Craft on Shafiq Alibhai

Book Binding

Thu, 22 May 2025 11:53:25 +0200

Bookbinding is a hobby I picked up during lockdown. It’s tactile, it’s slow, and the finished object is something you can hold. Here’s what I use.

Equipment and materials

Glue strips — 50-piece packs of hot melt glue strips (285mm). I’ve ordered these from eBay and AliExpress. They’re cheap and work fine for pamphlet stitching.

PVA glue — Artway Strong PVA, 1 litre. White, works on fabric and paper. From Amazon UK.

Thinking Before the Move

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 13:25:16 +0000

Reinhard Selten, the Nobel prize-winning game theorist, noticed something about how we think: we spend most of our mental energy being rational after the fact. We replay conversations, revisit decisions, trace back through the chain of events and ask ourselves what we should have done differently. This is rationality ex post – looking backwards, reconstructing the path we ought to have taken.

But game theory is concerned with something else entirely. It asks you to build a strategy before the game begins, to arrive at a good outcome a priori, without the luxury of hindsight. The gap between these two modes of thinking is where most of our failures live. We are brilliant historians of our own mistakes and terrible architects of our own choices.

'First Look: The Artical Trailer for Kichidi'

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 17:53:10 +0000

Saahith Mothkuri’s Kichidi finally has a trailer, and it’s worth the wait.

The Artical trailer drops a mood before it drops a plot. You get flashes of humour, a romance that doesn’t explain itself, and enough suspense to make you wonder what happens after the screen cuts to black. That’s how a trailer should work – it sells the feeling, not the summary.

Mothkuri has been building a reputation for stories that sit somewhere between the familiar and the unexpected. Kichidi keeps that thread but pushes it further. The characters in these first glimpses feel like people you’d actually recognise, not the polished archetypes that fill most of the screen time these days. And the camera work has a quiet confidence to it – it trusts you to pick up on the atmosphere without spelling everything out.