Another busy week. It’s about to get cold here again after a really mild end to the month. I was outside in just a shirt last night!
In the immortal words of the Postal Service “Now we can swim any day in November
Retreat to Recalibrate
Back in 2021, I embarked on a “word diet”. It was a deliberate, almost ascetic effort to radically reduce my media consumption for a while. At the time, I was grappling with the fallout of the lockdown years, especially the doomscrolling habits I’d picked up in 2020. At the time I was thinking a lot about boundaries—specifically, how to set time for “doing” and “not doing.” I remember coming out of it quite refreshed.
Going into December this year, there is A LOT of ‘doing‘ to be done still and I find myself drawn to that idea again. So I’m considering another “word diet”. This time, though, I think I might step away from the Dark Forest for a bit too. Apart from work purposes (which is time bound) this means not being present in the Discord or Slack communities I frequent and regularly contribute to. So won’t be hanging out in the usual communities or dipping into the ongoing chatter. It feels necessary—a retreat to recalibrate.
I have all my DM’s across all the social networks and Chat apps pipped into Beeper anyway so I don’t actually need to have the apps open. So I’ll still be responsive to people messaging directly if you need me.
As for reading, I also plan to restrict myself to my RSS “favourites” folder. This list is almost exclusively made up of people I know, personal blogs and posts from individuals—real people, not websites optimised for clicks and engagement. Hopefully I will experience an intimate and intentional internet.
As part of the broader “media diet” I’ve also decided to set YouTube aside for the month too. YouTube has been a cornerstone of my media consumption for 15 or 16 years, especially since I don’t watch TV shows or films. But lately, I’ve found myself unsubscribing from channels and watching less and less anyways. So this December might be the nudge I need to finally sever my reliance on it.
This whole exercise is – in part – prompted by the rise in Bluesky and the wider changes to social media, and my own reaction to it. I’m just beyond exhausted by it all. I just need a break.
Marshall McLuhan famously argued that new media technologies don’t just change what we think but how we think. After 20 years of pickling my brain in rich media and real-time updates, I can feel the toll its taken. This diet is an attempt to debug myself.
This is, of course, just another attempt at ‘Stepping away from noise‘, and another front in the ‘Conflict of Disinterest’.
I’ll just be posting here, replying to emails and DM’s if you need me.
On The Blog:
In the Storm, a Fire
Quite a big drop OTB this week. ADH and I co-published our 2020 BSFA long listed Solarpunk short story In the Storm, a Fire. If you have 40mins or so to spare – check it out.
The fire looked recent. The storm must have doused the flames just too late. Chani pulled her bike to a stop, smelling soggy ash, hanging in the breathless air. She could see charred pews, hymnal pages scattered by the wind. A porcelain-white Jesus looked mournfully out of the wreckage.
The Catholic church—was “Catholic” still right?—stood just outside urban Boise. Chani walked around the blackened beams, interrupting the hazy sky like the ribcage of a giant, burnt beast—then stopped short. On the picket fence, graffiti scrawled red and black: “JEZ LOVER” on one side of the gate, “BABY KILLER” on the other.
“On no…” Chani said.
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Final edit pass on 3k’s worth of essay
- Short call and 1 writing sprint on PROJECT FORK
- A call about PROJECT DIVE and renewed sense of urgency.
- PROJECT ENTRY: Monthly Report, Monthly meeting with funder, Full stream a head for next funding milestone.
- Replied to lots of nice emails to my contact inbox.
Terminal Access
Really enjoyed a recent missive from Gordon in his post blog incarnation over at Substack on ‘Advanced People Never Don’t Do The Basics’. If you have any kind of spiritual practice it’s well worth a read:
Hormozi’s framing is perfect because it retains the appeal or pull towards mastery. Without that frame, ‘starting with the basics’ sounds like ‘eat your vegetables’ or ‘you can go out play when you are done with your homework’. The basics are not just something you thunder through as fast as possible in order to get to the ‘good’ stuff. Advanced people do not progress from basic to advanced activities. They may add advanced activities to basic activities they always do.
Dipping the Stacks
Perhaps that is why the new swears are so popular in political discourse on social media, where people tend to speak to an imagined audience rather than to each other. We talk about how bitterly divided our politics have become, which is weird, because it seems like none of the parties involved are actually at odds
“They Built World: A Boyhood in Graphic Design” by Gilbert
For all its absorbing graphic laboriousness, White Dwarf would instil a doubtful disaffection in my younger self.
The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing
How ’90s webzines heralded the best — and worst — of today’s online media landscape.
Musk is still demonstrably able to use the media’s desperation for objectivity against them, knowing that they would never dare combine thinking about stuff with reporting on stuff for fear that someone might say they have “bias” in their “coverage.”
Self-Publishing’s Output and Influence Continue to Grow
Of course, just how much of self-publishing’s growing output translates to sales is hard to determine. But industry observers estimate that annual sales of self-published is in the billions of dollars.
Reading
I finally finished reading: Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J Silvio. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in ages. The book explores how the concept of animation permeates various aspects of Taiwanese culture and folk religion, and how the words and concepts bleed across into modern media and consumerism via traditional puppetry. Animation in the broadest sense in this book is the process of endowing objects, deities, and even brands with life and agency. SO GOOD.
I was convinced by the group chat to read Exordia by Seth Dickinson. it was pitched to me as: “Tom Clancy/Alien first contact/Cosmic Horror” and “What if Annihilation was about the Trolly Problem Meme”. Both these descriptions are highly accurate. Haven’t been able to put it down.
Still reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, and Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and the Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Still a lot on deck. Should finish all this pile by the end of the year.
Music
Agent Elf – Lost In Control
I don’t know if anyone reading ever played Midnight Club Los Angeles on Xbox back in the day.
If you did, you will definitely know the song:
Amazingly, they played a one off 15 year reunion show yesterday and it was wild.
Now, they are buddies of mine – in fact two of them are in my band but it was cool to see them do their thing – what they were all about in their early 20’s. I only saw them once back in the day. In 2008 or something shortly before the broke up.
Remember Kids:
Innovation and subversion in this period grew with the stridence of Gygax’s orthodoxy
The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson
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