Mo'menths August 2026: A Gust of Stars

August the month that ends the academic year, where students get their results with all the excitement and anxiety that comes with it. I remember getting my GCSE results and not being very happy with them, with Maths being the subject I was most happy with. Everything else was different levels of disappointment, that is to say the results mattered at that point in time, and regardless of what they were, what happened next was far more consequential.

This months interesting fact; the reason the academic year is even shaped this way (results in August, a fresh start in September) traces back to the Education Act of 1880, when school became compulsory for 5 to 10 year olds. Before that, attendance dropped off a cliff from late spring through summer because kids were needed for farm work (harvesting, livestock, shepherding for days at a time). September was picked simply because it was when the most kids would actually show up. A 145 year old scheduling decision made for a farming economy, still quietly running the system today.

• Year 4 of the magical UEL Alumni Big Weekend where I also got to break something.
• A "movie marathon weekend" that ranged wildly in tone
• Coyote vs. Acme being on point with it's messaging about the power held by corporations.

This year's UEL Alumni Big Weekend gave me my Kintsugi moment, quite literally. The Saturday workshops let you choose between perfume making, clay sculpture, and Kintsugi, and I didn't hesitate, I've always loved the Japanese concept of mending broken pottery with gold rather than hiding the crack. I was first in line to break my bowl, mostly because I already knew roughly how it's traditionally done and couldn't wait to get started, which meant I dove in before the rest of the instructions had even finished, applying the epoxy and dusting the gold powder onto the resin afterwards, the way it's actually done traditionally. Turns out that's not how the workshop had us do it though, their instructions were to mix the gold powder straight into the epoxy before applying it to the break. So naturally I got a second bowl and did that one the "correct" workshop way, mixing the gold in before applying it, which meant my head start doing it "properly" on bowl one just meant I got to do it both ways by the end. I'm not mad about it. There's something fitting about rushing into the repair before you fully understand it and ending up with two different ways of putting something back together.

The concept of honouring the break instead of hiding it, which is what most people would do, feels like such a powerful metaphor for what I think is our current societal expectation of "fix yourself" so you can hide whatever's perceived as broken about you. We live in a culture that leans on therapy-speak as a way of flattening something far more complex, and what works for one person's version of "broken" won't necessarily work for someone else's.

That idea got tested again a few days later, when someone close to me suggested I needed to "work on myself" before I'd be ready for anything romantic, the kind of comment that sounds wise until you ask what it actually means and get no answer back. I don't think that's wrong because I'm in denial about having things to work on, everyone does, it's wrong because it assumes there's one correct order of operations, fix the crack first, then be allowed to be seen. The gold doesn't wait for the bowl to be perfect. It goes on while the break is still fresh, sometimes before you've even finished reading the instructions. I'd rather be visibly repairing in real time than quietly hidden away until I'm deemed finished.

That idea followed me into Sunday's closing keynote, "The Sunday Night Test", which reframed the usual dread of the week ahead into three questions: where's my attention right now, where could it be, and where do I want it to be. It landed harder than I expected, because it's basically the same lesson as the bowl and as everything with the gold showing before it's asked to: you don't need to wait until you fully understand something to start putting it back together, you just start. Four Big Weekends in, I think I've gotten better at that, both with bowls and with everything else.

Don't have much in terms of updates, it's getting to a stage where it's "boring now", the NAS is chugging along with the services that are most important right now and things have settled to a quiet rhythm of "it just works". I am usually averse to the mentainance side of things, but it's a good thing in this senario because it means I can focus on the other things that I have put on hold over the last three months. Of course the main reason the settling has happened now is that it only came with 8GB of RAM which means I am not able to add all the services I would like to add. There is a plan to expand to 32GB (maybe 64GB) if the RAM prices come down to a reasonable level.

I did almost installed liux as a dual boot option on my PC to kick off my weaning from windows but the drive I had turned out is had died and I have to get a new one. I alreday blew out the budget this month so that will be a next month thing, so I guess next months Builder's Log will be a little more exciting.

In films this month, we are bringing the average back up again with a total of 19 films watched, which brings the total to 127. This month started with a rewatch of The Odyssey on the 1st, then again on the 5th, which makes it the 4th time I've watched it at the cinema, all different formats. And it ended with watching La La Land with my sister which was a great experience because she hadn't seen it before. La La Land is one of my top 4 movies on Letterboxd, why? Because it is a beautiful movie about two people whose dreams are bigger than their relationship, who both know their time together is only for the season of their lives where they push each other toward those dreams. I also loved what the movie did where it showed an alternate ending where they did end up together but the cost was that one of them, in this case, Sebastian, would have had to give up his dream. Such a beautiful and sad movie, I absolutely loved it. I was also wondering why I have apparently only logged it on Letterboxd twice before but it felt very much like I have seen it more than twice, but I believe it's because of the number of times I have listened to its soundtrack, I am obsessed!

I did what I dubbed a "weekend movie marathon" where I saw 6 new films out this year over the 22nd and 23rd, (why? because spreading them out would have meant choosing and I think i deserve a "me" weekend doing something that I fully enjoy) with a wide range of genres, Spa Weekend (this one can be skipped), Insidious: Out of the Further (a good one for horror fans), and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (not a movie for everyone, but worth it if you're a Gillian Anderson fan) on the 22nd, and David (a fun watch, a kids' movie about the titular Bible character), Tony (fantastic), and Stop! That! Train! (mostly funny, though the humour isn't for everyone) on the 23rd. One movie I wasn't expecting to hit home as it did was Coyote vs. Acme, which is about Coyote taking on the big corp that is Acme, which parallels my issue with microsoft, the movie pretty accuratly spells out this impossible task, which is of course an indictment to our capitalist system where corporations are more important than the individual and everyone, including the politicians will fight tooth and nail to keep it that way, because they are either benefiting from it, or are blinded by the shiny adds to look past the facade, I was like that before this issue happened and a part of me is disappointed I fell into the classic not caring until I'm personally affected.

Theatre this month continues last months change of watching live versions of some of my favourite movie franchise although this one I think got worse with each movie but the first one is still a favourite. The show in question is Now You See Me Live at the London Coliseum, it would be the first time I would properly watch a magic show, it was a great experience and might have made me believed a little more in magic because most of the tricks and illusions were flawless and quite jaw dropping. One of my favourite parts though was one of the tricks where we (the audience) were encouraged to pick 4 cards and while following a series of instructions, where we destroyed the cards, shuffled them while discarding the halves one after the other with the end goal being to have two halves left that are from the same whole, naturally with a trick like that, it wouldn't work with everyone (and it didn't) but it worked for me and for a second there, I believed.

In books, I got back into it with book three and four of Dungeon Crawler Carl; The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook and The Gate of the Feral Gods respectively by Matt Dinniman. In the former, Carl gets his hands on the Anarchist's Cookbook, a disguised heirloom artifact packed with secret strategies and lore from previous crawlers, which helps him navigate the fourth floor, The Iron Tangle, a dungeon level built like a complex, looping subway system. In the latter, the fifth floor traps crawlers in a "bubble" where they have to capture four castles to progress, centred around the Gate of the Feral Gods, a teleportation artifact whose use risks unleashing a feral god from the prison dimension known as The Nothing. I don't have a huge amount to add beyond that I'm thoroughly enjoying the series, things are really heating up and I can't wait to move on to book five The Butcher's Masquerade.

In music, this month was dominated by P!nk, more specifically, her song All Out Of Fight which is a sad but beautiful song about love and loss. The unpredictability of life and the sadness that comes with losing someone we love. I did also find myself revising an old favourite in the form of the soundtrack from Mother Mary, Mother Mary: Greatest Hits, beautifully performed by the ever talented Anne Hathaway.

In September, I will be participating in my third London to Brighton Cycle Ride. I think this is the first time where I haven't really thought a lot about it, but I am very much looking forward to it, maybe it's time to buy a new bib, the one I am currently using day-to-day is due for an upgrade.
I have booked to see Arcadia again, because the first time I experienced it was less-than ideal because I was only able to get a standing ticket and my neck did not like that experience. After finding out it is being released again at another theatre, I took it as a sign that the universe wanted me to experience it again properly this time.

This is the eighth entry in Mo'menths. September follows, Dream On!