📙 #038 - Cold or Wet, Curse of the Ego & Ink

On where ideas come from, again, being an arch nemesis (less glamours than one would hope), a nice bit about fountain pen ink, ditching social media, and shutting/opening the shop.

(As an experiment I’ve included an audio (directors commentary) version of this newsletter to see how it goes, also there’s a video version here: https://youtu.be/lhSaLsRWW2w)

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A gift of sorts https://anothergraphic.org/ Remember, steal, don't copy; then credit, transform, remix.

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# THINGS FALL APART

At home in the winter months, we play a game called "Cold or Wet" while removing things from the tumble-dryer, trying to determine whether the clothes are still wet or just cold. I believe there's science behind this phenomenon.

There's a similar one I'm currently playing called "shit or old".

When I was young (in my 20s), I was all over the latest tech. I was hungry for the '90s internet, and I couldn't understand some old people's reluctance to learn all this new stuff. "I'll never be like them," I proclaimed, "I'll always be deeply involved in tech."

Now, in my 50s, I'm thinking that I want to ditch social media and that much of technology is a horror show. Meanwhile, the algorithm is oh-so-busy, showing me peaceful tech and calm social media growth content from influencers pushing their slow videos to me weekly; they have me pegged.

I'm left wondering if those "old" (50+) people I scorned were noping out in the way I feel like doing now, or are these things properly worth rejecting?

Are they now bullshit, or have I just gotten old, shit or old?

I suspect the former because I am still fascinated by and dive into new technology all the time. But it's definitely become a self-awareness check I have to keep running each time I feel like dismissing something.

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Topping up the todo list writing fountain pen

# FOUNTAIN PEN INK

Here's a lovely post from James about why he uses fountain pens with pen plotters. The design he's working on is pretty epic, too!

You should read the whole thing, but I'm going to second the De Atramentis Document ink recommendation.

https://lostpixels.io/writings/fountain-pens-plotters

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# THE ENSIMPLIFICATION

The pings and notifications fall like heavy rain on a tin roof, and I'm enjoying them in a zen-like fashion.

"We could not charge your debit card; please update your billing" - reads the email.

Two things have happened here. The first is that my old cards have just expired, and they've sent me new shiny ones, so now I have to update 1Password with the new numbers and then fix the payment information for all the various services I use.

The second is that there's not always money in there, as I carefully move ever-decreasing funds around three accounts, making sure the right amount is in the right place at the right time—and definitely not the wrong time.

Soundcloud helpfully sent me a "We'll take your yearly payment in two weeks" email, so I cancelled that.

The browser testing suite in the cloud I used to make sure my projects last year worked on some wretched old version of a Google Pixel phone meanwhile yanked $120 out for another year's annual subscription, letting me know after the fact; thanks.

There are some services where I can't work out how to cancel or change billing information or even how to log in. So fuck 'em, they can keep the old card numbers.

The last time this happened (cards expiring), it was the only way to unearth some old services, and I swore blind that next time, I'd log and track everything.

The culling of services probably should have happened a long time ago. I had about five different ways of talking to chatGPT via services that wrapped around the API in various ways. The one I'm keeping is Cursor, "The AI Code Editor," where I can ask it to fix my code and still write stupid cat poems.

A sensible person, a person with better planning, would probably put a bunch of pen plots up in their shop and heavily promote it on social media.

Meanwhile, this person has decided to take a "digital sabbatical" from social media. I've all but abandoned Twitter/Instagram/threads/etc. and am focusing instead on Substack (more on that in the future) and YouTube. Oh, and I also turned my shop off, so there's that!

### shop update

I've turned the shop off not because I'm a total idiot (well, I mean, yes, that, too) but because as much as I liked using Shopify, it doesn't really do what I want.

I want a place where I can put fun front-end code so people can create pen plots, remix zines, or generate prints and then place an order with those designs, along with other algorithmic, generative, Kitty AI-powered, and random print experiments. And I can't do that with Shopify.

But I can do it with Stripe.

I last used Stripe over ten years ago, and to be honest, it was a bit of a pain. However, after dealing with the quickly evolving and shifting Web3 world, it was an utter delight to read the Stripe documentation and see a) just how much they've done to turn it into a wonderfully usable product and b) just how great it is to use well-developed mature Web2.0 processes, I mean, it’s sooooo good.

I nearly cried.

So I'll get sometvc hing very (like VERY) basic up and running fairly soon, which will at least have the prints and plots from before back up. The plan is to then iterate until we get somewhere a bit better.

Then I'll tell everyone on soci... oh, wait.

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# 28 DAYS LATER

Because I let Kitty (my AI PA) run the art studio, well, in a fashion anyway, you can get more of an idea of what that's like by checking out the "Roll-up" page on the Kitty part of the website: https://revdancatt.com/kitty/roll-ups/. This page shows you the morning questions Kitty asked, the to-do list she wrote for me, and the suggestions for what to do during the day.

The journal also appears in that roll-up but only at the end of the day, so it has its own page over here: https://revdancatt.com/kitty/journals/. I am part of the Dead Internet problem.

Anyway, because Kitty knows all, I asked her to recap the last 28 days for me in the form of emoji, which is the image you can see above. Of course she only did 27!

🌱🌿🚗🛠️✍️🚘🎥✂️👨‍💻⚖️🧠📺📝📷😴🏡🔄⏳⏹️🔗🎬📦🖥️📈🎤🎧🎥

Although I still think one of my favourite things is the weekly ideas she generates: https://revdancatt.com/kitty/ideas/

I put all that stuff online because I've been having to talk about "working with AI" in Zoom calls a lot more recently, and it's much easier to explain when I can walk through examples. Plus, it also becomes part of the documentation for the arts-based research I'm doing.

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# NEMESIS

Various plots, prints and photos from friends

Amy described me as her "Arch Nemesis" the other week. This clearly means I need to get a T-shirt printed, but I totally get it.

Now, I've given talks and guest lectures before about being an artist. The last one, "How to be an awesome artist," appears to have vanished from YouTube, which I guess means I have to make a new version for my own channel where I can keep it alive.

In that video, I talked about where ideas come from, which we'll come back to in a moment. At the end, I was asked the question, "What do you do when you work on something and then see someone working on something similar?" The correct answer is, "You just carry on."

And I gave that answer with great confidence and authority because, you know, I'm old and wise, and it's easy. (I also advised against listening to advice from people older than you.)

I've also worked really hard not to draw validation or feelings of self-worth from social media likes, hearts, and other such things.

So when Amy published her excellent post on generative handwriting, I felt a little bit of something—jealousy, I think—which was a surprise. I had to stop for a while and dissect what was going on.

And I think it was my ego having a little rant about made-up future events that hadn't even happened yet. It was going off with, "But, we've worked on generative handwriting, and we're going to write about that process, and where's our likes and validation? Where's my dopamine!"

The ego kicks in to protect us, but often in ways we don't need to be protected or are unhealthy. What's going on here is that I'm doing generative handwriting, AI, robots and drawing machines as part of my research, cool, different. Still, at the same time, I was also, "Oh, and because this is super niche, I mean, who else is doing generative handwriting art?! I can probably sell some art and maybe be part of an exhibition about it". And my ego suddenly felt threatened that all of that could suddenly vanish, just ‘cause someone else was also doing it.

It's wrong, of course.

The point is that even now, at over 50, after confidently telling other people how to deal with it, "Oh, you just carry on..." after telling myself I don't need validation, or worse, the made-up potential future validation from social media, it can still unexpectedly sink its claws in.

So perhaps I was the Arch Nemesis, but only for a small moment before I got that pesky ego back in check 🧠

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# IDEAS

I wrote about this back in Newsletter #1; most people haven't read it. It's about where ideas come from.

That writing is better, but the very short is that ideas roam in "ideaspace", trying to find a way to cross over into our reality. When the walls get thin, the idea can cross over, so you often see the same idea popping up in several places simultaneously.

"Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest."
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

The ceremonial magician Alan Moore has talked about ways in which artists perform rituals to either "summon" ideas from the ideaspace or thin those walls and make themselves receptive to ideas crossing over, in a philosophical and metaphorical way.

So I was delighted to come across a new quote I can use from Nick Cave's Red Hand Files

"...the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in. Songs, in my experience, are attracted to an open, playful and motivated mind."

This is why I use Kitty (the AI PA) wired up to a pen plotter as a tool to deconstruct myself and reconstruct ideas. All the above also, to a degree, explains why (recent/modern) generative handwriting suddenly became a thing.

And we owe it to the ideas to help them the best we can.

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# THE END

Substack tells me I've reached a point in a newsletter where email clients will truncate it if I write any more, so I'll wrap this up quickly!

The next issue should be with you around the 11th of July. If the whole old studio selling hasn't happened by then, I will properly start to cry. Wish me luck!

Also, for legal (apparently) reasons, I have to stick a postal address in the footer of each newsletter, so if you do need to get hold of me and I'm not responding to social media 👍👍, there's a 97% chance that anything posted there will get to me. But remember 10 Bullets, #6: "SENT DOES NOT MEAN RECEIVED"

Love you all,
Dan
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