Russell Davies

Warehouse

It's been too hot to have any original opinions. But this would probably be Episode Two of my Not Actually A Thing Podcast 'It's more complicated than that'.

Clock of the short now

I read a thing about aphorisms, which included this one:

“Amazing that the chess clock never found a more general application. A more enlightened society would have made it as indispensable to conversation as shoes to walking.”

Don Paterson.

I liked that. Then I listened to this Revisionist History episode, which included an extended bit about the difference between chess, blitz chess and bullet chess. It's all down to the clock and the time allowed.

The chess master interviewed said that if top class chess players were allowed as long as they wanted per move every game would end in a draw. The thing that makes chess hard is the time constraint. And that blitz chess and bullet chess are often won by different people to the regular sort. The shorter time makes for a different game.

Gladwell compares this to standardised tests in the US which add a time constraint to the questioning - basically you have to read things quicker than you can can actually read them and develop strategies for guessing a reasonable answer without being completely grokking the piece; "processing without understanding"

This feels a lot like work right now. It made me realise that speed is the key difference between my current job and every other one I've had; everything's just so much faster. Maybe I should get a chess clock. That feels like a useful, enjoyable framing, a way to tip yourself from panicked to excited.

UNRELATED

Anna wrote a blog post about a coffee we had and made me sound much more coherent and useful than I actually am. It became moderately successful on the links and twitters which made me worry that people think I fancy myself as a Strategist. This is not the case. If I'm anything I'm a Communications Strategist, which is very different. It's the difference between being a Doctor and being the guy from Doctor and the Medics.

God, I hate this song.

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Anne has been complaining about 'the moon' all week. She's not anti-moon. She's anti all this moon nostalgia. I knew what she meant but couldn't quite understand why. This tweet explained it:

Sorry but baby boomers have controlled the media my whole life, every day has felt like the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and JFK’s death and the last day kids ever played outside

— Julieanne Smolinski (@BoobsRadley) July 20, 2019 

And England winning the World Cup.

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If I was going to do another experiment in aggregating/sampling podcasts it would be called It's More Complicated Than That and season one would be about Plastics & Recycling and this would be the first episode. And this would be the second. Well worth a listen

From Winter Ships to Anyone

I done another mix. Quite pleased with this one. Starts off all pleasant and ambient. Robert Haigh. Richard Norris. Ore. Then I got a bit bored and added some Yazoo. At which point it goes a bit random. Not bad though, except for the bit where I accidentally knocked the pitch up.

Nettling

We walked a slightly overgrown country path this afternoon, nettles reaching in from both sides. So we were walking with our arms pinned behind our backs, like defenders in the penalty area under the new handball regulations.

Which, I realised, would have been a really good metaphor, if I was a sportswriter.

Wasted!

Unboom

Unboom from russelldavies on Vimeo.

It's been a while since I've had a day to waste on a fruitless music project, so spending the hottest day of the year wiring old electronics together in a boiling shed seemed an opportunity too good to waste.

The idea was to create a sort of musical instrument, designed to play low level slowly changing ambient by loading up various different musical files into various different machines and letting the pieces fall where they may. Sort of random, but not very. You'll see in there a combination of old rack minidisc players playing into the aux of some vintage cassette players, some newer Aldi boom boxes playing from flash drives and some miscellaneous bits and bobs. The plan is to get some of these cassettes working on autoreverse too.

I think I made the original music files too 'thick', there's not enough light and shade when everything's playing at once, not enough change, but I think there's something in this.

It's a bit quiet too. I just recorded this on my phone. I'm not quite sure how to capture the lovely feeling of sitting there with a cup of tea as the sounds bleep and bloop all around you.

Brass Fisk Large

I was clicking around ebay when I came across this poster.

The simplicity of it is lovely. And the names are superb. Brass. Fisk. Large. Real words. Sounds like a band. Or a Charles Stross code name. Or an instruction for dealing with archaic machinery.

Brass Fisk Large will definitely be the title of my first album of dense, chugging, prog house.

The joy of the internet is that you can find out what happened. (Fisk got in, Brass and Large lost to Conservatives. They'd all previously been elected in 1973.)

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I did another mix. Better in some parts. Worse in others.

Flourishing is nourishing

Another tiny music moment! It's like a flood. 5 seconds into Love Come Down by Evelyn Champagne King, there's a little hi-hat flourish that makes you glad to be alive. It says 'we're doing more than the minimum here, we're paying attention, we're fired up and you're in a safe pair of hands". Makes me skip every time I hear it.

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After chronicling my misadventures on the wheels of steel I thought I'd try and do it again. So I bought a mixer off ebay and I've been mucking about playing records. Above is my first attempt at recording something. WARNING: it's a mess. My beat matching, well, doesn't match. But, you know, it's got some tracks on it you might not have heard for a while.

Still a problem, apparently

It's a while since I've done a big, set-piece presentation on a big conference stage. The kind with anxious organisers and long-suffering AV people. This thread (and this fork) brought it all back and reminded me of the horror of presentation remotes. There's clearly still a market for something obvious yet satisfying.

I bet the problem is that they're also trying to make it 'discreet'. This is the bit of the battle they should give up on.

That's what the button was about.

Brendan had a similar thought. 

 

To be real

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about a tiny bit of a record that I really loved. I imagined it would be the first in a long series of tiny musical aperçu. So, without further ado, ten years later, here is the second one.

Got To Be Real by Cheryl Lynn has a couple of these supreme little moments. The first is the glorious shift in the vocals, where the lead voice shifts into the backing vocals and, somehow, sort of, into some sort of synthysound shriek that manages to be piercing without being shrill. It's ecstatic. You hear it first at the end of 'to be real' at around 50 seconds. And then again in an extended way at 2:42. And throughout.

And then there's the breakdown at 2:49. I love when a band switches into unison. But this is more than that, it's like a cutaway diagram. They slice open the track and show you the funky underpinning that's been bouncing you along all this time. Oh, you say, we've been riding this all along. And then they build the track back up around you. It's like being in a time-lapse of the construction of St Paul's Cathedral. So good.

Age and trying not to

I remembered the thing I didn't remember last week.

It was this fantastic New Yorker piece about age (and trying not to).

These fragments are pertinent:

"The work of the AgeLab is shaped by a paradox. Having been established to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged, the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged is a good way of going out of business. Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old. They are a market that cannot be marketed to."

"This paradox is, well, old. Heinz, back in the nineteen-fifties, tried marketing a line of “Senior Foods” that was, essentially, baby food for old people. It not only failed spectacularly but, as Coughlin puts it, poisoned an entire category. The most perverse of these failures is perhaps that of the PERS, or personal-emergency-response system, a category of device—best known for the hysterically toned television ad in which an elderly woman calls out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”—designed as a neck pendant that summons emergency services when pressed. It is simple and effective. “The problem is that no one wants one,” Coughlin says. “The entire penetration in the U.S. of the sixty-five-plus market is less than four per cent. And a German study showed that, when subscribers fell and remained on the floor for longer than five minutes, they failed to use their devices to summon help eighty-three per cent of the time.” In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button—one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old."

"The most effective way of comforting the aged, the researchers there find, is through a kind of comical convergence of products designed by and supposedly for impatient millennials, which secretly better suit the needs of irascible boomers. The best hearing aids look the most like earbuds. The most effective PERS device is an iPhone or an Apple Watch app.

Such unexpected convergences have happened in the past. Retirement villages came to be centered on golf courses, Coughlin maintains, not because oldsters necessarily like golf but because they like using golf carts. It’s the carts that supply greater mobility in and around the village. The golf comes with them. This process of “exaptation” has now accelerated. TaskRabbit and Uber and Rent the Runway—services that provide immediate help for specific problems—are especially valuable for an aging population."

"We’re doing a lot of work in the on-demand economy, which was made for millennials but is working better for boomers. Meals are delivered—these are amazing, assisted-living services that can come to anyone’s house. Older women in particular are saved from microdeficiencies in their diet. So, while the millennials want them for convenience, the boomers want them for care for their parents, or themselves.”

Every few years, in the advertising business someone writes a piece about how the advertising industry ignores old people. About how they're a massive target audience. About how we should get over advertising's obsession with youth. That is probably true. It's an understandable omission though, given that old people themselves seem to share the same attitudes.

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This Don Norman piece about how design doesn't take old people into account did the rounds earlier in the week. Also true. Also accurate.

I can't help thinking though, who designed all these door handles and utensils that are so ubiquitous now? Well, it was people who were successful designers, at the peak of their influence and power about 20 years ago. People who are old designers now. We did it to ourselves.

Don't design for old people. Design for your future.