Patreon February Update #tuttle

February 29, 2016 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

I just wrote this for the lovely people who support #tuttle with a regular donation every month. If you’d like to be part of the gang, head over to patreon.com

Hi Patrons! Thank you again for your support this month.

We’re still going strong at Z/Yen every Friday morning, it’s given us a slightly different flavour being in the City and we get drop-ins who we may well not have been able to attract on the Southbank. It’s less convenient for some of course but overall I think we’re doing well. Michael has invited us to stick around for another month so we’ll be there till the end of April.

This month I ran a couple of Open Spaces with Helen at the WeWork Southbank offices. We looked at “What are we going to do about…” for Artificial Intelligence and for the Internet of Things. It’s good to see these conversations moving on. We have a bunch of regulars who are tiring of just talking about things abstractly and wondering what they can actually do. Great!

As commercial opportunities seem to be knocking more frequently on Friday mornings, I’ve relaunched a Slack Channel for us to talk about such things in semi-privacy and try to revitalise the Tuttle Consulting offer. I’d like to be doing more work under the Tuttle umbrella, with the lovely smart people I already know, so if you’re interested in taking part in this, just let me know and I’ll pop you an invitation.

I’ve also enjoyed going to other people’s things this month. The John McDonnell MP, New Economics series continued with a panel discussion in one of the House of Commons Committee rooms about Technology and the Future of Work. The irony of doing this while sitting at desks that still have inkwells was not lost on many in the crowd. I’ve also been able to go to a couple of Open Spaces from Devoted & Disgruntled and I really appreciate being able to sit back and be part of the crowd rather than leading things all the time.

Thanks very much for helping make all of this possible. Do come down on Friday morning if you’re able (and bring a pal) And please encourage other people to support me here however you’re able.

Love & hugs

Lloyd

What I think, words

How do you find a smell?

February 26, 2016 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

Often, if I’m out in town, I will catch a whiff of something nice. Some cologne or perfume or something that transports me to a happy warm childhood place or an image of someone or something or just a feeling of rightness, a rightness that isn’t there all the time. And I think wouldn’t it be nice to smell that more often.

But how do you find a smell? Even if it’s a mass-produced thing that you can find behind the counter in Debenhams, how would you start? How does this happen? I’ve never done it. I can remember buying after-shave perhaps once or twice in my life and then it was always pretty random. Oh yes, that one will do.

I know there’s a vocabulary, “lemony”, “sharp”, “tweedy”, “high notes”, “musky” etc. but I’m not sure what they really mean – they can only be subjective can’t they? There’s one that reminds me of a playgroup I went to more than forty years ago – how do I communicate what that is? I know it when I smell it but I can’t conjure it up in the same way as I can say, the smell of cut grass. It’s just out of reach. When I come across something I like, I want to say to someone, “what’s that smell? How would you describe it? Do you know what brand it is?” but that wouldn’t go down well on the Waterloo & City Line at 08.51 on a crisp Thursday in February.

theatre, What I think, words

Theatre Blogging: it’s not what it could be

February 24, 2016 Lloyd Davis 4 Comments

I heard recently about a director having the nasty experience of inviting a journalist into rehearsals and then having an unhelpful (I haven’t read it, it’s paywalled) preview article published just before the show opens.

Yuk.

Reading about it sent me back to look at what I wrote nearly eleven years ago (!) about using blogging in theatre. I was surprised to see what emphasis I put on buzz and PR (that was how the original question had been framed). And it’s that angle that all the marketing people picked up. I went to see John Berry at ENO because (see the comments on the post) they were doing something like this a couple of years later. And a year after this first post, I did a little site about the opening of Avenue Q. It had to be done, and I’m glad I did it, but I don’t read any of the West End theatre blogs or the mainstream journalism that has taken on our blogging form but sticks to traditional writing styles of reporting and criticism.

But I was thinking about more than marketing.

What I was thinking was of a kind of collaborative production journal, where everyone contributes… think “The Making of…” fly-on-the-wall documentary style, only on the web, and released in chunks as they happen, day by day rather than being stitched together after the show has closed.

I think this points to something much more interesting to do – about using these tools as part of the production, as part of the artistic process, to log progress and reflect on thinking and how things are emerging, for the benefit of the team themselves much more than prospective audience members and to create something bigger and longer-lasting and more networked than traditional documentation or archiving. It’s “sources going direct”, cutting out the dependence on news organisations (and their sodding paywalls) and making our own media.

Podcasts, words

Podwalk 160223 – Soundscape through Paddington Station @NetworkRailPAD

February 24, 2016 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

Download .mp3 (9.4MB)

Oh my, it’s been a while but I did this yesterday. I ended my canal walk at Little Venice and took a phone call and then thought I’d grab this before heading home to “work”.

Seconds after I pressed “stop” I saw that there was some interesting pop-up jazz happening at Old Street and that I’d got a ticket to the People’s PPE session with Ann Pettifor and Yanis Varoufakis. So I jumped on a tube in the opposite direction.

Overall, a day of reminders of how lucky I am to live in this city and be able to go with whatever flow comes along.

Podcasts, What I think, words

Audioblog 160223 – Walking by the canal thinking about @solobasssteve

February 23, 2016 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Download .mp3 (7.9MB)

Walked by the canal this morning, nice and slow and easy. Reflective, as canals are and encourage us to be. Not much to do except dodge buggies, joggers and duck poo. And think about something Steve Lawson wrote on Facebook this morning.

6m 11s I pass by a jackhammer, mind your ears.
It made me realise how long I’d been talking for, so I finished.

Podcasts, words

Audioblog 160222 – Saved by @ruperthowe

February 22, 2016 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Download .mp3 (4.4MB)

I started going for a walk but almost turned back after five minutes or so. Then I saw something on my phone that made me carry on and record this.

Some links that might help you understand/remember bits:

lists, What I think, words

Self Care: Things To Do

February 22, 2016 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

This is by no means a canonical list, but I remembered on Saturday that I had it with me and so I shared it with people. It occurred to me that it might be useful to share here too. I could add to it, so could you, but it’s just what came out one day when I sat down to write “Things I need to do to take care and resource myself.”

Go for a walk – 20 mins to 1 hr (longer on rest days)
Have a rest day
Go on holiday
Walk in the woods
Talk to someone, anyone
Have a nap
Meditate
Tidy up and process stuff
Time my work periods (25 minutes working, 5 minute doing something different)
Do the washing up or some laundry
Read for fun
Play a game
Go to unplugged/tuttle/some other coffee morning type thing
Forgive myself for not being perfect all the time
Do someone a favour
Stop working for free
Listen to a podcast
Listen to music
Play music, sing and dance around the living room

Podcasts, What I think, What I've Been Doing, words

Audioblog 160220 – Why So Serious?

February 22, 2016 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

Download 5.7MB

I recorded this on Waterloo Station shortly after the Devoted & Disgruntled Vaults Festival Open Space on Saturday. The space was opened to discuss “Let’s stop romanticising depression and marginalising other mental illness” and I called a session called “Why So Serious?” about the issue of taking oneself too seriously, dealing with other people’s expectations, the link between adopting a serious persona and depression or burn-out.

I reported like this mainly because I’d called a session at the previous week’s space but had then spent the whole week not being able to write a report. It’s reminded me how much I like making this format. Expect more…

words

Blockchain, Public Service, Wealth Concentration – joining the dots

February 2, 2016 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

I went to hear Michael Mainelli talk about blockchains (actually Mutual Distributed Ledgers) at Truphone this morning. Michael brought the voice of reason and long-term comprehension to the some of the excitable bubble-watchers in the audience.

Over coffee beforehand, the vox populi was excited by the efficiency possibilities inherent in this technology. The ground I covered a little in “Eaten by Code, Replaced By Robots?” but from the perspective of financial services firms – ie the Banks have all got to do this, because: previously unimaginable productivity.

All that productivity and efficiency also means potential unemployment for a swathe of white-collar paper-pushers/keyboard-jockeys who make up the mass of our Financial Services industry. But that’s not the Private Sector’s problem, that’s something Government needs to deal with. This is the view criticised by Mariana Mazzucato at the John McDonnell #neweconomics lecture last week – that Government shouldn’t only be seen as a means to fix things that markets can’t (or won’t) deal with.

But we’ll give public services the problem to solve even though we’re simultaneously taking away the money they have to spend. Have a look at Evgeny Morozov’s piece in The Guardian on the relationship between tax avoidance and private investment in services like Uber: