The State of The Art (during Covid).

Covid has been a hard time for the arts, and for artists. For people with compromised immune systems, or who live with people with compromised immune systems, this has been even harder. Life has become one giant exercise in existential fear, as we see policy makers embark on a brave new era in which eugenics, expressed as “the majority of deaths are in people with comorbidities”, is the order of the day.

In this brave new world, public health has been replaced with personal responsibility – not a responsibility to protect your fellow citizen, but rather, a responsibility to protect yourself, and shoulder the sole burden for doing so. Society at large has absolved itself of any obligation to change in order to protect the vulnerable, and the costs that would entail.

The best practices recommended – universal mask-wearing, purifiers for air conditioning systems, working from home, are all being abandoned, seemingly on the basis that if we just “get back to normal”, that life will somehow become normal, in fundamentally abnormal times.

And so, the vulnerable cower in our homes, afraid of the very air outside, knowing that Covid, which hangs in said air exactly as cigarette smoke does, could waft in through an open window, courtesy of a neighbour.


Making art under these circumstances is difficult at best. More so when your process is industrial – metal fabrication, for example.

Prior to Covid, I had worked around a lack of studio space by moving my practice into Virtual Reality – and that worked really well, resulting in the Noosa Mnemonic project with Noosa Library Service. Unfortunately, this was one of the first casualties of Covid, as getting people together in a room, while sharing a device pressed against their faces, wasn’t Covid-safe.

I received an Arts Qld resilience grant early in Covid, to try to build an accessible storage cabinet within my carport. While the grant was acquitted to the satisfaction of the managing arts organisation, the project ran into the very problems it was trying to solve – I couldn’t build it in the space I had available to build it. To be clear, with an appropriate space to lay out the parts during construction, and leave them laid out over multiple sessions, I could definitely build it. Nothing about the construction is beyond me from a technical perspective, and if my carport was a garage, it would be a solvable problem.

I moved on to attempting to work around this, buying a human-weight-rated folding wheelchair ramp, to allow me to roll my welder, and air compressor up a step and into the townhouse so they can be securely stored indoors when not in use. With this setup, I have endeavoured to continue with preparations for my next series of works – doing small experiments, and learning the wiles of my welder.

This was another learning experience. I’ve been able to reduce the setup and packdown time to fifteen minutes each way. However, that hasn’t solved the fundamental problem – I’m working in a carport open to the communal driveway, and to the street. Therefore, I can’t set a work up, and walk away from it (and thousands of dollars of equipment) for lunch, or to think etc.


So that’s where we are, in the third year of Covid. My practice is largely revolving around digital processes – rebuilding workflows, and reworking material created before the plague times. In physical works, I’ve mostly been buying and testing gear, for the longer-term goal of getting back into fabrication, once I have a space in which to work. Along with that, has been a months-long process of re-organising my storage facility space, to better arrange all the materials I’ve been accumulating over the years, as well as all the possessions from my old life in Sydney that never found room in what was supposed to be temporary accomodation when I moved to Noosa.

To be fair, there have been some significant achievements during this Covid era. Surfing The Deathline was completed in its final single-volume form – the completion of a project I’ve been working at, on and off, for a little over twenty years.

Alongside that, was making the momentous leap to being fully-independent in selling my eBooks, via a Fastspring-powered general e-commerce store, rather than being reliant on an Apple, Google, or Amazon specific eBook store. Getting this working correctly was a long process, and it’s amazing the sheer amount of time that can seem to vanish on just research, finding out if a thing can be done, then how to do it.

Notwithstanding the time-suck, this is something I’ve been planning towards for a number of years, even prior to Covid. I now have control over the sale of my works – I can set whatever prices I like, and no one can ruin the appearance of the sales experience.


So, this is a roundabout way of saying that while it looks like things have been quiet here (I’m sure everyone’s exhibition records have been pretty sparse for the past couple of years), stuff has been happening, it’s just stuff that stays within the walls of home.

Surfing The Deathline – Full Course

Eddie Cartridge, and Janelle Tan – Machine Intelligence researchers and former partners.

Separated following the takeover of their mutual employer, which saw Eddie made redundant, life has lead them to radically different outcomes. Eddie is homeless, unemployed, down to his last few dollars, and living under the streets. Janelle is engaged to their former employer, living in a penthouse, and travelling to work by helicopter.

Eddie has been offered a job – subvert a Machine Intelligence for a critical window of time. The job has a payday large enough that he can escape this awful city – a middle-class-authoritarian city state, where the streets are always clean, and welfare benefits are tied to medical tracking implants which monitor sobriety, amongst other things.

The first problem, is that Eddie is not fast enough to out-react, and out-think a Machine Intelligence. He’ll need an edge, in the form of The Deathline – a neuro-accelerating hallucinogen.

The second problem, Eddie has never used The ‘Line before, and has no supply contacts for this highly illegal substance. He must reconnect with Janelle, who consumed prodigious quantities during their time together, to find out if she still has access to anyone who can supply what he needs.

For Janelle, contact with Eddie has contained a revelation which forces her to question her recent past, and to reassess her relationship with her fiancé. Will she abandon her comfortable, “perfect” life, and be reclaimed by the world of The Deathline?

The world is one in which Machine Intelligence is the supreme power, where a failed nuclear strike has fractured America into three separate nations, Europe is stricken by secessionary conflicts, and new Machine Intelligence-equipped non-geographic distributed states are beginning to emerge.

This 232 page book is published in DRM-Free Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

Preview / Buy

Cutting the Apple Podcast Cable.

I’ve been listening to podcasts for over 20 years. The entire time, my collection has been subscribed, and managed within Apple’s iTunes.

No longer.

Podcasting is a medium under threat from a number of assailants:

  1. Advertising agencies and “Podcast Networks” using Dynamic Ad Insertion: Advertising has shifted to “zero effort” pre-recorded ads, that are geotagged and invasively targeted to the listener. It’s a worse version of commercial radio advertising.

    I was listening to a recent episode of a show on the “i heart radio” network (fetch my vomit bucket), and it had (if I recall) eight 30 second pre-recorded ads in a single break.

    Prior to this development, podcast advertising was almost exclusively sponsor reads by the hosts of the show – you could enjoy listening to them, because the hosts would bring their own charm to the commercial. Now you’re listening to a (typically) American or British show, and you suddenly get a broad Australian (in my case) accent pitching you McDonalds, or coal-fired power. So now, I skip ads reflexively.
  2. Independent Podcast Applications trying to do both too much, and too little: Every podcatcher & podcast player I’ve found so far, that run on Mac and iOS, are loaded up with recommendation garbage and show discovery, but won’t actually provide a competent interface or methodology for managing a locally-stored podcast collection*.
    • They all seem to presume that either no one collects podcasts, treating them as ephemerally as radio, or that everyone burns down their entire back-catalogue collection every time they change application, and just re-downloads everything from scratch. Every app features OPML export to migrate the feeds between apps, but no one provides a mechanism to migrate the downloaded episode library.
    • If you have files that aren’t attached to a feed, they’re effectively inaccessible, because none of the apps (from my experience) will let you just point to a directory full of files, and treat that as a show.
    • There’s also the sheer idiocy of using cloud services to sync the actual episode files themselves, tens or hundreds of megabytes in size, rather than just direct transferring them between devices. I think there has to be something profoundly wrong with you, if you think the way to move data a foot across a desk, is to round-trip it via a server on the other side of the world.
  3. Apple: As the big dog in podcasting (though I note with significant schadenfreude that Spotify has apparently dethroned them), Apple is attempting to pivot from simply providing good applications, and a directory of shows, to selling subscription-based premium podcast feeds (and providing a mediocre podcast application).

    To that end, Apple has stymied access to the location where Podcasts.app on the Mac downloads its files; using randomised strings for names of files and directories, therefore removing human readability. Worse still, it’s enforced location is on the boot drive – something that can’t be upgraded on almost all Macs, and for which Apple typically charges approximately four times the industry norm, per gigabyte**.

    This comes after years of streaming-oriented changes to podcasts in iTunes, which made the process of keeping your files safe from auto-deletion more and more uncertain. It eventually required manually saving every single file, OR accepting a risk that if a feed moved and reposted its back catalogue to a new server, or changed the naming scheme for back catalogue files, iTunes would download the entire back catalogue again.

*Which excludes Overcast, because its entire basis is you rent space on Overcast’s servers, and store your collection there. However, I don’t build my archive plans on how long a single developer remains interested in continuing an app or business, nor on the volatility of server rental.

**I’ll note with some bitter irony that Mac OS X used to have human-readable plain text XML for all preference files, but they’ve been largely replaced with binary encoded versions that require a dedicated application to decode, and this regressive change was justified as saving disk space. Sure Apple, we’ll save a few megabytes so you can cheap out on the SSDs you put in machines, which you’ll fill to the brim with podcast files we used to keep on external drives.

So to hell with Apple.

Where to from here? Well, I’ve started by:

  • Manually copying all my podcast back catalogue episodes out of my old iTunes Music directory, into a new Podcast Archive: Everything there is organised in human-readable simple directory structures, with a folder for each show, and every episode in the appropriate place.

    To deal with shows which have changed server, or changed their “album artist” or “artist” ID3 tags (which is what determines the name of the show / feed within the Podcasts.app), I’ve used a tag editor (MP3tag) to align all the previous episodes to the show nomenclature of the newest episodes.

    For mass file renaming, to match the name schema of new downloads (because iTunes used to do strange things to filenames when saving podcast downloads), I’ve used Name Mangler.

    For cases where the date created and modified of files are out of order, I’ve used A Better Finder Attributes to adjust things so that Finder’s view of the episodes can, by sorting as a list, reflect their original feed order.
  • Setting up a new podcatcher application: Doughnut – an open source podcatcher and player. It’s still relatively early in development, and seems to have become somewhat dormant, but it’s a workable, basic application that has no frivolous show discovery or non-core functionality. I’ve set up all my subscriptions in Doughnut that were previously active in iTunes. Doughnut downloads new episodes automatically to disk, but that doesn’t solve keeping them in my new Podcast Archive, since it can’t display existing files on disk – it only knows about things it has downloaded.
  • Transferring downloads to the Podcast Archive: Once Doughnut downloads a file, Hazel (a system automation tool) copies the file to the corresponding directory in the Podcast Archive.

    The setup for this is pretty simple. In Hazel, I configure every folder Doughnut created for each subscribed show as an automated folder. I add an automation to each that has the rules; “File was created in the last 5 minutes”, and “move to (the Podcast Archive folder for that show)”. You could achieve this with the system’s built-in Folder Actions, or Shortcuts, etc.

    The nifty thing about this is that since both the Doughnut directory structure, and the Podcast Archive are on the same logical APFS volume, the copy doesn’t use any more space – the two files are just references to the same thing, but behave as if they’re independent objects. Another advantage of this is if Doughnut has an issue, like randomly deleting files, it’s only acting on its downloaded copies, not your actual Podcast Archive. This of it as air-gapping your collection from the podcatcher.
  • Viewing the Podcast Archive: While I can just browse my files in Finder, in any of the traditional views, what if I wanted a more holistic overview of all my shows in the archive, in a single list, ordered by date? Remember Spotlight Finder searching, and Smart Folders / Saved Searches? A bunch of wonderful technologies that have sat, undercooked without full GUI support sine Apple bought Siri and realigned the company around the idiotic notion that a server on the other side of the world was the best way to search for things on your computer. What we do, is:
    • navigate to the root directory of the Podcast Archive
    • in the search field at the top of the Finder window, type a single space character. This non-discoverable and unintuitive action will bring up the GUI options for crafting your search criteria.
    • hit the plus sign
    • set up Kind, as Document, and then hit plus again
    • set Date Modified as however far back you want the list to show, if you want to limit the list; the last month, for example.
    • Save your search (I keep saved searches specific to a volume on the root level of that volume) and choose to add it to the Finder sidebar, because that makes it available for use in open / save dialogue boxes (normally, Smart Folders can’t be accessed through an open / save file browser).
  • Syncing to iPhone: Here we come to iMazing, which has the ability to copy files from Finder, directly into the Podcasts.app on your iOS device, without having to go the whole Finder sync procedure.

    A word of caution; one of the goals of this process was to completely cut Apple out of my podcast life. When you install / first launch Apple’s Podcasts.app on iOS, it defaults to iCloud enabled, and downloads all your podcast subscription records from your iCloud account in the background before you interact with it. It is VERY hard to get rid of this once it’s in the app, so an important step within iTunes (or the Podcasts.app on Mac) is to:

    • Manually unsubscribe from every show to which you’re subscribed (and give that a few minutes to propagate to iCloud).
    • Switch off iCloud podcast sync on your Mac.
    • THEN delete Podcasts.app from your iPhone, nuking all its data with it.
    • Reinstall Podcasts.app on your iPhone, it should then load with an empty library because iCloud has no data for it.
    • Disable iCloud Sync in the settings app for Podcasts.
    • Now you’re ready to copy files with iMazing. One thing – you may encounter a bug where Podcast artwork isn’t copied across. As of mid-September, iMazing is aware of it, and are working on a fix.

And there you have it – you are now effectively back to the way things were when Podcasts were subscribed to in iTunes, and synced to an iPod. You lose a couple of things, like play counts, and synced playhead positions. However, iMazing’s drag & drop podcast loading (for which you can use your super-handy Smart Folders as your source) is a better workflow than the original iTunes sync. You also gain the ability to edit your podcast files (so those 10 year old adds for Lootcrate…) without worrying about breaking feed continuity.

Rebuilding Surfing The Deathline

Over the past few months, the past year really, I’ve been rebuilding the production process for Surfing The Deathline.

The project is built in obsolete versions of Adobe Photoshop, and InDesign – versions that won’t run on a modern operating system. On the assumption that vintage hardware will be unable to run for ever, I made the long term plan to build a dedicated virtual machine with the necessary applications, and fonts, to be able to continue to fix the work, should errata be discovered.

And boy, were errata discovered:

You can see the tag for the speech bubble doesn’t match the background colour of the bubble itself. They were supposed to be indistinguishable, and what I eventually realised was that I had switched the text box to an RGB-based black, while the tag end was still a CMYK black. The important point being that while they look the same at 100% opacity, as you apply transparency effects, the CMYK version takes on a grey tinge.

This error went live in an update of the books.

So back to the virtual machine; setting that up, learning to configure and run virtual machine software, acquiring an old version of MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard Server, reinstalling old Adobe Creative Suite 5, migrating fonts – each step required re-learning old technology. Dealing then with the vagaries of migrated fonts; how some fonts that had been in my system for years wouldn’t work when re-added to a fresh system, and so necessitated finding replacement versions effectively meant manually checking, and adjusting every piece of text in the work.

Eventually it was all done, and I was able to start re-building Surfing The Deathline in the new environment. Along the way, I started to find issues – typos, and style items incorrectly applied. Some of them dated back to the first print publication in 2006, or the first pdf preview in 2004. So there was literally a couple of months of going through the book, page by page, massaging fixes, running output sets, proofreading, noting fixes, fixing, running output, proofreading, etc.

The biggest limiter was my inability to do more than one proofing run per day – the changes were so small and obscure that after reading the book once, I simply couldn’t see the next set of problems – fresh eyes were necessary.

And so, for weeks on end, I’ve been largely nocturnal, barely leaving the house. Groceries arrive, I cook, I read news, I work, I have occasional weekends off. This is me in work mode.

But the work has been done. For something I declared finished in 2021, now in 2024 it seems genuinely finished.

The Joy in Older Methodologies…

…or, How I Wrote A Letter, With A Fountain Pen, On Paper, And Mailed It To Someone Two Weeks In The Future, And Half A World Away.

I bought a new camera – a Nikon D850.

It’s new, as in it’s a current product made by Nikon, and still manufactured, and for sale fresh from the factory. It was also launched in 2017. Seven years old, and still arguably the finest 35mm DSLR ever produced. With Nikon seemingly all-in on mirrorless cameras, likely it will become the finest 35mm DSLR that will ever be produced.

Choosing to buy the last of an older paradigm was a real decision, but the simple truth is, I don’t like mirrorless cameras. I don’t want to look at a little television screen, and frame my shot on that. I want to look through the lens, at the real world, and capture that moment. If I was going to buy a mirrorless camera, I think I’d be tempted to go stranger, with something like a Hasselblad digital back, with a 500 series (or technical camera) body.

If I were to compare the D850 to its mirrorless replacement; the Z8, which is almost twice the price; the Z8 only has an sRGB viewfinder – you don’t even see the full colour gamut your sensor can resolve, let alone the true colour of the world through the lens. In the fourteen months since the Z8’s launch, Nikon has released a significantly cheaper, lower-end Z6 III, which has a P3 gamut viewfinder. Still not the full AdobeRGB most photography processes work within, but significantly better than the Z8.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re in the early days of a new paradigm, the things you buy will likely become obsolesced by cheaper, newer versions. In all likelihood I will never have buyer’s remorse over my D850, because there will never be a better version of this camera. If I had bought the Z8, I’d already feel put out over having to compromise on viewfinder quality to get higher image quality, versus the cheaper, newer, lower-end camera.

Where is this going, and how does it relate to fountain pens?

So I decided to write a letter to someone I hope is still a friend, but with whom I lost contact perhaps six to eight years ago. I have an email address, and a Twitter handle for them, but those are either out of use, or I’m perhaps not friends with this person any more, because things I’ve sent in the intervening years have elicited no response.

I have a phone number for them, but given the aforementioned silence, I can only feel it would be an intrusion to call. When we were still talking, they gave me the address of a wonderful house they had bought, hence the letter.

I have not written any significant amount of text since I tore the sagittal band of my middle finger on my dominant hand several years ago. Despite the months of hand-traction, and therapy, and rehab, it never returned to pre-injury condition. It still feels weak, it still lacks some stability, and it still provokes debilitating psychological trauma responses at the memory of the injury itself when it twinges. Compounded with neurological damage which scrambles a lot of the sensation down the side of my hands and little fingers, the idea of writing with a pen and paper was something I approached with trepidation.

My art kit contained a tool for the job – an inexpensive clear plastic fountain pen. More for drawing than a fine writing implement, I suspect. it has a nifty archimedes-screw ink cartridge, which draws up ink when it needs refilling. Fountain pens can be problematic for left-handers. A left-to-right script requires the left hander to push the nib, rather than dragging it as for a right hander. Then we get to the text being obscured by one’s hand, and the smudging which can occur. Some hand-gymnastics can solve the former, but the latter was alleviated with some Mont Blanc waterproof permanent black ink. It dries super quickly, and doesn’t smudge from skin moisture. The downside is it dries in the nib, so requires frequent cleaning with glass-cleaner, which then takes time to work out of the nib so you’re back to writing with ink.

However, when it all comes together, oh wow. I wrote draft, after draft, after draft of the aforementioned letter. When the pen played up because it needed cleaning, or I made an egregious typo, or my hand just ran away scribbling marks faster than I could supply control… Start again, re-write.

Handwriting takes practice, and I’m still not even remotely capable of neat, regular cursive. That will require slowing down, a lot to regain the muscle memory. For now, merely keeping my somewhat-joined chicken scrawl printing consistent and legible is a real challenge. Especially after so many years of thinking in comics terms, where everything is written in upper case.

I wrote the letter, over and over, like a monk illuminating a manuscript as an act of devotion. Eventually, it was as much the thing I wanted it to be, as I could make it, and I put it in an envelope, masked-up, and visited the Post Office.

From there, the letter began its transit to a destination two weeks in the future, and on the other side of the world.

I’ve only ever had one pen-friend – in the era before email. We wrote back and forth a number of times, I still have the letters. Artefacts of the hand of a person, moments of their life, spent and unrecoverable, distilled to a physical object.

I miss that connection – when someone’s thoughts were manifest in a unique object they sent you. I imagine it’s an intellectual and emotional Skin Hunger – made all the more terrible by a world in which people are simultaneously too busy to write letters, and yet often unwilling to use technology to do video calls.

A toast therefore, to the joy of using a fountain pen. Just like my new camera, there is an experiential quality to older methodologies – the real, the physical, the practical. Looking through the lens, making a mark with ink.

Hail to the Real.

macOS Ventura eMail issue.

There’s an issue I’ve encountered a couple of times lately, where the SMTP server for an account will report in Connection Doctor that it doesn’t need authentication (even though it does) and fail to send mail.

There appears to be no solution to this, as all the settings will be correct, the only option is to delete the account in mail.app, and recreate it from scratch. Deleting just the SMTP server profile does not appear to be sufficient to do the job.

More Flowcharts

I realised recently that in the changeover to my new workstation, and the change to new operating system versions, my entire workflow for producing a Surfing The Deathline page art errata fix was broken.

Worse still, I couldn’t fit the entire thing in my head at once, so there was nothing for it, but to start mapping the whole thing out.

The process:

  • Adobe Indesign CS5.
    • Output all pages to individual .pdf files
    • Adobe Photoshop CS5.
      • Convert each page to .png, and .jpg files
      • Automator Workflow.
        • Rename files and copy them to the appropriate development folders
        • Chronosync Workflow.
          • Copy a subset of files to be used in the extract versions to the appropriate extract development folders.

A thought that occurs is to put the entire process into the Virtual Machine I’m using to run the Adobe apps, so that they’re sealed off against change.

Salut! Camarade.

Every four years, February 29th rolls around. It’s a day I remember an old buddy, a former partner, a fellow comrade in the trenches of the Sydney goth scene, and particularly in the audience participation cast of Rocky Horror Picture Show – Sharon Droscher (Née Hedley).


Not that I would ever expect any of the folks from Friday Insanity, or as it later became, Fun In The Dark to come across or read this, but for what its worth, Sharon and I were wrong, you were right. Trying to enforce a higher standard of “quality” onto a group “fun” activity, to chase a dream of a kind of professionalism that wasn’t a dream everyone on the cast shared, and trying to impose that dedication, was the wrong thing to do. In this, I allowed my loyalty to a person to supersede my loyalty to the group. That was my failing, and I’m sorry for that.


Anyway… like she was odd in so many ways, and seemed destined to be one of the weird who turn pro when the going gets weird, it was appropriate that Sharon’s birthday was February 29th.

We had a tumultuous relationship, a fairly acrimonious parting, and a sometime uneasy friendship afterwards – but she went on to be happy, I was chief bridesmaid at her wedding to Simon, with whom she moved to Canada, until cancer claimed her a little under nine years ago.

So every year I metaphorically light a candle on the 28th, and every fourth year on the 29th, light a bunch. I pour a drink, and try to remember to be gentle to the memory of who we all were when we were younger – full of fury, inarticulate and uncareful.

And then I remember when we all took acid, and walked from the warehouse in which we were living, under Glebe though a disused rail line tunnel with only cigarette lighters for illumination, then out along the viaduct crossing Wentworth Park, before making our way back to the warehouse (and peeling the stripes off a speedhump along the way). The night was ended with hours in the warehouse’s gallery, watching reflections from shattered pieces of mirror on the ends of springs dance about on the joists and floorboards of the level above, which formed our timber sky.

Happy 13th, Sharon.

 

#MicroFiction

The Long Death began about, it must have been around 2035. It’s funny in a grim way, we avoided the worst of climate change, by virtue of there being too few of us to outpace the planet’s carbon cycle. Too few of us…

It started everywhere, over about 5 years. The syndrome was like rapid ALS combined with mild Ebola, and was 100% fatal.

It was #Covid. It was the long-term effect of Covid, and it claimed every single person who was still alive 20 years after their infection.

2023 – A Wrapup

This was not the best of years. It’s really hard to think what I did, largely because I didn’t do much of anything. When I look back through my weekly diary, the most common word seems to be “research”. I spent most of the year indoors, as the outside world just became too dangerous, with Ubiquitous Covid becoming the new normal. I had an encounter in the service station where some arsehole started mocking and harassing me because I was wearing a mask. Right before Christmas, my mother caught Covid, so I spent Christmas by myself. I managed to dodge the bullet, but I was due for my next covid shot only a few days later. It was a frightening near-miss.


Speaking of health, this whole sedentary thing started to have some pretty major effects, with significant stress events leaving me tight chested and short of breath. However, a scare with my 2022 annual specialist’s assessment that I was losing upper body strength lead to biting the bullet and getting back into shape.

Mystifyingly, in the second half of the year, I went on a big diet health-kick. I mean big enough that “who are you and what have you done with Matt?” was a reasonable question to ask. I cut out almost all takeaway, junk food, processed snacks, radically reduced the amount of bread, more or less eliminated cereals, and had salads with a protein, like beef or chicken, for dinner almost every night. I think I accidentally paleoed. Breakfast for months now has been a banana, a handful of walnut kernels, and a small piece of biltong. I cut out all the soft drinks, all the beer, radically reduced my alcohol intake.

I lost almost 10kg doing this. I’m back to the weight I was, when I was 18. And the really weird thing is, I really don’t miss any of this. I think I’m so happy with the leaned down figure, that no food treat really has that allure any more. I’ve combined this with working out with weights almost every night, and my strength seems to be returning.


A big theme for 2023 was attempting to move house. We spent months with the house on the market, and almost bought a new one, but had to pull out when the offers on the current place didn’t go high enough. The whole process is arse-backwards, as agents try to tell you how good the offer for your place is, but fail to understand that the goal isn’t to sell, it’s to buy, and the sale is merely a means to that end.

The place we were trying to buy was pretty interesting – two houses on a single lot, but as we spent more time looking at it, worries started to surface. And that’s the real problem – the margins are so thin that we could get to a point where we go broke trying to own the new place. So, by August, that had come to an end, and we stayed put. The stress damn near killed me. We looked at another interesting property – a huge bamboo grove of a place, but again, the owner wouldn’t drop the price to something we could manage, and the house itself (which was being passed-off as the work of a prominent local architect) was in need of a lot of work.

I spent a lot of time working Sketchup, remembering why I love using it so much, and how disappointed I am with it being a subscription-only app these days.


Speaking of tech, this was the year all my tech fell on its face, and had to be refreshed. My beloved old Mac Pro finally died a hard death, and I replaced it with… Another Mac Pro, but this time a 2019 model, with dual graphics cards that cost me $10k secondhand. It’s an insane purchase, given Apple is transitioning away from Intel processors, but this was the machine that was closest to what I already had, without being less than I already had. Worst-case-scenario, It will become a chonky Windows or Linux machine one day. But, it should last me for a while. Interest rates being what they are, It’ll only take 14-15 months for the interest on my savings to recover the outlay, which is a shorter term than a personal loan I would have taken out to buy something like that, so that puts things in perspective. Those interest rates are part of why I’m more sanguine about not moving right now, than I might otherwise be – it’s a good time to have savings, and a bad time to have a mortgage. That big new computer actually followed a new iPad Pro, which has proven to be a lot less compelling than I thought it might be. I think I just need to give it more work, but the lack of bezels really makes it less good to draw on. I don’t feel the same carefree doodling I had with sketchbooks in the past.

The great tech revamp included some interesting things I’ve wanted to do for ages – I installed a switch in my tech gear cupboard, so instead of 4 ethernet cables leading downstairs to the modem, there’s just the one. The Mac Pro is installed on the shelf as well, with 7m display cables routing back to my desk, so I have a lot more leg room than I used to have.

My B&O headphones were replaced under warranty as they kept filing to connect to my Xbox. I bought and returned some Beats wireless earbuds, because they were too uncomfortable to wear. I don’t know who Apple tests their earphones on, but I’ve never found them as good as my old Sennheisers.

Mastodon really became my go-to social media space once I found Mona.app – it has some rough edges by virtue of being a Catalyst app, but it’s better than using the website. I stopped posting to Facebook entirely, nothing since May, and only two people reached out to check if things were OK. So much for social networks bringing people together.


So that was it, a pretty terrible year, which feels like I achieved nothing of note. Probably the only thing I can say that was successful with things, was reprocessing some of my old photos, and re-establishing my digital workflows – which accounts for a lot of the “research” time.