BREYDON’s old news
Updated February 2022.
1. Latest
I would like to serve material over the amiable Gemini protocol and perhaps Gopher. Some of the leggier patches of my personal website are now separated into smaller chunks, ready for sharing the same pieces across various realms, for the minimalist and maximalist alike. Here’s to a flourishing gemini capsule in 2022!
Breaking with over two decades of pecking out handcrafted H.T.M.L, the heart of the site/capsule‐/hole‐/pamphlet‐to‐be is now one reasonably elegant Org file. The sunnier styling of 2021 remains to be adapted to this new system, as regular readers will probably have noticed. The low‐fuss is having a refreshing effect on me — how about you? Maybe you would like the plainness to stay?
I have been doing all this reconstructing on a pretty versatile pocket computer I am setting up. I’m also exploring the idea of a smartwatch (the Pine64 PineTime) for housing littler everyday assistive tools.
Postponing a physiological directive to relearn guitar in the opposite handedness to the one I started in and to move to upright bass, I retuned my guitar strings to major third intervals from the utterly rampant harmonic framework of twelve equal divisions of pitch for every two times a reference frequency (let’s say “12edope2”) and tried horizontal fretless bass when my body would allow. The guitar tuned in major thirds is a modestly effective distraction from scheming about xentonality, just intonation, and rhythm. The fretless tantalisation: not so much!
Further teasing myself, I designed a skatable, danceable, compact urban cruiser of a daychair, which I am looking forward to learning from, once it has approval to be built.
Though still fairly stuck, where possible I slip outdoors to weed, to mulch, and to lure garden beds across lawns. It rends holes at my knees and eventually into my frequently exposed socks. In recent months, I have finally exercised what was a wistful interest in visible mending on several actual garments.
2. March 2021
Previously under the heading of “News Since Mid–Late 2020”.
2.1. Personally
Lately, life here has been dominated by dealings with the National Disability Insurance Scheme. In my free time, I am building up an annotated set of machine stenography dictionaries for everyday communication, and trying to help my body to work okay.
Beginning to, in a sense, codify my idiolect has made for a vigorous period of intimately interrogating imperialist lexis and facing up to my unwitting linguistic role in legitimising colonialism. Listening, collecting, dismantling and recurating is intense work — at times tedious, with which I may never get tremendously far — but phenomenal in effect… if only on my own critical thought and my physical capacity for moving through language in a generally legible manner.
Sometimes one’s first read of a particular book is such a special experience, it takes savouring to extremes. It took me months to close Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. Many years in, I have never even finished Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Now, I am crawling — figuratively and literally — through Emily Coates and Sarah Demer’s Physics and Dance.
2.2. Publicly
Shared under To Locomote is a condensed assemblage of some of my hard‐earned, far‐too‐much wheelchair knowledge. I hope you, your clients, or your loved‐ones can benefit!
Some old comics turned up recently: AFTER I UNDERSHARED AND YOU OVERTOOK and FLUID DYNAMICS. For the latter, I have written you some historical context and recommended several pieces of exceptional further reading and listening.
After a few years of its magazine look, this page adopts a plainer format, that it will skip more lightly across the internet to you. More pages are joining in, as they sprout updated content.
A whole new section has sprung up: on computing. Trace a journey from weary technambivalence, to life-changing research waiting in the wings, over coming months in ’Puting.
The fifth issue of thoughtful, outdoorsy favourite, Queer Out Here is here… out… queer. I tickle a goat (at the goat’s request) and interview a pig, partway through Side A.
3. July 2021
Writing electronically is becoming more realistic a prospect, in more scenarios.
My physical access to the existing technology has improved.
The set of annotated stennie dictionaries I have been developing, littoral, is growing sufficient lexicon and systematic features to function (slowly) for real texts. Littoral’s initial grammatical framework has got me through some urgent exchanges. Early trials of methodical compilation helped form my approaches to merging affixes, assigning briefs, and distinguishing between homophones. Now, I am bulking its English vocab up on academic literature as well.
In taking stenographed notes to boost baby‐littoral’s relevance, I’ve been raptly distracted by B. Ajani Brannum’s BAROT series, “combining tarot, performance criticism, and cultural somatics”.
Greetings also from the middles of Mullumbimby, by Melissa Lucashenko; Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance, by Phil Jamison; Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke; and the inaugral issue of kindling & sage, edited by Natalia García.
I am thinking of picking through the titles referenced in Kehinde Andrews’ The New Age of Empire: How Racism & Colonialism Still Rule the World, a rickety but compelling lecture, which excluded huge and pertinent questions while citing pivotal works on them!
Still stranded indoors without a daychair, I’ve been having moments of whizzing through chapters of books, slogging through podcasts, or dagging around with electronic flashcards.
I have fallen into low‐key study of language‐in‐its‐own‐right again. Perhaps the most surprisingly transformative has been becoming that bit better acquainted with jōyō kanji, through Philippe Daouadi’s script‐drilling application, Kakugo. Despite the software for easy codeswitching not yet being written, (at least in terms of overall coverage) even stark gulfs between language variants a set of machine stenography dictionaries can simply creep across.
The reprieve on my hands that steno facilities have offered has allowed me to get back into (small spurts of) drawing, as well. I joined a zine club online. It’s been lovely!