This has been sitting in my Bandcamp wishlist for a while, as a reminder to one day seek out the supposed 2CD release. I find something human and organic and timebound in electronic music of this era: the quality of the sound locates it in a specific place and time, it speaks of human hands operating instruments which were not yet fully understood to be instruments. I can hear motes of dust in the air.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Hunkering down for the cold snap. But it does look right now like I can start sowing seeds by Sunday at the latest. Finally. So I expect to spend Sunday burying cat shit and rebuilding the beds and beginning to put drifts of seeds down in the planned pollinator/wildlife-highway area.
ON DECK: Scripting!
INBOX: 47. I have a phoner tonight so I will drop out of email monitoring at some point
LISTENING: Just Night Tracks right now
READING: almost finished that giant book on the Modernist novel
SHIPPING FORECAST: Pretty sure I scheduled a couple of things to go out today.
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.
As you can see, a very ordinary, small, town garden. And an axe. Which I got for Christmas, and which I had to use to hack through thick, buried wisteria vine running under the western bed.
I got paid last week. I discovered a few months back that buying dormant fruit trees at this time of year is surprisingly cheap. So I have some apple trees incoming, ones that I can raise in containers. I’ve slowly been building a small stock of fruit trees, even as I raise other plants from seed. The soil is fucked. There’s no drainage, either. And, as my daughter’s partner pointed out, there is probably more salt in the air from the Thames Estuary than I, as a lifelong resident, actually notice. I’ve been amending the soil at the back western corner, behind the axe there, to start a pollinator/wildlife-highway section, and I’ll have to do something similar at the front end. I am determined that by summer this garden will be producing food.
I once read an interview with Jon J Muth where he talked about having his and his friends’ kids cover a wall with random messy marks, which he then considered the under-painting for a new mural, taking inspiration from the marks he had to work with. I consider my long-neglected garden in a similar way.
(Apparently I wrote this on Jan 30 and never posted it)
I see my creative process as a two-part thing: there’s the idea and the actual creation process itself. My habit is to always keep “ideas” in stock. I have a notebook (music notation paper) that I carry with me all the time and there’s also a folder on my PC with snippets of audio. So I try to keep a log of “ideas” to be used as a spark for a creative process. Sometimes using an idea that’s 15+ years old (and I can’t quite recall where that came from) takes me to unexpected places. I guess this habit made me avoid the “Blank Page Syndrome” for ages…
And that is about as warm as it’s going to get. We have a cold snap coming in, and a snow warning. We had some rain early this morning, but apparently not enough to activate the bulbs I planted in containers months ago.
ON DECK: script polishes, follow-ups, phone conference prep.
INBOX: 47. I have a few emails to follow up on, too.
LISTENING: Radio 3 In Concert, but what’s stuck in my head is “Envy” by Ash. And “I’ll Never Be” by Chemtrails.
READING: Read the TLS before sleep.
LAST WATCHED: REVISOR by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, which had me scribbling furiously in a notebook, as it concretised some visual-media ideas I’ve been playing with over the last few years. Brilliant.
Erin Lawlor, gallery partway down.
A new simulation shows how NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will turn back the cosmic clock, unveiling the evolving universe in ways that have never been possible before when it launches by May 2027. With its ability to rapidly image enormous swaths of space, Roman will help us understand how the universe transformed from a primordial sea of charged particles to the intricate network of vast cosmic structures we see today.
I could have called this post Swarmalators!
In 2014, Cornell researchers first introduced a simple model of swarmalators—short for “swarming oscillator”—where particles self-organize to synchronize in both time and space. In the study, “Diverse Behaviors in Non-uniform Chiral and Non-chiral Swarmalators,” which published Feb. 20 in the journal Nature Communications, they expanded this model to make it more useful for engineering microrobots; to better understand existing, observed biological behaviors; and for theoreticians to experiment in this field.
Or, indeed, Stone Of Stars:
St. Andrew’s Cathedral was believed to be haunted as early as 1890. Construction had only just begun on the new cathedral, when a lone gunman shot and killed an innocent man—David Fee—as Christmas Eve Mass was letting out. According to court records, during the subsequent trial, the defendant’s lawyer argued that his client had mistaken David Fee for “a ghost.”
I just found this story buried at the bottom of my email – seems I sent myself the link at some point.
It wasn’t long before Francis Fuller—the Irishman—began to demonstrate symptoms of “insanity.” By today’s standards, Fuller would have likely been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He heard voices, for example, saying that his travel companions were part of a conspiracy to kill him. When the French labourer disappeared, the priests believed that he had simply become tired of Fuller’s increasing instability. In later years, reporters would speculate that he might have been Fuller’s first victim.
Bishop Seghers believed he could control Fuller, despite the concerns of the other priests. Frustrated with the situation, the bishop sent the priests on a side mission while he and Fuller carried on with three First Nation guides. One of the guides left the party at a trading station. The remaining members continued on their way. Fuller began to act more and more erratic.
On the morning of November 28, 1886, Fuller shot Bishop Seghers through the heart as he leaned over to gather his gear. The man died instantly in front of the two horrified guides. Fuller immediately began to act even more bizarre, shaking one of the guide’s hands while expressing to them that “the man” needed to be killed. The guides wrapped up the body and left to get help with Fuller accompanying them willingly.
The party reached the village that day. No one knew what to do with Fuller. He wasn’t immediately incarcerated, but was instead sent to another village for the winter, away from two local white women who had expressed “terror” at being in his presence. Fuller continued to act strangely over the duration of the winter, apparently changing his story as to what had happened several times.