Now

This is a now page, and was last updated on 9 February 2026.

What’s going on, Internet? I was going to have this post as the December wrap up post but the summer took hold of me and here we are at the end of January and a week into Feb, lol.

December kicked off with a Tuesday night gig, Lewis Capaldi At The Spark Arena, a fantastic show. I finished off a post about what music ownership means to me, I was happy to get that one out of drafts and published. Then we were straight into finishing up work for the year and I took some time to reflect on the beers I drunk, the books I read, and the music I enjoyed throughout the year.

Christmas was an exciting time. With a four year old and a two year old we were in full hype mode. I also got into the hype and had a blast. We had a pre-Christmas lunch at my brother’s place with his family and my parents, two days of work and then straight into Christmas Eve prep which we had at my parent-in-law’s place with the kids, their aunties and all their grandparents. They actually managed to go to sleep and woke up super excited and we got to do it all over again on Christmas Day.

I braved the mall on Boxing Day and managed to pick up the last copy of the 2025 Indie Store exclusive re-issue of Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ pressed on red vinyl. The mall itself wasn’t too bad, but the traffic into the mall was horrific. Worth it though.

With Christmas out of the way we had a couple days down time before we started our road trip down south. This was so much fun. Our end destination was the Marlborough Sounds, and we broke the trip up into stages so we could explore some of the country and also make sure that the kids weren’t stuck in a car non-stop for days on end. On day one we headed to the Hawke’s Bay via Orakei Korako Cave & Geothermal Park. We stayed one night in Havelock North and visited the national aquarium in Napier before continuing on to Martinborough where we spent two nights. The kids got some grandparent time and my wife and I managed to head over the hill to Wellington to catch up with some friends.

On New Year’s Eve we packed up the car again and made our way with the kids to the ferry terminal in Wellington to cross the Cook Strait and make the drive to a remote part of the Marlborough Sounds. After four nights down there enjoying the remote tranquility of the top of the South Island, we headed back to the ferry terminal in Picton to catch the boat back to Wellington and drove straight back to Martinborough for a week of working remote rather than cutting the road trip short.

We then packed the car up for a final time and made our way back up north, back to Havelock North again for one more night. Before heading north again the next morning we took the kids to Splash Planet and had a fun time in the water and playing mini golf. We stopped off in Hastings for some ice cream before heading back to Taupō where we stopped off at the Hooker Falls and Cobb & Co for dinner. My wife and I have great memories of family dinners and birthday parties at the Cobb and were hoping the kids would have a blast, but I think they were over it and were just tired. Luckily it was only three more hours back to Tāmaki Makaurau so I made the drive home while the family slept.

Then it was back home to unpack and get back to the reality of the weekly grind of school and work. What an epic road trip though. I look forward to more of them, and they’ll only get better as the kids get older.

On Screen

TV Shows

I’ve been watching a lot of great shows recently, old and new. I saw Tulsa King on Cory’s website, gave it a go and ended up watching the entirety of season one over a couple days. I’m going to get right onto season two as soon as I can. The second season of The Vince Staples Show was like a fever dream. Short episodes, easy to watch.

My favourite universe, the Power Universe had season three of Power Book IV: Force on the screen and I loved it. It’s so over the top and the premise is wild. Great end to the series and looking forward to Power Book Legacy! I watched all four episodes of Sean Combs: The Reckoning - it really shows what a psycho that guy is.

The fourth season of Industry has started and I’m watching my way through that, I have no idea if I actually like this show anymore - it’s kinda fever dream like itself, but I’ll keep watching it. Shrinking is back for its third season. And finally A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms started, I loved the books and I’m loving this show. Set a hundred years before the events of A Song Of Ice And Fire, it’s a bit more lighthearted and funny than Game Of Thrones was.

Movies

Been a good run of movie watching over here recently. Partly due to Mr 4 taking more of an interest in them. He’d been coming home from preschool talking about KPop Demon Hunters, and we’d been listening to the music and so we sat down and watched the movie together one afternoon. I really enjoyed it. He did too. He’s also been into Paw Patrol recently so as a treat he’s been able to watch some of the Paw Patrol movies starting with PAW Patrol: The Movie, which I also ended up really enjoying. Surprising at the big names doing the voices. Totally different to the budget voices on the Tonies 🤣 So yeah, the movie was really good, although he got quite upset when Chase lost his confidence. It was cute.

Christmas was also a bigger than usual thing in our household this year and so on Christmas Eve we all sat down together and watched Home Alone with him. A fun movie which he enjoyed, and maybe laughed a bit too hard at parts. When the kids did eventually go to bed I enjoyed the annual screening of The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

During the roadtrip we stayed at a motel on the way down south and we took advantage of the yearly screening of Grease - one of my all time favourite movies. After the kids sleeping for hours in the car we knew they weren’t going to bed easily so we had a family movie night. Grease isn’t a kids movie, but it’s also quite tame compared to movies today. I enjoyed it, they enjoyed it and we all had a good time, and they eventually went to sleep.

The other movies I enjoyed were Woodstock 99 which dove into the absolute state of the 99 Woodstock festival and how it eventually turned into what it was. What a shit time that would have been. On the lighter side I enjoyed Good Fortune and then Shithouse, which has a shit name, but explored the isolating side of social interaction.

On The Shelf

Eleven records added to the collection across December and January. A lot of anniversary editions and special pressings landed on the shelf.

Bookmarks

Here’s all the posts I enjoyed recently. You can check out more over on the Bookmarks archive.

Around the Web

Shellsharks is back and publishing Scrolls again so go check that out.

Hyde is still publishing his Over/Under series and has just published issue #50 with Bobby Hiltz. I really love the way Hyde personalises each Over/Under interview with his guest - it makes for an interesting read and shows that he does go out of his way to read their websites.

xandra has also just dropped the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of Good Internet magazine. I can’t wait to get stuck in and read all the new articles while I wait for my physical edition to arrive.

This Website

Plenty of hacking on the website over the break. I’ve been messing with the homepage layout. I’m still not entirely happy with the bento, but it’s fine for now. I’ve added a “Stuck In My Head” section that highlights the six most played songs from last.fm. I’ve also moved the webrings into the bento and revived my buttons collection - I’ve got more to add here later.

I’ve started adding garden indicators for living posts that I intend to keep working on over time. I will eventually create a /garden/ page to list these pages for easy browsing. I guess that tag page serves that purpose at the moment. Along with that I think I’ve improved the post metadata on each post that helps tell the story better with category, tags, and dates. Let me know what you think.

I spent some (a lot) of time unifying the look and feel across Beer Fridge, Recordshelf, Bookshelf, and Comics pages with cleaned up CSS and introducing a common layout for the stat cards. That damn comics page needs a lot of work.

This update was brought to you by Girl in Stilettos by Annah Mac

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