You know how microwaves have about a hundred stupid buttons that are labelled stuff like "Potato" and "Popcorn", and how you can ignore the whole lot and just press the one that increments the time in multiples of 30 seconds and then starts cooking? (Well, maybe you also want to learn to control the power level if you're feeling fancy.) I love this interaction pattern and wish it applied to more things.

My digital kitchen timer is particularly stupid. It has seconds, but it increments them by 1 second each time, because of course I always want to cook something for exactly 7 seconds, that's a very normal thing to want to do. So it's prohibitively hard to time anything for 30 seconds, or 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and so I never do it even when it would be useful.

Also, while I'm at it, why is it so hard to find a timer that beeps for a while and then shuts up? Why do I always have to rush over to turn the stupid thing off? I can see that being useful for something where you might burn the house down, but at least half of the time I'm using it to time brewing tea. If my tea gets a bit stewed I will probably live.

And does it really have to beep that lazy 1000 Hz beep that all beepy things beep at, can't we have something a bit nicer?

Maybe I should rename this post to "I hate my kitchen timer, but searching for a replacement is so hassly and error-prone that I feel stuck with it". But let's focus on the good I want to see in the world.

I've only covered the "increment by 30 seconds" part above. The "... and then start" bit isn't so important, I'd forgive the lack of it in a kitchen timer, but it's a very nice convenience feature that I really appreciate in microwaves.

That's it, that's the post. I moved to London for work six months ago and totally broke my routines for writing outside work. I'm getting back into it now, but please bear with me while I get the engine running again with some short, stupid, or incoherent notebook posts.

Note that I am just a person having lessons and not some expert.

Subtractive

By subtractive, I mean that you're learning how to stop doing habitual things, rather than how to start doing new things. It normally improves your posture, but there are no special exercises you do to change your posture. Instead, the technique helps you drop your habits, and the posture you have when you drop your habits turns out to be better.

This was unintuitive to me, to say the least. I've always been clumsy and poorly coordinated and that felt like an intrinsic thing. The idea that there was somehow a coordinated person buried underneath sounded like the most ridiculous kind of hippie woo-woo nonsense.

But still, my movement has freed up somehow, and is lighter and easier. A lot of tension at the back of my neck has gone away (I didn't realise quite how much tension I was holding there). My arms swing a lot more while I walk, presumably because my hips have loosened up and rotate more or something? I don't have a clue how I'm doing any of it, it just happens.

In contrast, if I'd deliberately tried to "improve my posture", I'd have added some extra thing like "trying to stand up straight", and just contributed extra tension to the existing mess of habits. The subtractive approach seems to work a lot better.

The funny thing is that I didn't go to Alexander lessons to change my posture, and in fact most of my lessons have been over Zoom. I was living too far away to attend in-person classes regularly, and the main thing I wanted to work on was anxiety while talking, which could be worked with over a video call. I'm now finally making a big dent on that anxiety, but that's pretty new, and I got the posture effects first.

Indirect

Subtractive work is already hard to think about, but it gets worse because the Alexander Technique is also indirect. By indirect, I mean that you can't directly subtract away the bits you don't want, like a sculptor removing stone. There's no way to directly drop the habit, humans just don't seem to come with one.

Instead, there's a layer of indirection where you learn to do something different to the habit, and then the habit somehow drops away by itself. It's kind of similar to how a car can't go directly sideways, but you can still get to a place to the side of you, you'll just have to use the controls you do have available to do some indirect combination of turning and moving forwards and backwards.

The different thing you learn to do is to make your awareness very wide, out towards the horizon and up into the sky and down through your feet. You don't want to just be statically aware that these places exist, either, you want them to show up in such a way that you have freedom to go to them if you chose.

I was already used to expanding my awareness from the type of sitting meditation I do, but the "freedom to" part took longer to get a handle on. It's distinctive, though. If I'm having trouble getting back to that state I'll crank it up very deliberately by saying stuff to myself like "I could turn round and go to the bus stop. I could go downhill to the river. I could go to the supermarket", naming places that are well distributed around me (it's particularly easy when I'm already outside and walking). After a few rounds of that something kicks in and I can feel more aliveness in how I move.

These are the instructions I learned, anyway. Probably it varies with the teacher. I know F. M. Alexander originally had his students follow instructions like "relax the neck" and "head forward and up" and that worked too, somehow. It's all very weird!

Immediate

Expanding awareness is an indirect method, but immediate in terms of timing. You always apply it right now. Then you lose it and apply it again.

This one is maybe not so unintuitive but it's so integral to the flavour of the experience that I made it a separate point. You can't get it and keep it so you have to keep renewing it. You strengthen the intensity of the Alexander state by going there again and again and again.

One thing I found confusing when reading descriptions of the Alexander Technique before I started is that there's often so much emphasis on things like "non-doing" and "the natural state" that I couldn't figure out what I would actually be learning. If it's that's natural, why aren't I doing it already? Why would I have to go to all these lessons, and what would I be doing in them?

The answer is that you're practising expanding awareness again and again. You're not doing anything directly to your habits, they will sort themselves out over time, but you are doing something. A full day of Alexander teaching is very tiring!

But I do now understand why the descriptions are weird. "Subtractive, indirect, immediate" is a weird type of doing, and your default notions of how to do something will give you the wrong idea.

Some background: I've been learning Alexander Technique with Peter Nobes at the South Bank Alexander Centre, as advertised by Michael Ashcroft at Expanding Awareness / on Twitter.

That sentence reads like an ad, and it kind of is – I highly recommend going there! – but also it seems especially important to state the specific teacher because the Alexander Technique world seems very fragmented into subgroups and the experience at other places could be very different. I don't have any grasp at all of how the subgroups vary, but I do get the idea that some teachers focus a lot more on helping with your immediate problems, while Peter's group is trying to get you to a place where you can generate the effects for yourself. This is maybe confusing and frustrating if you just want to fix your back pain quickly, but it goes a lot deeper.

I still haven't solved the problem, so sorry in advance if this post is annoying, but I got reminded of the Lurpak anecdote in it today and thought I'd chance finishing and publishing it anyway.

Earlier in the week [edit: well, actually back in 2022] I was getting frustrated at some people on Hacker News who were bad at having fun, and started writing a rant. This seems mean. It's not their fault that they don't know how to have fun, and of course they are already suffering by not having fun. This is my attempt to make it a bit more constructive.

The thread was this one where the OP is stuck in a rut and asking for help to get out. A lot of the practical advice is good, but then one of the top-rated replies starts with the following:

It looks like you have discovered that life is boring. Doesn't matter in tech or any profession, we work to create wealth and get so engrossed in it. Once we conquer the "wealth" part we feel we don't have a meaning or a purpose anymore. And life is actually boring. To see life is boring and has no meaning is intelligence. I would go as far as to say only fools don't realize that life is boring and go on distracting themselves endlessly...

and keeps on in the same nihilist vein.

The top-rated reply to the reply starts as follows:

I don't think life is _necessarily_ boring as you claim. It's just that a lot about life is boring, particularly working at a job you don't intrinsically enjoy as well as things like commuting, preparing/waiting for food, etc.

But a best friend? A delicious meal? Making love? Learning something you want to know about? I could go on.

This is pushback of a sort, and sounds like a more enjoyable worldview than the one it's responding to, but it still has a weird-to-me ontology of fun where fun either does or does not attach to whole lumped activities like "commuting" or "a delicious meal".

Anyway, at this point I got frustrated and went to fill my recycling bag with cardboard:

I'm really enjoying disassembling cardboard boxes at the moment [edit: still enjoying this in 2025]. I got some Ikea furniture recently so there's lots of cardboard in the flat. The most satisfying part is where you score a line roughly in the cardboard with scissors, and then bend it, and then the whole thing snaps nicely along the line. Filling up the bag neatly like in the photo is also pretty good.

Another story: a while back, I had a bug where I couldn't taste much (not covid, just your standard issue pre-covid crappy bug), so I was wondering what to eat, and trying to figure out what I might enjoy. After considering some options, the only thing I felt really excited about was "opening a new tub of Lurpak butter and seeing the nice flat surface". Which sounds very stupid, but I did genuinely enjoy that!

Anyway, the point is that things that are fun are often very small, and sound kind of trivial and silly when you write about them. My sense though is that they are actually very important, and that most fun bubbles up from this kind of second-by-second experience. There just isn't much fun available in big pre-packaged narrative lumps, even the apparently positive ones like "having a delicious meal". Whereas you could break open even the duller-sounding lumps like "commuting" and find a decent amount of second-by-second fun inside. If you are spending your life up at the level of the lumps, then fun is going to top out at a pretty low level.

I wish I could shout at the Hacker News repliers to JUST GO LOOK AT SOME THINGS, LIKE ACTUALLY LOOK AT THEM FOR ONCE, AND SEE WHICH BITS YOU LIKE in a way that would actually help. I can't, so instead I wrote this annoying post.

One of the standard pieces of homework at Rugby was the vulgus, a short Latin composition on a given theme. Masters had to assign a lot of these, and so would eventually resort to reusing the same theme.

This led to the technology of the vulgus-book:

To meet and rebuke this bad habit of the masters, the schoolboy mind, with its accustomed ingenuity, had invented an elaborate system of tradition. Almost every boy kept his own vulgus written out in a book, and these books were duly handed down from boy to boy, till (if the tradition has gone on till now) I suppose the popular boys, in whose hands bequeathed vulgus-books have accumulated, are prepared with three or four vulguses on any subject in heaven or earth, or in “more worlds than one,” which an unfortunate master can pitch upon. At any rate, such lucky fellows had generally one for themselves and one for a friend in my time. The only objection to the traditionary method of doing your vulguses was the risk that the successions might have become confused, and so that you and another follower of traditions should show up the same identical vulgus some fine morning; in which case, when it happened, considerable grief was the result. But when did such risk hinder boys or men from short cuts and pleasant paths?

To create your vulgus, you would stitch together pieces from several different examples in the vulgus-book, as many as you thought you'd need to hide your tracks:

Now in the study that night Tom was the upholder of the traditionary method of vulgus doing. He carefully produced two large vulgus-books, and began diving into them, and picking out a line here, and an ending there (tags, as they were vulgarly called), till he had gotten all that he thought he could make fit. He then proceeded to patch his tags together with the help of his Gradus, producing an incongruous and feeble result of eight elegiac lines, the minimum quantity for his form, and finishing up with two highly moral lines extra, making ten in all, which he cribbed entire from one of his books, beginning “O genus humanum,” and which he himself must have used a dozen times before, whenever an unfortunate or wicked hero, of whatever nation or language under the sun, was the subject. Indeed he began to have great doubts whether the master wouldn't remember them, and so only throw them in as extra lines, because in any case they would call off attention from the other tags, and if detected, being extra lines, he wouldn't be sent back to do more in their place, while if they passed muster again he would get marks for them.

I wondered if anyone else had noticed how much this method was like being a human ChatGPT (with a somewhat smaller corpus of text), and, yep, here's a short paper by Tom Ue:  Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays , ChatGPT, and Academic Integrity.

– from Anonymity: An Inquiry

I’ll keep the normal categories, but there are two other new things that feel important. The first is that I fell into maybe the most intense internet rabbit hole of my life, where I went from idly typing "galant music" into Google Scholar to a full-blown attempt to learn piano out of an 1801 rulebook in the space of a week. I'm still going on the rulebook, and partimento practice in general, and it's completely transformed how I understand classical music. It's sort of transformed my piano playing too, though I do feel like I should be better by now given the amount of work I've put in. I think it just takes ages to build fluency unfortunately.

I already wrote about this new obsession in Improvising like it's 1799 and Minimal viable music.

The other new thing is that I started Alexander Technique lessons with Peter Nobes, who runs the South Bank Alexander Technique Centre (where Michael Ashcroft trained). Unlike partimento practice, where I’ve bored on at length about it to anyone who’ll tolerate listening, I’ve been pretty quiet about the Alexander Technique, particularly in writing. That’s because it’s weird and subtle and I have no idea what's going on most of the time, so it's hard to talk about. It's really working though.

The effect of both of these is that after a couple of rather stuck years I feel like I’m back in an open world with interesting new things in it. I don’t know where I’m going but at least I’m going somewhere.

Notebook

Nothing major happened here, but I still like it and write the odd post there. I also still read it back a lot – something about the design seems to really work for that. I think it's mainly the high density list of posts.

Variable names as handles or sigils got a bit of interest at the beginning of the year. I'd like to revisit that topic at some point and do a less half-arsed job. I also like Three pass writing.

Newsletter

I wrote about a pretty random set of topics this year. As well as the partimento post I covered Deleuze's "body without organs", Hasok Chang on realism, C. S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, Tantacrul's YouTube video on music notation and special relativity.

I'm not sure it adds up to much but I had fun.

Physics

I've slightly lost track of what I did here. At the beginning of the year I was in a phase of reading about relativity. Then I think I just dropped physics for a few months until the old negative probability obsession returned. In the last couple of months I've been trying to finally write up some of my negative probability stuff properly, which has been slow and frustrating. I'm currently procrastinating by reading some quantum foundations papers I've been meaning to get to for ages.

I'm struggling a bit with being so isolated from any community of practice. I'm still in the physics society but it's been fairly quiet recently and I don't feel particularly connected to it.

Reading

Here's what I can remember (I never keep a list but I like to try and figure it out at the end of the year):

• Alcott – Little Women
• Austen – Mansfield Park
• Montgomery – Anne of Green Gables and many sequels
• Sassoon – Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
• Rao – Tempo
• Harrison – Wish I Was Here
• Nobes – Illusion or reality? Are we teaching what FM Alexander was teaching?
• Alexander – The Use of the Self
• Jones – Freedom to Change. Strong recommend for this one if you're going to read an Alexander Technique book.
• Lewis – An Experiment in Criticism, The Great Divorce, They Asked for a Paper

Plus some of:

• Gallwey – The Inner Game of Tennis
• McLeod – Wake up to your Life
• Gjerdingen – Music in the Galant Style. "Some of" is a bit of an understatement, because I've spent a ton of time at the piano playing through the excerpts, but I haven't tried to read through the whole thing. Instead I work through a new pattern when I start to appreciate it.
• Mortensen – The Pianist’s Guide to Historic Improvisation
• Chang – Realism for Realistic People
• Alexander – Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual
• White – The Once and Future King

No particular themes, except you can see the influence of my two new interests.

Other stuff

I already talked about partimento practice and Alexander Technique. The other feature of 2024 was trying to adapt to the weird state of the internet. I lost patience with Twitter but haven’t yet found a home anywhere else. Hanging around on discord is nice but I miss the open internet.

Near the end of the year I decided to reduce the amount of time I spend reading stuff on the internet, as it wasn't like I was having much fun there anyway. I tried a drastic minimal internet experiment and some other ideas, but the final thing I've settled on is just to stay off my normal distractions until 3pm. Simple but works. I'm reading a lot of books in a browser tab to satisfy my text addiction, so maybe that reading list will be longer in 2025.

I also gave up with Wordpress for good (only somewhat drama-related, mostly because I had to fix yet more broken formatting and decided I was done there). Any new blog posts will be on Substack.

... we have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists. If we say that this is not total death, it may be replied that there was no total death in the Dark Ages either. It could even be argued that Latin, surviving as the language of Dark Age culture, and preserving the disciplines of Law and Rhetoric, gave to some parts of the classical heritage a far more living and integral status in the life of those ages than the academic studies of the specialists can claim in our own. As for the area and the tempo of the two deaths, if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.

And now for the claim: which sounds arrogant but, I hope, is not really so. I have said that the vast change which separates you from Old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete. Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room. This is quite normal at times of great change. The correspondence of Henry More and Descartes is an amusing example; one would think the two men were writing in different centuries. And here comes the rub. I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours. I am going to claim that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The disqualification is obvious. You don’t want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling. One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modern scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father’s house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.

Related: The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone

Three walks at night

First walk. Replace abstract distance by height, and fill the spheres with ordered contents:

You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante’s maggior corpo is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word ‘small’ as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

Second walk. The universe is full of light and music, and the darkness we see is only a shadow cast by the Earth:

Nothing is more deeply impressed on the cosmic imaginings of a modern than the idea that the heavenly bodies move in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity. It was not so in the Medieval Model. Already in our passage from Lucan we have seen that (on the most probable interpretation) the ascending spirit passes into a region compared with which our terrestrial day is only a sort of night; and nowhere in medieval literature have I found any suggestion that, if we could enter the translunary world, we should find ourselves in an abyss of darkness. For their system is in one sense more heliocentric than ours. The sun illuminates the whole universe. All the stars, says Isidore (III, lxi) are said to have no light of their own but, like the Moon, to be illuminated by Sol. Dante in the Convivio agrees (II, xiii, 15). And as they had, I think, no conception of the part which the air plays in turning physical light into the circumambient colour-realm that we call Day, we must picture all the countless cubic miles within the vast concavity as illuminated. Night is merely the conical shadow cast by our Earth. It extends, according to Dante (Paradiso, IX, 118) as far as to the sphere of Venus. Since the Sun moves and the Earth is stationary, we must picture this long, black finger perpetually revolving like the hand of a clock; that is why Milton calls it ‘the circling canopie of Night’s extended shade’ (Paradise Lost, III, 556). Beyond that there is no night; only ‘happie climes that lie where day never shuts his eye’ (Comus, 978). When we look up at the night sky we are looking through darkness but not at darkness.

And secondly, as that vast (though finite) space is not dark, so neither is it silent. If our ears were opened we should perceive, as Henryson puts it,

every planet in his proper sphere
In moving makand harmony and sound

as Dante heard it.

If the reader cares to repeat the experiment, already suggested, of a nocturnal walk with the medieval astronomy in mind, he will easily feel the effect of these two last details. The ‘silence’ which frightened Pascal was, according to the Model, wholly illusory; and the sky looks black only because we are seeing it through the dark glass of our own shadow. You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music.

Third walk. Looking in towards heaven:

I can hardly hope that I shall persuade the reader to yet a third experimental walk by starlight. But perhaps, without actually taking the walk, he can now improve his picture of that old universe by adding such finishing touches as this section has suggested. Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out—like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is ‘outside the city wall’. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith’s Lucifer, ‘the army of unalterable law’, but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable. You need not wonder that one old picture represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball. Then, laying aside whatever Theology or Atheology you held before, run your mind up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference, of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned.

Angelic intelligence

On the division between intellect and reason:

Intellectus is that in man which approximates most nearly to angelic intelligentia; it is in fact obumbrata intelligentia, clouded intelligence, or a shadow of intelligence. Its relation to reason is thus described by Aquinas: ‘intellect (intelligere) is the simple (i.e. indivisible, uncompounded) grasp of an intelligible truth, whereas reasoning (ratiocinari) is the progression towards an intelligible truth by going from one understood (intellecto) point to another. The difference between them is thus like the difference between rest and motion or between possession and acquisition’ (Ia, LXXIX, art. 8). We are enjoying intellectus when we ‘just see’ a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply ‘seen’ would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply ‘seen’ and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man’s mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia which constitute intellectus.

Right, so according to this I want to be an angel. I want to be able to "just see" everything without ever having to do the annoying work of reasoning through unintelligible intermediate steps. No stupid inference time compute for me. I do not want to think step by step.

World as special interest

On why medieval writers will include giant digressions on astronomy, history, natural history, medicine, on what to us seems the most flimsy pretext:

The simplest explanation is, I believe, the true one. Poets and other artists depicted these things because their minds loved to dwell on them. Other ages have not had a Model so universally accepted as theirs, so imaginable, and so satisfying to the imagination. Marcus Aurelius wished that men would love the universe as a man can love his own city. I believe that something like this was really possible in the period I am discussing. At least, fairly like it. The medieval and Renaissance delight in the universe was, I think, more spontaneous and aesthetic, less laden with conscience and resignation, than anything the Stoical emperor had in mind. It was, though not in any Wordsworthian sense, a ‘love of nature’.

I like this suggestion that the medieval universe is something like a shared special interest that writers can't help themselves from boring on about:

It may, for example, explain both its most typical vice and its most typical virtue. The typical vice, as we all know, is dulness; sheer, unabashed, prolonged dulness, where the author does not seem to be even trying to interest us. The South English Legendary or Ormulum or parts of Hoccleve are good examples. One sees how the belief in a world of built-in significance encourages this. The writer feels everything to be so interesting in itself that there is no need for him to make it so. The story, however badly told, will still be worth telling; the truths, however badly stated, still worth stating. He expects the subject to do for him nearly everything he ought to do himself. Outside literature we can still see this state of mind at work. On the lowest intellectual level, people who find any one subject entirely engrossing are apt to think that any reference to it, of whatever quality, must have some value.

The virtue that goes with this vice is a sense of ease:

What will strike him at once is the absence of strain. In the Elizabethan or Romantic examples we feel that the poet has done a great deal of work; in the medieval, we are at first hardly aware of a poet at all. The writing is so limpid and effortless that the story seems to be telling itself. You would think, till you tried, that anyone could do the like. But in reality no story tells itself. Art is at work. But it is the art of people who, no less than the bad medieval authors, have a complete confidence in the intrinsic value of their matter.

To bore on about my own current special interest for a minute, there are similarities here to eighteenth century music, where composers were insanely prolific in a way that sounds effortless (think Scarlatti's 505 keyboard sonatas, or Haydn writing 106 symphonies and still finding time to churn out endless baryton pieces for his patron). This was also a period that had an unusually rich shared world of standard patterns that could be recombined and elaborated on.

I realise people love doing this sort of experiment and then writing up their boring thoughts on it. I'll try and not make this a completely banal "phones bad" account like you've read a hundred times before, but no promises.

The experiment was mostly not as hard as I expected. Well, OK, there was one afternoon where I got intensely bored. Excerpt from the journal I kept:

- After lunch and I would really like to read some crap on the internet. It’s not fair

- This experiment doesn’t feel very interesting. I’m mainly learning that the internet is good actually and I like it

- There are 155 bristles on my hairbrush. Arranged in 7 rows, 21+22+23+23+23+22+21

- 15:00. I’m bored. Bored bored bored BORED. This is the most bored a person has ever been. It should be illegal to be this bored

Otherwise, I adapted pretty fast. My main internet text replacements were playing piano (surprisingly this is extremely low activation energy, you can just sit down and get started in seconds) and reading books. I was surprised how it became almost instantly very easy to concentrate on books when I knew there were no possible internet distractions.

David MacIver was writing about some similar experiments in How to read more books, where he pokes fun at excuses people sometimes come up with for not reading, including:

“I can’t read books because my phone has rewired my brain to require constant stimulus from short-form content.”

I didn’t believe this exactly, but I did sort of implicitly assume that there was some level of adaption to rapidly switching between distractions that would be hard to reverse. This wasn’t the case at all. As soon as I started the internet experiment and there was literally nothing I was allowed to look up online, I stopped having the feelings of wanting to check for anything new. I could just read books for two-hour stretches without coming up with reasons to switch tasks. And as soon as I started using the internet normally again, they came back.

My experience matches very closely with the current environment and supporting context being the important thing, rather than some "rewired my brain" type of explanation where I'd need some longish adjustment period in either direction. This is really good to know, actually. My brain still works fine!

So, given this, am I going to continue the experiment? Absolutely not, for a couple of reasons.

First, although I definitely read more books, it’s not obvious that the quality of what I read during the experiment was an improvement on what I'd have read otherwise. It’s possible that this particular week was not very representative. There seemed to be an unusually good haul of interesting writing when I finally came back to check blogs and newsletters and follow up on some links. And on the other hand, I mostly read old Alexander Technique books of varying quality. Also, I obviously only caught up the places that were likely to be good, rather than the giant Hacker News threads of pedants arguing.

I do think, though, that the best internet text is genuinely very good. I think densely-hyperlinked internet longform is a great genre, and actually better for a lot of nonfiction than the book format, which tends to encourage padding with filler text and hiding dubious citations somewhere at the back.

Second, it was crap socially. Reading books for hours at a time with no urge to switch tasks was very familiar from being a teenager, but so was the social and intellectual isolation. I really want to be able to talk to fellow internet weirdos about things I don’t have much IRL outlet for. This links back to the first point too. Another nice feature of internet text is that you can talk back!

I do want to tilt the balance a bit more towards books, though. Also, it's good to clear out some of my worst habitual reading and let myself get bored for a bit, to see what I find instead. So I’m trying to figure out something sustainable that gives me enough uninterrupted book-reading time while still getting me my finding-interesting-things and talking-to-weirdos vitamins. My current experiment is to keep discord and other messaging going, but corral blogs and newsletters into a two hour period in the evening. As for other kinds of internet text, I’m dropping the “only direct practical relevance” rule and letting myself read anything that isn’t one of my usual distractions. I have to go fishing around the internet rather than slipping into standard habits.

(Also no reading those threads on Hacker News. Why was I even doing that?)

I’ll probably have to try one or two more iterations of the rules, but I think something like this has a good chance of working.

I'm working through Furno's rulebook (pdf), the recommended entry point for beginners. Furno starts you off learning the Rule of the Octave, which gives you a default chord to play against every note of the ascending and descending scale. See this video to hear what it sounds like. The scale in the bass and the chords are played above it on the harpsichord.

I've found that even this is weirdly satisfying to practice! Normal scales are pretty boring, and I only practice them because they're useful, but the Rule of the Octave is actually enjoyable.

This is because it's something like minimum viable music. Like storytelling, music unfolds in time and gets a lot of its interest from the creation and release of tension. The Rule of the Octave has this built in from the start. The details don't matter, but this diagram (screenshotted from the same video) gives you a rough idea of how it works:

The red squares are stable points in the scale, and you put a stable, solid chord on them (that's the 5 3 underneath, representing the 3rd and 5th notes in the scale above the given bass note). The green circles are unstable points, and you give them a less solid-sounding chord with a 6 in it. As you approach a stable point, you add more dissonance to the chord to add tension, which you then release at the stable point (this is why you need a different ascending and descending chord, as you approach the stable points from different sides). There's one extra complication, where position 3 in the scale is treated sort of half-stable, half-unstable – it gets a 6 chord like the other unstable points, but you also increase the dissonance as you approach it, like you would for a stable point.

This turns out to be enough structure for the Rule of the Octave to sound something like music. Even short sections of the Rule, going between two stable or half-stable points, sound pretty musical because they have some inbuilt creation and release of tension. In comparison, nothing much happens musically in a normal scale, so it feels kind of dull. It's something you do because you want to get better at playing music, not really music in itself.

After the Rule of the Octave, Furno introduces partimenti, basslines that move in more complicated ways than just a straightforward ascending or descending scale. For the simplest partimenti you can mostly just plonk down a Rule of the Octave chord against every note of the bass, though there are some listed exceptions where the default chord is a bit too showy and dissonant and you have to replace it with a simpler one.

I'm still working on getting the Rule of the Octave more fluent, but I'm at the stage where I can tackle these simple partimenti in easy keys. The final result is not the most exciting performance you ever heard, but again it does sound like (very basic) actual music. It's fun to play them and to tinker around with changing bits of the bassline or adding decorations and seeing what happens.

It looks like Furno keeps adding new rules in the later partimenti, but in a pared-down way that introduces a minimal version of each idea. For example, the next thing that's introduced are cadences, sequences that end a musical phrase. In real music of the time these can be pretty complicated and nuanced, and Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style has a long chapter devoted to cadences with lots of examples of different ways to finish a phrase.

Furno reduces all this complication to: there are three types of cadences. There's a short one that you play if the fifth in the bass lasts for one beat, a longer one for if it lasts two beats, and a fancy long one for if it lasts four beats. Stick the appropriate one into your partimento and you're done. This is not sophisticated, but it's still enough to let a beginner produce something that sounds recognisably like music.

This steady, carefully scoped increase in difficulty level gives partimento practice an almost gamelike feel. There's always an obvious next thing to work on, and you can work your way through them and make incrementally more complex music. As you get more advanced and build up a store of known patterns, you can do things that are less mechanical and more like something you'd actually choose to listen to. But at every step you at least get some sort of music.

I don't exactly outline, but I do write in some sort of iterative top-down way. I'd already noticed that I tend to write in three rough passes for most of my writing, both technical writing and blog posts. This isn't some method I stick rigidly to, it just seems to work out that way for me. In practice there's some mixing between the passes, but they're still pretty distinct.

Pass 1: landmarks

In Pass 1, I paste in all the things I already know I want to cover, in roughly the right order. This includes any heading titles I already know I want to include, but also links, quotes and some short fairly complete bits of text. In technical writing these bits of text are often lifted wholesale from related pieces we've already written (this is a good thing – if an explanation is clear you should reuse it). For blog posts they're more often the bits that I'm most excited about, that make me want to write the thing in the first place. I've already monologued those bits to myself while out walking or in the shower, so I know what I want to say.

Sometimes this ends up looking like a classic outline, particularly for routine tutorials of the "How to integrate X with Y" type. For that sort of writing I already know what all the sections should be and what order they go in. For an exploratory blog post I might have no idea what I want to say in places until I write it, and also not much sense of what I'll eventually want the headings to be. So there will be large expanses of empty territory that only get filled in in Pass 2.

Pass 2: everything else except the annoying bits

Then I draw the rest of the owl, except the absolute worst parts of the owl, which I mark with a couple of blank lines with "!!" between them. These are all the annoying bits that I come back to in pass 3. Anything that significantly interrupts my flow gets a "!!" and I move on.

I don't attempt to write this in order. Instead my writing just sort of nucleates around the landmarks, in whatever order feels most appealing. I normally find that some landmarks draw me in and I really want to elaborate them, so I start with those. That normally gives me enough energy to tackle the others, and I often write more-or-less linearly for a while.

This is the bulk of the actual writing time, but there's not too much else to say about it from a structure point of view, so I'll keep this section short.

Pass 3: the annoying bits

At the end of Pass 2 I have a bunch of complete chunks of text separated by annoying bits marked with "!!". Pass 3 is the thrilling part where I fill in the annoying bits.

For me this needs a completely different frame of mind to Pass 2 and I like to do it on a different day if possible. There's this great observation by Nelson Elhage that I've been thinking about since he posted it on Discord. David MacIver quotes it in a post:

I think of the "finishing the project" as a much more deliberate mode of execution; for most of my projects for most of their lifecycle I'm doing some version of following my curiosity or interest, or "taking the next step" (or maybe "a next step" since the project often branches and expands); Finishing A Project is often the point at which I switch to writing down a task list and explicitly triaging and developing a burndown list of things to do (or deliberately not do).

Maybe said another way, Finishing The Project is often where I switch to backwards-chaining from a goal as my primary mode, instead of something more exploratory or driven by intrinsic motivation/interest.

Pass 3 is a small-scale version of Finishing The Project mode, where I backwards-chain from the goal of getting the damn thing finished. Some typical kinds of annoying bits I have left at this point are:

• "Connective tissue". Sometimes the chunks of text that have nucleated around landmarks don't match up nicely, and I have to work out how to get from one to the next. So I need a few sentences of relatively dull text to connect them.
• Precise statements that need to be correct, and where I have to look up details to get it right.
• Images, particularly screenshots in technical writing. It can be a faff to make good ones, and it's not a part of the process I particularly enjoy.

Once I've got rid of the "!!"s I'm almost done, except for a quick final copyediting pass. I don't count that as a separate pass, because most of the copyediting work gets folded into the earlier stages. I compulsively rearrange sentences as I go, which is maybe not efficient or whatever, but I couldn't stop even if I wanted to. Sarah Constantin describes the same approach in How I Write:

I do exactly what your English teacher told you not to do.

I don’t really write multiple discrete drafts.

I do a bunch of in-line micro-edits, rephrases, etc, and I sometimes move paragraphs and sections around partway through. This is supposedly Bad Practice but it’s what feels natural and I haven’t tried to force myself to write drafts since I was a teenager.

So I'm in good company at least.

This post as a (bad) example

I felt like I should go meta and use this post as an example. It didn't exactly work out, but that was sort of interesting in itself.

There was a clearly defined Pass 1, which you can see in this Google Docs link. It's quite outline-like, because this is a simple post where I knew what I wanted to cover in advance.

There's no separate Pass 2 and 3, though, because there were no seriously annoying bits. It's just me going on about something in my personal experience with no pesky facts to get right, there are no images, and there's a natural 1-2-3 structure that saves me writing any connective tissue.

This might actually be diagnostic for what I consider to be a notebook post? I often write notebook posts in one sitting, which is only possible if I don't have to do a lengthy pass 3 of working out fiddly stuff. So if I find myself in a pass 3 sort of situation it's probably too complicated for the notebook.

Partimento, que me veux-tu? is about Rousseau's failure to learn composition through the systematic music theory of the time, about the parallel trade-school education system that would have taught him successfully if he'd had access to it, and about the romanticised idea of Italian music he developed in the absence of understanding how the real thing was made. (The title means "partimento, what do you want from me?" and is a snowclone of something Fontenelle said. It doesn't matter much for this post.)

I've been interested in Rousseau's weird thoughts on music for a while now. I first learned about them through Derrida, who picks them apart in Of Grammatology. Then I revisited the topic last year and read Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, and it was entertainingly mad. My snarky summary from that post:

His argument in the Essay is something like, um... so he starts off by claiming that language grew out of 'passion' rather than 'need', as a form of emotional expression rather than for practical use. This happened in warmer, southern climates, where life wasn't too hard and people could spend a lot of time emoting about things, and language started out very close to song with lots of melodic vowel sounds.

Then, as people moved north, the weather got worse and they had to spend longer doing annoying practical stuff, and language got used more for needs than passions. As part of this evolution it got harsher and more cluttered up with consonants, and generally moved away from its roots in song.

I can't emphasise enough how much it really is like that. I'm paraphrasing in a bit of a silly way but I'm not altering the structure of the argument itself to make it stupider. If anything I'm underselling how forcefully he asserts all this stuff and how little justification he provides for any of it.

The second half of the book is the same thing again, but for music. Music from the south (and from Italians in particular) is full of free-flowing songlike melody which just pours out of them naturally or something. Gjerdingen quotes this passage by Rousseau from his Dictionnaire de musique:

The Italians hold the cyphers in contempt, the partition itself is of little service to them; the quickness and nicety of the ear supplies their place, and they accompany extremely well without all this preparation, but it is to their natural disposition alone that they are indebted for this facility and another people, not born to music like themselves, find in the execution of the accompanying, several difficulties almost insurmountable.

In contrast, music from the north is more clogged up with harmony, the musical equivalent of consonants. It's built up more vertically as a series of chords, rather than following the horizontal flow of the melodic line, which makes it more contrived and artificial. He's particularly aiming his criticism at Rameau, a very popular French composer who had written an influential treatise on harmony:

As Thomas Christensen has noted, “Rameau’s theory of music was seen as a scientific system. In both method and structure, it was frequently compared to Newton’s systematization of celestial mechanics and optics. . . . Not surprisingly, Rameau was often granted the accolade ‘Newton of Music’”

Rousseau objected to all this heavy northern formalism. But also, from a practical point of view, he found it hard to actually learn anything from the book:

As I began to read music tolerably well, the question was, how I should learn composition? The difficulty lay in meeting with a good master, for, with the assistance of my Rameau alone, I despaired of ever being able to accomplish it...

This was fair enough. It was genuinely very difficult, maybe impossible, to learn to write music people would actually want to listen to just from this kind of formal systemisation of music theory. But this didn't mean that you should instead follow the Italians and intuitively pour out music like birdsong according to your natural disposition. Because of course the Italians didn't do that!

This is where I loop round to my previous infodump on partimento practice. Students in the Italian conservatories would spend years on a rigorous curriculum, starting maybe as early as seven. This curriculum didn't consist of systematic theory like the Rameau textbook. Instead, it was based around working through huge numbers of examples, developing their taste first through singing and then through learning to compose melodies over progressively more complex bass lines.

The conservatories that taught this were trade schools for students who would go on to be chapel masters and court musicians, and who were treated as skilled artisans rather than aristocrats. There's a funny quote from Rousseau where he fails to understand this and is mortified to learn that his compositions are not going to get him the place in high society he hoped for:

Perceiving it to be about one o’clock, I prepared to take my leave. Madam de Beuzenval said to me: “You are at a great distance from the quarter of the town in which you reside; stay and dine here.” I did not want asking a second time. A quarter of an hour afterwards, I understood, by a word, that the dinner to which she had invited me was that of her servants’ hall.

This sort of trade education was passed on from master to student, and huge parts of it weren't written down, so it was hard for outsiders to get an understanding of how it worked. The books of partimenti were available, but these are just bass lines and maybe some rules, the equivalent of exercise books without solutions. Without a master to explain how to compose melodies on top of the bass line and feed you examples of good style, it's hard to make much sense of them. There were music theory books aimed at the aristocracy, but they were more suitable for teaching music appreciation than actual practice.

So maybe it makes sense that Rousseau, lacking an insider's knowledge, failed to understand how composers learned to compose, and I wouldn't be snarky if his alternative theory wasn't so ridiculous. He was right that Rameau alone wouldn't work. But it turns out that systematic rational theory and untrained romantic intuition are not the only options.

Mathematicians and physicists normally use single characters like \(p\) or \(\lambda\) for variable names, whereas programmers normally use strings of characters like width or lastName. Every so often I see a take that goes something like this:

"Single-character variable names in maths are an artefact of having to write everything down on paper. Longer variable names are more descriptive and an obviously better choice when you don't have this constraint."

There's a bit of truth to this, but I think it ignores at least one major tradeoff. This tradeoff is probably pretty obvious to a lot of people, but I haven't seen it written down in any detail, so I'm going to try here.

Variable names fall along a spectrum of how generally useful the thing you're labelling is. At one end of the spectrum you have pragmatic labels that refer to some one-off thing that you need to track in the problem in front of you. For example, you're writing the business logic for handling some particular type of widgets, and so you add a widgetCount variable. At the other end of the spectrum you have labels for things that come up again and again in multiple problems. For example, in school geometry you come across angles all the time, and by default you label them with \(\theta\).

I'm going to call the first type handles because they are simple one-time attachments to a particular thing in the world. The complexity is out there in the world, in the particularities of whatever kind of widget you're tracking, and all the handle does is use your ordinary-language understanding of what widgets are to point to them and say "those ones". There's no magic in the handle itself.

In contrast, the second type of variable name has been used so much to refer to a particular thing that a strong association with the thing has accreted around the variable itself. I think of these as sigils because they've been charged with meaning through repeated use. To me, \(\theta\) just looks like an angle now, and it would be very weird and distracting to use it for a length.

Sigils are useful because they concentrate meaning into a very small space. You can just look at \(A_{ij}\), say, and say "ah, that's a matrix, I'd better do matrix things to it." This is particularly valuable in maths, where you deal with natural regularities that come up in a lot of different situations. Generally mathematical objects are fairly simple in themselves, at least compared to most of the bags of properties and functions you'll find in programming, and the complexity instead comes from combining and transforming them. So it's useful to have a compact notation that concentrates meaning into a small space.

One-off labellings don't have the advantage of bringing an interpretation along with them. You could abbreviate "widget" to  w, but that would probably be more confusing than helpful because w isn't charged with any particular feeling of widgetness. Programming normally has to connect to particulars to get anything done, so it needs a lot of handles.

This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, and sometime maths has handles and programming has sigils.

For an example of handles in maths, sometimes you do a big calculation and end up with some intermediate quantity that's temporarily useful but which you don't have an interpretation for, and you're like "I dunno, let's call that \(Q\), I haven't used that one yet and it doesn't mean anything in particular in this context". In that case \(Q\) is just a handle, and not a particularly good one. A longer programming-style name would actually be better if you're not writing by hand, at least if you can find a reasonably meaningful one.

Another way you sometimes see handles appearing in maths is people tacking on a subscript or superscript text label to a single-character variable, as a kind of cheat code for making it into a handle. Here's an example I found from the Wikipedia article on the stress-strain curve:

Here \(\sigma\), \(F\) and \(A\) are standard symbols for the stress, force and cross-sectional area, but in this case \(A\) is the area of something called the "neck". I haven't read the article and don't know what this means, but presumably "the cross-sectional area of the neck" refers to something specific enough to not have a default symbol. So instead we get this sort of hybrid of a sigil \(A\) and a handle \(\text{neck}\).

(I deliberately chose a engineering-type subject when looking for an example, because I'd expect engineers to have to relate their formalism back to some particularity of the world. I thought I'd have to click through several pages, but got one on the first try!)

There are also a lot of repeated, general concepts in programming and often you do see short sigil-like variables there. A common example is the use of i and j  as counter variables. Things like loops and arrays come up all the time, so it makes sense to have dedicated symbols for counting your place in them. This particular convention is strong enough that using i or j  for anything else feels odd.

It's probably not a coincidence that counting is a maths thing and this convention is also borrowed from maths. Other single-variable names like \(f\) for file and \(e\) for exception are common but less strongly locked to the one interpretation.

So, that's the expanded, tidied-up version of the draft I wrote before doing some reading. I don't remember exactly what I read, but it definitely involved going through the many good answers to this Math.SE question.

The top answer is interestingly different. It also points out the usefulness of compactness in mathematical notation, but instead of emphasising the use of single-character variables as centres of meaning it takes almost the exact opposite approach, thinking of them as abstract symbols where the important thing is that you know how to push them around in the right way. Tokens, not sigils. In this case the single-character name is useful because it removes the distracting details of the thing it represents.

This also seems kind of right to me? I guess this relates to the usual thing in maths, where both intuitive meaning and calculational fluency are important. But it's sort of surprising to me that the single-character variable convention can support both at once.

Notebook

This went pretty well in the first half of the year. I fixed some broken things in my Ghost installation and continued to produce posts at a slowish but steady rate. Looking back my favourites are probably Great big examples, on when a big example is better than a small one, and Haugeland on digitality, on an interesting paper about what makes digital things digital.

Other decent ones: Swallows and Amazons and objects, rectangles bad, Foot massage roller as expansion cue.

Then my interest in the notebook crashed when I restarted the newsletter. I still like this format and want to go back to it, but I need to spin up more writing energy than I currently have.

Newsletter

I suddenly had an urge to start up the old Substack newsletter again. The first three posts get pretty into the weeds on specific physics things I've been thinking about, then the most recent two, on Smolin's The Trouble with Physics and Mermin's Boojums all the way through, are more readable for someone who isn't me.

I'm enjoying writing these, but something is still a bit off with how I'm doing it. Monthly writing is not quite frequent enough to be habit-forming, so I normally sit down at the end of the month and I've forgotten how to do it. On the other hand, monthly is exactly the right schedule for accumulating new things to write about. It would be good if I got into posting on the notebook in between, or something, but haven't found a habit that works yet.

Physics

This is actually going well and I seem to be regaining my interest in a more stable way.

Early on in the year I had a phase of learning about causal inference (not exactly physics, but still goes under this category in my head). This didn't produce anything very concrete apart from a half-baked notebook post, but I did get more intuition for things that confused me before.

Then I was back to my usual qubit phase space stuff. It's slow going but I've had a few new ideas and feel like I'm at least moving forward.

Books

Here's the list of everything I can remember:

• Ransome – Pigeon Post, The Picts and the Martyrs, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea
• Wardale - In Search of Swallows and Amazons
• Newport – Digital Minimalism
• Bhatti et al - Docs for Developers
• Bayles and Orland – Art and Fear
• Price – Unmasking Autism
• Abram – The Spell of the Sensuous
• McCulloch – Because Internet
• Fitzpatrick – Write Useful Books
• Wight – Unsouled, Soulsmith
• Tift – Already Free
• Stratton-Porter – A Girl of the Limberlost
• Enright – Gone-Away Lake, Return to Gone-Away
• Crawford – Shop Class as Soulcraft
• Duane – So You Want to Be a Wizard
• Smolin –The Trouble with Physics
• Bondi – Relativity and Common Sense
• Awbery – Open Awareness
• Hughes – Tom Brown's School Days

and parts of:

• Mermin – Boojums All The Way Through
• Pais – Subtle is the Lord
• Lowes – The Road to Xanadu
• Epstein – Visualizing Relativity
• Kipling – Puck of Pook’s Hill
• Deutsch – The Beginning of Infinity
• Goffman – The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
• McLuhan - Understanding Media

I guess the main themes this year are "reorienting to physics" and "old children's books".

Short version: while I'm on a video call I roll something under my foot. Normally a cheapo massage roller I bought on Amazon, sometimes a lacrosse ball. This is a sensory cue to be aware of something other than the call, and normally if I have that I can expand my awareness to other things too. This generally makes the call go better. Also free foot massage.

That's really all there is to it, but maybe I should also explain why I want to do this in the first place. My default experience of a video call is to get completely locked on the screen so that I don’t take in anything else in the room around me. Unless it’s someone I know very well, I’m normally also running some train of thought like “Aaargh!! I’m talking to a person!! Got to say the right thing and not a stupid thing!! OK, I got through that one, better start worrying about what I’m going to say next!!”

Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t improve the conversation. The verbal loop of anxious nonsense is loud enough that I’m missing a lot of what the other person is saying, and I can’t react very skilfully. And my awareness is contracted enough that the conversation is literally the only thing that’s happening, so there’s nowhere else I can get to that isn’t the loop.

In some way I’m “planning” what I’m going to say next, but it’s not the sort of planning that creates any real freedom. The actual thing I end up saying feels very cramped and overdetermined, and mostly just feels like the least bad option. I’m navigating away from stress rather than towards any real sense of enjoyment. Politeness bot mode.

If I can get any space into this loop, it helps a lot. If I roll something under my foot, then I’m now aware of two things, the sole of my foot and the call. Once I have that I can expand to a wider awareness that has the call in it, but also many other things. And then I sometimes have some actual choice about what I’m going to say! Sometimes l even listen to the other person! Which helps! Who knew.

I don’t know what the prerequisites are for this to work, but there definitely are some because this wouldn’t have worked for me a few years ago. Since then I’ve been doing quite a lot of meditation, in Opening Awareness style, so basically trying to keep my awareness as big as possible. This is slowly making me feel more distributed through my body the rest of the time too (the “get out of your head” cliche is kind of annoying, but fine, certainly less of me is in now my head), and for whatever reason that started in my feet. Because of this I’d already started using awareness of the soles of my feet as an expansion cue in stressful in-person situations. That wasn’t deliberate, it just happened, but then I realised that I could trigger it easily on purpose on a video call by rolling something under my foot.

So, yeah, some weird prerequisites, but potentially useful. If anyone tries this and gets anything out of it I’d be interested to hear.

Also relevant: Michael Ashcroft’s video on How to be natural on camera – by expanding awareness.