Weeknote, 30th October 2022
I had a week off work. I intended to get a lot of writing done, but I slept a lot and generally lazed around. The best-laid plans, etc.
I did get some writing done on a ghost story which I started thinking about doing in time for Halloween and, judging the slow pace I've been working at correctly, named "A Christmas Ghost Story". I associate ghost stories with Christmas far more than Halloween, which, when I was a child, was something which Americans focused on but the British did not. We had fireworks to celebrate the day of burning Catholic plotters (something which never seemed to be in my Catholic mind) and Christmas. Pumpkins and trick-or-treating were weird American things I only learned about because I read a lot of Peanuts comics.
Christmas ghost stories were definitely a thing when I was a child, at least on TV. I'm not sure if that is true -- I hope it is. It's a connection with the Victorians (think of A Christmas Carol, an archetypal ghost story) and the ancient pagan midwinter festivals. Christmas is a time of miracles and strangeness, something which our consumer-focused version doesn't really encompass.
Musk bought Twitter. It's a strange world we live in when a wealthy buys up what he calls "the digital town square" and gets to decide all the laws of it, laws which he himself can, of course, ignore. Or perhaps that, too is just a sign that we haven't moved past feudal lordships, despite our brief foray into democracy and believing that things should be done for the mass of people. Read the comments that people direct at Musk some time: there is a real sense of the commoners taking their plea to the lord.
I haven't yet decided if I will close my account. I joined on 3rd December 2006 and was user number 39,093. That on its own makes me not want to close it, but I don't think I will carry on using it much. It hasn't felt like a healthy space for me to be for a long time. I'm more active on Mastodon, but that's partly because it feels like early Twitter -- so that might not be something I carry on with in the long term as the service evolves.
Meanwhile, I've also broken my MacBook Pro. It failed while updating to Ventura with an odd error, so I decided the time was right to wipe it and reinstall the OS from scratch. This isn't the simple process it used to be, involving a disk image and some time. Apple's reinstall process now involves downloading code, and watching a progress bar with no information to it… and, in my case, failing at the end with a baroque error about cryptographic signatures on the disk. There shouldn't be any: I just wiped it.
Of course, when you wipe a Mac, you don't really wipe it: it's still connected to your iCloud account. This does not feel like progress.
Thankfully I know some of the most technical Mac people in the world, so I'll get it fixed, but it feels like it's more difficult to do this on a Mac now than it is on Linux, which doesn't seem the right way around.
I'm thinking of rebooting my newsletter, mainly to distribute this. If I do, I'll use Buttondown as a service, partly because it allows you not to track subscribers, something I'm keen to avoid. I don't want feedback on what you're reading or even to know how many people are subscribed, particularly. Data may be power, but creatively it can also be a prison.
Writing
Speaking of Linux, I wrote something outlining how to get Scrivener working on Ubuntu. Like most things about running Windows software on open-source operating systems, it's mostly about ensuring you have the correct libraries and stuff installed for Wine to work with. But there are also some ways to make Scrivener look less like a Windows app and more like one native to Linux, which are worth doing if, like me, you find such a distraction when you're writing.
I also wrote something on John Gruber's defence of the iPad's current line up. I can't understand anyone thinking this confusing mess is deliberate.
Reading and watching
The main thing I have been watching this week is rugby, with both League and Union having world cups. And, of course, Andor, which has fallen into a very slow period. I have no idea what's going on.
One exciting thing on the reading front: the marvellous And Other Stories (the publisher, not the clothing brand) sent me a collection of Ann Quin books, which means I have five slim, pretty paperbacks to go through. Quin was active in the mid to late 1960s, a working class woman writer who pushed back against the prevailing gritty "kitchen sink" style in favour of something more interesting. Every now and then, there's a Quin revival, mostly amongst writers, but she's never had the recognition she deserves.
The iPad's confusing lineup
John Gruber on the iPad's current lineup:
A lot of people are now complaining that the iPad lineup is “confusing”. I disagree. There are specific aspects of the iPads in the lineup that are confusing, or at least disappointing. These aspects are mostly related to peripherals — which Pencils and which keyboard covers work with which iPads — and I wrote about these issues last week. But in terms of the fundamental question facing would-be buyers — “Which iPad should I get?” — I don’t think this lineup is confusing. I’d argue, in fact, that it’s less confusing, because the lineup is more complete.
John then spends 424 words explaining the differences in the lineup, not including the table he had already used to show the difference in pricing above this paragraph.
If you have to spend that long explaining the differences between the products on offer, there is definitely a problem with the coherence of the product line. This is doubly true hen your explanation has to go into the details of which device has a P3 colour gamut, which has an sRGB, which one has a "media engine", which one supports Bluetooth 5.2 vs 5.0 and more. And that's before you start explaining which peripherals are on offer and why exactly the first version of the Apple Pencil still exists four years after the second generation one was introduced.
If you need reminding, the iPad is a device where you just shouldn't have to worry about that shit. It's a classic product where a Steve Jobs four quadrant approach works perfectly: consumer, pro; small screen/large screen. Of course, there will be variances in storage space within those quadrants, but the core of the product doesn't need to be more complex.
I have no doubt Apple knows internally this is a mess of a lineup. However, there are many reasons a company ends up with a confusing product line, usually in a transition period for the device. Sometimes this is driven by parts supply: for example, if a key part in (say) the iPad Air is constrained and will be for some time, making a similar device without that part to siphon off customers is a smart move if you have the ability to do it.
Sometimes it means an entire product remains in the lineup because you have a bunch of them that you need to sell off. And manufacturers can get blind-sided: it's easy to see how the new iPad could have been meant to be a replacement for the 9th generation version but ended up not being able to be manufactured at the same price.
Either way, the iPad line up is a mess. There might be good reasons why it is, but attempting to claim its not is a bit daft.
How to run Scrivener on Linux
Scrivener is easily the best application around for long-form writing. Yes, you can do it in Word or LibreOffice (or even, like Cory, just a text editor), but the combination of structured rich text, note-taking, outlining and character notes that Scrivener has will make your life easier. And, of course, you can compile your work into just the right format at the end.
There is no Linux version of Scrivener these days, probably because the number of people wanting to both run it and pay for it was insufficient to justify keeping it going. Them, as they say, are the breaks. There are several open-source alternatives, such as Manuskript and Bibisco, but when I've tried them I've always felt like they are a developer's idea of what writing is like, rather than a writer's. They feel like databases where you end up filling in fields, and that just doesn't work for me. That's not to say it won't work for you -- and you should try them and thank the developers for their work -- but it just doesn't work for me.
Another option which can work on Linux but isn't open source is Obsidian. Using some judicious plugins, such as Longform, you can get some of the structured writing capability that Scrivener has, but to make it work, you need to spend a decent amount of time creating templates and tweaking, and all of that is time not spent writing. Oh, and get to know Pandoc. You will so need to know Pandoc.
The good news is that you can get Scrivener working on Linux, and I will show you how to make it run and not look like a rat's ass. It takes a bit of work at the start but once done, it's done. Many pages around have part of the details of how to do this, but some don't quite work, and others have typos, so I thought I would pull everything together into a single article. Thank you, in particular, to Thomas Peltcher, who started me off on the right track.
A brief note about Fedora. These instructions should work with any Ubuntu-based distro. I've tested it on Ubuntu 22.04, 22.10, Mint 21.1, Pop!OS 22.04 and Zorin OS 16, and it all works. However, I have never been able to get this working on Fedora. Using the same steps, I can install Scrivener, but when I try to run it, it freezes at "Loading fonts". If anyone has a solution to this, feel free to either comment or email me, and I'll include it in this article.
Install Wine (7) and Winetricks
The first thing you will need to do is install Wine. If you're running Ubuntu 22.04, you will have an ancient version installed by default, and you probably want to update to Wine 7. However, Wine 7 can sometimes end up freezing, in the same way, trying to install on Fedora does so be prepared to roll-back if you find this.
Note: you don't have to install Wine 7 to make Scrivener work. It will work perfectly happily with the default available from Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.10, or distros based on those versions. But it won't look as nice, and you may need to spend extra time in Wine tweaking it so it looks like a Windows 7 app and more like something close to native on Ubuntu. That's my setup at the top of the page. Looks pretty good, doesn't it?
If you are on Ubuntu 22.04, I have good news: all you need to do is go to the WineHQ page and follow the steps there using the Stable branch. however, if you are on 22.10 (as I am), you will need to choose the Development branch instead. The 22.10 version of Wine 7 hasn't been released, but it is in that branch. I am on the Development branch and have had no problems at all.
Next, install Winetricks through the software store or via the terminal (sudo apt install winetricks will do it). Winetricks is a neat little app which makes it much easier to download and install optional parts of Windows that apps require, such as dotnet.
Configuring Wine
First, you need to set the architecture correctly. No, I don't really know what that means either, but basically, open up a terminal and type this:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Followed by:
env WINEARCH=win64Important! That's a double-dash before "add", not an em-dash. You will often find instructions on the web have that wrong, not because the authors are idiots, but because, annoyingly, WordPress often "helpfully" converts double dashes to em-dashes. I've even seen some pages where users have commented correcting this from the text, and then WordPress has converted their double dashes into an em-dash. Thanks, WordPress.
Next, you will want to install an appropriate version of dotnet and the core Windows fonts. You may already have the latter installed, but it's fine to do it again if you're unsure. In the terminal, type:
env WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine winetricks --force dotnet45 corefonts
Again, that's two dashes before "force". And again, WordPress often wants to convert it.
Finally - and this should be final - run the Scrivener installer. Sometimes it has been known to crap out if you double-click on it, so the best way is via the terminal. Navigate to the directory where the installer is (mine was in ~/Downloads, as I had just downloaded it) and run this:
wine Scrivener-installer.exe
That should be it, although some people have reported that it chokes when you try and enter your license code. If that's the case, the solution appears to be to install speechsdk, which you should be able to do via Winetricks. I haven't actually done it, but I didn't need to.
Does Wine look really tiny to you? Wine doesn't play well with fractional scaling, so if you have that turned on you have a couple of choices. First, you could turn it off. But you probably don't want to, so what you need to do is go to the terminal and type "winecfg". Go the graphics tab and crank the DPI up to the point where the sample text looks nice and readable to you - on my 1900x1200 laptop, with fractional scaling at 125%, I make it 244dpi and it looks OK. But you may wish to go smaller or larger.
Making it look like you actually want to use it
So now you have a working version of Scrivener, yay! However, if it's anything like mine, it looks like a sack of crap with blurry fonts, tiny menu items, and so on. Good news: all of this is fixable. The bad news, it takes a bit of boring and repetitive work.
First, ensure that Wine is set to use the light appearance theme: it looks much better. This should be correct out of the box, but just in case it isn't, go to the terminal, enter winecfg, and go to the Desktop Integration tab. Set the theme to Light -- if you have Scrivener open, you'll need to quit and restart to make it take effect.
When you open Scrivener, you might find things look a bit off. For example, when I installed everything from scratch every time I highlighted something in the Binder at the side it showed as black text with a black highlight -- not exactly readable. Another time it had buttons and menu items which didn't highlight at all, but worked perfectly.
This is because Scrivener has its own theming system which doesn't always play nice out of the box with Wine. The good news is it's easily fixable. The best way is to reset the Wine theme to the default, which makes it look like ropey old Windows 98. But don't worry: the next step will change that.
You could go through all the appearance options and set your own theme, but a quicker way is just to use a third party theme as your base and customise from there. There's a really good, simple white theme which I like in the Scrivener forums. This makes a great starting point for further customisation. Download it, change the extension from .zip to .scrtheme, and in Scrivener load it from File> Options > Manage button > Import themes. Select the downloaded theme, load it and you're good to go.
Next, let's deal with those blurry fonts. This is down to your menus using fonts in Windows, but which don't match the ones in Ubuntu, so you need to change them to something which works on both. Open Scrivener, and in the File menu, choose options. In the Appearance tab/General Interface, change the GUI Font to something which more cleanly matches your Ubuntu install - I chose Ubuntu Light.
That settles the menus, but the Binder at the side may still look too small. In the same options, go to Binder, select the Fonts tab, and pick something nicer. Again, I've gone for Ubuntu light.
You can go through the rest of the interface, too, if you want, changing the fonts on Corkboard, Index Cards, Outliner, and so on to something which works more nicely for you.
Once the interface looks decent, you will probably want to change the main editor, too -- unless you like really ropey Courier (hey, I'm not one to kink shame). This is done in the Editing tab. I've set mine to Optima because who doesn't love Optima? I've also bumped the paragraph spacing because I'm not a barbarian.
Things which don't work
You should now have a working installation of Scrivener, which doesn't look like trash. Almost everything will work, but there are a few things that don't, and you need to bear them in mind.
First of all, forget about importing a web page into notes directly. It will freeze Scrivener. Workaround this by saving any webpages you need as PDF or text and importing them.
Second, some good news: Scratchpad works! Yay! However, it only works if you invoke it via the menu, not via a keyboard shortcut. And as with the Windows version, if you have saved web pages into the Binder on Mac, they're unreadable and might crash your app. If you're working cross-platform, make sure to convert them to text.
And that's it! You should now have a working, good looking version of Scrivener. Now all you have to do is 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo and you'll be a writer.
Weeknote, 23 October 2022
This has been a pretty busy week at work because I HAVE A WEEK OFF THIS WEEK. I've promised myself that I'll spend a major chunk of it writing, as it's my writing group next week and I really do want to have something completed to share, even if it's only a bit of flash fiction. Obviously I've started something much more ambitious than that (see below).
Something happened in politics this week. Not sure you saw it. The only thing I can add is GENERAL ELECTION NOW.
And that's about all that's gone on this week, other than some vague discussions on what to do at Christmas (other than read ghost stories).
Writing
I've put other stuff to one side this week and started working on a ghost story for halloween. Except that I've called it A Christmas Ghost Story, as that's a MUCH more likely deadline. Sorry.
Reading and watching
I've finally dived into Becky Chambers' A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, after it's been sitting on the top of the pile of books to read for quite a while. I adored A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the previous story in the Monk and Robot series, for its gentleness and calmness. I'm already a quarter of the way through (these are short books) and it is of course lovely.
If you haven't watched it already I would recommend The Art of Japanese Life, which is available at the moment on iPlayer. James Fox's documentaries on art are always excellent. Also well worth a watch is We Are England: Trouble at Sea, which is a documentary on the struggle of a northern fishing community to get to the bottom of why thousands of crabs and lobster are washing up dead on their beach. Really well made stuff.
Keyboards! Apple being shit! Ducks! Or, as you might call it, links for today
Oh good. An attack on machine learning algorithms that secretly gives language models a point of view. No idea how that might be abused.
Chrome's "Incognito Mode" isn't. Even Google's engineer's know it, and privately suggest it gets renamed to something else. I don't use Chrome, and I don't recommend anyone else uses it.
DuckDuckGo has the first beta of their browser for Mac out. Seem interesting, especially the "Duck Player", which blocks YouTube ads which track you -- which, it turns out, is most YouTube ads. It preserves the ones which don't track you.
Firefox Relay, which lets you create one-off email addresses for signing up to services, now also lets you mask your phone number. US and Canada only for now, but this looks really useful.
An ultra-slim Keychron K3 you say? Why sir, you are spoiling us!
I stopped using Hey.com email because of two reasons: I really didn’t need another non-standard service; and DHH came across as a complete asshole, and I really don’t like giving money to assholes. He is, though, bang on the mark when he talks about how 32Signals are going to move away from the cloud and start hosting their own stuff. Cloud is great for some things — but the 30% take that the likes of Amazon will happily fleece you for is basically just you paying a large margin to someone else, and you probably don’t have to.
John Gruber gets this absolutely on the mark: the current iPad line up is a mess. There’s too many models in the line, you have weird anomalies like the new iPad having USB-C but using the old-style Pencil, the Pros still having the front-facing camera in the wrong place, and more. I am sure Apple has plans to make the line up more simple next year, but in the meantime, it’s just a mess.
I mean, we have a cost of living crisis, hospital waiting times at an all-time high, and schools literally collapsing. So obviously the Daily Fail thinks that the worst thing in the world is trans people and so runs six pieces in one issue about them. Did a trans person veto Dacre’s lordship or something?
Whoo-how, Apple is adding more ads to the App Store. Not content with taken 30% revenue from every single developer, it now wants devs to pay for placement – because let’s be honest, this is what it is.
This is an interesting account from Bono on the whole pushback against Apple for giving away their album. I never quite got it — it was a free album, you don’t have to listen to it.
Downgrading screens, misogynists losing money, and some Apple stuff
I recently downgraded my screen - my ThinkPad is a 1920x1200 display - so I think John Gruber has got this a little wrong. There is much more to a screen than resolution, and even relatively low-resolution screens now look much better than they used to. It's not just about the number of pixels.
Dreadful misogynist and racist Vox Day, AKA Theodore Beale, has apparently lost $1m to a crypto scam while trying to crowdsource money for a right-wing superhero film. Just think, only a few years ago, that sentence would have drawn a blank look from everyone. What times we live in.
In case you're not familiar with Vox Day's oeuvre, he attempted to manipulate the ballot for the 2015 Hugo Awards to ensure only right-wingers got on the list and was a prominent supporter of Gamergate. He's an all-around piece of shit, and losing money to a scam couldn't happen to a nicer person. If you want to check out the deep cuts of his awfulness, We Hunted The Mammoth has you covered.
Chris Hynes (via Michael Tsai) tells the story of Apple Mail's first importers. I love stories like this.
Michael, by the way, is the creator of SpamSieve, which is still the best way to filter out spam on any Mac. I bought my copy when it first came out in (I think) 2006, and I am still getting updates now, which goes well above and beyond what anyone could reasonably expect from commercial software.
The cost of YouTube Premium's family plan is getting massively hiked up. Well, when you have a monopoly on video, that's what you can do. Of course, it's still "free with ads" if you want to put up with incredibly intrusive privacy-violating tracking.
Completely unrelated, an extension to gPodder allows you to subscribe to YouTube channels and automatically download new content, where you can watch it locally. If you do this, though, support creators by subscribing directly to them -- most creators have Patreons or other methods of giving them money while bypassing the egregious middleman that is YouTube.
One of Microsoft's cleverer things on Windows is creating both Windows Subsystem for Linux -- which lets you run Linux apps -- and Windows Subsystem for Android. You can guess what that does. There's now a public development roadmap for Android app support on Windows. What's nice about it is how it fills in gaps in the Windows app ecosystem, such as having a good Kindle book reader on Windows tablets. It's much more useful than the equivalent in the Apple world, where iPad apps can run on Apple Silicon Macs, mostly because the Mac app ecosystem is now so much strong than Windows.
Of course, it's out of date now -- things move pretty fast on Brexit Island -- but John Lanchester's article on "Thatcher Larping" is still an excellent read. You subscribe to the LRB, don't you? You should.
It's interesting looking through this piece by Cory from 2010 about why he wasn't going to get an iPad. I think some of it's proved wrong, but some are pretty prescient. In particular, I think the idea that the iPad's user interaction model was all about consumption was correct (although I didn't agree with this at the time). Enterprising users and developers have pushed the platform to be focused on creation too: Matt Gemmell writes and publishes novels on his. But it's pushing and hacking and so on. Apple has finally acknowledged that the hardware is capable of much more than that, but it is now struggling to retrofit a more powerful and creator-focused user interface on it -- and I think iPadOS 16 is the point when the bough breaks. Apple's best option would be to make the iPad more open, of course (at least as open as the Mac) but I get the feeling there is still something of a religious war internally about doing that.
Paul Thurrott has reviewed the ThinkPad X13s, the first ThinkPad running on an ARM processor. It neatly illustrates the biggest issue with ARM outside Apple: battery life declines as soon as you push performance up to levels comparable to Intel. Paul was getting only six hours from this machine, which is terrible.
Terence Eden writes some good advice about how to write a literature review. Having had to do one, I wish I had read this before I did it. It would have saved me a lot of pain.
As I mentioned yesterday, Ubuntu 22.10 is out; of course, I've upgraded. I had to reinstall Wine (the Wine version in Ubuntu's repo's is ludicrously old) as 22.10 removed my hand-installed Wine 7. Thanks guys. And Ubuntu is really pushing Snap still. I am not religious about this, but I want Snaps to be at least up to date, which is probably one reason they have posted on the Steam snap.
Some stuff that's interesting (not featuring Liz Truss)
Cory's written a great post on how the FTC uses dormant powers and obscure provisions in existing bills to enact key policies like the right to repair. Still, there is a great lesson here for progressive politicians more broadly: being good at your job matters. Being competent is really important because it allows you to get stuff done.
Ubuntu 22.10 is out, and for those who like living away from the steady comfort of LTS releases, you can upgrade by following these instructions.
Google is still pushing hard for Apple to adopt RCS. On paper, this would be great: RCS gives much better support for features like rich messages and a bunch of other stuff. But despite what you may have read, there is no RCS standard for end-to-end encryption. Google's implementation is proprietary to it, and not supported by any third-party apps. It does not (yet) support group messages or encryption on multiple devices. And, importantly, the metadata surrounding your message is not encrypted, so Google knows who you're sending messages to, where and when. If you want encrypted messages, use Signal, which does not collect that data.
Idaho Republicans want to ban all public drag shows. Sigh. Meanwhile, over here The Daily Hate is making up shit about trans people to stir up hatred. Because hating minorities is what gets these nasty little people off.
The Das Keyboard Professional 4 for Mac
If you want to start a fight, ask people who are serious about keyboards what their favourite model is and watch them “debate” it. The debate will rapidly descend into something approaching a brawl. The ability of keyboard nerds to come into conflict over the best key caps, switches, wired or Bluetooth, and in fact every aspect of what keyboards can and should be like is unparalleled in the computing world. If you think Windows and Mac fans can get feisty, just wait until you see the adherents of Cherry MX Brown vs Cherry MX Blues come to blows.
From where I’m sat at my desk, I can see six different keyboards. I’ve tried everything, from ergonomic split keyboards from Microsoft to Apple’s Magic Keyboard and beyond. Mechanical, shallow-travel, you name it: I’ve tried all of them. And the one that I come back to all the time is the Das Keyboard Professional 4, which I’m typing this on at the moment.
I always imagined that the Das Keyboard was German. Das Keyboard sounds like the kind of declarative description that German companies love. But in fact, it’s all down to a small company in Austin, Texas, which has now been honing their skills in keys for seventeen years.
The best way to describe the build quality of the Das Keyboard Model 4 is that you could probably beat to death a reasonably stacked bodybuilder with it. It’s heavy, in a way that you will likely not be used to if you have only used laptop or even desktop standard keyboards. What the Das Keyboard has in common with Apple’s perfectly acceptable Magic Keyboard is they are both made from aluminium, and both have keys you press to make letters appear on-screen.
But the similarities end there. Where the Magic Keyboard feels lightweight, utilising the inherent lightness of aluminium to make something that feels and looks like cultured engineering, the Das Keyboard is heavy enough to cause serious damage if you were to apply it with force to someone’s head. Any burglar attempting to rob the house of a writer in mid-flow on a Das Keyboard will be taking their lives into their hands.
The layout is similar to something like the classic IBM Model M, with the addition of media controls on the right, including a very satisfyingly tactile volume knob. There’s also a handy mute switch and a sleep button which, as the name suggests, brings up the sleep/shutdown dialogue box.
There’s no fancy backlighting – another thing it has in common with the Apple – because this isn’t a keyboard designed for gaming on. Of course, you can game on it if you like, and depending on the key switches you choose (more on that later) you will have a good gaming experience. But this is a keyboard designed to make typists, and particularly writers, feel at home. If you’re the kind of person who wears out the WASD key caps first, this probably isn’t the keyboard for you.
And there’s no Bluetooth: this is a USB wired keyboard complete with two additional USB 3 ports to act as a hub, which is handy.
I selected Cherry MX Brown switches, which I find are perfect for the way that I type. They are soft, with the key click about halfway through the action, which means they don’t have quite the same SMASH click sound which you get with gaming keyboards or with Cherry MX Blue switches. If you’re not used to typing on a mechanical keyboard they can be tiring at first: your hands and wrists are used to depressing a key for just a couple of millimetres, whereas with these keys, you are going to apply anything from 2-5 mm of force.
This shouldn’t be a problem for me: I learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter. However, if you’re more often using a laptop, particularly one with limited travel, it can be hard to get used to. My advice is to do as much typing as you can on a mechanical keyboard, saving your work on a laptop as little as possible.
The keys are rated for at least 50 million depressions each, which means you will get a lot of typing out of this keyboard before you’re likely to get much wear. There’s also a special UV-resistant coating on the key caps to avoid fading from sunlight.
If you’re the kind of person whose longest writing work is a bunch of emails, this is not the keyboard for you (unless they are really long emails). However, if you write professionally and spend your life hammering away, then the £159 or so it will cost you will be money well spent. This is a professional tool for professional writers, and it’s worth every penny.
The new iPads
A lot of people are drawing attention to the fact Apple released the new iPad and iPad Pro with a video and a press release rather than an event. I wouldn’t read too much into that. These are incremental updates, particularly to the iPad Pro.
There’s a new Folio Keyboard for the iPad, which looks good but which costs a really rather remarkable $249. On a device which costs $449 that really is quite a lot of money. And it weirdly supports the first generation Pencil rather than the newer (and much nicer) one. Although the iPad has a USB-C port, it doesn’t have the magnetic charging capability of the iPad Air and Pro – hence the old Pencil support. Of course that USB-C port means you need a dongle to charge your Pencil. Elegant design? Not really.
The iPad Pros (iPads Pro?) gain the M2 processor and WiFi 6E, which delivers some speed gains (15% faster processing, 35% faster graphics, 40% faster neural engine, 50% more memory bandwidth). It supports capturing and editing ProRes, which is a big plus for the people out there using iPad Pros as cameras (yes, they do exist). There’s also a new Pencil “hover” feature, which feels like a really odd feature to add dedicated screen hardware for. Nice, but I think it’s going to be a hard sell to get developers adding support for it.
The iPad also sees its camera shifted to the right position: at the top in landscape, not portrait. However, I can’t see anything which makes it clear if this is also the case for the iPad Pro. You would hope so, but I have the nagging feeling that the position of the charging circuitry for the magnetically-attached Pencil might rule it out. If so you can expect another update to the iPad Pro next year which shifts the charging position – again. It wouldn’t be brilliant if the cheaper iPad gets the better camera position while the professional one makes do with the weird “from the side” view you get with the current one.
Apple made quite a big point in its video about Stage Manager, “released with iPad OS 16”. Of course at the moment, the best part about Stage Manager – massively improved external monitor support – isn’t there. It was, of course, demoed in the video. Hopefully it will be released soon.
There’s nothing there which makes it a must-have upgrade over either an M1 or previous generation iPad Pro, in my view. Yes, the performance increase is great, but until the applications are there and external display support is improved I just don’t think there’s a need for all that power.
Pricing hasn’t really changed. The lowest-cost iPad Pro 11in will cost you £899. A fully laden 12.9in with 5G and 2TB of storage? £2,679. I would love to know how many of those 2TB iPad Pros Apple actually sells.
Apple also sneaked in a new Apple TV4K, with an A15 Bionic chip and support for HDR10+. Oh, and best of all: a new Siri Remote which supports USB-C for charging. At last. It’s still too expensive at £149, especially compared to the $129 it costs in the US. Thank you Tories for trashing the currency. And that £149 version doesn’t come with Ethernet as standard: you have to move up to the £169 version for that, which also bumps up the storage to 128Gb.
Some stuff which caught my eyes this week
Oof. Apparently, Windows 11 is installed on just 3% of existing PCs, which is less than Windows 7. That is truly pitiful, but not surprising: there are remarkably few good reasons to update from Windows 10. There are things to like about it but they really are few and far between, and not sufficiently obvious. What will also be worrying for Microsoft and its partners is without compelling software, there's not much reason to buy a new PC either.
Related: Fedora 37 and Ubuntu 22.10 are out soon, with the rather nice Gnome 43 interface. Just saying.
Hey Apple nerds -- or just computer history nerds -- you will like this. Someone has digitised their collection of Apple VHS tapes from the 1980s and 1990s and put them on YouTube. Apple did a lot of video content at the time for training and communications, and I remember seeing some of these when they first appeared. The hour-long video on using OpenStep's cross-platform development tools plus the Rhapsody Blue Box for running classic Mac programmes is well worth a watch. Different era.
Meanwhile, the Tories want to water down your privacy rights online. For a good example of what happens when the rights of businesses to abuse your details become more important than your right to control your data, look no further than India, where commercial spam from legitimate companies has become enough of a problem to make WhatsApp barely usable.
Nick Heer makes a great case for why Apple is completely wrong in opposing charging being standardised around USB-C. It really is, in part, Apple's own fault: you can't stick with a standard which only supports USB 2 speeds for ten years and then credibly claim to move to something better is "stifling innovation".
Gabriele Svelto found a great way to improve performance on Firefox. Also worth noting: if Firefox was distributed in the Mac App Store, it would be banned. It really isn't great that there are public APIs which don't work well and private ones which do.
Obviously, this is complete asshattery from Apple.
Chuck Jordan wrote the best view on She-Hulk I've seen. I greatly enjoyed it for all the reasons that Chuck did.
This article sums up some of the problems with Microsoft's Surface Headphones. I have the first-generation ones, and I like them a lot, but it's a mark of what a market failure they have been that when I went into the Microsoft Store ones wearing them, the security guards stopped me on the way out because they thought I had stolen them from the store. They had never seen an actual person in the real world wearing them.
Paul Thurrott writes about his experience using Microsoft Edge, and he is exactly right. Edge started out as a good alternative to Chrome. It was clean, modern and not burdened with useless features or (importantly) Google's tracking. As Microsoft has added feature after feature, it has become a bloated, confusing mess. You can almost see how every team in Microsoft has wanted a piece of it. And, of course, its "tracking protection" is poor: you will want to add proper tracking protection extensions to it.
Some good news - We Hunted The Mammoth achieved its pledge goal!
Weeknote, Sunday 16th October 2022
I spent a lot of this week being ill, with the really noxious head cold that Kim had been poorly with finally getting me. Bad head colds are one step up from the flu: Imagine having flu, but take away the fever, and you have it. They are annoying in part because you never feel quite as ill as you think you ought to while not being able to do much, as they really sap your energy.
I recovered enough to have my annual flu jab on Saturday, and as they had some spare, they gave me the COVID booster too, which I'm really glad about. Living on a campus of thousands of students is a good way to get exposed to a wide range of exciting bugs, particularly at the start of term when everyone brings something from all over the country, like the world's worst party.
The only downside is that I've got mild side effects today, similar to what I get with any vaccination: a bit of tiredness and a mild headache that just won't shift even with paracetamol and ibuprofen administered.
(That, by the way, is a trick a nurse taught me: if you have a fever or bad aches, you can take both paracetamol and ibuprofen simultaneously to knock it dead. Because they work in different ways, it's not dangerous to do both.)
So here's to next week… and hopefully not being sick.
Writing
Unsurprisingly, I haven't written much this week -- I just didn't have the focus required for it till today. Just a couple of hundred words scattered across some of the work in progress. There are a few things in the "in progress" folder at the moment:
- A long article on switching to Linux: 1,181 words.
- Why journalism is never objective: 600 words.
- On Stage Manager and the iPad. 441 words
- Prompted by a conversation on Twitter with Matt Gemmell, I am also going to write something on using Obsidian for writing and how it can replace Ulysses if that's your thing. There are pros and cons, and it takes some setting up.
Reading and watching
We had two finales this week: Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power lived up to its name by actually including the rings of power, and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law which broke the fourth wall in spectacular fashion. I enjoyed them both.
I'm halfway through Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism, and it's a good -- and shocking -- read, particularly if you're into the politics of technology. For many reasons, breaking the stranglehold of monopolies (and monopsonies!) is an important battle.
For a bit of light bedtime reading, I'm also going through Ian Hunter's Diary of a rock and roll star. Hunter was (is?) the lead singer for Mott The Hoople, and this tour diary comes from the era when Mott were hanging out with David Bowie, who adored them -- Bowie, learning they were about to break up from lack of success, gave them his song All the Young Dudes so they could have a smash hit. And hit it was, too -- it was one of Bowie's finest. Diary is one of the best first-person books about 70's rock, and much more honest and truthful in conveying the boredom of touring than anything else.
Weeknote, Sunday 9th October 2022
OK PEOPLE I got so excited doing some other writing I nearly forgot to write this. I'm slightly tired so I'm not going to write much.
Writing
First draft of a micro-short story, called Like a mother’s love. 1199 words.
Continued work on Abigail Harvey returns home, which is now 4422 words. Someday I will finish this.
Link post with Meta's Metaverse, Graphene and more: 358 words.
Musk! Twitter! And why Google is a bit cheeky over RCS: 279 words.
Does my alien have a penis and other interesting things for today: 719 words.
Reading and watching
Decentraland is valued at $1.3bn. Decentraland has just 38 users per day. But sure there's no bubble around this nonsense.
TFI Friday notes: No one loves the Metaverse and podcasts I wish I could find
No one loves Meta's Metaverse. Including the people working on it. I still haven't found a compelling reason for the metaverse to exist until we can have a fully immersive virtual reality where I can be an elf.
I nuked my Graphene OS install on the Pixel 6 because I had never been able to re-lock it. So it's currently Android 13, and it's a good reminder of how much Google's Android is in your face and capturing your data all the time. I know Google now makes a story about its commitment to privacy and putting you in control. Still, it now has so many services doing stuff in the background I doubt any consumer can actually make a call on what to block -- or even what they can block. It'll be back to Graphene soon.
John Gruber has a good post about the putative X - The Everything App that Elon Musk teased. There are lots of reasons what amounts to a WeChat clone won't take off in the West, but honestly, would you want it to? Would you want your entire digital life in the hands of Elon fucking Musk?
IMPORTANT ONE: We Hunted The Mammoth is having a pledge drive, and it's not going well. The site does the absolute best work in uncovering both the hideous misogyny of the so-called men's rights movement and the awful transphobia of so-called "gender criticals" -- who are often related or actually the same bunches of people. Throw them some money, even £5, if you can.
This post on how it's getting harder to preserve the internet reminded me of something. One of my favourite podcasts of the mid-2000s was On the run with Tablet PC, hosted by Marc Orchant and James Kendrick. As the name suggests, it focused on Microsoft tablet PCs and had some really good guests. Sadly Marc died in 2007 and James in 2018, both too young. The page for the podcast has now vanished, and before that, the links to the files were broken -- I would love to find copies if anyone has them.
Musk! Twitter! And why Google is a bit cheeky with its RCS claims
There's some new Google stuff out, but I am just not excited about it. The Pixel Tablet looks interesting, especially because of the dock, which sort of converts it into a Google Nest Hub Max, but the watch and phone are just meh.
Of course, Google had a moan about Apple not adopting RCS. A reminder: the RCS standard does not include any end-to-end encryption. The end-to-end encryption Google has built on top of RCS is proprietary to them and only works with their Messages app. If you use it all your messages go through Google's servers, and of course, as it's a Google app you have to have Play Services installed which are constantly feeding data back to Google.
Here's another great example of why it's best to own your own platforms, or, if you can't do that, choose specialist providers rather than that "free" thing Google, Facebook or Twitter just launched (you probably should look at Buttondown)
Elon Musk appears to have worked out that he's better off buying Twitter than ending up paying them $20bn or so to walk away from it. However, he wants Twitter to stop its lawsuit, and if his finance partners bail out, he seems to want to walk away. I cannot imagine why Twitter would agree with that. Related: you can always find me at Mastodon.
Not sure how Apple can avoid this - who can make its chips other than TSMC?
It's the 30th anniversary of the first ThinkPad, the great-great-great etc grandchild of which I'm typing this on now. The keyboard is still good.
Ever wonder what the specs are for McDonalds characters? No, I hadn't either.
Does my alien have a penis and other interesting things for today
Only a so-called "gender critical" could turn the sex of a cartoon intended to get kids reading into a debate about whether an alien has a penis. This is a canonical example of why some people shouldn't use social media.
Meanwhile, Putin's conscription efforts are going exactly as you would expect from a country mired in corruption.
I have pre-ordered a Kindle Scribe because it sounds like the kind of technology I love. I have a similar Remarkable 2, and while it's a great note-taking device in many ways, it's a poor e-reader. The Scribe looks like it's probably the other way round, and that's fine with me. It's due to arrive at some point in December -- I'm hoping before I head off to a week-long residential writing course I'm doing.
Tangentially related: you can now easily send ePubs to Kindle, which means that the DRM-free books I've bought elsewhere can work on my favourite e-reading hardware.
Dan Moren has a good piece on the conundrum, which is the iPad. I must admit that the iPadOS 16 betas have made me fall in love with my iPad Pro a little bit. However, after the initial rush of excitement that I might be able to replace my Mac with the iPad Pro and a big monitor, external monitor support in Stage Manager has proved to be so rough that Apple has pulled it, and who knows when it will return. Something is wrong internally at Apple to get to this point and still be this much of a mess, which goes beyond just QA or the difficulties of grafting this kind of function onto a device that comes from a completely different paradigm.
Via Om comes this Christian Heilmann piece on the sorry state of the web. Christian is absolutely right: the social web is a mess, and there's no coherent archiving apart from the incredible work of Archive.org. I would add that the web has become the equivalent of television for my generation: something that just soaks up your attention rather than being a place to go to learn something or be entertained intentionally.
I immensely enjoyed Russell's latest email in which he ruminates on blogging for writing vs banging out link posts. I, too, wonder about this, but that's partly because I look at my ideas bucket for longer posts and find about 20 things, all of which I don't think I'll ever want to write about. So, for example, that post about how shareholder value isn't the best thing for directors of companies to focus on is great, but it just doesn't feel like something I want to write now…
There's a new Linux kernel out! I'm not sure when I will become a Linux user (is there a badge?), but I've been mainly working on my ThinkPad running Zorin OS for several weeks, and it's starting to feel like home. I'll probably write some more about this at some point -- it took me a while to settle on the right distro and get the right tools in the right places -- and although I still use my other laptops (both Mac and Windows), this is where I prefer to work.
One of the reasons that I started investigating Linux was an increasing wariness about Apple's future direction. Om has a good piece in The Spectator about why the company is pushing more into services and advertising. In short: there's no growth in hardware, and app store revenue is flatlining and is likely to decline.
Our wonderful government has decided to do away with GDPR and have some kind of "British Data Protection System". This is almost the perfect Tory policy: it will have little impact on businesses (which will have to continue to follow GDPR if they so much as sniff at an EU customer) while adding most cost because there's yet another system to support and deliver little if any real-world benefit. Bravo!
Weeknote, 2nd October 2022
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Go down to Brighton. Kim doing a drawing group with some Proper Art Friends(TM) while I have a mooch around, see old sites, and generally enjoy sitting around and doing some writing. Then do something fun in the evening and back on Sunday.
HOWEVER… we took one look at the prices of the hotels and decided to cut it a little short, staying only on Saturday. That meant setting off at 8am to get there for 10. Plenty of time. It's only an hour and three-quarters drive.
Except the M2 is closed, and there is a diversion. A diversion and a queue. A long queue.
Three hours later, we're finally there. I'm pretty good in these circumstances because once there is nothing you can do about something, I relax about it all going horribly wrong. And Kim wasn't too late.
With no hotel to check into, I spent the day wandering around, going back to old haunts and sitting around. I got a decent chunk of writing done, too -- over 1200 words, which doesn't sound like much but is more than I've been doing for a while -- and managed not to drink myself into an over-caffeinated mess.
I met up with Kim after her course had finished at 4pm for a quick pint with a couple of her artist chums. Which turned into three pints. In fact, as I had sneaked one while I waited, four. I am not the kind of man who can drink four pints. More important, Kim couldn't drink three pints and drive us to the hotel, which was out at Preston Park. Hence we ended up walking back this morning in the rain.
Of course, I also had no change of clothes and no charger. So my first, slightly hungover stop was the car to pick both up, then a nearby Costa to charge my phone.
All of which makes me realise how much I have come to rely on smartphones. Instead of trusting that when we arrange to be at a place with people, we will be there, we want the belt-and-braces of being able to send a message to someone, to check where they are and if they're still coming. And it opens up the possibility, too, of not coming: if you text someone beforehand, you can just rearrange.
Reading and watching
Stephen Baxter released The Thousand Earths this week, and I have already finished it -- one of the benefits of being around for a weekend without much arranged to do is the speed at which I read (something I should remember). Like some other Baxter works, this one involves a plot that revolves around the far history of the universe, in this case, trillions of years. It's a decent read, with some good ideas, but the end feels rushed, and as with quite a few of Baxter's novels, the secondary characters feel like caricatures designed to nudge the plot in the direction he wants to go.
Also started, Chokepoint capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. If you have been following Cory's recent blog posts about monopolies and how they come to dominate the creative landscape, you will find this familiar territory -- but of course, with a lot more detail.
A trip to the cinema while in Brighton to see Moonage Daydream, a documentary about David Bowie. I love Bowie with all my glam heart, but this was an incoherent mess that went on too long despite jumping from 2000 to Bowie's death with virtually no mention (and how could you miss out Tin Machine… ok, well, that was one good thing).
Episode six of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power delivered in a big way. I can't wait for the next one, and I wouldn't count myself as much of an LOTR fan.
Weeknote, 25th September 2022
Today was a bit of a double art extravaganza, as we went down to Folkestone to see Sara Trillo talk about a project she is currently working on about dene holes. Deneholes are interesting earthworks dating back to the bronze age, and consist of a shaft dug down, usually between 50-100ft, meeting the chalk. Whoever built them then excavated, mining some of the rich chalk, probably for use as fertiliser. There are estimated to be around 10,000 across Kent and Essex and very few anywhere else. Sara has been researching them to do some kind of artwork.
Also, we looked at our friend Judith's piece, A Square of Time: Prelude, which features Kim's voice reading.
Folkestone is a fascinating place for art at the moment. It reminds me of Brighton when I first lived there, with the kind of cheap semi-derelict spaces artists can afford to use and has a proper creative feel to it.
And we'll be down in Brighton next weekend. Kim is attending a two-day drawing event. On the other hand, I will be hanging about somewhere and hopefully getting some writing done.
Writing
Ah, writing. I have been putting off writing more of my short story. I hit a wall with it: I have a beginning. I have an end. I have an idea for a middle. But when I try and write that middle, it just doesn't seem to work.
Of course, the only thing to do is to keep writing it. As Cory Doctorow wrote:
What I realized, gradually, was that the way I felt about my work was about everything except the work. If I felt like I was writing crap, it had more to do with my blood-sugar, my sleep-deficit, and conflicts in my personal life than it did with the work. The work was how I got away from those things, but they crept into the work nonetheless.
You can't get away from the work. Part of my thing is that I haven't yet established the habit of writing coherently. I don't -- yet -- show up at the same time, every day, to write. It's still something that I do as and when I can. But that can change.
Reading and watching
I've started reading An account of the decline of the Great Auk, according to one who saw it by Jessie Greengrass, and crikey, it's good. I love short stories -- I've always preferred them to novels -- and Greengrass can really write.
In parallel (yes, I have a problem with this), I have been dipping into Words are my matter by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin's non-fiction is as good as her fiction, and I recommend you read it.
I'd recommend you read Kaspersky's report on How smartphone makers track users, as it's a real eye-opener. You probably won't want to use the version of Android you get with your phone once you have done it.
We are still watching Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and enjoying it. The one thing to note is that the various strands are currently a little ungainly and uneven. You'll care about some much more than others.
Deep in the depths of the satellite channels, on Talking Picture TV, you will currently find some repeats of The Outer Limits from the early 1960s. One episode they showed this week was the classic Demon with a glass hand written by Harlan Ellison. Set your devices to record.
On the fine art of not finishing
I learned, over time, not to be a finisher. I would start grand projects, read the first 20 pages of a hundred books and write the beginnings of a hundred blog posts (much like this one). All of them are fragments -- I have a folder on my computer called "fragments" -- and none of them is finished.
It took me a long time to learn this, using the power of habits to make myself a master at the heavenly craft of completing nothing. I wasn't always great at it, but through the sheer application of walking away from things I start, I have come to the point where I can consider not finishing what I started as my profession, my true calling.
And now, I am ready to take the next step and make this my full-time job!
Failing to finish things gives you an amazing feeling of accomplishment. The words you would have written but never got around to are the most perfect ones you can imagine. The exceptional middle and ending of the work, which you just couldn't put to paper or screen, will always beat anything you ever actually wrote.
I would recommend failing to finish things to anyone. You will never have a greater sense of achievement. Go forth, young person, and stop when you feel like it.
Weeknote, 18th September 2022
This has been a week of tech-futzing and annoyances. I converted my ThinkPad back to running Windows because I was desperate to use Aeon Timeline for part of my writing project. That was a big mistake for two reasons. First, I could have just used my Mac to run it. I have no idea why I didn't just do that. Second, I have really grown to dislike Windows.
Not, I should say, because of the interface. Windows has never looked and worked better overall. Microsoft took the opportunity with Windows 11 to get rid of some of the crufty old settings which hadn't been updated since the Windows 7 era (and in some cases, Windows XP). It's just a lot nicer to use.
However, they are also determined to lock in – sorry, "integrate" – more of their services and software into the operating system. That nifty little widgets panel offers you your task list, in Microsoft To Do. You can see news and weather, but only Microsoft News and Weather. And if you click on a link, it's opening in Edge not your browser of choice.
It's clear that, like Apple, Microsoft sees services as the way to go to build revenue. Making Windows free to update probably still rankles, and they would like some revenue back, please. But that kind of stuff is not for me.
The Mac, too, is frustrating me for a few reasons. Don't get me wrong: there is so much to love about the Mac, and my M1 Mac mini continues to be a delight. But again, it feels like a system that is becoming something Apple controls rather than me controlling it, and when things go wrong they often take far more futzing about to fix than they should.
Case in point: I'm currently sitting in a coffee shop using the very fast internet here to do some big downloads. Except that my Mac won't properly connect to the WiFi. Apple uses its own system process to handle connecting to wireless networks which require authentication, showing you a little mini-window for you to login.
Except that it doesn't always appear. Sometimes, when you have connected using another device, it connects, but doesn't bring up the window – and because the network sees the Mac as another device it doesn't properly connect. It claims to have connected, but it doesn't log in, so you have no connectivity.
Sometimes all you need to do is turn WiFi on and off and it will work properly. Sometimes that doesn't work, and you need to restart. And sometimes, like today, it just will not connect no matter what you do. I have even tried invoking the system application which does the captive WiFi connection, with no result.
There is probably a preference somewhere which will fix this. Maybe there is some cache that needs clearing. But whatever it is, nothing on the internet helps.
That's very different to the world of Linux, where almost every problem you will ever encounter has been solved by someone and documented. The only problem I've ever found which doesn't have a fix is, ironically, running Aeon Timeline in Wine. But to be fair, I never really tried particularly hard – and if I find a solution, you can bet that I'm going to document it.
And I still hate the MacBook Pro keyboard. Yes, I know that new MacBooks have reverted to sane key switches, but when I have tried them they still feel crap to me. Not as crap, but still crap. I'm now used to a mechanical keyboard, and only something as good as the ThinkPad's keyboard suffices on a laptop. I have turned to the dark side.
There is a more serious and less grumpy point to all this. I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with the integration which Apple and Microsoft are focusing on. It's not that the services are bad – in Apple's case, at least, they are excellent – it's that putting your entire computing life in the hands a single supplier seems like a bad idea. You only need to look at what happened to the man who Google believed had abused his children to see how bad it can get.
And I'm less happy too to have all my documents stored in the cloud. It is hugely convenient. It means that for about a decade I haven't had to think about backing up, as everything is in iCloud or OneDrive and easily accessible. But it also feels like I am putting too much in the hands of companies which I don't really trust.
Thankfully, at some point I have connected my phone to this WiFi and it is happily reconnecting, because the network recognises it. So I downloaded a nearly 6Gb file on my iPhone, and had to transfer it to the Mac later. Thankfully AirDrop did the job well.
So I lost a day to reinstalling Linux. I know. I know. This time, rather than Ubuntu, I went for the Ubuntu-derived Zorin OS. It's designed to be as simple as possible to pick up for Linux novices and I think it hits that mark well. It includes nice little features like making using Windows applications easier by letting you just double-click on an installer while it adds Wine in the background.
This weekend is when the first tranche of new students arrives at the University, so the coffee shop I was writing in is full of parents taking their children for a coffee before they head back to whatever corner of the country they have come from. Outside the window there's the constant bustle of wheeled bags going past, and our close will have more than one car load of people circle round it, with a parent saying "I don't think this is the university…" before going back and finding the real thing. We should put up a sign.
It's fun listening to the guy who works here ask each parent in turn if they have had far to come, telling them there's more seating downstairs, pointing them in the direction of the shop or the library or Sainsbury or wherever they are off to next. Then there are the small groups of students who are obviously new, meeting for the first time and going for a coffee to chat. Or to sit awkwardly in semi-silence.
It brings back memories of my own first trip to college when my dad drove me down to Hatfield. Unlike many families I see, my mother didn't make the journey: she was upset that the last of her babies was leaving home, and didn't want me to see her cry. She also gave my dad strict instructions that he was not to use the M1 and to use the A1 instead, because motorway drivers were madmen and she didn't want him to drive at the crazy speed of 70 miles an hour.
Writing
This has been a terrible writing week. I have struggled to get my head down and write. I don't have any excuses: I have a good idea where the story is going and I have had the time available to keep writing, but I just… haven't.
Reading and watching
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is actually very good. The characters and (especially) plot are better than Tolkien, who I tried to reread a while ago and found dreadful. Like a lot of people I read Lord of the Rings young, and raced through all three books in a week or two. I vividly remember staying up late and reading it in bed, gripped by it.
Sadly I haven't retained that love – or perhaps I have just grown into better writing.
On Michael Moorcock
I once wrote a letter to Michael Moorcock. I have no idea how I found some kind of address for him -- possibly via the Hawkwind fan club I was a member of -- but found it I did. And sometime later, he was kind enough to write back.
I have almost no recollection of what I asked him (probably something trivial about Elric), but I recall that I had asked him if he would read a story I had written. He politely declined, explaining that not reading other writers' unpublished work was his number one rule. I think he said something encouraging about continuing to write.
There was, of course, a certain element of teenage braggadocio involved in this. I had not written a story at all. In fact, I had never written a story, not a word of fiction. But I reckoned that if Moorcock did want to have a read of something, I could probably rattle something out fairly sharpish and get it back to him. How hard could it be?
Moorcock has remained one of the touchstone writers of my life, and his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (and associated short stories) remains a sequence of books that I return to repeatedly. His association with New Worlds also connected me to Ballard, M John Harrison, Samuel Delaney and many others I have read throughout my life.
There are three lessons that I learned from Moorcock.
Don't let the confines of genre bind you
Moorcock is a genre writer, with much of his output coming from fantasy and science fiction's weirder end. However, he hasn't let himself be limited to this, playing with the forms of the modern novel and writing things which have as much in common with Iain Sinclair as Edgar Rice-Burroughs. His real theme isn't fantasy, but the fantastical, something which can be found in everyday life.
Tolkien was the worst thing to happen to fantasy
I might be exaggerating: I am sure that even Moorcock would say that other writers (cough Hubbard, Lovecraft cough) were worse people and worse writers. But, while acknowledging Tolkien was a pleasant enough man and very welcoming towards him when they met, he certainly had no time for Tolkien's fiction:
"It would be the same if we were talking about Warwick Deeping or RC Sherriff. It's the British character sentimentalised, the illusion of decency, that whole nonsense of 'no British boy would do this sort of thing'. It was also the tone of the BBC when I was growing up. I hated it.
Middle Earth is a place which celebrates the pre-industrial hobbits while the rabble -- the orcs -- are notable only for their brutality. When Saruman's orcs are creating machinery, they are a pretty thinly disguised analogue of the industrial working class. But they are regarded as brutes, and their enslavement by Saruman is barely acknowledged.
It took me a long time to realise how odious Lord of the Rings was: Moorcock led the way.
Write, write and keep writing - but plan first
In his early years, Moorcock was capable of writing 15,000 words in a day , an insane amount of words unless you're writing something that is unpublishable. Not only was his writing publishable, but it was also published.
How did he maintain that pace? As he told Hari Kunzru, mostly, it was all in the planning:
"It's all planning. I'd have been in bed for three days, during which I've had time to sketch out the story. Then I spring out of bed and I've got a straight nine to five – or nine to six or seven – regime, which frequently includes taking the kids to school, then I just sit down and go through with an hour break for lunch. When you write that fast the book really does start to write you, you get high on the book. It's partly lack of sleep, it's partly the sugar – in my case I only had strong black coffee because it kept me going."