This is something that happened a while ago, and let's go for the most generous interpretation: Microsoft decided to take a small fraction of their huge piles of money and do something good with it by letting Project Gutenberg, the free ebook people who've been going since the 70s(!), make free audiobooks using some of their fancier AI text-to-speech stuff. Obviously, if you look at audiobooks through the prism of accessibility it is a lot better to have a bunch of free ones of classics, even if there is still the vibe that you're listening to Microsoft Sam's great-great-grandchild. It might be a bit weird that it reads out the pages with all the publisher credits and stuff, like the Garth Marenghi audiobook did for a joke, but presumably they can trim that or something. The thing is, though, there's already an audiobook service for Gutenberg books. It's called LibriVox and it's one of the weirdest things on the internet.

Audiobooks—the normal kind you would've got on tapes in the library when you were a kid, but which are now available largely from the Amazon cabal—can be uneven sometimes. I remember my brother and I listening to the Song of Ice and Fire books as audiobooks when we were teenagers. Because they're read by Roy Dotrice, who was already in his 70s when the first book was published, if you listen to them one after another you notice that he forgets which voices or accents he's given to characters between books—or, as the books get longer, within them . This is not a dig on Big Roy, as goodness knows I couldn't hold all that stuff in my head either; he was 88 for A Dance With Dragons, it was 50 hours long and had probably >200 characters. Most books with reasonable page counts, though, are a bit more consistent. There are often little quirks—almost any book where a male narrator has to voice female characters will see them busting out some pretty egregious "girl voice"—but it's mostly pretty radio-professional.

LibriVox, by contrast, is absolutely bonkers. There are often different people doing every chapter, so you get wild variation in mic quality, room noise, volume, voice, pronunciation, accent, pretty much everything. It's not professional, and frankly it's sometimes not even pleasant—try listening to, e.g. the first few sections of Capital, where the first section switches between three men who seem to be competing with each other to see how much they can sound like they're recording from the inside of a bin. But I dunno, I do like the fact that you can tell that a real actual person was involved at some stage of the process? Maybe this is just me being charmed by their haphazard nature; but a frequent Memhaz topic is bemoaning the slow removal of humanity from all kind of things. One definition of professionalism is doing stuff less like a person would and more like a computer would. Now that computers can do more and more stuff, I find the sheen of professionalism appeals to me less and less in a lot of things.

CM was at her mum's looking after the cat for most of the week so honestly I've been a bit out of sorts and not up to much. I feel like I've been sleeping more than usual too. Not a terrible week, necessarily, but I wouldn't say it's a great one.

Throughput

• Went to a code club at a local queer community space; unfortunately I wasn't able to focus enough to get much done but the people were nice.
• Shona had another gig along with some pals of theirs—Shona was excellent as always, the pals were also excellent—one of them (Alex Fincher) managed to include Star Wars references in their rap in a way that felt like a normal thing that someone who is into Star Wars would do rather than being some cringe nerdcore nonsense, which was tremendously impressive; the other (Oli Spleen) had a weirdly compelling, offbeat stage presence, and a keyboardist with a theramin who was very unafraid of just waving the antennae around. (There was a fourth act but I was way too tired and needed to sleep.)

• I, uh, reorganised my desk drawer? Used some organiser thingies CM was going to throw out, I think it's quite nice now:

• yeah it really was a quiet week wasn't it
• Work was good though; lots of people wanting to work with us, which is always nice, and my pal Luke has been looking at some design bits for us and is nearly ready to show us what he's done!

Output

• I tried to work out what different types of struggle are and what they might be telling you.
• I did an experiment on myself and seem to have cured, at least temporarily, my eczema.
• I watched a 3-year old documentary about QAnon.

Input

• I watched the aforementioned QAnon documentary.
• As part of my full-spectrum Q coverage I started reading Will Sommer's Trust The Plan, which I'm enjoying—Sommer has the rare distinction of being a proper journalist who is as entertaining to read as he is interesting to listen to on podcasts.
• Readwise Reader has introduced pagination, which means my little eink display Android tablet is finally usable for reading my big backlog of Readwise articles, so I'm getting through those a lot quicker than I would have otherwise.

Keep it real! Over and out.

CM's been back at her mum's looking after the cat this week, so I've had a bit more time than usual, and one of the things I've been doing is catching up on a 2021 documentary about QAnon. It's called Q: Into The Storm, and it was made by James O'Brien lookalike Cullen Hoback. I was excited to discover he also did Monster Camp (covered by Sean as part of his Decoy Octopus miniseries, get on that SFUltra Patreon if you're not already). There's actually a brief clip from Monster Camp in Into The Storm because the term "LARP" is thrown around a lot in the QAnon community—but actually there's perhaps more continuity between the two films than you'd expect, perhaps because both are about groups of weird nerds involved in concocting elaborate fantasy scenarios having internecine beefs.

The Watkins family are the most curious aspect for me, as, having heard about them on podcasts for years, it was another thing entirely to see them on screen, and in person they are really, really weird. Jim in particular had one of the more bewildering affects I've ever seen on camera, this slightly doddering thing that didn't quite chime with what I'd expect from someone in his position. It was like watching Ray Sipe videos, feeling like there was some old person joke I was unable to decipher; with perhaps the suggestion that it was more akin to Phil Hartman's Reagan bit from SNL. Ron seemed like an overgrown edgy teenager: punching a post in his garden until his knuckles bled, watching porn on his in-car entertainment system while driving. Nevertheless, he's the one who Hoback has pegged as the most likely to be Q (or at least, one of the people behind Q), for reasons which seem largely sound (though the pen/watch stuff does still feel a bit circumstantial to me).

Hoback himself has said that the main story is his trying to work out who Q is, the secondary story is the beef between the Watkinses and Fred Brennan (who founded 8chan and sold it to them) and tertiarily about the effects QAnon has had on the world. Honestly, I think that's the right tack. I saw some writing about it that said it doesn't spend enough time trying to debunk QAnon or talk about the harm that it's doing—but that's already being done elsewhere. It's basically the full-time job of some of the film's talking heads: Will Sommer, Jared Holt, the QAA podcast lads. QAnon is so multifaceted that you can't really cover it in 6 hours, let alone debunk it all. That being the case, I think it sensibly sticks to telling a story, and it's quite a ride—I was incredibly tense for the sequence where Hoback was trying to help get Fred Brennan out of the Phillipines before the law (and COVID travel lockdown) caught up with him.

I'm not really sure what someone unfamiliar with QAnon would make of it, but for me it gave me something of a new perspective on the thing. I'm often bad at imagining what the real people behind the stuff you see online are like, and it turns out that in this case they are more bizarre than I could've possibly imagined. After years of just hearing and reading about it, just being able to put names to faces has, albeit subtly, changed the way I think about it.

(Also, the opening is sick and the theme tune is an absolute banger)

I've had eczema for as long as I can remember and mostly it's been pretty bad. If I look back at old pictures of myself, like the one below, while I'm obviously an adorable child, my eye is drawn to the red patch on my arm, the scab on the back of my hand. This has been with me a loooong time.

When I was young enough that I can't really remember much of the details, my mum took me to a homeopath in despair because my eczema was so bad. They may or may not have given me some medicine, but they did give me some advice, which stuck: stop eating food with artificial colours in. I did that, and my eczema went away. It's recurred on and off since then but the flareup that's been ongoing for the last while or so has been really bad. I went to the doctor and their response, while sympathetic, was to prescribe me stronger steroids.

Now, having been through the wringer with this a few times, I know how this works. I take the steroids, they help while I'm taking the steroids, then I have to stop because steroid cream thins your skin and stuff if you take it for too long. Also I have it on my face and you really can't use the strong stuff on your face. But GPs can't really do much more, other than refer you to dermatology, and like everywhere else in the UK the system is creaking like anything and it's a real pain to get a referral—you have to either badger your GP (which I'm very bad at) or have a heinously, life-ruiningly severe case—and while mine is certainly putting a dent in my happiness (and has been interrupting my sleep!) I was pretty sure that wasn't going to do it.

So I did what any sensible person would do: I trawled Reddit and looked through the comments of every popular thread on the /r/eczema and /r/eczemauk boards that seemed relevant. The main one would obviously attract the most people, the UK one because that's where I live and different drugs are differently available over here etc. It was pretty grim reading: so many of the threads were people talking about the constant misery of itching, how bad it made them feel, people who had it on sensitive areas which sounds like maybe the worst thing imaginable? A friend of mine who suffers from chronic pain and has also had itchy skin conditions told me they think itching can be worse because pain is often a signal from your body not to do something, so you can not do whatever it is or eventually tune it out a bit, whereas itching is a signal from your body to do something and requires constant, active resistance.

Anyway, there were a lot of suggestions in there, and I made a list, prioritising things that seemed easy or cheap. The list I compiled:

• Vacuum the bed
• De-mold the shower
• De-mold around the windows in my room
• Get an air purifier
• Use this homeopathic anti-fungal treatment
• Take vitamin D3 supplements
• Take probiotic tablets
• Drink lots of oolong tea
• Black tea wash
• Yoghurt on the affected areas
• Salt baths
• Acupuncture
• AIP diet
• All this stuff

Now, I didn't get all the way down—I stopped after oolong tea; it's possible that some of these later ones work too, or work for other people! I thought I'd prioritise things that were easy, cheap, or could be done without hassle. They also cover a range of theories about eczema—one annoying thing about it is that there's no real clear consensus as to why it happens. There are any number of possible triggers, but no real conclusive underlying theory of the case. The above covers the gamut from vitamin deficiencies through airborne allergens like dust mites and mold spores, issues with skin flora and fauna to food intolerances and gut microbiome issues. I really can't pretend to understand the fine details of most of the mechanisms at play but the core concepts are simple enough.

Other things I've done in the past: steroids, obviously—until the beginning of the week I was using the steroid hydrocortisone, pretty much the mildest thing you can use steroid-wise—a dermatologist once described it to me as 'practically homeopathic', but while it does work, it doesn't completely clear it up—and as noted above it has side effects and also just makes my skin feel a bit weird? I don't really know how to communicate that to the doctor in a way they can do anything with, but it happens to be true. The weirdness is worse with stronger steroids which I have been prescribed in the past to use for particularly severe flareups. I also use antihistamines, currently fexofenadine hydrochloride which isn't my 'usual' antihistamine—I take cetirizine hydrochloride for hayfever in the summer, but the fexofenadine seems better for the itching. At the beginning of the year I did also try using a sunbed as a kind of DIY phototherapy, which initially seemed promising but I think that was more due to timing around my use of other things and its efficacy seemed to tail off pretty quickly. Sunbeds also carry significant other risks so I have stopped doing that.

So, the things I tried last week:

• I started with vacuuming the bed—I didn't do like these people did and use my robot vacuum—he's a bit delicate and I wouldn't want him falling off—but that was pretty easy. I have no idea what level of impact this had, but given the extremely low cost and effort, there's no reason not to do this.
• I also made sure that the windows and shower were free of mold—again, this is something that's probably worth just doing; it's a bit more of a faff but having mold around is bad in all sorts of ways.
• I bought this air purifier and have been running it pretty much continuously. As Dynomight will tell you, clean air is a really easy way of improving health outcomes so again, if you're willing to put up with paying £40 you're also giving yourself a longer life! And it's a free white noise generator if you have a hard time getting to sleep at night too.
• Taking a vitamin D3 tablet with the rest of my tablets in the morning. This is probably a bit less risky than sunbeds! You can get a year's worth for £10 and as long as you don't overdose (you'd have to have >10 of the tablets a day) pretty safe. The person in the reddit thread said results took weeks to appear, so this is likely not the thing that's helped most, but I don't think I'm suffering from getting a bit more vitamin D in the dark British winter—especially not as I'm a vegan and so my dietary sources of it are somewhat limited.
• Probiotic tablets—these form part of the gut health hypothesis; £10 for a month's worth doesn't seem too bad. I tried eating sauerkraet for a while and while I do actually like it I found myself forgetting, whereas I have set routines around taking tablets, so that made things a lot easier.
• There was an old study out of Japan about how drinking oolong tea could help, so I went down to delightful local tea retailers Bird and Blend and got myself a big bag of Coconut Milk Oolong (it's just oolong and coconut). It turns out oolong is delicious so even if I'm not helping my eczema at all with it, this is pretty good!
• The last thing I've done—and the one that feels the most impactful, possibly because it's in a Medical Form (a cream), possibly because it has that tingly menthol feeling, is this stuff. It's meant to treat something else (and hey maybe I just have this tinea versicolour thing—don't think so but who knows) but again, it's pretty cheap and it's homeopathic (and therefore hopefully safe), so why not?
• Also, before anyone makes a joke about the before/after pictures—I've cut down shaving my beardline to once a week in case the more-frequent shaving was irritating the eczema. This wasn't on the list, but might be relevant to some of you! (Eczema was also showing up places I don't shave like the back of my neck, inside elbows etc so it wasn't just that, but I thought I should mention)

And my eczema has gone from this (picture from a few months back, but it was comparably bad):

to this:

Obviously the sensible thing to do would've been to try these things one at a time so I could tell you which of the things it was, but I cannot stress to you enough how much this flareup was messing with my shit. I was waking up in the night, and I am usually an extremely solid sleeper. I have now not had the Proper Eczema Itches for (at time of writing) nearly two weeks! So, unless God decided to flip the magic eczema switch two weeks back, it is one or a combination of the things above. I will keep you updated on the progress of this—goodness knows it might come roaring back and I might be in agony in a few days time—but for right now this feels near-miraculous and I wanted to share in the hopes that it might help someone else!

Paul Millerd said something the other day about people who talk about how they "should" be doing more writing.

As someone that enjoys writing and does so consistently, a lot of people tell me about their own relationship with writing. Many people wish they wrote more. They tell me some form of, “I should write more,” or “I need to write more.”

They live in a world I call Shouldlandia. Inhabitants of Shouldlandia talk about what they should do and what they claim to want to do. But they don’t do it. Often for long stretches of time.

I'm pretty sure everyone has felt something like this at some time. You want to do something but for some reason it just keeps not happening—it's become a struggle. It's worth trying to drill down on that a bit and identify what's going on because I think a lot of the stuff people say about discipline or habits or whatever is incomplete because it fails to take into that some struggles are ones that should be leant into, some aren't, and if you can identify which is which you'll probably be better off.

Sometimes you're struggling against circumstance—and while it sounds silly, it can be easy to get disheartened because of a genuine conspiracy of unrelated events. I've been trying to arrange to meet up with a friend to get lunch for a few weeks but every time we've had to push it because something's come up. It starts to feel a bit weird after a few times—does this person actually want to get lunch? Is there some kind of cosmic conspiracy preventing us from getting some bánh mì? Your brain can, in the words of Lytton Strachey, "[invest] the wildest incoherences of conduct or of circumstance with the sanctity of eternal law." You've just got to push through and reschedule and hopefully it'll be fourth time lucky.

(Equally, sometimes things are bad for a bit and you've got to recognise that. The back half of last year was one long mess of bereavements and illnesses and accidents and emergencies and I was just out of it. I was often unable to even write my weeknotes. I would take that as a reverse indicator, almost: if I'm not writing, Something Is Wrong. Writing—and specifically, the kind of writing I do on here—comes naturally to me. and if I'm not doing it, not able to do it, then I've got bigger problems, and I need to address those.)

Sometimes you're struggling against your methods. I almost never have a problem writing. My brain is constantly just giving me things that I might like to write about and I note them down in my "Blog Post Ideas" list. Then, when I have a bit of time and I've put a reminder in my to-dos, I sit down and write. But I don't necessarily write linearly. My old boss once said "you wouldn't start 5 different sentences when writing, would you?" but I've learned over the years that actually, if I'm struggling with articulating one particular thing, I leave enough of a 'first attempt' at the thought so that I'll remember how I wanted to finish whatever thought was there and move on to the next paragraph, then when I've got to the end of what I wanted to say I loop back around and by that time my brain has usually given me an answer. The important thing for me is not to interrupt the momentum—though for others that might be different.

Sometimes you're struggling with the quirks of your psyche. Even though it is one of the things I enjoy doing the most, something that allows me to enter flow state with impossible ease, I sometimes just don't remember to do writing. If something's not in front of me I will forget about it (because, well,) so I have reminders in my to-dos to do it a few times a week. Some people don't have this problem, and good for them, but I need to set reminders for myself to e.g. watch a TV show I want to, because otherwise I will just forget.

Sometimes you're struggling with doing the wrong kind of the thing you're trying to do. If I am truly having a hard time writing, it's usually a sign that either I'm trying to 'grind something out'—I'm pushing at writing something that I'm not interested in or don't believe or just somehow doesn't fit. I tend not to write stuff that's super-long, for instance because it doesn't seem to work with the rhythm of how I work. I'm trying to work around that—I've got a longer project I'm working on where I write a few hundred words a day—but in general I find writing stuff like this easier. Another classic version of this is "I want to do exercise but I don't like running" so have a go at weightlifting or swimming or climbing or something else that's a bit more fun, and you'll be much better able to stick with it.

Sometimes, of course, you don't actually want to do the thing you're trying to do—you're just struggling against yourself. You either earnestly want to do the thing but have some subconscious resistance, or you have an idea in your head about being the kind of person who does this thing rather than actually wanting to do the thing. The first problem requires some reflection and internal inquiry to try and work out what's stopping you; the latter requires honesty with yourself about what you actually want. Dan Shipper talks about this here: "Admitting the obvious is to take a scary leap. It is to make decisions that bring your life into alignment with what you truly want—rather than what you think you should want or what others want from you."

Sometimes, the struggle is with unfamiliarity—and this is probably the kind of struggle I think Paul is talking about with video, and I agree with him there. Most often this is the struggle you have to deal with when you're learning. If something is new and unfamiliar, as most things are when you're learning, you're most likely going to struggle with it, but this is, unlike most most of the others, a productive struggle. Most of those are telling you to move away from whatever it is you're trying to do, that you're not vibing with it and you should try something else. This is something you want to try and move toward.

This isn't a complete map of this stuff, but I think it's useful to think through when you want to be doing the whole "grit, discipline, habit, routine" stuff, and when you want to be... not doing that. I think that you can generally find ways to not do that and achieve comparable results and be happier doing so.

We bought a car! She is yellow like a bee, so we have called her Bea. I was looking at getting an electric car through the business but that fell through so we had a look on Autotrader for something cheap, CM thought this looked cute, we test-drove it, liked it and bought it! I think I'm happier with just a normal old car-car: there's no computer intermediary between you and the vehicle, everything is a button rather than a touchscreen, it's small enough to be easy to park in the city, cheap enough that the insurance is reasonable, no-one's gonna want to nick it, etc etc. It's also only had one owner since it was new and they only did 3000 miles a year, which sounds like it was someone's pop-to-the-shops vehicle, so it's not suffered much wear and tear. After months of using car club and hire cars I'm looking forward to having a car I can get use to and comfortable in.

Throughput

• I was off sick a fair bit this week so it's been a bit quieter than usual. Actually took a bit of time off, though, and feeling better for it.
• Played some King of Tokyo with some friends, which was apparently designed by the same guy who designed Magic: The Gathering. It was quite fun—I have been burned by knowing some Board Game People who will want you to play for hours and hours but they're fine to play for just a bit.
• The toaster caught fire and we had to call the fire brigade. I was quite sad as I bought it when I moved into the flat and I really liked it :(

• My eczema, an occasional topic on here, has been doing really well; enough that I feel it worth noting! I might write some more on that next week.

Output

• Wrote something about the decline of projects online.
• Wrote something about how environment shapes mindset.
• Wrote something about a kind of distraction.

Input

• Since I saw a bunch of people talking about the new series of True Detective, I realised I never watched anything past the first series, so I started on the second, which I seem to remember getting slated at the time but I'm enjoying it, even if it is pretty grim.
• Still picking away at Rosewater, trying not to get into it too much yet.

Keep it real! Over and out.

Here's something that happens to me sometimes: I'm not busy—I have some small, unimportant things to do, and one specific big important task. It might not necessarily be that difficult or complicated, but it does have a deadline. Then I leave it and leave it and eventually it gets near the deadline and I've not done it. Then I speak to whoever it is the work is for and they don't ask me about it, or they do and it's clear that they didn't really expect it in by this deadline, and I feel like I understood that on some level, and I won't respond to the deadline unless it's really real.

I wouldn't usually say I respond super-well to high pressure from clients—I don't like being chased with emails—but I need to know that that the expectation I'll do stuff is there. If things are too low-pressure that just seems to... stop me from being able to focus, somehow? Not on everything, just on some things, occasionally. Every day this week I have set out with the intention of doing this task—that would probably actually be pretty quick, that wouldn't take that much time, but my whole brain will shift away from it, more than the kind of thing I'm talking about here.

Is it because there's not much else on—is it fear of not having anything else to do after? The terror of freedom? At least when I'm putting stuff off in the way I described before I feel like it's stuff that I'm somehow scared of (even though I have no reason to be). If it's something I know I don't want to do or is boring I can usually pop on some music and just crank through it. But this is something else. I've realised recently that I definitely have a hard time not having anything 'on'; it might be an extension of that. I'm really not sure, but whatever it is it really gets on my nerves.

I went to a book talk on Monday, the topic of which was QAnon. I've been fascinated with QAnon for years, but something I keep coming back to is that it seems to have a weirdly mass appeal despite large sections of it seeming on their face not just implausible but impossible. Whatever you believe about e.g. the JFK assassination, the idea that maybe it was the result of a conspiracy—whoever that conspiracy may have involved—and that it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald is a thing that could be true without any revisions to the laws of physics. Several core tenets of QAnon—the Great Awakening, for instance, when according to some debt will be abolished and cures for diseases made available to all—seem to rely on, basically, magic. I mentioned this to the speaker during the break and they said that they get you with the thin end of the wedge: Hillary was pals with Epstein or whatever. You don't really start seeing the wackier stuff about JFK Jr or whatever until you're in a bit deeper and it's begun to constitute a fair amount of what you read and see and hear, and you trust the people saying it, and it starts to feel more plausible.

It reminded me that I'd read something the other day about how some people who were into crypto for the DAO community stuff were around some conversations with people that made them realise that perhaps the money people were quite avaricious and bad, and maybe they should take a step back. They stopped following all the crypto twitter accounts they followed and began to realise that they almost never encountered anyone talking about it in the real world, and whenever they did it was almost invariably negative.

It also reminded me of when I suggested to my mum, who was telling me the other week about looking for a specific item of clothing in a difficult-to-find size, that she try and find it on Vinted. She said she was worried about getting scammed—not from the sellers, but by the idea of buying things off the internet with a card, which is apparently something that comes up a lot on Jeremy Vine. I said: how is that different to when Dad buys stuff on Amazon? She said, it just feels weird.

It also reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a friend the other day who was pessimistic about prospects for career improvement, and when I suggested various things to them, their perspective initially was rather one of "if this were possible, why isn't everyone doing it?" I pointed out to them that becoming a freelancer wasn't something I'd really considered until several friends of mine did so and I saw that it was a real, practical possibility.

The point is: people's information landscape really does affect their thinking. It's not just media diet, it's down to who you talk to—and if you're attempting to affect some kind of change (personally, or on a bigger scale) it's probably worth trying to think in those terms. If you want to try and move in a certain direction in your life—career-wise, lifestyle-wise, whatever—try and make more friends who are like that so you have an embodied example. If you're trying to make a change in the world and make others believe like you: I dunno, it feels like a dodgy way to go about it but you could probably do worse than just posting a lot about it and getting pals who agree with you to do likewise.

Thinking about projects which fail before they've really got going got me thinking about another phenomenon which certainly isn't the same but is partially related—projects which used to have vitality but don't any longer, they just have a long fade-out. I feel like it's particularly common—and particularly sad!—when it's a group effort, something around which there was a community.

There are multiple modes of this—there's a blog called the Art of Manliness—cringe, I know, but it sure is effectively search-engine optimised—which used to publish huge amounts of actual blog posts, and now seems to exist largely as a podcast. Presumably there's a hefty amount of historical traffic to the old posts, but the cost-benefit is such that interviewing folk for the podcast is a better return.

Crooked Timber is another example: a group blog that had many of its contributors go on to great things, but which I now find kinda unreadable because it's not really got any vitality—it's just Harry going on about marmalade or whatever, or Chris's pictures (which are very nice!). But they use to do all this stuff,  those book seminar things, and now it just seems very... desultory, just something that's done out of habit.

There was another blog called Caught By The River that I was going to use as an example here, but I went back and looked at it again and it seemed to be somewhat livelier than I remember it being the last time I looked, which is lovely! There's another other example but I vaguely know some of the people involved so I can't name it, but it was a group blog that used to publish regularly but now seems to have lost almost all of its energy to Twitter, various members' podcasts etc. I don't think it's coincidental that these examples are blogs, and it's undeniable that the "energy" of the internet has moved away from blogs. But it happens for other things too.

Often it's just that early on in a project, its whole "thing" isn't fixed, so if it's not been meticulously planned (and sometimes even if it has!) there's way more space and energy for experimentation, which later calcifies as it shifts from 'explore' to 'exploit' and you find yourself with less 'early project energy' to experiment and end up  just wanting to crank out the latest unit and move on to whatever does have that energy. Pretty much all our experimentation, our having fun with the form with Memhaz, for instance, was in the first year or so. A lot of that stuff might still be the most memorable to me. We also used to be very, very regular, and now our publishing schedule is fortnightly-to-monthly.

I think condensing a lot of novelty into a short period of time also makes the earlier phase feel longer in retrospect. My brother often talks about how a lot of what people remember about TV shows is actually from the early episodes. I think about e.g. Battlestar and I remember a bunch of bits: they have to keep jumping every few minutes; Boomer waking up covered in water; Zarek negotiating about the prisoners mining the ice; the explosion on the flight deck; Starbuck flying the Raider. That's actually just the first five episodes! I remember way, way less of the rest of the show—though I haven't watched it in a very long time.

It's something that's obviously not peculiar to the internet; something starting, having an imperial phase, then tailing off–but I guess it's particularly noticeable on the internet, where you can just see it all in front of you, you can look at the blog sidebar and see the dates posts were published. Internet projects also are far less often commercial ventures, and thus far more apt to be impacted by life changes. Projects started in a gang of friends' time-rich 20s may not hold interest as they change and grow, people also have kids, have to look after ailing family, all sorts of things. All this is pretty much inevitable–nothing stays fresh forever—but I always feel a bit of sorrow when I see projects whose spring and summer I knew well descending from autumn into winter.

Annoyingly, I read something really good on this topic a few months back but apparently didn't save it. I will edit a link in if I happen upon it again.

We're nearly done with January! The days are slowly lengthening—CM has something on her watch which tells her how much longer and it always cheers me a bit (2 minutes and 9 seconds today; we're over 9 hours of daylight 💪)

Throughput

• I've realised that I like waking up earlier because I'm able to get stuff done before people have started emailing me, so I've been getting up at 6:30 and into the office for 8:00. Some days I do not always manage; it's difficult to get myself to bed in time all the time, but in general I think it's good.
• Switched my Mac Mini and Macbook around so now the Mini's at home and the Macbook's in the office. This is intended to make me a bit more mobile at work and a bit more static at home (where I've got the standing desk). We'll see how that works.
• Looking at starting a meetup group for young founders and talking to some people about that.
• Work's been tricky but I think we're turning the corner.
• Went to a sauna on the seafront on Friday. One of their boxes has views out across the sea and even if the waves are a bit choppy it feels very tranquil watching from inside. Would've been more tranquil without the chatty Spanish lads who had the cadence of a Joe Rogan episode, but honestly I found that kinda endearing.
• Had a chat to a friend about some work problems he was having and we ended up having a really long chat about general life outlook and stuff and I feel like I was really able to help! Dunno whether I'd be able to do it for people who I don't know really well but I found it really fulfilling.
• It was my Nan's 90th birthday so the whole family went down to Wareham and took her out for lunch. It was lovely seeing everyone—I've not seen most of them since Grandad's funeral, which was obviously a slightly less cheery occasion, and even though I was running on very little sleep and CM had had a very busy Friday we both had a smashing time. Dorset and back in a day is still quite a mission though 😅

Output

• I wrote some notes on Better Boys, Better Men
• I was the gravedigger at the project graveyard
• I tried to think about how I think about national cultures

Input

• Played it a lot of BG3 the train to and from Dorset on the Steam Deck; makes the journey fly by, but you've really got to bring a power adapter with you. I said I'd nearly finished act 3 last time but I meant Act 2; I've just finished that and arrived at Baldur's Gate itself. Think these robot lads might be bad.
• Enjoying(?) No Bad Parts, a book about Internal Family Systems therapy by Richard Schwartz, the guy who invented it. My intuitive feeling is that the stuff he's describing isn't literally true, in the sense that there aren't literally other personalities in your head, but that it's a way of subconscious-spelunking that makes sense to the brain, but maybe that's just my Protestantism talking; some residual resistance to transubstantiation.
• Gilmore Girls takes way longer to watch than you'd expect because we keep stopping during each episode to talk about it. Really enjoying it!

Keep it real! Over and out.

I've been thinking about William L. Shirer’s Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, which I read some years ago. Shirer was an American journalist reporting from Germany during the rise of the Nazi party and the book is a compelling account of those events told by one who witnessed it. What really stuck with me, though, was his analysis of the causes of Hitler’s rise.

Throughout the book his contention is that rather than being chiefly a combination of structural forces and historical coincidence, the rise of Hitler was down to something inherent in German national character, a desire to follow strong leaders. This was the focus of much criticism at the time of publication in the 60s, especially from Germans themselves. What was interesting to me, though, was the use of 'national character' in this way. I've never really heard it used in my lifetime as much more than joke fodder for panel shows or an empty banality for political speeches, and here's someone who was actually around for the rise of the Nazis using it to explain the whole damn thing.

There are two thoughts which seem to be held, unconsciously, in tension by the British liberal (by which I guess I just mean 'non-conservative') mind: that we should respect and not derogate cultures other than ours and how they differ, but also that these cultures are not really that different; that they’re just reskins of our own, with fish and chips replaced with bratwurst or cheese or whatever. (If we're talking about Europe and North America, at least. Outside of that... maybe less so.)

My feeling is that are some significant cultural differences and those tend to be pastiched, and there are subtler ones that tend to be overlooked. In both cases, I think the extent to which they explain bigger things is that to which they inform and affect structures and institutions—playing into material factors. But I don't know, y'know? I'm not really well-travelled or of enough previous residential diversity to have an experiential feeling for it, nor am I well-read enough to have an intellectual conception. Cultural universals—which presumably therefore have some biological basis?—seem to indicate we're not looking at scope for infinite variability, but there's enough scope for big variation within those building blocks. You can make a lot of shapes with all that cultural Lego!

I think, perhaps boringly, it is generally good to respect other cultures and those who belong to them, acknowledge that all have their positive and ugly sides, and try to borrow the good where we can and discard and condemn the bad—if possible! Some people—usually conservatives—think that it’s not possible to have certain sorts of good without certain sort of bad (though they might not see them as bad). I think it’s certainly foolish to think there’s such a thing as a perfect society; people are flawed and difficult and even were we to subtract material concerns, which would relieve an immense amount of suffering, there would, realistically, still be people who were dickheads—but generally there are plenty of positive-sum improvements to be had, and those who think otherwise seem to me overly enamoured of a "hard time create strong men" mindset.

I was talking to my brother the other day and he told me that Patrick Rothfuss has published something recently. I was agog, but apparently it's just a novella, and based on a short story he wrote years back for a collection edited by George R.R. Martin, which might be one of the funniest things he could've done. The reason why that's funny might not make sense to anyone who's normal, so: Rothfuss is an author who wrote two fantasy novels about a decade ago that got good notices and has, to all appearances not done much writing since. Per Wikipedia:

In July 2020, Rothfuss's editor and publisher Betsy Wollheim responded publicly on her Facebook account to an article speculating on reasons why The Doors of Stone, the concluding volume of the trilogy, had not been published, saying she had "never seen a word of book three" and that she didn't think Rothfuss had written anything since 2014, despite having already been paid.

Three years ago he said he'd release a chapter from the novel to the public if his charity met some donation goal, and that it would be performed by a bunch of people that nerds like if it met some higher donation goal. It met both, and the chapter still hasn't come out, performed or otherwise. Now he's published something else that also isn't that. It's doubly funny that this thing he's published, is a novella based on a short story he did back in the day for a collection by George RR Martin, because that guy is the king of putting off writing the stuff people actually want to read from him to do Wild Cards or whatever (except he seems to be doing it deliberately to wind people up because he's a legend).

The reason this is quite so funny is that it doesn't seem to just be a case of writers block or whatever. If you follow his online presence at all, Rothfuss clearly just wants to spend his time talking about the writerly art of writing on podcasts, playing D&D with other similar ghastly 'nerd celebrities', streaming himself playing videogames, etc, rather than actually writing. He wants to have people post image macros of things he's said about the magic of libraries or whatever like Neil Gaiman, but while I might take the mick out of Gaiman for being cringe, you can't deny the man cranks out the work in a way that Big Pat seems to struggle to.

You might ask: why care? To be clear: I don't want to read this book. I haven't read the other books he wrote since I was a teenager and I doubt they will have gone up in my estimation since. I don't particularly mind that he took a bunch of money for charity and then didn't get Will Wheaton or Felicia Day or whoever to read something he hadn't read—that actually makes him go up in my estimation. It's because he's a peculiarly developed example of a phenomenon that seems to afflict a lot of people on the internet.

Akrasia, or acracy, is a Greek word which means something like "weakness" (literally 'a-krasia', the 'krasia' bit having the same root as 'kratos', which means 'power', as well as being everyone's favourite grumpy videogame dad) but more specifically something like "weakness of will" or "acting against your better judgment". Alex Harrowell talked about it a couple of times (here and here) in relation to Boris Johnson, who is a very apt subject for the description; he will blow about like a shopping bag in whatever the current political and media winds may be.

There are certain people online who always seem to be trying new initiatives that don't last. You will likely be familiar with them: bouncing from (to take one flavour) crypto to Urbit to AI, but just never quite sticking the landing, always looking for the next thing to strike it big. They try a lot of stuff out but it doesn't seem to go anywhere, it doesn't stick. Podcasts or blogs or Youtube series with one, two, three episodes, no views, no farewells.

I identify, at least to an extent—sure, I've been doing the same podcast on and off for nearly a decade, but there's plenty of things I try to get going that I either just don't do or I make a good start on and just crash and burn for boring life reasons. Rothfuss is an interesting example because he was able to crank out two books before he got his head turned by Twitter and Twitch and stuff.  

But some people move between projects without the stench of inconstancy attaching to them. Why do seem folk seem instead to just be rolling with the punches, changing plans on the fly?

Perhaps obviously, some people who do a lot of projects actually finish them. Some of them do a lot of little defined-scope projects, like Craig Mod and his pop-up newsletters. But you don't have to set defined scopes for everything up front. Some people don't "complete" everything they start—but they tend to note when something is done with, and demonstrate their constancy in other ways; keeping an "anchor project" going for years at a time.

Framing is another thing: if you say "I'm going to try [x] for a bit", that obviously has a different vibe to "[x] is now my whole thing, here's my five-year plan" etc. Sometimes people manage this, but it's rare. It has the ostensible virtue of social commitment to make you stick to it, but in most cases it leads to overwhelm if you've not adequately judged your capacity, then dropping things, usually quietly.

One way (perhaps the most telling) in which acracy announces itself is that the new thing is always the biggest, most turbo-important—that last thing was trash, forgotten about, yesterday's news. I'm reminded of an anecdote on a very old episode of Chapo where they went to CPAC and saw conservative grifter child Jacob Wohl trying to do a press conference to smear Ilhan Omar with some Big Revelations. The reporter Will Sommer asked Wohl about the Big Revelations about Robert Muller he'd been peddling the month before. Wohl replied "oh, we're done with that".

I think it's generally good to be marking the conclusion of things, rather than unceremoniously dropping them for the next thing, whether truly "finished" or not.  If you follow someone for long enough, you pick up that they drop things a lot. Even if you don't it often doesn't take much for people to sense when they're walking over unmarked plots in your project graveyard.

Previously on the HNTRW masculinity series:

maybe I'll read bell hooks like everyone's been telling me to

Now, I've not done that, for the very good reason that I started reading the bell hooks and it was way better than anything else I've read so far to the extent that it became clear to me after one chapter that this would have to be the last book of the series, so instead I put that to the side briefly to go through Better Boys, Better Men which is... arguably closer to the kind of thing I've been asking for than a lot of other stuff? but still feels quite mid.

The author, Andrew Reiner, is a university professor whose bailiwick seems to be roughly This Kind Of Thing, which is good. He brings himself into the narrative a lot, speaking about his own experience in a way that I found to be helpful to the general thrust of the book. However, the emphasis here is, at least initially, on childhood development, with chapters given over to the way that parents and others talk to children and how that differs by gender, and while some of it feels a little tendentious ("Fathers were more likely to use words with daughters that were associated with their bodies... [the researchers] speculated that this body-focused language introduced in girls a potentially damaging focus on body image") the basic points that baby boys get spoken to less, with less emotional language, are responded to less when they cry(?!) seem pretty wild to me.

It continues with chapters about crying, violence, shame etc. There are a few sharp observations—the identification of "targeted transparancy", where boys won't create a "fluid boundary" for vulnerability but instead open up to each other only when they have very specific need, for instance. A lot of it, though kinda boils down to "I went to see a group of boys/men in a private school/prison/whatever (a lot of kids in private schools, for some reason?) and they were in some kind of men's group and it helped them". There would maybe be more here if this was the first text of its kind you were approaching but after a few goes round at this you maybe get a little inured to statistics about male loneliness. Possibly unfairly, but there you go.

On the whole, this is... fine? The author's foregrounding of his own experiences is quite affecting at times, mostly around the tougher aspects of his own upbringing, but also a bit Anxious Lib Parent (the bit where he kicks off at his son for asking him questions about whether they still execute soldiers, like in the Civil War, was very Like That). Emphasis on the importance of male groups feels like a common thread throughout all the books so far, and it's really leaned into here. That's the thing I've taken away from the project the most to date.

Next time: yeah OK I'll read the bell hooks (I'm behind enough writing this that I actually read it ages ago, but let's preserve the suspense).

It's been chilly, a fact of which I'm all the more acutely aware because the heating in our office has been broken on-and-off since before Christmas.

Throughput

• Went to see my brother for his birthday on Tuesday, which was lovely; we went round the Tank Museum which we've not been to since we were kids. Lots of tanks.
• Had lunch with a pal who's been laid off recently which is obviously sad but they seemed pretty upbeat about it which was heartening.
• Had a nice chat with one of the lads I do BJJ with on the way home—he works as a video editor for Onlyfans corporate, which explains the stickers I've seen on bottles lying around.
• Eczema is not great right now :(

Output

• Wrote something about having a relationship with a system vs a person
• Wrote something else bemoaning that everything seems to be content marketing
• Had an idea for a dog adoption aggregator
• Another highlights video, this one for Nick Broomfield's Biggie and Tupac

Input

• Playing Baldur's Gate again; it remains good, think I've nearly finished Act 3.
• Rosewater's good fun, trying not to read it too fast because I'm going to talk about it on a podcast and I don't want to have thoughts about it until an appropriate time for that.
• CM and I have started watching Gilmore Girls. It does a very effective job of creating a world of cozy community you want to inhabit.
• We went to the cinema to watch The Holdovers which was charming and delightful. Would've been nice to watch before Christmas, but y'know. We also saw this poster—apparently Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal are meserising:

Keep it real! Over and out.

This one is one that I'm a bit sad to write, as I'd actually quite like to do it myself, but realistically the amount of effort required to build it and maintain it is silly.

So: my girlfriend and I live in Brighton, and we'd like to have a dog. However, if you go on any dog adoption sites, look at the listings, find one that looks lovely, look at the pictures, watch the video, fall in love with them, you'll eventually read down to the bottom where it says "the dog must have 50 acres to roam free and never ever meet another animal ever". This makes us sad, and I feel like there has to be a better way.

What I'd like is some way to filter the dogs beforehand, so we can have relevant criteria surfaced. There are a few problems with this, though: firstly, there's no good aggregator that pulls in everything and lets you sort and filter nicely. The aggregators that I've found are charmingly retro, but don't allow this kind of thing. Secondly, there's no common system for presenting information that allows you to filter stuff in a useful way between the shelters. RSPCA display stuff one way, Dogs Trust another, etc, and that's before you get to all the smaller shelters where you're lucky if there's any structure at all.

In order to make Dogfinder, then, you'd need build the site and then set up a system to scrape listings from all the different dog shelters, and then parse the text in their descriptions to pull out any relevant characteristics we want to use for filtering. (This might actually be a decent use for an LLM, actually.)

This is probably a bonkers amount of effort proportionate to the marginal reward of "a warm feeling"—dog adoption places probably aren't going to offer you much in the way of kickbacks, though I guess you could get sponsored by some dog treats or something? It'd be a right pain to operate and maintain, but if someone wants to build this I'll be grateful.