Reading Update: For The Record

When I was a kid, we had a Fisher Price record player. It was tan and beige and played 45’s, the record format of choice for singles back in the day. In my time, it was the choice medium for storybooks. The idea was that you read along while the record played. There would even be cue sounds to remind you when to turn the page. This usually wasn’t a problem except for the one we had for Star Wars. When it was time to turn the page, R2-D2 would chirp his iconic beeps and boops. Trouble is, they didn’t keep the R2 effects to just the page turns, which got very confusing. We had quite a few of these books, but I don’t remember all of them. The ones that stand out in my mind the most after all these years are Star Wars (both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), The Hobbit, and The Black Hole, which was probably my favorite out of all of them. It’s the one I remember reading the most.

After finishing my audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I decided to do something a little different for my next read, which was We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Apple Books has a collection of literary classics available at no cost, including audiobook versions for some of them. Two noteworthy examples of this are The Time Machine read by Kelsey Grammer and A Christmas Carol read by LeVar Burton. As it happens, Zamyatin’s We offers both a text and an audiobook version. So, using my iPhone for the audiobook (since I’ve got it paired with a nice Bluetooth speaker) and my iPad for the text version, I “read along” to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

The purpose of the experiment was twofold apart from simple curiosity. The cognition behind reading along is rather fascinating to me. When we read books in school, I’m sure we all remember having one person read aloud while the rest of us read along until it was our turn to take over narration duties. Incidentally, history class was when I learned about a rather interesting job from the olden times of the Industrial Revolution. Cigar factories still employed human workers while everyone else was looking to mechanical automation. As such, even a large room full of people rolling cigars doesn’t produce nearly the same level of noise as a typical factory of the time. In order to break up the monotony and do something about the deafening silence, the workers would take turns reading aloud from a book while everyone worked. I just find the science behind reading aloud (and especially reading along) to be an intriguing exploration of our own cognition, how we process this information and retain it. After all, so far as we know, humans are the only animals that have writing at all, so the fact that there are dedicated regions of the brain for these funny symbols we assign either abstract or concrete meanings to is, no pun intended, mind blowing. Amazon offers a feature called “Read & Listen” or “immersion reading” available for Kindle and Audible that not only allows you to play both the audiobook and let you read at the same time, but even has an active cursor to highlight the words as you go along. However, it’s not available for all titles and the highlighting cursor doesn’t always cooperate. Apple Books has nothing like this, but I think that’s okay; the only problem to it was I had to be mindful of stopping the audiobook before closing out of the book on my iPad to help keep my place if I didn’t stop at the end of a chapter. It also inflated the running timer since, as far as the app was concerned, I was reading two books at once. Needless to say, I absolutely smashed my daily reading goal while breezing through We.

My other reason for reading along was to see if, by some objective measure, my reading speed had genuinely improved from when I was in school. As I said in an earlier entry, I never got the hang of speed reading, and the context of reading to study for class (and therefore a grade) didn’t exactly nurture the skill as far as I was concerned. It kind of broke me and that led to me being one of those book-a-year-at-best people, even though I still had a tenacious glimmer of that childhood giddiness about books that kept me coming back to the bookstores every now and again. Sure enough, and to my relief, there were more than a few instances when I got a little bit impatient with the audiobook. It was to the point I considered abandoning the read-along in favor of a kind of flip-flopping: audiobook in the car, text version at home, or some similar arrangement. I stuck with the original plan and simply learned to let the narrator do what narrators do best, and that’s sell you on the drama and believe in these characters. So, I consider the experiment a roaring success. I have found a small and practical spectrum of speeds between my default settings of Audiobook and Violent, Panicked Skimming.

As for We, it was all right. It was written in 1924 and really set the stage for the Dystopian Future genre, with all the typical tropes on tour. Everyone is identified by numbers, all are dressed in the same gray uniforms (leaving our protagonist, D-503, to take note of people’s facial features as abstract shapes to help him remember them), information is strictly controlled by an enigmatic governing body, and all surfaces are glass, the sole exception being for curtains that can be drawn when permission for “Makin’ Whoopee” is granted. The book is presented as a journal, though each entry is labeled as a “record” rather than a specific date, which is more typical of the Epistolary genre. At times, it reminded me a lot of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, in which the narrator blurs the line between reality and the imagination, leaving us to wonder what’s literal and what’s a complex metaphor about processing new information as their respective arcs develop. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, by contrast, is much more direct, even pithy in places, and cranks up the totalitarianism of We to 11, to the point that the very pronoun of “I” is completely unknown to the populace (instead using the collective “We”). Of course, Anthem is notably shorter than We; it almost reads more like an outline for a much longer work. I may have polished off Anthem in a single, casual weekend.

After We’s experiment concluded to victorious fanfare, the next in my queue was Memoirs Found In a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. The last book by Lem I’d read was Eden, and there’s a common thread between the two of them I find rather funny. For starters, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub is set in the distant future, in which a spacefaring, solar system conquering humanity has suffered a terrible setback in their study of history thanks to a tenacious blight that has destroyed all paper. Lem wrote the book in 1961. At this time, Xerox was experimenting with the technology that would come to be known about 30-plus years later as E-Ink, and would ultimately be popularized by Amazon’s Kindle tablets a decade later. As I write this, word from many publishers is that mass market paperbacks are being phased out as digital sales of books go up (hardcovers, meanwhile, seem to be doing as well as ever). Obviously, prescience is at a premium even among the most studious of sci-fi writers, so I’m not knocking Lem for thinking that humanity would still be relying on paper that far into the future. In Eden, written in 1958 and set at an equally distant future date, the ship that crashes on the titular planet has a very well-stocked library, so well-stocked that the books get repurposed into a makeshift staircase due to the ship settling at an odd angle. If you know anything about space travel, weight carries a hefty cost, so a well-stocked library might come across as a little bit silly given how utilitarian the rest of the ship is. Finally, there’s the irony of me reading both of these books on a digital tablet more 50 years since Lem committed these works to paper from his trusty typewriter.

Lem died of heart failure in 2006, and I can’t find anything as to his opinion on the invention of E-Ink or the budding market of ebooks. Incidentally, Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 and had a very complex opinion of ebooks. In the posthumously published Salmon of Doubt, he had this to say:

“We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.”

Although Adams never made any mention of Lem as an influence on his work, the two have very similar sensibilities when it comes to the tone of their work. Lem is generally more serious than Adams, but one persistent theme of Lem’s work is the inability of the human mind to fully comprehend both the universe at large and the otherworldly denizens that may inhabit it along with us, something Adams also delved into in his work. Eden focused on our shipwrecked crew and their attempts to make contact with the planet’s odd inhabitants who largely ignore their new neighbors. As it turns out, they’ve got problems of their own. As for Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, Lem goes pure Kafkaesque comedy. Although set in the future (and flashing back to a less distant future via the titular memoirs), the sci-fi elements are at most a framing device and at least a few throwaway lines that blend into the rest of the existential metaphors that make up most of the dialogue. Set in a multilevel bunker in the Colorado mountains (referred to only as The Building and described by future scholars as a kind of back-up Pentagon), the government finds itself mired in paperwork as it tries to sort out its own shady operations of surveillance, code-breaking, and maintaining an illusion of order. Our narrator is an operative charged with a mission of such vital importance and such terrible secrecy that nobody can actually tell him what he’s supposed to be doing. The bulk of the prose has him going from level to level and room to room encountering other operatives who may or may not know more than they are letting on. Discussions with these oddballs range from the nature of decoding information to making triples and quadruples of un/known double agents to just how routine firefights and shootouts are in an effort to maintain the status quo of the facility. I kept picturing The Building as a kind of Cold War Retrofuturism blending of the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and the Wildfire facility from The Andromeda Strain, with deep red carpets, harsh overhead lights, white curving walls, and furniture placed in the middle of each room with lots of empty space around it.

In the end, I found the book overall rather average. It feels slapdash, like Lem didn’t quite know what to do with the memoirs in question and so tacked on this lengthy introduction about the paper plague. Frankly, I think one could just treat the introduction as a standalone short story and forgo the rest of the book and really lose nothing of value. That’s not to say the memoirs are bad, but once you get a feel for the joke of bureaucracy gone awry, it wears out its welcome and the only thing that kept me going was for some potential payoff that tied the introduction to the narrative proper. At the risk of spoilers, no such thing occurs. The memoirs end very abruptly and we’re left wondering if that’s all there is to it and just what it was that we read.

It’s hard to give the book a recommendation beyond my prescribed reading of the introduction and giving the rest a pass. If you’ve never read Lem and have any desire to, the best place to start is Solaris. The next book of his in my queue is A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of book reviews for books that don’t actually exist. It should be fun and I plan on doing a full write-up of its offerings (I've got plenty to say about the premise alone), though that won’t be for some time. Meanwhile, having just finished Memoirs earlier this morning, I am now halfway through C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. My impression thus far is one of not being terribly impressed. It’s another work of Epistolary literature, the letters being from a demon to his nephew as the latter tries to tempt a human patient away from the light. It feels more like the sort of thing Mark Twain would have written and spice up with his signature wit. Lewis, I think, takes himself a little too seriously and isn’t having that much fun with the subject matter. Once I’ve finished with it, I’m not entirely sure what’s next in my queue. Maybe I’ll randomize it, or at least take a break from fiction with some nonfiction I’ve got piled up, like a book about how Xerox effectively invented the personal computer as we know it, only to sit on it until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates saw the potential and pilfered what they could from their sanctioned tour.

Quite the history for a company known mostly for photocopiers. 

The Correct Resolution of Paper

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, typically; I prefer CGPGrey’s idea of having themes. However, in 2025, almost as an afterthought, I vowed to go paperless for the year. This was partly spurred by having gotten some Mobiscribe e-ink tablets, one to use at work instead of notepads or composition books and one at home for reading (and a color one because it was a good deal and I was curious about the tech). I was planning on using them for Inktober, but decided against it as getting notes and drawings off of the devices is more than a little tedious for something I’m supposed to do daily 31 times in a row. In the end, with only about a half-dozen Post-It notes at work as the exception, I stuck to the resolution well beyond the 365 days. 

Reflecting on this, I had another thought of something I could do as a resolution for the year 2026. It occurred to me while playing a typing game called Glyphica. In the game, you occupy a central turret and fire at invaders coming at you from all sides. You select your target by typing the word that appears above them. The game is a lot of fun; reminds me of the quality time I spent with Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, an  edutainment title that doubled my typing speed in the course of a few weeks. Though the games are very different in terms of presentation, the biggest difference is one of quality of life. In the decades between the two titles, we’ve gone from spellcheck being a luxury to the software going the extra step of not only correcting your errors without you asking, but even predicting what it is you’re trying to say in the first place. If I start typing a word like constitution, I only need to get about as far as “const” before the autocomplete shows me the rest of the word, at which point I need only press the tab key to finish what I started and move on to the next word. A hundred keystrokes can drop down to as low as sixty-five in this way. So, what, you may ask, is the problem? 

Between Glphyica and an online typing speed test called Monkeytype, it's occurred to me that I've amassed a sizable number of bad typing habits because autocorrect swoops in and fixes them, sometimes before I even notice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s convenient when it’s not trying to forcefully make me say an incorrect word, but I feel like this is offloading vital aspects of a skill I happen to be very proud of. Between that and autocomplete, the software is doing too much heavy lifting for my liking. 

My worst habit is something I like to call chording. It happens with especially short words such as "the", "to", and... well, "and." The problem is I hit all the keys at once and I end up with "teh", "ot", and "adn." I can't help but wonder if stenographers have this problem outside of the courtroom. Although chording has technically been with me since I first learned to type, autocorrect and autocomplete have made it substantially worse. Rather than typewriter keys jamming or the timing of my keystrokes being measured in imperceptible milliseconds, the software is able to work out that I'm writing "the" and not "teh" as "teh" isn't a word as far as I know, at least not one in English. 

If you've ever seen that brain teaser where the words in a paragraph all have their respective letters out of order (yet it's still readable because your brain unscrambles it from context clues), that's more or less what my typing feels like to me at this point. It's like I know words as clusters of letters rather than sequences of them. My muscle memory has contracted to the point where it's folded in on itself. My speed has been relatively consistent, but my accuracy has taken a massive hit, and that's no good to anybody ecepxt vrey wreid poelpe who lkie tshoe arfoneemtoiend barin tseaers. 

This has led me to the decision to disable autocorrect and autocomplete on my Mac. Spellcheck gets to stay, inadvertent brain teaser construction be damned. A red line appearing under a word I just typed doesn't bother me. That's instant feedback on a mistake I made and it's on me to fix it. It's gently saving me time, not doing the work for me. It's what The Oatmeal would call an administrative task and not a creative one. When I give what I've written a once-over, it's highlighted the areas that need my attention first. It's working ex post facto rather than trying to get ahead of me like far too many "smart features." Those assume what you're going to do next. Sometimes they're right, but other times I want to write construction or constriction or consternation or even constituent rather than constitution. 

As for my iPhone, predictive text (which is essentially autocomplete) remains enabled on my keyboard of choice, Microslop's SwiftKey, the only Microslop product I use willingly and with any consistency. The reason for keeping this feature enabled is simple. It's a small and cramped keyboard and I need all the help I can get. It's like Lewis Carroll's Nyctograph, a specific tool for a specific job. In his case, it was writing in the dark and without getting out of bed. In my case, it's when I need to write something and either can't get to one of my full-sized mechanical keyboards when I want to or, like Mr. Carroll, I can't be bothered to get out of bed or off the couch at the moment. 

The jury had been out on the iPad since it's a notable difference in screen real estate, but I don't always have one of my Bluetooth keyboards along with me and the on-screen keyboard still has all the same problems as the iPhone. 

As for the paper resolution, that has stuck around as far as taking notes at work goes, though Post-It notes will no longer give me pangs of guilt on the rare occasions I have to use them. For everything else, I do want to start doing more traditional art instead of my usual vector works. I'm even going to try using a fountain pen after either losing or breaking the first one I tried. I don't remember which fate befell it, which is why I'm happy to have discovered that disposable fountain pens exist. In fact, some artists recommend them over their more expensive brethren. 

Welcome to 2026, everybody. 

Countdown To Inktober 2018

I've officially become that guy, that guy who uses spreadsheets for almost everything imaginable. I tried setting this up as a checklist in Evernote, but it wasn't particularly convenient. 

It's currently the 20th of September, which makes it exactly ten days until the start of this years Inktober. This will be my third outing, I'm very excited for it, and maybe I'll get some of you to join in if you haven't already by talking about it here. 
For those who arrived late, Inktober was started back in 2009 by an illustrator named Jake Parker. It's grown significantly in that time, and while there are many takes on it, but the original goes something like this: the official Inktober site publishes a list of 31 single-word drawing prompts, a slew of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. You've then got 31 days to bring each individual prompt to life through the traditional medium of ink. That's the barest of the bare bones about it, and as I said, there's no one approach as all artists are of varying technical skills, comfort zones, and work ethics. 
Obviously, the important thing is to have fun, but of equal importance is to challenge yourself, push your skills, get out of your comfort zones, and try a new work ethic. Artists have a reputation for being rather persnickety and temperamental, working in a kind of ad hoc sort of flow. While I'm firmly of the opinion that creativity is not like a faucet or light switch that can simply be flipped on or off, I don't buy into the pretentious rhetoric that it's so elusive and nebulous that forcing it in even the most passive way would vaporize it on the spot. I think that's selling yourself short. Too many people see it like the Golden Goose; finding out what makes the fowl tick will stop its ticker dead, on account of being dissected. In reality, it's more like a muscle. You can injure it, of course, and there's certainly limits to what it can do, but you won't know it until you try, but it's best to take it slow, stretch it a bit, and pace yourself. 

I like to follow the official prompt list because it's the most well-known and it creates a nice common ground to see what everyone else is doing and how everyone approaches the same challenge, often in wildly different ways. 

For this year, the challenge I've set for myself is that I'm actually doing 2 prompt lists, the official and a new one I found on Instagram through a stationery company called MosseryCo. They're the pink column of the spreadsheet, with Jake Parker's being the gray. These lists are published in the early days of September to give participants some prep time, and I'm taking full advantage of it. I mean, I've got double the workload this year, so it's for the best. Yeah, this means quantity over quality (or at least some repetition), but like NaNoWriMo (in November) it's more about the process than the results. It's about getting rid of old and bad habits while trying to get used to new and good ones. 

In terms of medium, I'm probably playing faster and looser than ever. My first year was fairly strict, I made proper, traditional ink drawings in my sketchbooks, and the only digital work involved was some color correction and lighting adjustments in post. My second year I tried a hybrid approach of using an Iskn Slate tablet to "record" my traditional drawings and then digitally paint over them. What both of these years had in common was that there was more than one occasion I made an exception to my own rules. This year, I had an idea that if there was ever a day when I couldn't come up with anything, I would look to the corresponding day on the other list and combine the two. As I've been going through the pre-planning stage, though, I haven't felt much desire to do that. While there are some common/recurring themes between the lists, they are ultimately separate entities that will be resulting in at least 62 full-fledged drawings. As for bringing those drawings to life, I'm keeping that open depending on what's best suited to the idea, but the majority of drawings will be made using Paper by 53. It's hardly the most robust drawing app. In fact, the fine folks at 53 will insist up, down, left, and right that Paper is not a drawing app, but a notetaking app geared towards more visual thinkers. It's meant for making flowcharts and Venn diagrams rather than full, proper illustrations. Of course, that never stops anyone from using it as a drawing app, hence their own hashtag #madewithpaper, but it's overall not the strength of the app. It's got limitations and even, dare I say it, some shortcomings, but that's what I love about it. 

However you decide to participate in Inktober, I'd like you to keep something in mind. To crib a phrase from Stan Lee, every year is someone's first. If this is your first, I bid you welcome, hope you meet a lot of interesting people, and overall hope you have a lot of fun. 

Twit Tweets About Tech

I call it "Addled Existentialism... With A Toolbar"

As much as I like to think of this site as a tech-blog, I also have to be realistic about a few matters. The most important of these is that I am not an early adopter, not as a rule. I'm of the opinion that nobody gets a product right on the first try. Unless you're resigned to buying the same product twice, it's best to wait until all the bugs are ironed out. Sure, I still have my first generation PSP, and while improvements were made since then, I still like mine, almost more than the Vita. The other matter of importance is that we've reached a point in product development, particularly on the software side of things, where this "extended beta" paradigm is not only acknowledged, but deserves to be nurtured. Yeah, day one patches are annoying, but at least they get patched to begin with. Yeah, it gives developers an easy out on the QA and deadline fronts, but it also opens them up to a wider spectrum of feedback they may not have had before. 

I was going to do a write-up of Fifty-Three's latest update to Paper, its native app meant to accompany their Pencil stylus. In the interest of full disclosure, I've been very impressed with the support I've received from Fifty-Three and I appreciate them going above and beyond the call of duty in resolving a small issue with connectivity I was having with a stylus I'd purchased over a year ago. I have genuinely used the Paper app in the workplace when discussing design challenges with coworkers. All that said, the Pencil is not my favorite stylus. It is the second, once tied with Adonit (who are now dead to me for reasons I'll get into another time), paling in comparison to the ever-versatile Sensu Brush. Obviously, that is not a fair comparison, but that's my point when I talk about the Paper app, and why I decided to take a different approach to discussing its recent overhaul. 

I am not the person this app was made for. 

Paper is not an art program. Their Twitter feed may have you believe otherwise, but this is not the primary, or even secondary, function of the app, talents of the users notwithstanding. Paper is a productivity app, and a very simplistic and accessible one to boot. It is Microsoft One Note for visual thinkers. It is Evernote for doodlers. It is Powerpoint/Keynote on the fly. It is Post-It Notes without the litter. It is a dry erase board without the noxious fumes and notable lack of portability, fume-induced out-of-body experiences notwithstanding. 

If apps were physical items you had to visit a brick-and-mortar store to purchase, Autodesk Sketchbook would be at Michael's and Paper would be at OfficeMax. However, apps are not physical items and there's generally only one store you get all of them from. Given that they're not physical items, some consumers view this as anti-them, taking away their precious ownership... that they didn't really have to begin with because that's a sales receipt and not a stock certificate. The point is that the law rightly treats digital media as physical ones as its ultimately a human (or team thereof) producing it on their own time and dime for others to use, but that doesn't mean they're used in the same manner, much less produced. If I bought a game on my Sega Genesis and it was a glitchy, slowdown-riddled mess that may have even had a level or two that were simply impossible compared to what came before, that was your lot. Now, 20-some years after the fact, the lead programmer for Sonic 3D Blast is revisiting his old game and updating it. It won't be available in physical form (yet), but any user with a PC running an even half-decent emulator will be able to play this game that once may have been charitably described as rough round the edges. While I only rented Blast back in the day, I'm honestly excited to see a game I thought was impressive get that extra little bit of polish it needed. Why throw something away when it can be fixed? 

After summarizing all this in a brief tweet, someone commented: 

Ok so I am not the only one. Did the same: 2 emails. I found huge productivity loss with Paper 4 due to regressions and bugs.

I'll give this guy the benefit of the doubt (i.e. anonymity) that he wasn't fully paying attention to the original tweet, namely the part where I specify that the gripes I have with Paper's 4th iteration are cosmetic. What may not have been so clear is that I consider these faults cosmetic because I was trying to view Paper as an art app rather than a productivity app. As for it being a productivity app, the blame-shifting here is hilarious. Sure, it utterly bites (bytes?) when a piece of tech essential to your job doesn't work, but holding up Paper on some kind of pedestal makes you look more than a little inept. There's a reason I still carry a Moleskine and a handful of pens in the same bag as my tablet. 

To put this in perspective, here's a funny-if-pitiful story about when I worked for T-Mobile in customer service. I once got a call from an especially irate customer who wanted 60,000USD. He wanted 60K from us as compensation because of a business deal that fell through. Said unspecified business deal fell through because a text message was delayed by an equally unspecified amount of time. I can't emphasize enough that his complaint was that the SMS text was delayed briefly. Unless you were an early adopter of the iPhone or you've never known a time when smartphones looked like the illegitimate offspring of a graphing calculator and a toy keyboard, you've probably experienced a text not showing up the instant the other guy hits send. 

What kind of business banks a five-figure deal on a text message? 

Seriously, you're either so financially secure and well-off that it's a risk you're as willing to take as you are to shrug off as small potatoes if it falls through, or you're so desperately incompetent you can't even make a call to confirm someone got your urgent, time-sensitive message on time.