Books (ii)

A mimetic book post, part two. (here's part one.)

  • How many books do you own?
  • What is the last book you bought?
  • What is the last book you read? ⬅
  • What are 5 books that mean a lot to you?

What is the last book you read?

According to my book spreadsheet, the last book I 'read' (although I didn't finish it) was Max Gladstone's Last Exit. About six weeks ago... I did mention I've been in rather a reading rut.

Now, a few pieces of context.

First, a few years ago, I shifted my definition of 'read' for a book from 'have done a complete readthrough of the content' to 'reached the point where I have stopped reading the book'. It still usually amounts to me finishing a book in the completionist sense, but I realised that this makes me much less likely to stubbornly plough on with something when it's not working for me. (Which doesn't always have anything to do with the quality of the work.) That sometimes means just noping out early, or other times (e.g. with collections or other non-fiction works) just reading selectively the things that most interest me.

Second, specifically for Last Exit... I really, really loved it. Like, seriously. Max Gladstone is one of my favourite writers, and Last Exit was just knocking it out of the park in every chapter. My specific problem with that was just that my brain was all over the place and struggling to get out of work mode, and I love his writing in a very particular way which makes me constantly want it to take it apart, figure out how he does things, and take notes.

Which I think is a compliment. But that, plus the general strength of the book, just made it slightly too much of a meal for me to digest comfortably at that particular point in time.

I fully intended to get back to it eventually, though I've marked it as 'read' for now, because the idea of having an 'open loop' like that really bugs me far more than is ideal.

Out of time for today, last question soon.

Books (i)

A mimetic book post:

  • How many books do you own?
  • What is the last book you bought?
  • What is the last book you read?
  • What are 5 books that mean a lot to you?

How many books do you own?

Hard to say. A glance at the spreadsheet tells me that I've read 527 books in the past 9 years; various of those were borrowed from friends or libraries. We also have what I'd guess to be several hundred physical books at home, mostly stacked in piles because there are no shelves for them, yet.

So, including digital formats (why wouldn't I?), I'd say 'less than a thousand', but probably not far off the upper end of that.

What is the last book you bought?

I think it was pre-ordering Richard's The Tyranny of Faith (cough), but I'm not entirely sure I count pre-ordering something within the spirit of the question.

Otherwise, I bought these two at the same time: Vicious Circle by Mike Carey, the second of the Felix Castor novels. Really enjoying this and will probably power through the rest of the series afterwards. (Though I'm not sure my current reading velocity in general could 'power through' so much as a paper bag.)

and

The Box by Marc Levinson, a history of containerised shipping.

I'm reading both of these at the moment, and greatly enjoying them both. But I am in a real concentration rut in my downtime, not able to focus gainfully on much that is not deeply familiar to me or where the activity requires me to ante energy into the pot (even if I would get more out than I put in).

I'll answer the other two next week; I'm out of time for today.

Grab Bag -- The Moon, Mars, and Murmurations

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A grab back of links today.

I don't really have words for this one, just go ahead and take a look yourself. Orion flies far beyond the Moon, returns an instantly iconic photo

A very different scale of 'wonder of nature'. I love how, to the eye, they seem like a great, shifting single organism. Sunset murmuration in Nottinghamshire caught on camera

More science news. The last paragraph here is, uh, certainly something that felt like a weird twist in the tale, but is apparently not that unexpected. Researchers discover two new minerals on meteorite grounded in Somalia

More space. The Verge links to a TikTok by Lizzie Philip going over the (wonderful, amazing, ridiculous) plan to retrieve samples from Mars. A simple plan.

I'll quote from this one in more detail. It harks back to Birdwatch. Manifesting History

Musk’s narrative follows a similar path because up until alarmingly recently…it worked. As I’ve related above, Musk has been an irascible shithead for many years, but his overwhelming clout with the media meant that he could, effectively push through any idea his little mind desired. A flamethrower? Sure. $420 Tequila? Of course. Landing humans on Mars? He said 2022, but everybody was fine with saying “within five years” or “2029.”

Musk has gotten away with a mixture of half-truths and outright lies enough times that he believed that he had the popularity to do anything, another condition afflicted upon those with billions of dollars. When he bought Twitter, I truly think that he believed everybody would be behind him, because up until that point most of the media had been. Kara Swisher gave an interview in May about how smart Elon was. Jessica Lessin of The Information described the acquisition as “like watching a business school case study on how to make money on the internet.” Hell, he was able to con banks and investors into raising $13 billion for him. Musk still had the ability to manipulate the media - and still does, in the sense that he can still get a bunch of stories about literally anything he does - but couldn’t change the reality that he did not have a plan for the website that he tied his entire financial future to.

That’s why he seems so utterly pathetic. Musk may have had no plan, but he also appears to have never considered the eventuality that most people would dislike his choices. For someone supposedly tuned into “the future,” he continually fails to adapt to his changing circumstances, picking and losing fights and taking that as proof that his cause is just rather than his ideas being bad. And now his closest allies are wobbling sycophants like David Sacks, who accidentally ended up on the right side of the antitrust debate in an attempt to kiss up to his boss.

Yeah.

And finally, your one-stop-shop for Twitter nonsense: https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

Daily Notes

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I've gone more and more on in Obsidian over the course of this year. It's definitely got another boost now that I'm paying for Obsidian sync, albeit that I still mildly resent what feels like a bit of duplication with other services I pay for, but: the tool is fantastic. It's exactly what I need. It's integrated smoothly with the way I work, plus changed it in a few small ways to take advantage of its other features.

One thing I love at the moment is the 'Daily Note' button, which pulls up a scratch note for that day. You can customise the titling format, location, etc.; the point is that it gives me a very transient-feeling note space for stuff that I want to jot down that day but aren't invested in the long-term filing of.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say I benefit from the implicit assumption that I won't store or access these types of notes long-term. I don't worry especially about information formatting or tagging outside of immediate needs.

I've been using this routinely for a few things:

  • Some tasks or task-adjacent things. This feels odd to my brain, since I have some very developed task management systems. But these represent a different category of thing -- almost 'idle thought' tasks which I'd be happy to get done or follow up on today if I have the time, but can go 'poof' if not. Looking up specific things, chasing down recipes, whatever.
  • Rough drafts of messages that require some crafting before sending, but which I don't like drafting in the relevant interface.
  • Stuff I want to pass to and from my phone quickly
  • Little snippets and links to maybe follow up on but also which aren't important if they get lost
  • The bird omens

(I've also been contemplating Obsidian Publish as an eventual replacement for my current format of the blog. It's not something I want to drop the £ on right now, nor do I have time to explore the setup process, but if and when I transition my site off Squarespace, I'll look into that as a blog platform for these posts, assuming I'm still doing them. Everything so far is linked and tagged in my own Obsidian Vault, so should be nicely portable.

Squarespace is good for getting a decent website quickly, but represents a disproportionate ongoing expense for me these days, given my use case is so limited. I'm effectively paying long-term for features I don't use and an editor I don't use on an ongoing basis.)

The Idea of a Book

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So, books. I think I noted down this shard idea in response to seeing someone sharing that Sam Bankman-Fried quote:

“I would never read a book ... I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Which... well, maybe the guy should have read a book or two.

But it got me thinking about the idea of a book. What is a book? There's the obvious, physical artefact -- a set of leaved pages, bound within a cover. (Phrasing something in that way tickles my brain back to a slightly different time on Twitter, where 'a horse is a chair'.) But obviously with ebooks, audiobooks and the like, that doesn't actually describe the concept usefully (though it hasn't stopped people from yammering endlessly about whether 'you are really reading if you listen to an audiobook').

Then there are the more technical definitions to define, say, a novel vs a novella vs a novelette vs a short story vs flash fiction. Which has utility mostly in a publishing and marketing context, although limited beyond that.

For me, a book is ultimately an arbitrary boundary, but it's about lingering with something. A story or an idea. Giving it the space it (hopefully) deserves.

This is particularly stark for me when comparing, say, a non-fiction monograph to a six-paragraph blog post. Yes, on various occasions I have read books where I have understood the fundamental thrust very quickly, inside of a chapter or two. But almost always, there's been a specific benefit to the space -- examples, reiteration, coming at the thing from different angles, complicating the thesis. If nothing else it sure as hell aids comprehension and retention.

A six-paragraph blog post might, might be able to contain the same essential information. But that does not have the same valence as a book on the subject. (If nothing else, if you're reading a book on a subject, you know that the author has had to spend all that time and attention on the idea. That doesn't mean it will be good or worthwhile, but at least someone else has had to do this to a passable standard.)

I think this goes back to something I talked about the other day, in Birdfall:

Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.

So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people _do_ understand it a lot better than him.

The Elons Musks of the world and their warped, simplistic worldviews. If you think the world is, ultimately, rather simple, and that you are among the smartest people in it, of course you think you can understand something in depth from a six-paragraph blog post. And of course that makes you a complete and utter blockhead.

See also: It's Complicated The Box and Ox

Problem Solving -- Making Two Birds Crash Into Each Other

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One of my favourite things to do during the revisions process is figuring out how to solve problems with other problems (or, certainly 'to collapse two problems so that they can share one solution'). This is partly born of laziness, but it's also really efficiency (isn't all laziness really just efficiency?*). With limited time and energy to spend on revisions, especially in a commercial writing pipeline, you're already in the business of prioritising fixes and deciding what's 'good enough', so anything that lets you do more with those constrained resources is good. (It's not so much killing two birds with one stone as making two birds crash into each other.)

In something I'm working on at the moment, one of the big early scenes had -- or perhaps was -- a big pacing problem. It did not advance the story sufficiently relative to the space it was occupying/what it was demanding from the audience. At the same time, to my reading, people would be reaching the mid-point of the story with a shaky grasp of an important character. An unclear understanding of why he was the way he was, leading to -- most probably -- being emotionally underinvested in what happened to him and significantly undermining the later parts of the story (which were largely fine on their own merits).

My answer was to basically gut large parts of that early scene, keeping the core structure of it, but realigning it to be more about getting angles on that character, and trying to create some stronger, quieter emotional moments amid everything else.

If you looked at that scene on a plotting sheet, it would still largely be doing the same thing in terms of moving the story forward in a macro sense, but the focus of its constituent parts had changed a lot.

That's often what these sort of consolidated changes end up being for me -- throwing something out and realigning the purpose of a moment or scene or concept in the service of some other part of the story. This is one reason that the revisions phase feels much better to me -- the picture of the whole has emerged, and it's much easier to make decisions that converge on that. It can be plot or character or aspect, or just aesthetic details that didn't become concrete until later in drafting -- but this is the stage where everything starts to knit together, like feathers on a pigeon.

*No.

Vitreous Allium

Bit of an unfocused grab back this morning -- one of those days where I just sit and type for ~5 minutes.

Glass Onion, the follow-up to Knives Out, is phenomenally good, in ways both expected and unexpected. I went in knowing effectively nothing (I think just one promo shot?), and while you don't strictly need an information vacuum to enjoy this... it's really good so just go watch it.

Well, 'go watch' is a bit weird here. One of the things I didn't know about the film was that it's a Netflix thing, and will be up there on 23rd December. BUT it is/was having a limited run in cinemas before then. I stumbled across the opportunity to go see it entirely by chance, while looking for something else. I have a very high activation threshold to actually go to a cinema, but the two films I've seen there in the past ~3 years (this and Everything Everywhere All At Once) have just left me buzzing for days.

I deactivated my Twitter account last week. I'm already -- technically -- back on there, and this blog will probably get auto-syndicated, but I don't see that as a long-term thing. I really don't know what, precisely, to do with it. I had to dive back in for some work-adjacent messages, and it's hard just to cut and run after 14 years on the site, even if I don't use it much and really don't want to be there any more.

Musk has decided that it's a good idea to extend a general amnesty to anyone suspended for non-illegal reasons, which seems... yeah, bad. I don't see the upside for anyone except Musk, really (and even then, this is probably just another one of his 'famous brain genius' moves that maybe makes sense in a parallel universe where all cows are spherical and Elon Musk is actually smart). I guess it'll drive activity on the platform for a bit 🤷‍♂️. But good luck with that with a decimated moderation staff.

Anyway, go see Glass Onion.

I've, separately, been listening to the soundtrack for Bones and Al, which came up on my Apple Music alerts because: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It's an odd one, in parts, but another great soundtrack from them.

Dreams from our machines

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A piece I read a few weeks back: The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology.

A good read for a bunch of reasons, but one thing I'd noted down to come back around to was this:

I’m obviously not against innovation or building great things. But in this newsletter, I’ve criticized Silicon Valley’s impulse toward Builder Brain: “a particular line of thinking, one that seems to run the risk of missing the root cause of a problem in service of a more exciting solution.” I see it in the jargony, scam-riddled pyramid schemes and hype cycles surrounding Web3; I see it in the technology industry’s reluctance to embrace the Right to Repair movement; and I see it in so much of the pompous arrogance of tech founders and investors who think they can waltz into an industry with little expertise or understanding and disrupt it.

(Relevant right now for no reason in particular...)

It does come back to what I was talking a bit about yesterday in Birdwatch:

As for Musk himself, well, he really is showing himself up, isn't he? Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.

So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people do understand it a lot better than him.

This connects together in 'technosolutionism' -- a term I've been using for a few years without being quite clear as to its provenance -- the (implied to be mistaken) belief that technology is what can solve our big problems.

Now, that's not to suggest that technology can't solve problems. It's the idea that technology alone is all we have been lacking in the pursuit of solving some big, extant problems. Any problem we have is one we just haven't found the right technology for yet.

Which is obviously bunkum. The whole 'NFTs in gaming' thing fits into that -- the idea that the reason 'gamers' don't have the ability to transfer digital items that they own between games and ecosystems is because we haven't been able to do that, technologically. Ignoring, y'know, all the social, legal, business model, etc. problems with that.

(I think cryptocurrencies fall foul of this also, albeit in a different way. There are ways in which they are technologically distinct from traditional banking and currencies. But treating them as technological solutions and therefore infallible because they are technological solutions, is nonsense. Traditional banking is also riddled with technology; however, so many of the problems cryptocurrency purports to solve are social or political problems of trust and regulation.)

I haven't revisited this yet, but my mind does regularly return to this essay -- also in The Atlantic, actually -- from Debbie Chachra: Why I Am Not a Maker.

Instead we ask for dreams from our machines
and I’m no technophobe but
They’re just not made for this –

to give us visions in the smoke
to dream beyond the glass and draw for us some meaning from the gaps
in our sandcastle models of a world.

Birdwatch

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Not the good kind, sadly. Things at Twitter continue to be a mess. I've deactivated my account for the time being; that almost definitely won't stick on a permanent basis this time around, but I'm testing the water.

Lots of people shopping around for their new platform of record. Lots of platforms jockeying to be the next contender. Maybe there'll be a clear winner, maybe not, but I expect a degree of fragmentation, which might be a good thing. I think it's naive to expect to just be able to pop up a new Twitter [the good bits], without either bringing the bad bits over as well or taking on new bad bits.

Part of the problem is sheer scale -- if you really want a 'global public square' (which I still think has been shown to be a pretty terrible idea), then it needs a massive content moderation effort. Which takes a massive amount of time and resources to effect. Which is one of the reasons it's tended to be bundled alongside commercial interests and advertising. But bundling the putative 'global public square' with commercial interests is even worse, etc.

Dan Hon:

So. Mastodon.social may be too big. We may reasonably expect it to collapse and splinter into smaller instances. Maybe that is okay. Maybe it doesn’t need to be that big, and that means maybe we are not yet ready for the global public city, because if we don’t have the tools to do this well-enough at scale in a way that isn’t funded by extractive advertising, then… maybe we shouldn’t do it and try to achieve it and we’ll fail until we’ve figured out different, better ways.

https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s13e23-colliders-speedrunning-benevolent/

As for Musk himself, well, he really is showing himself up, isn't he? Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.

So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people do understand it a lot better than him.

(I expect the number of times acting under this mistaken belief actually works out for you if you are a person of immense wealth and power is non-zero. If nothing else, many of the normal rules don't apply to you, and sometimes, ignorance of or the ability to ignore those rules can let you get away with solutions that on their own would not be viable. Which does not make this approach on the whole remotely smart or sensible. And, unfortunately, when you do get outliers where this works out, those people take as evidence of their brilliance (while ignoring all the incidents that would disconfirm it).)

And then you get crap like this going on.

Look, I made you some content

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Re: this post on 'content': https://warrenellis.ltd/mc/content/

I've seen various pushback on the word 'content', used thus, in recent years. It's definitely a reponse, most proximally, to the Marvelification of everything. People ask over and over again, torturously, 'are video games art' (yes). This is sort of the opposite end of that -- deploying terminology which, intentionally or otherwise, shifts the emphasis away from these sorts of works -- written, visual, audible, etc. -- as being works of art and instead places it on their being works of entertainment or commerce.

Here's the thing, though. As much as I do recognise this trend and people's irritation with it -- I do think there is at least an element of it driven by the corporatisation of everything -- I still find it a useful and specific term.

The end of the first paragraph of this post is an example of this. I was groping around as to what to refer to these... things as if we have to omit terms like 'art', etc. 'Content' did actually feel like the natural choice there for me (instead, I went with 'these sorts of works' which feels functional but vague).

Perhaps my tolerance for this term comes from working in video games -- especially on a live service game. The idea of a 'content schedule' makes absolute sense, and I don't see another obvious word that could plug into that gap while describing the same thing. It's all writing, but it's not all all writing. The content (yes, content) takes different shapes, so we can't straightforwardly call it 'stories' or something like that, either. 'Content' feels right.

I'm all for using terms thoughtfully, and yes, it feels kinda meaningless to stick the label 'content' on anything when that's not what we really mean. But sometimes, we do mean content, particularly in terms of recognising the status of something as a mixture of art, entertainment, and commerce.

Golden Reprise

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I did some digging into the code for The Golden Heist over the weekend, for Reasons. For those that missed it, this was an interactive fiction game I co-wrote with Rob Thorman and submitted to IFComp last year. Here's the blurb:

The domus aurea. The Golden House.

Nero built his crowning marvel, the greatest folly of his reign, on the strength of your father's genius. And then he cast him aside.

It's time to get your own back. And, hopefully, a vast amount of gold.

Break into the Golden House during Emperor Nero's birthday festivities in this comedic historical heist caper.

We intended this to be a short project, a mini collaboration to support various small goals we had. We ended up writing over 40,000 words, plus, digging into the code, really quite a lot of little systems and niches on the interactive side. It's nice to look back on something and feel a) proud and b) slightly mad for the level of work it involved.

(I'm also thankful to my past self for leaving things in such a state that it was very easy to pick up and dig back into.)

If this sounds like your sort of thing, you can go play it, free, on itch.io:

georgle.itch.io/golden-heist

Birdfall

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It's really striking to watch how fast you can hollow something out.

Look, I'm not going to defend Twitter -- the website, the corporation, the idea -- but you don't have to like something to recognise an act of vandalism against it.

I'm genuinely undecided just how much of this is calculated and how much guided by delusional beliefs. To be clear, when I say 'calculated', I don't mean 'thought through with regards to its intended effect', because I really don't think any of it has been. I mean 'done for something other than the stated reason'.

The ultimatum feels like it might fall into this category. For anyone reading this who somehow missed it: Musk sent an email to all staff remaining at Twitter, telling them they had to click a 'yes' button on a Google Form, committing to 'Twitter 2.0' and 'going hardcore mode'. If they didn't... they were out (with apparently three months of severance pay).

There's a lot going on in this. Not least the fact that he gave them less than two days and did this via a bloody Google Form.

It is not a smart or good move. It was on the BBC front page at about 3am that Twitter was closing its offices to all employees until Monday. The football World Cup, apparently a major infrastructure event for Twitter in years past requiring some serious effort to keep the site running, starts this weekend. It seems that the office locked is motivated by the fact that because they made this opt-in, they don't actually know for sure who they need to kick out and who was just on vacation, etc.

Early reports suggest that ~75% of post-layoff employees have chosen not to take that truly tempting offer.

Look, I don't think this is tactical genius or whatever. But I think there's a good chance this is about laundering responsibility. Badly, it must be said, but I still read it as a hedged attempt at that. A way for Musk to shift the blame onto those who just weren't willing to commit to the apparent capitalist good values of abusive overwork for nebulous and possible non-existent reward amid a background of threats and bullying. I think this about image management and saving face (with the certain kind of crowd who don't just laugh about how ludicrous that idea is).

This also tracks with some of his recent messages, for instance celebrating -- celebrating! -- that Twitter has hit another all-time high in terms of user activity.

Well, yeah. But if you think, against all logic, reason, and common sense, that that's being driven by some positive, repeatable force that you can leverage to your advantage...

Well, you might just be Elon Musk.

It's all real time

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I was thinking about the term 'real time' and what that is taken to mean in games. It's generally used to mean continuous, unbroken time. In strategy games, it contrasts with a turn-based system, where the is the leisure of time to contemplate each move before making it, secure in the knowledge that time will not advance until you have.

(There are some vagaries, of course -- some 'real-time' strategy games will let you pause and think, or even set down instructions while the flow of time is paused.)

It's a useful term and one that has specific currency. I'm not actually disputing it here. But it's also not the only way we experience time.

I was thinking about 'real time' applied to something like Citizen Sleeper. You experience the passage of days; you decide how to spend a limited amount of energy and attention of different quality. You lay down plans and see them gradually come to fruition on longer timescales.

That is real time, for a different value of the concept. We don't just experience time with the moment-to-moment immediacy of changing lanes on a motorway -- a set of continuous inputs, decisions, and actions. We make plans, imagine future possibilities, (dwell on past annoyances, failings, or pleasures,) have to wait -- over the passage of longitudinal time -- for things to happen.

Obviously, games trying to have to create that feeling have to abstract what that looks like, to look for the feeling rather than the literal fact of the matter. (Unless you're doing something singular like THE LONGING). Games have to speed up and slow down to represent our real time.

(This thought, somewhat sidewaysly, brought about by considering hyphenation habits for 'a game in real time' vs 'a real-time game'. One of my first professional tasks (not in games) was editing a company 'book' which featured these phrases a lot.)

8 Minutes

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I give myself about 8 minutes to write these posts. Not enough time, it must be said, to get into anything of substance. There are a bunch of things sitting in my ideas folder which I really want to get to, but which I know just can't be done in that amount of time. (Though perhaps breaking them into a series of small snapshots? We'll see.)

That time-box makes this work as a sort of 'morning pages', 'here's a thing in my brain right now' habit. Which does cut right to the intent of this blog (sketch out a thought each working day). But it does force things into a certain kind of box.

(I do actually give myself ~5 minutes or so to clean up the post and get it scheduled. But it's a case of 'what can I realistically get down in 8 minutes?')

My morning 'startup' routine works extremely well for me, though it can feel like a bit of a treadmill as well. I generally start my day job work at 9.30am. Prior to that:

  • 8.30am I should be at my desk
  • I spend up to 15 minutes working on my basic setup checklist (sorting my workspace, writing a paper schedule, spending at least a few minutes reading something, etc.). I set a timer for this.
  • When I'm done with that, I add another 15 minutes to the timer and use that to run through my 'admin' routine.
  • This means going through my main communications channels and replying where I can.
  • Some days, there are some non-daily tasks like going through my email inboxes or my budget.
  • Any leftover time has me dive into my Trello board of tasks and work down the list.
  • THEORETICALLY I'm done with this by 9am.
  • In practice, I often start a bit late, or have something that slightly overruns.
  • I use a 'two minute heuristic' for that where practical -- 'can I finish this properly with two more minutes?' If so, do it, if not, just stash what you have for next time.
  • Then I set a timer for 8 minutes, snag something from the folder if I don't have something in mind already, then write it.
  • (Two minute heuristic still applies.)
  • Then I set yet another timer to give me a box in which to read back over it -- briefly -- and get it scheduled on here.
  • Then I go make coffee and have ten minutes or so to do whatever before I have to switch back on again.

This means there's not a lot of forward-planning for these shards. For instance, [I wrote about broadly this same thing back in May]|(https://www.georgelockett.com/shards/2022/5/11/morning-startup). But things change, thoughts drift, and you get what's on the top of my brain.

And there's the timer.

The Box and Ox

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I'm reading The Box (Marc Levinson), a book about the history of containerised shipping. Some of the early chapters focus on Malcom McLean, often credited (inaccurately but not without reason) with inventing containerised shipping.

Something that stuck out to me were the eerie parallels with certain lonE skuM who have been in the news a lot lately. McLean was:

  • A businessman, not an engineer or inventor
  • Much wealthier/more propped up by family influence and the resultant opportunities than his later attempts at spinning a personal history would suggest
  • Kind of an asshole, reading between the lines
  • Known for doing the unexpected -- his insight, such that it was, was in rethinking what shipping companies did (as the book points out, they were generally thought of as being in the business of operating ships rather than moving cargo, and the mindset shift was significant)
  • Interested doing very sketchy things to circumvent troublesome government regulation
  • The bar-setter for how leveraged buy-outs happen today

Some of it is quite uncanny.

Thoughts on this:

  • This has given me (vomit) slightly more appreciation for Musk. Specifically in the context of the valid criticism that's often thrown at him: he hasn't really invented anything. Which is true! It's wrong to present him as some visionary engineer or inventor! But also, McLean did still do something significant without 'inventing' anything in the sense we mean.
  • (That comparison dies pretty quickly on the lips, though. The best thing I can really say for Musk, even through this lens, is that he's brought a bunch of smart people together at SpaceX and, in spite of his horrible management style and general lack of competence exhibited these past weeks, managed to not get in the way too much. I do wonder, though, what a less horrendeous person with access to the same resources might have enabled to happen. Though, I suppose you don't get those resources without being a horrendous person.)
  • Unlike Musk (and this is where you can breathe a sigh of relief as I reveal I haven't had a brain transplant), McLean seems to have actually known what he was doing and been moderately smart and savvy as a businessman. He was obsessed with cost-cutting and finding ways of eking economies out of a legacy business. And he was good at it. Box feels like it's trying not to be hagiographic about McLean, but there is a certain element of these stories at a remove that still do make them feel quirky and inevitable, and thus the man feel like more of a visionary, whether or not that was actually true. We basically write these myths about Musk now*, though, but at least people seem to be wise to his general incompetence as well.
  • And the leveraged buyout thing, I mean come on:

National City's headquarters on wall street, wits-ton advised that McLean himself would have to convince the bank's top loan executives to approve the loan. The bankers told McLean that the loan was too risky and Wriston too inexperienced. "He's just a trainee," one of them said. "He may just be a trainee, but he's going to be the boss of both of you pretty soon," McLean shot back. As McLean remembered later, "They said, 'Maybe we'll take another look."

The loan was approved. But the deal was still not done, and a competing buyer, also financed by National City, had grown interested in Waterman. To avoid any chance of a slipup, the lawyers decided that the entire transaction needed to be completed simultaneously. On May 6, Waterman's board and McLean's bankers and lawyers convened in a Mobile boardroom only to realize that the board lacked a quorum. One of the Wall Street lawyers quickly took the elevator downstairs, stopped a passerby, and asked whether he wanted to earn a quick fifty dollars. The man was promptly elected a Waterman director, making a quorum. The Waterman board members then resigned one at a time, with each being replaced by a McLean nominee. The new board immediately voted to pay a $25 million dividend to McLean Industries, and with a phone call the money was wired to National City. As the meeting broke up, lawyers for the opposing bidder served the board with legal papers to prevent the transfer of the dividend, but the bank already had its money and McLean had Waterman. Typical of McLean's financial acumen, he laid out only $10,000 of his own cash to gain control of one of the country's largest ship lines through what later became known as a leveraged buyout. "In a sense, Waterman was the first LBO," Wriston recalled

McLean's prize was a formerly debt-free company whose bank loans and ship mortgages soared to $22.6 million at the end of 1955, nearly ten times its $2.3 million of after-tax income.

—The Box, Marc Levinson, p.61

Thread -- The Trust Thermocline

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I'm not really 'doing' Twitter any more, but here's an interesting thread I came across the other day via a comment on Ars Technica:

https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904

The concept is the 'Truth Thermocline', i.e. a sudden step-change in how the erosion of user trust suddenly and catastrophically manifests as action.

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

I suppose the mechanism here is that users have limited ways of signalling their dissatisfaction, particularly in the 'actionable negative' context, except for the high-energy, high-impact method of cancelling their subscription, or whatever the equivalent is. This makes it very much a lagging indicator, and all the soft-shoe buildup to that is 'much harder to take seriously' for the organisation at large.

But it all reaches critical mass at once, and the bill comes due.

Oop! Crow!

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I would really like to stop waking up exhausted this week. It's very rude.

(Okay, sidenote that for all that I am good at concentrating and avoiding distraction and procrastination -- not naturally, perhaps, but because I have many, many systems and much practice in making that happen when it otherwise wouldn't -- I give myself a specific carve-out for watching birds do interesting things. This post might be extra-truncated, is what I'm saying, because: there were some crows.)

Fortunately, I mostly just wanted to share this quote I really liked from Dan Hon:

There is no single player game, just in the same way that there is no single player and no single person ... there is no such thing as a single player game because so long as there are other people, there is always the chance that you will someday be able to talk to someone else about the game you played and maybe they will get to play it, too.

—Dan Hon, Things That Caught My Attention s13e20: What It Is Like To Be A Certain Kind Of Person

Breaking the pattern for these posts slightly by bundling several unrelated things in one post, but: I've mostly stayed off Twitter this week, and plan to keep it that way. I've always gone through patches like this, because Twitter is a misery machine, but fairly obviously, the field of play is somewhat different this time. I did dip back on there briefly this morning, and as awful as it all is, seeing the way that the Blockhead-in-Chief is just absolutely piledriving this situation into the ground (I guess he knows a thing or two about digging holes) is very, very funny.

Whoop crows are back, gotta go.

Softly Dreaming

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I'm short on time and energy today, so here's a selection of albums from my main work playlist, in order. Bandcamp links where I've found them, otherwise, you'll have to go digging.

Cognitive Cyborgs

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LEUCHTTURM1917, purveyor of fine notebooks, has the motto 'Denken mit der Hand' -- 'thinking with the hand'. This is very much how I think. There's only so much I can accomplish in my head before it becomes recursive and looping or just overly linear, and my mental buffer fills up quickly. There's a marked difference when I can sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and thrash things out on paper. It feels sometimes that I can't think clearly -- expansively and productively -- without that.

This is technology. It can feel strange to stick that term to what feel like quite basic things in comparison to the heights of high tech in which we live. But I'm obsessed with it. (And bags. And chairs.) Who would I be if I didn't have access to abundant and disposable writing materials? (Leaving aside for a moment the vast webs of other things that make that meaningful to begin with, like mass literacy or easy access to an abundance of received, asynchronous knowledge.) If an apocalypse were to come, and make paper scarce, how would that change me? My brain?

This is technology, and where technology meets the self. I can say the same for my computer keyboard, the suite of software that I use, the arrangement of things on my desk. I have learned to use and rely on them. I have learned to think with them, and if I am thinking with my brain as well as these things, then what is that except an extension of the boundaries of the self?

This idea gets more attention right now in the context of collaborative AIs or centaur pairings like chess, and it's more manifest with the ways our high technology can interface with the body. It's certainly not a new idea -- a cursory search of 'we are all cyborgs' reveals a wealth of thought and writing (and isn't the very fact that I can reach into the aether for that information with the barest of efforts part of my point?). But I think it has been true for a very long time.

(The taxonomy of when, precisely, that starts seems potentially more confounding. Is there a distinction to be drawn between tool use and being a cybord? Do clothes count? Cooking? Those were, I think, the ur-technologies which made us who we are, and we would more or less die without them. )

Situation: Corvid

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I actually wrote a blog yesterday which I never got round to scheduling/posting due to a 'corvid incident'.

We had to catch this regal-looking [scared witless and really hecking angry] lad yesterday. He's sick, possibly salmonella or something, with a drooping wing and very pale feathers. He can't fly for more than a metre or so (which is good only when it came to catching him).

We had to chase him for a very long time, herding him into trees and corners and trying not to get him (or us) run over by cars. In the end, we chased him in straight lines until he was too tired to run.

I feel intensely bad for him. Chasing a creature until it's so exhausted that it's throwing up is not nice. It also requires a weird balance of deeply caring for the creature [such that you're mad enough to want to do this in the first place] while also being a calculating predator [so you can actually catch the damn thing].

He was, apparently, unlikely to have survived winter out on his own. The rest of the crow flock here had ostracised him already. We have good relations with the crows, and we were worried about them turning on us after seeing essentially hunt one of their own. But they simply... did not care. They were actively soliciting us for peanuts while the chase was in progress.

I wish him well. If he makes it and returns, he'll probably never forgive us -- and, fair enough. But hopefully, he gets to stick around to hate us.

I'll stick yesterday's draft blog on schedule to post later.