Russell Davies

Gathering gatherings

I've been thinking about Interesting 2023 and about places for gathering. This is a lovely piece to do with that. And that formulation (Corner, Club Cathedral, Cocoon) is fantastic.

I was also very struck by Robin Dunbar pointing out that conversations can never, really, grow beyond groups of four people and how that is reflected in the design of tables and events. ('Design' might be putting it too strong, it's reflected in how those things have ended up):

"These natural limits on the size of conversation groups are largely responsible for the traditional size of dinner parties and even the size of dining tables. Four people is perfect because they can form a single conversation. Six or eight are OK because they add variety of opinions and a single table can accommodate two or perhaps three separate conversations – with the table still small enough for people to switch from one conversation to another when they feel inclined. But more people than that means that the table has to be so large that conversations across it become impossible (you just cannot hear what someone the other side is saying), and you end up being stuck with just the people either side of you. Moreover, it is very easy for someone to get stuck between two conversations and end up with no one to talk to. Check this out next time you are at a wedding or a formal dinner where tables often seat ten or twelve. Of course, one reason for larger tables at these kinds of events – and the reason they can get away with this arrangement – is that you aren’t really expected to spend the whole time deep in conversation: you are supposed to listen quietly to the speeches."

 

Monday morning

I read about this on Mastodon, but I'm not quite sure if it's polite to embed/link to that. So I did some independent googling

It's what we all need on a Monday morning.

Nice

This is an excellent idea, from Alex Mitchell of #feministfriday

"Here's something I'm profoundly glad I do at work. Any time someone says (in writing) something good about something that my team or I have done, I save it to a notepad file called nice.txt. Then when I'm in need of a boost I will open nice.txt and read what people have said in descending date order until I feel happy again. If you think there is a possibility that this would work for you, I really encourage you to try it, it's been a tonic for me more than once and is so easy to do."

Ooh

Phil has built a lovely thing. A hand-curated directory of blogs. Which is like 'the old days' but only in the same way that 'reading books' or 'talking to people' is like the old days.

The design is lovely. A nod to the Yahoo! days but not retro. The idea is relentlessly modern; keep humans in the loop.

Seasonal gift guide

Looking for gifts, look no further:

Get the audio book of Ways of Being. James reads it himself and does an excellent job.

Incredibly pleased that @audible_com has chosen WAYS OF BEING as one of the best audiobooks of the year. And it's read by the author ;) Listen to an extract here! https://t.co/P5IkBk7SAd pic.twitter.com/vtWIJ0rCWz

— James Bridle (@jamesbridle) November 19, 2022

These are the best cards. Or is it these?

Anne Ward's books are all fantastic.

There's the Kettle Companion, of course.

And, if you want more from the Internet of Good Things there's the Tidey.

 

 

Joan?

I enjoyed this paragraph enormously:

“I am obsessed with literary and media rivalries (historical or contemporary). So when Vanity Fair recently published a wild piece about the not-overly-fond friendship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz — featuring the very spiky letters EB wrote to JD in the 70s — I was hooked. In one letter Babitz suggests that Didion’s success and fame were only tolerated by men – including her own husband — because of her waif-like size. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” It’s the “Joan” there that kills me. Eve!”

(From)

Orienting quotations

Much to love about this from Alan Jacobs.

To start with: the idea of "a text file with a few orienting quotations".

"I have a text file with a few orienting quotations, and one of them comes from the English novelist M. John Harrison:

The idea you have when you’re young, to reach the edge of what can be done with your abilities and find out what might happen if you went past it? You promise yourself you’ll try but then wake up fifty years later to discover that you were in fact always too sensible to push things until they fell over, in case people thought less of you. In your seventies, though, it doesn’t seem to matter any more what other people think. That’s probably the first phase of your life in which you can actually do what you want. And certainly the last.

I think about this a lot. And, not yet being in my seventies, I’d like to get a head start. But doing what takes you to “the edge of what can be done with your abilities” and saying whatever you want are two different things. Often what I want to say isn’t charitable or constructive, and the part of me that suppresses the utterance of my uglier thoughts is doing me a big favor. But the part of me that fears to push the envelope of my gifts … that part of me needs to be stifled. The problem is that there’s so much of it inside me."

 

Bookish

Craig Mod has probably had more sensible ideas about the future of the book than any single person (and done more sensible, actual things). And somewhere, recently, I think he wrote something about how the dominance of Amazon/Kindle had killed most of the interesting things we all imagined would happen when books had computers in them. 

I remember being vey excited about how you'd add things to text: music, moving images, game-like stuff, all that. There are probably blog posts in here excitedly proclaiming all that inevitable. Well, obviously, that didn't happen.

What's just occurred to me, though. is that some of what we meant, some of those possibilities, are starting to show up on the web.

This, for instance, is way more useful and engaging than any textbook you could read about sound. (h/t Matt)

Of there's watches, or GPS. Magical.

There's the lovely stuff Ableton made. (Or is that now something else? Is that not sufficiently bookish?)

I'm trying to write a book at the moment and I'd kill to be able to use Nutshells.

Or there are Maggie Appleton's essays.

These are all great things on my computer and phone. But they're somehow different in a browsing moment than they might be as part of a longer, book-like reading experience. Dunno.

Anyway. 

 

 

 

Things can only get better

This is a really good read. The topic is interesting and confounding. It’s very well written. And it’s well written specifically to make a point about how these things aren’t normally well written.

The internet of good things

I was very excited about the internet of things. And ambient intimacy. All that stuff. That was probably naive of me.

Lots of it failed because of bad ideas.

But some of it failed because execution was really hard back then. Developments with phones and bluetooth and everything have made lots of IOT stuff easier.

And the simple, clever ideas are starting to get built again. Properly. Functionally.

Here's one:

It's called Kettle Companion. Someone, let's say an older relative of yours, gets a little plug adaptor thing that plugs between their kettle lead and the wall. Doesn't get in the way, is unobtrusive, doesn't need switching on and off. It connects to their wifi. But then they don't have to do anything.

Someone else, let's say it's you, gets a little kettle shaped device that plugs into your wall and connects to your wifi. It takes a little bit of setting up but that's it. You can just leave it.

The kettle glows blue at midnight. Then if/when your elderly relative switches their kettle on to make a cuppa it glows green. If they don't boil the kettle before 10AM it goes red and you should probably give them a call and make sure they're OK. And, of course, if it goes green you know someone is up and about. It's a good time to call.

There's some additional nuance but that's basically it.

It's obviously only suitable for someone with a stereotypically British relationship with tea. And it could be seen as surveillance. And it shouldn't be a substitute for an actual relationship, you should still call occasionally anyway. BUT it's nice, it's gentle, it's clever. It works because it's very limited, it sends a very simple signal. Someone in that house has recently boiled a kettle. That's it. No one has to open an app, no one has to decide how they're feeling, no one has to declare their status.