Recursive Words

A few days ago I made the colossal mistake of setting foot into the “social internet” in search of hopefully kindred spirits – or “unicorns” as I labelled them at the time – fellow recorders of life’s exhalations.

The wonderful thing about writing a blog – to me at least – is the bubble of solitude I sit in while writing it. My own little world, filled with the unimportant and inconsequential. A world without the voices or vices of others.

Given that most of my waking week revolves around others – doing chores, running errands, picking up, washing up, or tidying up at home – or descending into code caverns measureless to man for work – having somewhere else that is “mine” is kind of wonderful.

There’s something about standing your words up for others to read – there’s something about being a part of something bigger than yourself. So you stand your words up, click “publish”, invite the world to read them, and then walk swiftly in the opposite direction – listening for furious footsteps behind you.

How much should we share with others? How much of a wall do we leave to hide behind? I suspect my wall probably has more bricks left in it than many. I’m not sure if that’s because I worry about betraying confidences, or because I fear the reaction to what I really think about things.

The best way to avoid confronting truths is to avoid talking about them.

I watched an interesting panel discussion about belief, faith, and religion last night – where Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais spoke at length about their experiences as self-proclaimed “atheists”. Ricky made the astute observation that it’s a shame there has to be a counter term to “theism” at all.

The entire nature of opposition annoys me – that some people feel the need not only to question your thoughts, opinions, or views – but in doing so illustrate the fragility of their own. In sharing with the community, we shouldn’t have to prepare a defence, and we shouldn’t then have to dance around reactions to avoid further upsetting the obviously easily triggered.

It’s almost like a certain demographic search for opportunities to disagree – for hills to fight pitched battles on about anything and everything that opposes their personal view of what others should think or feel about the world and it’s people.

I find myself wondering why some people have such trouble accepting opposing thoughts, views, or opinions. It’s always been a mystery to me. Perhaps their opposition tells us more about them than ourselves, and our trepidation in triggering a reaction is misplaced.

Anyway.

I’ve written quite a lot about not very much. Norah would probably be proud.

I woke with a start at 7:30am this morning – to the sound of a door being slammed downstairs. Cogs turned in my head, and a memory conjured itself from somewhere that my middle daughter is doing the morning shift at Wetherspoons – which of course made me think about a cooked breakfast, and a bottomless coffee.

An hour later I left our slightly chaotic house in pursuit of my middle daughter, a cooked breakfast, and a bottomless coffee.

I managed to bag a booth – which always feels like a victory. I’ve never been here this early before – it’s remarkably quiet – although getting noisier by the minute. A small child is almost speaking somewhere behind me – garbling word-like sounds – it won’t be long before they’re asking their parents “why?” about anything and everything. In a strange sort of way I miss those days.

My coffee mug arrived within moments of ordering it – quickly followed by the “small American” breakfast. It’s the same as an “American” breakfast, except you get one of each thing, instead of enough to feed an entire family for several days. In case you’re wondering – potato hash, fried egg, pancakes, bacon, and a sausage. I’m sipping the “bottomless coffee” (a cappuccino) while writing this.

I’ve never forgotten something a co-worker once said – “you’re not full until you’re thoroughly disgusted with yourself”.

As mentioned, I left a slightly chaotic house behind – all of my daughters are (or were) home last night, along with two boyfriends.

I would normally wander between the shower and the kitchen in my underwear on a morning. Having house guests – regardless that they might look like they’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards – makes me pause. It always seems ridiculous though – getting half-dressed to walk to the bathroom, then undressing again. Thankfully I made it as far as being dressed before anybody else appeared this morning.

We have a three day weekend! – it’s a bank holiday here on Monday. I’ve been looking forward to it for some time. The weird thing? A work programming project has been borrowing time in my brain overnight – and continues to do so. I woke up thinking about it this morning, and still find my thoughts drifting off towards it while writing this.

I need to somehow shut my brain down – step away – divert myself.

I guess that’s often where the YouTube channel comes in – although that has its own pressures. When I first started, it was just me having fun in the simulator. I’m now judged by a higher bar than most; when I set foot in a simulated aircraft I’m expected to not only know how it works, but also how it should be operated, what the correct procedures are, how to communicate with air traffic controllers, how to deal with emergencies, and so on. It’s a lot.

I receive a steady stream of emails every day from people all over the world – looking for help with this aircraft, that aircraft, this GPS system, that guidance system, this joystick, that throttle, this computer, that computer, and so on. I try to reply to them all, but I don’t always manage it.

I also receive a steady stream of offers from marketers – trying to take advantage of the audience I have accrued – offering me money to advertise the most random things you can imagine. One company in particular has been offering me increasing sums of money to do the hard-sell on a dash-cam system for cars. A certain famous software development studio offered me an eye watering amount of money to live-stream myself playing their latest first-person-shooter game. I graciously turned them down.

Imagine if you’re sitting down to watch a TV show you like, and the presenters suddenly pull out paintball guns, and announce “instead of our normal show, we’re going to run around shooting each other today”. Actually – some people would probably love that.

Anyway.

It’s probably time for me to move. The pub is slowly filling with families arriving for breakfast. The booth I’m sitting in is becoming prized real estate. Maybe I should hang around for a moment or two – to see who makes a run for it.

Or maybe I’ll just go. I can almost feel the pull of the bookshop already.

I started writing a blog before the word “blog” had entered common parlance.

Yes, I’m that old.

In the late 1990s the only way you could publish words to the internet was via a self hosted website, or via one of the earliest social platforms such as Geocities – which experienced “enshittification” decades before Cory Doctorow coined the term.

If you’ve never heard of “enshittification”, it essentially describes the cycle most internet platforms have gone through – first attracting users, then abusing them for business purposes, then finally abusing the platform to such an extent that it no longer serves it’s original purpose, and is strip-mined for scrap.

So… back in the mists of time a number of different publishing platforms arrived – the likes of Blogger and LiveJournal – enabling anybody and everybody to start publishing their thoughts about the latest episode of X-Files or Battlestar Galactica for all to read.

Eventually WordPress arrived and crushed most of the previous platforms under its considerably shiny boots. Of course WordPress was a parlour trick of sorts – beneath the veneer of its shiny boots laid a foundation as old as the web itself – which it still creeks and groans atop today.

Who cares if the service works though, right? All you want to do is post your words, and allow others to read them – and that’s exactly what WordPress, Moveable Type, Vox, Posterous, Yahoo 360, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, and others promised.

There has always been a problem with the social internet though – the same problem that afflicts high-streets all over the world. As soon as a coffee shop turns up, you know that all of the genuine “mom and pop” stores days are numbered – the chains will arrive within months, and either run at a loss as a “statement” location, or survive for a few months as a hobby project for somebody with too much money and not enough common sense.

I’m getting side-tracked.

The promise of the social internet saw an explosion of interest in blogging. For a time – in the mid to late 2000s – the noise from a million keyboards was cacophonous. People opened their lives to the internet – recording their days, thoughts and dreams.

And then the coffee shops arrived.

Slowly but surely, blogs became monetised. Rather than adhering to Norah Ephron’s maxim that a blog didn’t need to be about anything much at all, or only relevant for as long as it was being written, commercial interests arrived, and instantly enshittified everything they touched. Suddenly everything had to have a niche – an angle – a focus. Traffic equals eyeballs equals mouse-clicks equals money. More followers. More subscribers. More, more, more. The entire online audience became a fishing expedition for many – drag-lining every barrel until the bottom fell out.

It’s happening right now at LinkedIn, and I suspect it’s starting to happen to Substack too.

I’m a bit sad about it, if I’m honest.

The attraction of social platforms for me is that if you cast a wide enough net, you’ll discover at least a few beautiful souls (and yes – that is a mangled quote from The OA). There comes a point however where every time you so much as touch the water with your net, it instantly fills with floating plastic – wrapped in advertisements, mansplained get rich quick schemes, and breathless tales of “how I convinced 50,000 people to subscribe to my advertorial nonsense”.

I’m pretty sure the bloggers I remember are still out there – sharing their almost daily thoughts about things that don’t really matter – but there’s just so much damn noise now that the chances of finding them are impossibly small. Impossibly small, but not non-existent.

And that’s what keeps me going.

If I’m still writing a personal journal, and publishing it to the internet, then perhaps somebody else is too. I might not have discovered them yet, but I might.

I might discover them tomorrow.

It occurred to me this morning that I’m not so much living in an escape room – rather an escape life. Except I’m not really trying to escape – just becoming increasingly aware of guard rails in all directions. Of course they’re not outwardly obvious, in the same way as a locked door – they’re cloaked in obligations, expectations, and responsibilities.

I wonder how different life might look if we didn’t weigh everything we do by what others expect, how we think our actions are perceived, or how much trouble we imagine stepping out of our lane – even for a few moments – will cause.

Perhaps it’s all in my head.

There’s an attraction to choosing the path of least resistance through each day. In the process of doing so you pretty much slam all the sliding doors around you though. Things you might have done. Things you wished you had done.

Anyway.

You find me sitting in Wetherspoons once more this morning – escaping the house for an hour for a coffee and a cooked breakfast. Given I rarely get a chance to either leave the house or interact with anybody during a typical week, these visits have become unexpectedly needed.

After ordering an “English breakfast”, the son of a close friend approached with a plate of food in his hand, and a shy smile. I smiled back, asked him how his new job was going, and tried to avoid embarrassing him too much. It’s interesting to see him “all grown up” – when ever I think of either my own children, or the children of friends, in my head they’re still at junior school.

Right.

Time is marching on. Time to wander down to the street market and have a nose around.

Some years ago – while chatting with an old friend (and wonderful singer) in Oklahoma, the subject of music came up, and I asked what she was listening to – for recommendations. At the time I was on a bit of a folk music kick. She recommended Rascal Flats, Keith Urban, and a new teenager that was being played a lot on her local radio stations at the time – called Taylor Swift.

I was working in London at the time, and spent several weeks with their albums ripped onto an early MP3 player called a “Creative Muvo”.

Along the way I lost touch with the friend, but the music stayed on the succession of music players and phones that lived in my pockets – travelling all over Europe, and the wider world with me.

I eventually lost track of Taylor, Keith, and Rascal Flats too – until I took my eldest daughter to watch the Hannah Montana movie (she was a colossal Hannah Montana fan – bed spread, pyjamas – the whole bit). Of course Rascal Flats appeared in the movie. On the way home I stopped at a music store – I didn’t find anything by Rascal Flats, but I did find the Red album.

Fast forward another few years, and the kids have grown up, are off doing their own thing, and I’m re-living my youth. I bought a record player. Given that I never owned many vinyl records growing up (child of the CD generation), it was all sorts of exciting – going “record shopping”. My other half has a colossal vinyl record collection, but it turns out has no female artists in it at all. So I set about putting that right – buying back the formative albums of my twenty-something years in vinyl format; Tori Amos, Alanis Morrissette, Kylie Minogue, Heart – with a huge skew towards female singer-songwriters.

Around the same time I started reading the news stories about Taylor’s back catalogue being sold out from under her, and her crusade to re-record everything – to destroy the value of the back catalogue.

I went record shopping – in search of the “Taylor’s Version” albums – and while listening to them became a somewhat accidental Swiftie.

While working on an enormous project in my day job for an entire summer, she provided a daily soundtrack.

I became the butt of jokes among friends for awhile – but then the Eras tour happened, and suddenly everybody was listening to her – buying her music – and listening to her talk an awful lot of sense when interviewed.

In a world filled with Z-List celebrities craving fame for five minutes at any cost, Taylor became a timely reminder (to me at least) that stars do still exist.

I bought “The Tortured Poets Department” on the day it was released. It’s been a go-to album during the quiet moments ever since. I’m quietly looking forward to the new album.

Given that anybody and everybody seems to pile on anybody that dares be different any more, I don’t mind standing up and being counted. It has always struck me that if small minded people invested as much effort in being kind, as they do in judging or tearing down others, the world would be a very different place.

While writing this (after procrastinating famously for the last hour), the clock is busy ticking past 1am – or rather, it did so about 10 minutes ago. I’m ridiculously tired, but also aware I’ve not written for a few days, and want to at least empty some of the utter idiocy from my head, lest it be forgotten entirely.

A new coffee machine arrived today. It arrived mid-morning, but I didn’t get a chance to open the box until late this evening – by which time my middle daughter had opened it (and left the packaging all over the kitchen floor in the same way she leaves her shoes, bag, coat, and dirty clothes all over the floor throughout the entire house, but we won’t go on too much about that).

I will admit to being a bit crestfallen when I discovered the box had been opened. There’s something about opening parcels, isn’t there – reminders of childhood birthdays or Christmases perhaps.

After finishing work quite late – because I’m terrible at walking away from anything that needs solving – I realised I had no coffee pods for the coffee machine. Crap.

An hour later I returned from town, with a bag full of coffee pods, and a bunch of bananas (don’t ask). After surviving on instant coffee for the last several weeks, having a nice cup of frothy coffee once more was kind of wonderful.

We ate dinner late. Some of the oven trays are still soaking in the sink. You know how some meals seems like a quick solution , but then they make such a mess of the cooker trays, it then takes 18 hours to soak and scrub them afterwards? That happened tonight.

So guess who will be finishing washing up before he starts work in the morning…

Later this evening I recorded more content for YouTube, and then fell down a colossal internet rabbit-hole – listening to authors talk about their books. I chanced upon a wonderful speech Andy Weir gave about the writing of “The Martian”, and its unanticipated success – which is most of the reason I’m now sitting here at 01:15am.

I should go brush my teeth and fall into bed. I have a couple of days coming surrounded by thousands of lines of source code. I’m going to need to be awake.

It’s Saturday morning, and you find me sitting in the middle of the huge Wetherspoons in town – escaping the house for a cooked breakfast and a “bottomless” coffee. After a couple of weeks burning the candle at both ends, I’m “treating myself” (that episode of Parks and Recreation will never leave my brain – I very much doubt I’ll buy a Batman suit for myself though).

In true “throw myself under the bus” fashion, I offered the breakfast trip to the rest of the family. Those that were already up – sitting in the lounge in their pyjamas – declined. I was kind of thankful – the worst case scenario this morning would have involved buying breakfast for six of us, and probably not leaving the house for another hour.

Eating alone isn’t without it’s problems though

I’m perched on one of their smaller tables with the laptop, coffee at my side – nursing the bottomless coffee because there’s no easy way of getting another without either leaving my laptop for somebody to steal, or upping sticks and taking everything with me to the coffee machines. Of course if I take everything with me, somebody else will take the table I’m sitting at – that I’ve ordered food to arrive at.

You end up doing things in a certain order to make them manageable – ordering coffee and food, knowing the cup will arrive first – then hoping for no queue at the coffee machines before taking everything with you and returning as quickly as possible – hoping you’re not going to have to tell somebody that you’ve ordered food to arrive at the table they’re now sitting at.

The same thing happens on trains and planes. If you need to use the bathroom, you’re going to have to leave your stuff behind. If that includes a computer, you find yourself in the ridiculous situation of perhaps having to put everything away, then get it out again – or fall on the mercy of hopefully trustworthy nearby strangers to keep an eye on it for you.

I’ve watched countless laptops and bags for strangers while on trains and planes – I always seem to be the trustworthy looking stranger. I guess I should be flattered really.

Isn’t it interesting how we choose who we trust though. I wonder what the unconscious cues are?

I’m guessing “next stop” will be the newsagent – to peruse the magazines. I’m toying with signing up for “Apple One” because it includes “News+” – which will pay for itself almost immediately – it includes countless magazines and newspapers – all with NO advertising. I’m a bit old-school in terms of news – if at a loose end you’ll invariably find me reading the news, and trying to get different perspectives on stories. I tend to rail against obviously biased reporting.

It seems (to me at least) that some people like to surround themselves with concordant feedback. Given that I grew up alongside the “social internet”, I’ve always been wary of it.

Algorithmic timelines purposely target that which we have stopped to read or interact with. The long game is a pursuit of our interests and prejudices in order to indirectly sell them to insidious marketers (“who do you want your advertisements to surface to? Right wing faschists? Yes, we can do that for you, even if they don’t realise they are…”). I’ve written about the end result before – the unaware presume the majority agree with their horribly distorted and uninformed views and opinions – they can’t be wrong, because “everybody” seems to agree with them. The machinery of the internet self-sorts people by prejudice.

Anyway.

Time is marching on. Time to go for a wander, and climb off my high horse. Maybe a quick scroll through the social internet first though, hey – to re-enforce a few of my own prejudices.

After burning the candle at both ends over the last few days, I pushed back a little today. Or rather I had all the good intentions of doing so, and then did nothing of the sort.

After standing up a number of programming tasks for the team around me to pick up at work this morning, I then found myself at a loose end, and with the opportunity to progress them – so ended up progressing most of it myself anyway.

I escaped at lunchtime and walked to the local supermarket – returning half an hour later with coffee and a ready-made pasta salad. It wasn’t really about getting food – it was just about escaping these four walls for a bit.

After work I (finally) cut the grass. I’ve been putting it off for weeks.

This evening I released a new version of a piece of software I wrote some time ago – to hopefully help a few people that have been having problems with it. It was one of those moments where you find yourself at a loose end, and a little voice in the back of your mind starts whispering “you remember that thing you said you would look at ?”

I’m terrible at switching off.

Right now – as the clock ticks towards 11pm – I’m writing this blog post, listening to music, and thinking about file storage. I think about the strangest things, but there’s method to the madness.

Since switching to Apple hardware at home, I’ve been playing around with iCloud – Apple’s cloud storage solution. I wondered if it might not be a good idea to move everything I have in Google Docs and OneDrive over. It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it. Except it isn’t.

I don’t get it. If you buy an “Apple One” subscription, you get a bundle of Apple services – including a significant amount of file storage in iCloud. Here’s the thing – iCloud is not a cloud storage solution – it’s a cloud sync solution. So if you throw 100Gb of photos into iCloud, you’re also throwing 100Gb of photos onto your phone, laptop, and tablet – in other words, you can quite legitimately use iCloud to wreck your phone and tablet.

I thought I might be mis-understanding it, until I started asking friends, and they confirmed what I thought – they all use either Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox for long term storage – they only use iCloud as a sort of “grab bag”.

In other news, I spent half an hour scrolling “Substack Notes” the other night (at about 2am – go figure) – liking posts, commenting, and so on. I’m not sure if it will go anywhere, but it seems a bit more friendly than Threads or Bluesky. I suspect Substack is heading for the same tipping point as every other social platform on the internet though.

It’s a bit like coffee shops. When any town is looking prosperous, coffee shops start to appear. The marketers have started to appear at Substack – and they’re ruining it. Not just professional marketers – self-marketers – running all manner of pointless scams to generate traction – traffic – eyeballs. The same race to the bottom of the barrel that seems to happen on any vaguely popular platform. It’s a shame.

p.s. listening to Taylor Swift.

This morning you find me holed up in a booth at our local Wetherspoons – part of a huge pub chain that stretches across the country. I’m sitting in the booth with my laptop, tapping away, and occasionally looking up to meet the gaze of older people wandering past in search of a seat – who seem to resent my existence, because I’m here on my own, and taking up an entire table that they could have used.

An elderly gentleman in the next booth keeps staring at me through the glass partition between our booths. I’m not sure what his problem is, or why he’s taking so much interest in me. I have a horrible fear that he knows about my YouTube channel – I live in dread that one day somebody is going to corner me in the street – “you’re that guy, aren’t you…”

It happened to me with my blog, many years ago – back when I was “somebody” on the early internet. We were on holiday in Turkey – staying at a retreat on the south-western coast. The host of the place we were staying took everybody out for a meal in Fethiye, and while sitting among everybody at dinner he interrupted the conversation – “I read your blog today”. All of the conversation around the table stopped, and suddenly I found myself fielding questions from all and sundry. Thankfully this was back in the days before smart-phones, so nobody was able to “look me up”.

Somebody at work HAS discovered my YouTube channel. I was quietly getting on with my work one morning when a call came in – my immediate reaction, as always with work, was “what have I done wrong?” – and of course he opened with “you’re that guy, aren’t you…” (He then started asking me really quite detailed questions about the engine start procedure of a particular model of turbo-prop aeroplane, but that’s a story for another day).

Another old couple just passed me and glared in my direction. Who knew that sitting in a booth at Wetherspoons during the mid-morning mayhem would cause such bitterness?

I better leave before I get strung up by an angry mob of pensioners.

I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room – the last person standing in the house as the new day arrives. I’m listening to “Seasons of Love” from the original cast recording of “Rent”. Love this song.

I’m trying to write more often, but find myself filtering more than ever. It’s a strange situation to find myself in – given that I used to be such an open book.

I sometimes dip back into blog posts from years gone by, and wonder at the little things – the daily happenings shared with the unknown audience. I wish I could get back to that.

Let’s try.

My coffee machine blew up yesterday. It was one of those nice Nescafe Dolce Gusto machines that take pods and fill your cup with frothy coffee. I put a branded “Starbucks” pod in it – which caused it to choke on its own steam, and turn itself into a working copy of Stephenson’s Rocket. There was an almighty bang, whereupon it ejected not only its own water reservoir, but also the glass mug I had balanced in front of it.

I recoiled from the machine on the B of Bang, and then watched in slow motion as the glass mug slowly rolled towards the edge of the kitchen counter and began it’s death plunge towards the tiled floor.

The glass mug made a strangely tuneful sound as it impacted the floor – instantly shattering into pieces no larger than your little finger nail – and spreading itself in all directions – tinkling as it went.

I swore. A lot.

And of course I was bare foot – surrounded by invisible razor-sharp shards of glass. How I didn’t cut my feet to pieces is still a mystery.

Today my other half accidentally knocked over a clothes drying rack that our eldest daughter had left out. The metal rack fell across my bare feet. Yes, I’m usually barefoot. The pain was sickening.

I swore. Spectacularly.

I find myself swearing a lot at the moment. Not always out-loud. You know that scene in the first Harry Potter movie where Snape is muttering things under his breath to prevent Quirrel from getting at Harry? That’s me, pretty much every day – hanging on to being outwardly cheerful and optimistic by inwardly festering all manner of spite and annoyance.

Anyway.

It’s half-past my bedtime.

Time to go brush my teeth, and see if I can have as whacky dreams as I had last night. I think most of them happened in the half hour between waking up, realising it was the weekend, and then waking up again. I do that a lot.

I might try and escape to the pub in town for breakfast. I need to escape for a bit. Find a little bit of “me” time before another week comes barrelling down the pipe towards me.