I have ever attempted historical work. I don’t think I underperformed the field.
Was both impressed and deeply disappointed by Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Here is one of my favourite directors, given free reign, a big budget, a great cast, and yet the result is inferior to the book in every variable they could share. My unhinged opinion about the shallowness of the whole medium of cinema is eating well. And it’s not even that deep a book!!

Greece
Egypt
Lebanon (draft). It’s actually hard to separate out the musicians of the two; many of the biggest Egyptian acts were from Lebanon but lived away for 40 years.
Dundee

delulu (K-pop adj.): delusional, particularly in the “manifesting” manner.
to slopsquat (tech v.): to register a domain name for a word often hallucinated by LLMs. e.g.