About

Who am I, and what is this site?

My name is Jason and I’m a student currently living in Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The website is predominantly in a blog style, with a few pages which are more permanent and the addition of the concept of “journals”. (While it would be wrong to suggest this is a concept entirely of my own creation, I haven’t seen exactly this feature in exactly this context before).

The content is, put simply, anything which happens to capture my interest, such as:

• architecture and urban planning;
• somewhat relatedly to the above, transport infrastructure
• conspicuous consumption (with which I am increasingly fed-up)
• environmentalism (with which I am most definitely not fed-up);
• politics
• computer systems (with a general disdain for anything that claims to be “smart” or part of the “Internet of Things”)
• the countryside.

This is also generally where I publish software that I’ve written.

What’s in the name?

It’s named after an example of a place a lot of my thoughts (and thus the ideas that appear on this website) originate from.

The Bowstones are a pair of large carved stones near the summit of Sponds Hill, a hill which overlooks Lyme Park, a large country estate in Cheshire now managed by the National Trust. One of the regular walks that I’ve been doing for years takes me past the Bowstones and through Lyme Park, and a lot of the things I write about here I have first thought through in the mental downtime that a long walk in the countryside affords me.

What are the “journals”?

The journals are effectively sequences of posts with dates and locations associated. They are intended to describe journeys, either literally (e.g. a train journey) or metaphorically (e.g. commentary on an ongoing event). A list of all journals is available here and if a post is in a journal, a link to the journal is displayed under the post title.