Monthnotes February 2025
Every month or so, I share a quick digest of what I've been working on and reading. Here's the latest. More in the series here.
The last few weeks have mostly been about queueing up work for the rest of the year, and wrapping up a few loose ends from last year. I'm working with Conservation International on a large editorial project. I'm prototyping a visualisation/sonification tool for another climate client. I'm working on sound design and sonification for Andy Kirk's upcoming data-driven Seinfeld web extravaganza. And I've got my ongoing work for climate charity Possible and Mojang.
As such, I'm more or less booked up now for the first half of the year. If there might be something you'd like my help with in the second half of the year, now is a good time to reach out.
As trailed in last month's message, I'm in the UK. It's largely as I remember, but it does seem to be a bit colder and damper than in August 2023. Not sure what's happened there.
Looking forward to seeing those of you who reached out - I thiiiink I managed to arrange something with everyone, but if you've not had an answer then let me know and we'll try and get something together.
A few weeks back, Possible released a report that I contributed visuals and layout work to. "Lower Cost & Lower Carbon" is a comparison of two scenarios for the UK's electricity supply. The government's current plan, with lots of nuclear and fossil gas with CCS, and an alternative that ramps up renewables faster. Turns out the latter delivers more energy, at a lower cost, with lower emissions. A textbook no-brainer. Read the whole analysis here.
Hannah Bland
I also worked on a bunch of visuals documenting how the public is not particularly into a third runway at Heathrow, or aviation expansion more generally.
I have been very much enjoying SURFIN' PLEASURES, an album of Scottish/Japanese surf-rock covers of Joy Division songs. Their version of Transmission is particularly good.
Stef Macbeth
One day after the inauguration, Melania and JD Vance pop up right at the front of my Instagram recommended follows 🙃. I think I’m going to go back to basically being read-only on Insta again. Wish I could quit it entirely, but too much of Malmö’s social infrastructure is dependent on Insta posts, so all I can do right now is work to change that in the small ways I can.
A couple of people have also tried to get me to join Bluesky. "It's just like the early days of Twitter," they say. I loved the early days of Twitter, but I don't think my life needs more social media so I'm gonna pass and just tell them to sign up to this newsletter.
My "more swimming" resolution is going well. Friday mornings at 9am. 40 lengths in a 25 metre pool, for a nice round 1,000 metres each week. Usually takes me about 30 minutes. I've done four iterations so far, and enjoyed each one very much. That's the kind of #viral #content that you only get here, that Bluesky is going to be missing out on.
I finally got to watch the Eno documentary, after missing the premiere that I had tickets for last year because my local public transit agency decided to shut down the train line to Copenhagen. One of the few times in my life when I've wished I had a car and a drivers' license.
The doc was good. Not so much that was new to me, but lovely to see him do his thing, and it was well constructed. Unfortunately I have no idea how the generative parts worked, and how the different versions differ from each other, because I could only see it once. Recommended if you're a fan, and recommended if you're not but you like thinking about art and media in weird ways.
A few weeks back I picked up a cheap fifteen-year-old, second-hand pair of Adam A7X monitor speakers. I’ve never really owned good speakers before, and they’re blowing my mind - right now I'm listening to r beny’s Eistla and there’s so much stuff in there that I’ve never heard before (despite having listened lots on good headphones). They’re kinda comically oversized for my desk. But gosh. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.
Connected to the above, metaphorically and literally, I dusted off an old Raspberry Pi 2B from about 10 years ago and turned it into an Airplay receiver, using this handy guide. Everything worked very smoothly, except that I forgot that the Pi I have doesn't include onboard wifi. Luckily I had a spare USB antenna lying around. So my fancy new (old) speakers are now attached to a fancy new (old) low-power DIY home entertainment system, which is all very nice and suitably distracting from the bin fire going on in the world right now.
Gus
Speaking of distractions, two small collaborative creative projects I'm starting to kick off work on:
- A small physical device that plays ambient sonifications of local API data. Weather data, air quality, ISS position, earthquakes, etc.
- A choose-your-own-adventure way to navigate through poetry on the web, where it's possible to get stuck in, and to escape, narrative loops.
The Sonification Awards is right in the middle of the judging phase. We got 82 entries! Now we're figuring out which of them will be awarded as "exceptionally good", using criteria that we put together as a community. The winners will be announced on 20 March in a ceremony in Boston, and you can bet that you'll hear about it here too.
Finally, I'll leave you with Robin Sloan exploring lots of future scenarios for how the LLM/AI revolution plays out to try to answer the question: "Is it okay?" The one major missing piece from it, for me, is the energy cost. What if we get super science, but we can't take advantage of it because we're too busy sheltering from super storms?
That's it for February. Short month. See you in March.