fragile soft machines

4. In conclusion I still think Baru 4 will get done. I have been working on it, I’ve known all along broadly what needs to happen, and I’ve done a lot of other work along the way — a novel, several games. But it has been too long since I promised to deliver this book and that’s on me. Part of it is that I now see attention from other writers and fans as something I want to avoid. Part of it is that, with a decent life and steady medication, I no longer feel the extremes of strong emotion that can push a writer to the page. (On the other hand, I no longer spend years in a depressive funk, either.) Part of it is that I’ve probably become too sophisticated and jaded about my own work, too able to see all the ways it falls short. It’s easier to charge forward with a draft when you haven’t learned to sneer at yourself. I don’t know how to fix all this but I suspect it will happen the way it always happens: at some point I will sit down and write the fucking thing, and when I get 100,000 words in, I won’t hate it so much I have to throw it out. I felt like I owed everyone some kind of explanation and update. I’m really sorry this has taken so long. I have no good excuse, because I could have finished by now if I’d just sat down and done it. I’ve just allowed myself to sink into solitary contentedness. Which is nice, but not enough for a writer on a contract. Thanks for bearing with me.

Devin Leonardi - "Two Friends on the Shore of Long Island" (2009)

𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒷𝓁𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒷𝒾𝓇𝒹𝓈!!!

Prints

The Ottoman side of the story is usually told in one sentence, "the sultans banned printing," and the sentence is doing suspicious amounts of work. The standard account has Bayezid II prohibiting printing in Arabic characters in 1485 and Selim I renewing the ban in 1515 on pain of death. The inconvenient detail, which the historian Kathryn Schwartz laid out in 2017, is that no text of either edict survives, and the story traces back to the reports of European travellers. Which does not mean it is false; it means the favourite explanation for why the Islamic world "missed" printing rests on evidence that would not survive a code review. What is actually documented is that the first Ottoman Muslim press, İbrahim Müteferrika's in Istanbul, opened in 1727, and that the deeper resistance was professional and aesthetic rather than theological: an empire employing tens of thousands of calligraphers in a refined, thousand-year-old craft looked at Fano-quality output and saw, quite reasonably, a downgrade. They were the only people in this story with working quality assurance.