I started a photo365 challenge this year, post one photo a day. On incredibly busy, sometimes stressful days, I’d be ‘Oh shit, I’ve still gotta take a photo and post for photo365’ and I’d manage it. Then mid-year I had my first day off work, to relax, unwind, the whole day to myself and nothing planned.
I had all the time in the world, the hours stretched in front of me.
That was the day I missed taking a photo. It only takes a single minute, and I had so many of them. Once I’d failed on that day, I failed on the rest.
# NEWSLETTER 100
Over in Gorilla Sun’s latest newsletter: Creative coding vs. AI, Blog Refresh, and Newsletter Changes, he very kindly wrote…
“a newsletter that I thoroughly enjoy is Daniel Catt's excellent Substack. It's one of the few emails that I actually read from start to finish without skimming whenever it lands in my inbox. I'm genuinely curious about Daniel's experiments, and equally entertained by his writing style. That's kind of the effect I want my writing to have.”
…in a deeper piece about writing, feelings, and (I think) validation, being true to ourselves and also a little bit of accountability.
In that post there’s an intention, a plan, also on Ahmad’s website there’s this...
…now I have plans for my website, but those plans sit in my head and if I’m feeling particularly organised; Obsidian, that way no-one will know if I’m succeeding or failing, so the idea of putting the “coming soon” things onto a website, seem… good!
I failed at photo365 on the day when it should have been easiest, and succeed on some of the hardest days of the year.
Writing the newsletter, every other Thursday, is hard. In the end section of each one I put the date the next one will be published. It’s half a promise to the reader, but mainly a challenge to myself; I’ve said it out loud, now I’ve got to do it.
I didn’t tell anyone about the photo365 project, not really, I was the only person I knew doing it, and only accountable to myself. Ultimately that’s why it fell apart.
# BUILD A NETWORK OF FRIENDS
Later in Ahmad’s post, this gem “The 100th issue of his newsletter is also right around the bend, and I'm excited to see what he's going to cook up for it.” - well I’m sorry to disappoint, but here we are 😁
Most people don’t write newsletters, probably because they’re sensible, a crazy few of us do. I’m old enough to remember when blogs were a thing, and people would link to each other’s blog posts all the time, and WebRings, and links-backs; and that was good.
I write this newsletter because a few of my friends also write newsletters, a few of my peers write newsletters, a few people I admire write newsletters.
We don’t link to each other’s posts all the time, but I still feel like we’re part of a network. It’s not spoken, but there’s a form of accountability there.
They found the time to write, I’ll find the time to write.
They’re going through a tough time, and they still wrote, so shall I.
I still write because my friends still write.
Anna Lucia is cycling, through, America, and can still write a newsletter. Meanwhile I’ve just eaten too many chips, and really have no excuse not to write one.
# THE DOWNFALL OF GRAMMARLY
I used to use Grammarly to check the grammar in these newsletters, right up to number #43.
I wanted them to be as good as possible, as well written as possible; I’m not convinced I even got close but grammarly helped me get my punctuation in the right place, stopped me from having run on sentences - even taught me when to used em-dashes (but not how to access them on the keyboard) - when to break a sentence with a semicolon; which I never got the hang of; and still use incorrectly to this very day, oh, and it also taught me not to use ‘so’ all the time, in short, it applied the polish, which was sorely missing from my own writing (it would shout at me for the redundancy in ‘my own writing’).
But then it went all AI, telling me to write a few words and it’d help write the rest of it.
I’d rather my writing be rushed (which it tends to be when I’m still writing past the 7:30pm deadline), often sweary, sometimes nonsensical, full of typos; than polished to competently average.
These newsletters will carry on having that low-fi, rough around the edges, no-ai vibes until LLMs have consumed enough of them that even writing like trash won’t be enough.
I would much rather read people’s actual thoughts and words, than the results of some prompts no-matter how well meaning; I can write my own LLMs prompt on a subject to find out more about it, but I can’t read your thoughts on a subject unless you write them.
🌈 🌈 🌈 🌈 🌈
🍿 🍿 🍿 🍿 🍿
# I STILL MAKE VIDEOS BECAUSE MY FRIENDS STILL MAKE VIDEOS
Tonino sent me an email (thank you!) letting me know he has a YouTube channel about pen plotters starting with a series of building a ExtruH plotter. I’ve been working my way through them, even though I don’t speak French, YouTube’s auto-translation is… something, but good enough for me to follow along.
I’ve even occasionally had some of the live plotting videos playing in the background while working.
You should subscribe!
# ANNOYINGLY NOTHING
I got an interesting email from the lovely people at Vetro Editions, that said some bits and bobs, then also; hey do you want to know more about █████.
I said yes.
And I haven’t heard anything back yet.
So, there’s that.
There’s a client who I’m supposed to do a █████ for, and when we first signed off on the █████ no-one else was doing the █████, and I’m excited to show off the █████ but I can’t yet because the client still needs to ████ the ██████. And now a few other people have started posted photos of doing ███████ with █████ and while I’ve already ████ █████ the █████ I can’t show any because the █████ █████ █████ and also ███ █████ ███████ ███ ███████ █████!
So, there’s that too.
█ █ █ █ █
# THE END
Looking at the calendar I can see that when I’d normally be saying; “hey the next Newsletter will be with you on Thursday the 16th of November”, I can also see I’m at the Who writes history? conference in the Netherlands.
I think I’m in Amsterdam on Wednesday, Utrecht on Thursday and The Hague on Friday. I’m not sure yet where the base-of-operations will be each night. Either way I will attempt to get the newsletter written on Wednesday from a small café that someone will hopefully recommend to me.
LOVE YOU ALL
Dan
🧡
Congrats on reaching newsletter #100! I love seeing ‘Daniel Catt’s Newsletter’ drop in my inbox - really appreciate that you keep on writing them!
What a lovely and delightfully Dan newsletter. 🧡 Happy travels next week; eat something delicious!