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Plutonic Rainbows

Jurassic World Rebirth

It opens today — another roar into the modern age. On Saturday, I will see it in Bristol, though not in the same cinema where it all began. That theatre, where I first witnessed wonder, fell silent in the late ’90s — its curtains drawn forever, its magic folded into memory. It was 1993. I was a younger man, sitting in the hush of that darkened room as prehistory stormed back to life. The screen lit up with beasts and awe, and something in me shifted — wide-eyed, breath caught, the future vast and alive. Now, in a different cinema, older, steadier, I return not to recapture youth, but to honour it. To feel the echo of that first thunder, still rumbling somewhere beneath the years.

It’s already dropped online — and the movie has only been out for a few hours. I need to resist the temptation and wait for the full big-screen experience.

Vintage Adverts

In a time when the world shimmered with optimism and edge, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren reigned as icons of the late nineteen-eighties, their adverts capturing more than clothes — they captured desire. Calvin’s vision was athletic minimalism: clean lines, sun-bleached denim, and the suggestion of motion even in stillness. Ralph, ever the storyteller, spun Americana into elegance, all polo fields and windswept hair, his models cast like Gatsby’s heirs. These brands didn’t just sell garments — they conjured a lifestyle, one of convertible drives along coastal highways, glances exchanged on tennis courts, and the promise of summer stretching endlessly ahead.

Each campaign was a window into a dream, printed across glossy magazine pages with grainy textures and radiant light. The faces, the fabrics, the fonts — they spoke of youth, confidence, and aspiration dressed in linen and ambition. Even now, decades later, those adverts hum with nostalgia: a soft-focus reminder of when fashion felt mythic and a slogan could make your pulse race. To revisit them is to time-travel, not just through style, but through feeling—back to a golden hour of elegance where image became legend.

Ready Player One

Watching Ready Player One. It's a good movie but not one of Spielberg's best. It's a dazzling visual spectacle that revels in pop culture nostalgia, but beneath its flashy veneer lies a somewhat shallow narrative that doesn’t quite live up to its potential.

I ordered a sample of Cartier Oud & Santal. The last fragrance I purchased from the house was the reimagined Pasha de Cartier Parfum from 2020 — an excellent modern interpretation of the classic scents Cartier created during its golden era in the 1980s and 1990s.

omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli

New album from Perila. A release on West Mineral records.

One of contemporary Ambient’s preeminent figures lands on its leading label, enacting a transition into a new phase of rhythmic noise and tonal shadowplay laced with peculiar sensitivities, wrangling Dilloway-influenced tape noise thru ASMR ambience, fritzed Dub Techno, layered vocal drone and ritualistic mantras - big tip IYI Grouper, Porter Ricks, Pharmako or Civilistjävel!.

GTMetrix Optimisations

I’ve implemented a series of performance enhancements based on my GTMetrix analysis to significantly improve the blog’s loading speed, particularly for users in China. The most impactful changes addressed the critical request chain latency — previously measured at 796ms — and reduced JavaScript execution time. This was accomplished by introducing resource preloading, applying defer attributes to non-critical scripts, and refining the requestIdleCallback logic with appropriate timeouts. Additionally, I improved the font loading strategy by switching from font-display: optional to font-display: swap, which helps ensure that text remains visible during font downloads. This is especially important in regions where Google Fonts tend to load slowly.

To further boost rendering efficiency, I implemented content-visibility: auto with intrinsic size hints for key elements such as images (800x600px), post content (1000px), and post items (500px). This allows the browser to skip rendering off-screen content, improving scrolling performance. I also adopted a non-blocking CSS loading technique for Lightbox styles, where styles initially load using media="print" and switch to media="all" after loading, thereby avoiding render-blocking. These combined optimizations reduce First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Total Blocking Time (TBT), delivering a noticeably faster, smoother, and more responsive experience for users.

Power

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s album Power unfolds as a sculptural sound environment where voice, modular synth, and ambient recordings merge into a single, living organism. Lowe’s voice slides effortlessly between breath, chant, overtone, and electronic shimmer, interweaving with analog drones to build a ritual-like ambience. At its core is the space 'in between the notes' — a deliberate embrace of silence and nuance that allows the listener to become part of the unfolding sonic ritual .

This is not music to simply listen to, but music to inhabit. Layers of modular tones form an architectural soundscape, Lowe’s vocal harmonics act as both anchor and wandering specter, and field recordings introduce the presence of a broader world in motion. The album recalls the patiently nuanced, melancholic logic of his earlier work (like Kulthan), yet Power deepens that legacy into an immersive act of transformation. It’s an atmosphere you enter lightly but leave fundamentally changed — an experience of sound as living energy, at once intimate, uncanny, and profoundly ritualistic.

Available on Boomkat.

Supabase Prompt Rules Management

The new Supabase integration transforms prompt management from a manual, error-prone process into an automated, centralized system that ensures consistency across all AI interactions. By storing the master prompt_rules.xml file in a Supabase storage bucket, I can update the AI behavioral rules once through the web dashboard and have those changes automatically propagate to all local prompt templates through an intelligent synchronization system.

This eliminates the need to manually edit multiple prompt files, reduces the risk of inconsistent AI behavior, and provides a single source of truth for all AI interaction guidelines. The system leverages Supabase's robust storage infrastructure with proper authentication and access controls, while the smart sync mechanism only downloads and applies changes when rules have actually been modified, optimizing both performance and API usage.

Silence The Sea

I finally added this to my Strangelove collection.

There is a moment, just before the sun slips beneath the Pacific horizon, when the ocean reveals its truest nature — not just in color, but in feeling. Silence the Sea captures that rare synesthetic space where light, scent, and sound collapse into a single impression: vast, resonant, and eternal.

Opening with a breath of salted skin and sun-warmed minerals, this fragrance immediately conjures the chill of deep water and the glint of sunlight caught in surf. You smell the ocean not as a postcard cliché, but as a living, moving force — dark blue and fathoms deep. There’s a physicality to it, like the pressure you feel below the surface, or the echo of whales sounding in distant canyons. It’s not loud, but it is profoundly present.

Ambergris — the soul of this perfume — lends both texture and myth. It’s the scent of ancient marine stories, borne on tides and lifted by the wind. Here, it doesn’t dominate but rather shimmers quietly beneath crystal-clear waves, like something glimpsed just out of reach. Each breath seems to pull you further from shore, toward the open, unknown deep.

Yet, for all its abyssal resonance, Silence the Sea is illuminated by a kind of golden-hour light — that Pacific glow when the surf catches fire and the salt hangs softly in the air. There’s a skin-like warmth that rises over time, as if the sea has kissed you and then dried in the sun. It’s intimate, but never cloying; haunting, but never heavy.

This is not a perfume for those who like easy resolutions. It is a reverie of oceans — clean, deep, and unspeakably vast. Wearing it feels like stepping out of time, standing still in the surf, while the whales sing below and the horizon blazes above.

Vercel App

With Claude Code’s assistance, I built a React-based app featuring a simple countdown. Claude handled the entire process — developing the app, installing all necessary packages and dependencies, pushing it to GitHub, and connecting it to Vercel.

I also added a system, light and dark mode to the application. Again, Claude Code essentially carried out all the work.

Finally, I had Claude Code configure Sentry to monitor the blog in real time, with the added ability to query Sentry through their MCP server.

Second Attempts

Yesterday, I spent some time revisiting Roja Parfum’s Lost In Paris and Dior’s Bois Talisman. Between the two, Bois Talisman left the weakest impression — the mid and dry-down stages have a peculiar plastic-like quality. Lost In Paris performed slightly better, though it felt somewhat linear, and I couldn’t detect the butter accord. For a fragrance in their prestige collection, it is something of a disappointment. Some are saying this is the best gourmand ever. I cannot say I agree.