What do Dizzy Rascal and Nine Inch Nails have in common?

Lots of things. But in this case it's a few titles. Fix Up, Look Sharp sums up the last few weeks and the Broken, Fixed, Hacked ep's sum up where this blog is going and how it's going to change. Also I just like injecting pop culture into serious talks to hide my self criticism behind cultural artifacts :)

Fix Up, Look Sharp

Last week I started the month long level 4 Social Media content creator course from Blackrook (not Blackrock, a very different course on offer from them, avoid that one). So I've been releasing more and more shorts on YouTube and Tiktok and not only restarted my Instagram account (inactive since 2016 and not in regular use since 2012) and started a brand account for NaturePunkz over there. It's been lots of fun but it showed me how I've already let this blog slip even though it's never really started.

The issue is the concept I decided to build it around. I wanted to build the site around what I saw and logged on my walks and in the garden so they would end up as a corpus of data combined with antidotal musings about the day. Hard science, art and whimsy in one place set up so each could be consumed without the others if required. And I stand by that as a good basis for this blog. The issue is how I was creating the data.

Broken

The Broken EP was the first release from Nine Inch Nails to feature mostly new stuff after the release of the first album Pretty Hate Machine. It featured a lot more guitars than the album and showcased the move towards a more US style hard industrial rock instead of the more European flavoured EBM of the album. It also featured a reworking of the song Trent performed with Pigface, Suck, and Physical by Adam Ant and it's fundamentally Broken if you're a record exec trying to sell the the follow up to a breakthrough album and just learned all the videos got banned on MTV that is.

And that's what this site is. The concept is the breakthrough album. It's fucking great (if I do say so myself) but the execution is broken. OK, that's where the analogy breaks down. The Fixed EP's production is mega considering how fractured it's development was and Reznor and Flood nailed it and I just didn't.

The biggest issue is the time it takes me to write up my sightings because writing up all that yaml(YAML Ain't Markup Language™) is boring, and I specifically selected YAML because it's lightweight (also it helps the header used in 11ty is already in YAML so I could drop my stuff in there and process it along with the rest of the content). That needs to be streamlined so that the things I see when I'm out are already written up ready for me when I come to add words, if I choose to add words, and hit submit. Hell I'm a programmer by profession even if I'm currently pausing that side of things for a while.

Fixed

A short while after Broken came Fixed a companion ep full of remixes by some of industrials rising production stars. It was also ace. And that's what I plan on doing with this site, remixing it.

A website is always a living thing. Even a static website is dynamic through time unless it's purpose is to specifically not change and remain as a monument. This site was always intended to have a life and live and breath as I moved through my time on the planet so it was always going to change and the biggest change has to come not with the contents or how they are presented but how they are collected.

To fix this site I need to create an app that I use onsite (or in the car before returning home more likely) to document my encounters. Now this isn't hard and is something I've had planned for a while because, you see, when I was procrastinating over this site a few months back I, sort of, created a social media framework for sharing sightings, errm, by accident. In a typical hacker way.

There was a hackathon and I hadn't worked my grey matter in a few months and fancied a crack so I created Bio-Fed a a federated, privacy-first biodiversity tracking platform built to rethink how environmental data is shared. Which didn't even place in the top ten but I'm not bitter. :)

Bio-Fed can link with mastodon and other ActivityPub servers and you federate your sightings so that others can back up and remix your data along open guidelines but you maintain control of the master. At the moment it's not great but it has potential and an obvious next step is being able to record sightings from an app, the same as this site.

Hacked

The final ep was a bit different. Hacked was a multimedia experiment based on the Broken/Fixed duo. Hacked in this context is how I'm going to bring the different things I've been doing together and a sensible timeframe for doing so.

Right now I'm busy, I've got another three weeks of this course and what ever comes out of that. There is potential that I'm going to take social media full-time and see if my own content creation combined with helping a few key partners with their own is enough to keep the wolf from the door so that is the first thing that needs to be done.

This site and the social media linked to it forms a part of that. I want to use this to prove I can reach activist communities and specific demographics that other social media marketing types can't. Currently my YouTube output is disproportionately watched by older people and that is great. If I can find a partner who wants to reach politically aware older folks that I find ethically appealing then I have no problem offering them several hours a week to boost their reach in those communities. I'm not going to sell out to do it though.

There is another hack coming up that I'm planning on taking part in and that is already linked to further Bio-Fed development and that's the Invent the Future Hackathon over at Hackster. Bio-Fed was always designed to have machine input alongside human input and in this hackathon I plan on using the Arduino Uno Q to run a local machine learning instance to track bird calls in the garden. So there is time already planned to do more work on this side of things and I think I can do the updates needed to bring Bio-Fed up to version 0.2, the first version of a client that I can also use to populate the field notes on this site and the little machine learning birding app at the same time.

Hacking

The real hack is finding the time to do it all. This is all time invested that means I get to spend more time doing nice things in the future so I think it's important to show how I want my time to break down in 12 months time.

Being on the course in a room full of people of mixed abilities who want to learn reminded me I like teaching. I really enjoyed it, I didn't enjoy the politics of working in the college almost full-time while on a part-time contract or dealing with 17-18 year olds daily but the stuff I did with adults I really enjoyed. So that's something I'd also like to do again.

In future I want to spend 50% of my time doing the things I want to, going out for walks (and hopefully bike rides again), taking photos, making videos, writing about the things I'm passionate about, in fact just doing things and making things in general.

The other 50% I want to break down roughly 50/50 between helping other communities and businesses make the connections they need to thrive and helping people live the life I want to live one connected with nature, their family (extended, not just the people they share genes or bodily fluids with) and the planet.

Now I'm not the best person naturally to help with communication which I think makes me a good person to do it for people who feel like they are on the margins when it comes to social media. I've had a number one on the Apple App Store, was a podcast host before it was called podcasting, have appeared hundreds of times at the top of Google search and I think I can do that sort of thing with niche social media as well. Lots of the people who push themselves forward can't say those things. They can get a creator to the YouTube monetization levels quickly, they can hop on hype trains and they can sell shit to shit shovellers but I don't sell shovels or want to, I want to connect people using tech and I think I can do that.

The other, roughly 25%, of my time I want to use helping people live the life they want to live. That might come from seeing the media I have created, it might come from a future teaching gig or somewhere entirely different but I want to see people break out of the 9-5 cycle and be happy every single day. I'm not exactly how this portion will work or how it will ever pay the bills but as long as we have a roof over our heads I will dedicate a portion of my time to making it happen.

Fuct

Right now I'm procrastinating again. It's the holiday week in the course and I planned on shooting lots of video, taking lots of photos and most importantly recording some voice overs for my YouTube channel but instead I'm sitting with a cold knowing that going outside with the current pollen counts comes at a risk of a chest infection but I'm trying to break out of that rut without breaking my own health.

First things first I need to dig out an audio interface so I can use my decent mic to record the voice overs (I actually have, I think, three interfaces that can connect XLR to a PC hidden somewhere) and learn not to hate my voice. Then I need to put something together for my presence in the social media consultant space that isn't fucking LinkedIn or an aspirational Instagram account full of AI bullshit. And finally, I need to pull together the threads of code to make creating posts on this site that contain patch notes easier so the original purpose of this site doesn't get lost.

I'm spreading the concept of imperfect environmentalism to imperfect social media and want to see millions of interesting people, concepts and small businesses float above the shovelled heaps. Let's post.

Bio-Fed

Now take a look at what we're working with. This was the first time I recorded my own voice since the early 2000's. This is actually done with the tiny wireless laver mics I use on my phone to capture bird song so perhaps I don't need that XLR interface at all. This was also the first edited video I made in more than 10 years and in the weeks since I've massively improved I'm just not getting it all together and publishing and that's going to change.

Anyway, enough rambling, here's the pitch video for Bio-Fed.