Dipping a toe into the Wordland water. It's warmer than expected.
The first thing I notice is nothing to do with the product itself, rather how ugly and cluttered my WordPress template has become. It's one of those things you don't like to think about too much.
I made it less cluttered, but it still feels off. Perhaps not surprisingly since the theme is called Twenty-Fourteen…
How do pics look?
OK
It's good to release
I'm thinking about the word "release" as it's used to describe publishing some work. Probably driven by working on a new release on metalabel and I'm struck by the feeling of relief that goes with it, which doesn't apply to "publish" or (ugh!) "submit". It points to a need in me to let go of my ideas more.
A lot of artefacts are sitting around my studio and in my head and body that I don't need to hang onto any more and it strikes me that I'm also not ready to release them yet or rather that I have an uptight feeling about the idea of releasing them, a bit like dropping your child off at nursery for the first time. The things that are sticking around all have ideas attached to them and that means that it's not as simple as just throwing them away, however old they are, the ideas need to be put in a place where they'll be safe and OK without me. This post is not just about "content" is it?
I think the thing that's niggling me is about why we release. I'm prone to wanting to release in order to get some (positive) reaction to my work. It's interesting to apply that to children and claim that the reason I want my children to go to school, or, as now, to be out in the world as independent adults is so that I can get some positive reaction to my work as a father. Heh! That hit deep. I mean, of course I like it when people tell me how great my kids are but that's not the reason for having them or for letting them go.
Another Living Culture Coffee Morning is happening on Friday March 7th from 10am till midday (follow the link for details and registration). I'm still using luma for registration even though I had feedback that one person didn't want to click on the link because the short URL looked "a bit spammy" – you can't please all the people all of the time.
Dear friends, here we are again. Another long but short but ordinary but weird week.
Quote of the week
“Any jackass can kick a barn down. But it takes a carpenter to build one” – Sam Rayburn
Doodle of the week
What’s on my mind
Heartbeats
The group I was part of at Hard Art this week were thinking about creating sustainable ritual using biofeedback. That’s a fancy way of saying we thought up some ways of using our own heartbeats as the basis for connecting with each other. That’s still sounds a bit fancy, doesn’t it? Sorry, that’s Hard Art.
It led me down a little rabbit hole of working out how to record the sound of one’s own heartbeat. Turns out, that of course there’s an app (or two) for that. But they’re a bit closed and enshittified for my liking, So I used the technique they suggest with the voice recorder apps I already have. The instruction for iPhones is to start recording and then press the mic end (the bottom bit that plugs in) against the left hand bit of your collar bone (maybe check first that you can locate your pulse there with your finger). And that’s it. I used the Rode voice recorder and the iOS Voice Memo app and I preferred the sound on Voice Memo. Your mileage may vary.
Anyway, my heartbeat is probably faster than yours because of my ADHD meds, but here‘s a little snippet, if it doesn’t feel too intimate to listen.
Reinventing Campfires
They (citation needed) say that every day in Silicon Valley, some tech bro reinvents the city bus (only more complicated). In the intersection of arts, tech and spirit that I bumble around in, it’s more like “every day someone trying to be helpful reinvents the campfire (only more complicated)” – and often that “someone” is me – this is more of a reminder to self, rather than an admonition to anyone else.
Connected is something Liz described to me on Monday as “getting distracted by the artefacts” – which no doubt is elaborated on at length somewhere in the wisdom literature, if only I could be bothered to read. It’s a bit like cargo cults, but it’s also about focusing on the material rather than the ineffable. Think harder, Davis.
What audit isn’t
In the 1990s and early 2000s I worked for a now dead organisation called the Audit Commission. I was never an auditor, but I worked with auditors, I knew auditors, I would even go so far as to say that some of my best friends at the time were auditors. So I know audit when I see it. And the idea that Elon Musk and his Teen Justice League are performing some sort of audit of government systems and spending is as laughable to me as trying to suggest he was just making a warm gesture to show how his heart was going out to people.
What I’ve watched
Finished “Rise of the Nazis” – the last section is about them hiding (sometimes in plain sight) after the war and how quickly the focus switched to Communism being the enemy, with people like Klaus Barbie recruited by intelligence services, but also what compromises had to be made in order to keep basic institutions going. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
Followed up with “Mr Turner” as a consequence – a marvellous work all round.
We’re just about half-way through “Little Dorrit” – still weird and getting weirder in parts. Eddie Marsan has grown on me.
I don’t think I watched the latest episode of Prime Target, which says something.
What I’m reading
I’ve been combing through old blog posts about Tuttle both in preparation for the first Coffee Morning and the re-release of the Annual Report from 2009. I’ve said before that I’m working on an annotated version of that report for release on metalabel, but I thought I’d do a kind of dry run first with the original document to introduce it to those people who may have been in primary school the first time round.
What I’m listening to
O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack Chopin Nocturnes Wednesday morning I was inexplicably driven to play The Beatles’ “I’ll Get You” while making my breakfast.
Where I’ve been
I went into London for Hard Art on Monday and I’m in again on Friday (today!) for the first Coffee Morning (it was good, but I’ll write more next week). I’m getting a hankering for going further afield, but I think that’s driven mainly by wanting more daylight – sunrise 07:30 and sunset at 17:00 is still too short, even if it’s going in the right direction.
What I’m tracking
Feline wanderings. I’m experimenting with having an airtag on the cat’s collar – she went out for the first time on Sunday lunchtime and didn’t come back until Tuesday. She was probably in our garden or the neighbours but it felt like a good excuse to buy silly tech even if it’s pretty useless.
What I’m playing
Rocket Racing (up to Gold III) with occasional forays into Fortnite OG. I’ve also revived my early morning Sudoku habit. Oh and last week I introduced best daughter to Rummikub. She beat me soundly of course.
What is this?
It’s my newly refurbished (dare I say “weekly”?) newsletter thingy. This is the last time that I’m going to publish it jointly via Perfect Path and Substack, I disagree strongly with the opinions on freedom of speech from the leadership at Substack and while WordPress is, well… WordPress, I will feel more comfortable publishing from my own domain only. It’ll still come to your mailbox, but I’ll do a note to those of you who are reading via Substack to explain what I intend to do and how it will affect you, before I hit send on next week’s epistle.
What’s in the works
“Spirituals” is not even a working title, just a description of some songs that I’m recording. At the moment this is kind of George Lewis meets Patsy Cline by way of “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” – this week’s progress included reviving my Reaper set up from back-up and mucking about with harmonies.
“Why can’t we just have old twitter?” is an essay that I’ve been writing for far too long and it shows. Mainly because new stuff keeps happening in that area. A further complication was the release of Tapestry (iOS only) – which looks pretty, but is read-only, so a kind of glorified RSS reader.
Tuttle Club metalabel – I’ve released the first (and to date, only) Annual Report from 2009 in all it’s original glory. I’m still working on a newly-annotated version – a kind of “director’s cut” if you can say such a thing about a 17-page PDF.
How to talk to me (or perhaps comment on my stuff)
If I do the thing formerly known as “tweeting” it goes on my micro.blog and syndicated from there to BlueskyMastodon and Threads but I don’t feel great about it. If I take pictures that I want in public they go on Flickr but I still put stuff on Instagram too. My blog is where it’s always been with a kind of backup of all the things on tumblr That should be enough.
Dear friends and neighbours near and far, prepare yourselves for the shock of a second newsletter before the end of January.
Doodle of the week
Some phone calls do this to me.
Quote of the week
“Boundaries are what we tell someone we will do, they don’t require the other person to do anything”. Dr Becky Kennedy talking about parent/child relationships in a way that is just as true for those where we’re all grown up.
What’s on my mind
Authoritarianism and Protest
Possibly because of “What I’ve watched” (see below) and possibly because of the news from the USA I’ve been rolling around the question of our age, which is something like “what can and should you actually do about authoritarian leadership when you spot it?” Having grown up in a world where that question was framed as “what would you have done if you’d been in Germany in 1933?” many of us are finding out that our answers aren’t as easy to implement as we thought. Seeing parallels with earlier times doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re heading to the same outcome, but when do you step in (or pull out)?
And I’m not just talking about the patterns in the leadership of our political parties, I’m seeing it in other organisations, most insidiously I think in the talk about getting people back in the office or seeing Amazon’s resistance to their workers forming a union. How do you deal with charismatic leaders who thrive on just enough chaos and conflict between their followers, all of whom are prepared to do whatever it takes to please those at the very top?
I grew up in a demo family. One of my very earliest visual memories is of being in my pushchair on a march against British involvement in the war in Biafra (so 1968 or ’69?). The first photographic evidence is from 1973 on a march about population growth with the slogan “Two will do”. Hmmmm…
In my teens it was CND and LPYS that had me wearing out my shoe leather and my vocal chords. The last time I went to something from start to finish was the Poll Tax march in 1990 that ended in a riot. I left before the worst violence started, because I’d been in similar situations in Whitehall during previous demos. The tactics introduced by the Police during the miner’s strike were just getting worse and thirty-five years later, here we are with people being arrested and imprisoned for even thinking about how to plan a demonstration.
On Wednesday, I saw a few hundred people outside the Courts of Justice, protesting in favour of the “Lord Walney 16” who’s appeal was being heard. and had coffee with some of them over the road at Unitarian HQ. The people there are many of the same people who’ve been there as long as I have, many of them longer. Lots of them look old and tired and fed up. They see their powerlessness in the face of new laws and hardened attitudes, but they also see years of avoidable tragedy ahead. So they carry on. We need other ways of organising for change. Ones where frail old bodies aren’t in the front line. I guess I thought that the action we took in the eighties would mean that by the time I was this age, we wouldn’t need to fight so much. I was wrong.
What I’ve watched
“The Rise of Nazis” BBC iplayer. I’ve never been a great one for documentaries about this period, thinking that the headlines are enough without going into detail. The first three episodes, about the moves Hitler made to get into power and the swift dismantling of democratic institutions, made for difficult watching in tandem with reports of that other person that we wrote off as a buffoon.
“Little Dorrit” BBC iplayer. We did Andrew Davies’s Bleak House just after Christmas and now this. I’m enjoying the long rambleness of Dickens as well as the ridiculous coincidences. I don’t know the book or the story at all. It’s weird though, isn’t it?
“Prime Target” AppleTV+ I’m still not convinced or recommending, but I made it through episode 3.
What I’ve read
Two things that show the power of impro and Open Space
8 versions of “I’ll Fly Away” none of which are by Kanye West.
Where I’ve been
It’s still winter!
I went into London for a couple of things on Wednesday, including adding my presence to the protest and rest area. But I also got to toddle off to Pimlico and sit in the Members Room at Tate Britain.
I also had coffee with a friend in Godalming, which helped get me out the door yesterday too. And this morning I went for a walk after breakfast.
What I’m tracking
In the last couple of days I’ve remembered that as a person whose work is often completely sedentary I need to keep an eye on my steps. This will help with the much-needed weight reduction and keep people off my back about my heart.
A frustrating aspect of being “older” is that health professionals (at least in this part of the UK) are primed to look for key indicators that mean they can put you in a box or “on a pathway”. It’s BMI in my case, and so I have to bite my tongue (and not swallow it!) when offered well-meaning (and free!) advice.
What I’m playing
I got back into Rocket Racing. The ranking has been reset and the matchmaking is quite efficient. That means that you spend some time, but not too long, grinding through with people who you can beat easily. I came first in my first half-dozen races, with ease. But then I also hit a wall quite quickly when I hit Gold where I’m suddenly in the bottom few and progressing by only a couple of points each race, if not slipping back.
What is this?
This is my newly restructured newsletter. In my best world it would be a summary of things I’ve already written during the week, with a bit of spit and polish, but it’s not quite there yet. It’s meant as a snapshot of my week, a way of (me!) keeping in touch with what’s really going on here, without slipping into “Come to my thing” or “Buy my stuff” too much.
The best way to get it to your mailbox is to subscribe on my blog. The Substack version will probably go away soon. If you prefer, you can get also get it on the web or in your RSS reader!
“Why can’t we just have old twitter?” is an essay that I’ve been writing for far too long and it shows. Mainly because new stuff keeps happening in that area.
Tuttle Club metalabel – I’m working on an annotated version of the first (and to date, only) Annual Report I wrote for Tuttle in 2009.
How to talk to me (or perhaps comment on my stuff)
If I do the thing formerly known as “tweeting” it goes on my micro.blog and syndicated from there to BlueskyMastodon and Threads but I don’t feel great about it. If I take pictures that I want in public they go on Flickr but I still put stuff on Instagram too. My blog is where it’s always been with a kind of backup of all the things on tumblr That should be enough.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
19:16 – : Saw the Bob Dylan movie. This may already be obvious to you, but I’d still rather be Pete Seeger. 10:33 – : “Never mind, change the subject, are you watching Martin Clunes?”
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
09:41 – : People outside the UK, what’s wrong with this picture? (incorrect and misleading answers only, please) 07:39 – : In Glasgow to see the massive underground turbine that will supply clean, renewable energy to the whole city. There’s a low background hum everywhere you go, but it seems worth it. I met friends for coffee in the “Hammer and Bagel” a socialist bakers co-op in the city centre. #lastnightsdream
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
Of course I signed up straight away… have you met me?
Oh ya! I was in the first seven and a half-thousand users you know…
At first glance, after first coffee, but still before first light in this part of the world in December, I’m not wild about the implementation. There are a couple of things that make it look like this is only for a certain kind of person, who lives in a certain kind of place and can afford a certain kind of technology. Oh and can afford a certain liberty with their own data and that of their contacts (or as the app has it “their people”). I’m becoming more cynical and sceptical about it the more I write.
this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.
I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends.
Throw in a clumsy use of flags (Good morning, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish friends!). I’m not even sure what that one is. (oh and you’ll need to be on WhatsApp to get the notification.)
whose fleg is dat?!?
Your plans had better be in a code that your friends will understand, as you only have 24 characters.
“keynoting at the symposium on K”
The granularity of location is the other problem. Letting people know that I’m going to be in “London, UK” isn’t much use. Which points to the use case being international travellers in select cliques for whom London obviously means “my parents place in Primrose Hill”. But if you know people *that* well, are you going to use a separate app for it, or are you going to have a Whatsapp group?
I may also have a chip on my shoulder because my little old iPhone SE won’t show the left and right edges to some screens.
Eh. Will wait and see who else turns up.
PS the wordpress featured image for this post is AI generated and does not represent an accurate representation of the Mozi interface.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
10:14 – : In the style of the “how old are you in internet years?” meme. I realise that I’m “put up with parsing an RSS feed and making it into a data structure, rather than looking for a JSON version of the same” old.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
This is mostly for Dave but I welcome eye-rolling discussion from all.
a screenshot of my micro.blog front page. My Gravatar is a picture taken by Johnnie Moore shortly after I returned from “Please Look After This Englishman” in 2011.
I’ve been doing a thing for a little while now, but only Dave has asked about it. And so, in our cozy, little internet for two, I’m just going to talk to him about it now.
Dave, hello, old friend. Thank you for paying attention to my RSS feed and this long, slow ongoing conversation about blogging that makes other people’s eyes glaze over sooooo quickly.
You asked:
@lloyddavis.bsky.social please can you show me how you do your micro.blog > WordPress daily thing. I think that’s probably the best way for me to achieve this: da.vebrig.gs/2024/10/30/%…— Dave Briggs (@da.vebrig.gs) December 10, 2024 at 5:52 PM
Well. So. Yeah. Hang on a sec.
In the summer, I was having cognitive capacity issues, keeping track of who I was talking to where about what. So I looked at the cross-posting capabilities of micro.blog – I was attracted to it first by seeing it being used by my early blog heroes Adam Tinworth and Robert Brook and I’m a big fan of how Manton Reece eats his own dogfood. Each of these people do their own thing with it and none of them are to blame for the stupid things I might choose to do when I pick up the same tools. I just mention them because I don’t want to look like I invented all this or that I think I’m cleverer than anyone else.
Where was I? Yeah so one of the cool things Manton has kept on top of is cross-posting to these different platforms. It was the most straightforward way of writing a post once and having software post it in several places (btw they also go to my ancient tumblr – and could go to medium, linkedin and nostr if I wanted to go bananas). And recently, I’ve been able to see my BlueSky and Mastodon replies there too, but that’s another complication and we’ve got enough complications here already, I think. Focus, Lloyd, focus!
Cross-posting deals with the copy/paste problem, but I was still feeling a gap. Ever since I got on Twitter, I wanted to have a place where I could find all my stuff instead of it being in different places. I couldn’t get my act together to go full POSSE, so maybe it’s cousin – PESOS might work. PESOS means publishing elsewhere, syndicating to own site. It feels inferior, and a bit wrong, but it kind of works for now.
I feel the need to just step back and acknowledge that I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just bumbling along having a life and now and then saying stuff on the internet. I don’t have Information Strategy meetings with myself to work out the ideal infrastructure and architectural approaches. I’m just the same bumbling blog-hacker, driven by novelty, that I’ve always been.
So I decided that what I’d do now, since I’d got all the chunks being made on micro.blog, it might be nice to make a daily digest post on here (perfectpath) of all the chunks I’d made that day. (turns out, it’s hard to get *all* the chunks, I’m human, sometimes I forget and just post something on one platform directly – also replies – we’ll come back to that).
I was also interested in how to use ChatGPT for helping me remember how to write code. So I asked it to write a script using the WordPress XML-RPC API (because that’s all I could remember there was) to take my RSS feed from micro.blog (because that’s all I could remember there was) and automatically post it here at about midnight every day. After some iterations I got to this version of the script. I then made a cron job on my home desktop computer to run at 11:55 each night, redirecting the output to a log file.
It’s all a little bit shit, but it’s my little bit of shit. Before we start with the “why don’t you just…” here’s where I can see it needs improvement:
It only handles my original posts, no replies (but see json stuff below)
I see that WP has lots of APIs – I’m tempted to believe that my first choice of XML-RPC is not the best (given it was basically down to ignorance of the others)
I also realise that micro.blog will give me feeds in json format which might well be more elegant to handle (and less error-prone?) than trying to parse the RSS into a custom data structure and then remember what I called the variables. There’s a whole API for doing more complicated stuff (including replies!)
The formatting is horribly basic (but then so am I).
If I want it to run more reliably, perhaps I should put it on someone else’s computer rather than my mac mini which is prone to attack via the feline keyboard marauder and my own stupidity.
marginally less pathetic than my Spotify For Artists 2024 stats.
I’ll never be a consistent weeknoter – at least in the sense of consistently posting week by week. I’m consistent in my irregularity – I just looked and it’s almost exactly a year since my last one.
So this is December 2024. I’ve been looking forward to this (in the way that people say to their proctologist that they’re looking forward to their next appointment) for a while. I’m now into the last few weeks of my fifties. After the weekend I’ll be saying “I’m now into the last fortnight of my fifties.” That’s how I’ve been dealing with it. Doing a time check every now and then through this year in an effort to make the passing of time feel slower. I’m pretty sure it’s the anticipation that’s doing me in. Once I’m there and I have a badge that says “I’m 60 (you might have to speak up a bit!)” or something, then I’ll be OK with it. That’s what’s always happened in the past with so-called significant birthdays anyway.
The main difference with this one is that it comes with some small benefits, not just free NHS prescriptions but also the start of my Audit Commission pension. It stems from my employment there between 1996 and 2002 when 2024 still seemed a long way off. Nothing huge, but still, it’s money every week for the rest of my life (the end of which, currently at any rate, “seems a long way off”)
On Monday I went to a Hard Art meeting. It was exhausting. Lots of people said so afterwards, although I always find it exhausting, so I’m not sure what was different from them. I’m pleased to see that lately we’ve adopted more Open Space ways of working (without it being *me* who’s pushed it to the fore). There’s lots more to think about in terms of how we work on stuff together and I’m a bit depressed that I haven’t been able to give that as much attention as I’d like this year, but when I pause and look back, I recognise that we’ve made progress.
I’ve been experimenting with republishing my micro.blog entries in a digest here. If there isn’t a digest that’s because I didn’t write anything. I use micro.blog as the place I write stuff that will end up on BlueSky/Threads/Mastodon. Everything gets cross-posted to those three (plus my old faithful tumblr). I have a script that runs just before midnight and checks the RSS feed for my micro.blog and puts them into a reverse-chronological list with a timestamp that links to the original – as always, it’s a prototype for something else. What I want is a digest of all my microblogging activity – a record of the little conversations I’ve had that day – but those are fragmented across the three platforms and although federation is coming (probably in a slightly sub-optimal way for the two newer ones) it’s still hard to catch it all. It’s also not mission-critical. My main aim at the moment is that it doesn’t piss people off.
I started to feel that thing where the natural world round here is slowing down getting ready to pause and reset, but the human world is speeding up, desperately trying to get stuff done before any sort of pause.
I’m not rushing, but I sent a few emails to tidy things up and clarify when we’re going to do some work and when it can be billed for etc. I’m very grateful not to be having the kind of end of year where it’s unclear just how we’re going to make it through to January. My condolences and solidarity if you are having that kind of end of year – it sucks.
On Wednesday, I remembered that micro.blog will host audio for you, so I made a little podcast about podcasting and cross-posted it here.
I also went to the dentist. She confirmed that I do need another crown to replace the mishmash of fillings on the upper left side, but that it’s not super urgent (but could easily become so if unattended).
My dentist is on the other side of Guildford town centre. I’m glad that I gave myself space to walk into town, but not so glad to find that a suspicious package had closed the train station, so I chose to get a slower but less crowded bus home rather than the faster, crammed one.
We gave in and handed a list of odd jobs to a chap who is much more able to do these things than either of us are. So now we have pictures on the walls; all the downlighters in the kitchen work; we have working lights in both the attic and garage; and best of all, he fixed the handle on the dishwasher so that I don’t have to scrape skin off my fingers trying to open it first thing in the morning.
I’m working on a first product to put out on metalabel. It’s an annotated version of the Tuttle Annual Report that I wrote in 2009. It’s fun to do and to noodle over what all that was about back then. I did get round to creating a Tuttle Club label page and the emptiness of that is motivating me to have something to put up there. I’ll be opening up conversations about collaborative working to share there in the New Year.
I’m aware of my tendency to make up systems to make stuff and then be too exhausted to implement those systems. But I’m doing some of that kind of stuff too – (hopefully with more of the actual making stuff and without the exhaustion).
That’ll do for this week.
I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.
Perfect Path 