Plutonic Rainbows

I have been a devotee of Strangelove for quite some time. Their scents are majestic, enigmatic, and seem almost timeless. I suspect this is partly because, as far as I know, they have never been absorbed into a large conglomerate. Their work still carries the depth, craft, and integrity that defined the designer fragrances I discovered as a teenager nearly forty years ago.

Much of that quality has vanished as once-great houses were gradually swallowed by large corporations, and Strangelove stands out precisely because it has refused to follow that path. I own most of the Strangelove collection, but it’s only recently that I’ve started experimenting with layering. My most successful pairing so far has been Dead of Night oil with Fall Into Stars EDP.

This pairing works because each fragrance completes what the other lacks, creating a full architectural structure instead of two overlapping scents. Dead of Night, as an oil, forms a warm, stable foundation on the skin. Its resinous oud, sandalwood, and amber unfold slowly, staying close and intimate. The oil’s low volatility prevents sharp edges and anchors the scent with a sacred, resinous depth that feels devotional and steady.

Fall Into Stars brings the opposite qualities: lift, movement, and radiance. Its volatile aromatic notes rise above the oil rather than sinking into it, creating the effect of warm resin below and incense-like brightness above. Both fragrances use a refined, polished oud profile, so they stay aligned tonally without clashing. Their contrast creates real dimension: Dead of Night is dark and contemplative, while Fall Into Stars is luminous and atmospheric.

Together, the skin’s warmth expands the oil while the alcohol-based spray projects outward, pulling the two layers into a unified aura. There are no competing citrus or sharp top notes, so the blend feels seamless and intentional. The resulting structure naturally evokes a sacred atmosphere: depth, calm, rising incense, space, and quiet intensity. In essence, the oil builds the sacred foundation, the EDP builds the church-like lift, and their ouds harmonise into a coherent, atmospheric whole.

My new cable arrived yesterday and I fitted earlier today. The cable is the Chord ClearwayX 2RCA to 5DIN Analogue Cable.

The network player arrived on Wednesday; I set it up yesterday and have been enjoying it ever since. I finally decided to buy one after decades of listening habits built around physically hunting for a CD every time I wanted to hear something. Now I can listen to more than forty years of accumulated music that I’ve been gradually committing to disk over the past twenty years — including ripping more than 2,000 CDs, along with my collection of hi-res, lossless audio and other formats. Having everything available through streaming adds a different level of convenience: no hunting through shelves, no swapping discs, no manual file management. Just immediate access to the entire library from one place. It’s good to have it all so easily within reach.

Sometimes it feels safer to keep away from old fragrances and old music, because their ability to resurrect the past can be overwhelming, even uncomfortable. Scent and sound work on the deepest parts of the mind, reaching emotion before thought, so the recall arrives too quickly to prepare for. What returns is not just a memory but a former version of myself, a figure I can sense vividly yet can no longer inhabit. These triggers also revive entire social worlds that have vanished — cultural textures, atmospheres, expectations that no longer exist — so the recognition comes wrapped in the realisation of how much has been lost. The past reappears too alive, too intact, while I stand changed, weathered by years that the fragrance or song has never had to endure. Faced with that imbalance, avoidance becomes a form of protection: a way to honour what those things once meant without being pulled back into emotional terrain that feels too raw or destabilising. Keeping them at a distance is not denial; it is self-preservation in the presence of memories that still carry more power than I can comfortably hold.

If you believe the past has autonomy, you acknowledge that progress was never guaranteed. History is full of dead ends, lost causes, and alternatives that never happened. To respect the past's autonomy is to give weight to those losers of history as much as the winners, because at the time, the outcome was not yet decided.

Do not treat the past as a rehearsal for the present. It was a real, complete world to the people who lived in it, and it deserves to be understood within its own context.

You get to create temporary pockets of order, beauty, meaning, and experience inside a universe that is always unfolding.

I keep a collection of vintage fragrances hidden away in drawers — bottles from the 1980s and 1990s that seem to hold their breath in the dark. I seldom touch them, yet I cannot bear to let them go. They feel less like objects and more like fragments that have slipped into an afterlife, familiar but no longer belonging to my world. Whenever I think of opening one, I sense the eerie autonomy of the past — how something once ordinary can become mournful and faintly threatening simply by surviving beyond its time.

A fragrance from that era does not summon a simple memory; it resurrects an entire atmosphere. One breath would bring back a decade with startling precision: the colours, the confidence, the textures of a vanished social world. And yet that world would return without context, stripped of the life that once animated it. It would feel like viewing an old mall through degraded film stock — recognisable, but ghostly; intimate, yet hollowed out. These scents carry the residue of human presence, but none of the presence itself. That absence unsettles me more deeply than I like to admit.

There is something profoundly uncanny about the recent past, especially when it returns through objects that should have remained fixed in memory. The bottles in my drawers seem almost familiar but just out of reach, as if they belong to a timeline I no longer inhabit. They have slipped free of the era that created them and now exist on their own, adrift, exerting a quiet pressure on the present. Their very survival feels like a small act of defiance, as though the past has developed its own momentum. I don’t remember them so much as feel them watching, waiting — alive in ways I can’t fully explain.

That is why I keep them sealed away. In ordinary remembering, I summon the past; but with these fragrances, it feels as though the past would summon me. One scent could pull me into a sense of déjà vu mixed with grief, presenting a version of myself I can no longer reach. The reversal of control is the truly sinister part: something inert — glass, liquid, a label — seems capable of acting on me. These bottles hold no narrative, no explanation, only traces of life without the life itself. They feel slightly malevolent not because they threaten harm, but because they remind me how thoroughly time can erase meaning while leaving the evidence intact.

And yet I cannot discard them. Their presence is unsettling, but their absence would feel like erasing an entire section of my own history. So they remain in the drawers, patient and self-possessed, like ghosts caught between worlds. Sometimes I open the drawer a fraction and glimpse a faded cap or the darkening of vintage juice, and the air seems to tighten. It is as if these fragments of the past still breathe in their own strange way — out of time, out of context, and utterly beyond my control.

I just picked up Joe Hill's latest novel, which earned a glowing review from The New York Times. I've only made it through the first couple of chapters, but it's already drawn me in. The writing is sharp and vivid, the atmosphere unsettling in that signature Joe Hill way. It feels like the kind of story that builds slowly, layering unease and mystery until you realize you're completely hooked. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

I've added a PDF generation feature to the blog that allows readers to download any post as a formatted PDF document. The system uses AWS Lambda with a Python function that converts markdown content to PDF using the ReportLab library. When someone clicks the Download PDF link on a post, their browser sends the post content to an API Gateway endpoint, which triggers the Lambda function to generate and return a properly formatted PDF file. I chose this serverless approach because it keeps costs minimal (typically under $0.02 per month for a personal blog) while providing real-time generation without pre-building PDFs for every post during the blog build process.

The implementation took some iteration to get right. I initially tried using WeasyPrint for PDF generation, but quickly discovered it requires system libraries that aren't available in the Lambda environment, so I switched to ReportLab which is pure Python. The design of the button also evolved through user feedback — starting with a prominent button with an emoji icon, then refining it down to a subtle text link Download PDF that appears inline with the post date, using a minimalist gray color that turns blue on hover. I also had to work through some technical challenges with CORS configuration and binary media type handling in API Gateway to ensure the PDFs download correctly as binary files rather than corrupted base64 text. The end result is a system that generates 2-10 KB PDFs in about 200-500 milliseconds, with proper formatting for headers, lists, code blocks, and other markdown elements.