STILL, IT’S SO MUCH CLEARER [550]

When a film about a horror film confronts you with the position that intellectual explanation and discussion get in the way of expressing emotion, presenting it both as a cinematic theme and as a real-life truth, that film is going to stay with you for a while. For that reason, expect spoilers as I recover from watching Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”.

There is a scene past the half-way point of this film where Kris Williams, played by Hannah Einbinder, a queer filmmaker hired to reboot a problematic slasher film franchise, “Camp Miasma”, becomes very emotional during a call with executives at describing her new vision of the story. This does not go over well with people that just wanted a revival of a dormant intellectual property with “woke” credentials and a queer voice to paper over the cracks, and you feel her idea has been dismissed as much for her as its merit.

By this point, reboots of slasher films have been shown to be an intellectual exercise, finding ways to repackage what has been as mindless violence or tired tropes: “Camp Miasma” had one in the 2000s, alongside “Halloween”, “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, the latter having already been given the postmodern, metatextual treatment in 1993 with “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”, starring the franchise’s original “final girl” Heather Langenkamp as her real-life self. I don’t remember the “Scream” and “Scary Movie” franchises being mentioned, but they hardly needed to be. The opening titles of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” place its fictional franchise as much a part of cultural landscape as the others, through VHS tapes, posters and merchandise to reviews and news articles depicting its decline and reboots, while positioning it as a mirror to “Friday the 13th”, down to using the same font for its title.

The call with executives followed Kris having travelled to meet Billy Presley — played by Gillian Anderson, who can do no wrong —who was the “final girl” in the original 1980 “Camp Miasma” film, never acted again, and has since bought the real-life camp used by the production as their home. Already compared to Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard” before Kris meets her, Billy is a much happier and well-adjusted person than given reason to expect, especially as she contends with Kris’s intellectual positioning of both “Camp Miasma” and of her own life: Kris describes ­herself as both polyamorous and in a consensual throuple, to which Billy immediately assesses that Kris does not sound happy about that arrangement.

Breaking through layers of emotional repression is at the heart of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”. Billy is an artist, but her works are of concentric squares, mirroring the box on the head of the franchise’s slasher villain. As Billy and Kris watch the film together, Billy forcefully draws the same arrangement.  A sign already seen among the other artworks reads along the lines of, “if it becomes too much, you can switch it off”, and the film is switched off, albeit by a power cut. Billy says that the sex scene in the film in which she participated turned into a sexual assault, something she overcame by imagining the killer watching them, then killing them after climax. Kris later admits she imagines being pursued and killed as what enables them to do the same, put down to having seen the film at too young an age. 

The slasher villain of “Camp Miasma” is named “Little Death” – la petite mort. Once a child at the camp marked out by their changing of gender expression each day, rendered into a boogeyman through successive campfire stories, they were killed and thrown in the lake, coming back to take revenge – the “Sleepaway Camp” series is also referenced, as are Felissa Rose and Pamela Springsteen, both actresses that portrayed the transgender killer Angela Baker in that film, a character similarly singled out as “other” through the emotional reaction of the other characters, and perhaps the intellectual explanation of the filmmakers. The feeling I got was that “Little Death” was more complete as a person, but in a way too unconventional to be allowed to live.

Upon Billy first meeting Kris, Billy tells her that “there is a hole at the bottom of the lake, where the movies come from...”, which is then laughed off as a joke. By the end, this is true: “Little Death” really does live at the bottom of the lake, in a room decorated like a video rental shop, ready to come to the surface and take revenge, the climax of the “final girl” delivering a VHS tape of the latest instalment in the franchise to their shop-room. “Little Death” is the filmmaker, the arbiter, and we are the surreal fodder, to be killed off at a rate of one every 7-8 minutes, if “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”, is anything to go by – I did feel the gore shown was more than would have been allowed in 1980. After breaking through layers of repression with Billy, Kris delivers that latest instalment through the killing of what frustrates them, the victims being the executives, agents and lovers that have inexplicably arrived to find them. The title of the new film is the one we have been watching.

And yet, the following morning, Kris and Billy wake up – covered in blood, the literal spear of “Little Death” having been removed from them both, but it’s a new day, and they are full of life. They go to the local store to stock up on more sweets and candies, a recurring motif through the film that I took to be as much of an enjoyment of “empty calories” as the real-life slasher films being parodied here, but they talk about them with such joy and knowledge, just like an audience of slasher films would.

There is a question in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation”: “What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” I feel like I have watched one answer to that question. This film completes Jane Schoenbrun’s “screen trilogy”, begum with “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021), about a video game, and “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024), based around a TV show. I have yet to see the first of these films, but we are drawn “through the looking glass” in this latest film just as with “I Saw the TV Glow”, the film grain and dust of film entering “real life”.

Schoenbrun and their team do as good a job of making “Camp Miasma” a “real” franchise as is done with the teen drama “The Pink Opaque” in “I Saw the TV Glow”, playing with our idea of nostalgia – we recognise its footprint, and we acknowledge that the constant reinvention of that nostalgia is not new either, shifting our memory and interpretation of it. Indeed, Schoenbrun was apparently asked about rebooting the “Leprechaun” horror franchise, although I perceived the problems with executives coming from A24, the production company that funded “I Saw the TV Glow”, turning down this film, leading to its eventual funding by the British producer (and streaming service) Mubi. When their novel “Public Access Afterworld” is published in October 2026, continuing the same themes of identity and self-discovery, I will most likely be reading that too.

I don’t know if this will make me want to watch a 1980s slasher film, as I rarely have before now, but they will allow me to understand why they persisted, and still endure.

I SEE A KEY ON THE GROUND [549]

“If you’re not using your phone, put it in your pocket,” is what I should have told myself, as I left the building, tipping through the exit, and launching my device in an overarm throw into the car park. The protective glass I put over the screen wasn’t going to help anything, as the face landed face down. 

 

A freak accident caused by not thinking in the moment smashed the screen of my phone, and my reliance on the device meant I could only see the cracks, the black mirror reflecting someone declaring themselves unlucky in the moment. My only fortune is that only the surface cracked, the screen itself remaining functional – I could still use it to catch the bus, and sign into programs at work – but green and purple lines would make themselves known, perhaps exacerbated by taking the phone out of my pocket and putting it back.

 

I would book a repair of my phone on the day of the incident, but that was set for Saturday – it was still Tuesday. On Wednesday, as the first few lines appeared, I realised I would need to cradle my device in my hands as I walked, the exact opposite of what I should be doing in order to prevent any further damage, because who would ever keep a spare smartphone at home for situations like this? This keeping myself aware of my phone’s new-found fragility also bled through to the preparations for its repair. 

 

In short, if you do not have a plan for backing up your data, find one, and find it now. I was faced with the advice to complete a backup, because the diagnostic processes to be run on my phone may result in data loss, and following multiple transfers of data from one phone to another over the years, a sidestep had never been needed before now. Perhaps that was one level of trust too far in the range of phones I prefer.

 

With my phone made by the manufacturer of my desktop computer, it would be very easy to back one up to the other – as well as their making stronger phones that have bouncier screens – but when they both have the same 256 GB storage capacity, that option is rendered impossible. I ultimately had to move some items to other devices, like thousands of unsorted photographs and screenshots that I will get to eventually, while paying for cloud storage to hold vital items like phone messages and contacts, and ultimately delete episodes of podcasts that were saved, deciding that they can be downloaded again if I need them later – they won’t become “lost media” if I don’t have direct access to them for a while.

 

Fortunately, the replacement of my screen, while costly, was performed without my hitch, and no data was lot. The manufacturer must warn of data loss because they are ultimately not responsible for your data, the same way that manuals for calculators contain disclaimers confirming they are not responsible for the answers generated by their machines. The user must know their answer has been calculated correctly, and the user must look after their data – I have just realised that may apply to the cloud storage as well.

 

In all, I spent under two hours without my phone, an experience that cannot now generate that level of anxiety again, through having been experienced once. Losing your phone is now like losing your keys, because that is the level of security and importance now expected by this Swiss army knife of devices, a level of convergence that risks becoming unhelpful. It may now be more useful to spread some use requirements across separate devices – your keys cannot be your camera, or your watch, or your calculator. Your clothes may need bigger pockets in future.

WHEREVER THERE'S A HANG UP [548]

Art by Steve Ditko from "The Amazing Spider-Man" #5 (1963)

I will freely admit ignorance to anything that isn’t important so, to that end, I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” was, despite having been a reader of comic books for over twenty years.

This apparent revelation came about due to the release of the new film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, the fourth film in the franchise with Tom Holland in the title role, the ninth made by Sony under Columbia Pictures and officially the thirty-eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

I have read the Spider-Man stories I want to read, and the same would go for Marvel Comics as a whole. I am more a fan of DC Comics, but I haven’t really watched their films either for the same reason. Comics are already their own form of visual storytelling, and don’t have to become storyboards for another medium, even if you are trying to increase exposure to the characters and their stories.

Despite all this, it appears I hadn’t been reading the Spider-Man stories closely enough. I have mostly read the 1960s and 70s run of “The Amazing Spider-Man”, mostly written or co-plotted by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Marv Wolfman among others, plus some of the 2000s run from J Michael Straczynski. However, they are Marvel comics, led by action, and Spider-Man is a character that demands to be drawn dynamically, as demonstrated by co-creator Steve Ditko to John Romita, both senior and junior, to Ross Andru and Sal Buscema’s run on the companion book “The Spectacular Spider-Man” in the 1980s. All the posing, the composition of frames, the economy of the storytelling as average page counts for the main story declined across the industry during the 1970s, but I should have been paying more attention to some wavy lines.

The story apparently goes that, when reviewing the pencilled artwork for the first issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” Stan Lee, in his other capacity as editor, had asked Steve Ditko how Spider-Man knew the story’s villain, the Chameleon, was in the same room as them. Ditko drew lines around the hero’s head, explaining that Spider-Man had “spider senses”, much like a bat can use echolocation. Similar lines were drawn around the character, both as Spider-Man and as Peter Parker, in earlier scenes to add credence to the device.

Now, what I had apparently done was think of these lines as acting like a visual approximation of being startled, like you had just been woken up to the presence of something. You don’t see speed lines or the energy of a “Kirby Krackle” in real life either, so I thought this was just the way the story depicted being startled. Upon realising my omission, the next thing is whether “Spidey Sense” – I am too self-effacing to call Spider-Man “Spidey” – is a “sixth sense” or some sort of precognition, and depending on its use in a particular story, the answer is yes, it is.

If it hadn’t been for two other people being in the same room as me when I said I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” really was, I would have been given no more reason to think about it. Yes, superheroes lead our current folk tales, or at least those from the United States, but no, not everyone knows these characters inside out. I am still more of a reader of Daredevil, the only Marvel Comics character whose book I pick up each month, and to be honest, his powers are easier to remember: the toxic incident this time around made him blind, but heightened his other senses, so anything about strength is down to training. As far as I know, that’s it.

LET'S RUN OR IT'S SURE TO CHASE US DOWN [547]

The Toyota Corolla is the biggest selling car in history, but I had to remind myself of this because, in its twelve generations over the last sixty years the car is, if not boring, then ubiquitous enough to blend into the urban background. I can reliably see three of them within five minutes of leaving the house one early Sunday morning, namely the one which I posted this article, one of which was a taxi. If a police car had passed me, that would likely be a Corolla too. “The car in front is a Toyota” was the company’s advertising tagline in the 1990s, but is more often true now.

I have noticed the wedge shape of the Corolla estate more recently as it has become more seen in the UK as a police car and taxi. The “Police Authority Specification Corolla”, only available as an estate, appeared in 2024 with a 1.8 or 2-litre hybrid petrol engine, and fully kitted out for police use by Toyota themselves, rather than by the police constabulary themselves or an intermediary, which I though had been the case to now.

Special rates are also offered for the Corolla estate, in a “Sports Icon” trim level, through Toyota’s fleet and business portal, which appears to be the source of the prevalent Corolla taxi. I have twice been in the back of these, at either end of trips to and from an airport, and they are perfectly serviceable as a taxi for hire, with enough rear room for four suitcases, although I do not agree that it can sit three people in the back. A “Corolla Commercial” is also sold on Toyota’s website, the back seats of the estate removed to install a flat floor, the remaining rear doors and windows not stopping them from describing it as a van.

The Toyota Corolla appears to be the only estate car still made in Britain, at Toyota’s UK manufacturing plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, with engines made in another Toyota factory in North Wales. All Corolla 5-door hatchbacks and estates sold in Europe are made in the UK, and while a slightly smaller Japan-only version of the estate is made and sold there, it is based on the European design. From 2020 to 2025, the estate was branded as a Suzuki Swace, under a five-year licensing deal Suzuki made with Toyota that seems only to have changed the badging, as it was one of my airport taxis – I guess it filled a need for Suzuki at the time.

Estate cars – or station wagons, if you must – are not endangered as a category of car, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) proving the versatility of their form. But the shift towards SUVs by car companies has reduced the availability of “regular” cars that used to form fleets of company cars, taxis and police cars. The Ford Focus and Mondeo have ended production in Europe, the Volkswagen Golf is only sold as a hatchback, but the Vauxhall/Opel Astra continues to hold on, their prices are undercut by other manufacturers, including VW’s own Skoda and Seat, and by Toyota.

I could have easily written this article about Skoda, although their use as a service car is split: the Octavia, similar in size to the Corolla, is also often used as a taxi in the UK, the result of good word of mouth and competitive deals, but the next car up in size, the wonderfully named Skoda Superb, is more often used by the police on motorway patrols, most likely replacing the Volvo V90, another discontinued estate car. Both cars make good use of parent company Volkswagen’s parts bin and service network, which also readies their models for police use, but my guess is that, as the inventors of “just-in-time” manufacturing that saves on storage expenses through having parts ready only at the right moment, Toyota is passing on value in other ways.

DON’T ANSWER ME, DON’T BREAK THE SILENCE [546]

“Why would I ask a computer how to do anything?” My family could argue I do this all the time, especially if something piques my interest – I am not looking up information to prove what one of them said is correct, it is to find a citable source if I make use of it here later.

Asking for information, rather than just searching keywords, used to be the preserve of the search engine Ask Jeeves, later known as Ask.com, which accepted queries in natural language, the site picking the key words from the sentence. I did not know that Ask.com, since 2010 just an aggregator of results from other search engines, had only closed on 1st May 2026 – Jeeves had largely been dispatched with twenty years before.

If I want to look for something online, I prefer to be shown it. I certainly don’t need the computer to interpret it for me, for that will be my job. Research skills are far more than deciding whether certain words have been used lead to the correct answer, it is deciding whether a whole source is even relevant to begin with, something a computer cannot do without human input. 

I am veering back into feeing crotchety about A.I., despite previously pronouncing myself bored of talking about it. But the wagon will keep going until all resources have been devoured, from concerns about data centres affecting water supplies, to the manufacturing of Random Access Memory (RAM) chips being prioritised towards equipping these centres at the expense of consumer products, an issue that won’t see demand being balanced by supply until 2027-28.

What concerns me is that the increased cost of computers, smartphones, TV streaming boxes and so on will not come down when RAM chips become more readily available. More RAM will still be needed than before if the expectation of these devices is to run A.I. programs locally, instead of acting as a terminal to send and receive results from a data centre. The gallop towards A.I.-centric services will irrevocably change the expectations of the devices we buy – I say this as someone who has never turned on “Apple Intelligence” on my iPhone 17, leaving me with a fast phone with a decent amount of RAM.

I am slowly realising is that the interface most often presented by A.I. programs, namely just asking your device to do something, could become the expected way to interact with it. Forget your keyboard, mouse, or your fingers on the screen, for the microphone may soon be all you need.

I already ended a previous article by saying, “I don’t know what point I want to make, as this is my reacting to something that doesn’t sound right, but what helps others to work changes how I would work, so therefore, I’m not doing it.” However, I wrote this in 2020 about preferring to use a keyboard when writing on a tablet computer, because my “daily driver” at that point was an iPad. That is just how I work, as trying to type on a tablet screen will become uncomfortable – writing longhand with pen and ink is preferable.

But I could never dictate my work into a computer, or ask it to edit my work. I might say a sentence in my own head before typing it, but attempting to say it out loud before typing it is just anathema to me. This may not have been the case when, in previous decades, the device of choice would have been a human secretary: the level of mutual understanding in talking to someone is much easier than talking at something that, no matter what you are sold, will not think.

I know I shouldn’t be so worried. I am using my computer for “productivity” purposes, not something general. People would rather talk to something if it feels enough like talking to someone, and if this is presented as a preference over choosing apps from a screen, or filling in details yourself, then ease of use will win every time. There is every possibility that Microsoft Copilot, introduced as an element of Windows, could supplant Windows altogether. What I want a computer for, as someone who retains a subscription to use a word processor program – Microsoft Word, like most other people – is a “specialty” case, in comparison to general consumer computer use. I just resent having to pay more for wanting that.

WE SHOULD BE ON BY NOW [545]

The offending item...

Sometimes, rabbit holes lead to nowhere.

The major appeal of the BBC’s “Antiques Roadshow”, for me, has been the level of detail provided by its experts about the featured items, both about their origin and place in history. Their monetary valuation is inconsequential – if the sentimental value is higher, it’s just a number.

But one item left me perplexed. In an episode recorded at Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, first broadcast in May 2025, expert Adam Schoon shows three brass items to host Fiona Bruce, inviting her and the gathered crowd to guess their use. The largest item is a clock dial, with one large hand, but instead of a standard twelve-hour face, this dial counts to sixteen. The engraved “P” on the face links to an either/or guess: was this dial used to record the number of partridges dispatched by a shooting party? Or is it an early 19^th century dial used to display the departure time of a stagecoach to prospective passengers? Why a 16-hour dial? Schoon said, “it didn’t go all night”, so therefore must only show the hours at which that specific stagecoach would leave.

That was all the information given, apart from confirming it was a stagecoach departure clock - apparently partridges could be killed in higher numbers. The clock dial is intricately engraved with a pattern between the dials, but they do not show increments of an hour – you can only indicate the “top” of each hour, from 1 to 16.

But this just refused to make sense to me. Another brass item shown in this guessing game was an Elizabethan (16^thcentury) laundry tally, used to count various items in and out of the laundry process, but this is also done using ten dials that count to 12, like a regular clock. Remember that counting to twelve was more prevalent until decimalisation in the UK – twelve pennies make a shilling, twelve ounces in one troy pound, twelve inches make one foot. Until the advent of computing, I can’t think of a previous need for a hexadecimal counting system, at least in my part of the world.

Describing the time using a twenty-hour hour clock, from 00:00 to 23:59, also only gained more widespread use in the 20^th century, even if clocks with 24-hour faces had existed for centuries before. Could it be that, wherever this clock came from, the only possible departure times were between 01:00 and 16:00? Without being told where it was displayed, I can never know.

Searching any of this information online proved to be a dead end. Searching “16-hour stagecoach clock” only confirmed that the Royal Mail stagecoach from Bristol to London eventually reduced its time to just sixteen hours before steam trains took over from then, accelerating the journey time even further. “Stagecoach clocks” only reveal pictures of similar brass clocks that show standard twelve-hour faces, or ornamental clocks being drawn by ornamental horses, while “carriage clock” creates a minefield: am I looking for a departure display clock, or a hand-held watch that is buffered by metal or wood to prevent its mechanism from being knocked during transit in a stagecoach, or did I want one of those little ornamental carriage clocks that your grandmother had on her mantlepiece?

Even worse as a search term is “stagecoach”: since the deregulation and privatisation of bus services in the UK in the 1980s, the Stagecoach Group has become one of the largest bus operators, and any search for information about stagecoaches from any period in history, or even the 1939 western film “Stagecoach”, will have to try to exclude services that are available right now.

What I am left with here is either a mystery, or nothing at all. It may be just a quirk that this clock face, made to display very particular times in a very particular location, made its way onto television, and left me feeling a little too intrigued... So the coach wouldn’t depart after 4pm, but it could leave at 1am...?

ARE WE NOT MEN? WELL, ARE WE? [544]

The full story of my vertiginous journey into the music of Devo will be told in full detail one day, but until then, an infamously mythologised moment in the group’s history was finally unleashed in full on Friday 19th June 2026, and I was of course ready – I had it on pre-order since the end of March.

“Nitrous Nightmare” is a double-vinyl album (or double-CD, in my case) of one of Devo’s first few live performances, on 31st October 1975 at a private Halloween party in support of the jazz and avant-garde artist Sun Ra, recorded by them to a four-track reel-to-reel tape. Accounts of this event are of Devo’s setlist running so long, having refused to stop playing, that the audience became openly hostile, threatening the group, with their instruments finally being unplugged for them. Another account was Devo overran so much that Sun Ra would never get to perform, and that a rendition of their signature song “Jocko Homo” approached half an hour in length.

Some of this performance appeared in 1990 on “The Mongoloid Years”, a compilation of early live recordings, but “Nitrous Nightmare” is, as far as I know, the entire extant recording of the set, all one hour and twenty-two minutes of it. The British label Futurismo have given this release the full treatment of photographs, artwork and Halloween imagery, collaged together in a sickly green and yellow, with secondary oranges and pinks.

The title “Nitrous Nightmare” was chosen for this release by Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, as nitrous oxide turned out to be a major ingredient of the evening for the audience, along with alcohol and other drugs, and store-bought Halloween costumes. For their part, dressed in grey overalls, blue hard hats and face masks, Devo appeared as normal. Mark Mothersbaugh as “Booji Boy” on keyboards is the enduring character from a line-up where all then-four members adopted personas: Gerald Casale as “Chinaman” on bass, Bob Mothersbaugh as “Clown” on guitar, and Jim Mothersbaugh as “Jungle Jim” on self-made electronic drums. 

With fifty years of mythologising now over, it is time to listen. The recording wobbles into life with the one “cover” Devo would perform that evening, as Bob Mothersbaugh sings Mark’s reworking of “Secret Agent Man”, followed by two more songs before Casale calls for a DJ to come to the stage, seemingly as a way to seal approval for the group to continue playing: “I know everyone’s looking at their programme right now... there’s a change in the programme... after that introduction, Murray reminded us that we’d better do it now”. That song, “Buttered Beauties”, is one of the initial “Hardcore” Devo songs that would not make it to later albums, although “Secret Agent Man”, “Smart Patrol” and “Auto Modown” soon will.

The Devo sound here is bluesier, rockier and noticeably slower, led by Casale’s bass and Bob Mothersbaugh’s guitar, while Mark Mothersbaugh’s punctuating keyboard sounds feel like a starting point with no tradition before it, although I still think the effect played in “Jocko Homo” sounds like a tiger. Jim Mothersbaugh’s electronic drums are interesting: while they do not match the force and drive that Alan Myers would later produce for Devo with a regular drum kit, you remind yourself that you normally hear electronic beats like these when they are regimentally programmed, not played manually like they are here. It is a tribute to Jim Mothersbaugh that his skill as a drummer is not overshadowed by his having built the kit.

The audience is not heard all that much on the recording up to now, with distant clapping, whistles and the odd comment. It sounds like the evening is running well enough until Casale, commenting on whether they have cleared the auditorium, says that “you just can’t take it... OK, here’s a man song, no Booji Boys”. To that end, the first public performance of “Jocko Homo” turns into eleven minutes of goading the audience. I remember the first time I heard the album version, thinking “oh, come on” upon hearing “we must repeat” after enduring “are we not men / we are Devo” sixteen times in a row. This time, I know what is going on: keep asking “are we not men?” until you pierce the surface of those who think they can say “no”. The moment one of the audience yells, “you’re not men, you’re fucking assholes”, the song then becomes, “is he not a man?” and “they are not men”. The sheer length of this version of “Jocko Homo”, which doesn’t yet include the middle section of “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it”, will begin to grate, until you laugh at how irritated you became. This is now my favourite version of the song, fully appreciating why “we must repeat”.

From then, you can hear the audience deteriorating, scandalised at their tastes being confronted, the sounds of beer cans hitting the stage. Devo’s answer? “We came here to observe your hatred.” After three more songs, proving they could rock as well as anyone – notably, the synth melody intro to “Chango” would be reused in 1988 for the song “Plain Truth”, on the “Total Devo” album – the question “want anymore?” ends the recording – nothing sudden action, and no popping sounds of plugs being pulled. Devo apparently decamped to a fish restaurant across the road for dinner, returning in their regular clothes to watch Sun Ra, no-one realising who they were.

For what I have heard about how badly this performance apparently went, “Nitrous Nightmare” was a rather good listen. If you have listened to Devo’s older pre-1978 material, recorded mostly in the seclusion of a basement, hearing them being performed in such a confrontational manner, with the audience reacting entirely as expected, is fascinating. You imagine the disparaging voices belonged to people who left before the end, satisfied they had maintained order, provided they were still able to think clearly. Other groups have been called worse, and had larger things thrown at them, but Devo made people look, then look again.

Gerald Casale’s liner notes for this release are much more extensive than those he gave to re-releases of the albums “Total Devo” and “Smooth Noodle Maps”, and read like it could be turned into a theatre or film script at a moment’s notice. I guess you had to be there, but if you did, the adrenaline worked better than the laughing gas could.

To clear up some inaccuracies I found in the notes, it was the album-oriented rock radio station WMMS-FM that held the private party at WHK Auditorium (now known as the Agora Theater & Ballroom) in Cleveland, Ohio, from which the radio station operated alongside the medium-wave WHK, then operating a hybrid country-talk format. Seemingly lining up with the “de-evolution” mindset, WMMS introduced “The Buzzard” as its mascot the previous year, a “scavenger” whose existence commented on the economic decline of its own city. 

The DJ who comes to the stage after the opening songs, yelling “it’s Friday” and “you gotta go low with Devo!” is not “Murray the K” Kaufman, as implied in the liner notes. It is really the WMMS-FM DJ Murray Saul, who yelled “it’s Friday” in the same guttural way on his radio show – I guess “Murray the K” was a much less annoying Murray to remember. Murray Saul does not have a Wikipedia page, but “Murray the K”, who during the 1960s insited upon calling himself “the fifth Beatle”, does.

This Devo line-up was preserved in their later short film “The Truth About De-Evolution”, before Alan Myers joined as drummer, and Gerald Casale’s brother Bob joined on rhythm guitar, the “Bob 2” to the lead guitar of “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh. Jim Mothersbaugh left Devo to continue in electronic engineering, joining the Roland Corporation during the 1980s to help develop the MIDI technology standard that allowed musical instruments to speak to each other, something Devo had been able to benefit from for some time.

I only discovered Bad Company was a British band while writing this article, and I still cannot name any of their songs. Their first album was recorded in a former workhouse in Hampshire. 

IT’S NICE TO BE ALIVE [543]

Having spent as long as I had last time talking about the 2003 anime version of the “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World” series of novels, the following is proof that I was apparently not done. To be more specific, you would have thought, for as much of a fan of Devo as I have proved, I would have mentioned their song “Beautiful World”.

One of Devo's very best pieces, remaining a persistently perfect closer to their concerts, “Beautiful World” is ironic, sardonic and angry, and I love it more now than ever. Having last time considered my sense of place, I realised how quick some people are to define that place without me, and what a “wonderful place” they make it. I never quite understood when Gerald Casale sang of “the way they show they care”, and especially “the way they comb their hair”, but I feel it now. Of course, the payoff of this being a beautiful world “for you” is that “it’s not for me” but, to tie this back to “Kino’s Journey”, witnessing the world at its worst makes encountering the best of it feel that much sweeter.

One sentence I should have included last time when discussing the “Land of Prophecies” was when one character tells Kino why a proclamation is happening: “The book is prophecy because the priest says the book says that it is.” I appreciate how clunky that line sounds, each clause serving to halve the credibility of the prophecy, if that ever existed for a neutral bystander.

Kino’s use of male pronouns in the light novels was something I carried over in discussing the anime, even though the novels established this information after the anime was completed. However, a follow-up half-hour film was produced in 2005, “Life Goes On”, that depicts how a runaway girl, from a country that was about to dispose of her, becomes a traveller. Only since completing my initial research did I find a copy of this film that included English subtitles, and I am happy I did: this is a story of someone learning how to become a different person, one for a different world, because they must.

But a crucial scene happens as Kino prepares to go to sleep, getting used to a name that was not their own. “Kino. Sometimes it still doesn’t feel like it’s my name. I am Kino... I guess ‘I’ fits Kino better after all.” It doesn’t come up again in the film, but this moment resonated with the series I watched – we are seeing someone who is only themselves, and is defined only by themselves, amongst groups of people in countries with identities ascribed to them, ones that must be witnessed.

This makes the final episode of the 2003 anime, with Kino considering staying a further night in one country that resonates with him, more heartbreaking. He is told he cannot break the agreed duration of his visa, but staying would have meant sharing the same fate, buried under a volcanic eruption the country accepted was coming. Kino discovers the country has purposefully left him with their memory to carry forward, carrying what was a beautiful world with them. “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is”, and so is the memory of what had been, if not what could be.

SO, THE BEAUTIFUL WORLD [542]

“Traveller, where are you… where are you headed too?”

I can now say with authority that if you have chosen to create something an average of once a week, every week, for ten years, without anyone asking you to start, that is now something you are, not just something you do. There may be goals and destinations along the way, but no endgames... only the journey.

Saturday 30th May 2026 marks ten years since the first article on this website was published, and if you have read any of these at any point, you have my thanks, because whatever track I am on, I feel it is the right one.

I wrote about what began this journey when I reached the five-year mark and, at that point, it felt like I reached a checkpoint: I talked about doing more videos instead, meaning the rate at which written pieces appear would decline. That ultimately didn’t happen because making videos became too much of a chore at the time and too prone to compromise, so I gave myself an increasingly long break from it. The only reason I never corrected myself since is because I am finding ways of making the video-making process more fun for me, and because I never stopped having ideas for videos. The point is to keep putting things out there, in any form.

 

Having made enough allusions to travel, I want to talk about a story.

 

In a land of countries separated by landscapes and forests, and known by characteristics very specific to them, a teenage traveller and their talking motorcycle venture to learn what is important about each country, and what makes its people unique. Limiting each stay to three days and two nights, exploration taking priority over thoughts of settlement, the traveller experiences the full range of human experience, from generosity and compassion to oppression and prejudice, even visiting countries to witness these extremes. Acknowledging the worst of the world to appreciate its best more wholeheartedly becomes this story’s theme: “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.”

 

Rarely am I captivated by a story’s premise as much as by “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World”, the 2003 anime adaptation of Keiichi Sigsawa’s light novel series that began in 2000, of which there will be spoilers here. Most of the stories from the novels remain not adapted or translated from the original Japanese, which is a shame, although fan translations of most stories exist online. For me, “Kino’s Journey” is almost the inverse of “The Prisoner”, where Number Six is trapped in one extreme place, one deliberately beyond comprehension. When events and the news threaten to overwhelm you, knocking your sense of place, it turns out I turn to stories of strong-minded, stoic individuals in remarkably specific settings.

 

The land in the story, while fantastic enough to allow for tracts of explored but unclaimed land to exist between countries, appears set during the 20th century, according to the level of technology displayed in the show. The countries portrayed in “Kino’s Journey” feel like our own – indeed, the walled states look very European – but each one invites scrutiny. In one land, all adults conduct their work, whatever it is, with good cheer, because children are mandatorily lobotomised at age twelve to become “perfect” adults. In another, everyone lives far away from each other to avoid hearing or feeling what each other is thinking, an empathetic scientific advancement driving everyone apart because they know too much, the pain of others driving them over the edge. Two countries resolved a decades-long war by turning it into a yearly game where they instead bomb a third, indigenous group. Another country practised the rule of the majority until the last of them was sentenced to death. A further country’s ancestors were travellers, who chose to settle for eternity in one place.

 

My favourite episode of the series involved visits to a few countries. In the “Land of Prophecies”, its people are getting ready for the apocalypse to happen the next day, because a priest has proclaimed that a book, which originated from a faraway land, but a “miracle” had sent it to them, has predicted the end of their world. When the sun rises the next day, another priest reinterprets the book to proclaim the apocalypse won’t happen for another thirty years. Passing through another land that ejected its former king and its traditions, unsuccessfully using travellers to test new traditions, like wearing cat ears, Kino and Hermes come across the “Land of Sadness”, where a lament has been recited on a bridge for decades, one that plunged the country into melancholy and withdrawal. It so happens that someone wrote the lament into a book... The episode ends with an army approaching the “Land of Sadness”, a prophecy telling them they must invade it.

 

What I was most struck by was how you are being invited to make up your mind about the events shown alongside the lead characters – we are passing through as much as they are. Pertinent lines of dialogue will be repeated as text on screen, but the on-screen patterns and sound design suggest a fleeting moment to reflect before cutting back to the scene – observations and realisations are highlighted by a soft bell sound. 

 

Acting as a guide without feeling didactic, the effect created by these decisions, alongside a more muted colour palette than early 2000s digitally-painted anime usually suggests, creates a calming and contemplative feeling in me as I watched. This is also aided by the constant presence of lines across the screen, in imitation of a cathode ray tube television showing us a story from another place, and another time, with its own alphabet.

 

Kino, the traveller, is stoic, straightforward and dispassionate in how he approaches each place he visits, helping if required, but not there to interfere. A quirk of Kino’s character design, barely shared by anyone else in the series, is a slight triangular cut from each pupil to make them look slightly “pie-eyed”, to use the term previously applied to Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, but giving the impression of someone mentally putting themselves at a distance from what they are seeing. Hermes, the novels and the series using the German term “motorrad” for a motorcycle, is more a sounding board for Kino than comic relief, and is sympatico with him – one provides speed, the other balance. (Hermes is modelled on a Brough Superior motorcycle, multiple models of which were owned by the explorer T.E. Lawrence.) However, we do not discover this fully in the first episode, your impression of Kino building with time. His level of resourcefulness as a traveller, plus prodigious use of guns and knives – the sound of a “persuader” pistol being drawn is heard many times, Kino continuing to practise their reactive speed – suggest that, if not for Hermes, and indeed the “Master” they supposedly learned under, they would be completely alone.

 

This is because Kino comes from the land where he was expected to have “the operation” at age twelve. The arrival of a traveller at his parents’ hotel led to questioning if they could become an adult simply by being themselves, causing his parents to label him “defective”, and triggering a “right of disposal” – the traveller gets in the way of the father’s knife, killing them, leading to an escape from the country on the motorcycle built during the story, and taking on the name of the traveller who died - “Kino”. Kino was originally a girl whose unsaid name was that of a beautiful flower, which became an insult when one letter was changed. Kino later decided that male pronouns suited them better, during his training with the Master described in the first seventh volume of the light novels, the first published after the TV series aired – perhaps this was a clarification by the author, or one more journey taken.

 

“Kino’s Journey” was a story that made me question my sense of place. I have lived in the same town all my life, but I don’t believe I belong to it – it is by the sea, which always helps, but this may have left something I need to explore, alongside physically leaving its boundaries, if only to work and shop. I am not defined by where I live, but does that mean I could live anywhere? Would I still be the same person if I arrived in another place? Why would it take so long for me to think about that? I have no answers right now, but the series, the stories, and its premise have, intentionally, left me with many questions.

 

Travel has been important to this website over the last ten years: I have written about being caught in the orange sky that descended on New York City in 2023, I have witnessed the work of Hieronymus Bosch in Belgium, and I essentially made a pilgrimage to Liverpool to see the work of Keith Haring. This will continue, and I should continue to make room for opportunities.

 

This may sound silly, but I once had a short trip in 2021, for three days and two nights, to a place that was known to run things its own way, but turned out to be a place where this was tried once, and seemingly never again, due to cost or indifference – it was Milton Keynes. 

 

Perhaps it explains why I have found myself thinking about Milton Keynes since: the grid system, separating pedestrians and cyclists from the roads becoming a place of wheeled robots and abandoned scooters for hire; buildings and trees kept to a maximum height, a rule since abandoned by new developments; a shopping centre so iconic in its design, it has now been preserved as a listed building, unable to develop further. 

 

Indeed, my trip to Milton Keynes was to look at an exhibition of postmodern Memphis furniture. I have joked that I would like a square of Milton Keynes to call my own, but just because it is a place I have visited, doesn’t mean there are other places where I could settle better – Oxford comes close, but again, it is not near the sea.

 

With the twenty-third and latest volume of “Kino’s Journey” published in 2020, I found no information online to confirm if this was the last. Going so far as ordering a copy of it, resolving to use my phone to translate the conclusion for my benefit, volume twenty-four was announced before it arrived, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. The journey goes on.

 

Once again, thank you for the last ten years – let’s keep going.

I AM BRANDED ON MY FEET [541]

Some decisions make so little sense, you must write about them to understand the situation. Business decisions, I find, make less sense than those which are personal: it is not just that making money can involve surmounting moral ambiguity, making money is the reason to do anything at all. Whatever the implications, the arrangement I am attempting to parse here sounds surreal, if not dubious.

Inevitable derision followed the rebranding of the high street stores of booksellers, stationers and newsagent WH Smith as TG Jones, following the chain’s sale to the private equity group Modella Capital in 2025. WH Smith, whose stores remain in train stations, airports and hospitals, did not include use or licensing of their name in the contracts signed, except in the continued selling of their stationery range. The attempt made to provide continuity with the old brand by choosing initials and a surname that mirror the original enough produce some sort of recognition, remains a bizarre move, but I can’t name a bookshop that doesn’t use someone’s surname.

Modella Capital, approaching a year since the sale, will be able to start closing unprofitable stores, after a moratorium period in the contract ends. In the shops I have visited, only the name above the door has changed, issues about tired decor and cluttered shelves remain unresolved. When the closures were announced, “The Guardian” newspaper reported that TG Jones owes £2.9 million to its owners in licensing fees to use the name “TG Jones”. 

At the time, this was discombobulating. Surely, the chain could have chosen a further name they could use for free: QT Taylor? AB Brown? JD Williams? (The last is a catalogue, now online-based department store, so perhaps not.) Modella Capital had said “the forced name change from WH Smith has also negatively impacted consumer awareness”, but after stepping in to provide “The Guardian” with more context, no actual money is changing hands, and any licensing fees that have appeared on paper would be waived subject to a restructuring deal, to be approved with a lender.

But why do this at all? Why do anything like it? It reminded me of the ownership of record store HMV by another private equity group, Hilco, between 2013-19, which accrued payments to Hilco for operational and licensing purposes. Surely, if you wanted a payment from one of your subsidiaries, you could just mandate it. (I originally wrote “ask for it”, as if it were a benevolent act.)

After HMV fell into administration a further time in 2019, bought out by its current owner for just £883,000, the “His Master’s Voice” brand and Nipper the Dog were just about the only non-stock asset left to it - Hilco’s 2013 purchase of HMV was for £50 million. You want to accuse someone of profiteering, but making a profit remains the name of the game, no matter how it is achieved.

It just so happened that I needed a TG Jones in the last week, knowing they would sell a certain brand of gel pen without resorting to ordering online. It is “that store” for me, the name change being so clumsy it cemented the connection in my mind instead of severing it.

But with the TG Jones name not being there, and with any licensing costs, whether they exist to be paid or not, being linked to profits, is there any incentive to create value in that name, when that will only cost you more in the long run?

I’VE GOT FRIDAY ON MY MIND [540]

So, there was me reaching the Friday before the publication date of my next article, and once more having no idea of what to write about, and reaching an often-considered quandary: what comes to mind next that I haven’t already covered? Do I take the week off? Or do I break the emergency glass and write about the mere act of thinking of a subject, thinking this will be a clever way out of a jam?

It was a nice thought at the time, but it never works in practice. Whoever was the first to say that writing is ninety percent perspiration, and ten percent inspiration, either did well to keep themselves anonymous, or the adage itself was effectively crowdsourced.

Aside from having a social-media based trailer ahead of my next piece each week, I use my Friday to say that, yes, you are writing about this, so you must do it now. Oddly enough, the Tim Burton film “Ed Wood” was the inspiration for this, a film producer showing Wood the poster for a film that he will then make, the promises made on the poster of what the film will be like having been used to raise the money required to make it. This practice was used widely by producers like Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson of American International Pictures, the purveyors of monster horror movies and teenage beach party films – it was where Roger Corman got started, continuing the practice himself.  American International was also among the first film studios to use focus groups to find out what films their prospective audience wanted them to make, but I don’t need to go that far at this stage.

My process upon reaching my Friday deadline, which I now realise is the first of two deadlines I set myself each week, is to engage in a very literal thought process: what stands out in the street? What open tabs do I have on my phone’s web browser? If I clear my mind, what comes to mind first? Having an innate curiosity about the world around me is something I have often deployed to meet a deadline?

You would by now think that I would have a list of possible subjects ready to go, but that would be terribly convenient. I think I have come to realise that, if having a system was helpful, I would have implemented it years ago.

But, to use a film analogy again, my name is above the title. It is not the subject that is central, it is my observation of it. What comes to mind is what makes the right subject that week. It is not the fact, but the thought.

Should I really do this every week? I am making this sound exhausting. It is not like I will wither and die if I don’t do it, and it is not like people won’t go uninformed. This is when you know you are doing this for yourself, and perhaps only yourself. One million views is just the bonus.

IT'S ALMOST THE DEADLINE [539]

The General Strike of 4th to 12th May 1926 was called by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in sympathy with British coal miners, whose wages and working conditions had eroded and declined in the years after the First World War. The first day saw an estimated 1.5-1.75 million workers on strike, the TUC had restricted participation to key industries: iron and steel, transport, shipping ports, and printing.

However, as “The Times” reported in its edition of 5th May, “The printing industry is at a standstill, but lithographers have not been withdrawn, and compositors in London have not received instructions to strike.”

I have owned a copy of this issue of “The Times” for years, but never properly scrutinised its bizarre appearance. It is a single sheet of foolscap-sized paper (32 x 20 cm) – I have since discovered this edition is known as “Little Sister”, in comparison with the “Big Brother” of the regular broadsheet – printed on both sides in dense typewriter text, the only picture being King’s coat of arms in the paper’s masthead. 

I had seen similar examples of other newspapers printed during the strike in similarly reduced circumstances – there exists rudimentary editions of the “Daily Mirror”, “Daily Mail” and “The Daily Telegraph” – but with “The Times” being Britain’s (unofficial) newspaper of record, with an unbroken print run since 1785, this was the one to have. My copy now resides in a mylar bag, to prevent decomposition of the fragile newsprint paper, a relic of a moment in time.

As “The Times” recently discussed [link], its 5th May 1926 edition was produced and distributed by volunteers and helpers corralled by John Jacob Astor, the then owner of the paper, having already been made aware at a meeting, of newspaper proprietors with the British Government, that its intention was to publish an official Government newspaper to provide both official news and the Government’s viewpoint during the strike, either as a collective effort with the industry, or by itself. This became “The British Gazette”, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office from the requisitioned premises of “The Morning Post”, using staff from that paper and the “Daily Express”, and edited by the former journalist and current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

With printing presses unavailable, six “Multigraph” machines were used to print my copy of “The Times”. These table-top devices, more used by offices for printing direct mail and forms, these involved sliding individual letters, spaces and punctuation onto a cylinder, with motorised versions printed six to seven thousand copies an hour. Haste and inexperience with loading sentences backwards explain many spelling errors, most notably the “WEATHER ORECAST” at the top of the front page, but these were apparently fixed for a second edition the same day, so I now know my copy was from the first edition.

The following days’ editions of “The Times” looked more like the regular paper, printed on its regular presses by an amateur team only just shown how to operate the equipment, but with its page count reduced to one broadsheet folded into four pages. This was partly a result of Churchill requesting newsprint stock for printing “The British Gazette” – originally requesting access to their entire stock for an explicitly Government mouthpiece, “The Times” would only relinquish a quarter of it.

In media terms, the legacy of the General Strike is usually the granting of a Royal Charter to the then-private British Broadcasting Company, having maintained its independent and impartial radio broadcasting during the strike in the face of a threat from Churchill to requisition it for Government use in a manner similar to “The British Gazette”, which still published programme listings for BBC stations like it was a regular paper. The “Little Sister” edition of “The Times” is a further reminder that the UK only ever had state media once, a hundred years ago, for less than two weeks.

The 1926 General Strike ended without agreement, with miners continuing to strike for a further few months. Much later, an industrial dispute over modernising work practices at “The Times” and “The Sunday Times” led to Thomson Newspapers, which bought them from the Astor family in 1966, to suspend production of the papers for nearly a year from December 1978, breaking a near two hundred year print run.

I'VE GOT THE KEY TO ANOTHER WAY [538]

Before leaving for work each morning, I check the app for my local bus company, which holds both my pre-paid ticket and their timetables, to see if my bus has left the station. 

I couldn’t have written that sentence before 2020. A byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic was the need to tell passengers if they had a chance of getting on a bus. Social distancing guidelines following the initial outbreak restricted the maximum number of passengers on my local buses to a quarter of their original number so, I am guessing, the bus company added a global positioning system to the ticket machine on each bus, telling you how many spaces were left as each bus moved closer to your stop. Would you be lucky? Or would the additionally reduced timetables cause you to wait for longer still? You could always walk to the next stop in the meantime.

With restrictions having lifted, the real-time map and capacity figures have remained in place, meaning I can leave home when I know a bus is coming. That said, I have only a notional idea of when it should have left the station: my local bus company also stopped providing books of printed timetables in 2020, which were always easier to find and read than a PDF on your phone.

However, one day last week, I couldn’t even access the valuable app. I had made the mistake of allowing my phone to update apps automatically, so when I went to use it as normal, I unexpectedly had to log in, which I am rarely asked to do. Putting my password this time around, an on-screen message said it was incorrect. My phone fills in the password automatically, and even after accessing the secure place where it was kept, so I could remind myself of it and type it in manually, I was still being told it was incorrect.

Passwords are a tyranny of modern life. Until my phone sprouted a dedicated directory for my passwords, I used to keep them written down in a safe place – ideally, that is something I should continue to do, if something ever happens to the phone.

I realised that the update to the bus company’s app had also changed the requirements made of a password, which must now have a minimum length of twelve characters, one capital letter, one number, and one non-alphanumeric number. These requirements had already been decried in 2017 by the person that came up with them, who instead preferred less often used combinations of words.

However, the use of human reasoning will still get you nowhere, as I found out in a separate incident. Because I had removed an e-mail address that was previously used to send passcodes to log into another e-mail address – yes, I know – the login screen started to ask me if I could match two symbols to the shadows they would cast if they existed in real life, or match a symbol to that which a small man was standing on in a ring of other symbols. These strange tasks, using inscrutable symbols that looked downright unclear on screen were, apart from being time-consuming, were enough to wrong-foot me, someone who used to only have to tick a box to confirm they were not a robot. I was being made to feel like one, so I wound up attaching my personal e-mail account to an authenticator app, which I sign into using my face, having now failed to separate its use from what I need to sign in for at work.

With phones now able to collect biometric information via face and fingerprint scans, with the intention (and hope) that this information never leaves the device, it is no wonder that passkeys are being touted as the way to go. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre unambiguously states that passkeys are safer than passwords, and is as safe, or safer than, two-factor identification. I may well have to move to using more passkeys in future, but it does mean I will dread upgrading my phone in future, having encountered problems at work when I did that last time.

With the password for the bus app no longer meeting two of the new criteria, it was never going to work, and I had never received an e-mail ahead of time to inform me of any changes. By this point, I was on the bus, having paid extra because I couldn’t reach my pre-paid ticket. I had also realised there was no way I could reset my password via the app, resorting to the bus company’s website to change it there.

There was no reason for me to write about any of this except to get it out of my system. If there is a takeaway, it is to be more mindful about your apps, and your passwords, until you can get rid of them.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? [537]

I will start with the facts. As of 8.03am BST on Friday 17^th April 2026, this website, www.leighspence.net, has had one million page views since it went live at midday BST on Saturday 1^st May 2021. Thank you for being one of those viewers. I have never added a page counter to this website, as I think people stopped doing that when GeoCities closed in 2009.

This website was originally found at www.dancingwiththegatekeepers.com from 30th May 2016 – yes, I will be doing something to mark a decade since then – and I regret having not used my name from the start. Before the 2021 switch, I had amassed over 185,000 views, but despite the usual promotion on social media, including reposting new links for everything I had done to that point, it took until July 2016 for the new site to achieve one thousand views. 

Fortunately, the momentum reappeared, feelings about starting from scratch being replaced by the safety of having over three hundred articles already available: ten thousand views were reached by September 2021, and twenty-five thousand by the end of the year. Growth was steady, taking until August 2023 to reach one hundred thousand views, but it only took one more year to double that, and only until May 2025 to double that again to four hundred thousand views. 

This means that www.leighspence.net has been visited over six hundred thousand times in the last year...

This is why I am sceptical about page views for websites: it is not from seeing counters on the sites that do have them, or from media reports about other sites, or claims made to attract advertising, but from having seen the data about my own work, for it appears to be thriving to the extent of having taken on a life of its own.

I can only guess that having written about so many different subjects over nearly ten years means that work will appear in search engine results – the main driver of traffic to the website is Google, followed by itself via links from other sites, with social media in third place. Although I will continue to use social media to promote my work, it may be that I am in a good place to survive any eventual decline in the general use of social media, as people move on to other things – it may be a good opportunity to resurrect GeoCities.

I still have my suspicions about A.I. robots scraping my writing, much as anyone who has created anything and put it on the internet will do, despite all the attempts you have made to mitigate or prevent this. However, it this is simply an evolution of how people are searching for information, no matter my misgivings on checking the veracity of what they are being told, then I am glad to be considered a reliable online presence.

The conclusion I should reach from here is accept the figures, instead of being bemused by them, and don’t question why the numbers are so high. I should take it as a sign that I must be doing something right... and if you’ve read this far, I probably have.

Thanks to all of you again.

ALL I NEED IS HELP FOR A LITTLE WHILE [536]

IBM MT/ST

When the spy thriller writer Len Deigthon died in March 2026, his 1970 novel “Bomber”, about a fictional air raid during World War II, was reportedly the first novel to have been written during the word processor. However, Deighton did not use what we would picture to be one: the IBM MT/ST recorded the keystrokes of an IBM Selectric typewriter onto a magnetic tape drive built into a desk, most devices having at least two drives to allow merging sections together, often onto a third drive. The instruction manual advised users to “Think Tape”, like inputting a program. There was no screen, but it could “play back” its output to the typewriter. 

Introduced in 1964, and intended more for composing mail for businesses, IBM withdrew the MT/ST in 1970, as floppy disc drives and terminals with screens became more commonplace. But Deighton’s reason for using the machine was clear: it eliminated the constant retyping of drafts by his assistant, chapters often being revised dozens of times, gaining the ability to edit something that already existed. The tapes are now considered to be lost, but it may be the first time where the record of a novel-in-progress was held on something other than paper.

Over fifty years since the writing of “Bomber”, it appears I still need to reckon with what I should consider to be a permanent record of my work, and where that should be held.

I have two writing projects to which I attach a “permanent record” status: these articles, and a diary. The former exists, save for written notes, as computer files, each one holding the numerous re-edits made during their writing. The latter is a succession of books, written out longhand, and in many cases, especially from 2012-19, ripped out of other books and kept in folders, with some vague intention of copying them up at some point.

Both approaches carry risks, from the lack of backup made of those computer files, to the corruption of data, to paper getting mislaid or removed, or coming into contact with water – only one incident like that will lead you to writing with semi-permanent ink as a minimum for the rest of your life. But should I print out my articles, or type up my diary in future?

The short answer is to embrace the fact that both options require levels of maintenance in order to attach a notion of permanence to them: computer files need to be backed up, ideally to more than one place, and at regular intervals to avoid data loss through file corruption and the lifespan of the devices on which you hold the data; written works can be copied, either by hand, scanning them or typing them up.

Ideally, I should wean myself off pen and ink, leaning more into typing as where the creative work starts, instead of where it ends. Because I essentially come to the screen with something to finish, I am already less perturbed by the flashing cursor on a blank screen than if I started with it. I should make use of that fact.