Woke up, hung out with the mancub a bit, sat outside with coffee reading the news, ate berries and honey, did a couple of pages on the laptop, walked up to the coffee shop, worked in the notebook over a couple of double espressos, had a chat with the Italian ice cream man who lives at the top of the road. I feel like 90% of myself at this point, and like my 2026 has finally gotten started.
STATUS: inbox 116 but an embarrassing number of those are delivery notifications READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:New Music Show LAST WATCHED: the new series of MOCK THE WEEK
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I am almost back to normal – just a cough and a sore throat for the most part, which means everyone else was right when they told me this mange going around lasts three weeks or so.
I have just been informed that a new coffee shop has opened, around the corner from me. When Uber came to town last month, I considered using it to get to Leigh, where Little Fin Roastery is, and then I caught the mange. And then Uber pulled out of town, apparently because they didn’t want to meet the council’s standards on private car hire. I am not Uber’s biggest fan, but huge chunks of my area are poorly served by public transport and I’m not walking for an hour and a half just to get a decent cup of coffee. And my deli of choice doesn’t do coffee! So I’m going to walk up to the new place in an hour and see if it will serve as a morning office. And once my chest is cleared and my voice comes back, I’ll be using the deli as my afternoon office for half the week, drinking £10 glasses of fancy wine and telling myself I am getting a great deal of thinking done and I have begun the great leap forwards.
AI is prompting investors to reassess every business model under the sun (vaguely reminded of that tech news website that clearly used a random headline generator into which they plugged the tech buzzword of the moment, which is how you got the headline “Can IoT Help With Bicycles?” There’s also a sense of people thinking they can see a huge hammer in the distance, even though it’s mostly made of smoke, and assuming everything around them looks like a nail. I saw a story, I think on World Of Reel, about a guy who’d been given 30k to make an AI film and was trying to crowdsource an idea for what film to make on social media)
OPERATIONS: I have a huge consulting job to nail down and a prose serial project to solve and it all needs to be done this week. And I’m out on Saturday night, so I need to land the newsletter before then, too. I am copy-typing out of a notebook for the next hour. STATUS: I really need to stop buying clothes and I really need to stop looking at the watches at Sputnik1957. READING: READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
…first prize went to the Wineflask, in which the almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’
LISTENING:
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Yesterday I reduced a viburnum by half, hacked back salvia and holly, raked a bed, dug a trench in it, mixed a hundred litres of compost into the trench, and planted three cherry trees. Today I am actually less achy and knackered than I expected, especially bearing in mind that I still have this plague in my system. Once I have some charge in my phone, I’m going to check the weather and see if I’m going to have the space to plant some apple trees today.
Today it’s the Swatch Metropolis, yesterday it was the G-Shock G-Rescue because it was a day of working with saws and chainsaws and other implements of destruction.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
When asked why he had made death the penalty for most offences, Draco replied that he considered the lesser offences to deserve it and had no harsher punishment for the greater ones.
I saw one of these on Valeluminal‘s IG account last night, and went straight to Amazon to look it up. I remember the Kodak Fling disposable camera from the 80s, and it turns out this is an intentionally low-res digital camera styled in a similar way. Charges off USB and runs off a TF card. There are six or seven different styles, and you don’t know which one you’ve got until the box arrives. Mine showed up eight hours after I ordered it.
Not my favourite of the designs, sadly, but it’ll do.
It’s about as long as my little finger and it comes with a keychain. The battery, according to reviews, gives out about three hours of steady use.
I have always loved digital cameras, but, if I’m honest, the better the iPhone camera got, the less interested I got. I loved the old digital cameras, that were a bit fuzzy and weird. I even did a photography book with an EyeModule, which was a black and white digital camera that plugged into a Handspring Visor PDA.
The Charmera comes, of course, with absolutely no instructions.
This was taken by accident while figuring out the pre-loaded image filters. I’m not mad at it at all. In fact, that was very much what I was hoping for. It’s going to get clipped to my day bag and I’m going to have some fun with it.
TODAY:
Snow-generating stickers. This is a weird one. Stickers that express chemicals on contact with snow, which rise up into the sky and seed clouds… so ski resorts can have more snow.
OPERATIONS: Many Things suddenly started Happening last night, right in the middle of me trying to dig my way out of all the things I’m behind on. Every time I walked away from my phone for five or ten minutes yesterday, I’d come back to another half-dozen notifications. And I still have to do Sunday’s newsletter. STATUS: I have had to put the Apple Watch back on, which displeases me but lots of Things have suddenly started Happening. Also had to fight a cat for access to my office today. Inbox 141 and climbing. READING:THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
Empedocles himself claimed to have already been a bush, a bird, and ‘a mute fish in the sea’. But now, as a doctor, poet, seer, and leader of men, he had reached the highest rung in the cycle of incarnations—and could, just about, count himself among the immortal gods. In a story that is almost certainly false but too good not to tell, he killed himself by leaping into the flames of Mount Etna, either to prove that he was immortal or make people believe that he was.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
So I got given these lovely A6 notebooks the other day:
Atoms To Astronauts make some gorgeous notebooks. However, they’re A6. Which means they don’t fit the Wanderings Passport notebook cover or the newestor Field Notes-sized cover, or the Field Notes-sized cover I’ve ordered from a maker on Etsy. So I had to order one of those randomly-generated-Chinese-company-name leather notebook covers in A6 (UK), because I got bought nine of these notebooks and I really want to get working in them.
That’s the third stage of the new notebook system, and I’ll write a separate post about that at some point. And when the other cover comes in from Etsy, that will be the fourth stage. Because I’ve decided that this year is all about going deep on working on paper and thinking on to paper.
I wanted to pre-order thar CD for herself, but Napalm Records’ shopping system is broken.
OPERATIONS: contracts processed, setting up another reprint project (fingers crossed), scripting and planning and printing off research notes to paste into one of the above notebooks STATUS: wearing the field watch today. Email at a dreadful 154. Still not back at full power, but getting there. READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a ‘wise man’ [sophos] and preferring instead to be called ‘a lover of wisdom’ [philosophos]—thereby coining the term ‘philosopher’.
LISTENING:
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Taking off the Fitbit and the Apple Watch, putting on the Maven watch, setting up the third stage of the new notebook system (with a fourth stage to come) – it’s rapid disconnection time. More on that tomorrow because I’ve just been told I’m apparently going out for lunch.
STATUS: first day in a few weeks that I’ve felt even half-human READING: I’m faintly annoyed with what I’m reading right now – last night I started a book about maximalist novels and it was so whiny (and obsessed with the word “transversal” that I gave up, and the Walsingham book is mired in “we have absolutely no idea what he dd in these years but here’s some random speculation” – so I picked up THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
It can be no coincidence that the hierarchical, anti-democratic Spartans, who privileged military might above all else, prided themselves on the pithiness of their speech. According to Plutarch, when an Attic orator accused the Spartans of being ignorant, Pleistoanax, the Spartan king (r. 458-409 BCE), replied: “What you say is true. Of all the Greeks, we alone have not learnt your evil ways.”
I have the good mead again. Very fond of the Bloodmoon.
Today is a personal day, so I’m actually checking out until tomorrow, which will be a resumption of normal notemaking service.
OPERATIONS: Finished script and processed contract yesterday, started rebuilding the newsletter template STATUS: going out for lunch LAST WATCHED: Ibsen’s THE MASTER BUILDER
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It is pissing down outside and the garden, waterlogged by weeks of rain, is starting to flood. I still have to plant and re-plant dormant trees and am fast running out of time.
I decided to get the Substack app and poke around in it last night, and fuck me did I underestimate the number of newsletters out there right now. It seems to me to be roughly equivalent of those days when most people seemed to be on blogspot. I’m going to need to delete that app immediately, because I was reading on my phone for three or four hours.
OPERATIONS: finishing touches on a script, then rewrite the newsletter template STATUS: rrrreally just want to curl up somewhere with a book for ten hours READING: Picked up a sample of BLANK SPACE by W David Marx
Related:
If artists can only make art while standing in the middle of the town square, you’re going to get more boring art.
Today I was gifted a new lapboard so I can work downstairs in the living room more effectively in the evenings. I gave in return a box of raspberry, rose and hibiscus tea from Fortnum’s and a fancy high-end citrus press.
Recent suggestions that we can improve the internet by a return to blogging strike me as unrealistic. This is an unusual form of activity, one best suited to writers (or to those who enjoy writing), to creative types rather than mere diarists, and to people who don’t suffer inordinately when they throw something into a public arena then receive little or no feedback as a result. Starting something like this today without being part of a connected community like Substack would require resilience to cope with the isolation. And yet… The blogging format still provides opportunities that can’t easily be satisfied elsewhere.
I’m with him there. You can click through on this post’s title, scroll to the bottom and get the daily posts here as an email. But ultimately this space is for me to make notes and think in, in a space I control, thanks to WordPress.
The problem I’m running into recently on Substack is that I’m seeing a lot of monotony in the types of writing and formatting of newsletters, and very little user innovation (I haven’t decided if this is on the users or the platform). Subscription creator monetization and parasocial relationships seem pretty intertwined to me — I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the worst case scenarios of some of the relationships that have been bred here. I hit a wall yesterday afternoon, and was overwhelmed by a feeling that was similar to how I felt when I hit publish on this essay in 2024.
OPERATIONS: I have a contract to peer at and a script to finish. STATUS: day 186 of the plague READING: THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+)
A magistrate from Kent known as ‘Justice Nine-Holes’ bored through the restored wooden rood-loft so he could spy on the people of his parish.
LISTENING:
LAST WATCHED: I started HAMNET, rewatched half of THE FRENCH DISPATCH
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Yesterday I wrote my newsletter and then the Beehiiv editor deleted half of it, never to be seen again, which will teach me to write directly into a web page. Everything is so fucking broken these days that even writing into a web-based word processor is like reaching into fog and fooling yourself that there’s something solid in there.
I’m not on Bluesky, I glance at X once in a blue moon, I never bothered with Threads and I can go days without even thinking about IG, but this piece by Sean Bonner made me wonder what the hell is going on out there in the fog:
…a lot of conversations on BlueSky are still about how they aren’t using X. This is a pretty common thing in the beginning of any social site, but I admit I was surprised that this far long that’s still such a common theme there. And it isn’t just X, but posting about not using a whole collection of other apps and services, and also guilting/shaming others for using any of those apps and services. People are even making block lists (more on that next) of people who use other services.
OPERATIONS: really need to crack a broken ten-page section of script today STATUS: 💀💀💀 READING:THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
