📙 #73 - Releasing 114 Ghosts into the wild, handwriting, AI studio management, Kitty.

Look, I'm just doing what I'm told.

I never thought I’d end pacing back and forth, talking instructions into a dictaphone like a twat, but here we are.

# RISO GHOSTS

The other week I had to show a couple of people who may end up running workshops how to use the Riso printer. One thing about Riso printers, they’re a bit temperamental in that they’ve been designed to be used, like, daily. And both Clare and I have been busy, so its been sat there for a few weeks sulking. To stop the sulking you have to go and run some prints through it to warm it up.

Two greyscale A3 originals, ready for the Riso Machine

I quickly threw together a ghost sketch in Procreate, separated it out into two greyscale layers, one for each colour, and then printed out an A3 sheet for each.

The Riso is a bit like a cross between screen printing and a photocopier. A photocopier ‘cause you put the thing you want to copy into the top and it, well, copies it. A screen print, because the thing it copies goes onto a screen.

Here’s two of the ink drums from the machine, if you squint a bit you can see where its “burnt” the ghost design onto the screen, that’s where the ink will get pushed through onto the card/paper.

Black and Red ink drums, each drum holds one colour, is a pain to change colour and hard to get hold of.

The other thing about Riso is it likes to make hundreds of copies, its main use is for offices printing documents — until artists got their hands on them. Put another way, printing one-off single sheets is not in its nature, you can, but again it sulks. I even felt a little stingy only running 10 copies of each colour way through.

I left one uncut sheet at the Riso studio (for their records), and one uncut at mine (for my records).

It was only after cutting up eight sheets of eight ghosts in three colour-ways did I end up going “Now what the fuck am I supposed to do with 192 ghost postcards?”

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# HANDWRITING

Kitty, my AI PA Studio Manager, has access to my handwriting; a whole thing I still really need to make a video and write a long-ass blog post about. There’s a lot of reasons to give my handwriting to an AI, and most of those aren’t nefarious!

The down side is that my handwriting is pretty fricking awful. So much so that Kitty also has her own handwriting for when I need things to be legible. Here’s an example of the todo lists she writes for me each morning.

If it’s not blindingly obvious, Kitty’s handwriting is on the left, my scrawl is on the right. She normally does the left style, I asked for one in my handwriting as an example.

Here’s the writing shown at x4 speed.

(And just for clarity, I didn’t write any of that, that’s Kitty generating the todo list, and then converting the text into my handwriting using code and a ridiculously large dataset of my cursive script)

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# AI

There’s an argument that very sensibly goes “I don’t want AI doing all the fun creative stuff, like art and music and writing, I want AI to do all the boring stuff like housework and laundry” - and I’m very much in that camp.

I’m not against AI, I just want it to do admin tasks around the art studio and make todo lists for me.

Two things AI is very bad at;

1. Art

2. Facts

Three things AI is pretty good at;

1. Asking questions

2. Remembering things (with a little help)

3. Transcription

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# KITTY

I’ve talked about Kitty (my AI PA) a little in the past, but a quick recap.

• In the morning Kitty asks me questions for the upcoming day, based on what the system knows about the previous 14 days. Then she writes a todo list.

• At the end of the day Kitty asks me a bunch of questions about how it all went, and just how much it did or didn’t go to plan.

• Throughout the day Kitty asks me questions about how it’s going based on the morning questions, which todo items I’ve ticked off and some random noise to keep things interesting.

I’ve also wired Kitty up so I can just talk-out-loud and it’ll get transcribed and squirrelled away in a “memories” database (and Obsidian).

Sometimes, about 10% of the time, instead of asking a question Kitty will make a suggestion or an observation. 12.5% of that time, she’ll be using her sarcastic personality profile while making an observation, which she sends through the Vestaboard and it always makes me laugh.

On Monday, using a more useful personality she suggested I send the Riso Ghost postcards off to people.

This isn’t out of the blue, I’d previously talked about sending postcards to people, and separately that I had one-hundred-and-ninety-fucking-two ghost postcards, she (the Large Language next work prediction Model) just put two and two together.

So I asked her to write 50 short halloween messages for me, a quick once over to check nothing had gone off the rails, then gave them to the grown up plotter to actually draw (Kitty only has access to an A4 drawing machine).

Thankfully for everyone involved she used her own handwriting.

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# DICTAPHONE

Two problems I have.

One

A lot of the thoughts, ideas, rambling half-figured out plans, come to me when I’m either walking to the studio in the morning, or walking back home again, 23 minutes each way.

Inspiration will strike, or a fleeting thought that’ll evaporate faster than I can grab the notebook from my pocket and write it down; especially true if three related ideas come along at once, I’ll get the first two down and the last one will escape into the aether.

Two

I HATE THE VOICE NOTES APP ON THE iPHONE

Or rather how the phone handles any voice recording. I have Air Pods in, or headphones on, and I can’t go “Hey Siri…” and launch into a voice recording for stupid “security” reasons, pffffff.

No, I gotta fish the phone out of my pocket, and as soon as I start to record, it stops whatever music, video or podcast I’m listening too. Which I don’t really want, I can pause the music if I want, but really I want to listen to music while walking and talking.

Worse, when I finish and unpause it’ll play whatever the hell it feels like, “What’s that, you were listening to a podcast, not any more, here’s some music I was playing yesterday!” - “You wanted to hear more of that YouTube video, no! Even though you only paused for 6 seconds I have a better idea”.

I genuinely don’t know how hard it could be for the iPhone to carry on playing what it was just playing!! Or, perhaps let me keep listening to something from my phone even though I dared to open my laptop. But judging from what Apple have managed, it’s really fucking hard.

Which is why I now have this tiny thing, a Sony ICD-TX660 dictaphone.

Now I can listen to music and talk my brains out into the magic voice recording shard, things like “Hey Kitty, I just thought that I wanna talk about the ghost postcards in the newsletter, and I need to remember to water the sweet pea seeds at the weekend, and Monzo keeps telling me I’m paying for a Medium membership and I haven’t read anything on Medium for about a year, I should probably cancel that…” etc. etc.

This morning I tested plugging it in; Hazel App grabbed the .mp3 files and copied them over to an Obsidian folder and deleted the originals off the shard, MacWhisper spotted them and transcribed them into simple .txt files, “Clive” (a different AI connected to the Cursor IDE) detected the .txt files, consumed them and either updated my Obsidian files or passed things over to Kitty to handle, who did and then deleted the rest of the files to tidy everything up.

Despite all the slightly awkward plumbing and chaining of various apps together (I know, I know, I could write some code to do it, but I’m kinda lazy) to MacGyver it to work, it does feel a little bit like living in the future.

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# THE END

After far too long this has now lost all meaning, but — I have finally recorded (for the second time) the first video in the whole Introduction to Drawing Machines series, and asides from work, this is now the only thing on my plate. Which means I’m starting the next one tomorrow, and then the one after that, and so on until they’re all done.

Actually properly happening.

I’m updating various bits and pieces around the internet connected to the video, and the soon-to-be-upcoming ones, but as it was all very last minute, last night, I want to let that bed in a little more, so I will be talking about it in the next newsletter, which is… Thursday 13th of November.

Happy Halloween!
Love you all
Dan
🧡