Category: jotter

There have been a bunch of “How to break up with your phone” articles in my RSS feed of late, so I guess it’s that time of year: the digital equivalent of spring-cleaning posts.

There was once a time where telephones were wired into buildings, and to speak with the voice of someone else you had to call the telephone in the building where you hoped the person you wanted to speak to was located. Or you had to go to a public telephone box, which was a metal kiosk most often used as a rain shelter or toilet, where once again you had to place a call to a building, as calling other phone boxes involved pre-planning and guesswork and hoping someone else wasn’t using it or sleeping in it.

And then the mobile telephone became available generally, where you could call the pocket(ish)-sized device belonging to the person you wanted to speak to. Though the first person I knew with a mobile phone, in the last half of the Eighties, carried it around in a briefcase and used it to “impress” girls at clubs by letting them call people with it from the club floor. Until that cost him all his money.

Mobile phones developed new features – “feature phone” was the word – and became connected to the world in new ways, with SMS evolutions and WAP, the early mobile web. Feature phones became “smartphones” and before we knew it they became always-on anti-boredom devices, weaponised to become more immediately interesting than whoever you were sitting with or whatever was on the television.

And now they’re a Problem, because they’re attention-sucking focus-destroying addiction-generating monster boxes that eat everything around them. Just today, I have seen solves for this ranging from putting a rubber band over the screen to spending a couple of hundred on apps to stop you using apps.

Here’s the thing. If you own a smartphone, then you hold in your hand a very powerful little computer that’s capable of connecting to millions of handy little services. It should do what you tell it to, to the best of its ability. But the apps that make it go are programmed by people who want it, and you, to do what they tell it to. “Breaking up with your phone” is really just about busting that chain and threading your own. The people who made the phone itself want the phone to be useful to you, just like any other consumer product. Vorspung durch technik. Bosch and its “with many solutions that can lead to a better way of living.” Obviously. Think of it as a concierge device, there to make life smoother and simpler. And disable any function that gets in the way.

Just take social media off your phone, for God’s sake. If you really need the private messaging functions, get the dedicated apps like Facebook Messenger or Instagram Direct Messenger rather than the full-fat apps, but letting FB on to your phone is a bad idea in any case. Train your friends to use Signal or something. Twitter is broken and you shouldn’t be using it anyway, but if you’re determined to keep it on your phone, create a local news list and pin it so it’s what you see when you open the app. At least that’s useful. Also try disabling commenting on all of your social media posts for a few weeks and see if you can be bothered to switch back afterwards.

Kill all of your notifications except for the useful stuff – delivery notices, weather alerts, maybe newsflashes (although these are not all made equal – getting a BBC breaking news alert about the fucking cricket is, I submit, not worthy of a breaking news alert push), and people you need to hear from. Turn your phone into a useful concierge device, is the thing. Ask it to tell you only what’s useful to your life.

Use widgets to make your home screen more useable at a glance, and stuff your “problem” apps into a folder that you have to tap to open. If you have phone twitch, make it so you can get what you need from flashing the home screen. Weather, headlines, photos, calendar, whatever works for you. Unless it’s actually urgent, wait until you’re back at a desk to answer your email. Your concierge service is there to tell you a message has arrived for you, not to demand an immediate response.

Smartphones are incredible tools. I can use mine to identify a plant in seconds, see weather radar on my home screen, check my heart rate, send money to family within a minute, download and listen to podcasts, order goods (even my organic produce provider has an app, an excellent one), read a book and get the news. It will tell me when it’s going to rain and track my deliveries. Also I can use it to place telephone calls to people rather than buildings. It’s not for mitigating fleeting moments of “boredom.” Everything bad we say about phones now is pretty much everything bad we used to say about television: it’s just that phones have been made better at the bad stuff. Reconceive it as a tool in your pocket with many solutions that can lead to a better way of living. It’s your service. It works for you. Keep it that way. That’s all you need to do.

Me:

write me a 200 word article on the intersection of hauntology and comic books, using the comic book series INJECTION as an example

chat.openai:

The comic book series “Injection” is a prime example of the intersection of hauntology and comic books. Written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Declan Shalvey, “Injection” explores the idea of hauntology through a narrative that combines elements of science fiction, horror, and the supernatural.

The series follows a group of scientists who, in their attempts to save the world from environmental collapse, create a virus that infects the world with supernatural elements. This creates a haunting sense of loss and nostalgia, as the characters are forced to confront the fact that the world they once knew is no longer recognizable.

The use of retro-futuristic imagery in “Injection” is a key example of hauntology in comic books. The series often features archaic technology and archaic ideas of the future that are combined with elements of the supernatural. This creates a sense of the uncanny, as the characters are forced to confront a world that is both familiar and strange.

In addition to its exploration of hauntology, “Injection” is also a meditation on the theme of nostalgia and the dangers of attempting to reclaim the past. The series challenges the idea that the past was a simpler time and instead argues that it was a time of just as much chaos and confusion as the present.

In conclusion, the comic book series “Injection” is a prime example of the intersection of hauntology and comic books. Through its use of retro-futuristic imagery, exploration of the supernatural, and meditation on nostalgia and the dangers of the past, “Injection” challenges the reader to consider the relationship between the past, present, and future.

Me: That’s actually not terrible, in that it found the correct source and summarised it in a coldly pleasing way. I can imagine this tool generating first-draft solicitation/blurb text. It’s also repetitive and without any colour at all. It’s a similar experience to a search engine that actually understands your vague search string that tries to surround something you only half-remember. (That 2am “what was the film that I think had Actor X in and maybe a dog and it was in the 1980s maybe” search that actually produces the thing you were trying to recall).

I have three Kindles. One of them is a very old Kindle Fire 8 that I’d largely forgotten about. I charged it up today and discovered it still had an active subscription to THE WIRE magazine on it. This came as a surprise. I’ve been getting sloppy. I’ve stripped a few of the remaining apps off the device and am turning it into another dedicated reader rather than a multimedia tablet, and disabling any ability it might have to reach the web.

The other two are Kindle Paperwhites. One is so old that I have to charge the battery every couple of weeks, I have to reboot it once a month to clear the lag, and it can barely even reach the Kindle store. It lives in the bedroom, and I read from it before sleep every night. The other one is in the living room, and it hasn’t been picked up enough.

The battery is dying on my iPhone 8 and opening Chrome on it zaps 20% of its charge within a few minutes. The next time the phone company call me up to offer me a subsidised replacement, I’m probably going to have to take them up on it.

I have an old iPad 2 on a stand in the office that plays podcasts and is capable of literally nothing else.

(Correction: I discovered today that the old Panic Status Board app still sort of works!)

I only filled two Moleskine notebooks last year because I was composing on to the screen a lot and synthesising multiple documents to get the outcomes I needed.

Usually, the space between Xmas and New Year is the time I take to think about the coming year’s practise. I didn’t get that space this year because of family medical challenges. But right now I’m in the zone on DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT between us having cast all the roles and the point where all the paperwork gets done and we lock our recording dates. So I’m taking this time to think about the rest of the year. (January 22, actually, and I’ve also written and scheduled many of the posts appearing here this week.) I want to go deeper into what you might call Attenuated Digital.

My only active online presences are this place and my free weekly newsletter. I fully intend to keep it that way. No social media. no boards, no nothing. I want to read more and strictly control what comes in, and make the most of what I have.

I’m big into recycling stuff to use in the kitchen and garden. Recycling requires you be aware of what you already have and be aware of what’s coming into the house. You can’t just slip up and say “well, whoops, I haven’t read THE WIRE in two years but it turns out I had a subscription that wasn’t showing up anywhere else.” I’m interested in limited practical use cases for devices that turn down their temptation and heat – for example, I was fascinated when people turned old Kindles into glanceable information radiators. I’m wondering if, when my iPhone gets retired, I couldn’t convince it to be an always-on display showing the Breaking News app and clipping it to the side of my office monitor. (I do still have a bit of a news habit, that I’m slowly training myself back out of, but the idea of a headline dripfeed that bypasses social media has a pleasant sound.)

This year: recycling, going further “offline,” gardening inside and outdoors.

Jotter posts! For not fully baked writing and trying to get my thinking out in front of me so I can see it properly.

Previously: Going Analogue, Returning To Digital

Edited and updated version of Spring 2022 post.

I doubt this is useful to anyone but me, so I can see it in front of me, or those people like me who are generally interested in process and knowledge work. But, as of right now, this is how my days go:

I rise at the entirely arbitrary time of 10am. I immediately extract a double ristretto from a machine and sit in my back garden with my phone. I have already glanced at my lock screen to see if there are any emergency messages, and flicked it open to the home page to look at the weather, but that’s all.

I sit outside for the duration of two double ristrettos, with noise-cancelling earbuds in (we keep loud chickens who want to be fed), playing ambient music. I have to start the day softly and gently, scanning the overnight email and messages, and reading a topslice of the news on the phone.

Current news apps: BBC News, The Guardian, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Reuters, BreakingNews, AP, France24, DeutcheWelle, EuroNews and Deadline. Need to experiment with more, maybe take some off rotation.

I was telling someone the other year: I have become the old man who reads the papers in the morning and then watches the news analysis show on tv at night. The phone is now “the papers.” Alternately, I grab the Kindle and read some of a book. Sometimes I’ll just ignore the email. If I don’t get this quiet time to wake up properly and centre myself, the whole day is fucked.

After the coffee, the chickens are fed, and after that, the clock is ticking. I fill a water bottle, make another coffee, grab a jar of overnight oats (made with oat milk, a handful of frozen blueberries, plant-based protein powder and cacao powder) and go to the office.

First, I put music on: podcast, BBC Sounds, something from my CD collection, something I’ve been educating myself with on Amazon Music, whatever. Something I don’t need to fully focus on. I go through the overnight email and messages properly, and mark up the boards: Pending, Status, To-Do, Calls and the big one is whatever is immediately on deck to write. The two paintings were done by my daughter when she was very little, and the print is by Lordess Foudre.

I go through the RSS feeds and newsletters, and compose a morningcomputer post here to condense what I’ve learned that morning that I consider worth retaining and processing. So some days there isn’t one. And usually that’s the end of my news/novelty input for a while.

There’s no social media patrol or use here, no engagement with or management of the outside world. No intrusions. Organisation is simple and physical – marks on whiteboards and paper, as you can see. I put some visual noise on the big screen if I’m not using it for work, usually an art film or a landscape documentary, muted. I play music over the top.

No news. Once I’m done with the morningcomputer post, no new news enters my space. This has become very important to me. I’m no longer on social media, so I don’t have any intrusion from that whole thing, and access to my email is limited.

Organisation is simple and physical – marks on whiteboards and paper.

I work until I get hungry. I’ll watch something – a tv episode, part of a film – while eating lunch, which is either cold meats and flatbreads or salmon with vegetables or something with eggs. I keep it simple and repeatable. Also I have constant access to eggs, as mentioned above. At some point in the afternoon I’ll have an apple with walnuts and cheese. Eight espressos a day, two litres of water. I mention the food because the one thing productivity notes tend to forget is that thinking burns calories, and the first things to kill thinking are thirst and having no calories available to burn.

I do leave email on in the background at this point, and it pops the occasional notification in the bottom right hand of the screen. (Hi there, The Bloomberg Close.) I treat it like a stray thought in meditation – acknowledge it happened, let it pass, go back to what I was doing. It’s probably not ideal? But I’m still me, and still working on it.

Around 5pm, I down tools, go downstairs, pour a drink, and that’s it for a few hours. I’ll catch up with news, spend time with some of the longer articles, cook dinner and generally do nothing except make a few notes if I have a brainwave. Creating a hard break with work posture for a period.

But at 8pm I pick up tools – the notebook, the iPad, the ultralight ThinkPad Carbon X1 on a lapboard, and get back to it. Never continuing what I was doing in the office, but working on something different, thinking of something new or just emptying my head. If that’s not working, I’ll pick up the Kindle and read a book. Never wasted time. I’ll generally watch as much of Newsnight or Peston as I can stand, but I’m still writing. At midnight, I airplane and DND the phone, go to bed and read on the Kindle, making notes and highlights as I go, until 2am tops. I usually get through a book a week like that.

And that’s it. Sixteen hours on, eight hours off.

I wrote this for my newsletter, several weeks ago. I received many responses asking me to put the piece on a permanent web page. So here it is.

The other week, I ended with the sign-off: ” So do the thing that makes you smile, look after yourself, and I’ll see you next week.” Someone replied to me with: “Sadly, right now nothing makes me smile.”

I know a bit about that.

A while ago, someone else recommended to me a book about depression in men. It was the wrong time of year for me to want to pick up that book right then. I want to talk about that a bit, and to talk about the thing that makes you smile.

(ADDITION: per many requests, I add here the name of the book: MALE DEPRESSION by Terry Real.)

My dad worked on the factory floor for much of his life, but there was a period where he worked as a buyer for a timber firm. What we didn’t know at the time was that it was too much work – he was doing several peoples’ jobs at once. At home he was angry, stressed and distant, and I didn’t know why.

It was the habit to meet him at the door when he came home from work. For some reason, that day, I went to the front door alone, to open it when he got out of the car.

He didn’t get out of the car.

After what seemed like an age, I went out to the car to see what was going on. Inside the car, my dad was slumped over the steering wheel, half-conscious and crying hysterically. I got the car door open, and he didn’t even register I was there. I called for help and nobody came. I tried to pull him out of the car myself. I was eight, maybe nine years old.

I recently caught up on the second season of SLOW HORSES, still remarkably faithful to the Mick Herron books and featuring Gary Oldman looking and sounding uncannily like my old grandad.

The thing about my old grandad, my mum’s dad, was that he was insane. Everyone agreed that he came back from WW2 a different person, and he’d never ever talk about his experiences. I knew him as affectionate, very difficult, a little magical and a lot batshit.

Back in the Seventies, pubs would have big perspex display lanterns hung over lamps on the front of the building to advertise whichever beer owned or supplied the pub. Some were like olde-worlde lanterns, some were bloody great plastic cubes. Because it was the Seventies, Grandad had a home bar of sorts – basically just a long run of cabinets and shelves made out of pressed woodchip board and plastic faux-wood laminate. But he was happy with it. It just seemed, somehow, unfinished.

And then I was dropped off at their little house on a Saturday morning to see a giant perspex Bass beer cube=shaped lantern sign balanced on top of grandad’s home bar.

What you need to know here is two things. One, I was pretty sure the Spread Eagle on Rayleigh high street used to have one of those on the front. Two: Grandad was an ice cream man.

Which means he drove to the Spread Eagle in his big old ice cream van on a Friday night, got pissed, staggered out, looked up at the big red and white Bass sign, realised in a moment of hoppy epiphany that this would complete his cherished home bar, got in his van, drove around for a bit until the pub was vacated and the high street was quiet, parked up his van, climbed on top of it, lifted the sign, tied it to the top of the ice cream van and drove home at high speed.

So, if you are an older reader from the area, and for decades have been telling people of that haunting moment when you saw what appeared to be a mobile pub that also sold ice cream ripping down the Arterial Road at midnight… that was my grandad.

(Taken from a recent edition of my free weekly newsletter Orbital Operations, which you can read and subscribe to at this link here.)