The Graveyard Of The Future

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. The sun came out, so I went to get lost by the sea. Here’s what I brought back.

In this letter:

THE WORLD SERVICE

THE GRAVEYARD OF THE FUTURE

My office is a graveyard of old devices. This is a Nokia N810, which I think Nokia actually sent me. For those who weren’t around, Nokia used to make shedloads of weird products, like the wand-shaped voice-activated phone designed to fit in ladies’ evening purses. The N810 is a beautifully designed piece of hardware - sliding keyboard, clever kickstand, solid, good weight - and it barely worked at all. It had memory issues, it ran on some weird flavour of Linux probably previously used to run water wheels in the 1600s and it really wanted to be a GPS. Which, back in 2007, was fair enough, and someone at Nokia could see a future where a tethered (it had no SIM card slot) single device could do GPS and email and music and web browsing and (sort of) email.

The software, and probably the chipset, just didn’t exist yet. Android OS was a year away.

Maybe that’s why I keep so many of these old things. Every one of these old objects is the distillation of a group’s beliefs about what the future will look like. They’re not junk. They are memorials for an imagined better tomorrow.

OPERATIONS

TOOLS OF THE TRADE 2025

Once a year, I review the work tools I’m using to see what I can do better.

This is the current daily kit, much of which is usually stuffed into a lovely leather shoulder bag my daughter bought me a few years back:

The Wanderings is the daily-driver general work notebook, for thinking and for running OO and LTD. The Newestor is for project-specific notebooks - it contains three Field Notes notebooks. The note card holder, which I torture myself with by calling it the Executive Hipster PDA, is for getting past the fact that I forget things and that notes typed into the phone disappear into thephone.

The daily notebook is a work notebook, journal, zibaldone and commonplace book, and gets a lot of stuff printed off and pasted into it to save, with indexes written on the front covers.

A big part of this is wanting to touch the phone a lot less, and the thing I discovered during the lockdowns - I’m much happier surfacing old thoughts by going into the box of notebooks than I am having to fart around with the phone or drag myself into the office to hunt down a file or email.

(One day I will trade up to a Roterfaden or one of those handmade notebook covers on Etsy that you can fit six notebooks in, and will never be seen again)

What does your kit look like? I am genuinely interested in the notebooks and tools of writers, artists, musicians and designers. I’d really like to see them.

I’ll probably load a version of this into LTD with links in a week or so.

Heavy design nerd bonus round:

Rail ticket holder from The Modernist, made using Otl Aicher pictograms. Bought during lockdown. Getting used this year.

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ORBITAL

BECAUSE WE’RE GOING ANALOGUE NOW

Because one angle on AI is that it’s a listening service that shoves your every digitally recorded thought into spreadsheets that are then compiled and sold back to you and everyone else as a product.

And everything from social media to the open web is being scraped to fill those spreadsheets, right? We have to choose what to put out there now. The distrust goes deep. I saw Matt Kindt go back to paper and fountain pens for his development drafts the other day (1). The faff of fountain pens cannot be entertained in this office, but I get the impetus. Julian Simpson wrote a lot about this on his Substack but he put it behind a paywall afterwards, the bastard (2): being Julian, it got kind of complicated and baroque and involved notecards from a shuttered stationery legend in a hamlet in Provence.

I mean, there are levels to this. I’m not saying you should go as deep as making your own flint arrowheads with Will Lord (3), but…

(Waving at Ganzeer, who has apparently been without any kind of signal for weeks (4))

I’m no purist. I used an AI system the other day to generate a snippet of WordPress code I needed to fix LTD. But, after half a lifetime of using digital tools to smooth, extend and speed up work, and being pretty constantly disappointed and/or having those tools randomly taken away from me… well, I’m not as future forward as I used to be. My whole life has been in the space between being fascinated by history and the future anyway - maybe even haunted by the past and the future at once. And that actually bothers me. I would like to be looking forward, and it’s getting harder.

I don’t feel like I’m in retreat, and I do worry I’m finally becoming small-c conservative, but… it’s all bullshit out there right now,isn’t it? Nothing works properly and everything is stupid. These are the mediocre years.

All that said: there are always ways forward, there are always new futures, and nothing’s stopping us from carrying old tools into new days.

I am suddenly reminded that there was once a magazine called MANAGED RETREAT.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

I was very amused when a news outlet sent Molly Crabapple to court to sketch Luigi Mangione. She adds, at the link:

Which may be the most depressing sentence I’ll read all week.

Also, a reminder that Lordess Foudre’s work as seen here recently is available as prints from the lordess.io store.

OTHER

PLAYLISTING

So it turns out two groups have built a function on to the side of Bandcamp’s playlist system. Buy Music Club and BNDCMPR. The function solves the one thing Bandcamp’s playlist system apparently cannot do - make public playlists. And every piece of music on any playlist made with these has a Buy button attached.

I’m not sure I have a preference between the two yet? I discovered their existence via the newsletter Moonbuilding, "Your essential DIY electronic music beano."

(I’m also keeping an eye on tone.audio)

Do you know what this means? Yes you do. I see the fear in your earballs.

I can make public playlists with the music I’ve bought from Bandcamp.

Just a little test. Curious to see if it will work. If you see no embed there, here’s the direct link.

ALSO

TANNHAUSER

Abraxas Publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of their facsimile edition of Aleister Crowley’s TANNHAUSER, in a gorgeous A4 form. Abraxas are doing all kinds of weird and occult stuff, and their website is really worth a look if you’re into that stuff. Lovely looking objects.

Here’s the product link, details in Finnish and English.

This letter is sponsored by a service I’ve used in the past and may well use again in the future:

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And that’s me for this week. Stay well, stay sane, stay safe, hold on tight.

W