China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media
China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media:
China has launched an investigation into Apple iPhone maker Foxconn over tax and land use, Chinese state media reported on Sunday. The Global Times, citing anonymous sources, said tax authorities inspected Foxconn’s sites in the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu and natural resources officials had inspected sites in Henan and Hubei… The Global Times article quoted an expert saying “Taiwan-funded enterprises, including Foxconn . . . should also assume corresponding social responsibilities and play a positive role in promoting the peaceful development of cross-strait relations”.
This is a very big deal and should be keeping Tim Cook awake at night. Effectively, it’s a small shot across the bows for Foxconn, a reminder that without the good graces of the Chinese government, it can’t exist.
Weeknote, Sunday 22 October 2023
It's been a while...
It’s been a while. I have missed the last couple of weeks not because I was too busy to write, but almost the opposite: I have felt like nothing much has happened.
Of course, that isn’t true. It’s never really true that nothing is happening in your life, but when you’re not working, what tends to happen is that the days elide into each other. The rhythm of most people’s life is work, or child-rearing, or the climbing frame of domesticity which they have erected around their time.
I haven’t really yet cultivated that. I have had no work to do other than to make myself get up and write something every day. We have no children to depend on our timekeeping. And keeping house has never been a routine for either of us.
The commemoration this weekend has been that of three months since I last had to get up in the morning, do eight hours of work, and sign off from Teams. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it. Having nothing to do, no one relying on your input to get on with their lives, is something I can recommend to anyone who wants to avoid waking up one day and asking “what the hell happened to me?” It provides that thing we most lack as we dance busily through life: perspective.
So, what new perspective on my life have I found? First, that I have a kind of pastoral radicalism, a communism-not-Marxism which believes in the collective good. That sounds abstract, but I think it’s important. It’s a deep and abiding value, and we live in an age when values are used as a debased common currency, but in actuality are as ephemeral and short-lived as muons, decaying quickly into more stable and entrenched positions.
The second thing I have come to understand is how deeply rooted impostor syndrome is in my life. I have always spent time denying my role in what I have achieved (at one point, one of my managers made “blowing my trumpet” a goal for the year because of my habit of deflecting praise). Because of this, I am not kind to myself in any meaningful way. Being forced to just stop has allowed me to start the process of letting some of this go.
The act of writing can be both an antidote to and a trigger for impostor syndrome. Writers crave the validation of an audience because it’s the one moment when the feelings of fraudulence are pushed into the shadows. But the fear of not living up to expectations, of having no originality, of creating nothing of value, is also right there, all the time.
I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of days. We were away, first in Hastings (Kim was teaching a life drawing class there) and then Eastbourne, seeing the Turner Prize show. If you get, go: Rory Pilgrim’s Rafts made me cry, as did Barbara Walker’s work. It reminded me that art is emotion, and it means that I really do have to tap into my emotions to make mine work. More of that, I suspect, over the coming months.
Meanwhile, at some point I will have to actually get some kind of income or other. I have a few more months when I don’t **need** to work, but at some point money will once again become a thing of concern, rather than an abstraction which I can deal with later. One learning about money: I need much less of it than I would have thought a few months ago. Debt, it turns out, robs you of your freedom quite effectively because you have to earn more than you need to pay back someone for the time when you couldn’t earn all that you required. I’m free of debt now, and that feels like an unshackling.
Things I have been reading this week
I finished Gary Gibson’s Europa Deep in two gluttonous sittings. It’s a neat, tidy and highly enjoyable hard SF story, and it reminded me how much of the SF genre is currently playing with the tropes of thrillers and crime drama. I need to think a bit more about this because somewhere in the race to make SF adhere to the structures, tropes and pacing of the thriller, something – quite a lot – is lost.
Reading Hilary Mantel’s A memoir of my former self feels like a delightful indulgence. It’s a collection of Mantel’s extensive back-catalogue of non-fiction, created because she developed the habit early in her career of writing for newspapers, periodicals, and magazines as well as books. It wasn’t really for fun: it was a survival mechanism because writing fiction (then as now) was not really enough to live on, at least until you become the kind of celebrated and storied writer Mantel grew to be.
I’m glad she had to do it because she applied her mind to it and the results are spectacular. In the first piece, “On the one hand”, she writes about the difference between fiction and journalism:
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.
It’s great. You should read it.
Weeknote, Sunday 22nd October
It’s been a while. I have missed the last couple of weeks not because I was too busy to write, but almost the opposite: I have felt like nothing much has happened.
Of course, that isn’t true. It’s never really true that nothing is happening in your life, but when you’re not working, what tends to happen is that the days elide into each other. The rhythm of most people’s life is work, or child-rearing, or the climbing frame of domesticity which they have erected around their time.
I haven’t really yet cultivated that. I have had no work to do other than to make myself get up and write something every day. We have no children to depend on our timekeeping. And keeping house has never been a routine for either of us.
The commemoration this weekend has been that of three months since I last had to get up in the morning, do eight hours of work, and sign off from Teams. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it. Having nothing to do, no one relying on your input to get on with their lives, is something I can recommend to anyone who wants to avoid waking up one day and asking “what the hell happened to me?” It provides that thing we most lack as we dance busily through life: perspective.
So, what new perspective on my life have I found? First, that I have a kind of pastoral radicalism, a communism-not-Marxism which believes in the collective good. That sounds abstract, but I think it’s important. It’s a deep and abiding value, and we live in an age when values are used as a debased common currency, but in actuality are as ephemeral and short-lived as muons, decaying quickly into more stable and entrenched positions.
The second thing I have come to understand is how deeply rooted impostor syndrome is in my life. I have always spent time denying my role in what I have achieved (at one point, one of my managers made “blowing my trumpet” a goal for the year because of my habit of deflecting praise). Because of this, I am not kind to myself in any meaningful way. Being forced to just stop has allowed me to start the process of letting some of this go.
The act of writing can be both an antidote to and a trigger for impostor syndrome. Writers crave the validation of an audience because it’s the one moment when the feelings of fraudulence are pushed into the shadows. But the fear of not living up to expectations, of having no originality, of creating nothing of value, is also right there, all the time.
I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of days. We were away, first in Hastings (Kim was teaching a life drawing class there) and then Eastbourne, seeing the Turner Prize show. If you get, go: Rory Pilgrim’s Rafts made me cry, as did Barbara Walker’s work. It reminded me that art is emotion, and it means that I really do have to tap into my emotions to make mine work. More of that, I suspect, over the coming months.
Meanwhile, at some point I will have to actually get some kind of income or other. I have a few more months when I don’t need to work, but at some point money will once again become a thing of concern, rather than an abstraction which I can deal with later. One learning about money: I need much less of it than I would have thought a few months ago. Debt, it turns out, robs you of your freedom quite effectively because you have to earn more than you need to pay back someone for the time when you couldn’t earn all that you required. I’m free of debt now, and that feels like an unshackling.
Things I have been reading this week
I finished Gary Gibson’s Europa Deep in two gluttonous sittings. It’s a neat, tidy and highly enjoyable hard SF story, and it reminded me how much of the SF genre is currently playing with the tropes of thrillers and crime drama. I need to think a bit more about this because somewhere in the race to make SF adhere to the structures, tropes and pacing of the thriller, something – quite a lot – is lost.
Reading Hilary Mantel’s A memoir of my former self feels like a delightful indulgence. It’s a collection of Mantel’s extensive back-catalogue of non-fiction, created because she developed the habit early in her career of writing for newspapers, periodicals, and magazines as well as books. It wasn’t really for fun: it was a survival mechanism because writing fiction (then as now) was not really enough to live on, at least until you become the kind of celebrated and storied writer Mantel grew to be.
I’m glad she had to do it because she applied her mind to it and the results are spectacular. In the first piece, “On the one hand”, she writes about the difference between fiction and journalism:
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.
It’s great. You should read it.
The new Apple Pencil
Apple has released a new Pencil for iPad and it’s weird. It looks like the Second Generation Pencil (the one which charges by sticking to the side of the iPad Pro or current Air). And it will attach there. But it won’t charge if you do – it charges through a hidden USB-C port via a cable.
Oh and it’s not pressure sensitive, which makes it worse for drawing than the old Pencil which charged via Lightning.
It is, though, £79 rather than the ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE POUNDS the second generation Pencil will cost. So that’s one thing.
Marc Andreessen's manifesto
It would take a far, far longer post than I’m prepared to spend my time writing to go through Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” paragraph by awful paragraph, but a few points probably won’t go amiss. - If you’re going to approvingly paraphrase “a manifesto of a different time and place”, you might want to check that said manifesto’s author wasn’t an early member of Mussolini’s fascist party.
- Writing “we believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views,” and then, two paragraphs later “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak” either shows you have no idea how to write, are being entirely disingenuous, or simply too stupid to think except in blocks of 240 characters. Either way, get an editor to help.
- If you are going to talk about the Greek notion of arete then having an understanding of its relationship to class in Greek society might be a good idea, too. Aristocrats were assumed, by definition, to be exemplars of arete. It wasn’t something that thetes like me would have.
- Believing that techno-optimism “is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy” while giving many repeated examples of what even a first year philosophy undergraduate which know was a political philosophy does not make you look smart.
I could go on – the whole thing is riddled with howlers – but really is there much point?
Thirty years ago, in a different life, I was a philosophy postgraduate student and taught first year undergraduates their introduction to metaphysics and ethics. In the first time, every time, someone would turn in an essay which read like this, and you would have to patiently explain to them they were going to have to rewrite it or fail, because philosophy does not mean writing down all the random thoughts you had when smoking that bundle of weed the night before the deadline.
This is the manifesto of an emotionally insecure man having a mid-life crisis as he realises that his life’s work is meaningless and all the gold and treasure he has accumulated will never make him happy. Mid-life crises in men are often surprisingly redolent of the emotional outpouring of pseudo-intellectual silliness that accompany late teenage, that first period of life when boys start to realise they are not the centre of the world and lash out at the injustice of it all.
Perhaps, then it’s no surprise this reads like it was written by a 14 year old and put on Pastebin. That it was written by a 52 year old with billions of dollars at his disposal says more about the failure of capitalism to imbue life with meaning than Andreessen could possibly imagine.
EDIT: The first draft of this contained something about A16Z’s investment in Uber. In fact, they passed on Uber. But as if to make the point about the kind of technology which Andreessen believes will save the world as long as we never question it, let’s ask an AI...
Publishers need to wake up to the truth about Google traffic
Google explained that SGE is part of the Google Search experience; it is a search feature and thus it should work as how normal search directives work. “The context is that AI is built into Search, not bolted on, and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt is the control to give web publishers the option to manage access to how their sites are crawled,” Google told us.
I’ve been using both Bard and Bing CoPilot a lot lately and the direction is clear: while AI-driven search will link to original sources as references, they are not going to send much traffic your way. The aim is to provide the answer to any query on the results page, not one more click away.
This has massive implications for publisher traffic, particular for reviews and answers pages which I think are most vulnerable to AI-driven answers. I’ve been using CoPilot for purchasing research and it’s great. I can start by asking it for, say, laptops under £1000 with good battery life. I can then have a conversation to interrogate more about each product. It’s a superior experience to any web page I have ever used for that kind of product research.
Is it 100% accurate? No – but neither are a lot of reviews, particularly the kind of “best laptop for…” top tens that are written to hit the top of product searches on Google.
But it’s not just affiliate: search provides between 40-80% of publisher site traffic. And we have already seen Facebook traffic, the other biggest referrer, die off.
Publishers can no longer rely on Facebook and Google for the bulk of their traffic. The time has past when content strategies should focus on them. Instead, they need to focus on getting a loyal audience which they have direct relationships with. The SEO era is coming to an end, at least for large chunks of traffic.
GitHub Copilot costs more per user than it charges
Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits - WSJ:
Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
The first stage of the enshittification cycle is often to charge customers less than it costs to run the service, in order to acquire and lock in as many as possible. After that, at some point, you dump on them from a great height.
The good use of ChatGPT for factual writing
I’m not a huge fan of using ChatGPT for writing, because even leaving aside issues of accuracy, its style is stilted and just the wrong side of formulaic. But there’s one area where it really works as a writing assistant: giving you an outline on a topic as a starting point.
Tell it what you want and what to include, and it will come back with an outline of everything you should cover. It won’t be your final structure, but as a place to start and especially if you’re a bit stuck and need something to bounce around to fine-tune your idea, it’s a really good assistant.
I’ve been thinking a lot about large language models as assistants for human creativity lately, in the context of Steve Jobs' old view of computers as “a bicycle for the mind” and also the Knowledge Navigator video which came later on – John Sculley’s vision of the future of computing. More to come on that…
Weeknote, Sunday 1st October 2023
How the heck is it October already? That's just not possible.
It's been a relatively quiet week. On Tuesday I was going to go to Waterstones in Canterbury to see Mark Stay talk about his latest book, but didn't feel great so I stayed at home. I suspect the reason I didn't feel great was basically that I didn't have enough caffeine: I accidentally made morning coffee with decaf, which is probably some kind of crime against humanity. Coffee-drinking humanity, at least.
On Thursday I went to the Good Bad Books event at the Barbican. We drove in, which is crazy, but even taking into account the charge for ULEZ and petrol costs it's half the price of the train. The prices of train journeys, even bought in advance, off-peak and discounted, are stupid. Once you have more than a single person, it's probably cheaper to drive if you can, even though fuel prices are again on the up. I hate it, but there it is.
The event was the culmination of a series of workshops. I went to the last one on horror writing and the story I wrote got selected to go in the book produced for the event, which was INCREDIBLY EXCITING. I have had my byline in so many magazines I've lost count, and probably had a million words published, but none of them have been fiction and that's incredibly exciting. I didn't even think it was that good a story, although I'm told otherwise -- so I'll take it.
This was also a week of computer maintenance, and I'm not even vaguely finished. The autumn new operating system bonanza -- new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows and even Chrome OS -- meant that a lot of machines suddenly wanted to download multi-gigabyte updates. Which would be fine if our home broadband ran at anything other than glacial speeds.
Cue me carting around various laptops to the University Library, where I can sit and update things at much faster speeds. And of course read some really good books. Having a borrower's ticket, though, is turning out not to be much of a money saver as I have a tendency to want to buy some of the books I find. Thankfully they are mostly second hand, obscure and cheap.
One other small good piece of tech this week: it turns out there is a version of iA Writer for Windows, which makes me very happy indeed. iA Writer is a great Markdown programme which includes some great editing features, such as the ability to highlight all the verbs, nouns, adverbs and so on in different colours. This makes it really easy to spot where you are being repetitive or where the adverbs are taking over the text.
And finally, Saturday saw us pop along to the Gulbenkian to see Acid Brass – acid house, played by a proper brass band. I first saw them 26 years ago, at the Barbican performance of KLF's Fuck the Millennium – a gig which lasted (if I remember) 24 minutes (there was some numerological connection to the number which Jimmy and Bill were obsessed with). There was dancing.
Things things which caught my attention this week
- This video shows a meeting between the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, who made some of the most beautiful animated films in history, and a bunch of AI dudes keen to show him their generative movement system. It does not go well. I think I agree with what Miyazaki-san says at the end: "We humans are losing faith in ourselves."
- iFixit dropped the repairability score for the iPhone because of its parts pairing scam. Sigh.
- When thinking about global warming, it's worth remembering that it really is the fault of the rich. Eat them. All of them.
Things I have been reading
I finished The Entropy Exhibition by Colin Greenland this week, which is an interesting (and out of print) look at the influence and influences of New Worlds magazine and its coterie of writers. They're a fascinating bunch: from the older ones (Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard) to the young punks (Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison) there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.
I have also started re-reading Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, which I first watched in television form (starring Anthony Sher) when I was a teenager. It was one of the things which persuaded me that maybe I should go to polytechnic rather than sign on or work at the railway painting trains like my father. My ambitions, at that age, involved being in a band and owning a transit van to take us to gigs. My life has taken many odd turns since then.
Also reading – I'm going a lot of reading – New Worlds: An anthology edited by Moorcock from 1983. This was a library find, where I have ended up buying a second hand copy. I had this book when it first came out, and lent it to my friend Stanley. Predictably, I never got it back. Wherever you are, Stanley, give me a shout.
Things I have been writing
I've been writing some notes for a potential novel, but I'm not sure it's got legs. We shall see. I don't think of myself as a novelist, at all, but I'm willing to give it a go.
Microsoft 365 Copilot shows you ads. Or does it?
Ask Microsoft 365 Copilot in Windows if it shows you ads, and it gives you a pretty confused answer:
But ask it a question about the specs of the iPhone 15, and at the bottom of a useful answer you get… what looks suspiciously like an ad:
So which is it? does Copilot show you ads or not?
Perhaps part the answer comes from the fact that, while it’s available in the UK, it’s not shipping in the European Economic Area (EEA). No reasons are given for this, but it’s likely that it’s the same “waiting and seeing” about the impact of the provisions of the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts in the EU as “stopped” Meta from shipping Threads there.
Which begs the question: what exactly is Microsoft doing with the data that it’s harvesting from your copy of Windows that makes it nervous about the DSA and DMA? Windows has access to every file, every message, every conversation you have on your computer. So what is Copilot doing with it?
In this week’s Weeknote, I’m doing some writing, walking around Sheppey, and being angry about repairability.
Weeknote, Sunday 24th September 2023
I spent Monday and Tuesday working on a short story submission. The workshop that I went to last week at the Barbican on horror was the last one a series run by Good Bad Books over the summer -- I hadn't known about it till the last one, otherwise I would have been to all of them -- and they were taking submissions from attendees for a chapbook of work.
However, the submission date was Wednesday which basically gave me two days to write and edit something. I could have simply pulled an idea off the shelf, or even taking a preexisting piece. But I wanted to do something based on the exercises in the workshop, so I was essentially almost working from a fragment which was never really intended to be a full story.
I got it done. Submissions had to be less than 1000 words, and mine was about 750. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. And it got accepted, so I'll get a couple of copies at the event they're holding this week (tickets still available!)
It's a horror story about a man on a train, a small child, and some plastic dinosaurs. You might enjoy it.
Yesterday we went over the the Isle of Sheppey -- which, it turns out, was named by the Romans who called it "Island of Sheep" -- for Flood III, a walking tour combined with writing workshop. It was part of a series of workshops run by the Fieldnotes group across southern England aiming to explore creative practice situated in place, and there is definitely something interesting and inspiring about moving from location to location while exploring some prompts for creative work.
We ended in the best possible fashion: a cup of tea and slice of cake at the Criterion Bluetown Heritage Centre. This is a brilliant small museum and music hall which is doing a huge amount to preserve the history of Sheppey and Bluetown in particular. Once a cramped working class district created to serve the docks, Bluetown housed thousands of people thanks to the adjacent docks, which made workers live within a mile. Now there are only about 200 people living in Bluetown. It's fascinating -- and outside of the island (and even on it) a lot of this history is invisible.
This week also saw the arrival of two new bits of technology. The first was a 2TB internal SSD, which I fitted into my ThinkPad X1 Carbon – which means it now has 32GB RAM and enough storage to last quite a while. It's mainly a Linux machine these days which means it is massively over-specced, but the performance is really good and I like using it. That keyboard!
The second arrival was a Keyboard Folio for my Remarkable 2 tablet. I recently started using this again after a long hiatus (I'll write something about this on Technovia soon), but I'm really enjoying it and the Keyboard Folio means I can use it as a little distraction-free device for getting words written in draft.
I'm considering writing a monthly old-school tech column. Not business focused (lord knows there's enough of that). But something more in line with Jerry Pournelle's Byte stuff, which was mostly just about the tech travails he had encountered that month. I've actually got enough for one this month, so might kick it off this week.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Rupert Murdoch "retired" (hint: he's not retired) and Mic Wright wrote the best thing you will read about him. Includes the line "When Murdoch is finally pronounced dead — perhaps for tax reasons…"
- Apple publicly states it's all in favour of right to repair, while undermining it through whatever technical and legal means it has to hand. This company really does not deserve your money. It sure as heck isn't getting any more of mine.
- This one came via Cory too, and it's a beaut: the B612 font, which is used in Airbus cockpits and designed for legibility, is actually open source and free to use. Mmmmm, fonts. You can download it. It's nice.
Things I have been writing
After finishing off the story for the workshop I did some more work fleshing out the world of the wolves that I mentioned last week. I think there is something in this.
Things I have been reading
My pile of books grows ever larger. Arrived this week was something new by Gary GIbson (Europa Deep), Stephen Baxter (Creation Node), and I haven't even finished Neal Asher's War Bodies, which is working really hard not to keep me reading.
All that's on top of a bunch of non-fiction: Danny Cipriani's autobiography and Tiago Forte's The PARA Method. I have much reading to do.
One of these days I am going to write something about the prophetic nature of Cronenberg’s “Videodrom” and “eXistenz”.
Weeknote, Sunday 17 September 2023
I spent Monday down in Brighton visiting my friend Vicky, who I haven’t actually seen face to face for a ludicrous amount of time. Astoundingly, we have known each other for 26 years, since I was a reporter on MacUser magazine, and she was an editorial assistant on Macworld, our biggest rival. We used to bump into each other at press things, then in Camden, back before it became a hellscape of tourist nonsense.
She moved down to Brighton after I did back in 1998 – she eventually introduced me to Alice, a homeless girl who became my flatmate at exactly the right time to pull me out of some major doldrums. As is occasionally my way, we had lost touch after I moved into London – but now with the time and space to not feel like my entire life is about work, I’m gradually getting back in touch with people. And it was great fun, although my feet hurt afterwards (you walk a lot in Brighton!)
Tuesday was, of course, the Apple event. There wasn’t anything there which made me want to rush out and buy a new watch or phone – I’m happy with what I’ve got, and I suspect that the next time I buy a phone it will be something more repairable like the Fairphone 5 rather than another iPhone. I’m somewhat done with glued together devices which end up being shredded when all that’s wrong with them is a broken port.
One Wednesday I had a session with my coach, which sounds a lot more la-de-dah than it actually is. Since leaving Bauer, I have had a few sessions with her to look at the kind of work that I want to do in the future, starting with working on what my values are. I’m past the point where I’m going to hold my nose and commit myself to a permanent relationship with a company that doesn’t share my values. We also took a long look at what I’m actually good at and how that relates to what I enjoy.
All this is stuff that you just don’t get much time to think about when you’re in a full-time job, so it’s been good to have the time to do it. Fundamentally, I’m good at leading teams through difficult times, whether that’s a change of strategy, structure, management or just a changing market. I’m good at getting people pointed in the right direction, and understanding the emotional needs they have – if you understand what people’s emotional needs are, it’s a lot easy to get them performing as part of a team.
We often discuss processes and structures and all the “scientific” bit of leadership, but we often forget that people are driven as much by their emotions as their rationality. The best performing teams are in a safe, secure place: without a feeling of safety, people cramp up and underperform. And that’s an emotional thing.
Thursday was my mum’s birthday. Mum passed away a few years ago, but she would have been 92, which sounds all kinds of weird. I know I’ll never stop missing her, no matter how old I get.
Yesterday I was back in London at a workshop about horror writing with Hardeep Pandai and David Steans, which was fascinating. One thing which came out is the relationship between horror and comedy. I think the archetype of this is Iain Banks’ magnificent first novel, The Wasp Factory. It’s a colossally horrific book (The Irish Times memorably described it as “a work of unparalleled depravity”) but also filled with black humour, and in some ways the humour acts to draw the reader in. There’s part of everyone that loves Frank Cauldhame because he’s just funny and the things he does are as much baroque comedy as horror.
I’ve always thought that The Wasp Factory is a massively underrated book. While people still talk about Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Banks’ book is overshadowed by his later science fiction work and some of his more literary novels. In some ways, I don’t think Iain wrote a more perfect book, and if I ever write something that’s even a tenth as affecting, I’ll be a very lucky human.
Things I have been reading
I’m slowly trudging my way through Neal Asher’s War Bodies, having given up on it after about 20 pages. If I were sensible, I would just drop it, but I hate not finishing books – it’s a bad habit to get into – and I’m determined to get to the end. It’s not that it’s bad, or at least not as bad as I thought after 20 pages. But it’s pretty clear that Neal has run out of road with the “Polity universe” it’s set it. Of course, when you have a universe that readers love, it’s all too tempting to go back into it for both creative (there’s always something else to explore) and commercial (publishers will want you to do it) reasons. But sometimes things run their course, and I think the Polity is done.
I would really love Neal to go back and write something more around the universe of Cowl, though. I think that’s his best book, with one of the best ideas around time travel I have ever read.
Things I have been writing
I wrote a piece of micro-fiction about a man who turns himself into a crab, which is about as bizarre as it sounds. I also started some notes about a story which involves Greek mythology, werewolves, and some interesting mystery elements. What’s fascinating is that I don’t know yet how its genre might play out: the background I’ve started writing could easily flex to being a weird crime novel or a straightforward horror. More work required before I actually start writing (which is always what I’m tempted to do!)
I also wrote something about how the recently released properties feature in Obsidian could end up a game changer for how it can be used. I’ve got a much longer post about the plugins I use for Obsidian to make it a good environment for writing, which just needs an intro writing before it’s ready to be published. Maybe this week.
Properties in Obsidian are a game changer
I have been an on-again/off-again user of Obsidian for a couple of years and have lately been shifting a lot of my writing work to it, both blogging and fiction. It’s an incredibly flexible tool which can be customised to meet your needs.
Version 1.4 introduces Properties, a new interface for metadata. You have always been able to add metadata to notes in two ways: tags, which are just a hashtag in the next followed immediately by the tag; and as YAML, front-matter which is delineated in the note by existing between two sets of three hyphens.
But that YAML has always been visible at the top of your note, which felt kind of clunky. Properties builds on this by taking that YAML and hiding it behind a much nicer interface:
The nice part is that the data behind this interface is still just YAML delineated by those three dashes at the start of the file, which means it’s editable in any text editor. There’s no weird database which stores the metadata disconnected from the original file.1
Why is this potentially so useful? Because for writing, it will allow me to stop using Tags for things like statuses. At the moment, I add a tag to define the status of a document. For example, I have tags for “Blog/Ideas”, “Blog/InProgress” and so on. In the future, instead of having to use tags I will be able to create a Property called “Status” and have ones for “Ideas”, “In Progress” etc predefined. This means that tags can become what they should be – a form of topic-based loose categorisation – rather than a mixed bag of topics and statuses and names and so on.
I’m really looking forward to seeing what extension developers do with Properties, in particular what can be built using the Auto Note Mover plugin which basically runs my writing workflow.
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This is one of the things I most love about Obsidian’s design philosophy: everything possible lives in the note, and the note is just a plain text file in a folder on your local drive. If Obsidian ever died, all my notes and articles would still be right there, usable in any other text editor. I would lose the functionality which Obsidian adds over the top, but not the underlying data. ↩︎
Weeknote, Sunday 10th September 2023
I'm writing this slightly later than normal after we got back from a trip down to the Bristol to see our lovely friends. There's a bunch of pictures on both Instagram and Hipstamatic (which is totally great and has encouraged me to start taking more pictures).
Other than that, this has been a fairly quiet week, with only a Society of Authors local meetup of note. It was good fun to catch up with some other local writers.
This week is going to be a bit busier. I'm in Brighton tomorrow, then it's another SOA meeting on Tuesday over in Whitstable, then next Saturday in London for something at the Barbican. And I probably should look for some work at some point…
The three things which most caught my attention
- Everybody's Everywhere, the documentary about Lil Peep, is available on YouTube. I wish he had lived longer: the kid had a way with words, and it would have been interesting to see him apply them to the concerns that come with a longer life.
- I'm poking something about Technocracy with a small sharpened stick, and I'm interested in Michelism and John B Michel. If you have a weird mind, you might want to take a look too.
- Michael Tsai, whose blog you should have in your RSS reader (like it's 1999), wrote a post noting discomfort about the smartphone as single point of failure in our connected lives. He's right: it is, frankly, scary.
Things I have been writing
I resurrected Technovia, and wrote something about the "climbdown" of the UK government over access to end to end encrypted messages was nothing of the sort. Then of course there was Elon Musk sabotaging a Ukrainian attack because he is a naive, gullible idiot. And of course there was the news that Brexit is basically going to give you a worse version of Windows in the UK. Well done, Brexiteers!
I also started working on my next short, more on that next week.
Things I have been reading
I've finished four books in the last week. The first was China Mieville's A Spectre, Haunting, which I have been reading for a while and finally got around to completing. China sometimes sounds like someone who did a PPE degree crossed with a Socialist Worker seller, but it's still a good book and I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in Marx.
Next came Russell Davies' Do interesting. A short book full of sound advice on how to get your mind moving, with little activities. Another recommend.
I finished Tansy Hoskins' The Anti-Capitalist book of fashion, which is yet another recommend. Even if you're not that interested in fashion, it's a good deconstruction of how a lot of modern Capitalism works, from the exploitation of workers in the developing world through the creation of alienation of various kinds in the developed world through media.
And finally -- four books! -- it didn't take me long to read Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con. If you are in any way interested in tech you need to read this book.
No, the UK government did not back down on its plans to spy on encrypted messages
Many places reported that the British government had seen sense and backed down from its plans to require companies like Apple, Meta and Signal to give them back door access to end to end encrypted messages. Unfortunately, these reports were completely wrong.
All that the government did was acknowledge that Ofcom, the body which would issue notices to companies requiring them to scan their networks, could only do so if it was technically possible – in other words, that it would be pointless to attempt to demand companies do something they physically couldn’t. This is clear in the quote from Lord Stephen Parkinson, the minister responsible, in the original FT story:
“A notice can only be issued where technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content,” he said.
That is a long way from a government retreat. And as it stands, the clauses requiring companies to endanger their users privacy and security remain in the bill.
The government has now confirmed this, with Michelle Donelan, the technology minister, saying saying:
“We haven’t changed the bill at all… If there was a situation where the mitigations that the social media providers are taking are not enough, and if after further work with the regulator they still can’t demonstrate that they can meet the requirements within the bill, then the conversation about technology around encryption takes place,” she said.
But the government is claiming it’s all technologically feasible:
She said further work to develop the technology was needed, but added that government-funded research had shown it was possible. (My emphasis)
The government is not backing down. It believes it’s possible technically, and will attempt to make companies comply. It will do this in secrecy, and it doesn’t give a damn about the privacy or security of the British people. The fight is not over.
Elon Musk deliberately sabotaged a Ukrainian attack
New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire's Ukraine dilemma | CNN Politics:
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
How, exactly is this man not in prison? This is also quite telling:
Gwynne Shotwell, Musk’s president at SpaceX, was livid at Musk’s reversal, according to Isaacson.
“The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally,” Isaacson quotes Shotwell as saying. “Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”
Musk, like many stupid men, has been radicalised by Twitter into supporting the far right. That includes supporting Putin, the “white knight” who the far right thinks of as the saviour of western civilisation.
Brexit making Windows worse in the UK
Microsoft will finally stop forcing Windows 11 users in Europe into Edge if they click a link from the Windows Widgets panel or from search results. The software giant has started testing the changes to Windows 11 in recent test builds of the operating system, but the changes are restricted to countries within the European Economic Area (EEA).
“In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links,” reads a change note from a Windows 11 test build released to Dev Channel testers last month. I asked Microsoft to comment on the changes and, in particular, why they’re only being applied to EU countries. Microsoft refused to comment.
Of course this isn’t happening in the UK: thanks to Brexit, we’re not an EEA country, and so you’re stuck with Edge opening links from things like widget no matter what browser you choose. Now that’s what I call taking back control.