Writing, photos, notes, and things read and watched.
Between this, exploded blobfish, eclipses of various kinds, electrical storms, and tsunamis, I would have been first among the pre-science people certain that we had offended God and were beyond redemption. Volcanologist Laszlo Kestay took this photo of a lava skylight in 1996 while conducting field work at Kīlauea on Hawaiʻi. The hardened lava flows strongly resemble doomed souls being sucked…
I listened to an episode of Adventuring Party where Brennan had on Dr. Emily Friedman, who’s very involved in Actual Play , what they call this thing where performers play TTRPGs with an audience. She wrote a book on eighteenth-century smells and reconstructing them, struggling to do so. Think ambergris, the Jorvik Viking Museum claiming to pump viking smells into the exhibits. We should really go…
There was a wave that rose and fell a little, rose again, then fell. Its period was a couple of months. At its hottest it was 40°C in Berlin. The parks in the city parched to straw and the birds started falling out of the trees. The city still bumped with music as it always does in the long, long days of summer that blend into one another. Along with the mercury, social gatherings surged upward…
In the interests of writing longform things that are not novels, I’ve looked into a few products that are intended for typesetting stuff like ebooks, scientific papers, books-as-websites, and the like. Here lie some unstructured notes with links to interesting prior art that I might come back to. Mattew Butterick seems to have poured an incredible amount of time into work on applying classical…
In my first job, I built an app for people to sell their old clothes to one another. Sure, it had developed into something more culturally specific, a marketplace for hype beasts to speculate on 80s vintage Patagonia and Soviet-era film cameras, but looking back on it now it was job that was a lot more rooted in the real world. People were signing up, taking pictures of their things, and letting…
There have been gleefully apocalyptical headlines about AI replacing people in all kinds of jobs for a couple of years. Recently though, a specific threat to those people building and integrating AI into the world economy themselves has emerged out of the background noise of hype and bullshit. Yes, you too senior software engineer, you will not be spared. My colleagues, even those who were…
We watched The Drama this afternoon and had the inevitable chat on the way home. We’re both all quite boring in comparison. We’re unrepentant thieves. We were high school floozies. By the time we were crossing the canal, it was early evening and the cafés terraces were still full of people. The city’s summer face fully emerged while we were in Mexico and it’s a lot of boys in Adidas shorts. On…
In 2016, the last year of my undergraduate degree, I wrote an essay about the through line of subjugating women to administrative and servile roles, from the mid-century secretarial role, through sexualised companion characters like Halo’s Cortana, to incorporeal but still female-coded virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. It wasn’t that well executed so I’m not linking it here, but I do stand…
We walked into the arrivals hall at Oaxaca airport and we were greeted by my uncle-in-law Tom and his driver Lupe, a Zapotec-Mexican man who had a big smile and cold bottled water for us. As we rolled out onto the highway northwards, Tom started to tell us about how this highway was once blockaded by the teacher’s union. They put up barricades throughout the city and shut off the airport at some…
It’s 9pm on a Tuesday and I’m wondering if I’m living through the most idiotic version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’ve been working on my silly little novel manuscript, thinking about what to pack, what to do in Mexico City. I’ve been stressing my silly little head about what has to happen at work this week before I head off. It would be pretty funny if after all of that, things go pop. I’m sure…
We got out of our heads. We ran every morning around the canal banks where the tree blossoms have already burst and dropped on the ground to look like cheap confetti. We bought a new video game and took turns smashing things on the screen. On Saturday, we watched The Passion of the Christ , which made me realise how much strange specificity is in the Bible story. The arrested Christ getting…
There’s a healthy suspicion of novels where the substance of the characters’ working lives is relevant and actually explored. The formulas of TV do permit it. Throwing around finance jargon in Industry or showing off the prowess of the medical consultant team in The Pitt is normal. For the novel, it’s unbecoming to talk about work in the same way it makes you dull to turn to your dinner companion…
I sit on a works council at a tech company in Germany. One of the things we’ve been working on is killing the Performance Improvement Plan, and we’ve just managed it. In Germany (as in much of the EU), dismissing someone for underperformance is deliberately hard to do. The employer must issue two formal warnings at least three months apart, reassess the employee’s capacity, and demonstrate that…