Main : Timeline

Things might be a bit funky as the new theme beds in and has fixes made. That said, Woot! This has been a long time coming.

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.

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

150km round trip, two and a half hours on the road, with two stops along the way, and a little under $150 in total cost, I secured a box of vacuum tubes, a wheel from a plough, and a whole bunch of stainless steel fixings.

According to the guy selling the stainless steel (for $100), it was about $2k-$3k worth of material, which I believe. It was, again according to him, surplus from a job.

So these materials should prove interesting, both for making things, but also simple stuff, like if I need to make concrete plinths and bolt things down, I can embed these.

Mona, Mona, Mona. *sigh*

Mona is a client application for Mastodon servers. It allows you to do all the things you can do on Mastodon, in a much better UI than a web browser can provide.

In intent, in its radically wide scope for user customisation, in its support for old devices back to iOS 12, in its single purchase / perpetual licence pricing structure, Mona is a fantastic application, especially as the result of a single developer. It is, quite simply, the best Mastodon client for someone in the Apple ecosystem.

Mona is better than vanilla Mastodon, in much the same way that Tweetbot was better than vanilla Twitter. It also furnishes capabilities the standard Mastodon experience lacks; quote-posts, for example. It doesn’t matter if mastodon.social doesn’t have an official quote-post format, if everyone uses a client that presents links to posts as if they were being quoted, your experience of Mastodon becomes one in which quote-posts exist.

Mona is what made Mastodon usable for me, in the same way that Twitter killing third party clients, like Tweetbot, made Twitter unusable for me.

What is it that makes a social media platform “usable”, in my eyes?

It comes down to this; a social media platform, which features chronologically delivered content, needs to have:

1. a native application on each of my devices, and
2. that application has to keep my reading location in my feed synchronised.

What do we mean by native application?

I’m not interested in using a web browser to view a social media platform, or a web page packaged in an application frame. I’m not interested in Electron “apps”; I want a Mac application for when I’m on my Mac, an iPad application when I’m on my iPad, and an iPhone application when I’m on my iPhone. As a side issue – I’m not interested in native apps for social media networks that are made by the social media network itself. Your social network is only as good as the third party apps it supports.

What I especially don’t want, is some “sortof works everywhere” compatibility technology second-class application on all three. Unfortunately, that’s what Mona is. Mona is a Catalyst app.

Catalyst is Apple’s version of Electron; only instead of allowing web pages to impersonate native software, it allows iPad apps to pretend they’re real Mac apps. Apple have supplied plenty of them on your Mac already, and it’s no surprise they’re the ones that feel off. They’re the janky apps that don’t have proper contextual menus with all the expected entries (like text transformation options), where spell checking doesn’t work the same, where the keyboard shortcuts don’t work right, where text selection of a single character with your mouse is difficult, where window resizing doesn’t look the way it does on your proper Mac apps. Apple’s Messages, Music, Podcasts, Books, Weather – all of these janky, brittle-feeling applications are so, because they’re iPad apps masquerading as Mac apps.

Mona is one of these, and shares all those characteristics. It’s better than using Mastodon in a web browser, but it’s worse than a proper Mac app. This is not because the developer is a bad person, or that the ideas behind Mona are bad ideas; it comes down to Catalyst being a badly implemented technology, which at its absolute best can only produce second-class applications on macOS.

For example, sometimes the main timeline in Mona will just stop accepting clicks. All the other tabs in the UI will be fine, however the main timeline will be scrollable, but inert. You can call up a second instance of the main timeline, it will be fine, but the only way to clear the problem, is to quit and relaunch the app. Sometimes, the app will return your timeline to where it was, sometimes it will return to the newest post in your feed. Then, you just have to try to remember how many hours ago you were at, and scroll back to that location. Unfortunately, there’s no feed location bookmarking, which would be really useful, because…

…feed synchronisation simply doesn’t work. Put it this way:

What these images are showing is that I was reading my Mastodon feed in Mona for Mac, and I had reached a point where I was 5 hours in the past, in terms of the posts I was reading. I moved over to my iPad, unlocked its screen, opened Mona for iPad, and after it did it’s “restoring iCloud Position” dance, it synced to a point that was 7 hours in the past.

Later in the evening, I tried again, this time going from my Mac to my iPhone:

This time I went from 1 hour in the past, to 6 hours in the past upon unlocking my iPhone, opening Mona, and waiting for it to “restore iCloud position”.

Or another attempt:

…you get the idea.

To be clear, what is happening here is that Mona is saying it’s syncing my reading position on my iOS devices, to match where my Mac is at, and getting it wildly wrong.

What’s really problematic about this is that there’s no way to get the correct timeline position from my Mac, with the iOS device. If I look in the settings on the iOS devices, I will see that the last upload of Mona sync data to iCloud from my Mac was after I stopped advancing the timeline, and yet, for no good reason I can figure, Mona is picking some random (and inconsistent) time as it’s sync timecode.

Where this becomes a data-loss class issue, is that any interaction with Mona on the iOS device at this point overwrites my Mac’s timeline location. If I do any scrolling on the iOS device, it will push that timeline to iCloud, and my Mac will then jump to that location, if it is still awake with Mona on the screen.

I lose the correct data, by interacting with the incorrect data in any way.

If I swipe quit Mona on the iOS devices, and relaunch it at this point, it will load with its timeline set to the current moment, and then overwrite my Mac’s timeline location.

The only way to get consistent timeline sync is to have both devices open in Mona next to each other, and then advance the timeline on the source device, until the destination device reflects those changes. At this point the timelines will do the party trick of moving their timelines in unison.

Obviously, this isn’t a tenable situation – the whole point of iCloud Sync is that you can do something on one device, switch to another device any amount of time later, even if the original device is asleep or shut down, and just pick up where you left off. As far as I can recall, Mona is the only application I use which makes use of iCloud Sync, and consistently fails to correctly sync.

Whatever the reason, the point is that the Sync function doesn’t work in the real world. As a gimmick, making the timeline on one device move in realtime sync with another device is fine, but that doesn’t solve the problem of maintaining continuity of reading location as you switch between devices.

The other thing that bugs me about Mona, is the timeline compression that occurs after not using the application overnight. You sit down to Mona in the morning, to catch up on what’s happened in your feed overnight, and some inconsistent way on from your current location, is a Load More Posts label; after which, your feed continues from only 4 hours ago.

What inevitably happens as I sit there scrolling un-caffeinated, is I find myself suddenly wondering why I’m already at only 2 hours, and realise somewhere in my scrollback is a clickable link to load between 6 and 8 hours worth of posts. So I have to manually scroll back, until I find an image I recognise from last night, and then carefully find the single line Load More Posts link.

This wasn’t the behaviour of the app when I purchased it. For whatever reason, no matter how many times I’ve made this suggestion, the developer won’t do anything to either make this a behaviour that can be disabled, or make the Load More Posts label more obvious; like giving it a bright contrasting background colour, or a skeuomorphic broken, saw-toothed edge, which contrasts against the dominant horizontals and verticals.

It’s maddening, and a great example of how self-sabotaging people can be with their own work.

So that’s Mona (as of 24, October, 2024), an app that showed great promise in its early days for its massive, industry-leading customisability, which really pointed to a better direction for software which every part of the UI being user-modifiable, but which is now drowning under its basic technology not being up to the task, and its core feature – the literal reason you would use it, and not a browser; feed syncing, no longer actually working with any reliability.

It really does seem that no one is capable of making truly great software any more. Whether it’s building on janky non-native libraries, or image editor apps that are restricted to a single window with no tear-off palettes, or photo library apps that can’t have the thumbnails in one window, and the viewer in another, or full-screen preview software that can’t cope with having more than one display, everything seems to be collapsing to a world premised on no one using anything other than a single-screen laptop.

What has gone wrong with the culture of software development?

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.

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.

…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.

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.

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.