cjlm

finished 30th September, 2026

You can’t separate gentrification and employment. People come here following jobs. As cities deindustrialize, there are all kinds of low-level service jobs out here. This is where they can afford places to rent no matter where they work, but it is also accessible to their places of employment

You also have to take into account the limits of public transport. You can map the flight from Portland—or anywhere—by mapping public transport. People go as far as buses will take them.

Density, especially residential density, opens up possibilities for compact, complete communities, walkable neighbourhoods, urban vitality and a host of cultural and political virtues that non-car-dependent proximity putatively nurtures.

If this book is trying to make sense of new urban reorderings and sub-urbanizations, what can thinking about London add? My instinct is that even though London is so fundamentally distinct in so many ways, some of the same processes of displacement are in play there, just piled up on another, hybridized and accelerated. Understanding what is happening in the cities around us, including cities that are a lot smaller and a lot less complex than London, can’t fixate on any single cause of element. Thinking about other cities can offer flashes of insight, but there is something about comparative urbanism that often sniffs of ranking, of a competitive pitting of cities against one another. Analysis across and between cities can not be a search for universalizing themes or transformations, but to see the multi-directionality of how places echo, appropriate, reconstituted, borrow and reflect each other.

I think David Wachsmuth is essentially right when he argues that “We should neither dismiss the concept of the city as outdated no try to resuscitate it as a category of analysis, but rather treat it as a category of practice, a representation of urbanization processes that exceed it.” That’s not bad but tries to split the baby too cautiously. Why try so hard? I like Natalie Oswin’s formulation so much more: “Yes, capitalism is everywhere. But so is everything else. And there are outsides—constitutive ones—all over the place.” This is perfect. There really are outsides everywhere, all over the place—so many, actually, that it makes no sense to call them outside. They are not outside of anything.

finished 21st September, 2026

finished 20th September, 2026

finished 16th September, 2026

finished 13th September, 2026

taken 12th September, 2026

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finished 29th August, 2026

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taken 25th June, 2026

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finished 15th May, 2026

taken 11th May, 2026

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taken 1st May, 2026

finished 22nd March, 2026

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finished 2nd March, 2026

taken 26th February, 2026

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taken 7th February, 2026

finished 7th February, 2026

finished 21st January, 2026

taken 19th January, 2026

All weekly emails are copied to the ocean

noted 14th January, 2026

finished 10th January, 2026

I’ve been reflecting on the interfaces we’ve ostensibly “chatted to” in the past – most obviously mainstream is the infamous assistants from historical versions of Office. The most famous of these was Clippy (real name Clippit FYI you’re welcome) but not unlike the devil, the Microsoft Office Assistant appeared in many guises including a faithful little golden retriever named Rocky.

I was delighted by this 2005 take on “Polite Computing” which posits an answer to the question of why Clippy was apparently so reviled by users at large.

If Microsoft and other designers have not yet figured it out – Mr. Clippy was impolite

Anonymous in 2011 appears to disagree and briefs us on a few realities of product prioritisation and management in the process.

I don’t like it that I don’t get a choice.

Users don’t usually get a choice when features are removed. It’s a statistical reality that widespread adoption of technology will mean that a small proportion will dislike choices made by the creators. Anonymous is one of them.

I DON’T CARE if other people found the assistants annoying. Those individuals could have just TURNED OFF the feature.

It’s inconceivable that features can stick around forever, especially ones that were reviled at worst and a distraction at best. But that doesn’t matter to the end user who cares the most about their experience. It’s not selfish, it’s just not reasonable to expect them to empathise with countless other users that they’ve never met.

So there my buddy will stay.

Anonymous plans on never updating Word to keep their Rocky safe.

I wonder how many Rockys are out there today? How many are faithfully sat next to a blinking cursor on a CRT monitor on an ancient desktop running Microsoft Word 97? I’m sure he lives on in emulation. But once the last person with odd nostalgia for a creamy yellow bundle of pixels is gone, will anyone care for Rocky?

noted 9th January, 2026

In lieu of a more thoughtful end of year review, here’s a smattering of extremes from my 2025.

Best song of 2025

Mary by Black Country, New Road

Perfect harmonies. Evocative Stuart Murdoch-esque lyrics. I love the loop-de-loop phrasings and emotional climax on “powers”. Total ear-worm.

Best bouncy guilty pleasure songs I listened to the most in 2025

Tied: Side Eye by Matt Embree and Can We Talk About Isaac by Rachel Chinouriri

Best show of a Victoria, BC artist that I saw while visiting Hamilton, ON (or: starkest ratio of effort level from the band to number of audience members)

Frog Eyes

The song my car played the most this year as it’s the first song, alphabetically on my phone

…A Few Final Bars by Bill Evans Trio

Best photo I took in 2025

Best thing that someone shouted at me when when I was panting and sweating cycling up a hill

“Well done for riding a REAL bike”

Best job I quit in 2025

I loved working for CI for 9 years but it was time to move on.

Entrepreneurial blog post that I’ve thought about most this year

You can have two Big Things, but not three by Jason Cohen

Best song lyric from the new Mountain Goats album that would be the title of my personal essay about John Darnielle if that was something that hadn’t been done to death by now

Is this not what you wanted from the sea?

Most boringest reason not to run a half marathon that I registered for in 2024

We booked a trip away.

Best reason not to run a (different!!) half marathon that I registered for in 2024

I broke my little toe stubbing it against a bookcase carrying my child across the room.

Best app

Albums - a Apple Music client that focuses on albums and shuffles your library to surface new, old and interesting releases.

Best book I read in 2025 (fiction)

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Best book I read in 2025 (non-fiction)

A Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu

Runner up: Language Machines by Leif Weatherby

Best book about Eels that I read in 2025

The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson

Earliest graphic novel ever written (?!) that’s also really good (that I read this year)

Gentleman Jim by Raymond Briggs

Best breakfast sandwich I ate in 2025

Adriana’s BACON EGGER (BACON, EGGS, ARUGULA & LEMON PESTO) in Tofino

The book I think about the most that I read in 2025

The Expectation Effect by David Robson

I read this after listening to McKinley Valentine raving about it on a podcast. As a pop-science, “this will possibly change your life” sort of book, I didn’t expect to finish it but it was worth the read. In short, it’s about the strange effect the expectation of something can change your experience of it. When you tell yourself that you only have enough energy to do a certain amount of stuff, is that really the case or are you just telling yourself that?

Lowest number of books read in a year since I started tracking books I’ve read on my website

26 in 2025.

Best domain I’ve purchased this year

https://practicegui.de

Lost in the Glitch shutdown and originally built by thricedotted. I wanted to give this fantastic little site a new home.

It’s a nice reminder to stay grounded when working on something creative.

I couldn’t help but add one (1) new feature: the ability to prepopulate it with URL parameters.

Best movie that I haven’t seen yet and have somehow avoided spoilers but I know will be amazing

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

Best movie I saw in the cinema in 2025

One Battle After Another

Best score from a movie I saw in the cinema

One Battle After Another – such a fantastic, nervy backbone for this movie.

Best score from a movie I haven’t seen yet

Smashing Machine by Nala Sinephro

The latest, best Destroyer song released in 2025

Hydroplaning off the Edge of the World

Best radio station

CFUV, local campus radio from University of Victoria

Best tracks discovered due to listening to CFUV

• Curtis Mayfield - We’re a Winner (Live)
• It’s Getting So (That a Man Can’t Go into Town Just to Have Him a Drink) - Colter Wall
• You’re Between Me - Pure Prairie League
• Drizzly - Dun-Dun Band
• The Road to Trantor - Carl Schultz
• O My Heart Is Full - Luka Kuplowsky
• Water No Get Enemy - Red Hot Org

Best website I built in 2025

Turns out CFUV doesn’t keep a record or broadcast metadata so, inspired by Now Playing for BBC Radio 6 I built a little app that Shazam’s the radio stream every 30 seconds to try and log what’s playing. It’s surprisingly effective!

https://nowplaying.cjlm.ca

Runner up: my new venture: https://ammil.industries. More to come here in 2026.

Best Raffi song

To Everyone in All the World - legit beautiful song, looks like it’s a Pete Seeger song.

I think the reason Raffi reigns supreme as the best of the best children’s music is that he never condescends. So earnest and authentic.

Best Instagram Reel I found in 2025

I’m not on Instagram but checked in on the profile of one of my favourite comedians (after his appearance on a hilarious episode of The Town Show) – Mark Little.

Pinned (for good reason) is this beaut.

Best sort-of-mantra I cobbled together that actually helped me more than I expected this year

What do you want people to associate you as? The sort of person who would eat a whole cake or go for a run. To be on their phone or reading a book?

Best show I went to in a bid to go to more live shows despite not finding anyone who wanted to go to the shows with me

Dead Bob @ Encore

(Honourable mention to band “Mean Bikini” for their progressive hardcore skate punk supporting set)

Runner up: Wine Lips @ Lucky Bar

Best blog post I wrote that I’m actually proud of and happy to share far and wide to see what people think

The Port I Couldn’t Ship

Honourable mention: Does Smitten Kitchen have a Chocolate Zucchini Bread Recipe?

Second honourable mention: it feels like gambling

Best thing Claude “said” to me

Are we actually working on something here, or are you just fucking around now?

Best articles I read in n+1

1. Pirates of the Ayahuasca by Sarah Miller
2. Construction by Elizabeth Schambelan
3. Struggle Unity Struggle by Hannah Zeavin
4. Large Language Muddle (the venom!)

Best fiction I read in n+1 in 2024 that I still think about

Arnie Robles Jr. by Paul Soto

Most entertaining email received

My friend Andrew T’s latest music mix

These teeth are of the universe, and I feel clearly that I should be sharing them with the dentistry school for the good of human society. My only regret is that I didn’t do this sooner (because of complacency).

Best album title from 2025

Getting Killed by Geese

Runner up: Cuntry by Cleo Reed

Best song from the 2025 album, Getting Killed by Geese

100 Horses. First heard this on the radio driving around in a rental car in the North of England. The combo of the laconic, out of time vocals with that impossibly funky second guitar line made me feel like I was in space.

Weirdest PR for an album that threatened to sap all the fun out of a really good release

Even Cillian Murphy’s son is listening to it – an email I got from MerchNow referring to Getting Killed by Geese.

Best song to listen to in the car (if you’re my child)

Lollipop by the Chordettes

Weirdest lyrics for a 1950s song

Lollipop by the Chordettes

The day the font on my website becomes the widest it has been all year

Today. Let me explain. Inspired by Dave Rupert, back in May I added some code to my personal site https://cjlm.ca that made the header wider each day. The font itself, in case you were wondering, is Fit by the wonderful David Jonathan Ross – a font that just begs to be as wide as physically possible.

The page title became a strange marker of the passage of time this year, it will feel weird to see it snap back to tiny at the stroke of midnight.

posted 31st December, 2025

taken 23rd December, 2025

finished 8th December, 2025

It strikes me that “a14m” could be a numeronym for anthropomorphism. I’m not sure the world needs any more numeronyms but it is tiresome word to type out. Anthropomorphisation would be a18n which sounds a little too close to i18n.

noted 5th December, 2025

finished 21st November, 2025

Writing on the internet is risky as it increases your attack surface for criticism. If you don’t write anything you’re not a target. If you write something it’s guaranteed that someone will have something to say about it.

Pre-empting this criticism hits your confidence and reduces the impact of your writing. Good writers have a voice, a recognisable way of seeing the world and sharing their thoughts. Less confident writers anticipate the loud voices of the "gotcha gang”, take up a defensive stance which seeps into their writing.

The best online writers don’t care about positive or negative discussions of their work, they understand that’s the trade-off with writing publicly. It’s on them to moderate their exposure and regulate their emotional response to the response.

It’s ironic that by trying to accommodate all readers the work is diminished; ignoring them improves it.

posted 19th November, 2025

taken 17th November, 2025

On fact-checking

[David Davis] said, our new establishment, academics, quango-crats and the BBC, are obsessed with misinformation and disinformation. They believe that you are too stupid to distinguish between the true and the false. And they think it’s the government’s job, or perhaps theirs, to do it for you instead.

Well, it is someone’s job, unfortunately, because we’re now in an immersive hellscape.

On information

If you Google me, where am I playing? You come to all these … pages where you have to sign up for alerts, and they pay to be put higher up the search engine than my actual [site]. And you have to get through all those, and I don’t want them to be there. There’s no need for them.

But there’s all these barriers created to information where the process is monetized by things that are sort of not quite true.

— Stewart Lee, Strong Message Here

quoted 17th November, 2025

taken 13th November, 2025

taken 12th November, 2025

taken 10th November, 2025

taken 5th November, 2025

taken 28th October, 2025

taken 20th October, 2025

taken 19th October, 2025

taken 18th October, 2025

I couldn’t get into this.

finished 13th October, 2025

I try to take a walk daily, optimising my route for Little Free Libraries. Opening those hand-painted doors delivers a micro-hit of anticipation – will it be romance novels with limp pages or something worth keeping? I’ve found indelible graphic novels about organic wine, children’s books that provided hours of enjoyment. It’s a harmless gamble, a homeopathic dose of the satisfaction books deliver.

When I cycle past LFLs I feel a tug to stop at each one, to roll the dice and see what’s inside. The blip of pleasure when opening their doors is momentary but genuine - a quick look is worth the potential delight contained within.

better call claude

Back at the computer and kicking off a new set of work with Claude Code feels like a different gamble. In a case study published earlier this year, Anthropic mentioned in passing that when they use Claude Code internally and don’t get the results they want, they throw the work away and start again.

they use Claude Code like a “slot machine”

And like a slot machine, it sure is addictive! The opportunity to have a diligent coder applied to any task you desire is intoxicating: it would be disrespectful not to have these working for you every hour of every day. Just one more pull of the one-armed bandit of code. It’s harmless, validating and compelling. You can build much faster! And with much less thinking! And you can trust it to do a good job, can’t you? Can’t you?

The doubt slips in but you embrace it: sure I’m not writing code, but isn’t my role as Quality Assurance just as important? I’m the manager, the orchestrator. What’s more, I can be more forward and critical than I would ever be with a “human” collaborator. In that last sentence I nearly wrote “real” worker but in what way is Claude Code not real? The commits and lines-of-code and tests and logs speak for themselves. It feels wrong to be blunt to “them” but does it matter?

LoggedOn

I’m in software sales, so I’m on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the only social media I use daily. It sucks.

I’m a rat in a cage, compulsively reopening the tab while the algorithm dispenses randomly-ordered posts from my network, each one a calculated dose of mild interest.

Sometimes I’ll message someone on LinkedIn and they’ll reply after a day, a week, a month – it’s just not in their daily flow. I envy these people.

LinkedIn is a closed garden of posturing, an echo-chamber of folk superstition around reach and impressions. Ostensibly smart men (and they’re always men) will reach a point on LinkedIn where it’s time to go meta. A post about posting.

“Excuse me everyone, my post didn’t seem to perform as successfully as I expected, why did I not get the engagement I deserve."

The hit isn’t the same, their minds are numb to the appreciation, bizarre oversharing is required to reach the same highs from the first viral post.

There used to be a dedicated LinkedIn Inbox app for the phone, separate to the core horrors of the News Feed. It was a natural way to build a firewall between flourishing collaboration and an erosion of attention span. Looks like it was abandoned years ago. This tracks. There’s nothing addictive about staring at an inbox of read messages. Corporations can’t use it to maximise the ridiculous metric of “Unregretted User-Minutes"

The Feed isn’t neutral infrastructure. It’s a deliberate choice to destroy utility in favor of compulsion. Instagram damaged our brains in ways future generations will find stupid - like treating tummy aches with turpentine. LinkedIn just did it in business casual.

No one’s planning a heist in LinkedIn DMs.

the best medicine

After years of hiding the feed with adblockers, I’ve reached the same conclusion I always reach: abstinence is the only true way to avoid developing a LinkedIn brain. I’m happier compartmentalizing it, avoiding it until absolutely necessary.

I’m a compulsive man. If I think about the ice cream in the freezer I will be plotting how to slot it in as a treat before the day is through. Spotting addictive patterns in my day-to-day life is important to protect and insulate myself from the forces that test my willpower at work, at home and when out-and-about.

posted 12th October, 2025

finished 8th October, 2025

taken 6th October, 2025

finished 27th September, 2025

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finished 15th September, 2025

taken 5th September, 2025

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taken 28th August, 2025

taken 27th August, 2025

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with corporate managers, he concludes that one of the principles of contemporary management is to “push details down and pull credit up.

The material I was reading was too demanding, and what it demanded was to be given its due. To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself

The manuals written by professionals in previous decades were also very different than today’s. They were written by engineers who were generally also mechanics and draftsmen, and it shows. The writer of the 1960 Vincent Rider’s Handbook is anonymous, yet when he writes that one who has never ridden such a high-performance motorcycle before is “very prone to be deluded” in estimating his speed, you feel the presence of an actual human being, before whom you are willing to sit and learn. You look over this writer’s shoulder as he describes the procedure for “grinding in” (that is, lapping) the valves. To be sure, you might wonder what exactly an Englishman means when he describes the sound of an engine as “wooly” (due to an overrich fuel mixture), but in looking at a drawing of the gearbox he might well have penned himself, the two of you enter into a common perception. It is a kind of philosophic friendship, the sort that is natural between teacher and student: a community of those who desire to know.

finished 27th August, 2025

taken 25th August, 2025

taken 24th August, 2025

taken 23rd August, 2025

taken 19th August, 2025

I ate this breakfast sandwich in Tofino 175 days ago. I’m still thinking about it. The surprise element was lemony pesto with arugula. I guess lemon isn’t something you usually taste in the morning.

Adriana’s if you’re curious.

noted 7th August, 2025

finished 4th August, 2025

A fascinating, dense exploration of LLMs through a literary, linguistic and information-theoretical lens. Weatherby draws from a wide variety of theories and commentary for a refreshing discussion of how to consider the culture generated and informed by these models.

In an interview with Yarden Katz in The Atlantic in 2012, Chomsky presented the sciences as a continuum based on the size of their objects. When the atoms grow too large, he said, the physicist hands the object off to the chemist, the chemist to the biologist, the biologist to the psychologist, and, finally, “it ends up in the hands of the literary critics”. Deep learning may belong exactly there–and it seems possible that the knowledge of the complexity of cultural systems will turn out to be a condition for the knowledge of cognition itself. When the humanities ceded language, they abandoned the relevance of humanistic analysis in a technocratic world in which cognitive science holds scientific court.

On the Eliza Effect

The effect occurs when someone is fooled by a bot or other system that possesses no intelligence but pulls its interlocutor into the simulation of meaning successfully. The term functions as the inverse of the Turing Test. For Turing, the question was what the threshold was for the social designation “this is intelligent” to occur–for Wiezenbaum, the realization was that humans were all too easy to fool, no intelligence needed.

The Eliza effect, I’m going to say here, went wide in 2023, and there’s no going back.

… I want to show how the Eliza effect recalls theories of intelligence–from Turing and McCulloch in particular-- that are both inclusive of semiotics and do not take intelligence to be some mystical substance we achieve a “general” version (or not). Instead, they think of it as something like what Jean Baudrillard called a “simulacrum,” a copy with no original

Poetic Machines

The poet Allison Parrish has taken this insight furthest, arguing that “large language models can only write poetry .” She cites William Carlos Williams’s definition of poetry as “a new form dealt with as a reality in itself,” not so much the “fact of an emotion” (which prose conveys) as “the dynamization of emotion into a separate form.” Parrish concludes that, because a language model cannot make a statement of fact, emotional or otherwise, their outputs–regardless of what they might look like on the surface–are poetry, not prose. Nevertheless, LLMs cannot write poems. Poetry is, Parrish suggests, language in new forms, the palette from which any real statement is drawn. A poem “is an intentional arrangement resulting from some action,” something knit together and realized from the background of potential poetry in language: the poem “unites poetry with an intention. So yes, a language model can indeed (and can only) write poetry, but only a person can write a poem.”

That’s Entertainment

Adorno and Horkheimer famously argued that the result of the handshake between technology and media was entertainment:

Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. […] The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment […] The merge of entertainment and industrial knowledge work completes the dialectical cycle that Adorno and Horkheimer saw in film in the 1920s.

Writing, Ideology and LLMs

But are already beginning to see downward pressure on language use from these systems. One has to write now in such a way as to seem not to sound like ChatGPT or Claude–this effort is a set of complex terms, a “style” (or an ideology, as I shall shortly call it), altering word-choice valuation acts that humans undertake. When we write now, we write in a language system that includes LLM language.” This is not a “delusion,” not just the Eliza effect; this is language in the age of its algorithmic reproducibility.

We know when we are on well-traveled paths. We can feel when a cliche has taken over from the narrative or when the tune reverts to some mid-temperature that sounds not like an imitation of some original but like an open statistical field, the neighboring regions of some signal we have once enjoyed or admired.

The reversal, if I am right that this is manually produced, is a parry of human creativity, which is able to denote the idea of generation by means of the recursive function called irony. But irony is slippery: objects of this sort bring a momentary laughter followed by the uncanny sense that culture itself has entered the mode of ideological generation, in which it is no longer clear what is “predigested” and what is not.

This type of ideology in extensive algorithmic use has genuinely confused the line between human and machine language. Efforts to demarcate synthetic text are not going well, and they illustrate the point I am making here. If it were just a question of the heat map being fine-tuned and producing some smooth text, some statistical monsters, perhaps we would not be in this panic cycle. When we have tried to “detect” which texts are human and which are AI generated, we have so far ended up in a very strange place. Note first of all that these attempts are done using AI, meaning that the Turing test is weirdly automated. The metrics used tend to rely on some version of the idea that human text is more robust–also the cause of model collapse, as we saw earlier–and LLM generation less so. The result, however, is that texts like the U.S. Constitution and large swatches of the Bible score very highly for “probably AI-generated.” This is because they weigh very heavily in the data set.”

Compute is the amount of computation needed or supplied, how much processing stands to be done. When we face down a day of writing emails, research memos and so on, perhaps we would do well to think of write as a finite amount of generation we can take on in a given time. Certainly LLMs first and foremost function to extend that power.

Not thinking

Generation remediates computation as language. In the general outcry we are currently hearing about how LLMs do not “understand” what they generate, we should perhaps pause to note that computers don’t “understand” computation either. But they do it, as Turing proved. And generation does language, severing the relationship between understanding and generation, but also reintroducing language to the problem of computation.

Tidbits

We swing wildly between fear and hope of a ghostly emergent sentience in AI and outright denial.

The philosopher John Haugeland dubbed this approach “GOFAI” (good old fashioned AI), and its early successes were in highly structured semantic spaces, like the game of chess or advanced logic problems.

The writer Ted Chiang has suggested that we call it “applied statistics” to demystify it. But it has to imagine the hype, the panic, and the funding flowing into applied statistics.

Deep learning classifies and generates. […] In both classification and generation, language mediates computation.

Whenever we think in dualisms about digital systems–body and abstraction, online and offline, cyberspace and meatspace-- we are forgetting the data hypothesis and looking past the complex interpretive surface to a depth that does not exist. All the ghosts of AI live in this depth, and all the analysis we can achieve lives on the surface.

All models are wrong, but some of them are generative.

Whoever controls LLMs, controls politics.

finished 1st August, 2025

Tech thriller backed with strong crime research. Undermined somewhat by outdated tech elements.

finished 30th July, 2025

“There’s no such thing as other people’s children.”

finished 14th July, 2025

Does this book hold up in 2025? Mostly! It mainly espouses the benefits of starting small and staying small. Perhaps my biggest takeaway: “OVERHEAD IS DEATH”.

finished 8th July, 2025

taken 6th July, 2025

I’m reasonably sure I met John Porcellino years ago at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I really loved what I had seen of King Cat Comix but it kinda didn’t clock with me that the guy in front of me was the guy who wrote the comics.

Hospital Suite is a bracing look at a life dogged by illness, ailments and neuroticism. The spare line illustrations are a uniquely disarming depiction of Porcellino’s challenges.

finished 19th June, 2025

This is a beautiful, lyrical book. Macfarlane blends linguistic curiosity with a natural passion for nature and the wild world. Often touching, frequently awe-inspiring.

ammil - ‘the icy casings of leaves and grasses and blades and sprigs were glowing and hid in a mist of sun-fire. moor-folk call this morning glory the ammil’ Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter (1927) Exmoor

• wonty-tump - molehill
• aquabob - icehill
• bleb - bubble of air in ice

Sparrows crowd every hedge and field, their numbers are incredible; chaffinches are not to be counted; of greenfinches there must be thousands.

The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead."

Ice without and fire within. Mostly, people apprehended the ice

Muir’s commitment to sympathy was part of his broader enmity to egotism: ’ most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.’

Children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them,’ wrote Henry James, memorably, in his Preface to What Maisie Knew (1897). But it might be truer to say that ‘Children have many more terms than we have perceptions to translate them.’

‘Childhood is a branch of cartography,’ suggests Chabon, but surely – again – we should reverse the terms of his proposition: ‘Cartography is a branch of childhood.’

finished 14th June, 2025

taken 11th June, 2025

taken 9th June, 2025

• a guy standing on a step ladder spraying a hedge with a spray bottle of weed killer
• a guy standing on an apartment balcony with a cigarette looking out over a cleared lot ready for construction
• an older couple silently eating a slice of cheesecake before sharing a chicken salad and plate of eggs
• a couple on the tube between victoria and kings cross talking about the impact of ai on their startup
• taxi cab pushing hard to get out of a side street
• the Official Tintin Shop
• a woman eating a supermarket baguette straight out of the bag
• the canadian bar with Moosehead on tap
• £3 Covent Garden macaroons
• apple store employee training session before the store opens
• woman at Wicked interval googling “how long is Wicked”
• stores with locked door policies
• “anti-vandalism paint has been applied to this asset”
• four friends walking to the pub singing Stacey’s Mom four times in a row (with guitar solos)
• “plainclothes revenue enforcement”
• a shirt that says “1-800-BOYS-LIE”
• bmx wheelies down The Mall
• massive tassels hanging from the union jacks
• a child horizontal and fast asleep in a stroller walking past the Eid celebration
• “insert navigation dvd”
• two old friends looking over as a man sings a quiet falsetto “Sheila Take a Bow” with Morrissey

posted 7th June, 2025

taken 25th May, 2025

taken 18th May, 2025

taken 16th May, 2025

taken 12th May, 2025

finished 4th May, 2025

taken 20th April, 2025

taken 18th April, 2025

If we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.

— Jim Barksdale, If All We Have Is Opinions, Let's Go With Mine

quoted 17th April, 2025

You are going to spend your whole life learning how to write … and then you are going to die.

I’m sure it’s not easy to write a book that is out of date as soon as it’s written but More than Words does an admirable job standing up for the act of writing as a uniquely human endeavour. It’s a nuanced discussion of the complexities of the craft of writing.

Warner’s folksy authority gave me early confidence this wouldn’t be a tirade against the evils of LLMs.

The most compelling sections, for me, were the literary analyses of ChatGPT outputs. While Warner is adamant that these are not “written” in the way we attribute to human authors, I’m drawn to critiques of LLM outputs to help reflect on the comparative strengths of great writing.

finished 16th April, 2025

taken 13th April, 2025

Alphabetical diaries is an experimental memoir; but is it a good read?

It’s an exercise in concentration. A lifetime of reading prepares us to follow the thread of a plot across sentences, paragraphs and chapters. Even stream of consciousness writing (looking at you, “Ducks, Newberryport,” sat on my bookshelf bookmarked at page 100) gives scant assurance that contiguous sentences are likely to be about the same thing. By alphabetically sorting entries of her journal extracts spanning a decade, Heti withholds this luxury.

I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.

At first the waves of similarly constructed sentences washed over me. Then I began to feel like I was reading the rings of a tree trunk from the bark to the core. As if a wood chipper had word processed the source material of introspection, doubt and passion and published the results.

I wondered whether, in her painstaking editing process, Heti had succumbed to temptation to merge original sentences together to leave their meaning and context intact. And if she had, would it matter?

And was she comfortable sharing intimate personal experiences with partners because of the incidental anonymity provided by the mix and churn of the original diary entries.

Right now I am cleaning the apartment for his arrival. Right now I am living on the surface of the earth.

As someone who instinctively flicks ahead to see how long the current chapter in a book is, it was interesting to notice how each individual sentence gave me a rough progress indicator.

The form of the book created unusual devastation: characters introduced and killed off in their first appearance, victims of the unwavering deference to the alphabetic order.

With enough surprise and novelty to keep me interested for 200 pages, I would recommend the book to anyone open to peculiar approaches to fiction.

You can’t grow if you are in a pot of concrete, and that’s what Toronto is—a pot of concrete.

finished 12th April, 2025

Will I ever read a non-fiction book that I don’t find to be a chore for the last few chapters? I knew next to nothing about Richard Sennett and even less about his work but I picked this book up on a recommendation from somewhere and was captivated by the first few chapters.

Sennett’s foundation for the book is the two sides of every city: the ville and the cité. The former is the physical structure of a place, the latter is the lives and interactions that are lead there. It’s a recurring motif that is mined with care, drawing from historical examples that span the globe.

Maybe there’s a method to the loose collection of anecdotes and musings about previous work engagements but I found the last third of the book to be slippery and unfocused.

Misc

Heteroglossia: Because people are not carbon copies of one another, speech is full of misunderstandings, ambiguities, unmeant suggestions and unspoken desires; In Kant’s terms, language is crooked, particularly amoug strangers who do not share the same local references, the same local knowledge.

The model which is viscerally felt is one in which people can imagine they are walking through it on the ground plane, peering at and pondering big blocks on a table. A smallish model tends to invite bird’s-eye viewing – but we are not birds.

The viewing of water is a solitary act, the regard of nothingness; in viewing water man turns his back, literally, on the conditions which support his life.

— Daniel Burnham

finished 10th April, 2025

taken 29th March, 2025

We rerun the repro. We look at the logged value. Math.abs() is returning negative values for negative inputs. We reload and run it again. Math.abs() is returning negative values for negative inputs. We reload and run it again. Math.abs() is returning negative values for negative inputs.

…

Finally she leaned back and declared that Math.abs() was definitely returning negative values for negative inputs.

— Jacob Voytko, War story - the hardest bug I ever debugged

quoted 28th March, 2025

finished 18th March, 2025

Deliriously riveting read.

finished 8th March, 2025

I’m a fan of anything that makes the web feel a little smaller. Happy to join a little bespoke webring with some friends.

posted 4th March, 2025

taken 2nd March, 2025

taken 28th February, 2025

The tone was often insufferable and self-aggrandizing but I picked up a lot of tips on interviewing and recruitment from this book. One piece of guidance is to move to meta as soon as possible. This is really valuable because it helps break out of the typical roles we fall into when interviewing and being interviewed. By exploring topics that are tangental to the position in mind you learn a lot more from the individual.

Example Questions

• If you joined and then in three to six months you were no longer here, why would that be?
• How did you prepare for this interview?
• Did you feel appreciated at your last job? What was the biggest way in which you did not feel appreciated?
• Who are our competitors?
• Open tabs on your browser right now?
• Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?
• How successful do you want to be?
• In which ways might Zoom be more informative than face to face?
• Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about?

Are they committed to consistent, perpetual self-improvement?

• “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?”

Five Factor Personality Theory

Not really a theory, insomuch as a good starting point to aid discussions about candidate traits.

Neuroticism

• General tendency to experience negative emotions and negative affect
• Fear, sadness, embarrassment, anger, guilt, disgust

Extraversion

• Outgoing
• Friendly
• Social
• Talkative
• Proactive

Openness to Experience

• Open mindedness
• Willingness to explore new and diverse ideas
• Experimental
• Curious
• Active imagination

Agreeableness

• Desire to get along with others, help them, be sympathetic
• If low in agreeableness, likely to be contrarian and competitive

Conscientiousness

• High self-control
• Very responsible
• Strong sense of duty
• Good at planning and organizing, due to their reliability

I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails

finished 14th February, 2025

taken 13th February, 2025

finished 13th February, 2025

taken 12th February, 2025

taken 11th February, 2025

taken 10th February, 2025

taken 7th February, 2025

Alternating between an evocative memoir and a thoughtful exploration of the nature and existence eel-kind, this was a fascinating, compassionate read.

Four things I learned from this book:

• Scientists have confirmed that eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce, no one has ever seen eels mating in the wild.
• Ming was a 507 year old ocean quahog clam that was accidentally frozen to death by researchers in 2006. Ming is thought to be the oldest individual animal ever discovered whose age could be determined.
• One method of fishing for eels is called klumma: threading a sewing needle through a bunch of worms to create a long line of them to throw into the water. It’s very effective.
• At least two books I’ve read in the last few years has referenced “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” - a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel. One of them is this book. I can’t remember the other.

finished 7th February, 2025

taken 4th February, 2025

finished 28th January, 2025

2024 has been a rewarding, challenging and humbling year for me.

I last wrote one of these at the end of 2022. It was good to take a sec, to take stock and think about what I’d been doing, what had happened and what might be on the horizon. I didn’t write one of these at the end of 2023, for reasons that will be patently obvious from later in this post.

Ah heck, why am I burying the lede? We had our first child in November 2023 and since then my life has been a whirlwind of love and care for our little one.

Suffice to say, despite my apparent intention of 2022, I didn’t write and record an album in 2023. Or 2024 for that matter. In fact, I barely picked up my guitar. I didn’t write regularly. I didn’t run as much as I would like and I didn’t do a whole host of other stuff shoved out of my day to day routine in favour of looking after the new addition to our little family.

Projects & Sites

One thing I did do this year is post something to this site at a reasonably frequent interval. Without checking the stats I believe the most commonly posted thing was photos – I’ve loved taking, curating and posting to this site. I picked up a Fuji X100V late last year and took some time to adjust to its interface. I love the photos it takes of the baby, the depth and tone of it puts my iPhone photos to shame.

I somehow found time to put together a couple of hardware projects: e-ink monitor Raspberry Pi widgets for around the house. The first was a continuation of a project from a few years back, I updated a little 4" screen to show the currently playing track on Sonos – perfect to see what song is playing at a glance on BBC Radio 6, SomaFM or a new playlist. I picked up another larger screen and built a satisfying digital photo frame – trial and erroring cutting a mat for it and retrofitting it into a classy wood frame from a thrift store. I’m really pleased with the result.

Music

I started the year on a Dry Cleaning and Black Country, New Road kick – listening to both pretty much non-stop.

Less than 4 hours after hearing the new Geordie Greep album I had bought tickets to his show in Vancouver in March next year. I loved the way the first track on the album, Blues, pummels you with controlled chaos, its muscular a/tonality rising to an aggressive crescendo before the end. Holy, Holy is a rare funny, surprising song.

I listened to the new Christopher Owens a lot, it’s a vulnerable, open record and it’s great to have his wavering voice back in my life. The new Remi Wolf album pales in comparison to her first one but has a lot of highs. Hooks from Rachel Chinouriri’s debut were stuck in my head for approx 22% of the year. John Vanderslice’s inscrutable new Google Earth monniker released one of the most interesting albums of the year (named “Street View” of course).

I got into Soft Play after hearing them during the BBC Glastonbury coverage. And I spent a lot of time with Soft Power by Ezra Feinberg. Yasmin Williams’ new album was also a treat this year.

Other albums on constant rotation for hours of lying on the floor playing with the baby include Hovvdy, Waxahatchee, Genesis (!), Yard Act (hilarious, droll album), Clairo, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, and Katy Kirby.

Travel

I was lucky enough to take three separate long breaks from work this year, time that was spent with a fair amount of local travel: Hornby, Salt Spring, Gabriola, Gibsons, Tofino, Vancouver, and Portland to highlight a few. A brief afternoon in Olympia, WA stands out as a particularly nice time and a week later we enjoyed a few nights staying along the Olympic peninsula.

I made it to Oakland and San Francisco for work and made a traditional trek to the UK for family. I’d like to be a little more adventurous in 2025.

Media & Writing

It’s been a year of shifting to smaller media sources and I believe it’s more important than ever to support independent groups and creators to ensure they can keep doing what they’re doing.

After reading the fantastic essay An Age of Hyperabundance by Laura Preston, I picked up n+1 magazine at Powell’s in Portland and loved it. It’s been nice to have a curated, beautifully printed magazine to pick up and the short fiction and long-form essays often blown me away. Paul Soto’s Arnie Robles Jr. was the best short story I read in 2024.

My favourite newsletter from 2024 has been Nothing Here for its grounding, enlightening coverage of the various horrors of the 21st century. It’s shaped my worldview in ways I wouldn’t expect for a humble newsletter and has grounded and inspired me.

I love everything about 404 Media. I had seen some articles once they started out but it was their coverage of a DEFCON talk about railway train DRM that made me an instant paid subscriber. This is the tech coverage needed today. Behind the scenes discussions and musings are catnip to me so the Behind the Blog article each week is a welcome perk for the supporter membership.

I always make time for writing from Tom MacWright, Molly White, Justin Duke, Vicki Boykis, Chris La Tray and Sarah Moir.

Books

I read a fair bit this year but it’s illuminating to note the books that are top of mind without consulting the list on my site.

A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon is a horrifying account of the widespread proliferation of microplastics. While Simon makes a number of achievable suggestions to mitigate personal contributions to the crisis, the extent of the issue is soul-crushing.

I found Fierce Bad Rabbits at exactly the right time, thanks to Mark Slutsky. It’s part memoir, part exploration of notable children’s books and their subjects.

I unashamedly enjoyed the first Silo book by Hugh Howey and like the Apple TV adaptation. Astra by Cedar Bowers was another highlight.

Strangers Drowning was life-changing, it was such a fascinating deep dive into the behaviours of supremely generous people. I loved the detached narration with just enough philosophical commentary to let the stories shine.

Oh and that’s right, I read a lot of graphic novels and Manga this year, perfect for quick reads before bed and during naps. Looking now, due to a slow start to the year my total number of books read was 32.

In 2025 I’d like to do a better job at writing blurbs and reviews for the things I’ve read. The longest piece I wrote in the year was for The Eagles of Hornby Island. It’s challenging to get my thoughts into the written word and I think I need more practice.

Podcasts

It’s been a fallow year for podcasts as I’ve tended to seek out individual episodes that have interested me. Top of mind is the pre-election “Know Your Enemy” episode from October.

A newfound pleasure has been The Town Show, a perfect vehicle for the comedic talents of Ryan Beil and Mark Chavez.

Three Bean Salad is the perfect blend of British “lukewarm banter” without straying into cloying whimsy.

Another mainstay has been If Books Could Kill – I like the dynamic between Michael and Peter and it’s comfort listening, even if I zone out a little 80% through the episodes.

Health

I ran the full Victoria Marathon at the end of 2023 - just before the baby arrived. It was another humbling experience, I have a tendency to assume I’ve considered everything and pay the price in some ways. In this case I messed up my nutrition and crashed around the 3 hour mark. I’m glad I finished the race but was pretty disappointed with my time of around 4:45.

I’m pleased to have continued at it in 2024, enough so to complete the Victoria Half Marathon in just over two hours. I’ve already locked in the Victoria and Oak Bay halves for 2024. Total mileage for 2024 was an acceptable 423 mi, down 60 miles from 2023 and 200 from 2022.

Taking the baby out for a run in the jogging stroller has been really enjoyable. It’s hard to find the right routes from home but once I’m out I find it rewarding.

Another bit of rewarding activity has been taking the baby out in a hiking backpack. She vastly prefers it to being in the stroller and having a little bean fall asleep on the back of your neck is the most incredible feeling.

Distractedness

When I’m out running I think a lot about the times I’m on my phone reading/surfing/texting people. Maybe it’s enjoyment of being out in the world and in motion but it always makes me want to return home and delete all the apps on my phone to reduce the avenues of distraction.

As a result I’ve gone to reasonably extreme lengths to dumb-down my smart-phone over the course of 2024. I understand now just how locked-in and addicted I can be to refreshing feeds and sites when they are so accessible to me in my pocket.

First I deleted any app with a feed – even including benign ones like Strava. I realised that the daily checking of stats and kudos and routes run by friends impacts my mood and feeds a corrosive competitive mentality.

I subscribed to Freedom but rather than blocking certain sites at certain times, I went nuclear and blocked all news and social sites for 24 hours each day.

It’s a bit frustrating when I can’t access Reddit search results when trying to research something but I’ll just save the URL for when I’m at the laptop and can be more intentional about it.

I’m effectively grey-rocking myself whenever I open my phone and it’s not uncommon for me to lock it again and put it back in my pocket.

2025

I recoil when I see online bios that specify “father, etc”. I see why they do it, being a parent is the most important thing in anyone’s life. But to advertise it as part of their online identity feels so crass.

But here’s the thing: being a parent is the most important thing I’ve ever done and it comes above everything else in my life. And as my child turned one and accelerated their abilities and skills accumulation, and started responding differently to me, my role as their dad shifted and found new depths.

But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to be productive and busy and feel like I’m furthering myself in some ways. Whether that’s reading, coding, music, or taking better photos – it’s never been so hard to find the time.

So all that’s to say, 2025 will be full of time with my child, but balanced with getting enough sleep and scratching that intellectual itch.

posted 4th January, 2025

finished 31st December, 2024

finished 29th December, 2024

finished 20th December, 2024

Bleaker and grittier than I’m used to. Haunting malaise.

finished 14th December, 2024

taken 8th December, 2024

taken 4th December, 2024

This was a challenging read for me. Didn’t care for the philosophical parts but found the gambling and pipe organ sections to be, in turn, riveting and inspirational.

finished 2nd December, 2024

taken 11th November, 2024

The other day I saw a squirrel with an apple in it’s mouth. The apple was was carried by the stem like in a cartoon. It scurried across the path ahead of me and clambered up a tree with the apple still dangling down from tiny clenched teeth.

noted 7th November, 2024

I picked this book up at the library as it was a Staff Pick with a striking cover and had a Douglas Coupland blurb on the back. If I had known it was about AI I perhaps would have left it on the shelf, but I stuck with it and enjoyed the book overall.

The book is written from the perspective of an elderly poet (apparently based on Marianne Moore – I’m not familiar with them or their work) and large portions are conversations with a LLM. I was distracted by the juxtaposition of the author writing as both a poet and a computer and had a sneaking suspicion that the latter really was a computer, a suspicion that was confirmed in the acknowledgement at the end of the book.

Marian’s internal dialogue and many of the scenes she found herself in surprised me and will stay with me for a while. As a artful AI book about AI’s role in art it has an unsettling, precarious footprint.

I felt the book was let down by a schmaltzy happy ending and a resigned pro-Big-Tech conclusion that seemed at odds with what the rest of the book had to say.

finished 1st November, 2024

Appreciated the thin, red & black artwork in this one. A queer story of a failing relationship with soft and hard allusions to climate catastrophe.

finished 22nd October, 2024

taken 21st October, 2024

A flawed, sometimes disturbing collection. Hard to read between the lines as there’s very little commentary. Nevertheless I enjoyed many of the artists and will seek them out in the future.

finished 20th October, 2024

taken 14th October, 2024

taken 11th October, 2024

Eagles of Hornby Island

For the second time this year I found myself on one of the Southern Gulf Islands reading a book by a local author. This time it was Hornby, a small island accessible from Vancouver Island by a ferry (not just any ferry but a cable ferry) before driving across Denman Island and catching one more ferry to the final island destination. Hornby surpassed expectations and has natural beauty that far outpaces it’s relative small size.

Eagles of Hornby Island sat on my shelf for a few years and I brought it along to crack open while the baby napped and before bed. I’d describe the book as a rambling citizen science / naturalist / slice of life tome, one in which Douglas Carrick puts his best foot forward to write a book to the best of his ability.

It’s an endearing little collection of anecdotes, anecdata and light-hearted opinions held by Doug on the topic of eagles. His passive interest in the birds slowly morphed into a scant obsession with his large feathered friends and it’s charming that Doug was able to collate all there was to say about the things he learned living so close to them.

The final quarter of the book recounts the rush of attention Doug and his collaborators received upon placing a camera into an Eagle’s nest and broadcasting the images on the internet. The year was 2006 and the novelty of beaming real life images across the globe was intoxicating. Millions of people viewed his cameras during the Eagle’s season.

It’s curious reading Doug’s hesitancy upon being presented with this new-fangled technology with which he can share his passion. He includes a handful of inspiring, touching quotes from viewers. Doug has no experience with technology and is hesitant about some of the intricacies of making the stream work. It seems as though he would be happy if the eagles were to remain on his CRT TV in the centre of his living room. It appears to be a unique idea to all involved.

At one point the ISP hosting the cameras adds adverts to the site without Doug’s permission. Doug then receives negative feedback that hits him hard and his regret at potentially disrespecting his audience’s trust in the project is palpable.

After finishing the book I tried to look online to see if any other seasons were filmed on Hornby since 2011. In the book, Doug notes that they were unable to repeat the exercise the following year. A few news sites note the return of the feed but despite some fishing on Google I couldn’t find any evidence apart from a handful of Youtube videos from six years ago, mostly failing to get more than a few tens of viewers. http://www.hornbyeagles.com fails to resolve.

Eagles of Hornby Island appears active on Facebook but on closer inspection but it’s swamped with pseudo-viral TikTok slop.

finished 4th October, 2024

finished 29th September, 2024

Interesting book of essay discussing Maus and it’s impact. The interview transcript near the end was free-wheeling and illuminating.

finished 29th September, 2024

An emotional, disarming Western Canadian Goon Squad. Loved it.

finished 29th September, 2024

taken 25th September, 2024

taken 24th September, 2024

taken 23rd September, 2024

taken 22nd September, 2024

Marginally better than I expected.

finished 22nd September, 2024

taken 21st September, 2024

taken 20th September, 2024

taken 19th September, 2024

taken 16th September, 2024

taken 15th September, 2024

taken 12th September, 2024

finished 10th September, 2024

finished 10th September, 2024

finished 10th September, 2024

taken 8th September, 2024

taken 7th September, 2024

taken 6th September, 2024

taken 4th September, 2024

taken 3rd September, 2024

taken 1st September, 2024

taken 31st August, 2024

finished 12th August, 2024

Nothing groundbreaking but a helpful reminder of ways to tend to creativity, in all it’s forms.

finished 12th August, 2024

A concise evaluation of how the use of LLMs is transforming business and education, disrupting existing processes and systems.

finished 12th August, 2024

taken 17th July, 2024

taken 15th July, 2024

taken 14th July, 2024

taken 13th July, 2024

taken 11th July, 2024

finished 7th July, 2024

taken 6th July, 2024

It’s fun to read about a place while you’re visiting. I wonder what it would take to write a humour book like this.

not knowing where to start has never stopped me

finished 28th June, 2024

A smart, clear-headed book that does a really good job dissecting the frog.

One of Morris’s offered innovations is that all comedy is made up of three notes: construct, confirm and confound. It’s enjoyable (to me! And I’m sure many others as this book exists!) to take a piece of comedy that makes you laugh and get a feel for how much of it is from the setup (or construction), the assurance of prior expectations (confirmation) or the surprising (often some sort of whimsical twist that defies prediction).

The thing I like about this model is that it’s curiously flexible and inclusive. Some comedy is 100% “construct” and it can be no less funny than a joke with an equal dose of all three notes.

finished 28th June, 2024

taken 27th June, 2024

taken 26th June, 2024

I was surprisingly moved by this graphic novel. A charming, earnest interchange of craft, patiently recounted with humour and grace.

finished 24th June, 2024

If there’s one thing I love

It’s an infinite resource

If there’s one thing worth loving

It’s a surplus of supplies

Hostages – The Mountain Goats (Bleed Out)

What I really love is to not use something to its full capacity

Not full power

Half its potential

Medium

Stumpwork – Dry Cleaning (Stumpwork)

noted 17th June, 2024

finished 1st June, 2024

finished 18th May, 2024

taken 14th May, 2024

finished 26th April, 2024

taken 25th April, 2024

finished 25th April, 2024

taken 23rd April, 2024

taken 22nd April, 2024

taken 21st April, 2024

finished 7th April, 2024

taken 3rd April, 2024

taken 1st April, 2024

taken 29th March, 2024

taken 16th March, 2024

taken 14th March, 2024

taken 26th February, 2024

taken 25th February, 2024

taken 23rd February, 2024

finished 8th February, 2024

finished 6th February, 2024

taken 4th February, 2024

taken 3rd February, 2024

taken 1st February, 2024

finished 14th January, 2024

finished 2nd January, 2024

finished 25th December, 2023

finished 19th December, 2023

finished 8th November, 2023

taken 31st October, 2023

taken 29th October, 2023

finished 28th October, 2023

taken 21st October, 2023

“You know how the cord on the vacuum has that strip of red tape at the end, to tell you when it’s out? But before you make it to the red part, there’s some yellow tape, too, right? What are they trying to say? Don’t you think the red one is enough?”

finished 16th October, 2023

taken 7th October, 2023

taken 4th September, 2023

taken 3rd September, 2023

taken 2nd September, 2023

taken 27th August, 2023

taken 26th August, 2023

finished 15th August, 2023

finished 15th August, 2023

taken 12th August, 2023

finished 30th July, 2023

finished 30th July, 2023

finished 28th July, 2023

finished 13th July, 2023

taken 12th July, 2023

finished 12th July, 2023

finished 12th July, 2023

taken 11th July, 2023

taken 10th July, 2023

taken 7th July, 2023

finished 6th July, 2023

taken 18th June, 2023

finished 16th June, 2023

finished 12th June, 2023

finished 16th May, 2023

taken 15th May, 2023

finished 7th May, 2023

finished 23rd April, 2023

Halfway through “Novelist as a Vocation,” I realized how much a Murakami fan I’ve become. Not that I’ve read all his books, mind, but I’ve devoured most of them, gained a sense of his psyche, improved my understanding of the translation process that’s so intrinsic to my enjoyment of his work, and warmed by his clarifying preamble in a short story collection.

At the beginning of this book, Murakami warns that the written word therein is reminiscent of the content delivered at a lecture opposed to a fully-realized book. This is one of the book’s strengths. There’s no stench of cynically polished productivity advice, it’s one (famous, inspiring) author’s take on his writing process, how his life has been impacted by his approach and how the world has swirled and reacted to that in the past 50 years.

The book was a delightfully lucid read. The author’s heart and craft is captured in off-the-cuff musings, made notable by his self-awareness when he repeats himself for the sake of it or when he delivers tangential rants about nuclear power and Japanese domestic policy.

On particular passage will stay with me. In a later chapter, Murakami delivers his thoughts on motivation and personal drive for satisfaction. His plain, succinct language is disarming as he delivers.

Still, not grasping what it all means, I persist in my daily running routine. Thirty years is a long time. To continue one habit that long requires a great deal of effort. How have I been able to do it? It’s because I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life.

I love the inevitability of this. The cold reasoning behind it. Committing yourself to something – not because it’s a noble thing to do – but because you’ve decided that it is something you have to do in this life.

finished 16th April, 2023

taken 15th April, 2023

taken 7th April, 2023

finished 2nd April, 2023

finished 2nd April, 2023

finished 2nd April, 2023

taken 1st April, 2023

finished 20th March, 2023

This was so strange and unsettling.

finished 20th March, 2023

I picked up this book as I wanted to learn more about Moresby Island and didn’t realise there are (at least) two Moresby Islands in BC. There’s a private island near Sidney off the Saanich Peninsula – 1.2 miles wide with an estimated population of two people and cattle.

This book isn’t about Moresby Island, it’s about South Moresby, the second largest of the Haida Gwaii Islands that was made into a Canadian National Park in 1988. But really, this book isn’t even about South Moresby, it’s about Gwaii Haanas, the traditional home of the Haida people.

Paradise Won is written by Elizabeth May, well known for her time as the leader of the Green Party of Canada. The book recounts her days as a Senior Advisor to the Environment Minister and documents in meticulous detail the steps, triumphs and setbacks of creating a new National Park in Canada.

As a new Canadian, the book weaved together a number of cultural strings that had previously been separate. It helped me to understand Governmental history, the interplay between the provinces and agencies, and Elizabeth May’s advocacy for environmental issues. It was also a sad reminder of the bureaucratic nightmare First Nations people find themselves in under the Canadian government. In one notable passage, 30,000 books are pulped because they included photo captions as the history they communicated was seen as verboten by government officials.

There was a reasonable amount of representation for the Haida people in the book but I couldn’t help notice a bifurcation between the government bods and friends and those living in the places in question. May herself didn’t set foot in Haida Gwaii until the Park agreement was all but inked. While the achievement was remarkable and a testament to their hard work, the fizzy celebrations and pats on the back sit in stark contrast to the further years of negotiations and even threats to other assets including mineral rights.

One thing I did appreciate was the blow-by-blow account of the negotiation between the BC provincial and Federal governments. I hadn’t seen a large negotiation like this spelled out, and it was interesting to reverse engineer the tactics taken by each side to get what they wanted.

finished 15th February, 2023

In The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, words are disappearing. In the Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa, it’s time for everything else to disappear.

It’s a considerate book that spells things out in a precise, laborious fashion. There’s a nightmarish book-in-the-book with a horror tone that plainly reflects the main story.

I’m intrigued by the enigmatic choices made, in particular: why are two of the main characters only ever referred to as “The Old Man” and “R”? The book didn’t capture my imagination otherwise.

finished 14th February, 2023

generally thought to be or to exist, even if this may not really be true

source

noted 14th February, 2023

A common theme for me is to start a book like this, get enthralled by the world building and characters and then start a slow, steady descent into disinterest. Towards the end I found it hard to care about the endless stream of creative names for people and places – nevermind tell them apart.

As a fantasy book with a modicum of magic, it’s certainly unique. It’s (intentionally) impossible to match the regions and races of people in the book to real-world counterparts.

If you like the machinations and plotting in A Song of Ice and Fire and fancy 300 pages of Council of Elrond-esque meetings between backstabbing nobles then you’ll probably love this. It has a lot of interesting things to say about colonialism with a big splash of economic theory to boot. I appreciated the flawed, titular anti-hero. But it doesn’t compel me to pick up the sequels any time soon.

finished 5th February, 2023

I borrowed this from the library after reading Dave Rupert’s rave review. It reminded me of Talk to Me by Dean Nelson: a journalist imparting wisdom on effective communication with a handful of interesting anecdotes to help illustrate the points.

The book wasn’t groundbreaking but there were a few takeaways for me:

• Setting expectations with people is very important. When you provide a summary of the form and content of a conversation ahead of time, you allow your collocutor to mentally prepare and orient themselves for how it will unfold.
• When comforting someone it’s common to want to sympathise by sharing a relevant personal experience – it’s natural to think it will help them feel better. Try to avoid doing this as it naturally takes the conversation away from the person looking for support.
• The backfire effect is a cognitive bias where someone faced with information challenging their beliefs tends to “double down”. See also “Mistakes were Made.”
• Sometimes you don’t have to talk!

finished 31st January, 2023

taken 29th January, 2023

taken 28th January, 2023

taken 26th January, 2023

I was at a Broken Social Scene show in Toronto and as the band walked onto the stage a handful of cell phones were raised to attention for the perfect shot.

To my left, an older man with a thick white mustache and complementary wiry beard pulled his phone out of his pocket. It was folded inside one of those leather cases with an awkward little peephole window in the front. Over the course of the show he recorded various snippets of songs with his camera app, each time flipping open the case, turning it on, hovering his thumb to find the icon he desired before tapping open a folder with a single camera app – the folder in question?

“Folder name”

This was a minor distraction for someone who’s easily distracted. But there was something that distracted me more.

Behind the band, a kaleidoscopic background was spinning and spreading a trippy palette of color across the back wall. Watching the background transition and morph across pictures I quickly spotted the hallmarks of “AI generated” images. Each frame slipped into view, melding and merging, incremental shifts as faces and shapes surfaced as if seen through a technicolor fog.

There were unintelligible words, transcriptions of descriptions of letters no one has ever seen before.

All the lines drawn had a strange alien quality, gloopy ink splotches always straining to escape along their axis.

I thought about the artist who created the visuals. I thought about what prompt they used. I wondered how long it took them to generate the video – was this edited after the fact or was it the raw stream from an almost-bleeding-edge tool. Had there been a deadline?

And what happened when they first showed the results of their work to the band or whoever signs off on this sort of thing? Were they impressed? Did they comprehend how much this work was the result of a melting pot of the work of countless, uncredited artists? Did the artist consider the same, fatalistically wondering if their art in turn would be remixed and blended into a creative sludge, a stablised average of every unique inspiration anyone had ever conceived?

I would say I’m someone who’s slightly more online than average. As a result I know the tells of art that’s been procedurally generated. It’s not a notable skill, I’m sure thousands if not millions of others could do the same.

But for the average attendee of the show – or for people who don’t know or care to change the default name of a folder on their phone – I would wager these AI manifestations were only distracting because of their virtue: they looked impressive.

I’m not sure what happens next. We are nowhere near the widespread adoption of these techniques. They are yet to become commonplace although there are indications this transition is well on its way. Image generation may be able to lose those qualities that make it obvious but I think the aesthetics will be harder to scrub away.

The aging superfan next to me reached into his trenchcoat once more and fumbled for his phone. He flipped open the case, turned it on, hunted for the right app and tapped: “Folder name.”

posted 24th January, 2023

taken 22nd January, 2023

After being burned by a book with an extremely similar premise, I gave Upgrade a chance as I remember enjoying Blake Crouch’s 2019 novel, Recursion.

To it’s credit, the first third of Upgrade kept my interest but my enthusiasm quickly waned with the formulaic second and third parts. Any emotional resonance in the book was undermined by schlocky writing and over-explanation of the protagonist’s feelings. By the time the main character described a database query he was writing to advance the plot I was ready to be done.

finished 17th January, 2023

Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone

When I started this book I had no idea just how unintelligible I would find it. Nothing prepared me for the onslaught of unbridled, hold-onto-your-butts cyberpunk vibes. I’m smitten by Gibson’s writing but I’m not certain I could recall the plot to any degree of accuracy.

One I’m going to have to come back to, for sure.

Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction.

finished 17th January, 2023

taken 15th January, 2023

taken 14th January, 2023

A friend challenged me to describe 2022 in a single word and – true to my nature – I bristled at the mere idea. How could I summarise 365 full days around the sun with a single word?

Despite my reluctance, I think there is a single word to describe it: fragmented. 2022 was much more fragmented, bitty, piecemeal than the last few. I read less, wrote less, sent fewer newsletters, did fewer personal coding projects and – to cap it off – I failed to run a marathon in October.

But fragmented works as there were a few wins. I ran a half marathon earlier in the year, ramped up to some significant mileage over summer before pivoting to alternative gym exercising in the past few months of the year as a result of injury. I read a respectable number of books, partially aided by audiobooks (love you, Libby). I wrote (a bit) more about each book I finished and poured a lot of time into my blog. I picked up a new (old) camera and enjoyed rekindling my eye for photos.

It was fragmented because I was all over the place. My travel has picked up since the pandemic and I spent a lot more time with family in the UK and back in Ontario. I returned to my UK company HQ in Cambridge twice and was lucky enough to take a long week’s holiday in Japan in November.

I figured there’s a lot to reflect on this year. Here’s my attempt to digest and share what went well and what might happen to me now I find myself in the early days of 2023.

Slow newsletter year

Around the beginning of the pandemic I started a newsletter, ostensibly about network graph analytics and data visualization. In the last year, it morphed into more personal-adjacent writing about graphs and networks in the real world. In hindsight I had more time to devote to this side project during the pandemic and struggled to do it justice in 2022.

I never managed to define my target audience, real and ideal, and didn’t quite land the takeaways. It wasn’t clear to me why I was holding myself to strict publishing timelines of every other week.

I was also blithe in my unawareness of other, “real”, data visualization newsletters that have found and grown a strong audience for years.

I suspect the more personal writing alienated more of the original technical readers. But I learned not to care too much about this. I was writing what I wanted to be writing about. If it’s not for me then what’s the point?

After seven editions at the beginning of the year, I announced I was taking the summer off and made the mistake of closing my June edition with

I’ll see you again in September.

This… didn’t happen. And it’s not like readers are vocal or demanding, but the fact that I wasn’t able to polish and publish anything in the latter half of the year has weighed on my mind.

I have a draft almost, kinda ready to go, and I’m committed to getting it out. But is this something I want to dedicate more time to in 2023? I’m not certain.

Part of me thinks I was writing to aid my career, but three years later I’m comfortable with my progression and I’m not sure that’s necessary any more. There was always dissonance and conflict writing around the same sort of topics commercialized in my day job. Should I make an effort to write and learn more about things that aren’t graphs and data visualization? I’m not certain.

Reading water

I read 56 (!) books in 2021 and 37 in 2022.

Prompted by reading “The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories” in 2021, I read a disproportionate amount of Japanese fiction this year. Particular highlights were two quirky novellas from Yoko Tawada and a magnetic little book called “Kokoro” by Natsume Sōseki. It took me a long time to get through the Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki – as I wrote in September, “glad I stuck with it but it was a slog at times.”

Looking back at the full list, “fragmented” is a good way to describe my reading. I struggled with a lot of books this year, leading me to add a new category to my reading log for “did not finish.” I have a few books I’m meaning to go back to and shelves of novels stacked in a silent prayer, waiting to be read. I like to think 2023 is looking bright for that.

The proportion of books read as audiobooks was up this year thanks to time spent at the gym or travelling. I listened to Bob Odenkirk’s memoir which was pleasant but uninspired, and followed it up with Steve Martin’s which was much more impactful.

Recording my reading publicly is a net benefit for the feeling of accomplishment and sharpening my critiquing pencil. I find it hard to have novel opinions but I’m slowly getting better. It does sometimes get in the way of choosing and taking time when reading books as my mind will drift to what I’ll say about it on my blog. The reduction in number of books finished this year and (gasp!) not including some books on my site helps with this.

I was lucky to read three fantastic non-fiction books this year: User Friendly, Living in Data and “Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)”. I can’t say I was as lucky with fiction. But Looking back, I didn’t try very hard. 2023 will be a year for more interesting, meaty fiction.

Media report

My podcast consumption shrunk in favour of audiobooks. Apart from listening to standalone episodes of podcasts with interesting guests, I mainly spend my podcast time with lighthearted comedy podcasts from the UK and Canada.

I still read Private Eye every two weeks (thanks Dad!) but I let my Economist subscription lapse. I always find it rewarding but couldn’t carve out the time required for such a dense “newspaper.” I try to pick one up every once in a while as a little treat.

There’s been a shake-up in my newsletter consumption. I read Money Stuff and Today in Tabs religiously and have picked up nothing here as an horrifyingly essential summary of news around technology, climate and social issues. I’m finding other old favorites to be… less essential. I still like hearing of Duncan Geere’s updates although there’s a lot of “viral intellectual content of the week” filler. Daniel Miessler’s cybersecurity-skewed news update has become less interesting to me and I subscribe to Sentiers but find it aloof and aspirational rather than realistic and actionable. It takes a lot for me to swipe “mark as read” but I’m learning to do it more and it’s strangely liberating.

Albums of my year

More fragmentation. I’ve always prided myself on having an eclectic taste but find myself skewing towards accessible indie-pop/rock/folk instead of anything challenging. This is fine, here are some highlights!

• Labyrinthitis by Destroyer is probably my Album of the Year. June is transcendent.
• Actually, scratch that, the Deluxe version of Remi Wolf’s Juno album came out in May and it’s incredible. I’ve almost certainly listened to much more of that this year than any other album. Infectious vocals, fresh approach to music production and so. many. ear worms.
• Blue Rev by Alvvays blew me away, Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths is another winner but has made me aware of their even-better earlier album, the hooky Future Me Hates Me.
• I have a real soft spot for Bleed Out by the Mountain Goats. It’s the best Mountain Goats album in years – and that’s coming from someone who loves latter-day Darnielle. Only the clanger “Need More Bandages” with the uninspired chorus chant of “We’re going to need more bandages!” distracts from an album of perceptive lyrics and sinewy melodies. Don’t skip on “Hostages” – for some reason that eludes me, the line

Good luck to the guys.

makes me laugh out loud every single time.

• I spent a lot of time with 4 Guitars by Bill Orcutt – deliciously dissonant.
• Asphalt Meadows by Death Cab was my official “album to listen to while on a plane”
• The horrifically-titled d E A T h ~ b U g by ORANGEPURPLEBEACH (a new moniker for John Vanderslice) was a sleeper hit for me.
• Other strong contenders: Painless by Nilufer Yanya, Turn it On! by Romero, Vulture Prince, Bartees Strange, Indigo De Souza, oh my.
• I don’t know Wilco that well, although I suspect I saw them live once. Their older, less popular album, “Sky Blue Sky” was on heavy rotation for me this year.
• Over in the guilty pleasures department, I listened a lot to Hotel TV by Lawrence and In These Silent Days by Brandi Carlisle.

One new ritual this year is putting on Iggy Pop’s Confidential on a Sunday morning. It’s a fantastic mix of music and I always find at least 5 new artists or records I want to spend more time with.

None of these music choices are unique but this unwieldy section makes me think I should enthuse more about music on this here blog in the future.

I can’t say I moved the needle on my guitar playing this year. I want to play more music in 2023 and even try to record and release a selection of original music.

Tool Time

I’ve always wanted to be a person who is proficient editing text with vim, my lack of vim skills has irritated me for decades but this year I made a concerted effort and learned to use vim and am actually okay using it and: I’m not sure it was worth it?

It’s weird to cross off an aspiration as half-complete but actually complete but that’s what I’m going to do. I know enough vim to be dangerous and can extend my knowledge more over time. But this isn’t hanging over my head like it was before. How stupid of me.

After falling for the hype of “tools for thought” as procrastination for true intellectual and creative output, I’ve pared my use of productivity tools down to Things, Readwise w/Reader and Obsidian and I’m not sure about Obsidian.

I’m particular about the tools I use and have been a Workflowy maximalist for a few years. I used it to track lists and todos in its unique infinite list capability.

I’m more interested in battle-tested native macOS and iOS apps in 2023. I want to support small teams that have a laser-focus on good UI and UX. The broadening of the capability for both Workflowy and Obsidian gives me pause and, ultimately, their “wizzyness” and novelty is a distraction from getting shit done.

Projects and shipping

I had two large projects this year: tweaking my blog site and thinking about all the source/target newsletters I wanted to write.

I adore the layout of my blog. The thin, responsive column format is unusual but has a density and personality to it. There’s scope for a re-style but I think it will last in its current form for a while. I streamlined the ability to add photos this year and added automated Twitter Social Share image generation but, on balance, I’ve spent more time on writing and publishing than on site tweaks. I’d like to post more “notes” and longer-form “posts” in 2023.

Hit by COVID and self-isolating in July, I did something totally reasonable and made a new website. I forked a repository for a site that documented book review scores from a productivity podcast and rebuilt it to track reviews from one of my low-key favourite podcasts, Evil Men. This was a lot of fun although I the low-level Eleventy configuration and my still-poor CSS skills bogged me down.

I spent a lot of time on three other projects: one semi-secret, one barely released and a third set to be mothballed.

The semi-secret one was something I’ve been proud to be a part of. I’ve long been a lone coding coyote pup, rattling around a git repo on my own. Collaborating with a small team on something I like to think I know something about has been eye opening. I don’t see many chances for this in the future so it’s been a nice change.

For part of the year, I worked on a tiny little project that made me smile. The idea came to me earlier in the year and I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I cobbled something together. I worked out how to host a website from the Raspberry Pi in the corner of my office and kickstarted leaving.live back in September.

What is leaving.live? It’s a website that tells you when other people leave the website.

I had big, small plans for leaving.live but couldn’t find the time to enact them. And then something funny happened, I linked to it as a work in progress earlier this week and it resonated with others, to my surprise!

Thousands of people have shared and marvelled at it since then and I’m so pleased. All my planning and anguish over not finding the time for improvements melted away. It was perfect as it was.

The final project is a public labour of love: many people use Send to Workflowy to quickly add text and links to their Workflowy account. It’s bizarre that this capability is missing in an otherwise feature-rich product. I released it in May of 2021 but I never truly “launched” it. I was hesitant to be fully responsible for a live service and aware of the shaky foundations I was building a pseudo-SaaS product on. I spent a fair amount of time this year hacking on new infrastructure using fancy low-cost tooling like fly.io and CloudFlare Workers. In the end a low key announcement that first-party API support for quick capture is on the way means that it’s just not worth my time any more. I’m proud that one of my repos on Github has accrued a (small) number of stars and I learned a fair bit.

Both leaving.live and Send to Workflowy teach me something for 2023: ship and share your projects early! Everything is a draft! Oh and: kill your projects early too!

2023

After six years in the same role, my company promoted me at the tail end of 2022. I’ll face some new challenges as a manager as we continue to grow the business. I suspect this will fill my winter long work days but I prefer that to twiddling my thumbs and stagnating.

I do want to carve out the time away from work to keep happy and healthy. This means recovering from my injury enough to get back to running. It means making time for fun projects and not letting the less-fun bits drag me down. It means making time for my wonderful partner and family.

In short: more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff. A bit less fragmented, a bit more joined up.

posted 9th January, 2023

taken 8th January, 2023

The one line that sticks with me from this book is

He muttered and choked out all kinds of lies. It was painful to watch—like a hot dog trying to tell you how it was made.

finished 1st December, 2022

Mildly disturbing, greatly evocative.

finished 24th November, 2022

Copacetic (a):

very good or going very well

noted 21st November, 2022

taken 20th November, 2022

“That word is also dead.”

If I hadn’t read the back of the book I suspect I would have twigged that this author had a thing for language. A published author in both Japanese and German, Yoko Tawada excels at dreamy sequences interspersed with lucid discussions of the words we use how they make us feel.

The Emissary is a short novel set in a future where Japan has isolated itself from the world as a result of an unnamed catastrophe. Only the elderly, the octogenarians and older, are healthy. Their younger friends and family are poisoned by the land and unable to imagine a future for themselves.

This book was better-conceived than “Scattered All Over the Earth,” it’s loopy, shifty ending will linger for a while.

finished 18th November, 2022

taken 13th November, 2022

taken 12th November, 2022

taken 11th November, 2022

taken 10th November, 2022

taken 9th November, 2022

taken 8th November, 2022

taken 7th November, 2022

taken 6th November, 2022

It’s not clear what didn’t click with me and this book: in principle it overlaps with many of my interests. It focuses on self reflection through an eco-environmental awareness. It also achieves much of the feel I aim for with the more narrative-driven source/target editions. I was close to giving up on it and likely would have if it wasn’t an audiobook.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of a condescending tone illustrated by unremarkable anecdotes, along with inconsequential nature observation passages that rarely transcended their pat delivery. Lots of mourning what we may have lost in nature with limited calls to action.

The last few years haven’t been kind to the then-topical sections. Breathless anti-Trump passages are beyond weary at this point and date the well-meaning sentiment.

One upside was learning more about Oakland, a place I’ve visited a few times but never digested in full.

I suspect I acquired too much of the media surrounding this book via osmosis back in 2019. The core conceit was unremarkable and covered better elsewhere.

finished 6th November, 2022

taken 5th November, 2022

taken 4th November, 2022

Written in the early 1900s, this was a short, thoughtful book of three distinct parts. The first introduces the protagonist and his relationship with an elderly man identified throughout the book as Sensei. In the middle part, the protagonist returns home to look after his ailing father and rejects opportunities to move his life forward. The final and longest part is a letter from Sensei explaining his experiences as a young man that lead him to be the man he is today.

I enjoyed the book and found the allusions to progress and depiction of male relationships to be quite revealing. The inner dialogue of the protagonist (and, later, Sensei) was a realistic portrayal of the dissonance faced when navigating complex social dynamics. Some of the tale remains mysterious and open to interpretation – it’s a book that will reward a repeat visit.

finished 29th October, 2022

taken 22nd October, 2022

taken 16th October, 2022

taken 9th October, 2022

taken 1st October, 2022

A fascinating first-hand account of living and working at logging camps after the Second World War.

Hans Knapp moved from Austria in 1951 and began work as a logger at the North end of Vancouver Island. The glossary of logging terms at the back of the book is a required reference for some of the more dense sections covering the older logging roles and terms.

Working in extreme weather conditions and faced with the drudgery of working long days in the wilderness, quirky personalities clash and tensions fray. Much of the book describes a range of characters with memorable names such as “Slippery”, “Jolly Good”, “Terrible Ted” and “The Garlic Twins.”

There are countless depictions of various accidents that befall the loggers. These include freak events, near misses and depressing fatalities.

In one tonal shift, Knapp recounts stumbling upon an old abandoned prospector’s cabin on a Sunday afternoon hike. The eerily preserved home sits hidden amongst a lush wilderness tamed by the long-absent owners. The gold rush has been and gone but Knapp belongs to a new breed of opportunists extracting from the land.

finished 1st October, 2022

Daemon by Daniel Suarez was a book that made me remember that sci-fi was a thing that I enjoyed.

It was a gripping thriller with assured tech credentials. Published in 2006, it was also prescient in its depiction of modern-day cyber threats.

Looking for an audiobook on Libby, I stumbled on Change Agent and the bioengineering angle piqued my interest. Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood was a rewarding read in this area for me.

After a bold start I was hoping it might match the heights of Daemon but the book slips into hackneyed “wanted suspect” crime novel territory with trite plot devices and repetitive internal dialogue.

Other sci-fi authors like Gibson and Miéville will occasionally test my patience with their stream of undefined concepts that must be cracked like contextual riddles.

Change Agent goes too far in the other direction.

Every little bit of unfamiliar technology, however slight, is explained at length. This has the effect of wringing out all the joy of exploring futuristic ideas, however dystopic.

I gave up at 56% and have wired up my reviews to accept a D.N.F.^[1] rating. There’s no need to feel obliged to complete books I’m not enjoying.

finished 27th September, 2022

taken 25th September, 2022

taken 24th September, 2022

Just under 10 minutes into the 2017 upload of the “Mother of all Demos” on YouTube, a wave of irritation flickers across Douglas Engelbert’s face. “What the hell happened to that?” he mutters, almost inaudibly, as a thin smile and nervous giggle betray a moment of mild panic. It’s 1968 and he’s just started a presentation showcasing countless technological techniques that will echo for a half a century and beyond.

Engelbert is one of many characters covered in this fantastic book from Cliff Kuang – individuals obsessed with reorienting the world with visionary ideas of how technology should aid rather than abrade. The book avoids oblivious hero worship in favour of a global collection of stories.

With various stutters and beeps Engelbert finally wrangles his list into a quiet order. A breeze of relief leads way to a soft apology before he forges ahead to reveal the future.

Affordances

Don Norman is probably most famous among designers for popularizing the idea of an affordance—physical details, designed in products, that tell us how they’re to be used, such at the subtle curve of a door handle that tells you which way to pull, to the indentation on a button that tells you where to push.

Metaphors

Navigate, browser, hyperlink, search engine.

It was explained to us all so slowly, over time. We learned what the web was by using it. Eventually, we didn’t need the metaphors at all.

(As the design theorist Klaus Krippendorff writes, "Metaphors die in repeated use but leave behind the reality that they had languaged into being.)

But to those women in GP Block Pitampura, the internet had simply arrived one day, devoid of any explanation at all. No wonder it was baffling at best, even terrifying.

Beauty

In the user-friendly world, beauty is a tool that transforms something that’s easy to use into something we want to use.

Beneath every product you see, there is a designer, sometimes a good one, whose fodder is an intuition about what you’ve seen before, what you might admire. “Beauty” is the word we use when a designer’s vision overlaps with our own.

Industrial Empathy

In 2018, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed more than 100,000 executive-level design decisions across three hundred publicly held companies those with robust design-thinking processes had 32 percent higher revenues than their peers over a five-year period, and 56 percent higher shareholder returns.

Disability as an Engine of Innovation

Perhaps you’re reading this book with your phone by your side, checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to a friend. You sit at the end of a long line of inventions that might never have existed but for people with disabilities: the keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email. In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters, because electronic messaging was the best way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.

Perhaps one day someone will write a history of the internet in which that great series of tubes will emerge not as some miracle of technical progress meant to connect people faster and easier but rather a chain of inventions each meant to help more and more types of people to better communicate. But the most critical piece of the history will be this: Disability is so often an engine of innovation simple because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs, no matter their limitations.

Design Leaders

In setting the Imagineers on a pedestal apart from operations, Walt had created a model common across countless companies today, in which innovation is viewed as a function owned by an anointed few, rather than an emergent property of the system.

Automation Paradox

As cognitive psychologists and human-factor researchers began inventing better and better solutions to hand off control between pilot and machine, they noticed a worrying dynamic: As planes became more automated, the pilots themselves were less and less practised in flying their planes …

The automation paradox suggests that as machines make things easier for us—as they take more friction from our daily life— they leave us less able to do things we once took for granted.

Re/action

Rosenstein brought up the idea of a Hegelian dialectic— the idea that society creates a thesis that’s met with a reaction, then an antithesis that amends that prior paradigm, and finally a synthesis, which resolves the tension between the two.

Competitors

As Michael Margolis, a user-experience partner at Google Ventures is fond of saying, “Treat your competitors as your first prototypes.” Take advantage of all the effort that some designers have put into their work and learn from it.

Other Sites

Jakob’s Law: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

Unfinished Tasks

In the 1920s, the Soviet psychiatrist Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik conducted a study in which she found that uncompleted tasks are easier to remember than successful ones, a discovery known as the Zeigarnik effect.

finished 20th September, 2022

When, on a bright May morning in 1953 Huxley had swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, he had been watched by a researcher who had recorded his responses to the drug. He had seen books glow like rubies; a slow dance of golden lights; flowers shine with eternal life. When the researcher asked Huxley how he felt about time, he had replied with clarity: “There seems to be plenty of it.”

– Ann Shulgin pioneered the use of psychedelics in therapy, The Economist

noted 13th September, 2022

After reading Bob Odenkirk’s memoir I wanted to try another, reportedly better, one. It didn’t disappoint. Short and funny with the right amount of detail. I recognised a range of comedy setups that I now realise must have been inspired by Steve’s act in the 70s.

finished 11th September, 2022

A dense book filled largely with the dull daily activities of a once-prestigious family in pre-war Japan. I found it realistic and captivating at times, especially when tracking the formal matchmaking process and protocols of the time. There’s a thread of disease and illness throughout the book that seeps into the characters existence in ways I didn’t appreciate until the end. Glad I stuck with it but it was a slog at times.

finished 7th September, 2022

taken 5th September, 2022

taken 3rd September, 2022

taken 28th August, 2022

finished 27th August, 2022

I checked a few reviews before I started this short story collection by William Gibson and a few noted that the final, eponymous, story was the best of the bunch. Reading it I was a little underwhelmed. But reading around it I learned that it was the first use of the word cyberspace back in 1982. This put the whole collection in perspective – forty years later what was once novel is now routine.

My select favourites from this collection include:

• The Belonging Kind: a pseudo-noir tale of sleuthing and cybernetics.
• Hinterlands: an unsettling space exploration story

finished 23rd August, 2022

This inessential memoir kept my interest, but I’m not sure I needed to hear Bob describe each of his favourite sketches at length.

finished 18th August, 2022

An interesting complement to The Candy House with dovetailing characters introduced in each chapter adding to the main party of protagonists. In this thinly-described pseudo-dystopia the idea of nationality is almost foreign. Language is a gloopy tool for expression and nothing and nobody are quite as they appear.

This short novel was dreamlike, lyrical and captivating.

finished 24th July, 2022

I enjoyed this although it didn’t have the same impact as Goon Squad. The core conceit of wildly overlapping characters was satisfying and the email thread chapter was a gleeful highlight. I found a few of the individual character chapters reminded me of Douglas Coupland short stories where things fizzle out with either mild unease or surprising resolution.

finished 19th July, 2022

I made a website to collate all the scores from the comedy podcast, Evil Men.

shipped 9th July, 2022

When I write code I don’t expect it to ever have an audience; I’m not accustomed to sharing or collaborating on a codebase. I’m also guilty of refactoring and rewriting everything while I write it rather than planning ahead or saving small issues for a full review at a good milestone. I like to think I’m getting better at this but I’ll often reach for terse snippets instead of clean, readable examples.

In that vein here’s a neat, new-ish JavaScript pattern I always want to use but usually forget.

Sometimes you want to

1. append to an array if it exists
2. or if it doesn’t

I used to write something like

const o = {};
const key = 'a';
const x = 'new value';

if (o[key]) {
  o[key].push(x);
} else {
  o[key] = [x];
}

with the new logical assignment operators in ES2021, that last bit could be cut down to the un-grokkable but attractively short:

(o.key ||= []).push(x);

This initializes o.key to [] if it hasn’t been done already and then pushes onto the result.

noted 8th July, 2022

A bit of comfort audio whilst recovering from the dreaded Coronavirus. Michael Palin is eternally affable, unflappable and overwhelmingly amiable. It’s strange reading a travelogue from over 20 years ago, a strange snapshot from a distant place and time.

finished 3rd July, 2022

finished 2nd July, 2022

finished 27th June, 2022

A heady mix of egotistical self-promotion, gimmicky wins and dated sales strategies.

finished 10th June, 2022

finished 5th June, 2022

finished 3rd June, 2022

I looked nervously down the path. The woman was nearly close enough for me to ask my question.

newsletter sent 2nd June, 2022

finished 31st May, 2022

Really enjoyed this. Better than Universal Harvester and on par with Wolf in White Van.

finished 15th May, 2022

finished 7th May, 2022

how do I save when there’s so much to pay for?

Thao & the Get Down Stay Down – Hand to God

noted 6th May, 2022

Life is an unending, interminable, unrepentant, flow of dependencies. To do this, I have to do that. I can’t start something until I’ve completed something else.

newsletter sent 5th May, 2022

finished 4th May, 2022

finished 1st May, 2022

finished 27th April, 2022

finished 22nd April, 2022

“I’m sorry, Tom Hanks says you have dead eyes. We’re going in a different direction.”

newsletter sent 21st April, 2022

finished 17th April, 2022

finished 26th March, 2022

100,000 years ago, early humans were using a blend of red iron oxide, charcoal and bone marrow as a form of paint. Around 40,000 years later an improved mixture of materials such as sap, blood and berry juice was used on cave walls for creative depictions of hunters and herders.

newsletter sent 25th March, 2022

Certain voices stick in your mind. It could be the tone or the surprising emphasis on certain syllables. Sometimes a timbre or an unusual gutteral inflection.

I swear I read an interview with John Darnielle where he recommended “staying out of the results” but I can’t find it now. I can hear him saying it though!

Stay owt … … of the re-sUlts

To me this means having a dispassionate relationship with your work and the effect it has on others. For an artist with a passionate fanbase like The Mountain Goats it’s classic “Death of the Artist” at play – your work will resonate in ways you can’t, and shouldn’t, predict.

For someone like me, it’s about working on something that resonates for me and assuming those vibrations will find a home – even at another wavelength – with others.

noted 24th March, 2022

Fantastic tales of whalers, loggers, hoax real estate and a cast of coastal characters.

finished 19th March, 2022

finished 5th March, 2022

Last week I took a long weekend to go surfing in beautiful Tofino. It’s still winter so there’s no way to avoid a thick wetsuit, hood and gloves. It’s been a few years since I last tried it and while I’m only marginally better than I remember, there’s something about the randomness and persistence of the waves that makes it addictive. Falling asleep at night I can still feel the waves rushing towards me (just before another mouthful of saltwater.)

newsletter sent 3rd March, 2022

finished 22nd February, 2022

finished 18th February, 2022

Hocket (n)

a spasmodic or interrupted effect in medieval and contemporary music, produced by dividing a melody between two parts, notes in one part coinciding with rests in the other

noted 7th February, 2022

One small but inconvenient pandemic shift is that I’ve found it to be much harder to leave the house without forgetting something. I’m not leaving the house as much, so it’s a novelty to do the usual wallet / phone / keys check. I stepped out to run some errands the other day under an overcast sky. I didn’t get very far before my phone vibrated to tell me that I’d left my keys behind.

newsletter sent 27th January, 2022

When debugging JavaScript I often find myself swapping arrow functions to old-school ones simply to log variables. But there’s no need! console.log returns undefined so one can simply OR a console.log call to get it to print out before the real return!

promise.then((response) => console.log(response) || response.data.test);

noted 27th January, 2022

I may be just reinventing the wheel, but it’s my wheel!

Hammerspoon: Handling Windows and Layouts

noted 25th January, 2022

I expected to love this but the “cast of characters in a quirky company” vibe never quite landed for me.

finished 17th January, 2022

Okay, okay this is the first and last time management/productivity book I’ll read this year. But it’s pretty good! An antidote to the others, Burkeman describes the sheer finite nature of our time on this planet and makes recommendations to overcome the fatigue of overflowing todo lists.

Decline to clear the decks

Make it a conscious decision to “tolerate the discomfort” of less important tasks building up while you focus on the most important things.

The measure of any time management technique is: “Does it help you neglect the right things?” To take a phrase from financial planning you should pay yourself first and prioritise the things you want to do over the less important things you feel you should be doing.

Pitfalls of convenience

We have a dependence on technology that makes it convenient to eat, travel and live. Silicon Valley builds products to remove pain points but it’s the brokenness of everyday processes that make us human. By relying on technology to make every process smooth we remove the delicate social threads binding a network together, binding a neighbourhood together.

David Cain on happenstance

I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.

Warren Buffett

Make a list of the top twenty-five things that are most important to you. Top five are the crucial use of your time, discard the rest as they are just a distraction.

Idleness aversion

“Core ingredient of the modern soul.”

Developing patience

1. Develop a taste for having problems
2. Embrace radical incrementalism; focus on brief, regular actions over trying to do too much at once
3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality, “stay on the fucking bus!”

Time is a “network good”

Value is derived from how many others have access to it too. Same for phones and social media networks.

Chain of centennial lifespans

• 35 to Egyptians
• 20 to Jesus
• 5 to Henry VIII
• 60 for all humans

Egocentricity bias

We look after ourselves to give the best chances of staying alive. This is in contrast to our sheer insignificance.

Five questions to consider

1. Where are you pursuing comfort when you should pursue discomfort? Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.
2. Are you holding yourself to standards of productivity and performance that are impossible to meet?
3. In what ways have you accepted who you are, not who you think you ought to be?
4. What areas are you holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
5. Without worrying about actions reaching fruition, how would you spend your days? Do the next and most necessary thing.

Recommended steps

• Use open/closed todo lists
• Set pre-determined time boundaries
• Focus on one big project at a time
• Strategic underachievement (decide what to fail at)
• Imbalance your tasks to focus on what you need to
• Consciously pick your battles
• Pay attention to every moment
• Act on instantaneous generosity

finished 16th January, 2022

Hello and welcome to my new subscribers! It’s been a while so just a quick intro to start: this is source/target, an occasional newsletter on network thinking. There’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom but I hope you’ll stick around.

newsletter sent 13th January, 2022

The real-life impact of our technical decisions really hit home to me once again: my Mom had trouble volunteering and participating in her local community because somebody shipped the optional chaining operator in their production JavaScript.

The Optional Chaining Operator, “Modern” Browsers, and My Mom

noted 12th January, 2022

This book was fantastic. A deep dive into how people self-justify their actions and the cognitive dissonance they are comfortable living with.

Pyramids

The guiding metaphor of this book has been the pyramid of choice: As soon as people make a decision, whether reasoned or impulsive, they will change their attitudes to conform to that choice and start minimizing or dismissing any information suggesting they chose the wrong option.

Imagination Inflation

more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened—and the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go

Benevolent Dolphin Problem

A fun shorthand example for confirmation bias.

There are stories of dolphins helping nudge shipwrecked humans to safety. To accept this as evidence they like humans we would need to know about cases where dolphins have caused harm and, ultimately, have killed humans. But

We don’t know about those cases because the swimmers don’t live to tell us about their evil-dolphin experiences.

Arrogance Control

At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

Retaliation

We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.

finished 11th January, 2022

photos are just screenshots you take of real life

noted 8th January, 2022

A project to build shouty little presentations using Eleventy. Makes text as large as possible and includes website screenshots, syntax highlighting and some basic theming.

shipped 15th December, 2021

On November 29th I gave a talk at the CambridgeJS meetup on a favourite topic of mine: the static site generator Eleventy. I gave it the listicle-adjacent title “Eleven Reasons to Love Eleventy” but I didn’t go to great lengths to declare what each of these were.

Slides and notes from my presentation are available but I wanted to spell out the bones of my talk and record the magnificent Eleven for posterity.

Simple & Flexible

Eleventy is a super simple static site generator. In short it takes input files like Markdown and converts it into website. Critically no boilerplate or JavaScript code is included by default which give a really great base to add whatever bits and pieces you wish to add to your site.

Unopinionated Templates

Unlike other static site generators, Eleventy supports many template languages out of the box. My preference is Nunjucks, a reasonably intuitive language to do a sort of meta-programming on top of whatever file you wish to generate.

Eleventy allows you to use a blend of different templating languages in one site. One benefit of this flexibility is that it makes the process of migrating over from a alternative generator a cinch: you can “progressively” migrate content and formats as needed.

Written in JavaScript

Eleventy is written in JavaScript and it’s easy to use the language to do core configuration of your site. Custom shortcodes – snippets that can be expanded into wider markup from a small string can also be written in JavaScript along with transforms. These allow you to transform your HTML before being output in your application.

The Eleventy documentation takes care to note it is not a JavaScript framework itself. By being in the JavaScript ecosystem, Eleventy allows you to leverage the depth and breadth of packages available on NPM.

As you define every bit of code and markup that ends up on your website it’s not uncommon to find yourself writing more JavaScript used to generate your site than actually deployed to end users.

Pagination

Eleventy pagination makes it easy to split collections of materials into chunks for your site. It can also be used to create multiple outputs for the same input – I use it to generate OpenGraph images for social sharing and email markup for my newsletter.

Data Cascade

Underpinning every Eleventy configuration is a flow of data from a variety of different sources and blended together according to a hierarchy of inheritance. For the best summary of what this means check out Ben Myer’s full coverage.

Extensible

Eleventy doesn’t care about the other libraries and tooling you may wish to use. There are countless starter templates covering a wide variety, from Gulp to PostCSS, Tailwind to Vite. As an extra bonus many of these have full marks over on Google Lighthouse.

Plugins

There are a wealth of fantastically useful plugins for Eleventy. Many plugins are official ones solving real problems in convenient and modular packages.

To give two examples: Eleventy Image makes it easy to generate modern image formats and necessary markup. Eleventy Syntax Highlighting makes it easy to add language highlighting in code snippets without requiring client-side JavaScript.

Accessibility

The documentation and ethos of Eleventy prioritises and promotes accessibility when building websites. Official plugins like Inclusive Language normalize considering accessible language when writing content for an Eleventy site. As per the documentation (emphasis mine):

It’s very important that we take responsibility for the code we publish and deliver and strive to correct accessibility issues with the same veracity as a full service outage.

Fast

I’m a nosy web browser – whenever I come across a site that impresses me I reach for one of my favourite Firefox extensions: Wappalyzer. This takes an educated guess at the technologies used to build sites. A site built with Eleventy will have very few “tells” that give away its generator and it’s invariably the fastest sites that don’t have anything in their Wappalyzer results.

On the other (server) side – Eleventy builds are very quick to run and will provide pointers if particular configurations start to slow down the build.

Community

My experience with the Eleventy ecosystem is that of collaboration and camaraderie in the name of making great websites. The Eleventy community Discord is friendly and the regular Eleventy meetups are supportive and welcoming.

It’s Fun

Finally I find that the documentation and general ethos of Eleventy is fun – from the reassuring possum mascot to irreverant humor sprinkled around the documentation.

I like to say that Eleventy sites are “hand-crafted but not by hand.” By being in full control of the process outputs it’s fun to build sites that have everything you need and nothing you don’t.

posted 12th December, 2021

I’ve previously used Tom MacWright’s big tool to make simple, text-heavy presentations with from plain HTML and a sprinkling of JavaScript. As someone who deliberates over slide layouts and procrastinates practice by tweaking text alignments it’s very helpful!

Preparing for a talk on the static site generator, Eleventy, I wondered if I could apply the same concepts to building a slide deck as I have for my Eleventy sites. The main benefits to me were to allow slides to be written in Markdown and provide a base configuration to sprinkle extra Eleventy magic like shortcodes in the future.

I tried a few approaches to massage the Markdown input into the format that made the most sense for Eleventy. I rabbit-holed a few times with the HTML transformations required and hacking the copied version of client-side big.js into something I fully understood.

Is it better than big? I don’t think so. Was it fun to build? Yes. Will I use it in the future? Probably!

Check it out over at eleventy-little.

noted 12th December, 2021

npx npkill

noted 7th December, 2021

CTRL + CMD + D

noted 6th December, 2021

My handwriting isn’t very good. You might even go so far to say it’s bad. I remember being told to write my name again and again at school as I couldn’t seem to get my cursive to a good enough quality for my teacher. After years of preferring to hammer away with the clacky safety of a keyboard I find myself reaching for a pen a lot more often than ever before. I scratch away with a feisty little compact fountain pen in a little journal and dabble with sketching pictures as a form of self-acceptance for a handwriting ability I was always ashamed of.

At this time of year my usual error is to coast into a “Christian” when I mean to write “Christmas,” but writing a handful of cards today my mind wandered and I slipped out a “great” when I meant to write “grateful.” I stared blankly at the page and considered scrapping the card in favour of a clean slate – a fresh card without evidence of err.

It’s hard to make this sort of error when typing an email. You may make typos but you’ll summon the squiggly reds and some forgiving, trusty backspacing will make everything okay. The tablet I use for sketching has a helpful undo button but every press and resulting removal of the last stroke feels like a cheat, a betrayal of the intent of the moment.

I leaned into the “great” mistake and made it part of the message with a splotch of extra ink. I don’t think it looked bad. In fact, in some small way, I think it made it better.

When writing a card my handwriting is me, writing a card, by hand. Making mistakes is okay.

posted 4th December, 2021

finished 14th November, 2021

Short and sweet, the core few concepts in this book resonated with me and have clear applications in sales. The title and main conceit is a touch misogynistic, sure, but the author isn’t the first to recommend speaking to someone unfamiliar with a topic to gauge quality.

A recent New York Magazine article about the late “anarchic anthropologist” David Graeber, notes the use of his mother Ruth as an influence on his work:

Ruth herself never went to college. She was a constant reader, however, and years later, she was the audience her son kept in mind when he wrote. Graeber, Leve recalls, used to say that “if he understood something, he should be able to write it in a way that would be accessible and interesting to her.”

My main takeaway is that it’s easy to lead people to say the things they think you want to hear.

The Mom Test

Rules of The Mom Test:

1. Talk about their life instead of your idea
2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
3. Talk less and listen more

It’s easy to get someone emotional about a problem if you lead them there.

Good questions about them:

• “Who else should I talk to?”
• “Where does the money come from?”

Avoiding bad data

• Deflect compliments
• Anchor fluff - “tell me about the last time this happened”
• Dig beneath opinions, ideas, requests, and emotions

“Venture capitalists are described as professional judges of the future” – I like that.

Sometimes people will discuss a problem that irritates them but they would have no intent of buying a solution to that problem.

that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to solve the petty annoyances of their day.

It’s recommended to cut off pitches as early as possible:

Being pitchy is the dark side of the “seeking approval” coin. Instead of inviting compliments by being vulnerable, you’re demanding them by being annoying. It’s when you hold someone hostage and won’t let them leave until they’ve said they like your idea. Normally, compliments are well-intentioned. In this case, they’re just trying to get you out of their office. “Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” is generally a good quality for a founder to have. But when it creeps into a conversation that’s meant to be about learning, it works against you.

Asking important questions

Avoid prematurely zooming – that is getting into the weeds hearing what you want to hear.

When you fall into a premature zoom, you can waste a ton of time figuring out the minutia of a trivial problem. Even if you learn everything there is to know about that particular problem, you still haven’t got a business

If you ask When he talked to farmers, he asked questions like, “Would you switch trackers if something cheaper and more effective was available?” That’s the same as asking someone whether they would like more money.

Commitment and advancement

It’s on you to get a commitment. This can take many forms:

Time commitments

• Clear next meeting with known goals
• Sitting down to give feedback on wireframes
• Using a trial of the product for a non-trivial period

Reputation risk commitments:

• Intro to peers or team
• Intro to a decision maker (boss, spouse, lawyer)
• Giving a public testimonial or case study

Financial commitments:

• Letter of intent (non-legal but gentlemanly agreement to purchase)
• Pre-order
• Deposit

Good rule of thumb:

It’s not a real lead until you’ve given them a concrete chance to reject you.

Finding conversations

The author discusses some strategies to talk to potential customers about your idea.

Be persistent:

Unless your plan is to sell your app via cold calls, the rejection rate is irrelevant.

Strategy for conversations is summarised as Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

Don’t mention your product, just your vision:

You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z.

Frame expectations:

mention what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell.

Show weakness:

give them a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster.

Put them on a pedestal:

show how much they, in particular, can help. Explicitly ask for help.

In terms of mindset, don’t go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power. Instead, go in search of industry and customer advisors. You are just trying to find helpful, knowledgable people who are excited about your idea.

Running the process

When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoid creating (or being) the bottleneck. To do that, the learning must be shared with the entire founding team promptly and faithfully, which depends on good notes plus a bit of pre- and post-meeting work.

Conclusion

You’re never going to be perfect, but it always helps to be better.

finished 13th November, 2021

I keep thinking about Adam Buxton quoting Karl Pilkington.

People don’t like it if they think you’re trying too hard

It’s part of a podcast on Adam’s craft of writing silly jingles and he’s describing an encounter years ago where Karl gives him some advice at the XFM radio station.

(In that same episode Adam notes the value of sticking at something – persistency!)

I’ve started listening again to the recordings of Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant & Karl Pilkington from their weekly show on XFM from the early 'aughts. I’m sure I’ve listened to the whole archive at least once – there’s an air of deep familiarity about the whole thing. Last night one comment stopped me in my tracks and made me feel old. In his usual laconic drawl Karl recounts being stopped in the street by someone asking if he practices meditation and “knows how to breathe.” There’s a pause and Karl says

I’m thirty

As well as being hilarious it’s shocking to me that Karl was just 30 as his fame was growing due to his exposure via proximity to Ricky.

Strange things can make you reflect on time passing, I guess this is just one for me.

noted 13th November, 2021

There are some interesting things about this chart!

Habits of highly effective HN submitters

noted 13th November, 2021

yarn upgrade-interactive --latest

noted 6th November, 2021

A few good insights to start but quickly devolved into listicle-worthy life hacks.

finished 30th October, 2021

I get a small amount of joy from the handful of newsletters I subscribe to. Here they are in no particular order.

Drawing Links

Drawing Links is the newsletter I recommend to everyone. Subscribe for little comic strip vignettes from Edith’s day-to-day accompanied by high-quality recommendations and her sharp eye for humour.

Dense Discovery

Dense Discovery is a blend of productivity and design along with a smattering of climate and environmental coverage. It’s one of the more beautiful emails I receive and, arriving on Monday, it slots comfortably into my inbox as I start my week.

HN Blogs

This newsletter feels like a secret: Paul collates submissions to Hacker News that point to personal and independent sites. By avoiding the links that ascended to the front page it’s a helpful look at the nearly-made-its.

The signal-to-noise ratio is skewed slightly to the noise, but it’s smaller compared to the Hacker News firehose. I’ve found a wealth of interesting views and people through this newsletter.

Hello from Duncan

Duncan’s newsletter helped me appreciate the value of working in public. In it he recounts and discusses that which he’s worked on in the last 10 days. Since reading the reborn version of his newsletter I’ve understood better how I work and reflected on how I can be a better contributor to projects.

Reply All

I don’t remember actively registering for this newsletter and I stopped listening to Reply All a while ago but I let these recommendations slip into my inbox as they’re often good value. It’s funny to see the creep of Spotify links into the recommendations since the acquisition.

Today in Tabs

A relative newbie, it took me a few editions to appreciate the zippy, irreverent Today in Tabs from Rusty Foster. I’m since a convert, Rusty lives and breathes misanthropic internet and exudes equal parts joy and disdain for the world wide web in 2021.

Like an overstuffed tab bar of pages you promise you’ll read, each edition groans under the weight of itself. I always get a mixed wave of disappointment/relief when I reach the end.

An Irritable Métis

I love Chris La Tray’s writing and appreciate his perspective on some important topics. Arresting and disarming.

Exclusive Content by Megan Koester

Exclusive Content is exhausting. Acting as a biographical outlet, commentary on the dysfunctional comedy industry and scathing look at late-stage capitalism, Koester’s emails are an (un)healthy dose of anger and skepticism.

Unsupervised Learning

Daniel Miessler’s weekly email summarizing news on cybersecurity and technology was the first newsletter I subscribe to where I realized people were committing to writing and creating a newsletter.

Miessler does a great job at giving enough commentary on news to be helpful but not overbearing.

Where’s Your Ed At?

When I first read Ed Zitron’s newsletter I was turned off by his tendency to ramble. Recently, however, he’s truly knocked “it” out of the park with some head-turning takes on remote work and related topics. It’s refreshing to read someone so utterly committed to their takes and I like that.

Money Stuff

I subscribed to Money Stuff years ago but had to cut it loose after feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume and quality of this daily newsletter. I picked it up again this year during the GameStop chaos and find it a really rewarding read. Levine’s writing is superb and I’m constantly in awe of his voice and ability to explain. It’s also really funny!

Noah Kalina

I find this newsletter a little infuriating – it seems so effortless. Photographer Noah Kalina shares some photos and a short commentary on life’s mundane side quests. It always makes me smile.

Laura Olin

An airy mix of internet and art, Laura Olin’s newsletter is short and well-crafted.

Data is Plural

A fantastic newsletter and resource: Jeremy Singer-Vine curates and provides links to datasets available online. It’s an impeccable treasure trove of real-world data.

posted 29th October, 2021

I love taking longform articles and newsletters over to Instapaper for some calm, distraction-free reading. But my backlog of articles was gnawing at me. Would I ever read everything in there? Probably not. I occasionally tried the “read a random article” in a vain attempt to slice through some ancient article artifact from 2019 but it was like bailing a boat with a teacup – a flood of pushes from my browser would offset any work I could skim away.

I have three solutions to this problem:

1. Be more mindful about what I save – will I actually read this?
2. Be more ruthless about not reading something if it doesn’t pique my interest in the first few paragraphs.
3. Wipe out the backlog! There’s a helpful “Archive All” option. Since invoking that I feel so much better.

noted 26th October, 2021

This time last week I was halfway through a six hour, round-trip hike to an alpine lake. My partner had taken the week off and we’d climbed high enough to have hit some light snow about an hour ago. Our phones had been without signal for two hours, and we hadn’t seen another soul for three. Suddenly we came across a dank, magical grove filled with the most beautiful mushrooms I have ever seen.

newsletter sent 23rd October, 2021

“We, and I personally, believe very strongly that more information is better, even if it’s wrong. Let’s start from the premise that more information, more empowerment, is fundamentally the correct answer"

Eric Schmidt

I can get behind this in an “information just wants to be free” sense but it’s a strange position. If we could easily classify and label wrong information as such then the existence of it could help explain actions and feelings. But that classification is hard and takes time, meanwhile that wrong information may be causing irreversible damage.

noted 23rd October, 2021

Q: Sometimes it takes me forever to finish a comic because I’m constantly going through phases of “this is good, ppl wanna read this” vs “wow my stuff is trash and no one will want this.” Do you get phases like this? How do you stay motivated?

I think you’re essentially describing my base-level mental state while making comics. I honestly can’t imagine going through the process of making a book with unwavering confidence and self-satisfaction. It’s difficult, but I think the key to managing these kinds of “bi-polar” thoughts is to be as objective as possible. Make sure you’re not deluded in either direction, and try to evaluate your work in a way that’s critical but not defeating. I also think it’s useful to not obsess too much about how people will receive the work, and to instead focus on just making it as satisfying to you as possible.

Adrian Tomine

noted 21st October, 2021

But even after presenting students with every metaphor in the books, Colling still isn’t positive that his students get what he’s talking about: “It feels like I’m having some success, but yeah, sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he says.

Without any point of reference Gen Z are struggling to grasp traditional file systems – File Not Found

noted 19th October, 2021

A wonderful collection of short stories. Carver’s spare, tight sentences draw a much more emotive picture than they have any right to.

Particular highlights for me were “Chef’s House,” “A Small, Good Thing” and “Fever”.

finished 16th October, 2021

Plangent (a):

(of a sound) loud, reverberating, and often melancholy.

noted 16th October, 2021

Odd little book, quite unsettling.

finished 14th October, 2021

I’ve been picking this up every other week since I was gifted it last Christmas and I finally finished it with a burst of completionism. It’s a beautiful curation of Japanese short stories from between 1898 and 2014 translated to English. I enjoyed all of them with the exception of the gory “Patriotism” by Mishima Yukio.

It was so rewarding to read each short story before flipping back to the commentary from Murakami. I now have a much deeper appreciation for Japanese literature and will definitely seek out some of the further reading.

Here are my favourite short stories in this collection:

Kono Taeko – In the Box

This is a story of a petty grudge and sheer irrational behaviour. I loved it for the lack of explanation and the domestic yet unpredictable setting.

Natsume Soseki – Sanshiro, Chapter 1

A strangely nostalgic tale of transition to a big city.

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro – The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga

The book starts with this novella of sorts: a mildly unbelievable but alluring mystery that slowly unravels.

Genji Keita – Mr English

I enjoyed just how mundane this story was. A tale of work politics and salarymen.

Betsuyaku Minoru – Factory Town

An allegory with a plausible backbone. Written in 1973 but could have been published in the last decade.

Uchida Hyakken – Kudan

This short story was from the section entitled “Dread” and describes a Kafka-esque world of transfiguration and misunderstanding. Haunting.

Sawanishi Yuten – Filling Up with Sugar

An unsettling depiction of the decline of a relative to a fantastical disease. Pay close attention!

Seirai Yuichi – Insects

A heartbreaking account of the fallout from atomic warfare, wonderfully crafted and deeply evocative.

finished 12th October, 2021

* knock knock *

newsletter sent 1st October, 2021

finished 1st October, 2021

I was pretty cynical about this at first as I thought I’d heard it all before. I think this should be required reading for anyone working with data. I can’t shake that the injustices created by the use of data as described in this book are just the tip of the iceberg.

Just like with Humankind’s homo puppy I winced at the use of the WMD acronym, a purposefully overloaded term.

Three factors to systems deemed “Weapons of Math Destruction”

1. Opacity: Are the rules of the system transparent to those that are being judged and analysed?
2. Scale: Does the model have the capability to grow exponentially?
3. Damage: Is the model unfair? Does it have a “pernicious” feedback loop that only makes it more unfair?

Clopening is when a worker is scheduled to both close a location at night and then re-open it in the morning. This can be stressful and result in an erratic schedule for workers balancing a number of responsibilities.

A large amount of Facebook users believe the algorithm behind the scenes is just presenting factual information and isn’t tailored to them.

In 2013, when a University of Illinois researcher named Karrie Karahalios carried out a survey on Facebook’s algorithm, she found that 62 percent of the people were unaware that the company tinkered with the news feed. They believed that the system instantly shared everything they posted with all of their friends.

I wonder if this is still the case eight years later?

O’Neill uses the phrase “birds of a feather” a few times to discuss how members of the same social network will often behave in similar ways. One example is that they may click on the same ads on Facebook.

Some recidivism analyses use this concept and inadvertently encode bias by taking acquaintances, jobs and credit rating to predict behavior. This sort of data would be inadmissible in court.

Interesting dataset alert:

A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks.

finished 28th September, 2021

Sententious (a):

given to or abounding in excessive moralizing

noted 27th September, 2021

osascript -e 'id of app "Name of App"'

noted 27th September, 2021

Enjoyed these stories on their own but all together they felt a little heavy-handed.

finished 22nd September, 2021

It feels nice to feel wanted and equally bad when you don’t feel wanted, even if the matrix through deciding you’re unwanted is literally “the numbers are the same or slightly lower than before.”

I personally (and presume others do too) find myself adding way too much stock to people’s willingness to do these things naturally - if someone doesn’t retweet something, it’s a split-second decision likely based on whether it immediately made them laugh or happy, or resembled something they deeply care about. That split-second decision is genuinely meaningless to them - they can (and will!) move on almost instantly. Still, in the grand scheme of content, these minor social media moves are so significant to people in such an outsized way that I believe drives them a little bit insane.

How Our Need For Attention Online Drives Us Crazy – Ed Zitron

noted 18th September, 2021

The dialogue is a little clunky and I need to do some reading around Adlerism but there were quite a few “aha” moments for me in this book. It was a library loan but I picked up a copy to give myself more time with it.

causation/purpose

Etiology is the study of causation while teleology is the story of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than it’s cause. In Adlerism we don’t think about past “causes” but instead about present “goals.”

Lifestyle is the tendencies of thought and action in life.

No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.

A life-lie is the state of coming up with all manner of pretexts in order to avoid life tasks. e.g. “I’m busy at work so I don’t have enough time to think about my family.”

Separation of Tasks

All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.

Adlerism denies the need to be recognized by others, one must not seek recognition. You are not living to satisfy other people’s expectations. Do not behave without regard for others – separation of tasks. All interpersional relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own taks intruded on.

The life tasks of interpersonal relationships are:

1. “Tasks of work”
2. “Tasks of friendship”
3. “Tasks of love”

We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?” and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks.

Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?

Intervening in other people’s tasks and taking on other people’s tasks turns one’s life into something heavy and full of hardship.

All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgment do other people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and is not a matter you can do anything about.

Horizontal and Vertical relationships

Horizontal relationships are relationships where members have equal standing whereas vertical relationships are those where one member has greater power, authority, knowledge or wisdom over the other.

Don’t praise or rebuke: praise is passing judgement from someone with ability to someone with no ability. By praising we are making vertical relationships, not horizontal ones. All healthy relationships should be horizontal.

The more one is praised by another person, the more one believes they have no ability.

Go from praise to gratitude.

Community

When Adler refers to community, he goes beyond the household, school, workplace, and local society, and treats it as all inclusive, covering not only nations and all of humanity but also the entire axis of time from the past to the future.

The scope of community is infinite! People are never truly alone or separated from community and cannot be.

You must consider yourself part of the community rather than the centre of the world. The goal of personal interpersonal relationships is a feeling of community. Use separation of tasks to “unravel the threads of the complex entanglement of one’s interpersonal relations.”

When running into difficulties in interpersonal relationships, one should zoom out and “listen to the voice of the larger community.”

Dots

Life is a series of moments called now, not a linear map from birth to the top of the mountain.

Think of this as a line drawn with pencil, if you magnify enough it’s made up of tiny dots. These are the now.

finished 17th September, 2021

A very readable, refreshing look at human nature. I didn’t expect to enjoy this quite so much. The author covers a fascinating array of studies and historical examples to show that, contrary to popular belief, people tend towards being good.

I cringe a little at the repeated reference to homo puppy – the moniker given to the empathetic humans we evolved to be.

• Availability Bias: if we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common.
• It’s suspected that, across history, the vast majority of soldiers never actually fire their weapons.
• There are many examples of studies that were skewed by the researchers to be more divisive and shocking. This includes the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s shock machine.
• Nocebo: Tell someone that they may experience symptoms from a harmless substance and they likely will feel those symptoms. Self-fulfilling diagnosis.
• Pygmalion Effect: beliefs we’re devoted to – whether they’re true or imagined – can likewise come to life, effecting very real change in the world.
• Golem Effect: when we have negative expectations around someone we distance ourselves from them. This will lead to poorer performance by that person. Negative expectation can result in negative results.
• Participatory budgets are used by some governments to allow citizens to have a direct input into the budget process for their municipality. These have been shown to improve engagement, inclusion, trust and transparency.
• Alaska has a “Permanent Fund Dividend” – unconditional money for citizens that fosters trust and ultimately reduces poverty.
• The author takes a dim view on the Broken Windows theory and highlights many criticisms and negative impacts of the application of the theory in policing.

Ten Rules to Live by

1. When in doubt, assume the best
2. Think in win-win scenarios
3. Ask more questions
4. Temper your empathy, train your compassion
5. Try to understand the other, even if you don’t get where they’re coming from
6. Love your own as others love their own
7. Avoid the news
8. Don’t punch Nazis
9. Come out of the closet: don’t be ashamed to do good
10. Be realistic

finished 7th September, 2021

“Someone said: ‘Well, you do it now, don’t you? Because you’ve got the costume’. I was just slowly nodding,” says Denson.

Sometimes you find yourself with the costume, slowly nodding.

‘A Loveable Anarchist’: The Oral History of Mr Blobby

noted 3rd September, 2021

Reading them in quick succession it’s hard not to blend the worlds of Project Hail Mary, Three-Body Problem and Ministry for the Future into one. Speculative near-future fiction with climate overtones, spaceships and a hope for cooperation between the entire human race.

The main character in this jarred on me at first but reading around I appreciate that Weir’s “gee-whiz” schoolteacher is a tongue-in-cheek inversion of the sweary protagonists of his previous books.

Really enjoyed this, appreciated the thorough science, twists and dedication to an idea.

finished 30th August, 2021

The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of other people’s gestures and movements.

finished 15th August, 2021

A book of two halves. I loved the first part as Newport described how email overtook as the dominant communication method for businesses, despite being inferior to traditional methods.

A misjudged reference to The Tragedy of the Commons marked the beginning of the book’s decline. The author describes common Kanban tools, provides some introspection on writing the book and finishes by rattles off a few productivity life hacks.

The bits I liked the most echoed Newport’s advice in Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

Technological Determinism happens when we allow technology to control how we act and behave

finished 9th August, 2021

I used to work with someone who would take weeks off work to do nothing but watch the Olympics. Summer or winter he would close the blinds, order takeout and multi-screen his way through a slew of sporting excellence. He was predictable like that.

newsletter sent 8th August, 2021

Peripatetic (a):

Walking about or from place to place; traveling on foot.

noted 3rd August, 2021

I wasn’t sure at first but this turned out to be a good listen. Lots of helpful considerations for successful transactional conversations. One undercurrent in the book was that a strong negotiation strategy is simply to buy time and extract information from your “counterpart” to aid the process of reaching an agreement.

Labelling is an interesting idea. Effectively calling out something for what it is without ascribing blame.

It seems that …

rather than

I think you …

Harks back to non-violent communication with the aim of being as non-judgemental as possible.

Similarly I liked the example Voss gave of showing contrition early if you’ve done something wrong. Getting ahead of the situation and keeping in control.

Mirroring is a remarkable active listening device with a clear benefit.

Voss recommends leaning into the conflict that’s at the core of any negotiation and to see it as a collaborative process to reach agreement.

Calibrated questions should be used early and often in negotiations. Voss’s favorite is the oft-repeated

How am I supposed to do that?

but any open question that draws information out of your counterpart is worth using. Questions starting with “how” or “what” will spark a cooperation for both sides to agree.

finished 2nd August, 2021

I had high hopes for this book at the start but my enthusiasm waned towards the end. The optimism of the spunky, tech-savvy protagonist and ease in which he could achieve his goals soon grew weary as the mystery slotted into place.

I was surprised how much the book aligned with my interests, in particular data visualization, typography and cryptography. It reminds me there are many people interested in the intersection of these topics.

The fawning Google-worship proved too much. The undeserved, magic code-breaking scene betrayed what is otherwise a reasonable “hard” science fiction fantasy book. The fantasy-novel-in-a-novel failed to escape it’s use as a plot device and a vehicle for some cringe-worthy geekery. Oblique references to Harry Potter were apt considering the author’s fondness for Dumbledore-adjacent names.

All that being said I did enjoy this and I’m not sure why I’m being so harsh. The book just seemed to go off-the-rails a third of the way through and never recovered.

finished 2nd August, 2021

I should emphasize that this is not investment advice and I am probably wrong? Like, one, I’m wrong about every prediction I make, and, two, in this case there keep being articles quoting professionals saying “this is going to be a wild one” and you should probably believe them instead of me. I am just laying out my thinking here so we can understand how I’ll be wrong.

—Matt Levine

noted 28th July, 2021

There were a few humorously archaic references in this book, but for the most part it holds up 100 years later!

Here are the main rules that stood out to me, most likely because I flout them all.

Usage

1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's
2. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.

Oxford comma, I don’t do this but perhaps I should?

3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas

I do a lot of parentheticals. Good core rule to remember.

4. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing a co-ordinate clause.

So before the and or but. I need to do this.

5. Do not join independent clauses by a comma.

If two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

Or a period.

6. Do not break sentences in two.

7. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject

e.g. about the subject of the sentence:

Walking slowly down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children

vs. referring to the woman

He saw a woman accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road.

Composition

8. One paragraph to each topic
9. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence, end it with conformity with the beginning
10. Use the active voice as it’s more “direct and vigorous”

A common fault is to use as the subject of a passive construction a noun which expresses the entire action, leaving to the verb no function beyond that or completing the sentence.

e.g. A survey of this region was made in 1900 vs. This region was surveyed in 1900.

11. Put statements in positive form
12. Use definite, specific, concrete language
13. Omit needless words
14. Avoid a succession of loose sentences
15. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
16. Keep related words together

The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.

17. In summaries, keep to one tense
18. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end

Words to avoid

Certainly, can (instead of may), factor, feature, interesting, so, sort of, kind of, system, very, while

finished 27th July, 2021

My recent reading list tracks Tom Macwright’s closely, mainly because I see he’s rated something with five stars so I go to the library website to add it to my holds. But I forget to pause the hold until some reasonable date in the future, the book arrives at the library and – bam – I start it in earnest.

This book hooked me. The sharp character observations along with the grey areas of intent and purpose made it a magnetic read. I respect the ending but it felt a little unresolved.

finished 25th July, 2021

This was really good. A very clear, cogent take on the craft of writing. It almost made me want to start writing a novel.

On distractions

… I’m sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right understanding people, I just KNOW I could be penning my masterpiece

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. And the larger the work looms in my day—the more it seems like an I hafta instead of just an I wanna—the more problematic it can become.

finished 21st July, 2021

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noted 19th July, 2021

ListenBox

noted 19th July, 2021

finished 16th July, 2021

finished 16th July, 2021

Edward Tufte has informed and inspired data practitioners for, literally, decades. A lot has been said about his forthright opinions on information design and one can draw a direct link between his work and the attention to detail many aspire to when they create visualizations for consumption.

newsletter sent 8th July, 2021

We are all migrants through time

finished 7th July, 2021

I’ve been Zooming a lot this year, like everyone else, and I always end my calls by closing the lid of my laptop. Maybe that’s all death is: the laptop closing, nothing cosmic, just a gentle click as we stop using our app.

I love this. It’s like putting a landline handset down on or snapping a flip phone shut.

noted 29th June, 2021

To have a “thin ear” is to be too easily swayed by the advice of others.

finished 28th June, 2021

I don’t have any plans to interview anyone but this was a good read on the things to consider if I ever do. The tone was a touch smug at times but it was a breezy read with plenty of anecdotes to help it flow.

Finding a way in

Nelson suggests finding something unusual that proves you have done your research and shows the interviewee that they are in safe hands. One example digs into the craft – Nelson asked about a particularly long sentence in something Gay Talese had written. Looks like it’s reproduced in this article.

Heat and Like

Heat for heat’s sake or heat for light’s sake

This is referenced a few times, the first time as quoted from Chris Wallace. I really like it. “Heat for heat’s sake” is something that’s pleases an audience. I liken it to virality online and pushing for controversy. “Heat for light’s sake,” however, is the process of “making things a little bit difficult for the object of your scrutiny in order to really try to help the audience understand.”

In my comparison to online discourse this would be drawing attention to something in a non-confrontational way for the purposes of greater awareness.

Open Questions

Unsurprisingly open questions are lauded as important devices for getting good answers from interviewers.

What kind of father were you?

What do you think?

There are also lots of examples of asking questions that you already know the answer to in order to keep in control of the interview. This is a powerful technique when combined with the knowledge you’ve learned “on backround.” But if you don’t know then stick to open questions:

Did it change you in some way? How so?

Always end an interview in this way

• “Can you tell me the exact spelling of your name”

This is a surprising question to most and even if someone has a “conventional” name confirming regardless will ensure that the printed result won’t upset them in some way. At the least you will prove that you’re thorough.

• “Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask?”

Give your source a chance to tell you something that they were hesitating to bring up.

• “Who else should I talk to?”

I love this because it’s all about referrals and loops. “There’s always someone who knows more, someone behind the scenes, someone who isn’t quoted or sought out very often.”

• “May I contact you later once I write this in case I need some more information or clarification?”