📙 #036 - Annoyance as Motivation
Project management for the slack, back-handed compliments, some good links and putting Kitty in-charge because I have zero energy.
Well hello! I swear this week's newsletter is going to be short, as very little has happened (at least in my world) over the last fortnight. So, I'm going to blast through a couple of updates and fire off a couple of links.
TikTok version: https://www.tiktok.com/@revdancatt/video/7374334370187840800
# SOCIAL MEDIA BITES BACK
While I'm working my way through the pen plotter tutorials, which is very slow going for reasons I'll come to in a moment, I'm still making the #Weeknotes. This originally started as a way to force myself to use the equipment and software needed to make videos. If I had to make a weekly video and publish it, then by the time I got around to recording the tutorials, I'd know what I was doing.
And it worked because I know what I'm doing (maybe).
Recently, the #Weeknotes have been referred to as...
"I just got recommended this. awesome production quality for such a low subscriber channel."
"Your videos are superb, with fantastic music and editing. I am surprised it has only 7.3k subscribers. It deserves more."
"What is this? I'm not even sure what is going on, but I love it!"
...and...
All of which I love.
Meanwhile, Instagram informed me that this post (image below) was 195% more popular than my other posts in the last 30 days, thanks algorithm.
# KNITTING
The other day, this site crossed my radar: https://www.knitwise.com/ for creating all your generative art knitwear. I mean, I don't want to be mentioning Christmas and ugly generative art Christmas jumpers already in May, but at the same time 🎄🎅
I can't decide if it's going to be a FALLiNGWATER or 70s Pop cardigan, but it's definitely going to be one of them.
# HANDWRITING
The reason for very little happening is the overlapping stress of driving up and down the country to the exam centre for my homeschooling youngest and slowly pushing the sale of the studio along, which only seems to happen when I'm actively involved in chasing every, last, step.
Leaving me with little energy for anything else and an even smaller sense of direction.
Generally, I try to have four "streams" of work going on at a time...
My job (commission/external project & internal project 1 + internal project 2).
Something fun!!
Fix something that's irritating me.
Admin.
...and I try to get a good balance across those.
The "Fix something that's irritating me" in this case is the handwriting code (but there's always something)...
I want to keep a physical handwritten journal of what I'm doing, but I find the actual writing by hand part irritating, so...
I work out how to use single-stroke “handwriting” fonts and get the plotter to work with those. However, it's kinda irritating that it's not MY handwriting, so...
I work out how to encode my handwriting, which is great, but I'm irritated that it's not full cursive, so...
I finally do the cursive part.
What I like about this approach is previously, I would have tried to do everything in one go or not at all if it was apparent I didn't have time to fit it all in.
But now I'm much happier to half-arse it, and in many cases, it turned out that I don't really need the whole solution I thought I did, as just fixing the first part is good enough.
Anyway, having Kitty write my journal entries in my Non-Cursive writing got irritating enough that I finally figured out the math to make all that work. However, not so much that I've moved that code to the back end yet, so Kitty still can't automatically use my handwriting, but that's an irritation for the future.
# KITTY (an AI PA, not an IPA, sadly)
An example of an annoyance that turned out not to be is Kitty asking me questions throughout the day.
All the productivity books, articles, videos, and podcasts say that getting interrupted is the WORST THING EVER, and it takes you like a billion years to regain focus.
So, when I added the code to Kitty to ask me questions throughout the day, I wanted it to only trigger when a timer for finishing a work block kicked off, the perfect time to pop up a question. I knew I didn't have time for that, so I decided to have them pop up randomly whenever. The theory being I'd get SO VERY IRRITATED by the interruption that I'd have to go and fix it.
What I discovered was that not only having Kitty pop up with a "Hey Dan, what are you working on at the moment?" didn't disturb my flow at all; the context switch to bash out an answer and get back to what I was doing was seamless. But also being faced with that question was sometimes helpful because actually, what the fuck am I working on and have I gotten off track?
The idea behind Kitty asking me questions about what I plan to do (at the start of the day), what I am doing (during the day), and how it went (at the end of the day) is so I can ask back, "Hey Kitty, what have I been doing?"
I flipped that around the other day by giving Kitty access to my Obsidian vault. Obsidian is a note app that keeps all those notes as Markdown files on your local file system. People use it in all sorts of ways. I use it to keep track of projects, ideas, plans, todo lists, and more.
I love having a place where I can store ideas, thoughts, and notes and know that they're safely in there and all backed up. But I'm pretty bad at finding those things again once they’re in there, and ultimately, I wanted a way to just go, "Oh hey, you know that thing I wrote once about fonts to use on my webpage? Well, at the same time, I also wrote down a tagline, but I can't remember. Can you please tell me what it is?"
On Sunday, I was like, fuck it, I'm going to feed all these notes to Kitty and have a way of keeping them all in sync.
As I've had very little energy this week, instead of asking Kitty what I have been doing, I've instead had fun throwing out the general question, "Hey Kitty, what should I do today?" - and because the system throws on an extra layer of prompting which includes the day of the week, it can then have a rummage around, checks out my project plans, quarterly plans, notes about what I generally do each day of the week, my todo lists, and the journal entries for the past two week and come up with something.
I'm pretty sure there's a massive flaw in this plan somewhere, but for low-energy weeks like this, it's kind of fun.
Oh ffs…
That insight cost me 8 cents.
# REBRANDING
I've linked to TYPEONE magazine before; you should totally get issue 7, "The Creative Coding Issue", if you have any love of typography and code: https://type-01.com/product/typeone-magazine-issue-07/
I also spotted a font that spoke to me in the latest issue, who says adverts don't work!!
ClonePE from Rosetta: https://rosettatype.com/ClonePE
That’s when I went down the rabbit hole of branding and picked a colour palette: pink, blue, yellow, and burnt orange. That’s the swatch I posted at the top of the newsletter that did better than all my other posts because, of course, it did.
Of course, I immediately updated my website with the new colours. Temporarily using CloneRounded font, as ClonePE isn't in Adobe's font library yet, which means that has to wait until the studio has sold.
Oh, and I’ve switched from “Daniel Catt Contemporary Print” to “CATT PRINT: Research & Development” at least for the next year to, ummmm, realign my brand values with what I’m currently doing.
# LINKS
Well, I already snuck the links in, but here they are again…
Knitting: https://www.knitwise.com/
TYPEONE Magazine: https://type-01.com/product/typeone-magazine-issue-07/
Rosetta font foundry: https://rosettatype.com/ClonePE
But I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Amy's new newsletter (SubStack buddy, yay!): https://amygoodchild.substack.com/ and her recent blog posts...
GENERATING THE ALPHABET: amygoodchild.com/blog/generating-the-alphabet
CODING MY HANDWRITING: amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-javascript
MEANINGFUL NONSENSE; HOW I GENERATE SENTENCES: amygoodchild.com/blog/meaningful-nonsense-sentences
The "Coding my Handwriting" one missed the last newsletter by a day, so it's good to have it here.
My first instinct on seeing that blog post was to think, AWESOME MORE HANDWRITING stuff. My second was, "Oh crap, now the good title has been taken", and then I remembered that my own post on my attempt at handwriting is still likely a couple of months away, and the internet moves fast, so I'll probably end up using the same title anyway 😁
# THE END
Was it really a short newsletter? No!
Should it have been a short newsletter? Probably.
Next week is a nightmare of exam driving, and the week after that, I theoretically have jury duty (if I get selected). Somewhere in all that, the old studio will (hopefully) sell, and I'll have to shift the last few boxes, shipping tubes, and goodness knows what else is still in there.
If I thought I didn't have much to write about this week, God* help us all with the next one, which should be with you around the 13th of June.
Love you all. Good luck with the thing you're doing.
Dan
❤️
*Eris, obviously.