How strange it is to be anything at all [566]
Greetings from The Borders...
I’m Christian Payne, photographer and writer. In this weekly dispatch I explore connection, community and the tools that shape how we share.
Thanks for joining in.
#TheAction
While visiting this week, my friend gordontant helped me move some large tree rounds to where I could split and store them. He also took this photo.
The image made me a little sad. I was just sitting there tired on the log, but now, when I look at the photo it reminds me of those images where trophy hunters sit beside a fallen beast.
This tree had to be felled. The next large storm would most likely have sent it crashing through the side of our house. I had asked the owner about it, who said it would probably “fall slowly and then rest against the roof.” But I don’t think that’s what falling trees are known to do. A tree surveyor agreed.
So down it came. The loss of a life that, according to its rings, spanned 80 years. It might have lived for more than 300 if it hadn’t overreached for the light.
It was sacrificed so that we can continue to live where we do. Not without thought. There will be no waste, though three and a half tonnes of wood takes time to process. As I’m doing it manually with an axe, I’ve had plenty of time to think.
One thread had me pondering that most things in the universe never become alive. Never become conscious. Never experience the world.
But the atoms in this tree organised themselves differently. This tree was able to detect the direction of the sun, responded to drought, sensed gravity, touch and damage. It could also communicate chemically with other plants and fungi.
Perhaps this is why humans have communed with trees for millennia. They respond to the world around them and perhaps share our sense of time far more than most living things.
This tree might go on to heat our living room for up to five years. With the wood we already have stored and some still waiting to be processed, the logs I’m storing to dry may even be burned long after I am gone.
As I stack eighty years of sunlight, I’ve marked and dated a few logs with the species and the year.
It’s a very small act of remembering. Hardly worthy of this tree’s life.
#TheSeen
I took the kids to the Boiler Shop in Newcastle to see indie-rock bedroom-pop band Cavetown.
My kids are huge fans and this is the second time they’ve seen them. By far the best venue though, as last time they were supporting in an arena.
It was a last minute thing and all the photo passes were gone so I took some snaps on my iPhone from amidst the crowd. I’d also took a little compact Sony which took the top photo but weirdly that seemed to struggle even more.
These iphone images are hugely compressed for this post and nowhere near the quality of a ‘proper camera’, but the 5x zoom was handy and the kids were happy with the images as a reminder of the night. The phone struggled in the changing light, but if you snap enough, something gets through. There are some larger images on Bluesky.
It was a fun intimate gig with a great crowd. I remembered a few tracks we’d heard at the arena gig but it’s not my usual listen. It’s a different thing when you are in the room though. Lots of emotion and singing along. I’m glad they played their older stuff as on the car ride in I was introduced to latest album and to me it feels over produced and a bit of a step backwards.
Robin Skinner’s band were super tight though and looked like they were having a lot of fun. Skinner came across as an incredibly accomplished ego-less guitar player.
A great night and much respect given to some great musicians.
Cavetown were supported by Dreamer Isioma, a Nigerian-American artist from Chicago who had everyone in stitches when they asked what they got up to in Newcastle. They missheard the crowd shout drink and drugs when they’d actually shouted “drink and Greggs!”
The band were then schooled on this weird northern bakery which stays open till 4am.
Finally one of the most action packed things I did this week was manage to get tickets to EMF camp. More tickets will be released soon, sign up on their website and you’ll be notified. If you only go to one festival this year, I highly recommend EMFcamp.
I also watched Conclave this week.
It was a slow horserace of a film but I was with it all the way. The predictability didn’t ruin the great acting and cardinal gossip-fest. 4/5
There I am, happily browsing the feeds in Bluesky and a friend I follow links to an instagram video. I really like what they share but I know that clicking on that link has the potential to drop me into a doom scroll. Should you want to save people from a similar doom, download the insta video with a site like this and upload it where you need it. You can always offer a link to the original post for those with better willpower than me.
#TheWords
"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well."
This week’s must read is ‘AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit.’
“If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole:”
#TheHeard
If you’re looking for new ways to discover music, I’ve mentioned radio garden before, but there are more places to explore on this cool list I found via BackstageRadio from J&NE | JENNE
Listen to these similarities between the Irish and Jamaican accent. There’s a reason.
#TheConsumed
The wild garlic here is back with a vengeance and rather than just pick it for salads I was chatting with my mother in law in regards to what we might be able to do with it more long term. While I manage the land maintenance and logging etc, my wife and mother-in-law are chief growers and preservers. After dropping a comment on The Crows Nest my Mother-in- law inspired the author Alexander to create this great recipe for Bear Garlic Pesto. We really enjoy pesto in this house and i’m excited to give it a try.
The exploration in to low/no alcohol beers for midweek refreshment continues. Water always feels like the best bet to rehydrate but perhaps it’s the electrolytes and plant compounds present that are beckoning me.
In fact I read that some athletes in Germany quaff a low alcohol wheat beer (Alkoholfreies Weizen) as a German study has shown that marathon runners found that drinking is for several weeks around a marathon reduced markers of inflammation and respiratory illness after racing. It appears that the polyphenols from hops and barley boost the immune response after heavy exercise.
But alcohol free wheat beer is hard to find round my way so I took a dip into Brewdog’s offerings. Little did I know at the time the selection box was bought in the local Morrisons, that Brewdog had just gone into administration.
End of what looks like a messy era I guess. I was never an investor and so knew little of the company’s history other than a few publicity stunts. If you want to catch up on the who, what, why, where and how, this BBC article goes into detail. I feel for the punter/investors that were loyal to the brand and of course the almost 500 staff who lost their jobs.
Brewdog the brand and some of the locations have been bought by US cannabis and drinks company Tilray.
And what of the beer?
I had tried Nanny State a long time back and although good in its time, these other offerings have also come along to be a little more hoppy with a little citrus twist. Certainly all drinkable and refreshing. A bit thin though. Other beers are doing better. Lucky Saint is a better lager and I still think Guinness Zero is a great creamy alcohol free pint.
#TheBody
If you want to know how technologies can better interact with wellbeing, this website helps organisations put a measurable value on social outcomes such as jobs created, wellbeing improvements, environmental impact, or working conditions.
#TheThings
The weirdest thing I have seen drop into my feed this week was the kickstarter for a ‘device’ that makes your poo different shapes. After seven million years of human evolution we now have… the pooplug.
I don’t normally pay attention to spam email but one in particular caught my attention. It was advertising an “AI robot puppy.”
I’m not in the market for a robot puppy, but the ad looked so bad and so obviously AI-generated that I became curious about who might have fallen for it.
When I searched for a video review, the web was saturated. The promotional videos for the fake product were AI generated and the videos with headlines like “DON’T BUY!” were also AI generated, but they ended with a positive sales pitch.
It looked like infinite fake faces with unlimited fake voices enthusiastically selling a fake product that you could buy with a few numbers linked to your hard-earned cash.
Is this the future of shopping online? Will the web soon become a place where the product isn’t real, the images of the fake product arne’t real, the thumbnail of the fake video review also isn’t real and neither are the reviewers themselves?
In fact the only genuine part of the whole transaction is the money leaving your bank account.
If so, this could be great news for the high street. Imagine it… physical people looking at physical things in a physical place and buying them from an actual human being.
Do you think AI slop might accidentally save us from ourselves?
#TheLinks
Here’s a handy website for helping you find European tech software and service alternatives.
“Overall, I still believe that LLMs are a net negative on humanity, that the destruction of our infosphere is going to have generational consequences”… But…
Have you added yourself to the Documentally community map?
We have gone from thinking that the TV messed with kids minds to buying AI toys for our toddlers to ‘help them develop’.
A few bits of good news you might have missed this week.
Some of my other places include these…
A lovely piece entitled ‘This is not the computer for you’.
#TheThanks
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“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” ― Martin Heidegger
Ponder.
See you out there.
Over…
I loved your thoughts here.
Maybe part of the process of trying to pay tribute to this tree's life is the remembering of it, in the right way. The way you're doing here. Not seeing the tree as something less than us, something to be exploited, but instead an equal in many of the ways that matter, however differently it's alive (a difference we've yet to bridge with language). Life usually finds a way, but life also wants to be remembered when it didn't, and when it ran out of time to remain in our story.
Lovely, varied and engaging post Christian. I loved it.
Have you tried Erdinger as an alcohol free beer? It's fairly readily available in bigger supermarkets here and is one of the most enjoyable alcohol free beers I've found https://erdinger.de/en-INT/beers/non-alcoholic-wheatbeer
Strong agree on Lucky Saint and Guinness Zero as well.