Some of the nonsense from my old loaf

I had no idea how much nonsense it was, but nonsense it all is.
— Anna Scott, Notting Hill

This is my nonsense, the corner of my website where I preserve my least worthy thoughts with as much diligence as I do any worthier ones. This is a bit like twitter, only it’s just me here. There’s no dialogue, no foment, just me chatting shit to myself, and you… watching me, apparently.

Dieter Rams gave us less, but better and the world is a better place for it. Here I’m giving the world more, but worse and no doubt the world is poorer for it.

Nought but hokum to be found here, proceed with caution

The Advent of a Demon, unknown artist

Werner Herzog in Thomas von Steinaecker, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, 2022

A photograph shows Mick Jagger, Werner Herzog, Claudia Cardinale, and Jason Robards on the set of the first filming of Fitzcarraldo

I hadn’t known that Herzog’s had originally cast Jason Robards and Mick Jagger in Fitzcarraldo (1982).

I can see Jagger in it, but to imagine anyone but Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo feels unthinkable. Thankfully, fate intervened.

Kyle’s just back from Jessey’s, they’ve been tackling target audience for their sketches and screenplay. He wondered aloud what my audience is and I landed on encouraging people who are already throwing out a Hail Mary.

I’m not trying to inspire people in a broad sense. I think there is a specific kind of person, at a particular time in their lives, to whom I can be useful and I want to connect with those people with all of my being.

People like Ferdinand.

Small problem with the new image reference solution: classes specified in Djot are no longer passed through as the Djot rendering is bypassed. Most images on the site are wrapped in a ‘gallery’ div, so I can still class that, but it does create a small annoyance for bare images.

†

On the table this morning I found $10 expressing itself as a roll of quarters, something that up to now had existed only in that part of my brain dedicated to Stuff That Exists In Movies. Not any more! This spawned a conversation with Avvai that ended with my trying (failing) to remember how much I weigh in stone, the canonical expression of mass in my homeland.

What is truth?

I read a newspaper and I imagine myself to be engaged with truth in some way, or with facts of some kind or other. But what is a fact? My having even a passably accurate sense of the reality any story is attempting to attach itself to depends in that case on my being a very good reader. And just as much, it depends on the writer of that story being a very good writer (that in turn requiring they be a very good reader). Now most writers are far from being very good writers, and I think I’m just as far or further from being a very good reader, so the story I create in my head at the prompting of the story said writer created in their head and then tried to translate from their head to mine and to a dizzying number of other minds… Well, it’s barely better than a game of whispers, is it?

There is no truth but what we feel, and what we feel is more or less locked within us.

I’ve been getting bogged down with the writing, agonising over what to write. Partly this is because I’ve been basically forcing myself to work from existing drafts. Which, when I think about it, is a recipe for a rough time. Like, “here’s something you couldn’t finish last time, get at it!”

Today I’m starting from the blank page. It’ll be raw, and feel unfinished, and that’s just fine.

I’m getting toward the mid-point of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s taken me a little longer than I expected. It isn’t slow reading, it’s just been a busy week.

Frankl’s relating of life in the camps — the trauma, the humour, the total psychic experience — is extraordinary.

Canada in general, and Vancouver specifically, is a pretty expensive place to live, so we’re gonna try and lower our costs in a few ways. Top of mind for me is bin diving, because I’ve done a fair bit of it in Australia and across Europe.

Alas, in my two trips to Safeway I’ve checked the bins but both times they’ve been locked, so I’ll look at a few smaller stores, and also see if they have a regular pick up schedule that they unlock the bins for.

Kyle put it to the table at his dinner tonight and got a couple suggestions,

  • Food Stash CA run the Rescued Food Market. Membership is on a lottery basis and costs $24. Next membership window opens Thursday November 28th.
  • Too Good to Go

It used to be that I was interested in building the system for its own sake, but now I would almost rather it would simply land in my lap so I could stop developing it and spend more time using it.

This system of documents more or less boils down to that preoccupation with memory that I’ve always had, but only recently begun to articulate in conversations with Jess, Kyle, Avvai, Ferdinand et al.

Preoccupation frequently arises from fear, and I think it is true to say that I fear forgetting. Which is odd in a way, because my beliefs about the durability of ideas could just as plausibly inspire an easy calm. My forgetting an idea can hardly be said to imperil the idea itself, so my fear must arise from my own self-interest in — perhaps even greed for — Ideas.

On some level, I don’t believe that I really have ideas, rather ideas have me,

Consider the obsessiveness with which creators birth new ideas into the world, which we’ve clinically termed “intrinsic motivation”, but don’t really seem to understand beyond that. We can observe that it is happening, but we don’t know what actually causes someone to drive themselves nearly to death just so they can give an idea a beating heart and a chance at survival in the world. “Because I had to” or “Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it” are symptoms, not causes.

But still I fear losing that which feels important, ie. that which might become yet more interesting,

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

I just woke up from a strange dream where you got lost on the way to Canada (you had wings, and they kept falling off) so I’m taking this as a sign 😅

I’m not worried about you but I would like you to make your flight haha

— Avvai, WhatsApp message, 2024

Avvai followed up with some pointers for getting to the airport sans-stress. I’ve had a couple of adventures on the metro already, and was planning to do the shuttle anyway, plus I’d figured out which airport I was going to to boot, but I was very grateful for her council anyway. A younger (incomprehensibly, more foolish) version of me would always take offence when receiving information that has reached me by other means, but no more.

Some days, when I let my head get carried away, I wonder if the legacy of Covid isn’t quite a bit more than an uneasy awareness of the fragility of our way of life, if it isn’t more than long Covid. What if it has also brought us to the end of the long peace?

Did Putin sense that Covid had numbed a part of us all? Did Covid rot the part of our collective memory that spent 80 years consoling itself with the belief that next time a fascist invaded a country in Eastern Europe, we wouldn’t just sit around and say, well that’s a bit naughty, wouldn’t like to be Polish Ukranian right now, but it’s not really our affair, is it?

That next time we wouldn’t wait until it was too late. Did we forget that?

I’ve been back and forth between the hostel and the printers over the last week, sometimes three or four times in a day trying to get things dialed in before I commit to the big print. And every time I go I pick up a simit at the same hole in the wall bakery, almost exactly half way between the two.

Just noticed that Source Serif Pro isn’t handling left-single-smart-quotes correctly when they’re in italics, instead falling back to the right-quote/apostrophe. A pretty niche case, but I care about those little details. I’ll have to investigate whether it’s just missing from the font altogether, or if I inadvertently removed it when sub-setting it for my uses.

’example’

(If the above is no longer wrong, it’s because I’ve fixed the issue.)

†

I’m a prolific quoter. On the rare occasions that I do dream of something like work, it’s in a role that might be best likened to that of a librarian. I dream of connecting the right people, to the right ideas, at the right time. If you like the things I write, or more especially if you don’t, then take a gander at my collection of quotes and you’re sure to find a clipping of something much better.

The imagined surface of my system of files is changing.

The web view is increasingly revealing itself to be the multi-media paradigm that I’m after, so the filesystem as thematic hierarchical underpinning is fading in significance.

This is a roundabout way of inviting the idea of a database, as opposed to the system of files that I have built and staunchly preserved thus far. As I have envisioned before, the next step down that path is likely something of an overlay database, where the working set is first ingested into a database and then processed, rather than being read from files directly. Advantages include the innate cacheing ability of this method, and a gradual on-ramp to multi-user contributions.

I have a love of cities that sometimes feels like it belongs to someone else. I feel I could spend my whole life living in one city, and I could also go my whole life without ever setting foot in one again.

Here in room 44 I decided to move the desk to the middle of the room — or as close as the bed permits. As I made to lift it I was surprised by its mass. It was heavy! I’d expected it to fly. Briefly I wondered if it was bolted to the wall until, with a firmer lift, it made its way easily to middle of the room. But it left an impression. Of mass.

Mass gives us a certain confidence in an object. A heavy desk, a tungsten ball, a thick sweater. Mass feels reliable. Mass assures us that our trust in the object is well placed.

So looking from the other side, when an object’s mass is less than what we expected, or less than that of whatever our archetypal form of that object would suggest it should be… we’re disappointed. Sure, there are circumstances where lightness in an object is its own delight1, but lightness rarely inspires the same confidence, or sense of stability.

  1. Like switching to a lighter piece of hiking gear and feeling the emotional relief that comes from knowing you won’t have to carry your old familiar heavyweight version.↩︎

That our affections may be fickle and uneven in their distribution is their beauty, not their defect. Feature, not bug.

We invoke chemistry in relationships, not because they are a science, but because they are composed of volatile elements.

This walk is distinguished by linearity.
Even its detours succumb to that linearity.
Cutting right across France in order to enter Switzerland in the west and walk the span of the Alps; turning west in Albania to meet the coast; sinking south in Greece to climb Olympus; walking north to see Bulgaria and summit Musula.
All diversions fall into the line, become the line, make the line.

Anything that cannot be made linear is disavowed. Contrasting the walk with the time I spend in cities, they feel like something other entirely. Cities defy linearity, sprawl, agglomerating.

It seems to me that it is impossible to write in a linear way about and in cities—they’re necessarily nonlinear places.

I wonder if it is true that the truest agreement emerges between people disposed in some way to disagree with one another. In a sense, there is a profound disagreement between Alan Jacobs and I, in that he believes deeply that the world before us is evidence of a benevolent creator, and I do not. He believes in the Father (God), I believe in the Mother (nature). But that disagreement only seems to increase my regard for his opinion. Of course this is not always true, but I think there is something in the way we can admire a person who holds such a different view of the world.

I believe the real future of transportation was launched in pre-Enlightenment France, by Blaise Pascal — he of the famous wager, that posited belief in God was a safer bet than non-belief — in the year 01662. After inventing the mechanical calculator, the philosopher turned his mind to the problem of traffic in Paris, which, with a population of half a million, was then the most populous city in Europe, and the most densely settled. The wealthy got around in private carriages, drawn by horses, which they paid vast sums to maintain. The poor walked. Pascal dreamt up a system by which “les petites gens,” the little people, could move, if not in as much comfort as the rich, then at least as quickly and reliably. His “carrosses à cinq sols” were horse-drawn carriages, each seating eight passengers, “infinitely convenient,” as Pascal described them in his appeal for a royal patent, and “leaving at regular times, even when empty.” For a fare of five sous, the carrosses carried passengers along five lines, on both sides of the Seine River. (A fare increase to six sous led to protests, and, after fifteen years, the service shut down.)

I found this reference to the French/Parisian brand of protest that, in the 17th century, already held that characteristic passion of protest in France today. It got me wandering about culture, what brings it into being, how it persists through time, changes through time, both for good and ill.

This site is the visible portion of a much larger project, one with a singular goal but a broad scope: To capture the truth, as I witness it, as I create it.

If I am a witness at the unfolding of my thought, then this site is my statement.

I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it

Most major, typical infrastructure systems emerged gradually over time. And since becoming widespread, they have evolved and innovated, but usually within a relatively similar set of means and ends, at least in terms of what they enable directly. Thanks to that gradual emergence and relative stability over time, the governance of those systems has had the occasion to become reasonably established and reliable.

Reminds me of John Gall on “complex system[s] that work”.

Walking under a ladder is dangerous, mostly for whoever is on the ladder, so in our culture we attach supersition (bad luck) in order to engage the self-interest of people who are not considerate or aware of the danger they might create by doing so.

Where else is luck used as a cultural device for codifying behaviour?

The rant: After using Hugo for a little while I got fed up with how annoying it was to add custom functionality (everything has to be a template), how “content” and “static” files were treated differently, how CSS files were excluded from the templating system, how you couldn’t display data from the data folder easily on pages, how confusing index files were, and other silly things.

Being a programmer, I thought treating all files equally and enabling the use of an actual programming language would solve most of these problems.

I think this is the direction I’m heading in. The separation of prose and code/templating is a constant source of frustration. I want to be able to run code within a page as it’s building, call out to other pages, not be limited by what can be expressed in a gnarled tree of templates.

The with of without.

Not having everything you need is a very good way of connecting with other people. Or to put it in the reverse, having everything you need keeps you from connecting with others.

If you can’t put the thread through the needle, put the needle over the thread.

I’ve been doing a bit more sewing lately — mending my kit as it disintegrates to the demands of the walk — threading a lot more needles, and it seems much easier to put the needle on the thread than to poke the thread through the needle.

Some years ago I came across Geoff Manaugh’s work, was impressed by it, and promptly forgot about it. Checking in at Gwern’s site again today I came across his OPML file of RSS feeds and lo and behold, winking at me out of the plaintext, in block capitals, was BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh’s home on the web.

So I dove back in… and Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis promptly blew my socks off. Briefly something something… generative image models for unparalleled world building… or at least speed. Until you gradually realise the pre-gen-ai work from the original project (2011-2014) is so much more considered, balanced, and meaningful. With that the visual wow of the new images fades, becoming as hollow as the caves it depicts.

“Superficial scars hidden in this expansive desert landscape are a keyhole into a complex cave network teeming with miniature excavators, reshaping the world below”

During weeks like this one — where I’m able to give solid blocks of time to my data projects — I can truly feel myself chipping away at the layers.

For all that I mean to achieve it using bespoke and discrete tools, my vision for this work and it’s outcome is monolithic, total.

Primed by Craig mentioning — in issues 264 and 265 of Nightingalingale1 — having to install “the lingua franca of Big Publishing Edits” (Microsoft Word), I was tickled to read Alan Jacobs call it his “forever lament” and then link on to two other take downs, including Charlie Stross’:

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc [.docx] files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it’s an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon.

A good ol’ Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

  1. Nightingalingale is a members only newsletter documenting Craig’s journey writing and publishing Things Become Other Things (TBOT) which you can pre-order now.↩︎

There’s a power to faces.

Here in the Ivan Vazov National Library in Plovdiv — in a large, gallery like room — there are bookshelves and glass cabinets given over to biographies, histories, and catalogues in translation.

Even the names are transliterated into the beautiful — but opaque to me — Bulgarian script, so that the only familiar features are the medium (book) and the faces: Anne Hathaway, Al Pacino, John Cleese, Will Smith, Woody Allen; all gaze out from the covers of these artefacts.

There is a focus afforded by this limited comprehension. Unable to read even the titles, I look more closely at the faces and indulge that part of the imagination that dares to guess at what the person behind that now duplicated1 face was thinking in that moment.

  1. Susan Sontag describes photographs as creating a “duplicate world”, making us ”feel that the world is more available than it really is.”↩︎

I recently sent an email to a company’s customer support line. Swiftly came an automated reply informing me that they respond to enquiries in the order that they receive them. Like… duh! I would never have feckin thought otherwise, UNTIL YOU SAID THAT!

Each library will have a small window (probably no more than 3 versions at any time) of acceptable protocol versions.

A new version will be specified, with a brand new KDF salt, every time we need to improve the protocol to address a security risk. Additionally, we will upgrade the protocol version at least once a year, even if no security risks have been found in the latest version of the protocol.

I was reading through this initially with a lot of skepticism because I imagined an xkcd Standards parallel where the author was (falsely) convinced of having arrived at a novel solution. (To their credit they end with a note that the idea isn’t novel.) Anyway, these two paragraphs have about convinced me of it’s viability. Of course it still hinges on consensus, but it builds in a mechanism that resists inertia at the protocol level.

The key ingredient here to me is making the process mundane, expected. Much like short lived TLS certificates — as popularised by Let’s Encrypt — have moved the vast majority of web facing certificate issuances into the realm of Fully Automated Luxury Cryptography, I think such a policy has the potential to truly scale and keep a distributed protocol nimble. It’s only a shame that ‘agility’ has already been burned because it’s the ideal name for it.

Autocorrect should exhibit what I’ll call a ‘diff flicker’, visually signalling that a change has been made. Promoted by my phone just autocorrecting ‘Lada’ to ‘lads’ and me almost not noticing.

June 6th 2024. Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain — former CEO and VP of Finance at Autonomy respectively — are found not guilty of all 31 (combined) charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy in a case claiming damages of 5 billion dollars.

August 17th. Chamberlain is struck and killed by a driver while out running.

August 19th (two days later!). Lynch dies when his superyacht — moored less than a kilometre offshore from Porticello, Sicily — sinks in a storm.

This is a good example of a coincidence that sounds like a conspiracy.

As an addendum, Lynch’s current company (Darktrace) is also facing allegations of questionable accounting, marketing and sales practices. Make of that what you will.

If my mind is modest, I walk the great way. Arrogance is all I fear. The great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains.

I’ve found in this an indictment of my method up to this point. Perhaps avash means I must take the road that is low and plain.

the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, Harper & Row, 1989

This quote keeps popping into my head, and the bit that comes before it (click the link for the full quotation). I keep accumulating, but with that I kill it all. I need to use it, else I’ll lose it.

I almost walked a marathon today, but stopped myself as an exercise in avash. Instead I found myself in Ballsh, having dinner with Teo and Fatbar, followed by drinks with Emeliano, and falling asleep on a too-hot rooftop that was swarming with ants. I didn’t doubt my choice at dinner, or while drinking, but as I lay on that rooftop that was still baking hot at 2am, I did catch myself thinking, “you could have knocked off that marathon, pal”.

Sometimes avash (slow) is harder than shpejt (fast).

†

Legs exhausted from the technical climbing needed to cross the mountain range, I opted for a rapid descent over the ice.

†

Vaber describes charisma as being the only force by which we can be drawn out of the iron cage of bureaucratic rationalisation that we find security and comfort in but which constricts us. (See also: Tripartite classification of authority)

That isn’t to say that we all need be charismatic to live well, it’s an observation that charisma is necessary for a revolution.

Charismatic figures are obeyed because of the extraordinary abilities of an individual personality, by virtue of which they are set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with superhuman, supernatural, or exceptional powers or qualities that are not accessible to the ordinary person.

— Vaber

I keep returning to that idea set out by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice wherein we design a society such that we would be happy for our enemy to choose our place in it. I find that idea, and his distillation of it, so captivating.

I do my best walking in the morning, I do most of my walking in the afternoon.

And that’s fine I guess. Sometimes walking/working is a grind and you just have to put the time in, sometimes excellence doesn’t move the needle.

If you haven’t found what you’re looking for, look somewhere else.

So often we’re like the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp. Let go of the lamp. Step out into the dark. Dare to look for your purpose in places you haven’t looked before.

One of the many treats offered up by this post-truth world we find ourselves in is the rise (and rise, and rise, and…) of scams, counterfeits, and fraud in just about every sphere. But rather than waffling on too much about the ills of large society, I’ll just record here a sound way to check if that SD card you bought online actually has the capacity it claims.

We’ll be using f3probe, a command provided by the ‘f3’ package available in the Arch User Repository (AUR).

The below command does a full write and read back across the drive and reports back on whether it is true to it’s word or counterfeit.

WARNING: Any data on the drive will be erased!

f3probe --destructive --time-ops /dev/mmcblk0

Replace /dev/mmcblk0 with a full path to the flash/thumb/SD drive in question and wait for it to complete.

Be aware that on large and/or slow drives this could take some time. For a good quality SD card in 64GB it should take only a few minutes but may take as much as 15.

There’s something beautiful about old computer magazines/brochures. Here’s one from Texas Instruments about their groundbreaking (then… ish) Explorer Computer System.

The cover of it is a work of art and has aged far better than the Explorer System. Naturally, the article opens with a breathless word on Artificial Intelligence and how it will extend “the boundaries of knowledge”.

Texas Instruments brochure cover

Artificial intelligence promises to open new dimensions in the ways that machines serve people. The Explorer computer system from Texas Instruments will play a vital part both in extending the boundaries of knowledge and in delivering the products emerging from AI research.

Written nearly 40 years ago but it could just as easily have been written yesterday, with the frenetic announcements in the ‘AI’ space of late. I wonder from what dizzy technological heights we’ll be looking back in another 40 years.

Here’s a few pages of it. Retro, but more typographically sound and visually respectful than its contemporary equivalents.

The Explorer Computer System, Page 1/2 The Explorer Computer System, Page 3/4

Came across this gem at R. Stricklin’s spectacular Typewritten Software: retrotechnology research lab.

click here to download the original

Came across How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap via a HN thread. It’s a little bit over my head but squarely within my interests for sharing my journeys/wandering. Another HN user commented with their efforts (in Go, written in Russian) to produce similar for their sailing trips, but it lacks any technical explanation. Still useful as artefact or ‘prior art’.

Yet another user linked to Here Dragons Abound: Exploring procedural generation and display of fantasy maps.

Some people say you’ll remember what’s important, and I think that’s bullshit. I have very little control over what I remember, and what I do remember has no discernible correlation with what’s important, to me or anyone else. I remember that Howard Hughes lent his name, as a cover, to a secret CIA operation to recover the Soviet submarine K-129 that sank in 1968. The project took six years and still to this day very little is known about what was recovered. But without a prompt I couldn’t tell you more than a handful of my closest friends birthdays. I would gladly forget everything I know about any clandestine salvage beneath the Pacific to remember those birthdays, to remember to send a postcard to my Grandma from time to time, to remember that I’ve run out of onions when I’m at the market, not after I’ve started cooking.

But my mind is filled with the like of the former, and I don’t remember any of the latter, and sometimes that makes me want to scream.

I’ve heard myself say before that “a camera is just a tool”, usually in response to someone commenting on the seemingly careless way I use mine (perching it in precarious places, bombing down scree slopes with it in my hand, shoving it in a bag with other things, using it in the rain), but I realise I don’t think that’s quite true. My camera isn’t just a tool, it has a personality all its own, it brings with it a set of constraints that serve to both limit certain efforts and liberate others. I like these constraints, this character, I’m not interested in the relentless pursuit of optically perfect lenses, they seem to me to kill photography. That’s why I sold all my Sony kit, it was so clinical.

A pure tool is as unobtrusive as possible, tries to get completely out of your way, but that’s not what I want. I want a tool that is fun, that has quirks, faults. There’s a pleasure in using a tool like that, a pleasure that you wont find in just any tool. Not just a tool, a medium.

And perhaps this seems like pointless semantics, but I really do think that the relationship that emerges between artist and tool — the ways in which we anthropomorphise our tools — have a significant effect on how effectively we can use them.

Sara Dosa, Fire of Love, 2022

Curiosity is stronger than fear

Moving. Of the earth. Sara Dosa knits together a wealth of footage of — and mostly by — the late Katia & Maurice Krafft. A beautiful story of dedication to one another and to the volcanoes on and in which they met their purpose, and ultimately their end.

The footage and the soundtrack were exquisite, the use of animation and static to bridge the ‘gaps in the archive’ was charming and successful, the use of readings from (particularly Katia’s) journals was tasteful and added emotional context where it was needed most.

Their was a sort of pure hedonism to their lifestyle which gave me a mirror for engaging with my own feelings/doubts about my (perhaps) selfish desire to see the world in the way that I want to.

A story of two extraordinary, singularly driven people, told with an earnest reverence for their legacy. Watch it.

Peter Weir, Dead Poets Society, 1989

Dead Poets ran quicker than I expected, I wanted it to go on, to see more. But I suppose, as ever, it is better to be left wanting than wanting to leave.

Robin Williams plays John Keating beautifully. Keating’s pedagogy is as enriching for the viewer as for the boys of Welton, channelling Thoreaux and many other… dead poets. I found myself wishing I could have been shown poetry in that way. As something more than dead men.

Mick Jackson, Temple Grandin, 2010

Just finished watching Temple Grandin (2010) with ma. An extraordinary film. It connected me, perhaps more than any other film, with my relationship with sound, language, and people: how disruptive and all consuming sound becomes for me; my unrelenting obsession with how we all use words differently and the pain that induces in me in spite of my realising that that too is the beauty of life; and with my larger obsession with trying to understand people, what they’re thinking and why they’re thinking it.

The world needs all kinds of minds.

Christopher Sykes, Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1981

Know the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

A fifty minute documentary/interview with Richard Feynman where he explores, among other things, what he calls his “limited intelligence”.

A number of real gems contained within, including a refrain on the style of parenting — particularly from his father — that he credits with fostering his curiosity.

Watched with ma this evening.

Daniel Lawrence Lu, DLLU

Just came across Daniel Lawrence Lu’s website and I find it beautiful.

The spartan but complete design, the side barred figure captions, the simple but effective animated icon.

His home brew markup language, DLLUP is of interest to me too. Having just kicked the tires of Djot and been very pleased with it I’m not in need of another change just yet, but the matching of markup to a person’s self expression is important to me and not something I intend to stop exploring.

He also has a post on using a Raspberry Pi as a timelapse camera, something I’ve wanted to do for some time.

Discovered Daniel via this HN thread that has a number of wonderful gems in it.

We are all fallible observers of the world, our place in it, our influence on it, and of others. Some days it seems that from that there are two conflicting conclusions:

Trust no one, including ourselves.
Trust everyone, including ourselves.

Perhaps a good life emerges in the reconciliation of the two. Understanding that everything we do is wrong by some measure, but finding the courage to act anyway, balanced by the humility to admit fault when we err, and the compassion to forgive when others do likewise.

Sometimes I think that if I can’t make myself understood then I’m probably not saying anything worthwhile anyway, while other times I think that if people understand what I’m saying that it is then that I must be saying nothing at all.

The truth changes. What I write today is different than what I wrote yesterday, is different than what I would write tomorrow. What we remember becomes our truth, but our memories change with time, with the making of new ones, so our truth changes with them.

I’m trying to write more, but I also want to continue to change, so my relationship with what I write must also reflect this, nothing is fixed. And will I find it harder to change as I wrap myself in ever more verbosely recalled memories?

Wouter Groeneveld, Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs

We all see the world a little differently and, in ways both large and small, who we are is reflected in everything we do. Still, much of the world — and the web in particular — can seem to have been reduced to the generic, a sea of identical templates.

I like seeing what people do with their personal sites when they reach the limits of the template, out beyond the edge of the map is where people really find their voice, where the act of expression truly meets with the medium of that expression and the two grow together.

Some people step into that liminal zone of creativity with pencils and pens, others with clay, wood, oils, watercolours, pots and pans, light and time,

Some of the links in Wouter’s roundup of cool things reach for that lofty goal, of expressing something outside the plain template of a piece of software.

IndyStar, Rotating the Indiana Bell building

So you have a building (nice for some!), you like the building, but you realise that you’ve put your building in the wrong place. It’s not a million miles from where you want it though, you could throw a stone from where it is to where you want it, so that’s nice. But it does weigh 11,000 tons (22 million pounds), (which I’ve been told is quite heavy). Oh, and it’s facing the wrong way.

What would Kurt Vonnegut do? I don’t know, but I can tell you what his father (also called Kurt Vonnegut) did, he lifted it up, moved it a bit, and then rotated it 90 degrees. A building.

It took 600 workers less than 30 days, in the winter of 1930, to do all this. And during the whole manoeuvre the building continued to operate as a telephone exchange.

Gas, electric heat, water and sewage were maintained to the building all during the move. The 600 workers entered and left the traveling structure using a sheltered passageway that moved with the building. The employees never felt the building move and telephone service went on without interruption. IndyStar

Or if you prefer video, see Moving the Indiana Bell Central Office by Telephone Collectors International, that has much more footage, photography, and commentary.

For another entry in the category of ‘right building, wrong location’ take a look at how a How a 7,000-Ton Broadway Theater Was Hoisted 30 Feet in the middle of Manhattan.

And finally (for now) an entry from San Francisco, The Journey of Commerce High: A Closer Look

View north on Van Ness toward Grove, Commerce High School (Newton J. Tharp Commercial School) being moved. The building was just completed at Grove and Polk when plans for the the new Civic Center were finalized. Rather than demolishing it, it was moved from the site to the northeast corner of Fell and Franklin, where it still stands in 2021.
OpenSFHistory

If you know of any other similar sagas, please send them my way reply@silasjelley.com I’d love to hear about them.

Jamie Zawinski, Technological Antisolutions, 2023

I like Jamie’s definition for a Technological Antisolution. If you’ve found yourself looking at a piece software/technology thinking “that’s a solution in search of a problem”, then you’ve encountered one yourself, hell some of us have even built a couple.

He goes on to link to several great examples of such anti-solutions, so click through or use the links below.

In the tree outside the window just now there was quite an interesting flock of birds. About a dozen magpies, 2 pigeons, and several black birds, all grouped together. By all appearances they’re having a meeting. Perhaps gerrymandering territory, or discussing recent encounters with local cats.

Philippe Falardeau, Monsieur Lazhar, 2011

Watched with mum, children being important to us both.

In a word — Beautiful. From opening credits to closing key everything was in proportion, no character too large or too perfect.

The cinematography was understated but ever present, the long and significant one take of the ‘discovery’ scene is far and away the longest take of the film, a perfect, eery entry to the subject. From there the shots become shorter. Everything is shot tight, only allowing into the frame what belongs in it.

The emotion of the film is heightened by the formality imposed by the classroom and the school, in this context director Philippe Falardeau is able to reveal each characters’ inner turmoil by turns. A story of grief, from multiple sources, some shared, some private, some resolved, much not. Sophie Nélisse and Mohamed Fellag are exceptional.

Scored perfectly, every note attached to a moment, and only where it was wanted.

I didn’t know before watching it that it was adapted from a play, Bashir Lazhar by Évelyne de la Chenelière, a one character play.

See also: Monsieur Lazhar: An Interview with Philippe Falardeau

Semantics are fascinating to me. By semantics here I mean in essence, the attachment of labels to anything. Culture emerges in the expression of, and prior and subsequent discussion of, semantics. The things we say, about the world we see.

But semantics are also an abstraction, at once they both connect us to the world, to our understanding of the world, and they separate us from it.

Platonic Idealism is rooted in this. Here in the world we are limited to abstractions, we can only glimpse at the extraordinary durability of ideas, which so far exceeds our own as to be almost incomprehensible.

†

I saw an artist wearing a head piece made of magnetic tape pulled from a VHS cassette. My first thought was that it seemed a shame to destroy an old tape, even a blank one. But as I thought about it more, eventually I came all the way to thinking that the destruction/use of that VHS tape in that way did more to preserve the tape than it did to destroy it. At the very least, the transformation brought it to my attention in a way that an untouched tape could not have.

Things that are not in a state of transformation are in a state of decay.

Transformation permits the making of new memories about an object (or an individual).

The act of transformation is an act of preservation then, expending effort to slow the relentless effort of the universes entropy towards the destruction of all things is a beautiful, tymeful act.

Knut Melvær, Thoughts On Markdown, 2022

As I add progressively more structure to the ‘data’ that backs this website — more strictly defining relationships between documents — it makes sense to consider what the constraining effects the use of any given markup format has on my ability to encode (and subsequently, decode) document structure, intra-document relationships, etc.

Knut makes a pretty thorough summary of markdowns defects, his thoughts about it being “a hassle to parse and validate, even with great tooling” echoes my same feeling.

I agree that block centric editing experiences offer a solution to many of markdowns painful limitations, but it’s an evolution that must be pursued carefully, I love the accessibility of plaintext.

John MacFarlane explored similar territory in Beyond Markdown

I’m exploring this same space in my own projects. Relevant proposals:

Daniel Roher, Navalny, 2022

Just watched Navalny with mum, truly riveting, and moving too. Several times I was brought to the edge of tears by the courage of Navalny, his team, and his supporters. It’s no small act to stand and challenge Putin and his Plutocratic militia. And to continue doing it after surviving an attempted assassination is almost beyond words. It puts a more vivid face to a story that I’ve read about but seen little footage of.

And of course it reminded me of the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal next to my grandma’s home. The military/MI6 closing off part of the city, Grandma not being able to visit her daughter’s grave, Theresa May’s impotent speech condemning Russia.

Besides the striking story, what really stood out to me was the brilliant attention to sound. It often feels like attention to sound has gone completely to pieces in the world of television and cinema these days. The phenomena wherein 40% of people1 permanently enable subtitles when available isn’t because we’re all losing our hearing, it’s because the sound stage is often complete mush, rammed full of distracting background noise.

  1. The Guardian, Mumbling actors, bad speakers or lazy listeners? Why everyone is watching TV with subtitles on↩︎

I can eat cake!

Paddy and Val, two humans who I very much admire, have a phrase that they use between themselves. Here’s the short version of how it came to be and what it means (disclaimer: I’m probably misremembering it badly:

They were both working hospo at a lodge, one night a guest ordered cake after dinner. Paddy looked at the guest, raised an eyebrow and said, “you don’t look like a cake kind of person”, to which the guest responded quite aggressively with “I CAN EAT CAKE!”.

And now that emphatic phrase lives on in the house of Paddy and Val, brought out any time one of them presumes to tell the other that they’re doing something out of character. Might we all eat cake, that our characters may grow fat.

If there’s enough time in the day to record all that you do, you’re not doing enough.

And I say that as someone who aspires to capture ever more of what I do.

But journaling is an inherently oscillatory exercise, we try hardest to capture the highs and the lows. While I do regularly make entries in service of the mundane, that isn’t where my heart is.

MikeRun, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Extroverts are not the problem. And the problem with the Introverts is that we think the Extroverts are the problem. And the problem with Extroverts is that they don’t think about Introverts at all.

I used to be chronically introverted. It took a while, but life taught me that I’m at my best in company and now I live for that. I’d like to have a better idea of other people’s relationship with that arc, like, is that how everyone feels or is there something unusual about being an introvert for twenty years and then finding the tools to live intensely socially.

Or am I just missing too much of the puzzle to even ask the right question…?

Kyle Aster, Taste and The Zen of GitHub

Anything added dilutes everything else.
Approachable is better than simple.
Avoid administrative distraction.
Design for failure.
Encourage flow.
Favor focus over features.
Half measures are as bad as nothing at all.
It’s not fully shipped until it’s fast.
Keep it logically awesome.
Mind your words, they are important.
Non-blocking is better than blocking.
Practicality beats purity.
Responsive is better than fast.
Speak like a human.

Distilled principles of design from Kyle Aster’s (nee Neath) time working at GitHub.

Emphasis mine.

Anhedonia

deficits in hedonic function

Scary. I’d never heard of the word before. Sure, I think in a transient sense it’s probably something most can relate to, myself included, but learning a word that basically means the lack of feeling has unnerved me a little, because for ten years I did lack feeling. In some ways that all feels so distant now, but it isn’t really all that long gone.

Came across it reading Issa Rice’s site.

Emphasis mine.

The need of people to express power by writing about how much they could destroy has continued to present day. However, with more information than ever available to the serious researcher, files seem more and more professional than ever before. But make no mistake; the same caveats and warnings of previous generations are the same: don’t believe everything you read, and don’t try to blow things up based on what you read.

Got a chuckle out of Jason’s disclaimer at the top of the destruction collection on http://textfiles.com.

The design of the site also stands tall as a reminder that websites can have a style, and not everyone has to like it.

tangerine, A classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture

Culture, the embedding of norms/ideas into a place/relationship/society/etc, enthrals me.

Cultures are emergent, responsive to history, geography, climate, fortune, adversity. Culture is the sum of place and people, and a people are the product of culture, and a place is borne of (and reinforces) both people and culture, round and around in a fascinating and nauseatingly infinite loop of achingly slow iteration and sometimes deafening inertia. Cultures represent stability — good and bad — they are the seemingly unshakable bedrock of society, until they crumble.

Culture can exist between two people or eight billion, Culture is present at the scale of individual cells all the way up the relations of nations. It is everything, and it is everywhere. But what makes a culture?

It’s almost midnight, I’ve barely slept for two days — for good reasons, don’t worry. I’m in no fit state to answer a question of such unbounded consequence but all I’m really getting at is that I just read something: buried deep in a far away forum, a reply (to a question of no particular interest), written by a user called tangerine, that introduced me to a whole new lens for looking at culture, particularly at the scale of nations.

What happens when Ask Culture meets Guess Culture? And what other similar dichotomic comparisons can be drawn between cultures large and small?

Goodnight.

Somewhat related: The One Thing I Can’t Stand About Teaching English In Japan

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth

I can be a bit of a puritan when it comes to software and the proliferation of ‘bloatware’ — software whose function doesn’t seem proportionate to its consumption — but Joel makes a reasonable and compelling counter, that software is not bloating significantly when viewed in the full context of its existence.

And he made this argument 22 years ago today! Whether that makes his rationale more or less compelling is for each reader to decide, but the years have done nothing to diminish the clarity with which he expressed that reasoning and I’m glad to have stumbled across it again. When I read it first, probably six or seven years ago, I was unconvinced. Reading it again today I’m less sure, so thank you Joel.

After living on the far side of the earth for more than 5 years I’m now back in England. I was never intending to stay long but I will take some time to see folks I haven’t seen for 60+ months, but I’m also turning my attention to the next adventure as a means of keeping myself sane. There is an idea emerging, the beginnings of a plan to walk from Britain to India. I don’t intend to rush, I’d hope to be walking for at least a year before I even reach India, perhaps much more.

†

I have a vision of the community I aim to be a part of, but there are things I must do before I can be a part of such a community, and that above all I must go out in search of more of the incredible luck that has continuously befallen me these last few years in bringing me so much closer to that goal. Because half-blind/half-sighted ambition and a great deal of luck together is the only path to the life I imagine. Once achieved it will be a thing to behold, an uncommon thing indeed. But there is much more to do and learn before that dream can come fully to life and I can’t do all of that here.

I’m scattered. It’s been two days of that. Get started with something, be interrupted by someone, follow that interruption, lose all focus, try and return to what I was doing, fail.

The collapse of all focus. 31 days left with the woman I love and she’s at work. I make dreary progress on my packing but lord above, what am I doing? Who leaves a life like this behind? It’s hard because it’s absurd! This life, here, with this woman, is incredible in every dimension and yet, in a month of days I shall fly away.

No wonder I’m in a struggle.

Kim Samek, I Am the Ghost Here

I’ve never read anything quite like this before. It’s fiction, that’s not new. It’s a short story, but I’ve read plenty of those before. Yet somehow I had no idea what I was getting myself in for. I loved it. I feel moved by it though I don’t know quite how. It feels extremely real.

The experience of watching a brother become something I don’t recognise is deeply, painfully familiar.

Parents unfit for one another, I’ve felt that too, that pressure cooker.

I don’t believe strongly in either self-determination or inevitability. I think both are easy to get wrong and where it concerns anything that matters, the truth is both too complicated to discern and impossible to verify.

Experience has shown me that our ability to determine what brought us to a given point is deeply lacking. The natural and helpful1 instinct of the mind to create a plausible, comfortable, and simple explanation for any given (or perceived) reality is fantastically fallible and we are never likely to reliably overcome it. Moreover, if we were to overcome it, life may well cease to be worth living.

This belief shares a theme with my beliefs (touched on here) that it is with emotions and entropy (randomness, disorder), not without, that we find meaning.

  1. Without this instinct. I believe that anxiety occurs where the mind cannot reconcile itself to an explanation that is plausible, comfortable, and simple.↩︎

I believe that wherever we attach emotion we are vulnerable, especially if we are not self aware about that emotion. I don’t take this to the conclusion that rationalists do in attempting to be less/non emotional, rather I aim to understand where my emotions come from and how I can interpret and respond to them in order that my acts in life reflect the confluence of my values and emotions. I believe the rationalists attempts to segregate beliefs and emotions represents a kind of death of the soul, a profound loss of what makes us human.

†

I struggle with computers. I don’t struggle with them in the sense that they don’t make sense to me, rather they feel all too natural, or maybe not exactly natural but very very interesting. For as long as I’ve known about computers they have appealed to me, for lots of reasons, but perhaps most of all because I love order. Computers are ordered. Sure, disorder can be imposed on them or perpetuated with them, they’re not perfect, after all they’re just meticulously refined rocks that we’ve some how filled with lightning and tricked into doing maths, but they facilitate a purity of order that can’t be touched by any other medium. Any other medium. Computers are a medium, and that I think is where I’ve gotten lost. My relationship with computers has morphed into computing as the goal. Computers are the medium, and as a medium they exist only to help me discover and express. A means, not an end.

Ginevra Davis, I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person

Trying to stay off the internet feels like pushing back against a wave. 

That quote captures a bit of my relationship with the internet. It’s just so captivating, so hard to look away from.

Everyone knows someone who has lost a piece of themselves to the internet. They latch onto a digital community and start to think it’s the whole world. 

Yeah, I know a few like that.

Everyone loves the idea of the internet. The live wire—touch it and watch the world flash before your eyes. In the late 1970s, home computers only had primitive internet precursors like phone-in BBS forums, but people bought them anyway because they liked the idea of being connected. Everyone together, all at once.

That’s what sucked us all in. Everyone together, all at once. What a promise. And as time passes more people start to believe it. Never mind that it’s patently untrue, never mind that even with more than 5 billion people online1 we’ll never communicate with more than a handful of them. All that matters is that maybe we could. It’s electric, captivating, tantalizing. It’s bollocks. Because the venn-diagram of very-online and very-interesting has a vanishingly small overlap.

Being online today mostly means constantly performing your personality—or whatever online schtick you develop. Liking is a personal endorsement. You post iPhone photography of yourself, or of your family and friends. You write mini-essays about your beliefs. Most of us go on and try to present the best version of ourselves. Because this is the future, whether we like it or not.

5 billion people trapped in a race to conform.

Their real lives, their better lives, were somewhere online. Seeing them in person felt like an intrusion.

So many zombies.

I am not afraid of Charlie because he writes extreme, offensive things online. I am afraid of him because I recognize so many of his proclivities in regular people—the shifting eyes, the formless references and mental absence. If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation. 

The scariest thing isn’t how strange it all seems, but rather how much less strange it is than it seemingly ought to be.

You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you.

Davis’ article was interesting, but not great. It’s written for a very credulous reader, and falls apart a little due to the mismatch between the apparently neutral voice but the heavy handed judgement within, which is a shame because there is some really good writing in it.

  1. Digital Around the World↩︎

I just watched the world population clock tick past 8,000,000,000 on the worldometer.

Of course the number is just an estimate and almost meaningless as a ticking counter – we might actually have crossed that threshold months ago, or perhaps we still haven’t – but there it went, momentous somehow, nothing somehow.

Eight billion of us here on this earth. The few humans we might meet in our lifetimes are less than a rounding error against the total eclipse of that figure.

I heard someone say that there will never be more children alive on earth than there are today. That fact, be it a true fact or not, made me wonder how many children are born each day.

385,000 children born today. Today.

Just imagine all the experiences that this lot will have. How many of the people born today will I meet? Perhaps none. Yet each of them will inhabit this earth, they along with the next 385,000 to be born tomorrow. Their lives will share all the same essential components as mine.

We will experience joys, and pains, feel love, taste hate; think and see and touch; wonder at the world as we wander out in the world. We share all that and more, yet I will never know you outside of the arbitrary provocation of this made up clock that has counted you into the world.

The most durable things are those that can be replicated easily and therefore transmitted widely, kept whole and undivided, and both near and far. The most durable things therefore, are Ideas.

The extraordinary durability of Ideas is such that an Idea could theoretically be completely extinguished from the earth, all trace of it wiped out, every mind it had ever inhabited passed on, and still reappear at some later date, in any language, even a language (also an Idea) that didn’t exist in the previous era of that Idea.

Photographs are not as durable as Ideas. Nor indeed are words, mere semantics in comparison. The durability of Ideas is such that I think they are subordinate only to the entropic durability of the universe. In that hierarchy, it is inescapable that we/humans are ourselves subordinate to Ideas. This echoes of Nadia’s writing,

Once ideas find an audience, they’re hard to eradicate. Many a surprised creator has found that they’ve lost control over an idea, watching helplessly as it’s shaped and reinterpreted in ways they didn’t intend. It is enormously difficult for a successful creator to escape their own idea, because ideas need hosts to survive.

† † †

When do I do my best thinking? When I’m moving. Walking lifts my spirits immensely. Craig calls it locomotion. It’s generative. Motion is my thinking. Motion of the legs over the earth, followed by motion of the pen over the page.

What do I want to do? That’s the other big one isn’t it. I’m getting pretty good at answering it mind, and growing better at putting the answers into practice, y’know, doing the stuff that feels good.

So thinking and doing, thinking and building, thinking and creating.

Motion and creation. ha. I want to live the kind of life where MOTION AND CREATION would be an apt title to a memoir. Move and create. Move and make. yada yada.

The ability I have, that we all have, to affect people with words scares me sometimes.

A long time ago, in my teens, I remember being asked about my ‘type’ by a girl in our friend group. What kind of women was I attracted to? I was a bit thrown off because I hadn’t really thought about it much, so I just said something like “I like dark hair, not really into blonde” and didn’t think anything of it.

The next time I saw that group of friends, one of them had died their hair dark, she was naturally blonde. Even then I didn’t really put it together. It wasn’t until much later that I found out she was attracted to me and connected the two things.

On the one hand, of course we can change the way we look in order to try and attract those who attract us, it might not be a universally bad thing… but that experience haunts me still and, for better or for worse, I try to be more cautious about revealing things like that, for fear that it might catch someone where they’re vulnerable.

I’ve recently started using a Garmin smartwatch/fitness tracker. I was mostly interested in it as a backup GPS navigation device when in the backcountry but have been pleasantly surprised by its other features, so much so that I haven’t taken it off (except to charge) since. Each morning it gives me a sleep score for the nights rest, and I’ve found it completely spot on. To begin with I doubted it, when it would say I got a ‘fair’ sleep I might have thought, “nah I feel great” but sure enough within a few hours I’d be losing sharpness.

Likewise, camping at the top of Anapai beach on the Abel Tasman on Saturday night, I woke up the following morning feeling about as fresh as I ever have, and sure enough I had a sleep score of 96, ‘Excellent’.

I sat at a tram stop reading The Alchemist, waiting for the 109. Two 86’s went by before I realised I was waiting at the wrong stop, on the wrong line. It’s howling today. As I walked from Spring to Gisborne, a red hat came tumbling towards me on the wind.

Being here in Melbourne – days spent roving the streets of the only city I’ve ever loved, nights spent in the company of the coolest couple I’ve yet met – has been a joy I could not have imagined. There has been something missing, I have fooled myself my whole life long, and I fool myself still. So slowly does the veil lift.

There’s a page in the front of my passport. THIS PAGE IS RESERVED FOR OFFICIAL OBSERVATIONS it reads. Immediately below, printed in a faux stamp style, THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL OBSERVATIONS.

Though quite the opposite of its intent, I thought that a poetic comment on the frailty of appeals to authority. There are no official observations like, only observations.

Found someone’s groceries forgotten on a bench in a park, had clearly been there over night, the tins and packaging were all wet. Stumbled upon a food pantry beside Fitzroy town hall and left them on the shelf.

Reflecting on the pandemic which, apart from the masks we still wear, feels strangely distant. Thinking back to that time where life seemed to hang in the orbit of a single choice, six feet apart or six feet under.

I decided to look up some coping strategies for ADHD, anyway, turns out that Sweden’s Iore iron ore hauling freight trains produce enough power from regenerative braking to power the empty trains back up to the national border.

I just want to shut my eyes and not have to see the places I’ve been.

— Michael in Barry Levinson, Sleepers, 1996

The poster for the film Sleepers (1996)

Sleepers (1996) is a dark film about abuse and truth, with enough courage not to dish out a happy ending. It’s not a perfect film, not even close, its moralising rings a little hollow, like the plot didn’t quite live up to the message its creators were trying so hard to deliver.

Ever since watching Princess Mononoke I’ve been much more conscious of the fragility of moralising in film. Princess Mononoke rises above decreeing good and evil where Hollywood has never really been able to manage that. Sleepers is no exception.

The acting was excellent though, even when the writing let the stars down. Dustin Hoffman’s small part is one of the most compelling in the film, his talents all the more vivid as he plays the washed up lawyer to perfection. Father Bobby, played by Robert De Niro, is another great character and one of the few whose moral posture is left open to the interpretation of the reader.

The style and cinematography are well matched to the writing, with the scenes in Hell’s Kitchen seeming particularly true to the mythos of Manhattan’s West Side

Kenneth Turan of the LA Times ultimately concluded of Sleepers that “it’s difficult to take this film as seriously as it takes itself”, and I think that’s fair and apt.

It makes for good cinema, I’d even recommend it, but it’s not the gem it aimed to be.

The man I know is not the boy you remember.
— Carol

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

  • Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  • And sorry I could not travel both

  • And be one traveler, long I stood

  • And looked down one as far as I could

  • To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  • Then took the other, as just as fair,

  • And having perhaps the better claim,

  • Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

  • Though as for that the passing there

  • Had worn them really about the same,

  • And both that morning equally lay

  • In leaves no step had trodden black.

  • Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  • Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  • I doubted if I should ever come back.

  • I shall be telling this with a sigh

  • Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  • Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  • I took the one less traveled by,

  • And that has made all the difference.

I just re-read The Road Not Taken, and then an exchange between Frost and Edward Thomas, for whom he probably wrote the poem, and realised that I had it wrong all this time.

  • Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
  • I took the one less traveled by,
  • And that has made all the difference.

The poem is a mocking one. There is no difference, except for that which we manufacture. Looking back we tell ourselves that it was our choices that made the difference, that we shaped our destiny. But Frost doesn’t think so. Maybe Frost is wrong, but still it comes as a shock to finally realise that those words in which I have taken great comfort, that have meant much to me, meant in fact quite the opposite.

  • Though as for that the passing there
  • Had worn them really about the same,

But then it’s a relief too, to think that it doesn’t really matter which path we take.

†

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

We want certainties, security. The broader road feels more secure. The narrow way is fraught and precarious.

I think there can never be a perfect chair. Bugger

I’ve always wanted a perfect chair. But of course, how could there be one? More fool me for ever thinking there would be one. A chair dictates our form, but we cannot get through life in one sitting form, nor one standing form, nor one supine form.

The perfect chair would have to be a constant, while also changing from moment to moment. No. There can be no perfect chair. Plato was wrong. I was wrong.

But can a moment have a chair perfectly suited to it? If it can, then maybe there are many perfect chairs, each perfect in a given moment with a given purpose, for a given person. Maybe that’s even better than a single perfect chair. Not one chair to rule them all, but many chairs, for one and all.

Goodbye perfect chair, I probably wouldn’t have recognised you anyway.

Brandon Rhodes, Semantic Linefeeds

Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later.
— Brian W. Kernighan, 1974

I’ve read Brandon Rhodes’ Semantic Linefeeds a few times over the years, usually having been linked to it by another writer. The practice generally finds its way into some of my writing, but never quite sticks.

For the unfamiliar, a linefeed is a carriage-return. Terms of art from the age of typewriters which we more often call line breaks in the digital age. When Rhodes talks about semantic linefeeds he’s suggesting that the linefeed, like any other feature of presentation, should be used first and foremost as a tool for establishing meaning, and only secondarily as a means of applying aesthetic order.

Well, I came across it again this morning as I re-read Gwern Branwen’s design document and all afternoon I have been writing in this style, perhaps I’ll stick with it this time.

I almost never regret green purchases.

I’m not talking about “let’s save the planet” green purchases, though those are good too, but rather things that I buy that are green in colour tend to bring me more satisfaction and less regret.

Craig Mod, Covid

Title derivative of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Craig Mod is young and healthy. Still, covid hit him “like a kick to the throat”. He avoided it for twenty-eight months. Almost no sooner had he left Japan, his cocoon of two and a half years, did ’rona take him for a ride. Soon I too will leave my cocoon, New Zealand, headed for the very same country Craig did so fatefully – England, my home.

Covid-19 reached New Zealand 864 days ago, and so far I have evaded it. It will find me eventually, but I won’t help it along. Avoiding the virus here in New Zealand has not been particularly arduous, life has been only minimally disrupted when compared to most other countries which saw less cohesive responses to the outbreak. Indeed life has gone on almost as normal outside of our two comparatively short lockdowns.

Things become less certain as homeward travel becomes more so. But five years away is long enough, it is time to go back, even if it means going a few rounds with this sobering supergerm.

Through the looking glass of this pandemic, and his bout with the bug that left him feeling like he had been “beaten by a dock worker”, Craig questions the justification for travel.

The romantic ideal of travel is to leave as one version of yourself and return another, changed, “better” of yourself. This trip changed me, but not in the ways you might classically expect. I’ve returned suspicious of travel, more confused than ever about why so many people travel. Unsure if most travel of the last few decades makes sense, or has ever made sense or justified the cost. It feels like some consumerist, un-curious notion of travel was seeded long ago and, like a zombie fungus, has mind controlled everyone to four specific canals in Venice. To a single painting at the Louvre. To three streets and a square in Manhattan. To a few rickety back alleys around Gion.
— From Covid by Craig Mod

It’s hard to argue with that. Hard, but not impossible. Because there can be more than that. Craig knows this, he knows it deeply. He’s scratched beneath those “four specific canals in Venice”, he’s vagabonded the full span of the Tōkaidō connecting us to the texture of its 400 year history, he’s explored how travel itself is a creative tool. In spite of his covid induced doubt, Craig has shown us that motion, and its less subtle cousin travel, are powerful tools for thinking, growing, and creating. So long as we are looking closely.

Of course, I need to believe that, for I mean to travel again. Slowly, in my own way, under my own steam, but travel I will. First home, then away again.

A few snippets from Design Principles Behind Smalltalk. I have skipped those maxims that apply only to programming language design, and focused instead on the principles that are broad enough to prove useful in all fields of design.

  • If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.
  • A system should be built with a minimum set of unchangeable parts; those parts should be as general as possible; and all parts of the system should be held in a uniform framework.
  • [Languages exist] to provide a framework for communication.
  • Languages and systems that are of sound design will persist, to be supplanted only by better ones.
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I feel like a kid again; the world is vibrant and real — there is still so much to learn. It is thrilling.

I recommend it with all my heart.

— Erin Ptacek, Be Coachable

I can be stubborn.

Sometimes I think you have to be a bit stubborn in order to do anything because doing anything is a bit like saying “I’m good enough at this to make a go of it”. It’s a rejection of that voice that says “but maybe I’m not good enough?”.

Stubbornness is just an expression of ego.

If, like me, you think that the ego is neutral, not inherently good or bad, just who we are, then stubbornness need not be inherently good or bad either. Sometimes it’s good, other times not.

But sometimes I am too stubborn. Too stubborn for my own good, and too stubborn for the good of others. I learn a great deal from other people, but I don’t always make it easy for those people or for myself.

Reading Erin Ptacek reflecting on the same trait in herself was a good reminder that just because I can do something alone, doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it better – or have more fun doing it! – if I made myself more amenable to collaborating.

Because when I let myself ‘be coachable’, I experience the same dizzy joy that Erin describes.

Things happen. Not for any particular reason. They just happen. For Mizuki, things happen for a reason. Both are true I suppose.

Alistair is going blind, he also thinks things happen for a reason. I wonder if that gives him comfort. I hope that it does.

Dates on this website
I date things when I write them. Like a letter. Though I am often offline for extended periods. You wouldn’t date a letter for the day when you think it will be received, would you?

I wonder if my life would be better or worse if, all else being equal, we had no means of speaking of time, of situating things in time. No millenia. No months. No Mondays. Time yes, but just as a feeling.

Imagine not being able to say “just a sec” or “in a minute”. We could still say “see you tomorrow”, pissing about with words won’t halt the solar system, but there’d be no “let’s pencil that in for Tuesday July 12th at 2.50pm if that works for you?”. It doesn’t! It really doesn’t work for me.

This is one of those times I’m reminded that it’s a Very Good Thing™ that I’m not in charge of anything big, like time, or the world

Qualifications are generally quantitative rather than qualitative, but we are not quantitative beings. Focusing on qualities over quantities seems like a more sustainable posture but maybe I’m just shaking my fist at the sky because I don’t have any ‘qualifications’.

If the phrase “modal editor” means nothing to you, count yourself lucky and ignore everything that follows. For the rest of you clowns, leave your vitriol at the door.

I love vim, but the fact that I feel the need to tell you I actually use neovim is proof enough that everyone who talks about vim sounds exactly the fucking same – me included – which is why I’ve tried not to. But I love vim so I have to. I’ll keep it brief.

Vim is a special class of philosophy, in that everyone takes the same path through it. To leave the path is to leave vim. Vim is a cult.

Kev Watters lays bare all our culty, modal bullshit much better than I can in This is Your Brain on Vim.

Click through and have a read.

If you love vim and this makes you laugh, you’re going to be fine
If you love vim and this doesn’t make you laugh, you hate yourself
If you love emacs, you hate your operating system

Ma and I’s regular Sunday morning phone call (Saturday evenings for her) yielded a neat little bite.

Decrying my own recency bias and the broader recency bias of society at large I said that life is reduced to “the loud and the recent”. Ma reflected/reframed/refined this as “the loud and the now”.

I imagine it like a venn-diagram, only at the overlap of the LOUD & NOW can society see. Everything else is either too quiet or too distant. Any sufficiently large group becomes blind to anything but THE LOUD AND THE NOW.

Why are my beliefs back on the brain? My beliefs govern my life, any thinking about them or attempts to refactor them is certain to ripple through my life, so what am I seeking to change in my life?

What is life?

Is it just what we see and do?

What would non-life be? Death? Perhaps not, death is a part of life so might be inaccessible to anything that is not alive. Inaccessible? Can we have death? Can we possess it? Is death inside or outside of life?

Is death the last chapter, or the infinite after?

Venkatesh Rao treads similar ground in What is a life?, looking at a life as an accumulation of experiences, while stressing the need for a life to have a stable, “recognizable” core identity around which this accumulation happens.

I like accumulation as a metaphor for looking closely at life, at a life, at my life.

But belief in something greater than all that we can perceive, something like God, surely yields a more convincing and complete lens for a believer, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”, St. Augustine in his Confessions. Believing this life to be a part of a journey toward God grants the believer a firm existential setting. But I do not believe. I was not raised in a faith, I do not wish that I had been. I do not believe in GOD, poly-Gods, talking snakes, or corporeal unicorns.

And even the faithful have still to wrestle with this question, and also with the far more pernicious, “is this life that I have lived enough for this GOD under whom I have lived?”, so I don’t know if faith really salves.

Where faith probably does help is in the depth of philosophical study carried out inside the walls of the house(s) of GOD. More has been thought and done in the service of GOD than not. The corpus of theology has touched, inspired, and expanded every school and avenue of thought and gives the believer such a rich and storied thread on which to draw as can hardly be compared to any other.

A life without GOD is a life in which our own ego takes to the stage, for good and for ill. Without GOD I am free to explore (and indulge) my ego, but I must also teach my ego to inhibit itself for no GOD exists (to me) that will do that for me.

So perhaps a life is simply what accumulates around our own ego. People, ideas, trinkets & treasures, name, and fortune. All enter into the orbit of our ego and our ego too is pulled into the orbit of other egos & ideas. The result is a chaos of forces akin to that of the Three Body Problem. The result is a life.

What do I believe? PART 1

All creatures are dignified, worthy of honour and respect.

I believe that life’s purpose lies in the making of meaning. Or more fully, meaning is made in the making of meaning. I do not need a discrete purpose or focus in my life, though I recognise and respect that many people do.

I know myself to be self-divided, that I grow by confronting my own inconsistencies, in the knowledge that I will never overcome them all. I believe this to be true of all people and think this ability, to believe in things that can’t be certain or that may be wrong, is essential to achieving (or even really attempting) anything in our lives, but is also a weakness through which our worst fears may become the ugliest of prejudices. An inability to act in the shadow of conflicting ideas is anxiety.

“We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”
― Michel de Montaigne

Nothing has to be done. This belief governs my attitude to deadlines, my feelings about life’s ultimate purpose, my approach to work and my desire to avoid having a career, my relationships (it is the starkest difference between myself and most of the people I adore), and many other aspects of my life.

Prefer specifics to generalities.

I have a habit of trying to draw the things I think, and learn, and believe into ever larger contexts. I do so in part because of an innocent sort of eagerness, but also, in part, out of a desire to legitimise my thinking within some greater, profounder conclusion. But forced conclusions are often poor conclusions, and often speak most to our prejudices. Trying to apply order where order has not been asked for is selfish, fraught, and almost doomed to fail. I would do better to contain the scope of my thoughts closer to the things I understand, or at least to avoid projecting imagined answers onto unasked questions.

All this isn’t to say that every effort to apply ideas across disciplines or contexts should be forestalled, only that such efforts should be undertaken with care – especially when that other context is another person – and a ready willingness to admit folly and boneheadedness.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
— Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966

The hammer is perhaps an overused tool in my (thinking) toolkit. Developing a preference for specifics rather than generalities is likely to help me in my efforts to become a kinder person.

Emotions are a bit like an ocean. They have depths we can hardly fathom, and breadth that we cannot imagine. Like our own oceans we must surface from time to time, we cannot breathe our emotions. Unlike our own oceans, some of our emotions grow hotter the deeper we go.

I’m interested in anchors. Not real ones, not the kind that peg ships to the ocean floor, but all our sort of metaphysical anchors that peg our hearts to an emotional floor. The tethers that ground and surround us, that inhabit, inhibit, and delimit us.

What are my anchors?

You, me, ma, money. I’m letting go of you, hard though it is. That leaves me, ma, and money. I can’t let go of ma, I won’t let go of money just yet, can I let go of myself?

Why am I trying to let go of my tethers anyway?

Something better than Nattō

I love Nattō, a Japanese food of fermented soybeans. Trouble is, it’s expensive, can be hard to find in New Zealand if you’re not in Auckland, Christchurch, or Wellington, and – like a lot Japanese products – comes packaged in heaps of unnecessary plastic which spoils just a little of the pleasure of the eating.

I also love barley and today, in a moment of supine inspiration, I combined cooked barley with tahini, sesame oil, and a little salt and found it gets pretty close to the texture and pleasure of Nattō. Of course, it isn’t Nattō, it foregoes all of the fermentation that gives Nattō much of its unique (and divisive) essence. But it’s bloody good, and fills the need for me without all the palaver and plastic of the real thing.

Pleasure is not measured in grams.

I was eating a crumpet this morning – a square crumpet, which is relevant I promise – and it got me thinking about my relationship with food. At the supermarket I instinctively, often unconsciously, compare food in terms of cost to weight. I only buy fruits and vegetables that are in season because they cost a small fraction of what shoulder-season or out-of-season produce costs, or if I’m deciding between two kinds of biscuit I’ll almost always favour the option that costs less by weight and, almost paradoxically, will sometimes even spend a little more to satisfy that instinct (eg. buying a bigger bag of biscuits than I need).

The supermarket has two options for crumpets: round, or square. Either option entails six crumpets. For reasons unknown square crumpets cost $3 and round crumpets cost $2.50, but square crumpets offer up 425 glutenful grams, 42% more than the lowly 300g in the round pouch.

Now I’m no mathematician but even I can figure out that with the round crumpets I get 120 grams of crumpety goodness for my dollar, but the square crumpets offer up a lip-smacking 141.6g per dollar. That’s 17.5% more crumpet per dollar people!

But! Eating my second crumpet this morning I had an epiphany… it’s six crumpets either way! I won’t bother making generalisations about the wider population, I’m not a public health expert, but I know for a fact that the shape of my crumpets has no impact on how many crumpets I consume. So taking what we know from my ‘studies’ carried out above, I’m paying 50 cents per crumpet for squares when I could be paying just 42 cents for rounds.

They got me! Big Crumpet™ has tricked me into paying more per crumpet, and eating more crumpet-calories, for the same crumpet pleasure.

But it gets worse, it’s not the same pleasure, the square crumpets aren’t even as good. They have too much edge, and the edge crisps up too early in the toaster, so you’re forced to choose between over-crisp-crumpet-crimps or much-too-soft crumpet centres. The round crumpet is much more reliable. What a fool I’ve been

Note to self: don’t try to measure pleasure in grams (unless cocaine…), and buy round crumpets.

If this isn’t an addiction, then we need a new word for it.

— Dave Gauer, nosurf

The web is so sticky. Like Hotel California, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.

Dave hits the nail on the head in nosurf, describing the feeling of urgency that surrounds time spent on the web:

And I always feel like I’m in a big rush because I should really be doing something else. I’m simultaneously wasting time and short on time.

Compared to most people I know, I’m not a big phone user, but even still sometimes when I open my phone I find I’ve opened the web browser instinctively, unconsciously, even if I meant to open my calendar or reply to a message. There is an addictive pathway there.

But on my laptop I’m a Heavy Weight Surf Champion of the World. No one even comes close to finding as many things that I find just so very bloody interesting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a functioning addict, like I (currently) have a full time job that I’m real good at, and my partner doesn’t feel neglected, and I still find time to draw and write and tramp and take photos, but jeebus put me in a room with my laptop and nothing that absolutely needs doing today and before I know it isn’t today any more, we’ve hit tomorrow!

And Dave’s right, away from the web “ideas bubble up more often and there’s more mental space to ruminate about things”. I go out for a walk and 5 minutes in I have to stop and write shit in a notebook for half an hour because all this stuff just comes tumbling out of my over stimulated brain stem. And sure, all the very interesting stuff I’ve seen and since forgotten definitely does feed into those moments of all-out inspiration, but is it definitely worth it? Might there be a better balance I/we/you/etc can strike?

I won’t spoil all of Dave’s conclusions, which extend into a second post aptly titled nosurf2, but he raises several more good points about what using our time well might look like, and why it is that we often don’t want to.

As an aside, Dave’s two posts appear in his RSS Club, posts that he publishes exclusively to his feed without linking to them on his site. I find this novel, and though I’m not currently interested in further bifurcating my outputs, I might join this club of clubs eventually.

I’d like to be able to create meta-series’ of posts. Like a table of contents that sticks to the page, but instead of linking to internal anchors it crosslinks to other pages. This would need to be established in the document metadata in order to sidestep the brittleness of doing it in markup.

More figuring out what it all means, how it all streams.

I have my journal, and I have my nonsense. Ever since I birthed nonsense, I’ve had a much easier time getting words out, it’s been a relief to have that ‘default home’, a place for proto-thinking, unvarnished ideas. But I’ve struggled with what my ‘journal’ should be in this new context. Am I just observing that I needed to lower the bar? Did I just need permission to pollute my journal with these fitful ramblings? Why do I think they need to be separate?

Because they are different. This is really quite different from this. The former is a single line, an atomic thought, 16 words, that’s it. The second is more than 1500 words accompanied by 9 photographs. Situating those two things together would feel wrong, which is why they’re not… but my journal isn’t feeling quite right either.

Maybe I just need a set of rules. I liken my nonsense to a sort of private twitter, maybe I should have christened it with similar constraints, a character limit might clear up my confusion. Twitter isn’t the place for a 1500 word spiel, neither is nonsense. So where to draw the line? After all, this is emerging in my nonsense right now, but it’s getting a little long…

Yet it belongs here

If Nonsense is thinking-out-loud and this other part is recording my experiences then maybe my journal needs a new name. Here’s the long-list of ideas so far:

anamnesia echoes hindsight journal logbook memory memories memoirs nostalgia retrospect retrograde

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Fed into the canon of art as a quote by Picasso, though he probably never said it. I’m not even an artist – good, bad, or ugly – so it doesn’t matter to me, but I’ll try my hand at copying anyhow. Here’s a bad copy of something by Theo Eble (1899–1974).

My bad copy of half of a Theo Able piece.

Here I was mimicking one of his lithographs, though I just used a biro.

Theo Eble never ‘made it’ as an artist, never found much success. He probably isn’t even a great example of his own style. Still, I like his style, at least his abstract pieces. His still life’s don’t resonate for me, but then still life’s rarely resonate for me.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to do a few more of these in Eble’s style. See parts #2, #3, #4, and #5, and #6

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I had no idea how much nonsense it was, but nonsense it all is.
— Anna Scott, Notting Hill

Notting Hill (1999) is lovely. I think it’s beautiful, and I’ll fight you if you disagree.

Notting Hill has been mimicked by every gaudy romance since, but that doesn’t dilute its beauty, only heightens it. It is worth imitating, even badly. All great art should be copied, stolen, even desecrated.

The fame thing isn’t really real, you know.

Good writing, well cast, creative cinematography, and just really bloody cheerful, happy like. What’s not to love?

Anna and William sat at a table in 1999's Notting Hill
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Richard Mitton, A Note on Layout Language

In A Note on Layout Language Richard Mitton gets to the root of why CSS has always felt so clunky as a language for visual layout. It was built to style, its design and its fundamental primitives are suited to that. Layout calls for a different grammar that the cascade is unable to convincingly contort itself into.

How many man hours could have been saved globally if the web had been birthed with a more appropriate layout language based on prepositions rather than the INI style key-value list we got?

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What should the structure of this site achieve?

Chiefly, it should allow me to group rather than filter. I don’t want to filter out my rubbish, it has a home in my nonsense; I don’t wish to fret over whether someone doesn’t care for links to other places, they’re all in my pearls and that guy doesn’t need to look at them; likewise, people who aren’t interested in travel need not delve into my journeys, but I can still write them.

There should be a place on this site for everything I might wish for it to contain. That isn’t to say that everyone who pays a visit should have to wade through all those streams. Like any good resource it should be composable, discoverable, adaptable to the desires of each reader.

I make use of distinct streams for me and for you. They give me permission, freedom. They give you choice.

Eventually the contents of this site should become unknowable, even to me. Not by being obtuse but by being vast, prolific. This site should permit and indulge that desire. It should have folds, so that the stale can sink and the salient can surface. The parts of this body should migrate in and out of these folds with the seasons.

I have a hot and cold relationship with dates in URLs. For a while I took an absolute stance against them. Took a while before I realised that they’re well suited to some things. And now, most of the fragments of my site are located in time via their URL. What changed?

I can’t consume and emit at the same time.

As I stood eating a biscuit, looking around at the mess of my packing for an urgent, unplanned, week-long getaway starting in the early hours of tomorrow morning, this occurred to me. I ate one biscuit, then another, still my head was empty. No thoughts came, only calories.

There are different kinds of consumption: eating things, buying things, watching things, destroying things. Consumption doesn’t just consume the object of our desire, it consumes us too. Consumption is an antidote to thinking. This rings true with those periods when I do my richest thinking, they always coincide with eating little or nothing at all. I say coincide with my tongue in my cheek, because it is causation not coincidence at play I think.

Consumption feeds creativity, I could do nothing without consuming food and other people’s ideas, but consumption also has a tremendous power to placate.

Conspicuous Consumption, Symbolic Consumption, Addictive Consumption, Compulsive Consumption and Sacred Consumption are five main categories defining distinctive consumption styles. Basic characteristics of consumer culture can be summarized in the transforming of needs to desires, utilitarian/hedonic needs-values, commodity fetishism, conspicuous leisure and consumption, cultural values, aestheticization, alienation, differentiation and speed. A consumer society is one in which the entire society is organized around the consumption and display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige, identity, and standing.
– Kutucuoglu, Arikan Saltik, Firat & Tuncel, 2013

Hey you! Why not point your web browser over to Pointer Pointer?

Sometimes I rail against skeuomorphia, but there exist a few folks out there who do it so well, with such love and craft as to demand adoration. Simone and his computer are exactly that: beautiful skeuomorphic artistry. It even has a bloody screensaver!

What would be the most engaging way to showcase the workings of a watch via the web? Lots of macro photography? A tastefully put together video? Bartosz Ciechanowski has a better idea.

Arun Venkatesan, Your native language affects how you see this image

The symbol for the “Fast Pass” service at Shanghai Disney Resort, via <https://arun.is/blog/your-native-language/>

Arun makes a small but beautiful bi-lingual observation. How much more depth could be unravelled if we could build better bridges between cultures that don’t depend on one or both sides diluting themselves. How much beauty and creativity is being lost today to the ravages of English asserting itself upon the world.

Nuance isn’t profitable, death to nuance. Diversity of language is nuance, death to language. What else must die in service of ease and the big squeeze.

What kind of world will my children wander, what more will we have lost by then.

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I’m imagining a computing paradigm where the first interaction – every time you wish to use the computer – is a declaration of how long you intend your task to take. As you wake/power-on/unlock the device, you’re greeted with a question: how much time do you need? Not how much time do you have, not how much time do you want. How much time do you need?

This task that has brought you to the computer, for which you have interrupted all else that you might have done with this time, how long must it take? How fast can you get it done and get off this inhuman, infinite arcade and return to the real?

I want to draw. Learn by doing and all that. Get over the fear of it.

It’s not much, just the wood burner here at Locking Street. I didn’t have the guts to try and add flames, maybe next time.

For now I’ll scan any drawings I do and convert them to SVGs for displaying them here, see how it feels/looks/works.

A sketch of the stove at Locking Street

I came across Simon Griffee a long time ago, filed his site away somewhere in my catalogue, and just returned to it as I hunt through sites that I have admired looking for taxonomical inspiration.

Only this time I caught site of a link to imgtlk, a meta-art project that he stewards. There’s something special (to me) about Simon’s style of design, particularly web design, he walks a fine line between almost claustrophobic and a little inscrutable on the one side and precisely balanced, simple, and elegant on the other.

journal chafes a bit. I’m happy with chronology, I want that. Still journal feels a little rigid, impersonal. Ironic, because of course it is very personal.

But it seems so obvious, and I like that, interfaces should be obvious, reasonable, discoverable. So why don’t I like ‘journal’? Why don’t I like obvious here? I think because it isn’t obvious to me what the relationship is. Where does it fit? There’s indirection involved, some amount of shearing exists between my real, private journal and the one I publish here.

nonsense has no indirection, no shearing. It is unabashedly low signal, high noise. It’s purpose is obvious to me: close noisy loops, record them, but get them out of my head.

I want that clarity for my journal here. Maybe I can’t have it, maybe that tension is inherent to the pretence of public fragments of a private whole. Need to look for prior art

No resolution here, just preserving some more of my taxonomical self-torment.

†

I enjoy breaking this little website of mine. Like I’ll miss some syntactical error in a template, or put a question mark in a page title, and all of a sudden my bespoke, scrappy little build scripts will shit the bed and spit out a broken feed. I don’t notice for a week, when finally I do, I implement a fix and now my site is a little more robust – anti-fragile even.

Thank murphy no one else reads this though, imagine the pressure that such a pressure would imbue!

A closing scene from Princess Mononoke Opening landscape from Princess Mononoke

I’d never watched a Studio Ghibli animation before. I’ve watched very little in the way of animation at all, besides the staples of Aardman Animations growing up.

It was beautiful. It’s Mizuki’s favourite. She would have been eight when it released, when she first saw it, she estimates she’s seen it 10-14 times since. I would have been two then, but only now – at 26 – have I finally watched it. Despite having seen it so many times she still clutched at my arm in the dramatic moments, of which there are many – her immersion greater than mine.

I remember coming across Akira (1988), one of Japans most famous animated films back when I used to watch more films. I always meant to watch it but never got around to it. It’s set in 2019, the same year that Blade Runner (1982), one of my favourite films, is set.

I’d like to rewatch Blade Runner, and watch Akira, and see how their dystopian predictions, for what is now the recent past, compare to one another. Mizuki has seen neither.

Akira (1988): The poster for the animated film Akira features a young man in a red jacket walking toward the viewer with his futuristic red motorcycle in the background. The poster for the film Blade Runner (1982)
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What would be a sensible thing to do with someone who had committed a crime? assuming we wanted them to not commit more crimes in the future

Send them to a big house full of other people who have committed crimes and hope they don’t learn any new and interesting ways to do crimes?

I am definitely not a domain expert, but something is telling that perhaps that’s really fucking stupid.

Conversations don’t scale as far as we might like.

Involving more people in a conversation can be a great way to canvas a broader set of opinions and surface a superset of possible solutions, but as the number of voices in a dialog grows we approach a near certainty of breakdown.

Godwin’s Law/reductio ad Hitlerum speak to this phenomena.

Trust is pretty wild. I just sent 2100 dollars to a stranger on the internet. In return he agrees to send me a camera. I don’t know this person, I don’t know if the (used) camera is in the condition he claims. I won’t know if I’ve been defrauded until it does or doesn’t arrive here in Nelson. If I have been defrauded I will have no avenue for recourse.

When I read a list, I start from the middle.

I was at dinner with friends recently and hit upon that while trying to convey how my brain works – and how it doesn’t. I’m scattered by nature, my attention is hard to arrest and harder to restrain. I love reading but have terrible trouble doing it. I flit from one thing to the next. I yearn to finish things, but acknowledge that I suck at it.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about A system of urls. Hierarchies, taxonomies, ontologies. How can they best be expressed in this medium.

A large fraction of the writing on this site is of the chronological kind.

At the moment my nonsense locates itself in the form $YEAR/$MONTH/$DAY/$TIME where my journal takes the form $YEAR/$MONTH/$DAY.

I quite like the form of Dave Winer’s hierarchy at scripting.com though. Every node in the chronology is timestamped, and the page at $YEAR/$MONTH/$DAY is simply an automatic collection of every entry from that day.

I wear your affection close to my heart.

You made me a necklace. I wear it close to my heart, I don’t want to take it off. You say it looks like my eyes, this shard of west coast greenstone, brown at the top, drifting into a dark sea green, tapered on the left edge so that it looks a little like a tooth. I hold it close in more ways than one.

I’m sort of looking forward to this site calcifying. Not the writing, nor the habit, I hope to keep that alive and fresh, but the wrapping, the glitter, the skeleton that holds the guts all together. Perhaps when I stop caring so much about what this all looks like it’ll be because I’ve found something more important than the trappings – something of real substance. That’s worth looking forward to. Brittleness and decay will be welcome if they mark the arrival of that too.

Mizuki and I watched Rope (1948) tonight. One of my all time favourite films. It is about as close as it gets to watching theatre on the silver screen.

Watching it again, coupled with a certain amount of tension at work, has put me in a loop thinking about conformity, about how we all batter each other into the shapes that our culture allows. We’re all complicit.

Rupert, Brandon, Phillip, and the chest in the closing scene of Rope (1948)

In the end Rupert feels only shame at the sight of his ideas taken to their end. Brandon is perhaps more hurt by his mentors shame than by the puncturing of his ‘superiority’ or the end of his freedom. Phillip’s agony at the realisation of what his love for Brandon blinded him too finds some relief in the justice of his approaching punishment.

Craig Mod, Looking Closely

What is Craig Mod doing that interests me so?

We consume a lot in this age, but what is it that really binds us to an artist or creator? That bond that means we’ll consume all that they emit even if we wouldn’t take a second look at it coming from someone else.

There’s always a bridge, some strand of their work that carries you into their world. Something shared, or some enlightenment. Craig Mod has an abiding affection for walking, an affection I share. But there are quite a few creators that study and explore walking, none have captured me as Craig has. What is he doing differently? He’s in Japan, this is novel in this space, and lends further richness to his explorations; skill, he’s an excellent writer, it has been his career and craft; he’s a great photographer, and he develops his writing and photography in a tight loop. These are some of the things that distinguish him, but there’s more, an essence that is harder to define.

I’d be tempted at this point to say that Craig’s work is greater than the sum of its parts, but that belies the more novel truth: that it is equal to the sum of its parts. Craig produces with a remarkable consistency of quality, but it isn’t mysterious, his output is equal to his inputs, reflective of the immense time and focus he has devoted to his craft, always looking closely.

I trust Craig as a creator, and as a human, though I have never met him, because his work has moved and inspired me. I have a feeling that after this point, after we have crossed into a creators world and accepted the laws of their universe, there is very little that they can do to lose our affection.

This perhaps begins to explain why it can be so hard to put across quite why we favour this creator over that one: trust is a deeply personal affair, built in secret and closely guarded thereafter.

I want to marry my nonsense from each day to the journal entry from that day (if one exists) such that each nonsense item shows up at the bottom of said journal page.

I also want to add a build-step that populates index pages throughout the hierarchy of my journal so that the breadcrumbs can be traversed at will, rather than (as currently) depending on the too-brittle hand of the author to supply those indexes.

Why oh why does the Atom specification require a title element? As a feed markup I like Atom better than RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0 etc etc but I struggle to forgive the insistence on a title element, it’s just a clumsy and inflexible oversight for an otherwise elegant specification.

Twitter brought the unit of discourse down to 140 characters with some interesting results, Atom missed the boat as a markup optimally suited to this age.

And before you say “just use the title element for short content” let me just say ahhhhhh, thats a sucky solution, go away. We could have had better.

Update 2024-03-03: Chris Coyier on titles in feeds

Really I’m obsessing over structure. I’ve long been preoccupied with structure, often looking for it, or trying to establish it, prematurely. As an example, in my conception of my site there has emerged a tension between my ‘journal’ and my ‘nonsense’. What belongs in each? How should they (inter)relate? The journal lowered the friction to writing, to thinking, having my ‘nonsense’ as an outlet has lowered that friction further still, but I reintroduce friction by constantly trying to contort all the elements of me and of this site into some sort of cohesive order.

I’m not writing nearly as much as I would like, instead I keep tinkering with code on the backend. I enjoy the tinkering a lot, but it’s mostly a distraction from what I’m trying to do here. The breadcrumb style navigation I just added is a prime example: useful yes, but not necessary or important if there isn’t anything worth navigating to.

Susam Pal, Comfort of bloated web

Moore’s law is dead, long live Moore’s law. In spite of (or is it because of…?) the absolutely absurd progress in personal (and pocketable!) computing power over the last 1 2 3 4 8 decades, and particularly so in the last ~15 years, much of the software we use day to day seems only to be getting slower.

We are well into what I have termed The Age of Bad Software, where perverse incentives (money, what else?) and the aforementioned abundance of available CPU cycles have given rise to a credo of ”just make it work and get it out the door” in software development. Ill-considered, bloated, wasteful code is propagating apace. Eleven years after Marc Andreessen’s landmark essay Software is Eating the World, it looks a lot like it has been Bad Software eating the world.

In the increasingly rare case that we encounter good, respectful, performant software, we’re liable to doubt whether it is in fact working correctly.

Susam describes exceeding his readers’ expectations of plausible web performance, and the confusion that results in Comfort of bloated web.

Came across a letter I wrote at some point in my teens, to be read after my death. From that letter,

If I treated you well then you can be sure that I loved you, if I treated you poorly then I hope you can forgive me.

Trying to give shape to a pair of tattoos I would like to get to represent my trips in Australia and New Zealand. Something to do with a bicycle for Oz, and walking/Te Araroa for NZ, but what exactly… and I’d like to capture some detail of each country that I love: deserts in Oz, beech forests and Kea’s in NZ.

Knoll

Knolling is the process of arranging related objects in parallel or 90-degree angles as a method of organization. The term knolling was coined in 1987 by a janitor name Andrew Kromelow who was working at Frank Gehry’s furniture making shop.

(of a bell) ring solemnly; knell.

a low hill with gentle slopes and a rounded top

Do I enjoy the work? Fuck the work. Do I enjoy it? I did enjoy it. I don’t know. I liked it. And then I loved it. Fuck the work this week. Better luck next week. Don’t let the bastards under your skin. Remember that it was good.

Notes as a forest, developed in cycles (seasons), self pruning (shed leaves and even branches), self seeding too: sure occasionally a lone tree will establish itself, carried far by the wind, but the forest grows outwards from established trees.

He who travels the fastest, travels alone.

Let go of your goals. At the end of my life, be that at the turn of the next century or tomorrow, I want to be able to say that I achieved what I set out to achieve. But perhaps I have already done that. All I want is to live well, and I am living well.

I remember Rose and I being frustrated by the kayak people’s insistence on pronouncing Whanganui with a ‘wa’ sound rather than its proper ‘fa’ sound. It wasn’t until some time after finishing Te Araroa that I learned that the Iwi of the area pronounced it that way and my self-righteousness sheepishly evaporated.

They have stories too

I think I’m not alone in this but, when I take a dislike to someone, I am often guilty of attaching to them a simplicity of character that doesn’t recognise the depth of humanity that we all posses.

I want to make sure I’m not doing that.

Habitual and optimal, never shall they meet.

As I walked into the bathroom I flicked the light switch as I swung the door shut with a flick of my heel – efficient. Only the light was already on, so with great efficiency I succeeded only in plunging myself into darkness.

The more we repeat an action, the more unthinking that action becomes. This frees us to turn our minds to other things rather than being wholly and perpetually absorbed with the same mundane elements of our routines, but it also opens us up to a whole new class of human error. When I flicked the light switch (off), some part of me will have been aware that the light was already on

Benn just observed that this time around, everyone switched into lockdown mode nearly instantly. I remember when we all went into lockdown the first time, everyone one was flailing about, ransacking the shops for a ten year supply of toilet paper and flour, never mind that they’d have nothing else besides.

Watching Fernando Meirelles’ The Two Popes I was struck by how the high station granted to bishops, cardinals, popes, etc on the basis of hearing God’s voice in their heads, contrasts with the very low status afforded to others who claim to hear God’s voice in their heads.

“But remember, truth may be vital, but without love it is also unbearable.”

There’s something close to the essence of life in that. Altogether a very moving film, certainly one of last years best, a film that didn’t let truth obscure love.

Random with your name on it…

The venerable Spotify unloaded it’s next round of Only You ‘personalised recommendations’ on me this morning. They bear no resemblance to my listening habits. Naturally there were a few good songs/artists in there that I was glad to discover but I couldn’t help wondering if their hugely complex algorithms actually move the needle compared to a simple random assortment of music from the platform.

Rose and I are talking about modern novels, 21st century archetypes, novels like Hot Milk and Netherland. Rose remarked that they – and we in the real – are ”in an era of existential dread”. As ever, The Great Gatsby is my touch stone to which all of reality and fantasy is compared, and I wondered how our contemporary dread compares with that of Fitzgerald’s characters. Are we more fatal and forlorn than Daisy? More performative than Tom? More wilfully out of it even than Gatsby? Maybe we are, or maybe we’re all just sharing more.

Oh, and if you’re reading this and you haven’t read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, please do. It is a novel fit to define our time, not in a grand epic sort of way, but in a this is how we lived in this era sort of way. It’s beautiful, read it.

Alex Hope, When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number

I love this. Alex Hope knows how to weave a good story.

This is good storytelling. True, but not pathologically true, not boringly true, the right amount of true but with copious embellishments and omissions ie, the craft of storytelling.

I aspire to write something as entertaining as this, something that can raise a laugh in the reader as the above did for me.

一期一会
ichi-go ichi-e

A Japanese idiom which is most often translated as for this time only and which serves as a reminder that, whether we meet someone often or only once, we will never again encounter them, nor ourselves, as they are in that moment. Every encounter, no matter how mundane, is unique.

Time spent with others is precious, for no moment can ever be repeated.

It wasn’t wisdom that carried me 10,000 miles from England to Australia at 21. It wasn’t prescience, it was a naive hope.

Our minds like to draw neat linear conclusions - from cause to consequence. We like to rationalise the world, do away with its entropy, but sometimes naivety beats sense.