Our red campion had an amazing first flush of flowers but the following year was sapped by aphids. I'd seen a TED talk on leaving them be, specifically mentioning ladybirds, so we did. Suffice to say we've had countless 7-spot ladybirds this year! It helped we left dead stalks for overwintering too!

Aw, I adore Oddada. It's such a joy to play around with and create little musical vignettes. One of my highlights of 2024. Here's one of my favourite tunes I pulled together:

Two of my games of 2024 have been Woodworm, a clever and compact puzzle game where you nibble out replicas with a woodworm, and Xenosphere by Nifflas, where you... well, it's better you just play it. It's only about 20mins long. Nothing like it.

spratt.itch.io/woodworm

nifflas.itch.io/xenosphere

Ooo yeah, that was a cool game with loads of style and some interesting mutators/modifiers. I will admit that the core gameplay loop started to get a little long in the tooth towards the end but it's a very neat horror sandbox that never failed to put me on edge.

I remember doing the same at uni for presentations. It was always funny hearing my friends go 'what happened to your accent?!' but, really, it's lousy I felt inclined to do that. I often recall this 'citation needed' Wikipedia paragraph about the 'Father of Railways' George Stephenson: