Why stand on a silent platform

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1
Why stand on a silent platform? Zach de la Rocha yells out on Township Rebellion.

And I agree. This is the greatest time in history to get your voice heard around the world in whatever medium suits your fancy. Do you want to write? Start a blog. Do you want to make films or have your own TV show? Start a YouTube Channel. Do you like radio? Start a podcast! Do you want to be a photographer, a fitness model, artist, illustrator? Start an Instagram account. Do you Want to be a musician? Start a Soundcloud account. There is no limit on your means of self-expression.

I wrote my first blog post on the 8th of February 2004. There was a real sense of community then, in the blogging world, mainly because it was new and people were still trying to figure out blogging’s potential. It was more personal then too. But once someone figured out they could make money from blogging, the game started to change. And once people got more comfortable with e-commerce (giving they’re credit card detail over the internet) the game changed for good.

Then social media came along and like TV killed the radio, social media killed personal blogging.

Commercial blogging still managed to thrive. The likes of Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, The Dredge Report, Gawker (now defunct) and others like them, kept blogging alive, albeit with a different cultural flavour. The days of the solo blogger (alone in his or her room) bleeding their heart and soul out into the Internet were gone. The CopyBlogger crowd moved in with the promise that if you niched well and nailed your SEO, then you could quit your day job and be a full-time blogger. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If you wanted to blog for the love of blogging, you took your game over to social media ‘cause that’s where the eyeballs are. And that’s fine too. But why not write from your own blog and syndicate out, which is what the IndieWeb Movement is partially about. There’s also the fight against having your data harvested and sold to any bidder and then fed back to you via algorithms designed to make you buy more goods and services that (in a Fight Club sort of way) you probably don’t need.

If you have a blog that is sat gathering dust because you fell for the rhetoric that blogging is dead or because you thought (in reference to social media) if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em and left for the promise-land of ‘likes’ and ‘hearts’ and ‘rewteets’, then dust it off, and join the IndieWeb Movement. Your blog deserves it!

Side note: Most blogs, these days, look the same -clean, neat, colour coordinated. Remember when they used to look like this?

2
Travel reminds me that people are pretty much all the same regardless of where you go or what country you’re in. Everywhere we’re trying to survive and that breaks down to 3 things – feeding, fucking, and fighting. Everything else is just a sideshow or a way to kill time between the 3 F’s.

These are the kinds of thoughts I have at 3:30 in the morning.

3
My journey to Madrid was not a direct one. For some reason, nothing was flying out of the UK and going directly to Madrid. My only options were to fly to Frankfurt or fly to Brussels and then onto Madrid. I have a soft spot in my heart for Germans. I lived in the country for 3 years. I grew fond of the people and the place and the culture. Plus I love pretzels like the Germans love pretzels. And since I had an hour layover in Frankfurt I thought I’d seize the opportunity to grab a couple of them:

4
So it’s day one of #blogpals19 and because I’m not one for always choosing the easy route, I didn’t hesitate to jump into this challenge knowing that my first 4 days of the challenge were going to be a challenge because I’m away from my home base on a business trip!

But that doesn’t matter. It’s a great opportunity to practice my mobile blogging chops. I’m using my iPhone 8+ to type this out as I taxi down the runway on LH 1112 to Madrid. I love having a small computer in my hand capable of being a one-stop media creation shop. I can write. I can record and edit audio. I can shoot and edit video. I can take pictures and edit them. I can broadcast live video and live radio. In short, I have the means of total media production in the palm of my hand. I know I’m not saying anything you haven’t heard already, but man this stuff excites the hell out of me. I get fired up every time I think about the power we carry around in our pockets!

5
We’ve done a pretty good job of domesticating humans. Law and order are prevalent in most of the civilised world. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Frankfurt or Madrid people, on the whole, behave the same – we greet each other, respect each other’s space and property. We stand up and sit down when we’re told. We stand in line. We pay for goods and services. We get up, go to work, watch a little TV, watch the news, complain about politics. We eat. We sleep. And we get up and do it all again the next day, until we eventually die.

We are well trained domesticated primates.

6
The only thing that separates us from the beasts is our imagination and wild ass capacity for creativity. So don’t be a robot. Create stuff. Express yourself in you’re own unique way.

The world doesn’t need another automaton.

It needs YOU – in all your beauty and glory.

Go make something!

Madrid, Área metropolitana de Madrid y Corredor del Henares, Spain

58 °F Mostly Cloudy

A small group of rebels has gathered

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Slow start, but then again, Sundays were made for slow starts. If I tap into biblical mythology, even God took a break on Sunday. I guess, the trouble with us these days is we’ve been conned into the 24/7 mentality where we’re encouraged to cram as much “productivity” into a day as we can. Gorden Geko taught us that lunch is for wimps. And in this new world, rest is for chumps and suckers! Of course, I don’t believe that! But it is the sub-text of our lives.

Tomorrow is the start of #BlogPals2019 which is a 30-day blogging challenge I’m doing with some friends. I’ve been making my triumphant return to blogging and wanted a little motivation to help keep me in the habit of posting regularly. They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit, so 30 days should be plenty to get us into the habit of posting on our blogs daily. This is where I think documenting and self-expression and advocating for things you care about comes into play. It makes blogging easier and more fun. On top of that, each new post becomes a continuation of your personal narrative. People get to know YOU through your blog.

And that’s as it should be.

It’s time to take back the web from those who just want to feed our data into an algorithm so they can sell us more stuff or tell us what to think or do. Even tell us how to vote for!

You have to throw that yoke off, be a free-thinker.

A new hope…

Join us!

Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom

49 °F Mostly Cloudy

Like a kite in a hurricane

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October flew by like a kite caught in a hurricane. I didn’t realise it was November. The dark days should have been a clue. That and the sudden drop in temperature as winter starts to creep in. I didn’t really clock that it was November already until I started seeing posts for #NaPodPoMo show up in my Twitter feed. But hey, ho, there you go. New month, new ideas to chase and adventures to have as I continue my quest for new experiences.

Earlier in the month, I got into a Twitter chat with @alexrobinson. She carries a work phone and a personal phone and I commented that who I am and what I do are so mashed together that I couldn’t separate my life between work and personal. Most people probably see that as a bad thing. For me, it’s the goal:

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor, and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he’s always doing both.”

October has seen my return to blogging, but I’ll write more about that later during our 30 Day blogging challenge that starts on Monday.

To sign off this post, I’ll leave you with my October Playlist:

6 of my fav:

1) Red Hot Chili Peppers – Soul to Squeeze

2) Temple of the Dog – Say Hello 2 Heaven

https://youtu.be/Bgsg9xfsSoc

3) Meat Puppets – Backwater

4) Cracker – Low

5) Bakar – Hell N Back

6) Audioslave – Doesn’t Remind Me

 

Peace good people,
Clay

Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom

50 °F Mostly Cloudy

Just another cookie monster

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Who’s obsessed with pinball? I used to be back in the day. I picked up the habit up from my Aunt Valerie who was super obsessed with the game. She used to drag me along to the corner shop and play for hours (or at least seemed like hours for a little kid who wanted to be outside playing with his friends). I remember one time while she was playing, she had me hold her paperbag full of cream-filled cookies. I remember there were a mix of flavours – strawberry, vanilla, lemon…lemon was my favourite. I got so bored waiting (and hungry I guess) I licked all the cream out of the cookies and put them back together, and then put them back in the bag. I didn’t think she’d notice. Later, when she went to eat her cookies, she most certainly did notice and I took a clobbering for it! I decided being a cookie monster wasn’t worth the pain.

I learned to play pinball instead.

Here’s a piece from Quartz on the history and state of play of pinball machines now in an age obsessed with video games.

Did you know…

Although pinball seems downright wholesome these days, it was considered anything but when it debuted in the 1930s. At best, having a pinball machine or two in your establishment might earn the owner a bit of a seedy reputation. And at worst, it would land the owner in jail, complete with a hefty fine.

I might do what my Internet friend Albert Z did and buy an old pinball machine.

“Pinball is in between the industrial revolution and the information age. Pinball is a warm entertainment. It’s electronic, but it’s still wood and metal. It’s still about using the heel of your hand to knock a big, giant machine so that Martians can die. Video games aren’t about physical interaction; they’re about information interaction.”

—Pat Blashill, writer and “professional pinball obsessive”

Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom

36 °F Mostly Cloudy

a little taste of adventure close to home

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I felt compelled to stay up late watching 80s videos. So many teenage memories flooded through my half-baked brain. Not such a great idea when you’re on the backside of 50 wondering where all the time went. Watching these videos reminded me of time when all I wanted to do was rule the world. Back then, you couldn’t tell me nothing. I knew how everything worked. I had it all figured out.

Of course now I’m not so sure anymore.

I picked up a copy of Hadley Freeman’s book, Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (And Why We Don’t Learn from Movies and More. I wanted to see what lessons I should have learned, which now elude me.

Last night, I turned to Beverly Hills Cop for some answers. Really I just wanted some light entertainment and BHC is easily my favourite Eddie Murphy movie. But there were lessons:

  • Don’t always play by the rules
  • Rules were made to be broken
  • Use you intution
  • Heart over head
  • And sometimes, the ends do justify the means!

Today, one of my normal walks turned into a little mini-adventure on account of the floods produced by all this rain we’ve had over the past few days.

It started off innocent enough:

Then it heated up a little:

And finally it came to this:

All in a good Sunday.

I have the crew together who are doing a 30 Day blogging challenge with me that starts on 4 November. The folks include:

Cathy – my long-time blogging buddy

Zoltan – Mr bassplayer extrodinaire

Aimee – my collaboration partner in crime

Dave – my Twitter buddy

Raine – a fellow trainer who goes waaaaay back to our MLHSBC days!

So we have some blogging newbies, some veterans, and some inbetweeners. I’m looking forward to the challenge!

 

Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom

38 °F Clear

Ah just like the old days

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1
I love the momentum that’s being regained by the personal blogging genre.

2
I’m working on forming new habits with the Internet. The last couple of day i’ve spent the majority of my day re-wiring my blog to IndieWeb standards, which has meant a lot of reading about the IndieWeb and exploring other IndieWeb writer’s blogs.

I’ve also been tinkering under the hood of my site and inevitably it crashed – twice! Ah! Just like the old days of the web when you’d spend hours trying to figure things out and experiment and have those experiments fail and then hopping on the forums to try and source an answer. It’s also been nice to write in a more relaxed manner without worry about whether or not what I am writing conforms to some marketing standard. I can let my blog be an extension of me – a place where I can share little pieces of the world through my eyes.

3
I felt like capping off the evening with something 80s. I need an 80s movie fest. In fact, time for a little Beverly Hills Cop, one of Eddie’s best movies in miy opinion.

by

Pursue more friendships. That’s going right on my vision board. I’d hate to be nearing the end and wishing I’d done so when I had the chance.

 

h/t theguardian.com

The place is a mess

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Well the house officially looks like a disaster area. We had to empty of bedroom to make space for our ne wardrobe to be fitted. It’s crazy how much stuff we have crammed in our room. Well all that stuff is now spread out all over the house. The only room that doesn’t have anything in it from our bedroom is the kitchen!

In amongst all of this, I’ve been redoing my blog to be inline with IndieWeb specs. That entailed changing the theme and using Elementor to design the right look. I’ll still have quite a bit of tinkering to do get it right. In fact, my ISP locked my into of my account when I triend to use Quill to try posting to the site outside of using the WordPress editor.

The endgame is to make my blog the central hub to all of my comings and goings on the web. It’s been a long time coming getting back into personal blogging and participating on the social-web as an Indie web guy and extracting myself from being solely depended on the “walled gardens” of the big commercial platforms. I know I’m not going to toatlly be able to get away the corporate giants of social media, especially since that’s where the masses continue to hang out despite all of the negativity surrender the corporate controlled platforms.

Last thing I’ll say before I get back to putting my place back together, and that is, It’s likely to be a bit messy around here on my blog as play with and experiement with the various apps associated with the IndieWeb movement.

 

52° 15.456 N -1° 23.546 W

55 °F

Damned if I do; damned if I don’t

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Meriel Swain asked the question, “What will your epilogue say?” I paused for a second to reflect on her question, but all I could come up with this “His name was Clay. He played the game well enough to have more good days than bad days .” That’s all I could muster before being distracted by Mitt Romney’s secret Twitter account. 

My days are long!

05:00 start, so you can imagine by the time 23:00 rolls around, I’m pretty beat. It’s not so bad on my non-client facing days because I can take extended breaks through out the day and still squeeze in everything I want to do. On my client facing days, the story is a little different. I’m in full-on engagement mode with my client and so have very little time for reflection or writing during the day.  My intent is to doing it in the evening. The problem is, if I go to the gym after dinner, then that’s me done. I come back with good intentions, but having spent the last of my reserves pumping iron, there’s just nothing left in the tank. I try. Boy do i try. But mostly all I do is nod off at the keyboard until Ruth tells me to go to bed.

My only option is to skip the gym. I know…boo…hiss…boo. “You gotta go to the gym,” that’s what my good voice keeps saying. My bad voice, on the hand, be like “nah, forget the gym, you’ve got shit to do!” Both voices are right. But I don’t have the reserves to do both.

Like tonight I skipped the gym. Oh let me rephrase that; I took a rest day. And now it’s 8 minutes to 11 and I’m still up cranking away on stuff like writing this post. Plus I made this video which is a down and dirty overview of the open-sourced, social networking app called Riot.

I’m left with a dilemma. And like Bart said, “You’re damned if you do; and you’re damned if you don’t.”

The new PureGym opens in a couple of weeks. It’s one of those 24hr gyms. I’m thinking of changing up my tune and working out in the morning, and getting my ass under some weights before I do anything else (except having my morning cup of joe of course).

Anyway, here’s a link to the soulcruzer lounge, join me, even if it’s only to help me experiement with the platform.

via GIPHY

The real reason I’m a blogger

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I played PUBG with Jeremy last night. It’s been 142 days since I last played. 1) where does the time go? 2) Shows you how much of a gamer I am!???? I like games, but always feel guilty if i whittle away hours playing them. In my head, I keep thinking how many pages I could have read in those hours I spent playing? I know games are important too, but it’s hard to shake the notion that games, while pleasant to play, are time wasting activity.

Which brings me to Monday morning and thinking how can I be ridiculously productive today?

A couple of responses I got back from the crowd:


and

and

Over the weekend, I worked through the question of how to be as close to the open web as possible, and by that I mean how to extract myself from the walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, and use open sourced software and play in places whose business model isn’t driven by algorithms that exploit my personal data?

Micro.blog is one solution. I have a presence there. Also @TheEinarkist recommended Riot (which I’ve yet to sign up for) and PeerTube and Mastodon. I’ll explore all of these at some point. I have set up a micro.blog account if you want to check that out. The community there have been very welcoming so far.

All of this is closely related to my return to personal blogging versus blogging as a content marketing channel for business. The reason I started blogging in the first place was a channel for self-expression. Then the idea that you could make money from blogging kept oozing in through the seams as marketers began to dominate the social web bent on convincing people that even the Average Joe or Jane could quit their jobs and become full-time bloggers. I’ve always been more about readership than money (although a couple of pennies would be nice to pay for hosting and stuff, so click on those darn amazon affiliate links when I post them!). The hook that I always bit on the marketing line was “if you niche they will come.” Not fully realising until now that as a personal blogger, my niche is me!

Personal blogging is blogging about the things you care about and find interesting. And maybe along the way, you’ll bump into people who care about the same things. So that is where I’m at now with all this blogging stuff – writing about the stuff that interests me and connecting with other bloggers who are into the same thing.

Which brings me back to the open web. I’m on a hunt to find other bloggers and such who are outsiders like me. Drop me a link to your blog in the comments.

Panicked indifference

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My mother belongs to the fear I was needing, interlocking arms with white bags. Today has everything I need – wet clothes, pillowcases, liquor, eyelashes, and chemicals. Excuse the scars. Ducking, jumping, terrible things I was mid-air like a heavy meal. You save people too scared to fall from the sky. I need them to fall to feel better. I wept twice. My favourite emotion, a mix of happiness and sadness. No visible shame just a panicked indifference.

Lost in the woods

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Admiral McRaven has put into words what has been on mind and spirit for the past three and butt years. America has lost its way because the leaders of the country have lost their way and have lost sight of America’s values and what we stand for as a Nation. I spent 11 years in the service of something higher than myself. I was proud of the country I served.

When you serve something greater than yourself, you understand:

…the awesome responsibility that the nation had placed on their shoulders. They understood that they had an obligation to serve their soldiers and their soldiers’ families. They believed in the American values for which they had been fighting for the past three decades. They had faith that these values were worth sacrificing everything for — including, if necessary, their lives.

I believe Admiral McRaven is right:

It is easy to destroy an organization if you have no appreciation for what makes that organization great. We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

And if our current government leaders can’t understand that, then as Admiral McRaven says, it’s time for them to step aside.

Jesse’s Endgame

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I finally watched El Camino last night, and seeing how Breaking Bad was one of my all time favourite TV series, I had high hopes for the movie. You can probably guess from my intro that it fell short of what I was expecting. Instead of a movie, we got an extended last episode to the series, one that we could arguably have done without.

I don’t want to get too much into the spoiler game, but basically, we catch up with the story at the end of the last episode of Season 5 with Jesse Pinkman speeding off into night in psycho Todd’s El Camino. The 2 hours that follow drift along at a slow pace as Jesse encounters some of his old crew, both in real time and flashbacks.  He does have a problem to solve before he can ride off into the sunset like the High Plains Drifter. I guess the movie brings closure to the show, if you need such things, but I think we would have been better off leaving Jesse’s endgame to our individual imaginations.

Switching gears…

Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus came yesterday. I was a little reluctant to pay £25 quid for a book sight unseen (there was no preview available on Amazon). I had to go on the strength of the reviews alone. I’m glad I went for it though because so far it has not disappointed me. And in fact, I cranked out my first tiny poem using one of the techniques from the book. Real quick, Jeff Noon is a really big language dude (he’s famous for writing in the cyberpunk genre with hits like Vurt, Pollen, and Automated Alice). He’s also into his music. He wanted to do what DJ’s do with music to literature, i.e. taking source texts and running it through a series of noise gates and filters to produce something totally different from the original text.

I used a couple of random tweets, exploded them

 

and then mixed it with this tweet:

to finally arrive at:

satan got the whole team reading dark material like your heart.

I did that over lunch. I’m looking forward to using the different filters and gates on some longer source texts.

So blogging turned 25 this week:

Last Monday was a significant anniversary in the evolution of the web. It was 25 years to the day since the first serious blog appeared. It was called Scripting News and the url was (and remains) at scripting.com. Its author is a software wizard named Dave Winer, who’s updated it every day since 1994. And despite its wide readership, it has never run ads.

I’m amazed that Dave Winer has managed to blog every single day since 1994! That’s lot of blogging. I like the writer’s suggestion that blogging is still important despite the infilitration of social media:

He’s also a reminder of the importance of blogging, a phenomenon that has been overshadowed as social media exploded and sucked much of the oxygen out of our information environment. When Winer started, blogging was an elite activity: you had to know how to set up a website and publish to it. But when Blogger and LiveJournal launched in 1999 followed by WordPress and TypePad in 2003, the barrier to entry became vanishingly low; in effect, if you could type and had an internet connection you could become a blogger. And so for a time blogging became the predominant form of user-generated content on the web.

And finally, I agree:

The blogosphere continues to be one of our greatest information resources. So why not log off social media, get yourself an RSS reader and wise up?

And here’s my RSS Feed so you can add me to your RSS reader.

Musical Interlude

I’ve been digging Cake this week. Particularly this version of I Will Survive:

One of these seconds

by

I often wonder
about nothing;
Sometimes I wonder
about something, but
mostly i just wonder
about Hell

and my place in it
or on it if Hell is Earth
and other people

Worlds within worlds
within worlds. Worlds
come and go.

Four births happen
each second of every
day and nearly two
people die each second.

One of these seconds has
my name on it, I know,
we all know, but we carry
on doing what we do until
the second that has our
name on it comes.

Not the kind of thoughts
you want to be having
driving down the road
at speed with

one hand on the steering
wheel and the other hand
flipping through Spotify to
find just the right track to
suit my mood.

For some reason
I like to dance around
the edges of the abyss
comfort i guess,
keeps me loitering on edge.

And nothing even blew up!

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America’s digital goddess has been around since the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Her she is in 1990s explaining what a computer is. I know, hard to imagine a time without a computer!

By the way America’s digital goddess aka Kim Kamando is still at. She host a radio show about tech. She has some classic lines in this video:

“What happens when you press the wrong button? Does it blow up?”

“That’s how simple DOS is. It’s like house cleaning”

“This is called pointing. There’s also click”

“We’re going to use the clock program now”

“It’s not tough to use a computer. And nothing even blew up!”

Gotta love it.

h/t @gizmodo 

My postmodern sex goddess

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Giving Aphrodite a run for her rubies would have been easy for you, you are, after all, a postmodern sex goddess. I tried to penetrate the day, but the hours skipped ahead somehow removed from where we sat watching reruns of the Real World.

I thought about Puck. Where did he go after the show? Falling through the darkness, I am terrified of my own crucifixion, which had already begun the day I left my bike on your front porch.

Crushed by love and by war, I miss the stories we used to tell each other at night. I felt ashamed when you said yes. The old man died. You smiled.

“Bitter glory runs in our family,” you said.

There was something I wanted from you – a poor boy’s pale arm – or something like that, I can’t remember.

Do I smell ginger drifting down from the front line?

Internet porn makes life more reasonable when you realise it’s the sub context we think things through, at least for the upwardly mobile anyway, who think it’s erotic to see the source of our modern souls play acted on blackened screens.

“Who would you like to see naked?” I ask her, mildly amusing myself.

“I’d like to see Carl Jung naked while he’s explaining the concept of the collective unconscious and the connection between darkness and vampires and Internet porn that focuses on anuses and amateurs and overweight little freakish Italian men in high heels.”

Sometimes when she talks to me that way, I wish I was a werewolf slayer, like Buffy only buffer.

Why is she here lap dancing me to tears of delight and reverie? I recognise her whore’s eyes now – eyes that attract and dominate and devour time and the handful of people strolling through the garden in the early morning. I listen to her laughter. Boulders roll and chime beneath the current of music whispered to the dead. Like Bruce, I’m on fire. I pray to her in anger hoping she’ll cool my desire. Secretly, I know she will.

She’s a benevolent demon, my petulant little postmodern sex goddess.

It’s the Puritan in us

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“The most important thing in life is not happiness but meaning.”

— John M. Hull, Notes on Blindness

1

Fun. I like the word fun. Who’s having fun today? Are you having fun today? Do you have enough fun in your life or could you use a little more? I could use a little more…just a little. Everybody is acting so serious. Who around you is having fun right now? Is it you? If not, why not have some fun.

Perhaps it’s the Puritan in us – an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, and all of that. We feel guilty if we’re having too much fun, unless we’re on our “own” non-work time or on holiday, then you’re expected to have fun.

2

I wonder what kind of porn Ika Schwander is watching that it scares her.

3

Have you ever considered the long-term effects of vice-versa? Especially if you live your life from the outside in. I have a couple of projects i want to kick off today, one of which is to visit and rate all of the non-chain cafe and coffee houses in Leamington Spa. I’m currently writing this from Fat Birds Cafe. It’s a family owned joint on the main drag. I’ve been here before, but they didn’t  Wifi and a brother can’t be dealing with a cafe with no WiFi. Good WiFi is an expected part of our culture nowadays.

The only reason I’m here is I had it on good authority that the caf now has good WiFi (and they do). The coffee is ok. The cakes are nice (i had the coffee, carmel, and pecan cake). The atmosphere is decent, it’s well lit and plenty of space upstairs and downstairs. I do have to make this one complaint though (and this goes for probably all independent coffee shops) and that is the price of the coffee in comparison to the “evil empire” chain joints. Fat Birds only have one size coffee on offer and it’s £2.35 a pop. If I was bringing someone here for a meeting, fine. But for a working session, it’s not good when I can go across the street to the ‘Bucks and pay £1.35 for a black filter coffee and get free refills for as long as i’m on the premises. The economics are in favour the ‘Bucks.

The other project I’m starting today is a snapshot project. I’m using an app called Reporter to randomly ping me through out the day. When I get the ping, I’ll take a snapshot of whatever is around me at the time. So far:

4

I think I’ll follow Roberto Bazlen’s lead: “I think it’s no longer possible to write books,” he wrote in one of his notebooks. “That’s why I don’t write books. Almost all books are footnotes, inflated into volumes. I write only footnotes.” And me, I write only fragmented blog post entries and the occasional scrap of verse. Sometimes I curate my favourite scraps and collate them into (e)book form and pimped them on Amazon. (Link to poetry book). In fact, I’m in the process of collating a new book together now.