The therapy sessions have definitely started having an effect because I got a perfect sleep score of 100 last night. This morning Ruth and Alex (who have been visiting Uncle Boris) popped in for a cup of tea before "departing the Shire" and heading back to York (via South Wales) and after I'd waved them off I decided to have another go at sorting out the mess that my home studio had gotten itself into, as I realised that my reaction yesterday had been much too heavy on the catastrophizing and hadn't taken into account the obsessive levels of focus that I naturally bring to problem-solving (particularly when the problem is something that has really annoyed me). So I let my Autistic traits off the lead for the next four hours and the inevitable happened: the hyperfocus kicked in, I stopped noticing the passage of time, and when I came out of it I'd fixed everything.

The turning point was finding this help page from the nice people at Korg UK. The solution is quite involved, as it involved uninstalling my entire MIDI stack of gear and then installing the Microsoft Software Development Kit (SDK) and Tools for MIDI users; one of the tools this contains is a one-click method of sorting out all of the Windows registry entries concerned with old MIDI drivers which have been superseded by Microsoft's new stack. Once I'd run that, I reinstalled a couple of specific drivers I'd uninstalled which provide additional functionality to MS's default driver, and then crossed my fingers and rebooted the studio PC.

Lo and behold, everything started working again. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and then allowed myself to sit there feeling very smug for a good five minutes or so. I followed that up by spending an hour playing the Fender Jazz, because I will be playing bass a lot over the coming weeks and I need to build my finger strength back up after letting things slide for a few weeks. It's amazing how quickly my capabilities wear off when I don't keep at it and as I sit here typing this I can really tell that I've just given my hands a thorough workout. So: it's time to put something in the oven and open a celebratory bottle of wine, I reckon. It is Friday, after all.

Yesterday I was going to record another piece of music for the pilot Song Sprint that's running this week, but I got sidetracked when I discovered that the studio PC was acting up. Eventide's control app for my H90 pedal had decided that it wasn't going to talk to the pedal any more, even though the PC can see it's connected and if I put the pedal into recovery mode, Windows can see what's in the public section of its memory. The last time this happened, I was eventually able to get everything working again but trying the solution which worked last time hasn't fixed things. And this time, both my Ableton Push and NI Komplete Kontrol S88 have stopped transmitting or responding to any MIDI signals at all, even though they show up in Device Manager as USB devices (and Windows makes a notification noise if I unplug them or reconnect them). Something has been seriously broken.

I also discovered that my nVidia video card had messed up the Windows registry with at least three MIDI entries for its high definition audio driver, which I never use and which I make a point of disabling whenever I update the card's drivers.

The Razer Kiyo Pro webcam I used to use for streaming had also added multiple MIDI drivers and I really, REALLY wish webcam manufacturers would find some other way of controlling their hardware over USB, because there aren't too many MIDI channels available and I have a lot of synths, control surfaces, and effects units that rely on MIDI to work properly with my DAW. I spent the whole afternoon fiddling with stuff and as a result I didn't achieve anything at all; my musical productivity was zero. To say that I ended up being rather annoyed is an understatement. I've decided I should uninstall the Kiyo Pro from the studio machine entirely, because I've had enough.

When things go wrong like this, they affect me much more deeply than they would if I was more neurotypical. Yesterday evening I realised that I had been pushed very close to being completely overwhelmed by it all (and yes, I think that's every bit as ludicrous as you do, but that's how my mind works) and I'd reverted to a pattern of destructive thinking that's known as catastrophizing, which has been a habit of mine for my entire life. However, what's changed for me lately—and I'm profoundly grateful for the fact that it has—is that now I can spot when it's happening and do something constructive about it...

I'm now half-way through a series of therapy sessions which are trying to address various mental health issues which I've been suffering from for a very long time. I never thought I'd be the sort of person who could do this. I learned as a kid to keep everything bottled up and hide my feelings, so bringing them out into the open and confronting them has been incredibly tough. For the first couple of weeks, I was all over the place emotionally, although I think that things seem to be stabilising slightly this week.

Sessions involve talking about the things which have affected me most strongly in my life and which I've been struggling (and failing) to deal with. Some of these events happened more than sixty years ago. It's not been easy opening up to a complete stranger about some of my most deeply personal experiences, and I found that I feel exhausted for a couple of days after each session. It's not easy, but that's kind of the point. But the aim of these conversations is to change my patterns of thought (which have become habituated, ingrained, and negative) into something much more positive. It feels like now is the right time to try something like this, because my sense of self has taken some hard knocks over the past year and I'd simply reached the point where things could no longer continue as they were. I had to accept that I need help and treatment, and that has definitely been a first for me. How bad was it? Part of the treatment involves several exercises designed to stop destructive thinking and ruminating. There were twelve different unhelpful thinking behaviours listed on one of the information sheets that the therapist gave me, and I do eleven of them on a daily basis. Nearly a full house! Yeah, that's not good.

We also agreed that I need to wean myself off my obsessive tendency to rehearse the next day's possible conversations in my head, a behaviour known as scripting which is a very common Autistic trait that's linked to masking. While scripting can be beneficial as a coping strategy and help socialising, when you find yourself running through scenarios at four o'clock in the morning, it becomes counterproductive, if not outright destructive. Believe me, it leaves you utterly worn out. This week I learned a new technique of visualising the negative voice in my head as a repulsive entity that's your mind bully; the idea is to make it as ugly as possible and reject it outright, rather than attempting to engage with it. It sounds daft, but last night I tried the technique and it appears to have worked; I seem to have spent ninety minutes in a single unbroken phase of NREM sleep, and that never happens. My watch gave me a sleep score of 94, which is the highest I've managed in nearly a month.

My focus is better during the day, too; the amount of reading that I've managed to do this month has skyrocketed. Yesterday I finished the 27th book I've read so far this year, and I read the whole thing in a single day—and then I wrote a review of it for good measure before I went to bed. At the current rate I will get half-way to my target of reading sixty books this year a whole month ahead of schedule.

All the same, I think I'm going to have a quietly contemplative day today. Everything else can wait for a while.

I got an email notification last night that a shipment is on its way to me. Yes, the refund from DV247 came through and I've already ordered my new bass guitar. I suspect that it won't get here before this week's song sprint finishes, but you never know...

Fifty/Ninety might not be a thing any more, but over at FAWM the team have been planning a number of "off season" events, including what we've decided to call a Song Sprint starting on July 4th, where we'll be encouraging participants to have a go at writing five songs in nine days. See what we did there?

And as yesterday's date is written as 5/9 in the United States (I note that the rest of the world is more sensible about things) a few of us took the opportunity to begin a trial run at it, where for the moment we're just posting the results in FAWM's unofficial channel on Slack.

So yesterday I recorded the first piece of music I've made in nearly a fortnight. It took me a while to build up anything resembling a head of steam, but once things started moving they picked up momentum nicely. I had a few technical issues and I really need a reliable way of editing presets on my Red Panda Particle 2 because these days their web editor for it only works some of the time, and with limited functionality, regardless of which browser I use for it (Google Chrome is not a viable option for me, obviously) but in the end I decided I'd leave the gear hassles alone and focus on simply enjoying myself playing music.

It felt very good to return to being actively creative again. I can't overstate how important it's been in preventing my mental health from deteriorating in recent years any more than it has.

Some spam got through my filters today. It originated from one of those archetypal techbro wazzocks informing me that their AI-driven hack job "might be a game-changer for your 2026 operations" and no, I wouldn't have clicked on his dodgy link even without the massive red flag he raised by cautioning me that it wouldn't be available for long, because I'm not stupid.

If by "2026 operations" the techbro concerned was referring to my day-to-day activity on the web, he obviously hadn't bothered to do any actual work by researching me as a potential victim—sorry, I meant to say "customer"—by actually reading this website.

This website, which is full of stories calling out the results of using AI which have reduced accessibility to accurate information online, are demonstrably causing a decline in human cognition, which are actively destroying the potential for profitable creative work, which have sunk more than one business's credibility beyond redemption and which are resulting in the alarming reversal of progress being made toward the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. This website, which includes a blog stuffed full of stories about people's self-destructive behaviour driven by the AI bubble (you can read several of them below, and we're still less than a third of the way through the month). This website, which includes a policy statement rejecting the use of AI to replace any aspect of my own work in any field.

I might be Autistic, but even I can manage to read a room better than techbro guy can. I suspect he got an AI-driven app to do his spamming for him. Steer clear of AI, kids. It rots your brain.

The Environment Agency warned last year that the UK faces a potential shortfall of five billion litres of water a day by 2055, but apparently the Government thinks it's fine for AI providers to help themselves to as much water as they can lay their hands on.

And as it now turns out that Google have been lying through their teeth about the environmental impact of two new data centres that they're proposing to build in the UK, the amount of water that is actually going to end up being appropriated for such purposes is certain to be far more than the Government is expecting, let alone planning for.

Think the UK's situation is unusual for the tech industry these days? Nope. Not a chance. Over in Fayetteville, Georgia, local residents started complaining about the town's sudden problems with low water pressure. It turned out that the data provider company Quality Techonology Services had quietly helped themselves to thirty million gallons from the town's water supply without telling anyone (or paying for it). And were they prosecuted for this? Of course they weren't.

Even if AI didn't destroy useful information and rot your brain, the costs of using it are simply too high to be sustainable. Perhaps if businesses knew that they were actually spending more money using AI than they would have done by using people, things might change?

Nah, who am I kidding? Everyone's drunk the Kool-Aid.

And let's face it, when the esteemed medical journal The Lancet is publishing alarming papers about multiple cases of AI psychosis it's obvious (to me, at least) that you shouldn't touch LLMs with a ten-foot pole.

Hmm. I wonder if Richard Dawkins is familiar with that paper?

According to this article the Google Chrome browser has been silently downloading and installing 4 Gb worth of Google's Gemini Nano AI model on to users' machines without asking for permission to do so. And what's worse, if the user then deletes the model, Chrome appears to reinstall it.

Google's original motto was do no evil but they've clearly moved on from that—quite frankly, I've seen better-behaved supervillains in James Bond movies—and they're now all about corporate gain; petty things like the staggering environmental costs of rolling something like this out at scale (the author of the article in that last link estimates it will have generated roughly 28,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions (which—as you can see for yourself—works out as the equivalent of the total electricity used by 5,835 homes over the course of an entire year) don't appear to factor into their equations at all.

If you still have Google Chrome installed on your device (despite the many alarming reports we've seen recently) then maybe now is the time to think about getting rid of it?

Richard Dawkins has thoroughly lost the plot and his breathless adoration of the Claude LLM has not gone down well in the scientific community, particularly as because Dawkins is all about the ladies, he convinced himself that Claude is actually female and started calling it Claudia. Poor Richard has fallen victim to AI psychosis, a variant of exactly the same delusion that he scoffed at theists for making in his bestselling book. If you can only bring yourself to read one article on what happened, Rebecca Watson's scathing critique of how Dawkins announced his infatuation to the world is the one for you, because it's a doozy.

It's embarrassing, and rather sad.

Yesterday I was notified that the Ibanez bass which UPS wrecked for me and which was shipped back to Music Store last week has arrived at its destination. Note that I didn't include the word "safely" in that last sentence, as after my recent experience I take a jaundiced view of international couriers.

I just checked my account page at the Music Store site and it still shows no indication that I've made a return at all, and there's no sign of a refund being credited to the payment method I used.

I am therefore still feeling somewhat aggrieved, to say the least.

Yesterday I began reading Nigel Watson's delightful book about UFOs of the First World War (as you do). But fifty pages in, I found myself reading about a sighting of "mystery airship" by two policemen which took place just up the road in Wotton-Under-Edge in January 1913.

I wasn't expecting that!

Nigel's footnote gives his reference as the edition of the Dursley, Berkeley and Sharpness Gazette published on Saturday, 25th January 1913. I was able to track down a different report in the Cheltenham Chronicle of the same date which is stored in the British Newspaper Archive (you'll need to register to read the page, but it's free; the story is at the bottom of column five) and learned that the policemen were Sgt. Packer and Constable Garner. According to the Cheltenham Chronicle, the two men noticed the "airship" as it appeared to be flying over the village of Hawkesbury Upton, and making in the direction of Swindon. That means that they were looking south-southeast and the object was at least four miles away; when they first noticed it, it would already have been heading away from them in an easterly direction so suggesting that it had come from Wales is based on the assumption that it hadn't changed course. The reporter continued, "The policemen tell me that they were quite positive it was an air-ship, and one of an unusually large type."

It's an intriguing tale, although I think it's more likely that they had seen a large meteor as it disintegrated in the upper atmosphere, much further away and at a much greater altitude.

The nation mourned a dog yesterday. The death of a thirteen-year-old Patterdale terrier mix called Ted made headline news but if you've ever watched an episode of Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing you'll know exactly why it did.

This week hasn't felt quite as bad as last week. It seems like I have a little more energy and even though I'm still not sleeping very well, I don't feel quite as exhausted as I did. The good weather has helped, and releasing the new album (see below) boosted my spirits as well. I've been trying to overcome the inertia that descended on me after FAWM and sending the broken Ibanez back meant that I had one less task looming over me that my ADHD brain really didn't want to have to deal with.

I've also been more successful in not taking naps in the middle of the afternoon, which were almost certainly making things worse rather than better—although it doesn't count as a nap if you're just lying down to listen to music on headphones with your eyes closed, right?

It still feels like I have a long way to go before I will be able to tell myself that I'm feeling healthy again, but the longer days have definitely started to improve my mood. I saw some swifts flying over the village yesterday, and that always makes me feel better.

It's Bandcamp Friday once again today. The site will waive their cut of transaction fees until 08:00 BST tomorrow morning, which means, for example, that if you bought a download of my latest album What The Eye Doesn't See, I will get slightly more money out of the deal than I normally would. Which is nice, obviously.

I always try to support artists I admire when Bandcamp runs these events and I've already spent more on other people's music than I've received from people buying mine, but I'm totally fine with that. I'm fortunate enough to have funds which enable me to help sustain independent artists a little bit, so that's what I do.

But all the same, I am very grateful to all the people who have already bought my new album. You folks rock!