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This morning, when I fired up my web browser, my home page, which is the landing page on the website for the British newspaper The Guardian, displayed a pop-up window giving me two choices: either I could disable the javascript and cookie blockers that I use in my browser to keep it safe from malicious software (known colloquially as "malware") which can be injected into their website by third parties who have paid to run "adverts" there, or I could take out a subscription to the newspaper, which would remove the pop-up message.

I wasn't prepared to do either of those things.

Instead I chose the third alternative, which The Guardian won't be happy about but which is the safest and cheapest response: I set my browser's home page to that of a different news organization and removed every single bookmark on my machine that was pointing to The Guardian's website, because it's evidently no longer going to be of any use to me whatsoever.

This isn't me being petty. Unless you take steps to stop them, websites run by big companies regularly track your online activity: which other website you came to their site from, how long you stayed to browse their site, and which pages you looked at, where you went to afterwards, and for many, all sorts of other more personal information. All this data about you is traded with other companies, and each time that you click on that "accept cookies" button you're giving your consent to the practice. Much of this behaviour goes beyond what the EU considers to be justified, let alone appropriate, hence GDPR, and the occasional message that EU residents get online about a website not being available in their country (which is because the company can't be arsed to make what they do compliant with EU legislation and doesn't that tell you a lot about the sort of company they are?)

Websites are also an easy vector for people who want to con you, defraud you, or spy on you to gain access to parts of your computer that they have no business looking at. This isn't just about looking at your browsing history or finding out where you live, either. Just this week the FBI warned against a number of websites currently in operation which—unless you're careful to block how much control they have over your browser—can gain access to information stored on your machine; important data like your credit card numbers or bank account details, for example. Some of these sites will try to encrypt all of the data on your computer so that you can no longer read it, and then ask you for a "fee" to reverse the process (this is what ransomware does). And make no mistake about it: this sort of thing is going on all the time, and has been for decades. Even Google's own web browser has been compromised (I removed my Chrome install as a result of that particular debacle and have yet to put it back). Cyber crime is serious business and there are a lot of security threats out there.

In asking me to turn off a whole tier of the protection I've installed to reduce the risk to my data, the Guardian is simply making life easier for the bad guys. And that's why from now on I'll be steering well clear of their website until they see sense and reverse their current policy.

When I crash, I don't do things by halves.

I'm okay, sort of. I'm still very down but I'm nowhere near as bad as I was a few days ago. Tuesday and Wednesday weren't fun. It's been a long time since I last felt the need to do so, but I ended up going back to bed in the afternoons, because I simply couldn't muster up the energy to do anything but read a couple of chapters of a book (I'm on a serious Raymond Chandler binge at the moment, and aside from making me want to open a detective agency and drink inordinate amounts of cheap whisky, it's also managed to keep my mood from dropping completely off a cliff because Chandler was one hell of a writer). Yesterday I managed to get through the day without needing to retreat back under the duvet at all which made me feel a little bit better, but I am still in a lot of pain. Moving about hurts.

But yesterday I picked up a guitar for the first time in more than a week and I have resumed some of my usual music nerd activities, like updating the firmware on my Pocket Master to version 1.2.2. (which tweaks the built-in looper's settings and improves noise gate performance), editing the sixty-odd presets I'd loaded on to my Red Panda Particle 2 so that they play more nicely with the rest of my reverb/delay effects chains, and updating a bunch of my VST plugins to their latest versions.

The thing that has cheered me up the most this week was deciding to watch every episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks again from the beginning. If you're not familiar with it, it's an animated series that's set shortly after Star Trek: The Next Generation and it's the nerdiest, most canon-focused, joyful, and extremely silly take on Trek that you will ever see. The show takes its name—and its focus on a group of humble ensigns at the absolute bottom of the chain of command instead of what goes on on the bridge—from a TNG episode of the same name (which featured different characters). The cast are an absolute delight. Nobody can scream in terror quite as enthusiastically as Jack Quaid and his character, Ensign Brad Boimler, gets to do that a lot. Most of the situations which prompt all that screaming are instigated by Ensign Beckett Mariner, played by Tawny Newsome, who is his perfect foil: she's experienced, wise beyond her years, supremely competent, and sassy to the point of insubordination (which she tends to get away with, because her mother is the Captain of the USS Cerritos on which they all serve, and her father is an admiral in Starfleet). But for me, it's the touching relationship that grows over the course of the show's five seasons between Ensign D'vana Tendi, played by Noël Wells and ensign Samanthan Rutherford, played by Eugene Cordero which lifts things to another level. The episode where the two of them have to pretend to be married in order to update the travel guide entry for Ferenginar (as blatant a Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy reference as Trek has ever made), get stressed out about it, and have a meltdown to the utter bemusement of Doctor Migleemo (the always great Paul F. Tompkins) is an absolute hoot. Is the fact that the name of the episode is a reference to one of UK comedy's finest shows the icing on the cake? Believe it or not, I'd have to say the answer to that question is no. Instead I'll go with the fact that Mariner's Ferengi contact Quimp is played by none other than Spongebob Squarepants himself, Tom Kenny.

As well as the showrunners somehow managing to talk a quite ridiculous number of Trek legends into popping up with cameos on the show, they also drop lots of otaku-level easter eggs into the background of almost every scene to the point where I frequently find myself pausing and then flipping through it frame by frame while giggling at all the references to obscure props or secondary characters from years ago that were put there for people just like me to spot.

And the crossover episode with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is the best episode of any Star Trek series, ever. You can fight me on this all you want, but you are mistaken if you think otherwise.

I had a really bad night on Sunday night and by the early afternoon yesterday I'd retreated upstairs for a nap which ended up lasting a couple of hours. I think it's safe to say that the post-FAWM crash has kicked in with a vengeance. After a much better night last night I'm still feeling profoundly lethargic and I ache all over, so aside from doing a few loads of washing to take advantage of the bright sunshine outside (the roof is currently generating 4.7 kW, which isn't bad considering we haven't even got to the spring equinox yet) I'm not planning on doing anything much at all today other than drink tea.

Lots of tea.

You've probably read somewhere that it takes roughly three weeks of doing something for it to become a habit. Actually, as the saying goes, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that. Doing something that strongly activates the reward centres in your brain can become a habit remarkably quickly; if it brings you sufficient joy, you won't need three weeks for it to become part of your default behaviour. Anyone who tells you it always takes three weeks, or six weeks, or even 66 days (which seems to be the figure that's gradually replacing three weeks as received knowledge on the matter) is most likely bullshitting you because they're trying to sell you something. Psychology is not an exact science. A lot of statistical analysis is required and people are—let's be honest here—often weird and unpredictable.

All I know is that I will always have developed a FAWM habit by the end of February. For the past seven weeks or so I've been checking the FAWM site every few hours to make sure there were no problems and everything was running smoothly. And my brain's reward centres would regularly get a serious boost every time I discovered a new spam account and deleted it; some days, I'd get to do that more than a dozen times.

Now, all the FAWM website displays is a landing page where you can sign up to take part next year, so I can't do that any more. For the last couple of days every time I've opened my web browser, it felt like it was broken. I miss being able to catch up with what's been going on in the forums and it feels like I'm neglecting my moderator duties in not looking for spammers and scammers to swat. My reward centres are no longer getting their fix. It'll take a few days for this to wear off, because it always does.

Talking of scammers, last week I picked up a follower on Mastodon who claimed to be the "Executive Chairman Officer (sic) at Royal Bank of Canada." I only managed to make one mildly sarcastic post about that account before it was suspended; on the birdsite and Facebook, the grifter would still be building up his scam today. And this morning, I discovered that I was being followed by "Shania Twain_" on Mastodon. Pay particular attention to that trailing underscore, folks; it's always a bit of a giveaway. The profile for the account wasn't even remotely convincing and when it followed me, it had zero followers. Initially I decided not to do anything and just wait and see if it was the start of another one of those "support slot on world tour" scams that are doing the rounds in the music community at the moment. Yes, this is what crooks do these days, as if musicians aren't finding being able to make a living doing what they love enough of a challenge as it is. Was this bogus "Shania" like the fake "George Strait" who had targeted my pal Markus last month? Goodness knows why anyone would think I was talented enough, successful enough, or affluent enough (or, quite frankly, gullible enough) to try ripping me off in the same way as that. I haven't played on stage for years and I'd like to think I have a realistic idea of my abilities as a musician.

But after giving it more thought, I decided that the sensible thing to do was to report the account and let the mastodon.social admins decide what to do about it.

It didn't take them long; the account had been nuked by teatime. My brain's reward centres just got a little bit of the stimulation they've been missing.

Last night my fellow FAWM moderators and I had a final wash-up Zoom call to review the proceedings; the consensus was that we've had a good year and on the whole, discourse across the site was remarkably good-natured and pleasant. I know I've enjoyed myself a lot over the last seven weeks or so and FAWM proved to be a welcome refuge from the madness going on in the rest of the world, as it usually does.

I did a bit more listening after last night's Zoom call and left a few more comments; I even managed to bust a last-minute zong! My final comment count now stands at a very respectable 625. This morning I swatted a few more spam accounts that had popped up, because there are always more spammers popping up out there. But the website will be returning to hibernation mode later today (at 16:00 UTC/GMT) so it'll all be over for another year. I've already archived my profile and all the comments my work received there (as I do every year) and tomorrow I'll fire up the studio PC and move the folder with all my Ableton sets for this year's music off the SSD it's sitting on to the slower, mechanical drive that I use for my historical records.

Yesterday afternoon I mixed and mastered the next ICH album and after giving it another listen on my monitors and then on headphones (because they give very a different perspective on a piece of music) I sent it to my bandmates for their approval. It's a single piece, just short of 53 minutes long, and I really love how it's turned out.

So this weekend I've experienced a strong sense of projects closing and creative phases coming to an end. I think before I start anything else I'm just going to take a break. Even though I'm retired, as I was peeling the potatoes earlier I found myself thinking "I could really do with a nice holiday right now" and I never think things like that. That's an obvious sign that I really am very run down at the moment.

I was glad I took the rare step of filling up the hot water bottle last night. It was a cold one out there, dropping to -5°C (23°F) once again. But despite getting a decent night's sleep, this morning I felt very under the weather. I have been going to bed later and later over the past week or so and it doesn't do me any good at all. As a result I have spent all morning wandering round the house feeling cold and sore and even my breakfast bucket of coffee didn't help matters, so I have given up trying to tough it out. I know when I'm beaten. Instead, I've put the central heating on its "boost" mode and switched the gas fire on full for good measure. I'm going to have an early dinner. I just parboiled the last of the bag of potatoes I had in the fridge and they're in the oven right now, being roasted along with some katsu chicken. I need to start looking after myself more carefully, and a man's gotta eat, even when he's trying (successfully, I might add) to lose weight.

After that, I'm just going to hunker down in the living room, veg out, and not do anything. My brain is full and thinking is too much like hard work this afternoon.

I mentioned last week that as I'd just ordered a new laptop I planned to clean up the old one and then install AVLinux on it. While I drank my morning coffee yesterday I finished moving the last files off it that I needed to keep. After I'd concluded yesterday's studio session I felt like I needed to flex my nerd muscles, so I decided to crack on and attempt the install. Things went remarkably smoothly; the only hitch that I came across was discovering that if I plug the Dell's mains adaptor into an extension lead with a surge protector on it, it stops working. Fortunately I noticed this before the battery ran out of juice. Less than quarter of an hour after I'd started, this was the result:

From Windows 7 to Windows 10 and now AVLinux 23.5; the laptop is on its third operating system. How many machines have you got with that long a track record, eh? So far, I'm really impressed with the distro. The only thing that I've changed is to uninstall Blender to free up more room on the SSD (which is just 1TB—more than adequate for Linux but it's smaller than I'd like when audio starts being involved). I really like the look and feel (I changed the wallpaper for a photo of a Fender amp that is part of the look and feel out of the box) and it feels like Linux has put a bit more zip in the old beast as well.

WINE is up and running. Now I need to whack a few VSTs on the machine and then have a play with Ardour (which looks like fun) and Reaper for a few days. Music nerd, yo.

It was trying to snow here when I got up yesterday and the temperature overnight had dropped back down to -4°C (25°F). Last night it was slightly warmer out there at -2°C and the forecast is for things to stay that way for a couple of days and turn even colder on Saturday. My optimism that the worst of the winter was over (which had led to me dialling back the amount of time the central heating runs for every day) appears to have been misplaced. I've still exported nearly 100 kWh more electricity than I've used so far this month, though.

But every morning I download more footage from my trail camera that shows one or more hedgehogs rampaging around the back garden. And my amaryllis plants are flowering and the hyacinths by the front door are in bloom. Much to my surprise, they have survived being dug up last summer when the drive and front path were replaced.

So I'm hoping spring isn't that far away...

After putting fresh bedclothes on the bed (yesterday was a laundry day) and giving the house a gentle airing, last night I got a sleep score of 100, just as I thought I would. And it felt like it, too. When I woke up my tonsils were gently throbbing in the way that lets me know that I'd been snoring quite a bit. I must have been pretty much dead to the world all night and that is a good thing, because I really needed a good night's sleep. With my watch reporting that I spent 46% of it in NREM sleep I'm pretty sure that's what I got.

But the whole practice of wearing myself out the previous night in order to attain such a high sleep score is getting rather old, in my opinion. I've had enough of that. I'd much rather just be consistent.

I spent this morning giving my Chapman Stick page on the website a long-overdue update; I hadn't touched it in ten years. Sadly the event that prompted me to do this was the news yesterday that of one of the Stick's most talented players, Jim Lampi, had passed away.

Jim was one of my earliest and strongest influences on my approach to the instrument, and he was one of the leading lights of the UK Stick community. My social media timeline today is full of posts from fellow Stick players and every single one has remarked on what a nice guy he was. His passing is a great loss for the community.

Activity on the FAWM website seems to have markedly dropped off this week, so I think the site will probably be going back into hibernation as planned on Sunday.

It's been fun this year. And I got some good work done. But this week I've been very conscious of just how much time I've spent on FAWMing over the last six weeks and I'm looking forward to restoring a little bit more balance to my day-to-day activities.

Yeah, right. Like that's ever gonna happen...

The last time I updated Netbeans was to version 23 back in September and when I finally got around to checking whether an update existed for it last night, I discovered that version 25 was available, so I've just installed it. Things did not go according to plan this time, as the installer threw up an error message as soon as I ran it about being unable to load Netbeans's local registry (and the discussion in that link is twelve years old; evidently the bugfix for it is still outstanding) but the suggested solution fixed the problem and here I am editing away as normal. I've already imported my old plugins and settings and yes, my install of Notepad++ is up to date as well.

I had a lousy night last night. I was in a lot of discomfort and I kept waking up. The percentage of NREM sleep I got was down in the twenties and I suspect that was an exaggeration, because my watch appears to have assumed I was asleep for at least an hour when I know I was wide awake.

I'm going through a phase of having alternating good and bad nights; I wish I knew how I could reliably get the good ones.

Now that FAWM is all over bar the shouting, I have embarked on a couple of new projects. The first is the second album from ICH, which is already sounding very cool.

The second project I've started won't actually pay off for another couple of months. I'm attending another event at Real World and as I realised the last time I was there, my venerable old Dell XPS laptop is much too old to pass muster running Live 12 and all my plugins any more (I bought it way back in April 2012 and I've had a lot of use out of it over the past thirteen years, so it doesn't owe me anything). At Real World I'm going to need something that is capable of running my current DAW and recording 48 kHz, 24-bit audio through one of my audio interfaces but which I can pick up and carry around with me, so for the last three months I've been looking around for a replacement. Given Apple's recent shenanigans with the UK government, any of their kit is most definitely off the table for me. Last month I'd settled on an Alienware machine but hadn't ordered one; last night I noticed that they were having a sale and the price of the model I wanted had dropped quite a bit (by several hundred quid!) so I finally pulled the trigger on it.

The old Dell won't be going to the recycling centre just yet, though. Since Mint is no longer supported on 32-bit machines like my ancient ASUS Eee (which still boots up!) I don't have an up-to-date Linux box in the house, and this will not do. My plan, therefore, is to install AVLinux on the XPS so that I can offload the video streaming side of things in my studio to a separate machine (the distro comes with OBS already installed). As AVLinux also comes bundled with Reaper, I'm planning on finally buying a license for it so that I can try out what's become a very popular (and cheap) digital audio workstation package. It'll be good to have a back-up for Ableton and I'm sure there are things that Reaper can do that Ableton can't, and vice versa.

Last night I hit my target of leaving 600 comments on people's songs on the FAWM website. My comments made to comments received ratio is now sitting at a much healthier 1.31:1 and so I think I've probably done most of the commenting I'm going to get around to making. I don't feel guilty about easing off, now; there are only four other people taking part who have left more comments than that. Site traffic is dropping off now that it's March and people can no longer add new songs to their tally; of the more than two and a half thousand people who used the site in February, there are around 150 still logging in, and unfortunately that includes all the spammers who have created accounts in order to tout their wares there. We got a sudden influx of Russian drug dealers doing just that last night, for example.

At this time of year it used to be traditional for me to write a list of the top five things I discovered about my creative process as a result of taking part in this year's FAWM, although it's been a few years since I last did so. Here, then, are the top five moments of enlightenment that I experienced this year. In reverse order, of course.

5. The new site functions were popular (and really helped the moderators).

Burr, Beto, and Eric made some additions to the codebase this year that made my experience of the site much more pleasant. For example: the forums pages list threads in order of how active they are, with the thread which has the most recent post always listed at the top of page one. Last summer, the first page of the list was dominated by one or two people who kept on bumping threads that they had started in order to promote their latest albums on Bandcamp (or listening parties for them) by making new but irrelevant posts in them; most of the rest of page one was occupied by a number of contentious threads that had turned into arguments in which nobody was prepared to let somebody they didn't agree with have the last word. As a result, I would feel my heart sink every time I refreshed the page.

So this year, moderators are not just limited to locking a thread so no more posts could be added to it (which used to just upset the worst offenders and get them whining about how heavy-handed the mods were being), they can now choose instead to detach a thread—which allows posting to continue but stops the site from bumping that thread back to the top of the forum list every time a new post is added. When mods did this to a thread, its visibility decreased and it stopped being such a rage magnet (and although there was a fair amount of grumbling about it, the listening party/new Bandcamp album pluggers quickly got the message that enough was enough from them, even if the worst offender simply shifted his attention to the Fawmers group on Facebook and flooded that with his stuff instead). Instead, these threads slipped quietly down the listings and died. Argument over, discourse hogging prevented, moderator stress levels greatly reduced.

Other new options which allow FAWMers to mute or block other users were introduced and people were able to just stop paying any attention whatsoever to people who were irritating them. The admin area maintains a list of who is being blocked or muted the most, and the folk at the top of the list were exactly the people we expected to have this happen to, so the option worked just as it was intended.

Another change was more subtle, but again it worked just as planned. Last year, changes were made which were intended to support FAWMers (particularly newbies) who weren't getting many comments. This new "magic sort" option (which was entirely optional, and could be turned off by users with a single click) immediately attracted the ire of folk who had got lots of comments in previous years and who, ignoring the fact that commenting overall was down by 10%, jumped to the conclusion that because their work wasn't getting as much attention any more, they were being penalised in order for others to benefit. Like I said, last summer really sucked the joy out of 50/90 for me and this sort of entitled behaviour—and many of the most vociferous complainers hadn't even donated to keep the site running—was the principal reason for that. So Burr and the gang employed a clever bit of social engineering and tweaked how the site shows people how everyone else is doing. As of this February, although you can still see exactly how many comments your own work has received, if any song that you haven't personally worked on receives more than nine comments, the comment tally icon next to it just displays a count of "9+" to you. Comparison is the thief of joy, as the saying goes; but now everyone else's work that gets more than nine comments shows the same "9+" count regardless of whether that person got nine comments or ninety, so meaningful comparison (if that is even a thing, and I don't think it is) is no longer possible. This year there was a lot less comparing, a lot less whining, and much more joy.

I said in yesterday's blog that I had enjoyed myself more than I'd expected this year, and all the new functionality had a lot to do with that.

4. I am never going to stop jonesing after new gear

Isolation stands for my monitors; a £50 box of battery-powered magic stuffed with awesome guitar tones; a new desktop microphone stand; a mic preamp that can supply phantom power to a condenser mic with 28 dB of clean gain; and colour-coded, extra-long XLR cables for a stereo mic rig that's set up in ORTF configuration; I just have to own up to the fact that there is always going to be something else that I absolutely must have to make my work in the studio a little bit easier.

3. Fit your lyrics closely to your rhythms if you write the music first.

I've known for several years that I get the best results when my process begins by writing the lyrics first and then working on the music that would fit them. This year I found myself asking how I could improve the outcome when I start the other way around with the music first and then write lyrics that fit (and surprisingly this is still my default way of working). Judging by the comments I got on my experiments (because FAWM is first and foremost a month-long bout of research and development for me) it would appear that the more attention I pay to making sure that the percussion or drum tracks closely match the cadence of the lyrics, the more enthusiastic people will be about the song.

2. I'm already heartily sick of AI-generated music.

Hearing a shimmering production that on closer inspection appears to have a different singer on each verse, or where not just the vocals but every single instrument sounds like it's been autotuned to death, or just reading liner notes that said how the FAWMer had asked Suno to make them something along the lines of (genre) and how pleased they were with the results all prompted an increasingly violent negative reaction from me. This isn't songwriting. In my personal opinion there is no justification in submitting this crap to a songwriting challenge, because nobody other than the listener is being challenged by it at all. It just makes me want to vomit.

And quite frankly the same applies to the lyricists whose work regularly scored "This is 100% AI generated" from one of my favourite AI checkers and "98% AI" from the other.

1. The Slack gang are awesome.

Getting to hang out with the usual suspects in the FAWM channel on Slack has been a constant source of amusement, entertainment, and inspiration and it also introduced me to such gems as Song Hamster and Dried-Out Specialty Bread (Hell Raisin). I love those folks.

Last night I didn't take any painkillers before going to bed, and I didn't even strap up my ankle, which had been gently throbbing for most of the day (as it always does). I wanted to see if it was possible to get a relatively good night's sleep without medication. Much to my surprise, it turned out that I could; my sleep score this morning was a respectable 94, although the percentage of time I spent in therapeutic and restorative NREM sleep was a middling 38%—far better than the low 20s I was getting in my last job, but not up in the high forties that I've managed more recently.

I was less surprised by the state I'm in as a result this morning. I feel the same way as I used to do the day after wiping out badly on a ski trip: I'm a shambling bundle of aches and pains, so painkillers were very much on the breakfast menu today.

And yes, the post-FAWM crash finally kicked in last night. I pushed my comment count up to 570 but then I completely ran out of steam. I was listless, and tired, and I eventually gave up and ran a hot bath, where I stayed, reading, until after 11 pm. Today I will be back on the FAWM website and will try to hit 600 comments, but I think that once I've done that, I'll call it a day. Tomorrow I plan on writing up my regular "five things I've learned during FAWM this year" blog post, and then I'll switch my focus back to moderating and swatting spammers until the site goes back into hibernation.

But it's been a good FAWM. I enjoyed myself more than I was expecting to. I ended up writing more songs than I'd planned. And I haven't ended up feeling as completely drained in a "never doing this again" sort of way, which is how I felt after last year's 50/90.

It's lovely outside this morning. The sun is shining brightly and the temperature is in the teens. This is ameliorating the post-FAWM crash nicely, although the painkillers and a large mug of coffee have also played their part. It's been bright enough to run the oven entirely from the solar panels again, so I had a freshly-baked croissant and pain au chocolat with my coffee and if there is a better thing to eat for breakfast out there, I don't know what it is.

So while I might be knackered and run-down, and struggling with anything that is remotely cognitively challenging, I'm in a good mood. I'm going to avoid the TV or news websites for the rest of the day in an effort to keep it that way.

Yes, it's Bandcamp Friday today once again. My inbox this morning was absolutely packed with news of new albums from people that I follow and if yours was the same, you'll probably be thankful that I haven't had enough time to top and tail a new album, so instead I'll just leave this here:

And this:

I've just bought and downloaded all the items I'd added to my wishlist on Bandcamp over the last month and a half. I have all sorts of lovely new music to listen to. I plan on doing just that while I finish off the housework I've been busy catching up with for the last couple of hours; the living room hasn't looked this tidy since before Christmas and I will actually be able to sit down at my dining table for dinner tonight, which I certainly wouldn't have been able to do yesterday. But a long overdue session of ironing, dusting, and vacuuming still awaits, so...

Yesterday afternoon I pushed my comment count up to 550, which is quite a bit higher than I was expecting. This was largely because the quality of work submitted to FAWM in February has been astonishingly high and I have really enjoyed listening to it.

Sure, there are a few people taking part who have handed off all of the creative aspects of songwriting to tools like ChatGPT, and I gave up listening to more than one song where each verse had been rendered out with a different voice, and others that suffered from the revolting Suno shimmer (which at least provided an easy way to identify when I was wasting my time listening to AI slop).

Maybe I will get to 600 comments, after all. At present, site traffic is tailing off largely as predicted, so it'll probably go back into hibernation next weekend. That should allow me plenty of time to get there without getting stressed about things.

I keep thinking that the post-FAWM crash is creeping up on me, but all the listening and commenting I've been doing this month seems to be keeping things at bay for the moment.

After spending most of the last couple of days in front of my monitors I've now left more than 500 comments on other people's songs on the FAWM website (the final song count currently stands at 13,200 songs and every single one of them has received at least one comment from someone; there are no "zongs" or zero-comment songs left right now) and I still have an appetite for more listening and commenting. I doubt that I will get to 600 comments, but I intend making a significant dent in my progress there today and maybe postpone the crash for a while longer. The ratio of comments I've made to comments I've received is now well above unity, and this statistic makes me much happier than I was last week. It was quite a challenge getting there; one of the collaborations I worked on has more than fifty comments right now.

I've also started compiling this year's "what I've learned" list, and that will no doubt make an appearance here on the blog in a few days.

This month has stayed cold (things dropped down to -4°C or 25°F again in the back garden last night) but the days have been bright and sunny. As I look out of the window right now I can't see a single cloud in the sky. As a result, the amount of electricity I've exported back to the grid so far this month is more than twice the amount that I've used. My energy provider reckons I used 6% less gas last week than I did the week before, too. As a result, the credit in my account with them is building up nicely again.

All that sunshine has taken me past another milestone for the house's solar panels. As of right now, they have generated a total of 5,031kWh of electricity. More than five megawatt hours; this pleases me a lot.

Yesterday I shut myself away in the studio for a mammoth listening and commenting session on other people's work for FAWM.

And I got rather carried away.

By the time I shut the studio down, I'd pushed my comment count up to more than 350. Despite this, the ratio of comments I've made to comments I've received (yes, I know; I've reversed the maths from what I blogged about yesterday) is still the wrong side of 1:1 so I'm going to head back upstairs in a moment and have another stab at things. Will I reach 400 today? I don't know, but I'm going to try.

It's been clear and sunny here for the past few days. By the time I was ready for breakfast this morning the panels on the roof were already generating more than 2 kW, so I heated up this morning's croissant and pain au chocolat in the oven and I was still exporting more electricity than I was using in the process. It's been a while since I had a nice, warm, oven-baked croissant with my coffee and I have to say they're just not the same any other way. So good!

The clear skies mean that we've been having a string of nights here where the temperature in the back garden has consistently dropped to a rather chilly -4°C (25°F) but last night it was colder still at -5°C (23°F). Despite this, my trail camera not only picked up a considerable amount of hedgehog activity, it even spotted a mouse!

After a whole month of sustained, intensely creative activity I always find it very difficult to switch off. You could argue, in fact, that since 2020, when I finally put together the home recording studio I'd always dreamed about, I really haven't stopped making music at all. The amount of stuff I've added to my list of albums on my Bandcamp discography since then is more than sufficient evidence of that. This morning I was standing in the kitchen watching the starlings fight over the food that I'd just put out on the bird table and found myself thinking that I ought to write a song about them (something along the lines of having my own murmuration in the back garden, which would give me a great title into the bargain) and then realised that it was March, and FAWM is over. This made me sad.

I've already reached the target I set myself yesterday of leaving 300 comments on other people's work. I spent a very enjoyable day hanging out on the FAWM Slack channel with the usual suspects, who were all in much the same state of mind (tired but exhilarated) as I was, while I listened to song after song and left what I hope were positive and supportive remarks. That wasn't difficult. The quality of work this year has been nothing short of astonishing. But after totting up the number of comments that other people had left on my work, I realised that I have to leave a lot more if I'm going to get the ratio of comments received to comments made down below unity before the site closes—which at the moment is planned to occur on March 15th. I make this commenting commitment every year because, as I said in the blog last month, comments are the lifeblood of a creative community such as FAWM and I know very well how inspiring that endorphin hit of people paying attention to your work can be (and it takes my mind off not being able to upload any more music to the website, too.)

I'm already thinking about which tracks I'm going to put on my planned "best of FAWM" album ready for Bandcamp Friday this week, but this year I might try something different. With nearly two hours of music in the can, I have enough material available to allow me to pick out a couple of themes and use them as starting points for several releases down the line instead; I haven't decided yet, but as this would provide me with an excuse to make some more music, the outcome can probably be regarded as inevitable.

For the morning after FAWM, I feel remarkably with it; last night I was still awake enough that I remembered to set the calendar on my analog watch forwards so that when I woke up it wasn't telling me that today is February 29th like it normally does. I did treat myself to a lie-in this morning, though. I didn't get up until 10:00 am. As I type this, the site will be open for submissions for another fifty minutes, then that'll be it for another year—but I resisted the temptation to set the alarm early this morning so that I could crank out another song or two, or maybe have a stab at posting the last song of the year. I don't have anything left in the tank right now.

I had a much better second half of the month than I expected to have after the first half. By the 15th I had drastically cut back on the number of songs I was setting myself as a stretch goal to just 21. In the end I managed to pull a double FAWM out of the hat and my profile page now has twenty eight tracks listed so I managed to create an average of one new piece of music every day for the entire month. Historically, that means 2025 is one of my better years; my best was back in 2022, when I somehow managed to finish February with a quite frankly ludicrous Treble FAWM, but those were crazy times (aren't they always, though?)

I'll be catching up on my listening and commenting for the next couple of days (I blazed past two hundred comments a couple of days ago, and I'm aiming to make 300 by Sunday evening) but I'm taking a break from making more music for a few days before I knuckle down and compile an album of February's best bits from the two hours of music I somehow managed to record. It's Bandcamp Friday next Friday, after all. And once I've done that, I will be producing the next ICH album with Ingrid and Henry (who have already sent me their contributions). Just because FAWM is over it doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing stuff.

The latest tweak I made to my home studio might have had something to do with the recent uptick in my output. It started off primarily as a cosmetic thing, but it has actually turned out to be remarkably beneficial for the studio's acoustics as well as my mental health!

I love the Focal monitors that I bought during Fifty/Ninety back in 2022 and not only are they still sounding as good as ever, I was chuffed to see this week that that Music Radar have just rated them as the overall best home studio monitors you can buy, period. But the monitor shelf on my studio desk is high up (it was designed that way so that I could fit my Komplete Kontrol S88 MIDI keyboard underneath the work surface) and the way the Focals have been sitting for the past couple of years has been with the tweeters a few inches above the height of my ears. This isn't optimal, as high frequency sounds don't disperse widely like lower-frequency ones do, and because I'm me, this has been really bugging me.

So I've been looking for a pair of isolation stands that would both decouple the monitors from the desk and allow me to angle them downwards so that the tweeters are pointing directly at my ears. You can get angled pads that will do this, but all of the ones that I looked at seemed ludicrously overpriced for what is effectively just a couple of shaped lumps of PVE foam rubber. I needed something made of plastic or metal instead; I wanted something properly engineered.

My first trawl of the review sites a few months ago turned up some ridiculously expensive things. It wasn't just the prices which put me off taking things any further; I was also worried I'd buy something that was the wrong size for the Focals and they wouldn't fit. But that lack of alignment was still bugging me, so last week I had another look online. When I discovered that the web page for IsoAcoustics' ISO-130 stands features a large photograph of the product supporting exactly the model of Focal monitor that was sitting in front of me I knew that I'd found a promising candidate. When I checked the usual music retail sites and found out that they were much more affordable, I decided to order a set. After they'd arrived and I'd spent an hour or so trying out a couple of configurations (they come with sufficient parts to allow them to tilt at a variety of angles) I found just the right arrangement for them, and they've been supporting my monitors for the last week or so. The Focals are now pointing exactly at my head. Because the stands have raised them off the desk, this allows more light to get past, and I was surprised by how much of a positive effect that's had on my mood (February has been largely overcast and dull here, and I need all the sunlight I can get in the studio, which faces North). My nascent OCD tendencies are happy with the perfect alignment, too.

And maybe it's entirely psychosomatic, but to my ears they've given the Focals more definition and punch. And not just for my own music. After sitting in on a couple of Bandcamp listening parties this week, I've concluded that it isn't just my imagination playing tricks. Everything really does sound more defined now. How about that?