Bonjour, I missed last week didn't I. I got up to a bunch of things this week. Managed to slip the first draft of a chapter on fiction, imagination and smart machines in just in time which is great. I write a lot about writing on here (and will probably do so again today) but I find myself cramming at the deadline, doing pretty well and wondering what would happen if I actually paced myself.
Which reminds me of the fact that I'm currently restructuring the enormous block of text that currently constitutes the insane ramblings and have finished thoughts of a PhD thesis. I made myself a target of 8 hours a week and so far I'm sticking to it. It is no way structurally or argumentatively sound and is basically 60,000 words of polemics. My transactional, strategic mindset is really struggling to comprehend or develop a structure or even how intellectual arguments work. Consequently, I'm returning to the advice which I give students; that reading makes us better writers and am trying to read a lot more. I've become much more disciplined at staying away from the YouTubes.
I gave a talk yesterday at Arup, who I used to work for, which was just a general scope of things I'm interested in and I find this quite a useful process in figuring out what a PhD might be about, but even then, it's still all incomprehensible rambling to me. I find myself looking for answers and some surety in the whole thing but the catch with 'reflexivity' is that every conversation of an intellectual nature we have just makes things more confusing. Is all this writing about writing just prevaricating?
I have to get back to more transactional things; books to balance, meetings to set up, documents to complete. I have an hour of time right now so I want to make the most of it.
I'll send better words next week, promise.
9.7.19 Something, Messidor, 227 (Microblogging and the self)
I didn’t blog last week. The last two weeks were a kind of perfect maelstrom of stuff and an endless domino rally of deadlines. I’m working from home today because there are no meetings and it is fascinating how much work I just got done in 2.5 hours which would normally take me the whole day in my office. So, I had time to think about what I’ve been thinking about and write about it here. It's also the reason why this post is dated 'something' since I'm not at my desk and don't have my French republic calendar to hand.
There’s no right answer. Every time a new platform pops up and folks start to migrate I kind of wonder if we haven't damaged online discourse to the point where it's irretrievable regardless of where it is. I’ve found my approach to Instagram much better and fulfilling. I can share events and activities which is part of being in practice but I also put up bits of my life. Documenting a lot of what I thought might be boring and unrelatable bicycle activities seems to have got a good response, I had emails or comments from folks who said they were learning stuff about mechanics or maintenance and that’s great. If it’s useful and I can share some of the stuff I’ve learned or figured out that’s cool. Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have as someone who is on the Internet. How do you reconcile all of this stuff?
This reminds me tangentially of a really great quote that Kristina Andersen introduced me to from The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente:
Have a great week!
Well-known Irish-based microblogging website Twitter dot com.
I was thinking about Twitter dot com yesterday. I know it’s a bit prosaic to have divided feelings about Twitter but I do. There’s different aspects to the way my personality engages here:- The player. The bit of me that is fully neuro-chemically bought into the content-creation-reward function of Twitter. The bit of it that is gamified like an RPG. You’re encouraged to grind away for likes and retweets and gain experience points as your followers. As a gamer this taps deeply into something that’s hard-wired in my elastic brain and I’m deeply and anxiously aware of in both online interaction and in my dangerous habit of slipping into gaming binges to get a kick.
- The networker. The bit that reminds you what Twitter was for, why you signed up and what you got out of it; where you’re connected with interesting people or ideas. This is the bit that is optimistic every time I open Tweetdeck that someone might have done a; ‘Hey Tobias, you might like this’ or ‘you should meet this person.’ This is also the bit where I get people IRL come up to me saying ‘I saw that thing you tweeted, thanks’ and I think that it’s worth it if it’s useful to people. I know it’s corny but I genuinely believe the connections I made on Twitter in the early 2010s were responsible for getting my career started. However this is all held back by…
- The doomsayer. This is the bit, that every time in a moment of idleness I open Tweetdeck growls ‘there is no joy to be found here.’ And it's right usually. It’s been years since anything on twitter made me joyful or laugh in a way that would have not been possible otherwise. On average its instrumental: I post what I’m up to, I share what some other people are up to and it’s like a bulletin board in a supermarket with no-one really engaging meaningfully. At worst it’s just a non-consensual hazing which by coincidence of being there you’re obligated to be grateful for. That and (and maybe it’s just my curation of my timeline) it’s anxiety-inducing stories of horror foretelling of the collapse of civilisation. In which case I’m divided again, because I don’t want to be complicit in turning away from knowing how others are suffering in the world.
There’s no right answer. Every time a new platform pops up and folks start to migrate I kind of wonder if we haven't damaged online discourse to the point where it's irretrievable regardless of where it is. I’ve found my approach to Instagram much better and fulfilling. I can share events and activities which is part of being in practice but I also put up bits of my life. Documenting a lot of what I thought might be boring and unrelatable bicycle activities seems to have got a good response, I had emails or comments from folks who said they were learning stuff about mechanics or maintenance and that’s great. If it’s useful and I can share some of the stuff I’ve learned or figured out that’s cool. Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have as someone who is on the Internet. How do you reconcile all of this stuff?
This reminds me tangentially of a really great quote that Kristina Andersen introduced me to from The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente:
First, you build the machine, then it tells you what it’s for. A machine is only a kind of magnet for attracting Use. That’s why we say things are Useful – because they are all full of the Use that chose them to perform itself. (Valente 2013)I should read more children's books.
Learning stuff
Since I’m increasingly valuing learning simple things and it gives me a much richer sense of progress and self-growth than followers or likes, I’ve decided to keep a note and make a section on things I’ve learned each week. These aren’t necessarily useful yet but I've found everything ends up being useful at some point. I don’t know, it might be nice to share?- On Google maps, the short description for Starbucks is ‘Seattle-based coffeehouse chain known for its signature roasts, light bites and WiFi availability.’ which I find cute.
- Despite being deep into French revolutionary history for a while (see titles of all recent posts) it was only this week that I connected Jacques-Louis David’s famous ‘Death of Marat’ (1793) (right) with the Jean-Paul Marat. I had a real ‘oooohhhhh that Marat’ moment when the connection was made thanks to some untraceable prompt which was nice.
- The length of sprocket teeth on bicycle parts have no real standards, despite the widths being pretty well standardised. They’re just a sort of best guess by the manufacturer. If you get your combination of parts wrong you can end up with a really noisy drive because the teeth stay in the gaps in the chain as the chain releases form the cog, essentially trying to continue pulling the chain with it. This is the source of the Bad Noises my new bike has been making and quite frustrating as there’s little guidance, just guesswork and it creates quite a bit of resistance.
Channel recommendation
Here’s a real quick (and bicycle related one). Since I’m sinewy and whippet-like it turns out I’m actually a real good climber as I’ve found from training round Richmond Park and doing Box Hill in Surrey the other weekend. Sprinting is bit harder than trudging up hill so I looked round for info and found this cool little series from State Bicycle Company. It’s a kind of interview format where they interview pro riders (usually with a good sense of humour) while riding fixed uphill. There’s a lot of speculation on the Tour de France in the later ones, some of which is… prescient. Anyway, I like them, enjoy.Have a great week!
20.3.19 Equinox (Plantoir, Ventose, 227)
Bring out your dead.
I ended up talking about blogging a lot recently. It seems it just won’t die. Some students I was supervising said they really enjoyed my blog and I was kind of shocked. I just use it to update people on what I’m up to rather than anything intellectual and then I was speaking to Nicolas Nova about it and the value of writing etc. All of this stuff is like canon for creatives and academics but it don’t make it fun. As I’ve said before I don’t particularly enjoy reading or writing. I always see a value in it and get myself in a good flow but I don’t ever relish it. I like video games and YouTube. Maybe I can share a channel I’ve been watching a lot recently with each blog? Ok new feature.
*Interruption* Channel Recommendation
I was holed up ill a few weeks ago and the recommendation algorithm started pushing up car restoration things. i don’t mind admitting that I like cars, I think some are really beautiful objects and they’re mechanically interesting. This was after a stint of videos on the science of Formula 1 which were fucking fascinating. Anyway, I found this guy - B is for Build - who restores and modifies cars in his garage and I just really like him. He has a positive attitude, doesn’t show off or make a big fuss, does some really good evaluating of the problems he’s facing, how he’s making decisions about stuff and considering what he wants to achieve. It feels very much like being in a design project, with him discussing his process with us and reflecting on the lessons he’s learning. Plus you get to learn about different bits of a car and how it all fits together. It’s not demanding and the time lapses make me sleepy which is a bonus when you’re sick. So check it out if it sounds interesting, I’d recommend watching the playlists as you can see a whole build evolve.
*resuming*
So anyway, I’ve decided to keep a record of thoughts and things as the week goes by and then try and publish at least once a month and maybe no-one reads it but then it stops things I would just say to myself in the kitchen disappearing into the ether.
It’s also hard to know what to say on here and Twitter dot com. I’m in positions where I’m responsible for a lot of plans and people’s work and it’s not that there’s much that’s secret but it’s either only relevant to a handful of people or it’s just a bit sensitive and I like keeping people’s confidence.
Bring back the dead.
I’ve decided to bring back Ongoing Collapse. I decided a while ago when I got the domain notification and people keep mentioning it or asking what happened to it. What happened was that it was really badly built when I didn’t know what I was doing (I still don’t) and used some dodgy CRON to PHP scraper to SQL database to browser pipeline which hardly ever worked and was completely unmanageable. Anyway, the maintenance got to be too much and I flogged off to some other folks who passed it around like a vintage car that needs twice its value in repairs and it ended up back in my lap.
So this morning I was thinking in the shower about how I’m going to rebuild the interface with gnarly D3 or P5 stuff and build a custom API (so that others can use it if they want) and hope for the best. I’ll try and document as I go as I don’t really know what I’m doing and my Stack Overflow profile is already trash. I was kind of inspired by hanging out with Joana Moll a bit recently (she’s great) and remembering what it was like when we all just used to make little browser-based experiments. I can’t promise a deadline as there’s a couple coming up and I reckon theres a solid week of work to do but maybe by the end of April it’s up and running again.
What I need from you is new references to bits of data - doesn’t matter whether they’re APIs, websites, whatever, anything I can scrape and any tips you might have on building good working APIs. As with the old Ongoing Collapse I really want it to keep rolling. Last time people sent in bits of data they wanted to see and I did my best to find them. Any tips on a good pipeline to scrape data, keep an ongoing record of it (say, daily) and then publish that to a browser would be A+.
Book
I don’t know if I told you, I’m co-authoring a book with some colleagues. We’ve been doing it since 2015(!) and are in the final stretch. One of my co-authors had a bebe which gives us some deadline leniency but I’ve spent a lot of this week going over chapters. It’s actually pretty good. I always have that thing when I do any project that I hate it at first and then you look back and it’s like ‘you know what, that was pretty good.’ So yeah, it’s pretty good. Just hope the editor agrees.
Impakt videos
Impakt, who as you know are my favourite media arts organisation, have published videos from the mini-festival held at the beginning of March. I did a talk for them about interfaces which was bringing a couple of things together. I did a summary of how future interfaces are shown in science fiction, pivoting into the magic and Haunted Machines stuff and then drawing them together with Harry Potter and how magic is visualised in that. It was one of those talks where things that you’ve been working with for a while kind of come together quite neatly. Anyway, check it out.
I also moderated a panel which was quite interesting. It began with a performance from Marianna Maruyama which was brilliant. Well worth watching, really funny and clever. I definitely want to get her involved in some future things. And I met Veronika from Ars Electronica who I’ve emailed with a bunch of times and never met, she was lovely. Impakt just has a real knack for finding funny, interesting and good-humoured people. I love those guys.
What else
I’m driving up to see my parents this weekend which is cheaper and easier than train travel and it feels like a cop out but the last few weeks have been a bit of a drag and me and Santo need to have a mini (and quite sedate) adventure. I haven’t had a drink fifty-two days today (and consequently no cigarettes or late-night taxi rides). It got to a point before Christmas where I was just looking forward to drinking every day and spending crazy money on food, alcohol, cigarettes, taxis. I’m not going to bang on about it but I’m pretty cheery that I just cold-turkey'd something that I knew was just going to balloon into a bigger problem and was at the root of a lot of other things I was unhappy with like being cranky all the time, getting bad sleep, eating like shit, never exercising and spending too much money.
Oh yeah
I also decided to do a render each week. No promises. I used to do digital sketches which are a bit more intensive to set up whole animations but an image is probably manageable. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I make up weird settings and try and imagine what they’d be like. One of them is the inside of a hemisphere that’s a desert and I try to imagine the horizon to go to sleep. So I thought I’d try and actually visualise it.
Set up as two spheres, one inside the other, one as light source one as surface, flip the normals so the surfaces face in and then subdivide. Three times seems to work, more than that was getting strange striations in the texture.
Ok I can't get it to work in time today. making the texture work at that scale crashes Blender. No render today! Good start!
I ended up talking about blogging a lot recently. It seems it just won’t die. Some students I was supervising said they really enjoyed my blog and I was kind of shocked. I just use it to update people on what I’m up to rather than anything intellectual and then I was speaking to Nicolas Nova about it and the value of writing etc. All of this stuff is like canon for creatives and academics but it don’t make it fun. As I’ve said before I don’t particularly enjoy reading or writing. I always see a value in it and get myself in a good flow but I don’t ever relish it. I like video games and YouTube. Maybe I can share a channel I’ve been watching a lot recently with each blog? Ok new feature.
*Interruption* Channel Recommendation
I was holed up ill a few weeks ago and the recommendation algorithm started pushing up car restoration things. i don’t mind admitting that I like cars, I think some are really beautiful objects and they’re mechanically interesting. This was after a stint of videos on the science of Formula 1 which were fucking fascinating. Anyway, I found this guy - B is for Build - who restores and modifies cars in his garage and I just really like him. He has a positive attitude, doesn’t show off or make a big fuss, does some really good evaluating of the problems he’s facing, how he’s making decisions about stuff and considering what he wants to achieve. It feels very much like being in a design project, with him discussing his process with us and reflecting on the lessons he’s learning. Plus you get to learn about different bits of a car and how it all fits together. It’s not demanding and the time lapses make me sleepy which is a bonus when you’re sick. So check it out if it sounds interesting, I’d recommend watching the playlists as you can see a whole build evolve.
*resuming*
So anyway, I’ve decided to keep a record of thoughts and things as the week goes by and then try and publish at least once a month and maybe no-one reads it but then it stops things I would just say to myself in the kitchen disappearing into the ether.
It’s also hard to know what to say on here and Twitter dot com. I’m in positions where I’m responsible for a lot of plans and people’s work and it’s not that there’s much that’s secret but it’s either only relevant to a handful of people or it’s just a bit sensitive and I like keeping people’s confidence.
Bring back the dead.
I’ve decided to bring back Ongoing Collapse. I decided a while ago when I got the domain notification and people keep mentioning it or asking what happened to it. What happened was that it was really badly built when I didn’t know what I was doing (I still don’t) and used some dodgy CRON to PHP scraper to SQL database to browser pipeline which hardly ever worked and was completely unmanageable. Anyway, the maintenance got to be too much and I flogged off to some other folks who passed it around like a vintage car that needs twice its value in repairs and it ended up back in my lap.
So this morning I was thinking in the shower about how I’m going to rebuild the interface with gnarly D3 or P5 stuff and build a custom API (so that others can use it if they want) and hope for the best. I’ll try and document as I go as I don’t really know what I’m doing and my Stack Overflow profile is already trash. I was kind of inspired by hanging out with Joana Moll a bit recently (she’s great) and remembering what it was like when we all just used to make little browser-based experiments. I can’t promise a deadline as there’s a couple coming up and I reckon theres a solid week of work to do but maybe by the end of April it’s up and running again.
What I need from you is new references to bits of data - doesn’t matter whether they’re APIs, websites, whatever, anything I can scrape and any tips you might have on building good working APIs. As with the old Ongoing Collapse I really want it to keep rolling. Last time people sent in bits of data they wanted to see and I did my best to find them. Any tips on a good pipeline to scrape data, keep an ongoing record of it (say, daily) and then publish that to a browser would be A+.
Book
I don’t know if I told you, I’m co-authoring a book with some colleagues. We’ve been doing it since 2015(!) and are in the final stretch. One of my co-authors had a bebe which gives us some deadline leniency but I’ve spent a lot of this week going over chapters. It’s actually pretty good. I always have that thing when I do any project that I hate it at first and then you look back and it’s like ‘you know what, that was pretty good.’ So yeah, it’s pretty good. Just hope the editor agrees.
Impakt videos
Impakt, who as you know are my favourite media arts organisation, have published videos from the mini-festival held at the beginning of March. I did a talk for them about interfaces which was bringing a couple of things together. I did a summary of how future interfaces are shown in science fiction, pivoting into the magic and Haunted Machines stuff and then drawing them together with Harry Potter and how magic is visualised in that. It was one of those talks where things that you’ve been working with for a while kind of come together quite neatly. Anyway, check it out.
I also moderated a panel which was quite interesting. It began with a performance from Marianna Maruyama which was brilliant. Well worth watching, really funny and clever. I definitely want to get her involved in some future things. And I met Veronika from Ars Electronica who I’ve emailed with a bunch of times and never met, she was lovely. Impakt just has a real knack for finding funny, interesting and good-humoured people. I love those guys.
What else
I’m driving up to see my parents this weekend which is cheaper and easier than train travel and it feels like a cop out but the last few weeks have been a bit of a drag and me and Santo need to have a mini (and quite sedate) adventure. I haven’t had a drink fifty-two days today (and consequently no cigarettes or late-night taxi rides). It got to a point before Christmas where I was just looking forward to drinking every day and spending crazy money on food, alcohol, cigarettes, taxis. I’m not going to bang on about it but I’m pretty cheery that I just cold-turkey'd something that I knew was just going to balloon into a bigger problem and was at the root of a lot of other things I was unhappy with like being cranky all the time, getting bad sleep, eating like shit, never exercising and spending too much money.
Oh yeah
I also decided to do a render each week. No promises. I used to do digital sketches which are a bit more intensive to set up whole animations but an image is probably manageable. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I make up weird settings and try and imagine what they’d be like. One of them is the inside of a hemisphere that’s a desert and I try to imagine the horizon to go to sleep. So I thought I’d try and actually visualise it.
Set up as two spheres, one inside the other, one as light source one as surface, flip the normals so the surfaces face in and then subdivide. Three times seems to work, more than that was getting strange striations in the texture.
Ok I can't get it to work in time today. making the texture work at that scale crashes Blender. No render today! Good start!
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