I’ve been pottering around cyberspace this week as I moved some old websites from one server to another. Midway through my list was a blog I started in 2010 after moving to the capital, which I called “Lessons Learned in London”.

It was mainly concerned with the perils and pitfalls of the London rental market and superficially aimed at fellow newbies navigating the seemingly-arbitrary demands of prospective landlords and letting agents. Reading back some of the entries fifteen years later, I’m struck by how small my problems seemed back then (not to mention the font size on my blog).

As you read this, I’m on my way to London for the weekend, seeing family for the run-up to Christmas. The five years I lived there are memorable for the bevy of new experiences I was exposed to, and I have no regrets: I moved there at 23 and left not long before turning 30. A misspent youth it wasn’t, but sometimes I find myself starting to calculate how much money I earned during the period without saving a single penny of it, and wince.

I apologise for the lateness of this week’s issue, normally scheduled for Friday mornings. I wracked my brain to think of a good excuse but wasn’t able to come up with anything convincing, so I asked an AI bot to write some instead:

1. "Sorry it’s late – email platform outage — but we’re back now!"

2. "Sorry it’s late – I held out for a last-minute update — and it’s here!"

3. "Sorry it’s late – quick 24-hour bug, but I’m back on track!"

Convincing.

This is relevant because I’ve been thinking a lot about AI this week. It’s the topic du jour and in the last few days I read this piece by Ed Zitron who argues that AI is “a technology that lacks any real purpose, sold as if it could do literally anything”.

My new album is out this week – a collection of songs I spent the past year or so writing and recording, then editing and tweaking until I hated each song and never wanted to hear them again. But ignore me, and go listen to it!

Choosing a name for something is hard, as I’ve written before. A child, a pet, a song, or a record: these names will stick around for a long time. In this instance, nobody really cares except me, but I wanted to choose something that symbolised the collection of ideas and feelings I was expressing, without sounding trite.

I settled on “Masks”, which also ended up being the name of the closing song on the album. A lesser writer would insert the dictionary definition of the word “Masks” at this point, but come on: this is Man Feelings. Let’s talk about emotions instead!

It’s 2005 and a week before my nineteenth birthday. Mobile phones at the time were still primitive, but if you were creative and had enough time on your hands, you could edit your own ringtone on some Nokia devices, which I successfully used to program the main riff of my teenage band’s new song as my alarm sound. Once again, the primitive early years of now-dominant technology encouraged creativity, despite (or because of) the limitations.

But I digress. On the Saturday afternoon I’m thinking of, I was standing at the entrance to the Cornerhouse, a large cinema/shopping mall in the centre of Nottingham. I’d planned to meet my mum and sister there for lunch, and had forgotten to bring my phone. No matter; they’d be there by 1pm and I was five minutes early.

Time ticked past and soon it was half an hour past the meeting point. I agonised about what to do: if I left and tried to find them at the pub we were supposed to be meeting at, they might come to the Cornerhouse and miss me. The best thing to do was to stay where I was.

Everyone’s a little vain, really. If you’re on social media—and who isn’t—then you’re lying if you claim that you’ve never gleefully checked the Like count on a particularly good post you were proud of. We’ve all been trained, like the proverbial rat in a cage, to press the dopamine button and try to get the machine to love us.

A dozen years ago I was working at the Guardian and wrote a piece on the newly-launched Developer Blog about the first stage of a website redesign we’d been working on. I was a member of the team working on this, but certainly not the main contributor. I liked to write, though, so my teammates were fine with me being the “face” of the work, at least as far as the scope of the blogpost went.

Six months later I was on stage at my first tech conference as a speaker, doing a presentation version of the article to a paying audience. A year after the article, I was giving my second, similarly-themed talk. For a brief period, I was mildly on “the circuit” of tech conferences.