Campfire

Unable to install b-ber. I don’t really understand how the terminal is operated. I mimic the commands listed - and am left bewildered by anything that deviates.

I dumped the last copy of A Moire into a new .md and began shaping it into the format.

I created a styleguide doc to note key styles and methods. These might be adapted if I get b-ber or something similar working.

Returning to something old is always strange. I thought I’d finished with it. But maybe because no one has read it yet, it hasn’t finished with me.

That’s all this is. A way of publishing the things I’ve written down, that haven’t found a home.

There’s an obstinacy to the word. The need to give it air.

Editing is writing.

Writing is reading.

It creates a practice of writing and thinking that is easy to let fall away. Outside of the institutions, you have to invent a framework.

Loiter in the libraries, repositories and folders where the texts slip out. Seep through the paywall. Whatever context they benefited from is stripped back to the files either side of it.

The mercy of OCR.

Tenses change freely in these fictions. A steady shifting, changing narration.

It is time travel.

It is a gift to myself. A private space.

Returning - passing back.

Writing out. Away from the local. A digital wandering.

I keep the trails clear. Moving through the network. Between nodes. Always the vector.

A pass is made. Decisions are made over the use of punctuation, the layout of dialogue, that exist on top of or around the language itself. These parts are the ornamentation, the suggestion to the reader of timing and pace.

The typographical ticks that are laid bare in reading. Given little thought in writing.

A strategy towards selective openness. Chance encounters served up by algorithmic participation in a field of networks - the price of this is chaotic, rhizomatic, fractal, surface thinking. Declare the branches made, tended, that reach out of these fields are now resilient enough. They will more frequently place new knowledge on my screen. They will also receive and react to my own transmissions.

A reckoning with frustration, boredom, disappointment. Failure to communicate. Failure to be heard.

Wondering what the older works were about. Or are about now. At a distance of forgetfulness. They have shifted gently as I slipped out of their container. No longer a convincing stand-in for the protagonists.

Sections bleed together. The bruised vessels, bloom.

Distracted moments set into sequence appear different, voiced by a body, given a name and ocassionally reacted to.

The importance of the terrain. A fascination from the beginning.

Naiive conversations. Questionable innocence. Lazy ignorance. Sheltered dreams.

Odd that I wrote about these places. Didn’t imagine things further away.

The fictions lay atop the real like shimmering webs.

Each text requires splitting. Wherever possible, the final structure implied within the file structure. It is time to make decisions on the additional snippets of information that will occompany the text.

I’m quickly discovering additional steps and moments of formatting, required in the initial blocks, to make Pandoc create something usable within Sigil.

A balance between processes and processing.

Sections should end with a space to avoid the next running in and losing formatting.

Labryrinth of texts dancing.

The static that clings to a passing body.

After the commit.
Nothing.

We’ve been here before.

Writing forward.

The pages updated in pieces offline and uploaded as bulk revisions.
Versioning.

Always outside.

A notebook discarded. Pages yellowed in the sunlight.

Thinking about what’s next.
Thinking about sticking to the plan.

Life shifts, eddies and whorls.
A pause, noticed.

Other libraries.
Other packets.
Other blobs.

The information is stored as a blob.
It congeals.
It bubbles.

I must have wandered away from the fire for a while.
Following the sounds of other voices in the trees.

I’ve found some others now, out there/here, like me/you/us.

The image is the text caught in a moment.

Strands stretching between-

The material oscillation.

Humans oscillating, a breath in, a breath out.

The erasure of the in-between.

Linkrot.

I'm assembling thoughts - drawing lines between things under the elaborate guise of research. I'm an interloper. An interferer. Simply a witness. Someone who happened to be there. Extra-disciplinary hauntings.

I develop codes like a nervous tic.

Encoding the world and whatever passes between It and I.

I.e. to denote a day that is free of the office job - I now write OOO set to all-day. Out Of Office with an obvious nod to Object Oriented Ontology. Which at this point is framed more as a challenge to myself to remember something of what I read some time ago.

The process of writing markup feels useful as an exercise, and retains a proximity that is at danger of being lost - if, the processes used to move from markdown to markup are not clear, open, flexible, mutable.

So- the need is to work in a way that supports that.

The archive is broken open.

A drawer hanging.

Documents spill, disordered.

I'm also faced with the challenge of moving the things from their format to a new format.

Connected to this is a need to move to something that supports versions. Again, at the outset the brittle state of the single .html file appeared useful. However - as things change and develop it begins to be more restrictive.

Reading escape.

Absurd performance of study - an excuse to be searching, to be listening, to be in a room.

I carry a library, forgetful.

Activist tools must be active.