Quite a busy week, all told. I finished off a feature for PC Pro magazine, which will be the first freelance bit of tech journalism I’ve done for quite some time (I think it’s a good five years since the last one). I also took a trip into London to see one of my former colleagues, and it was great to hear what they have been up to. That includes a project I had encouraged them to do involving offering more work experience placements for young people wanting to get into automotive journalism, and it sounds like it’s been a success.
I’m excellent at encouraging other people. Encouraging myself is a bit harder. But even that’s been pretty good this week. I’m still arsing around with technology too much, and thinking too much (and too hard) about platforms and systems and all that jazz. But I also feel like I’m getting somewhere – finally – with the personal projects I have wanted to work on.
One thing I have been arsing around with (for professional purposes) is AI image generation, and it’s absolutely hilarious. Can you guess what the prompt was which produced the image at the top?
Things I have been reading
I’ve been reading Babel by R F Huang this week, and I’m entranced. There’s a lot of wonderful writing in it – I will probably have to write a post just about it when I’m finished – but there are two things which hit hard for me: the scene at the start, where Robin is leaving Canton and believes that he will never see it again, and the continual careful subtext of the seduction by empire of its best and brightest subjects. For me – a grandchild of the Empire, whose mother left Imperial India as a small child – there are so many elements where both those points hit hard. It’s a terrific book, and if you haven’t read it, you really should.
Things I have been writing
I wrote something about Apple Vision Pro, in bullet point form. The confounding thing about Apple is that I think they have, to a degree, lost their soul, and in some ways the Vision Pro is emblematic of that. Vision Pro feels like a device that’s not going to encourage people to be more creative – except in the context of creating things for others to view on Vision Pro.
I’ve been meaning to do a regular link blog post for a while, and now I have an idea for it. So every Friday, I’m going to do a ten blue links post with ten things that have found their way into my inbox. I don’t think the format of the first one is quite right because it is too long (and took too long to write), but I’ll see how it develops. I’m pondering how to make this an email too.
Speaking of newsletters, this week’s was about adapting to the new reality of search. Quality content is going to win, ultimately. Includes a passing reference to Roland Barthes. What do you expect from a philosophy graduate?
I’ve also been working on Orford, the piece of fiction which may well be a novel. I have the beginning. Not only that, but I have the end. How I get from one to the other is the tricky bit. I think I need to redo the outline because that bit just isn’t hanging together well. And then I need to write about another 50,000 words. Go me.
