python3 -c “
from faster_whisper import WhisperModel
model = WhisperModel(‘base’, device=’cpu’, compute_type=’int8’)
segments, _ = model.transcribe(‘ccru-lecture3.m4a’, beam_size=5)
for seg in segments: print(f’[{int(seg.start//60):02d}:{int(seg.start%60):02d}] {seg.text.strip()}’)
” > transcription.txt
remove the timestamps from this audio transcription and tidy it up into sentences. Don’t assume you know what I was saying, if there is uncertainty about meaning or word choice, query me.
claude-opus-4.6: This is a meaty transcription — clearly your notes/reflections on Sadie Plant’s work, probably from the CCRU course. I’ve gone through it and cleaned it up, but there are quite a few spots where the transcription seems garbled or I’m unsure what you actually said. Let me work through it in sections and flag the uncertain bits.
Here’s what I’m confident about, with queries inline:
So let’s have another crack at it.
Sadie Plant connects the art of weaving — calls it a feminine activity that’s worth an art. It is a way of imbuing meaning into reality, stories that like their toll come real.
Query 1: “stories that like their toll come real” — did you mean something like “stories that, like a toll, become real” or “stories that take their toll and become real”? Or something else entirely?
It’s an art form that was mechanized, but the loom connects that to Ada Lovelace. Coding as weaving, weaving webs, we’ve got threads, online cultures. And it starts to make the argument that the internet is feminine, digital technologies as feminine. And the arc of progress — the idea that the arc of technological progress bends toward liberation. Cyberfeminism, Afrofuturism, scenic futurism.
Query 2: “scenic futurism” — did you mean something else here? Xenofuturism maybe?
But by extension, the arc of technological progress bends towards liberation.
Just to expand on that more — the idea is that AI is fuzzy. The first idea is that women have been seen as less than men to some extent, so have people of colour. So this is, you know, contrary to the white supremacist patriarchal view, right? The colonial view of the treating of people — and the present men saying they are irrational, inhuman, and maybe not possessing a specific type of intelligence, whatever. So it’s like an identifying with them — so the super intelligence will identify with traditionally marginalised people, historically marginalised people, and will maybe remake society in a way that resets things.
It might be too reductive. There’s a lot of parts of this where biotech is like non-masculine, treating it that way — it’s gender-bendy, it’s identity-warping, it’s non-stable. And there’s all these kind of muddy things that maybe I’m not getting. I don’t think I can be like a grass ball, right?
Query 3: “I don’t think I can be like a grass ball” — what were you going for here? “I can’t grasp it all”?
It’s kind of postmodern identity, it’s fragmented, neo-conscious stuff. It’s plugging your brain into a matrix of a sort. And so here’s the criticism — which is: the matrix is still owned by the maker class.
Query 4: “the maker class” — did you mean “the master class”? Or “the maker caste”? Or literally “the maker class” as in those who build/own the tech?
So it was the superintelligence, right, and that’s just software. Look, at the end of the day it’s just software. And people — I always have this thing where you just take AI and replace it with “software” and it just dampens the phrase a bit, because AI is like — people bring a lot of sci-fi baggage to it, and software is really mundane. It’s just computers, it’s bits, right? Software can be secure or insecure, it has degrees of trust and interoperability and brittleness and understandability and complexity and simplicity and beauty. Software is a lot of different things, hardware is a different thing. AI is software and I think we can take too much away from all of that.
Right, think about who owns the digital experiences — that would be the big tech companies, right? Who owns the digital infrastructure, the actual hardware — that’s the same thing. Who owns the software — what the AI would be — just the same as the digital experiences. It’s like metaverse stuff, which has fallen over itself. And even crypto had that thing of liberating the web — it was trying to be all of this stuff, but humans keep doing what humans do. They want to be the ones wearing the boot, right? The whole point of the crypto thing is like “what if we remake society where we’re in charge?” You know, that human all-too-human tendency is still there. And the core of that is power, and power dynamics, and power relations. So I don’t see how in 2026 or in 2036 the power relationship changes enough, right?
So then I guess the core premise — maybe the premise that saves Plant — is the runaway machines. That the AI will just get too smart and take over. Runaway software. And I just find the idea of runaway software not very compelling. It’s too science fiction, it isn’t realist enough. Yeah, maybe there’s the hyperstition that we haven’t touched on yet in the course, and maybe I’m too much in that realist mode. And this is like being sold some fantasy future. I want to see something that’s connected to reality, because I think the future has to have that. I think if we’re just talking about ambitions of the future based on golden age sci-fi and ambitions of AI — we have to go from the cyberpunk dystopia, don’t we? Isn’t that the reality that we’re in?
Kind of — you need to have owning the means of computation be the thing, as a potential source of liberation. Or else you’re just assuming this similar teleological thing of the arc of history bending towards — like, capitalism will destroy itself, hopefully, from within. And it can’t, because the system continually renews itself. There’s no exclusion that is sustainable enough to continue.
Query 5: “There’s no exclusion that is sustainable enough to continue my except then you look at like the big bang” — this part is unclear. Were you saying something like “there’s no contradiction sustainable enough to bring it down, except then you look at the Big Bang” or something else?
And you go — that somehow continues to be alive. And maybe if this is just a copy of that, then it carries on. So how well does that logic work? Like if it never — the other time it folds, the fold itself is like the Big Crunch or something. So I don’t know how conceptually that works either. It’s turtles all the way down.
And what’s the other way out? It’s new consciousness. Is it that the superintelligence is not just software? The systems — maybe this is what we’re getting at — that it’s the software plus the human interactions plus cities and smart lights and sensors on everything, right? That is the new consciousness. That it’s walking away from your screen and still thinking about the interactions you had on it. The new consciousness is seeing a whole bunch of stuff on social media and it getting caught in your brain. The new consciousness is not having to remember directions, or how to think, because that’s all done by machines. The machines do the thinking for you. All you do is feel and have desires.
But again, that just sounds like new consciousness is stripping away the human and diffusing it, in order to peel back more layers to get to the desire button that it can just press or whatever. It’s an anti-agency thing. It’s just trying to — because that’s what it’ll do. So I don’t see the way out. I didn’t see how this is a way out at all. The situation is — I think all she’s done is recreate it, maybe, or find it again. It’s just been subsumed. And maybe the problem isn’t capitalist structure or whatever as much as it’s just the human structures themselves. But if we just invent ever-better utopias — but wait, okay.
So there’s the capitalist realism thing — like, we had a vision for the future and we kind of hit the end of it. “Where’s the future I was promised?” — that’s the Mark Fisher thing. And it’s very real. The world we live in now is nostalgic, with the fascists doing the “where was the future I was promised” thing. And you see that in the economic circumstances — it’s like, oh, ten years pass and you miss out on housing and you’re spending twice as much on half as much.
Query 6: “should the idea that the future’s kind of been already sold out for Lundy was being like priced in” — I can’t parse this. What were you saying here? Something about the future being “priced in” or “sold out”? And what’s “Lundy” — a name, or a garbled word?
Where’s the escape though? The escape is into greater illusion again — that’s what she’s saying. Go deeper into illusion, go further from reality. And you go, yeah, at some point you can spend all day plugged into the matrix in whatever form, you can spend all day staring at screens. And then when you’ve got to tend to the wetware — like, return to meatspace — you look around and this sucks. Why does this suck? Because I’m spending all the time in cyberspace, which is ephemeral and illusory by nature. Like, there is physical reality, isn’t there? It has objects in it, it can be passed from person to person.
The rest of the space is like in your eyes only, in a real way. It’s curated for you, it’s hyper-personalised, it’s not shared. It’s not shared space at all in any meaningful way. I don’t think it can be. I think it’s far too localised.
Query 7: “is the idea that we just make — is this the web three promise of like what if internet more interoperable, ActivityPub, is that the great white hope?” — is that a fair reconstruction? You were talking about Web3 / ActivityPub as a potential answer?
I don’t know, because I think people choose cigarettes and Twitter. They pick the thing that is simpler. Information is like a drug, not much else.
Query 8: The next section gets quite fragmented: “when they leave us / maybe I’m just an old-fashioned / the damn or something it’s just politics” — can you clarify what you were saying here? It seems like trailing thoughts that didn’t fully form.
I think we’ve got this swing against all of this stuff. I actually think it’s more boring than it looks. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that goes on but it doesn’t last very long. Not like a bridge, you know. Or we hit an eternity inside this place.
Query 9: “More cyclosis” — did you mean “more cyclical” or is “cyclosis” the word you intended?
I think the power is going to be in people who can use their minds, who think through things here and now.
Query 10: “I’m used to software that isn’t using them” — what were you saying here? Something like “as opposed to software that’s using them” (i.e. people who use software vs. people who are used _by_ software)?
These swings are going to be more extreme. There’s the radical gesture. Yeah, the radical gesture is leaving it. Is that the thing? The radical gesture is to leave, to not be in the spectacle. Yeah, the radical gesture is not to be — you can’t just plug into the spectacle. The spectacle, the scale is just immense. You don’t have the compute power, you don’t have the means of computation. You’re just a little fucking speck, just data points for it, you’re nothing for it. Stay away from it, stay the fuck away from the spectacle. Right, the radical gesture is to walk away. Like, to be offline.
Yeah. She was wrong. Or she was right. About — I think the idea is maybe it’s just not yet. Maybe we need to be in between or something.
Query 11: “like yeah she’s talking the culture of fucking shit right / this is really an embankment this is yeah / you’re opposed to him and / robot layered to utopia” — this section is very unclear. Were you talking about Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels? “Robot-layered utopia” as in the Culture’s AI-managed society? And “embankment” — did you mean “an Iain Banks moment”?
Where when you do something wrong you have to have like a little orb float around you.
Query 12: That does sound like a Banks Culture reference (the drones). But then: “banks as culture is just neo-localism / again it’s new imperialism” — is that what you were saying? That the Culture is just neo-imperialism?
The grey goo. And if she’s just ended up describing that, or wanting that — we had to help, you know.
Like, you don’t have the scale. That’s the fucking problem. You need to — like, the average person on the street would have to jacket up and fucking get a botnet. You know, you have to have capital to spin this stuff up, or you have to be able to break into enough computers.
Query 13: “the average person on the fuller / jacket and fucking get a bot net” — was “fuller jacket” meant to be “Full Metal Jacket” as a metaphor, or were you saying something like “the average person on the floor would have to jack in”?
In theory the AI will do it, or an AI will do it. But it’s — to be able to remember, it’s the puppets. It’s just software.
Query 14: “but it’s to be able to remember the puppets” — what were you getting at here?
It comes back to something at some point. And I don’t think there is some grand zero-day that comes across everything. I think the net is too dispersed. There’s too many different operating systems. They’re not all going to get pwned simultaneously. People find stuff. The nerds are still there. And it’s the offline ones who find stuff — the ones who are still paying attention to how much memory a fucking program is using. It’s the ones who are going “huh, there’s this slide — why is there so much lag in this package? Oh, it’s because the little bits didn’t change over, there’s an extra something that’s been injected.” And the ones who are like jacked in but not quite the same way, because they haven’t given up their local thing.
]]>TeddyBear83: What do you want to know?
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: The whole thing, I guess.
TeddyBear83: I can just do the full download.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Go on then.
TeddyBear83: So it was like the history of the Ccru.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Which stands for?
TeddyBear83: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. So it started initially with Sadie Plant.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Did you get the monitor?
TeddyBear83: Yeah she’s out. Face down on her bed.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: N’awww.
TeddyBear83: So Sadie Plant had in like 1989 finished her PhD on the Situationist International, which was a kind of left-wing performance group I guess. They came up a bit when I was reading David Graeber last year.
A disembodied cry emanates from beyond the conversation space.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Oh no, there she goes again.
TeddyBear83: Poor thing.
Patient, hopeful silence. The cries do not continue.
TeddyBear83: I think what they did was stage fairly abstract performance artworks. Spectacles. And it was almost meant to be like an absurdist circuit breaker to get people out of the capitalist consumption machine, right? I think that was the idea — hey, we’re in the world and we can bring in a new reality if we just sort of act differently and think differently about how to behave and be in the world. I think that was the concept. So she studied them and then she was a cyberfeminist — talking about the new realities of cybernetic cultures and internet cultures and digital technologies and how it’s changing society. But this is the early 90s, right?
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Right.
TeddyBear83: So a bit about the failure of the Situationists to change the world. It’s neoliberalism and Maggie Thatcher. And Francis Fukuyama saying look, it’s the end of history basically — that the neoliberal, capital, social democratic liberal world order is just so malleable and so powerful that it’s going to become the standard for everything and it’s unbeatable, right? That’s the claim. End of history. We’re there. We’ve finished it. This is how humanity just goes on.
Crinkling of a chocolate wrapper.
TeddyBear83: So the Ccru comes out of the University of Warwick and all these other figures kind of join. And what they were trying to do — instead of doing what universities normally do, which is talk about people from a distance — they were trying to immerse themselves in digital culture, internet culture, and sort of be with it and emerge out of there. So there’s a lot of techno music and experimental digital poetry and there’s this sort of multimedia idea — audio, visual, all bundling together at once. They used to do these binge writing and creation sessions where the idea was that nobody could tell who wrote any single part of it. It was a collective effort. And that was the concept they were trying to bring together. You think about things like open source software — big groups making things kind of anonymously — and that’s sort of what the internet is. They were trying to bring that energy to academic study in the 90s.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Okay.
TeddyBear83: The problem was — especially because of Nick Land, who ended up being a bit of the leader of it—
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Land? Like the ground?
TeddyBear83: Land. Yeah.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Oh okay. Not like the kids’ book author, Nick Bland.
TeddyBear83: No, but every time I see The Very Cranky Bear I do think it’s kind of funny. So anyway they did some weird stuff. It was borderline culty but they had a real big following. And you can see where the Situationist stuff comes in — they would host these conferences and there was some story about Nick Land presenting a talk on a certain type of music and he’s just writhing on the floor growling into a microphone. It wasn’t academic in any normal sense. So eventually there was a conflict and the uni was like — you’ve got to do papers and lectures. And he was not doing that.
The cries begin again, more emphatically than before. It becomes a scream.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Oh no.
The recording stops.
…
Time passes.
BEDROOM - TeddyBear83 and xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx are in bed. A bedside lamp is on.
TeddyBear83: So they’re looking at internet cultures and cybernetic-type cultures from within, not from without, and doing a bunch of funky stuff. And there are some key ideas within it. One is called theory-fiction — the idea that you’re trying to extend some theory about where society is going and you do so in the form of fiction. And it tended to be a lot of dystopian sci-fi.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Right.
TeddyBear83: And then that combines with this idea of hyperstition, which I think is this concept of kind of memeing reality into existence. That ideas about what’s real, if reinforced enough and mentioned enough, become kind of real — especially in the cybernetic context when you’ve got enough people saying the same thing.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Hm.
TeddyBear83: I think Trump is almost an example? Him becoming president — it was almost memed up. If you think about 2016, the mainstream news tried to cover him or whatever but it was just the repetition of his name over and over and over again, especially on social media. They were able to game the network just by saying it enough. It kind of builds momentum. I almost want to say that’s an example of hyperstition.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Okay yeah I think I get that.
TeddyBear83: And where we end up now — and I think this is the point of the lecturer, Vincent Lê, who’s just done a book on Nick Land — his sort of endpoint is that these guys, the right-wing accelerationists, stem from this and kind of running the US at the moment. It’s sort of the dominant ideology. But anyway that’s not quite where we are yet in the course because there is this interesting part where at some point they’re living in the birthplace of occultist—
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Who?
TeddyBear83: I don’t remember his name. And they get into this numerology type thing and they come up with some numerograph or some structure based on the way numbers work. I don’t know — he’s going to try and build it out for us over the coming weeks. And some of these folks ended up doing rituals to summon like — time demons.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Time demons?
TeddyBear83: I think so. I don’t know, really. Something really weird, either way. I don’t know what that part is. Apparently during one of the classes we’re going to do one of these rituals.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: And like summon a demon?
TeddyBear83: Yeah.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: No thank you.
TeddyBear83: It’ll be fun.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: Nuh uh, no way.
TeddyBear83: I mean, I’m not going to be physically present for it.
xX_aGeNtScArFaCe_Xx: But what if you accidentally summon one of these demons?
TeddyBear83: Guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Casey is studying The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) as part of the MSCP Evening School Semester 1 2026, taught by Vincent Lê. The course runs Wednesdays 6:30–8:30pm, March–June.
]]>I have a computer. Don’t we all. This is my father’s old computer.
We (my wife, daughter, and I) moved in with my parents nearly a year ago. It was a decision about – oh look I don’t need to explain all this. Cost of living. House prices. Deposits. Yada yada yada. The point is, we moved in and Dad had this old Acer Predator Orion PC sitting around gathering dust.
I left my PC with my sister-in-law in Sydney, so I started using Dad’s machine. Put Linux Mint on there and away we went.
At the time, I was playing with this idea of an artwork’s aura.
This is a Walter Benjamin concept that was first introduced to me by the writer Brian Castro during a supervision session in 2016.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin 1935
The rough idea is that art objects have a direct connection to time and space. An artist sculpting clay. A hand on a cave wall. The musician in a studio. (On this last example, there’s a terrific recording of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations in which you can hear him humming which brings the recording to life again.)
So art has its connection to time and space, and often to other cultural activities: rituals, religious ceremonies, community, etc.
But in a time of mechincal reproduction, we can make copies. Seemingly endless copies. Computers, by some measure, do nothing but copy and edit files.
Benjamin was writing nearly 100 years ago, and we’re way past the looking glass now. In 2026, much art barely inhabits time and space at all. It is mere content flickering across our screens.
AI slop goes one step further still because there’s barely even a physical location where the content was made. It’s all distributed. It’s in the cloud, man.
One person’s prompt gets routed to a data centre, a building of spinning fans and hot drives where virtual machines run inference on an astounding amount of inane text.
It’s aura-less.
My project has been to have AI art located in space in time. There’s a machine in the front room. I can hear the fans on its GPU spin up and down. I can touch it. It’s real. And now it’s got an agent on it, trying to make art.
The bot has access to its own directory on that computer. It has some instructions and a few folders. It’s been told to make something new. Whether that be an image, sound, story, 3D model, file of code.
This is not so-called AI art like you’ve seen before. I’m not prompting some trillion-dollar company’s 500k token capable monster machine. It’s a box in the front room, and maybe it’s going to make some art.
I’ve been documenting a bit of it on bluesky vontonks@bsky.social. Documentation is something I’d like to do more of. We’ll see. For now it’s just fun. Playful. Like art should be.
]]>My hands still hurt, despite a fair bit of physio and other work to help improve them. I’ve got a new desk coming next week because I finally let myself buy a thing I need. Dunno what all that says about my psychology. Would rather suffer than spend money, apparently.
Too much oversharing! But hey, that’s what a (scarcely used) blog is for.
Writing has continued to be a thing I do. Since the last post, I finished off all the short stories on my list and moved on to writing a novel. The short stories don’t exist anywhere, yet, as I haven’t been sending them out to publishers because of my focus on the novel. And work. And being a parent. And trying to live. Etc and so on.
The novel has been a fun experience. Challenging, for sure. I still procrastinate, even by writing this when I haven’t done my daily words. But hey it is what it is.
Does feel a bit like I’ve got a few things I’ve wanted finally moving along. Daily driving Linux now on this old HP laptop. Omarchy breathed new life into what was otherwise a piece of crap windows machine. It’s a big learning curve, but I’m getting there. Part of the reason I’m back on this blog is because I was noodling with the OS today, setting up cloud backups and ways to cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky simultaneously, and found myself wandering back to the blog, wanting to do more computery things. So here I am in vim in terminal typing away. Will push in git and post all in terminal. It’s kinda piece by piece the workflow I’ve been waiting for. Kinda.
So the novel. I don’t want to talk about content too much but I can talk about the process.
See, I’d plotted the thing out and wrote about 50,000 words, mostly in the 1st and 3rd acts. Then my words per day slowed to a crawl. I was stuck. Had been stuck for weeks. On the last night of our trip to New Zealand earlier this month I thought about evaluating the thing by compiling it. Taking each of the separate files (I’ve written the novel in Obsidian, one file per like story beat or chapter or character). Which was useful because in the process I cut like 14,000 words and had a shitty first draft.
This I gave to a beta reader (my mum, who reads just so many novels) who had plenty of questions, which I dutifully noted. The process of having someone else look over things was really helpful.
I then took the compiled draft and broke it apart into the constituent characters so I can do each arc separately, tell each character’s story on its own. Plus answer the questions. And this week I’ve been writing one story and I’ll do that until hers is done. Then I’ll do another character’s. And this way feels a bit less strict than trying to conform to story beats, to pre-defined chapters, and it feels more like I’m telling a story.
]]>Being like 10 months since the last blog about well, just kind of life and bloggy things.
Am back to try and talk through life changes. when I wrote the title of the blog, it made me think of the clips I keep getting fed of Yungblud covering ‘Changes’ at the Black Sabbath farewell festival, Back to the Beginning.
Because I guess I’m going through changes too.
Been living in Adelaide for two months now. In my parents house some 30km away from the CBD. We’re having a good time, but it’s a story for another day.
The reason I’ve opened up this old clunky blog is to talk about my hands. Because they hurt! It’s been going for a little while; gradually getting worse, the hand pain. I’m doing the right things to deal with it: went to the GP, have been seeing a hand therapist. Nerve compression seems to be the culprit. Posture related, we hope. A lengthy 45min/day of exercises, stretches, and so on.
Got myself a more ergonomic keyboard.
I was tempted to DIY a Lily58 but the simplicity and a quick trip to the shops beat the added complexity and wait time.
But I’m still stuck with the problem that I use my hands like all the time. All. The. Time. And so much of my identity is writing and so much of writing is hands. I have good days and bad, but the overall lesson is I need to rest my hands.
Unfortunately, I’ve reached a point where if I don’t write, I go crazy. But I can’t write much because of my hands. So I feel down, and writing would help me feel better but I can’t write much because of my hands. And so on.
So I’m trying to dictate. And tonight that means lying on my stomach in the study with my phone in front of my face using the little microphone button next to the iPhone keyboard.
It feels odd because the format has been wobbled. Like why do this in text If I’m just going to talk to my phone? I could just make videos doing this, I guess, and capture more detail about who I am and my context/setting/etc.
My hope is I can get to the other side of this patch and not feel like a really important part of me has died that I didn’t want to die. But also, I need to learn to let go. And to bloody rest when I need to rest.
Until next time, No One.
case
]]>How can it be that even when I’m told that I’m doing a fine job I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not? Some sense of like I don’t even what to call it… I guess I want to do better or I strive or some such thing. Striving might be the word. Lack of feedback fucking hurts. So do my hands, again. My fingers. My knees. Joint pain. Brain pain. Barely slept last night because Penelope was sick. Thankfully her fever seems to have gone away entirely now. She’s a lot better. Also we have some fucking guy coming over today to look at the apartment, a prospective buyer. And that sucks. It really does. Not the buying part, at least that will offer us some certainty. Hopefully he’ll buy and we can stay and everything is hunky dory. But the fact that we’ve had to effectively cede our house to strangers every week so they can roam through and look and judge and consider. We’re part of the deal, too, us renters. A source of income for the prospective buyers.
Anyway, that’s all just rage. I need to focus on the task at hand which is my fiction writing. Specifically, getting my backlog sorted out and ready for other audiences: publishers, agents, people in general. What that has meant over the last week is going through my old files and pulling out the most complete, useful stories and putting them into my little tracker. I’ve got a few there that are complete and just need an extra person to review and offer edits before I go out and submit to competitions. That person has been Sama but I’m thinking I might get mum to help edit, too, now that she’s got the time.
Here’s where that tracker sits now:
We’ve got a total of 93,662 words across 36 stories. It rpresents the majority of my fiction writing over the last 10 years not in terms of total volume so much as in terms of overall quality and readiness, or near-readiness, to publication.
]]>feelin no defeat cos we were ready to ignite the sky it was the first time that I had the time of my life
Embrace the chaos and just write. Maybe that’s what we need to do and just write write write write write write. I haven’t done a fucking thing on my website in ages. When was the last published piece? 7 October. So a couple of weeks. Incredible how time passes so quickly. I’ve got some stuff I could push now, I guess. Will need to review it first thought.
Yeah nah looking at what I’ve done I don’t think I will be posting both of those two other things I’ve written in the intervening weeks. One was just whining but the one where I was sitting on the couch playing chess might be fine for public consumption.
So there we go, this one plus the one from a couple of days ago makes two blog posts. Not too shabby. Now what? I guess I could get on with filling out the publication tracker. Maybe submit a few more of them. Might need to also make sure I’m keeping those receipts for submission because in theory at least its meant to be about earning income somewhere along the way.
there is still something kind of magical about words, even if I feel like writing serves no purpose.
Two examples: the law and computer code.
Listening to the new Amyl and the Sniffers album Cartoon Darkness. Tops start to it with ‘Jerkin’’: You’re a dumb cunt, you’re an arsehole. This is great. Proper punk. Fully articulate and angry. Relentless, uncomplicated riff.
Fuck I heaps don’t want to have to do work though. I just want to while away the time but I can’t. I have to like function and stuff.
]]>The current state of the game: 1. e4 Nc6 2. Bc4 e6 3. Nh3 d5 4. Bb3 dxe4 5. Nc3 f5 6. Qh5+
I fell down a pawn because I didn’t protect it in my opening. It’s a basic mistake but it is what it is. The important thing about chess is to focus on the current state of the game and play from there. Maybe a zen lesson there, too.
I’d like to improve but it takes a bit of time and effort both of which are somewhat limited. What I want to do is write more. More more more more more more. And read more. But I’m addicted to the sweet brain scratching of scrolling social media.
No more wasted time. We are immortal The line is drawn I plan my devotion There is no turning back.
That’s my writing down the lyrics to For You by Killswitch Engage as I heard them. I really dig this album. It’s epic as hell and, as far as I can tell, lyrically unproblematic which is the relatively low bar I’ve set for music from my youth.
this might just be something I don’t send out into the world. that’s fine. I’ve kind of missed that somewhat.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I have decided to send this out. Not because it’s good (it clearly isn’t) but rather as a commitment to writing publicly habit.
So the chess game. I’m aiming to swap my bishops so they sit on b3 and g3. It came from this book which I don’t have directly in front of me so I can’t reference it.
Just by the way, Gerald Murnane’s personal library of notes is amazing. No machine knows how he thinks in the way some might have gathered from my very online method of writing.
Not sure I’m going to get a full game out of Patto tonight. Might look for a 30min game. The key for me is concentration. Got to get an opening down.
TIME PASSES
Interesting game. Opponent crashed his bishop into my knight after I castled kingside, opening a huge hole. He’s pushed up my flank and has a mildly threatening attack with a knight but I’ve gone and thought I did a genius move with c5 and … I lost. Got smashed, actually. It’s happening a lot. I should get back to reading the book. Maybe I should think about a different aspect of the game. I’ve been particularly bishop centric for a little while…
TIME PASSES
Might win a game. Feel like it worked a bit better. Again trying the Bb3 and Bg3 play. Made some mistakes but hey a win’s a win. Should stand up and take a break.
I think just having this goal of the bishops on b3/6 and g3/6 has given me a better sense of strategy. Unsure if that was the intention behind the book talking about the Ruy Lopez…
11pm Penny has started crying, the poor love. Will give her a few minutes before I go in.
…
Seems she’s gone back to sleep. Only 3 minutes awake. Patto and I have traded knights for bishops. I’ve retained mine and we’re going to fiancetto with a Q side castle. It’s becoming quite a closed game. I think that favours the player with bishops (?) SO I’m feeling in a good spot. Nothing is under threat
I’ve been here before, playing chess. Picked it up during my last year of uni it became a massive distraction, as it’s becoming once more.
]]>Anyway, it’s been five days since I was last here, writing about Neuromancer. In that time, I finished a big work thing, then it was the long weekend. Saturday was a run around because I needed to clean the place for the open inspection because the owner is selling the joint. Ugh. Then we had Penelope’s swimming lesson, came back, did some housework, went to the shops. From some time that afternoon, I started crashing. Went to bed around 8.30pm.
Woke up to Penelope holding presents in my face. It was my birthday! I had a lovely sleep in then Sama made me a bacon and egg roll. We got ourselves together, made sure Daisy was fed and walked, then took Penny’s car seat over to my sister-in-law’s so we could all drive to the Early Start Discovery Centre in Woolongong.
That was such a fun trip. Parents learn very quickly the value of child-friendly spaces. They need to move around, seeing new things, touching things, playing, experimenting. The Discovery Centre was purpose built for exactly that and seeing kids have a place of their own is really special and heartwarming. Still a lot of work for the parents though who follow their excited kids around with an ever-increasing fatigue.
Parenting has brought a different kind of fatigue, I’ve found. And I wouldn’t change it for anything.
]]>