I needed a new belt in a shade of brown, to match the brown straps on two watches I’ve recently bought. Just for the hell of it, I added “vintage” to the search string on eBay, simply to see if it threw up anything interesting. This showed up, a Sergio Cerruti Roma leather piece. It’s from the 1990s.
Vintage. 1990s.
I need to go and lie down.
OPERATIONS: yesterday was an utter clusterfuck, so today is all scripting STATUS:
Made an ice cream base using 300ml of coconut cream, as I’m still trying to create dark chocolate Bounty ice cream. Missed it last night – touched it with cacao to bring the dark up, and covered the coconut. Experiments will continue. Tonight I will be essaying a cherry sorbet.
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: rewatched MEGALOPOLIS
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Well, the heatwave is here. Today is linen trousers, thin socks and one of the 100% cotton popover tops I get from from a manufacturer in Tibet, which are remarkably durable.
Today begins a much less connected season, in a way. I managed to read the top ends of four newspapers and four news/magazine sites this morning. (If anyone’s keeping up, the current stack is: The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Economist, BBC News, Politico and Foreign Policy.) I am gathering up the print objects that have gone unread so far this year, and last night I started catching up with the Times Literary Supplement and The Wire after I squeezed a litre of organic orange juice. (The Zulay (UK) (US+) is the best squeezer I’ve ever had.)
The honest response to all this, for someone like me, isn’t to write a manifesto. It is to build something small, and then to use it, and then to invite a few other people to use it, and to see what happens. Not a revolution. A tree.
That is what Tuhat is. Tuhat is Finnish for one thousand, and the rule is exactly that — every post must be at least a thousand words. No notes. No threads. No hot takes. No algorithm sorting writers into winners and losers based on how often they post or how spicy their headlines are. You get a page at tuhat.net/u/you, and your readers find you the old fashioned way, through a URL, an RSS feed, or an email subscription you actually own and can export as a CSV.
The constraint is the point. A thousand words is enough room to make an argument, tell a story properly, or sit with something difficult without rushing to a punchline. It is also enough friction that nobody publishes here for the dopamine of it. If you don’t have something you genuinely want to say, you won’t bother. That is by design.
John Coulthart:
a further evolution of a form of digital drawing I’ve been developing, a process in which you draw a portion of the picture then copy and paste it to a new layer, distort it slightly using one of Photoshop’s Distort filters, then draw over and around the new section until it blends seamlessly with the rest. This has the effect of creating unpredictable forms that underly the work as a whole, rather like the Surrealist techniques of frottage, grattage, decalcomania and so on. The Surrealist processes were all the product of physical materials but the impulse is the same whatever technique you may use: the introduction of a random element that might evade the conscious input of the artist and the habitual strokes made by the drawing hand.
However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.
OPERATIONS: am behind. STATUS:
I have taken my FitBit off, because the app was “updated” to Google Health and now it hallucinates bicycles.
I have just taken delivery of two cases of ale from Williams Bros brewery and a case of wine from Flint Vineyard. Flint is a Norfolk vineyard that makes an exceptional sparkling, and William Bros is the home of the Fraoch heather ale and a remarkable summer ale called Birds And Bees.
Four phone calls before noon suggests that this is going to be a difficult day for focus.
READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) LISTENING: SUPER-HEAVY HAMOAZIAN REVERIE, Urthona LAST WATCHED: SCARFACE (1983), because you always drop the remote when SCARFACE comes on. Also, THE RUNNING MAN (2025), and finished watching THE BOYS, and did two episodes of British period crime show LEGENDS. DRINK: found a 25 year old Lagavulin in the back of the cupboard
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I have had an incredibly unproductive week so far, at a very bad time in my schedule to be out of juice, so I am taking the long bank holiday weekend to get back on track and reset and prepare. I need to get sixty pages out, reply to a ton of emails and messages, deal with a shedload of life stuff, put the fucking phone down for a while and actually get around to finalising and enacting my small plans for this website.
Today is St Helena’s day, patron saint of archaeologists.
OPERATIONS: ALL THE THINGS STATUS: inbox 175, rss 1000, everything is out of control READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
By Christmas 1975, the CIA’s optimism about the broad political situation in the Middle East was accompanied by a relatively sanguine view of the threat from terrorism too. The December edition of its monthly summary of international threats ended with an unusual warning. On the night of the 24th of the month, the agency said, a ‘new organisation of uncertain makeup using the name The Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge’ was planning ‘to sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole’. Security precautions were being co-ordinated worldwide and the ‘prime minister [of the North Pole] and chief courier S. Claus had been notified’.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Annoyingly, this is just a quick logging, as I lost yesterday to trying to figure out new accounting software I’ve been told to use which doesn’t seem to want to work for me, inbox is at 160, I have three unopened packages, and I’m a few days behind on work production.
So on Saturday afternoon I went to the Jazz Centre to see blues guitarist Chris Corcoran play.
And on Saturday evening I went to Konsztrukting Soundz, which I’m going to try and note in a separate post at some point, but one of the performers was harpist Rhodri Davies:
Accessions:
Rhodri Davies was selling CDs, and I noticed the Eliane Radigue piece he and his sister played on that I discovered online in January, and grabbed his TELYN RAWN at the same time.
I spent last night looking at cheap vintage watches on eBay. Usually I come up empty – nice things that I don’t necessarily want to spend the asking price on, or broken junk. Turned up some fascinating things in my self-imposed price bracket last night. Expensive watches are nice, but the fun for me is in finding a bargain-priced weird thing I have never seen before that I love. The watch has to say something to me. There’s a terribly beaten-up 80-year-old Swiss watch I have a bid on, just because something about its design spoke to me. And here’s the thing about 80-year-old Swiss watches – they still work.
“Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax” – by which they mean certain very successful paid newsletter operations have noticed Substack takes 10% of subscription fees to run a business that is otherwise free to use
Politics in Britain has returned to high psychodrama, the kind you normally find in failing states.
Just noticed I haven’t set the date window on this watch! 8C with a feels-like of 4C, which explains the pain in my hands and wrists this morning, and the sky to the east has turned black.
Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on April 1, mechatronics engineer Rodrigo Trevisan Okamoto received confirmation he had been waiting for since the Artemis 2 mission was announced in 2023. The email from NASA stated that the crew of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century would carry a device developed by Okamoto and his team at Condor Instruments, a São Paulo-based startup.
“The NASA announcement was sudden and caught us by surprise. And it was only after the mission concluded that we learned the astronauts had been using the equipment in tests for the past two years,” Okamoto told Agência FAPESP.
The device, called an actigraph, is shaped like a wristwatch and incorporates accelerometers, as well as light and temperature sensors, to precisely map the user’s sleep and wake patterns over the course of days or weeks.
In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, colleagues at Cornell University, published “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature as part of the emerging field of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.3 Recognizing the spin-flip resonance frequency of hydrogen and noting the ubiquity of the element throughout the cosmos, they deduced that other technologically advanced civilizations would similarly attempt to transmit messages on what they termed “the hydrogen line.” In effect, the scientists had identified a pre-civilizational cosmic commons: the hydrogen envelope enshrouding the Big Bang’s host of celestial bodies, cosmic detritus, and all potentially existing lifeforms beyond planet Earth—an open field for interstellar communication held in common before any civilization arrived to claim it.
The 1420 MHz band is now protected by international convention, reserved strictly for the reception of potential transmissions and restricted from commercial or terrestrial use. The hydrogen line is thus shuttered to the appropriations of what Bataille terms “the restricted economy.”4 In our secular scientific world, the hydrogen line serves as the part of the frequency spectrum humanity holds open for contact with inhuman realms…
You notice the anxious darting of his eyes, then the makeup: thick, chalky concealer layered over skin that looks irritated, acne ridden and painful underneath it. His content team trails him carrying bright portable lights, but he doesn’t speak to them like a boss or even a collaborator. He speaks to them like an insecure thirteen-year-old midway through a panic attack: rapid little bursts about how the angle is wrong, how his skin looks bad, how he’s not even talking to the right people.
Within thirty minutes he’s completely withdrawn, sitting alone at the edge of a banquet, scrolling on his phone. Every few seconds his face twitches slightly, tiny repetitive tics perhaps a side effect of the chemical cocktail he’s on.
I had no desire to speak to him. I watched several girls try, only for Clavicular to speak about them while they were still standing there, openly complaining to his entourage that the interactions weren’t interesting enough to clip into content.
Before I leave I glance over Clavicular’s shoulder to see what he’s scrolling on.
No surprise: himself.
He flips between platforms checking views with total concentration, pausing at different uploads like a trader monitoring stock performance.
STATUS: spring is apparently on pause, and this week has turned into a cluster – lost yesterday to plumbing issues that cost me five hundred quid, the day after I said, we’ve got a little money, let’s go out to that very expensive restaurant on Friday… READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
At dawn, he walked a short distance to a stream to wash. He had just knelt to splash water on his face when a tremendous blast of hot air flattened him among the rocks. When he recovered his senses, staring upwards, he saw the afterburners of two Israeli F-4 Phantom jets disappearing into the sky and, very close to him, a small green lizard that he would remember for the rest of his life. Apart from cuts and bruises, a bloodied forehead and singed hair, Ekberg was unhurt. As he staggered back, unable to hear anything other than the ringing in his ears, he saw men running and gesticulating, a severed leg on the ground, what looked like entrails caught on tree branches. Fires were burning among the trees and the air smelt of roast meat, cordite and faeces.
Another cold snap. Had to take a rootbound acer out of a pot yesterday and plant it in the ground, sowed some seeds around it, so of course I woke up today to discover the local wildlife turned over the ground and tried to dig the acer out.
I think looping and iteration are very much a part of the creative process. Often I find myself starting with a feeling or an idea. I know I want to get to a place and then it’s just a matter of putting in the time, the thought, and the effort until I get there. You can be looping and looping, and then sometimes you’ll have a conversation with a friend, or you’ll encounter new ideas about technology while you’re working, and that’s what kicks off new ideas. Maybe you’re running a lot of loops simultaneously and they’re all informing each other—so it’s not so much a closed, but expansive system. I don’t think of loops as a trap.
OPERATIONS: dev day. Too many half-finished ideas and outlines hanging STATUS: running all the damn heaters in the middle of May READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
…when Timothy Leary, the counterculture icon who advocated the use of hallucinogenic drugs, wanted to travel to Jordan he was rudely rebuffed.
Yesterday was a braindrain day, so my plan is to mostly check out for the next couple of days and just get Sunday’s newsletter done. New material coming in that newsletter.
READING:HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+)
