📙 #054 - What if my hands stop working?

Slightly different one this week, a more personal story.

Back around November time I gave a small talk at Papercamp, called “Robot handwriting & AI assisted journaling”, this is the blurb to set the scene…

Daniel really loves the idea of journaling, but he’s too busy to do it, and besides his handwriting is steadily getting worse. So he’s doing what any sensible person would do and handed over all responsibility for journal writing to an AI (Kitty), who he’s probably unwisely also given his encoded handwriting and access to a drawing machine to. A short talk & demo on how this hasn’t turned out to be a terrible idea, algorithmic handwriting, and the joy of fountain pens & index cards.

…I thought it was recorded and would end up on YouTube at some point, but that hasn’t happened yet, and as I don’t have the time to re-record the talk I’m popping a shortened version here. Actually just the end part.

The first two parts were setting up how I’m dealing with Kitty, my studio AI PA, and how I’ve encoded my handwriting so Kitty can use it to write.

This is the story of one of the reasons why.

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# Smugglers

Me, some badass sandals and great-father

My great-grandfather was a smuggler.

I mean, he wasn’t, he was a fisherman, but the logbooks he kept told a different story. A meticulously handwritten ledger of dates and goods brought over from France. I think at one point one of his journals ended up in an Isle of Wight museum.

Written records for the win.

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# The Merchant Navy

Old photo, me on the left, grandfather on the right.

My grandfather was a sailor in the Merchant Navy, years spent sailing around the world, making friends in every port, etc. etc. When he finished he moved back to the Isle of Wight to hire deckchairs out to holiday makers, his friends spread around the globe.

I would watch as he sat at his desk and write letters, his contact to far distant lands. We’d walk down to the postbox and send them on their way.

Then, letters would come back, his face would light up and the cycle continued.

I think that’s where my love of writing letters came from, watching the ebb and flow of correspondence. A week doesn’t pass where I’m not putting something in the post to a friend.

To get a letter, send a letter.

At some point he started to develop a tremor in his wrist, his handwriting suffered and the letters slowed down.

A couple of years later he couldn’t write at all. The phone wasn’t the same, this is what he’d done for years, walking to the postbox, picking letters up from the mat.

He died within the year.

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# The Cancer

My father also sailed (dear reader, I get sea-sick, the nautical adventures of our family line ends at me), and then took over the deckchair hiring business.

He spent his time sitting outside the beach-hut, enjoying the sun, not a care in the world for sunscreen.

Honestly, wear sunscreen.

He was a few years older than I am now before cancer took him. Fuck cancer.

But a couple of years before that, his hand started to develop a mild tremor.

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# The Handwriting

My handwriting as drawn by Kitty

I decided that as terrible as my handwriting is, now would be a really good time to take a “snapshot” of it. And of course all the effort of writing the code to allow an AI to write with it using a drawing machine.

The pen plotter an augmentation of my body, the AI, I dunno, an augmentation of my mind?

Kitty, the AI PA, has been asking me morning questions, end of day questions, and, well, all through the day questions for over a year now. Kitty’s been (somewhat badly) writing my journal entries, in fountain pen, on paper, for almost a year, and helping me write notes, postcards and letters for nearly as long.

All of these newsletters have been fed into the system along with the transcripts of my YouTube videos to act as a “style guide”.

Because, what if my hands stop working?

What then of my art? What then of my letter writing? What then of my friends around the world?

Do I stop being an artist, a writer, a friend, because my hands stop doing what my brain tells them?

Do I stop being an artist, a writer, a friend, because I’m using AI to help me with all those thing?

Of course not, we find a way, a solution.

Will it work? I don’t know? Will I be able to work with an AI? When I ask it to write to so-and-so about such-and-such, is it really a letter from me to them? When I talk my way through a design and we collaborate on code, am I really the artist?

More importantly, can one-day this help a writer, a poet, and artist, a lover of letters, keep writing in their own hand, when the pen has got too heavy?

There’s only one way to find out.

Kitty’s handwriting, neater! Better for writing todo lists.

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# ArtFrame and AAAAAGGGGHH

A tiny bit of pen plotter news, the new Bantam Tools ArtFrame 2436 arrived the other day. I’m in the process of making a video about it. But I did what any normal person would do when getting a new drawing machine that has significant downwards pressure; stick a rubber stamper onto it and give it an ink pad.

I’m making a video about my first impressions and opinions about the plotter at the moment. But I do keep getting distracted by using it 😁

The software that comes with it is pretty nice, which does a good job of converting SVGs to GCODE (for normal “flat” drawings). But if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and write the GCODE yourself (or write the code that writes the GCODE), then you can control height, speed etc, which means this machine should be good for oil pastels and the like, we’ll see.

For those curious the very hastily written code that generated the above “print” lives here: https://github.com/revdancatt/stompy-stamper/blob/main/aaaaaggggh/index.js

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# THE END

That’s it for today. Back to normal service in the next newsletter (20th Feb for those that like to mark it in their calendar). Where, I suspect we’ll have more ArtFrame news, a The Sea Howls From The West (zine) update, and some more info about my new job!

Exciting.

Love you all,
Dan
❤️